Abstract
The question asked in this paper concerns the relation between perception, the senses, and the human faculty of conceptualizing experiential values. I suggest that I came across data that exemplifies the transition from the sensing of an Umwelt to a conceptual grasp. The human faculty of conceptualizing experiential values obviously relies on experiential ontologies as a reference system. But the latter does not bring about the conceptualizing. The main question is then: How does conceptualizing work, and what is a concept? Do we know what conceptualizing is like? Do we know what thinking is? Of course, we experience the processual endpoints with words as convenient results. We seem to know how we learn words. Do we also know how we create their meanings? The meanings of iteration and infinity are in focus here. The passage from iteration to infinity is not defined by words. The distribution of response numbers seems to indicate that there is an underlying feeling, or sensing that enables, and accompanies, the understanding of a meaning.
Keywords
- sensing and feeling
- ensuing conceptualizations
- the meaning of words
1. Introduction
During a playful reading experiment, five different groups of readers (students) were presented with an excerpt from Saint-Exupéry’s
I asked the students to jot down what came to mind, and I allowed 10 minutes for the task. Never did their responses match with the words written by their fellow students, nor with the drawings and sketches either. However, the response
In the text, that was in focus, there were altogether 44 segments, each signaling one of these core conceptual features. Up to now, I have looked at the types of highs and lows of response numbers highs and lows of response numbers at segments that signal bounded versus unbounded events, and positive versus negative evaluations. As for the present project, I want to find out more about the nature of the
In sum, the above-mentioned five different groups of readers—when reading the text in five different languages, at different times and places—produced
1.1 Segment 34, iteration: shimmer in the trembling water—not known when ending
34. and I could see the sunlight shimmer in the still trembling water. | 34. 而 陽光 正在 波動 的 水面 上 粼粼 發光 著. | 34. (a) und im Wasser, das noch zitterte, 34. (b) sah ich die Sonne zittern. | 34. (a) вода в ведре ешё дрожала, 34. (b) и в ней играли солнечные зайчики. | 34. ve hâlâ titreşen suda güneşin de titreştiğini görüyordum. |
Sensing that my ‘mind’ is directed to a something, does not produce awareness of my consciousness, but rather of the specific something, here signaling an iteration (
The usual assumption is that our concepts come about by an underlying consciousness that responds, through our ability to think, to our experience of the world. In everyday life, we even assume that concepts are given that we use for sorting out things that are relevant to us. But what do we know about this underlying consciousness that ‘presents’ us with the concepts which we use? How does
Dictionary meanings focus on the ability to think in relation to one’s experiences, summarized as the faculty of consciousness and thought. When applied to the present problem, the ‘feel’ of iteration seems to shine through the high numbers—as an expressive means that reflects a sensing accompanied by an intensity that is
In everyday life, one would probably refer to the effect of happy endings as a good example of elements that excite an emotional effect when reading a story until the end. But that would still not explain the regular numbers of the reader responses at places like, for example, negation (zero to few responses’), iterations, completion of an action, positive evaluations (high response numbers, as aforesaid see [1, 2]). The regular ups and downs of the response numbers tell us that there is
Before I move on to address the latter question, I present statements from grammars of the five languages within which the text of
1.2 Iteration: unbounded processes
English | Cantonese | German | Russian | Turkish |
progressive | verbal particle | timeless present tense | aspectual layers | progr & habitual |
Downing and Locke, 1992, p. 368ff. | Matthews and Yip, 1994, p. 202ff. | Eisenberg, 1989, p. 123 Hentschel and Weydt, 1991, p. 91ff | Isačenko, 1968, p. 416ff | Göksel and Kerslake, 1992, p. 368 |
In spite of the diversity of the language typologies, the notion of ongoing processes is a semantic key notion shared by all, albeit in different output formats and clusters of aspect formation. All languages describe ‘infinity vs. finiteness’ as variations of iteration. Iteration may be unending (progressive, habitual), interrupted, completely stopped, or negated as happening at all. The first question related to this phenomenon is: Why do the languages of our world share the grammatical concept of iteration? [3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
Up to now, I tried to figure out the possible reasons for the regularities of the ups-and-downs of the numbers in relation to the story structure [1, 2], also as visible from the types of pictorial responses that express/show affective reactions (see [8], on iconic diagrammatic effects). What is of particular interest in this context is the fact that iteration and the hierarchies of iteration are the very fabric of the processual texture of cellular entities. As such, human minds work obviously as offshoots of this texture, that is, as an extension of this procedural type of mirroring life processes, by mirroring them, even though confined to the perspectives of the human species. Below, I present my main questions again:
Sensing that my ‘mind’ is directed to something, does not produce awareness of my consciousness, but rather of the specific something, here signaling an iteration (
The present paper is my first try at a focus on a ‘substance’ that underlies the conceptual organization of the world’s languages, specifically, the concept of iteration. What gives me a hint is the
2. What is a concept: opinions and attempts at explanations
Concepts are categories or groupings of types of experience. In this paper, the concept of
The sign systems that have been developed in the languages of this world, all have the means to communicate—
2.1 Consciousness: the organization of energy in the brain
Obviously, the
The denoting of the conceptual entity of iteration by response numbers, that is,
In total, it is obviously the case that the awareness and sensing of particular experiences are being noted at varying levels of consciousness. Feedback systems and energy in the brain should surely be involved. Do these driving factors then solely reflect the organization of energy in the brain? I would want to keep this question unanswered up to the point, at which other aspects have been brought to the fore.
2.2 Consciousness: internal broadcasting
Feedback systems and energy in the brain are surely driving factors of the processes which happen in the brain and the body. The question is whether personal awareness is just a weak offshoot, that is, the end-product of non-conscious processing. The commentary below seems to confirm this latter aspect.
Oakley and Halligan further suggest that the sense of agency and self has a role to play in human lives. “We argue, however, that central to the traditional domain of consciousness is a personal narrative created by and within inaccessible, non-conscious brain systems where personal awareness are end-products of widely distributed efficient, non-conscious processing ….” (p. 13). They further suggest that personal awareness “lacks adaptive significance like rainbows or eclipses” (ibidem)
Neither Oakley and Halligan, nor Peperell ascribe an agentive-reflective consciousness function to the brain. They rather stress the non-conscious processing as fundamental to the living with an identity of a self (“with a personal narrative”), the latter as the end-product of a non-conscious processing.
2.3 Conceptual organization, its experiential substance , and processual dynamics
In the following, I will refer to authors who attempt to find out about the question of how the self, that is, the end-product of ‘non-conscious’ processing, comes about. They stress the
2.3.1 Jose Musacchio: the transparency of experience
Musacchio highlights the difficulty as follows: He suggests that “…the most misleading factor in the understanding the nature of the mind and conscious processes is the
Such qualitative experiences (
The phylogenetically conserved neural structure that allows for qualitative experiences relies on the information received by the senses, and then on being processed by pathways in the brain. “Colour, motion, depth, shape, contours, distance, etc. are processed in multiple cortical areas” of the brain ([15], p. 72).
We normally perceive bodily experience as very different from thought. When realizing the complexity of the interplay of a body and a functioning brain, the picture changes.
As is obvious, Musacchio’s reasoning concretely informs the view that the sign systems, notably the sign systems of the world’s languages, are all based on the experiential reality of human bodies. No concept would have been formed if there was not a ‘collection’ of bodily processes, including ‘sensations, perceptions, and memories’, firstly, as concrete momentary experiences, and also as chains of experience that are reflected from conceptualized pictorial, verbal, or other sign-system experiences.
The nested and interlaced cellular structures of our bodies, with the brain in the role of an aligner control unit, are the non-conscious resources, the underlay of our consciousness. When describing the cellular interplay with the view to learn more about ‘how’ we arrive at and ‘live’ with the experience of being conscious, various authors explore specific ways and stress somewhat different aspects. In the following, I give a summary account of the aspects highlighted by Fuchs [16].
2.3.2 Thomas Fuchs: the body as a point of conversion
Cells, and higher organic units, are the building blocks of organs whose interplay results in the wholeness of an experiencing body, and the brain configures elements of experience “into resonant patterns that form the basis of integral acts of life” ([16], p. 169). The wholeness of this experience is not found inside a body alone. Like bodily processes belong to one processual dynamics (sensations, perceptions, memories), elements of an Umwelt are equally focused on and are also functional for a wholeness of the conscious experience of being in a situation.
The gist of this observation declares an Umwelt as part of the ‘personal’ consciousness that relies on the input of a processual interplay of the nervous systems of a body. In a similar vein, Fuchs remarks: “There is no ‘pure’ pain, no ‘plain’ seeing or hearing. Conscious experience is not put together from components at all; it is, conversely, from components at all; it is conversely, a
To sum up, Fuchs posits that consciousness is everywhere. It is nourished from all regions of the body, brain, and an Umwelt. What is called the ‘mind’ is thus not a solitary cellular entity. “[T]he brain as such does indeed not contain more consciousness than, for example, the hands or feet; only as a whole is the living creature conscious, does it perceive or act. (p. 136)” During perceiving and acting,
2.3.3 Mark Johnson: continuous nestings of cellular connectivity
Johnson argues for a nondualistic, nonrepresentational view of mind as “a process of organism-environment interactions ([17], p. 117) that relies on neural maps. Higher up the neural-structure chain the organizing structure of experience combines, e.g., perceptual fields by creating image schemata (center-periphery, compulsion, attraction, blockage of movement, “to name but a few aspects of what Leonard Talmy calls ‘force dynamics’ ([17], p. 137).
The cellular processes of human bodies all occur in nested systems, which combine in hierarchies of further overarching nestings, experienced as ‘up-down, compulsion, attraction, blockage, scalarity’—thus, reflecting ever-ongoing connectivity of the cellular units of living bodies. With different contexts of everyday life, adapting the needs of the body to the momentarily available resources is an ongoing process. The needs of the body are experienced by variations of ‘feelings’ that require a response.
There are then various directions of continuous cellular connectivities, usually described as the effects of a ‘mind’—in three dimensions: “[Y]ou need a human brain, operating in a living human body, continually interacting with a human environment that is at once physical, social, and cultural. … no brain, no meaning; no body, no meaning, no environment, no meaning” (p. 155).
3. Scalar fields and the vectors of consciousness
The experience of a self is not possible without the conscious experience of:
3.1 The hard problem of consciousness: non-commutative structures
Chalmers, who put forward the notion of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, remarks
In 2018, he asks, “[W]hy are physical pain processes accompanied by the feeling of pain?” (p. What we call ‘feeling’ is a human response to a causative root that is alien to the nature of the cause. In this way, the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness turns into a ‘meta-problem’, that is, into a question that does no longer aim at the particular quality of consciousness, but at the question of why there is this epistemic gap between phenomenal and physical factors.
3.2 Quantum concepts and experience
What is in focus is, on the one hand, the brain. The brain is the physical place where nested neural structures are active. However, when dealing with consciousness, it is not the brain that is its creator. For consciousness (and a mind) to come to the fore, a totality of the responsivity to an Umwelt is needed. We regard the ‘mind’ as the creator of—thought, perception, emotion, memory, also imagination, and reason. The neural structures of the brain are needed as the physical
The above-mentioned quantum
Human thinking is afforded the means to reflect on the particular organization of sensing, the ability to reflect on both
What these chemical properties are and how they operate on the tongue receptors can be approximated through data that are retrieved from data sources which are helpful, but knowing about them does not change the way we feel them.
3.3 Apeiron and other forms of infinity
One form of dealing with the phenomenon of unending was, in the Western World, the belief in Gods, or in
Sieroka continues to say that the ἄπειρον was not only viewed in terms of an inexhaustible source of the power for the generation of things in the world, but also as indeed spatially inexhaustible. The ἄπειρον was thus claimed to be an unlimited causal principle, not being identical with
As an unlimited causal principle, the assumption is in line with what we know today about cellular processes. Cells, and higher organic units, are the building blocks of organs whose interplay results in the wholeness of an experiencing body, and the brain configures elements of experience “into resonant patters that form the basis of integral acts of life” ([16], p. 169). As shown also by the grammars of the world’s languages, human environments allow for the experience of a no end. Other than that, how can it be that all languages possess the means to express the unending of processes, either by developing explicit words for it (‘no end’) or by aspectual systems that are generated through their grammars.
4. Georg Cantor
Cantor created set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. He established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets, and proved that the real numbers are more numerous than the natural numbers. In fact, Cantor’s method of proof of this theorem implies the existence of an infinity of infinities (infinities of transfinites, i.e., events that have a singular end but go on indefinitely as a process of reproductive sequences and structures).
Cantorian set theory is based on the principles of extension and abstraction. The set
An example of a finite set is the number of cigarettes in a packet of cigarettes. However, an infinite set has no last element. It is not possible to count the elements of an infinite set. The union of two infinite sets is a superset, and the superset is also infinite. Different levels of infinity represent/constitute the transfinite numbers. “Cantor himself showed that there are indefinitely many transfinite numbers beyond C [the number of points on the continuum of a line], for he proved that the set of subsets of a set always is of higher power than the set itself ([19], pp. 634–5).”
Besides making the infinite to a reality, Cantor [20] postulated that the
The above is somewhat rephrased as follows: In human lives, finiteness is an end-of-life experience. Even though there is the felt and concretely observed finiteness in relation to the
5. Scalar fields, processual dynamics, and apeiron (ἄπειρον)
From the outer view, it looks as if only words are the products of the construction of languages. But a comparison of the language structures betrays something else: The core concepts are all the same. Human bodies all connect in some ways, locally and over time. This processual continuum is reflected in the grammars of all languages. What is shown by the concept of iteration is a psycho-physical responsivity that allows for the experience of living in a human body. That kind of responsivity translates the experience of the world into conceptual visions, including the construction of the concepts of language.
5.1 Segment 34, iteration: shimmer in the trembling water—not known when ending
34. and I could see the sunlight shimmer in the still trembling water. | 34. 而 陽光 正在 波動 的 水面 上 粼粼 發光 著. | 34. (a) und im Wasser, das noch zitterte, 34. (b) sah ich die Sonne zittern. | 34. (a) вода в ведре ешё дрожала, 34. (b) и в ней играли солнечные зайчики. | 34. ve hâlâ titreşen suda güneşin de titreştiğini görüyordum. |
Sensing that my ‘mind’ is directed to something, does not produce awareness of my consciousness, but rather of the specific something, here signaling an iteration (
The usual assumption is that our concepts come about by an underlying consciousness that responds to our experience of the world. In everyday life, we even assume that concepts are given that we use for sorting out things that are relevant to us. But what do we know about this underlying consciousness that ‘presents’ us with the concepts which we use? I take it that the response numbers in the above example are, or could be, part of an answer. In other words, if the phenomenon of
As for this ‘underlying level of this projection between domain A and phenomenal domain B’ we still need to know how, by which means, a human mind accomplishes this projection. To say that there is a causal context still needs to show a causal manifestation, to find a link. The key findings (theses) of the authors whose suggestions I summarized in sections 2 and 3 of this paper link the experience of iteration to bodily properties (cellular, cellular-plus-umwelt), and to phenomena concerning infinite experiences (processual infinity, quantum concepts, apeiron-ἄπειρον as an unlimited causal principle). In Section 4, I gave a glimpse of how Georg Cantor reflected on the concept of infinity—transfinite numbers (endings with a continuous/infinite reproduction), and infinity (the unlimited stepladder of the transfinites).
6. Concluding remarks
Phenomenal domains are one thing, but then we still want to know
For Peirce, there was no doubt that a ‘gob of protoplasm’, say an amoeba or a slime mold,
The body is “an integral component of the way we think” ([21], p. 80). As is shown in the example of the response numbers that came about when the five groups of readers were asked to ‘jot down what comes to mind’, we deal with numbers that highlight the phenomenon of
The five languages—among many other types of the givenness of reality—give evidence of an experienced ongoing processuality as ‘encyphered’ in human bodies and expressed in languages as various conceptualizations of iterations in the grammars of languages.
Cantor’s “Punktmannigfaltigkeiten” (set(s) of points) correspond to and conceptualize the variations of the “ongoingness… and location in time” as described in the grammars of the world’s languages ([23], 155; in Filipovič and Jaszcolt, 2012). Cantor developed set theory, describing the various properties and intersections of finite and infinite sets. Such properties and intersections have become the accessible qualities of sets. As for the process of creating a concept, here the concept of iteration, a number of experiential pathways have been suggested—energy in the brain, cellular connectivity, quantum concepts, the experience of unlimited connectivity (fire, water, earth, and air; ἄπειρον). However, the question remains how the world of the senses
So far, what can be said is this: The experience of a concept is a restatement of a felt sensing that confirms something. “A
Grammars
Downing, Angela and Locke, Philip (1992).
Dunn, John and Shamil Khairov (2009).
Eisenberg, Peter (1989).
Göksel, Ash and Kerslake, Celia (2005/2009).
Hentschel, Elke und Weydt, Harald (1990).
Matthews, Stephen and Yip, Virginia (1994).
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Notes
- my italics