Re: [xmca] Consciousness, Piaget

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Carol-- You mean it is outside of the brain? It IS mind-activity.
mike

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 6:17 AM, Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>wrote:

> Carol  Macdonald says
> Many years ago (in 1976 exactly) when I read Piaget's theory of
> perception,  he put consciousness between the subject and object. It is
> outside of the mind.  Much later I wondered whether this conception would
> somehow fit with  LVS's perception of mind. Can anybody comment on this
> primitive perception?
>
>
> 2009/9/4 Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
>
> Your multi-lingualism, as always, David, is very helpful, along with your
>> broad and close readings.
>>
>> I am a very late comer to the issues of consciousness, having been raised
>> in
>> the era when the term
>> was exorcized by American psychology. You can find my first halting steps
>> at
>> coming to grips with
>> the idea in *Cultural Psychology, *in the chapter where I describe the
>> analysis of question-asking reading that Peg  Griffin invented and which I
>> still work with as a  teaching tool. There we replace the solid triangle
>> with a triangle that is "open at the front end" putting time along the
>> bottom line and having a gap
>> between the mediated and direct connections between subject and object.
>> That
>> process of filling that
>> gap is the process of consciousness. This idea appears in a different
>> nascent form in analysis of
>> fixed images on the retina that can be found at
>> http://lchc.ucsd.edu/People/MCole/PHYSIO326.pdf
>> The fixed image data make clear that tripartate nature of HUMAN
>> consiousness, where discoordination is constituitive of consciousness.
>> elsewhere i have written about taking the russian term,
>> voobrazhenie  into-image-making as THE fundamental cognitive act.
>>
>> All of these involve, I believe,
>> a) awareness
>> b) noticing
>> c) selection
>> d) potential anticipation
>>
>> But there are so many more and many different ways of thinking of the
>> matter. False consciousness is a term I worry about a lot.
>>
>> Color me self conscious.
>> mike
>> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 4:03 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>> >wrote:
>>
>> > Tony, Mike:
>> >
>> > We translated Piaget's "prise de conscience" as "seizure of
>> consciousness",
>> > except that in Korean the verbal noun has the more psychological sense
>> of
>> > "grasping" as when you grasp a meaning that you didn't really understand
>> in
>> > a phrase that you have heard many times. So, to nominalize, the "prise
>> de
>> > conscience" is the "graspture of awareness" or the "rapture of
>> awareness".
>> > Every child is an awareness raptor.
>> >
>> > I think that one important thing to grasp here is that "conscience" in
>> > French is not really the homuncular "consciousness" we have in English,
>> any
>> > more than it is the obvious false friend, the meaning of a moral
>> > "conscience" that we find in English writings on ethics. It has a number
>> of
>> > OTHER meanings that attracted Vygotsky to Piaget, to wit:
>> >
>> > a) awareness
>> >
>> > b) noticing
>> >
>> > c) selection
>> >
>> > d) potential anticipation
>> >
>> > It seems to me that all of these can be conceptualized as moments in the
>> > passing of the child from a relatively passive, reactive state to a much
>> > more voluntary, volitional one.
>> >
>> > Last night, I was re-reading Engestrom's old book "Learning by
>> Expanding",
>> > which some of our teachers are busy translating into Korean. In Chapter
>> Five
>> > he does try to tackle the question that I think gives the "prise de
>> > conscience" its real importance, which is the question of whether and at
>> > what point learning is REVERSIBLE--at what point the laying down of
>> > socioculturally accumulated experience becomes the creation of new
>> content
>> > for the next phase of sociocultural progress.
>> >
>> > I think Engestrom sees Vygotsky's preliminary considerations of history
>> > (which he describes, it seems to me incorrectly, as phenomenological),
>> his
>> > laboratory experiments (what Paula and Carol replicated), his empirical
>> > classroom observations (Chapter Six of T&S) and his theorizing as
>> moments of
>> > a single process which can be REVERSED in order to yield the next,
>> higher
>> > phase of expansion. The first process works from outside in, and the
>> second
>> > from inside out.
>> >
>> > The problem, it seems to me, is the crisis. the "prise de conscience" is
>> > really a crisis par excellence, and a crisis is by definition NOT
>> > reversible. For example, awareness is not simply the end point of
>> noticing
>> > done backwards, nor is noticing the endpoint of attentional selection in
>> > reverse. Obviously, active anticipation requires awareness, noticing,
>> > and attentional selection, but not vice versa.
>> >
>> > So the crisis obeys different laws, and we can also expect post-critical
>> > development to be different from precritical development in important
>> ways.
>> > In physics, a shock wave cannot, by definition, be understood with the
>> same
>> > mathematics we use to describe continuous phenomenon. And the shock
>> > reverberates: if a crisis is generally restructuring, we have to expect
>> that
>> > the laws of the next phase of social progress are going to be in some
>> way
>> > fundamentally different.
>> >
>> > David Kellogg
>> > Seoul National University of Education
>> >
>> > ---
>> >
>> >
>> >
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>
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