If I start with the presupposition that Mr. McCarthy is an intelligent and broadly knowledgeable individual (given his corpus of work I think it's a safe place to start), I can chalk it up to one of two things:
1. It's a device to get the point across, though clumsy and innacurate to people familiar with an evolving area of study
2. He isn't up to date with the various studies that certainly show something akin to a type of consciousness. But I bet he'd be open to the notion...
It may be a tad early to say that the statement is wrong. It might be technically correct that plants don't have unconscious but they have something we'd classify differently.
I just chalk up to a kludgy device, I get the point he was trying to make- at least I think I do.
What about jellyfish or oysters? They don't have a brain and have very limited sensory and movement abilities. If they have an unconscious then why not carnivorous plants?
I think the trouble with stories, language, and symbolic meaning is that over time people confuse the symbols with reality. Somehow the story becomes the reality and people forget that they made it up. Conspiracy theories are a really good example of stories and fantasies that people are convinced is reality. When you keep substituting symbols for reality it is pretty easy to confuse the two at some point.
Another example is fantasy literature. Much of it is concerned with magical systems that revolve around saying the right things. As if the right words and gestures can shape reality. I think this is the definition of magical thinking. Even though saying the right words will not make them reality people really like to think that is the case.
symbols are designed to be conflated for reality. in our own minds we are interacting with the mental representations of external things and only the external reality by proxy of our mind. cogito ergo sum and other such observations are just pointing out this basic truth: we live in our minds are interact with symbols as the primary objects of consciousness.
the higher-order symbolic systems, like narrative fiction, or mythology, are designed to run with this natural conflation and go beyond merely conflating the symbol with reality, but instead now conflating the symbol with SUPER reality. the symbol now stands for something better than the real. more meaningful, more beautiful, more true than reality could ever be. in other words, it becomes culture, which is more important to people whose lives are embedded within a cultural context than reality is to those people.
the really strange thing about this is that it is adaptive, up to a point. when your daily life is much more about navigating through a culture than it is about navigating through a wildnerness it is perfectly understandable why the cultural symbols become primary in their importance.
this can go too far, of course. the culture can be a deranged, destructive, rapacious, monster of a thing and we know what the consequences of that can be. still, it seems quite clear why stories carry the weight and importance that they do.
Although a lot of good magic writing involves a training phase where the trainee is parroting the words of the master, yet casts no spell. The words are correct, but the trainee is lacking some internal state. The magic comes from that internal place. The words are a side effect.
Words really do have power when spoken correctly and received openly. If you and I are arguing about something and I persuade you to my side, in some sense you had no power to resist. The ways in which you might resist would be logical errors. Things like status quo bias, or motivated misunderstanding.
> Even though saying the right words will not make them reality people really like to think that is the case.
I sometimes compare programming to these 'magical systems' because in both cases 'saying the right thing' has a direct or almost-direct effect on reality.
Other forms of writing obviously have an effect on reality too, but with programming (and magic systems) it's much more obvious and 'literal'.
Jordan Peterson makes the point that human sight is so excellent, we think, because it evolved to detect predatory reptiles (snakes) and ripe fruit (hence seeing color).
It puts this story and the story of The Fall in a different light when looked at from this perspective: the snake as dangerous knowledge.
The dream was not of any snake, but ouroborous (a snake eating its own tail), which makes perfect sense because Kekule couldn't find any linear form that satisfied the laws of chemistry, and the image of ourborous helped him realize it was a cycle (at that point, nobody knew that organics could be cyclic).
Kekulé's account has been challenged, partly on the basis that at least two others reported very similar (and better organized) ideas right about the same time. The speculation goes that Kekulé may have been trying to bypass the priority controversy with something that couldn't be refuted - the dream story.
Maybe it's just miscommunication, where one part of their brain can't talk directly to another, so it has to pass vague cryptic notes around. Doesn't have to be desired behavior.
(Most of my insights these days are pretty direct)
Sometimes the "suggestion" comes when you're wide awake, at which point it's got nothing to do with the unconscious. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and suddendly you have a brainwave and rush to your desk and write like crazy for a couple of hours- something just clicks. And it comes entirely from outside, from the concrete, objective (haha) reality outside your head.
So the unconscious mind doesn't have to send you any cryptic signals. In fact, nothing needs to send you any signals. Just a bit of luck and the ability to form associations is all you need.
ok, suppose language was evolved. what is the evidence of that? how would we verify whether or not it is true that language evolved?
it seems like a reasonable assumption because we think of essentially every attribute of an organism to be evolved, but is this really true? there is evidence of physiological changes that support the production of speech but the puzzle is really about why those changes would ever occur in the first place. they are not adaptive (in fact, maladaptive) unless you can already speak.
so what is the evolutionary ancestor of modern language? it doesn't leave a fossil record. it's really hard to gather evidence that satisfies anything about this. the cave paintings are some evidence of a mind that has a level of symbolic abstraction consistent with being able to speak, but the oldest cave paintings we find are not really on the evolutionary time scale.
basically we just don't have the robustness of evidence that we wish we had when it comes to supporting the hypothesis that language evolved. it's understandable why we make this assumption, but finding the evidence for it is problematic.
I spent a good few minutes googling around as I think I had heard a conflation of the Kekulé dream and the initial idea from Crick that DNA was a double helix.
The way I remember hearing it he had the vision of two snakes winding around one another trying to bite one another's tail. I can't find much about it online so I'm going to put this down to a conflation with Kekulé's dream.
Reminiscent of Walker Percy's essay "The Delta Factor", in which he theorizes that the essence of human-ness derives from the "linguistic triangle" (thing + word + human brain).
[+] [-] Mitchhhs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manyxcxi|9 years ago|reply
1. It's a device to get the point across, though clumsy and innacurate to people familiar with an evolving area of study
2. He isn't up to date with the various studies that certainly show something akin to a type of consciousness. But I bet he'd be open to the notion...
It may be a tad early to say that the statement is wrong. It might be technically correct that plants don't have unconscious but they have something we'd classify differently.
I just chalk up to a kludgy device, I get the point he was trying to make- at least I think I do.
[+] [-] mrob|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarapetyan|9 years ago|reply
Another example is fantasy literature. Much of it is concerned with magical systems that revolve around saying the right things. As if the right words and gestures can shape reality. I think this is the definition of magical thinking. Even though saying the right words will not make them reality people really like to think that is the case.
[+] [-] metaphorm|9 years ago|reply
the higher-order symbolic systems, like narrative fiction, or mythology, are designed to run with this natural conflation and go beyond merely conflating the symbol with reality, but instead now conflating the symbol with SUPER reality. the symbol now stands for something better than the real. more meaningful, more beautiful, more true than reality could ever be. in other words, it becomes culture, which is more important to people whose lives are embedded within a cultural context than reality is to those people.
the really strange thing about this is that it is adaptive, up to a point. when your daily life is much more about navigating through a culture than it is about navigating through a wildnerness it is perfectly understandable why the cultural symbols become primary in their importance.
this can go too far, of course. the culture can be a deranged, destructive, rapacious, monster of a thing and we know what the consequences of that can be. still, it seems quite clear why stories carry the weight and importance that they do.
[+] [-] jjaredsimpson|9 years ago|reply
Although a lot of good magic writing involves a training phase where the trainee is parroting the words of the master, yet casts no spell. The words are correct, but the trainee is lacking some internal state. The magic comes from that internal place. The words are a side effect.
Words really do have power when spoken correctly and received openly. If you and I are arguing about something and I persuade you to my side, in some sense you had no power to resist. The ways in which you might resist would be logical errors. Things like status quo bias, or motivated misunderstanding.
[+] [-] mercer|9 years ago|reply
I sometimes compare programming to these 'magical systems' because in both cases 'saying the right thing' has a direct or almost-direct effect on reality.
Other forms of writing obviously have an effect on reality too, but with programming (and magic systems) it's much more obvious and 'literal'.
[+] [-] carsongross|9 years ago|reply
Jordan Peterson makes the point that human sight is so excellent, we think, because it evolved to detect predatory reptiles (snakes) and ripe fruit (hence seeing color).
It puts this story and the story of The Fall in a different light when looked at from this perspective: the snake as dangerous knowledge.
[+] [-] dekhn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apo|9 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/16/science/the-benzene-ring-d...
[+] [-] thriftwy|9 years ago|reply
(Most of my insights these days are pretty direct)
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|9 years ago|reply
So the unconscious mind doesn't have to send you any cryptic signals. In fact, nothing needs to send you any signals. Just a bit of luck and the ability to form associations is all you need.
[+] [-] mijoharas|9 years ago|reply
He seems to state this view a few times, but does not (to me) offer a convincing explanation as to why.
[+] [-] metaphorm|9 years ago|reply
it seems like a reasonable assumption because we think of essentially every attribute of an organism to be evolved, but is this really true? there is evidence of physiological changes that support the production of speech but the puzzle is really about why those changes would ever occur in the first place. they are not adaptive (in fact, maladaptive) unless you can already speak.
so what is the evolutionary ancestor of modern language? it doesn't leave a fossil record. it's really hard to gather evidence that satisfies anything about this. the cave paintings are some evidence of a mind that has a level of symbolic abstraction consistent with being able to speak, but the oldest cave paintings we find are not really on the evolutionary time scale.
basically we just don't have the robustness of evidence that we wish we had when it comes to supporting the hypothesis that language evolved. it's understandable why we make this assumption, but finding the evidence for it is problematic.
[+] [-] mijoharas|9 years ago|reply
The way I remember hearing it he had the vision of two snakes winding around one another trying to bite one another's tail. I can't find much about it online so I'm going to put this down to a conflation with Kekulé's dream.
[+] [-] najajomo|9 years ago|reply
https://web.chemdoodle.com/kekules-dream/
[+] [-] jkestelyn|9 years ago|reply