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Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Zvvv0kffkv +
Hence, from his perspective, there is no linear progression without end, but simply development of method and concepts in one discipline leading to novel conceptualization and coordination in another. The recent impact of the physics of molecules and particles on the conceptual framework of biology would seem a good example. +
In order to survive a particular situation or change in the environment, an organism must have the required characteristics before the situation or change in the environment occurs that makes these characteristics necessary. In other words, surviving organisms are adapted before the event and it would make no sense whatever to say that they did or could change because of the event. There simply is no causal connection between the selecting event or environmental pressure and the properties the surviving organisms have acquired at a prior time through mutation or some other accident. +
From an evolutionary point of view, it would be far more consistent to say that, like mutations, novel behaviors may arise for no biological reason at all and may be perpetuated from generation to generation, provided they do not diminish the organisms’ biological viability below a critical point. +
Let me cite one example that is particularly well-documented and well-known: the Japanese macaque Imo on Koshima Islet that started washing her sweet potatoes (Kawai, 1965). Within 10 years the entire population, with the exception of a few old males who were too conservative, practiced potato washing. There was no time for a mutation or some other genetic accident to increase or decrease anyone’s viability. Nor, indeed, is there any evidence that potato washing has increased anyone’s genetic fitness. But as the new activity quickly created exceptional familiarity with water, it led to yet another novel behavior: swimming. Since all this has taken place in a country where earthquakes and tectonic disasters are not at all impossible, it might be tempting to conjecture that if Koshima Islet should one day sink into the sea, the swimming skill might yet become the crucial feature that allows these macaques to reach a safe shore while the macaques in other sinking regions perish. Subsequent generations of sociobiologists could then use the swimming macaques as a textbook example for “evolutionary explanation.” But such a scenario in which swimming might become an important asset toward the survival of macaques or macaque genes has not yet happened. Yet the washing of food and swimming have become part of the behavioral repertoire of a macaque population without the benefit of an evolutionary explanation. +
If something has been found to work, it is likely to work again. +
Hence one may also introduce the concept of reinforcement which, in phylogeny, would remain vacuous, since the only thing that could count as reinforcement on that level (i.e., survival) is not contingent upon the organism’s modification of its behavior but upon its past and therefore immutable history of genetic variation. +
In other words, the basic operational elements were there, but their coordination into complex operational systems cannot be ascribed to natural selection, since it is demonstrably the result of learning in a very peculiar and highly sophisticated environment. +
Epistemology thus becomes the study of how the mind operates, of the ways and means it employs to construct a relatively regular world out of the flow of its experience. +
Two eggs may be considered the same because of their shape, size, or color, or because they come from the same hen; but there will be a pungent difference between them if one was laid yesterday and the other six weeks ago. A fieldmouse and an elephant are different in many ways, but they will be considered the same whenever we want to distinguish mammals from other animals. Finally, all eggs, all animals, and indeed all objects that I have ever seen or imagined, are the same in that one respect that I have isolated them as bounded, unitary objects in the total field of my experience. +
A similar, often cited example, is the movie film which, depending on the conditions of perception, we see as a sequence of individually different images or as one continuously moving image. Irrespective of any “real” horse that may or may not have trotted somewhere at some time and been filmed while doing so, when the film is presented to us, we ourselves must construct the motion by constituting a continuous change of one horse from the succession of images. +
Just a the environment places constraints on the living organism (biological structures) and eliminates all variants that in some way transgress the limits within which they are possible or “viable,” so the experiential world, be it that of everyday life or of the laboratory, constitutes the testing ground for our ideas (cognitive structures). +
The only aspect of that “real” world that actually enters into the realm of experience, are its constraints; +
The question is unanswerable, because no matter what we do, we can check our perceptions only by means of other perceptions, but never with the apple as it might be before we perceive it. +
Sameness, however, as we have seen, is always relative: Objects, and experiences in general, are the “same” with respect to the properties or components that have been checked in a comparison. Hence, an experience that consists, for instance, of the elements a, b, and c, can be considered the same as an experience consisting of a, b, c, and x, as long as x is not taken into account. +
because the success of a key does not depend on finding a lock into which it might fit, but solely on whether or not it opens the way to the particular goal we want to reach. +
In other words, experience as well as all objects of experience are under all circumstances the result of our ways and means of experiencing, and are necessarily structured and determined by space and time and the other categories derived from these +
“natural selection” does not in any positive sense select the fittest, the sturdiest, the best, or the truest, but it functions negatively, in that it simply lets go under whatever does not pass the test. +
No one uses these conceptual possibilities more skillfully than the professional magician. During a performance he may, for instance, request a spectator’s ring, toss another ring across the room to his assistant, and then let the stunned spectator find his ring in his own coat pocket. The magic consists in directing the spectators’ perception in such a way that they unwittingly construct an individual identity between the first experience of the ring and the experience of the thrown object. Once that has been done, it would, indeed, require magic to transfer the ring from the assistant to the spectator’s pocket. Another case is that of the red ribbon which the magician cuts into little pieces and then – literally with a flick of his hand – produces once more as one whole piece. +
Hence, the environment can, at best, be held responsible for extinction, but never for survival. +
either a species fits its environment (including the other species), or it does not; i.e., it either survives, or it dies out. +
