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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

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You can assume there are always assumptions! OK, so let's start here:

And as far as consciousness [feeling] being fundamental, if something like IIT were to be the case, I think it would be unprecedented for something "fundamental" to correlate with a macro process/structure such as integrated neurons in a state, right? That is, if feeling/consciousness is fundamental, why would it correlate with only a macro structure like an integrated cluster of neurons?

You say unprecedented, but that's exactly the point - so why then immediately assign physical like properties/characteristics to this fundamental? Why assume consciousness is particulate? That there is an atomic theory of consciousness - little bitty particles have to be assembled into bigger units?
Fundamental in the sense of panprotopsychism. So, to say that consciousness is fundamental, wouldn't be to say that whole minds are fundamental or even that "qualia" like redness, sadness, or pain were fundamental. Rather what would be fundamental would be "raw" feeling that would somehow combine to create qualia and also minds.

It's not easy for me to see how qualia or whole minds could be fundamental.

why would it correlate with only a macro structure like an integrated cluster of neurons?
You point up the weakness here ... "correlate" that it correlates doesn't tell us anything about causality. Is that above statement even true? If brains are filters ... but even here, filters, "shaping" those are physical metaphors. I'm not sure our language or even our intuitions (based on a physical embodiment) are adequate here ... apophatic language or some of the experiences in meditation or maybe other languages from cultures and eras that take consciousness as fundamental may offer some tools, I don't really know.
In the context of panprotopsychism, and what I know of the intimate relationship between the mind and the physical brain, I do think minds are shaped like physical things. I think we'll just disagree on this.

But I do know if we start from the get go by saying consciousness is fundamental but then talk about it as a particle or field, then we may not be radical enough ... and if we can capture it this way is it fundamental in a non-trivial way or are we back to talking about dual aspects and saying that since consciousness arises from matter, it must be implicit as a potential, if matter is arranged in certain ways? That would just be physicalism all over again and we wouldn't really need to talk about consciousness as fundamental.
I don't say the mind is constituted of protoconscious units by way of the brain because I want to be conservative. I say it because it seems to be a logical conclusion based on what we seem to know about what-is.

The hard problem leads us to fundamental protoconsciousness. The strong relationship between the physical brain and consciousness/mind leads us to: brain shapes the mind from protoconsciousness.

If consciousness is truly fundamental we might even be able to talk about matter coming out of thought, coalescing or condensing (see there are no mentalistic words that I can think of!) about the universe coming about from a thought or feeling or notion,but even if we don't mean that in a specifically religious way ... it's going to immediately triggers those reactions from some people.

We are caught up on our physica metaphors but also on basic thinkgs like thinking of things as seperate, thinking of relationships, but if consciousness is fundamental, it isn't a thing at all, it certainly wouldn't have physical properties, so it might not even make sense to ask what is the relationship between mind and matter, might not make sense to look for a psycho-physical nexus because a nexus is a kind of relationship and that evokes for us physicalist kinds of causality.

Consciousness as fundamental, truly fundamental ... wouldn't be subject to physical laws ... that would be just to invite the problem of mental causation back in.
 
Fundamental in the sense of panprotopsychism. So, to say that consciousness is fundamental, wouldn't be to say that whole minds are fundamental or even that "qualia" like redness, sadness, or pain were fundamental. Rather what would be fundamental would be "raw" feeling that would somehow combine to create qualia and also minds.

It's not easy for me to see how qualia or whole minds could be fundamental.


In the context of panprotopsychism, and what I know of the intimate relationship between the mind and the physical brain, I do think minds are shaped like physical things. I think we'll just disagree on this.


I don't say the mind is constituted of protoconscious units by way of the brain because I want to be conservative. I say it because it seems to be a logical conclusion based on what we seem to know about what-is.

The hard problem leads us to fundamental protoconsciousness. The strong relationship between the physical brain and consciousness/mind leads us to: brain shapes the mind from protoconsciousness.

Of course! But it's exactly all of the above assumptions that I'm trying to question. I wouldn't do that if we were actually getting somewhere with current approaches. But we're not. And the combination problem actually just packs down into the hard problem all over again, as I've said many times before. It has the same exact aporetic structure as the hard problem -it's like those little puzzle games where you can shift one tile over at a time, you are always only moving the blank tile:

number-puzzle-plastic-frustrating-gridlock.jpg

I'm trying to not be conservative ... it's great that you are because then we have two approaches. I am trying to see that maybe it's premature to come to logical conclusions based on the little that we (as you say) seem to know about what-is (reality?). We have to be very careful not to overstate what we do know/

In the context of panprotopsychism, and what I know of the intimate relationship between the mind and the physical brain, I do think minds are shaped like physical things. I think we'll just disagree on this.

I don't disagree with your conclusions, I'm questioning the entire context. If you want to run with panprotopsychism that's a great direction. I'm interested in what else is out there, even in what might be beyond PPP.

As for how consciousness could be fundamental, I don't know ... I'm just saying let's not just rush into physical metaphors because we are familiar with them and they are easy to talk about ... let's not make too many assumptions, just enough to get started.

As for whole minds being fundamental, here is a thought:

the recurrence of things like neural networks in brains and tree roots and possibly in other (or the whole) interconnectedness of things may mean that mind-structure is fundamental structure, that what-is is organized in networks from the very get-go, whether that's more to the physical or mental side of things, it could probably be used in both ... with a very interesting question of why the world comes out that way.
 
Fundamental in the sense of panprotopsychism. So, to say that consciousness is fundamental, wouldn't be to say that whole minds are fundamental or even that "qualia" like redness, sadness, or pain were fundamental. Rather what would be fundamental would be "raw" feeling that would somehow combine to create qualia and also minds.

It's not easy for me to see how qualia or whole minds could be fundamental.


In the context of panprotopsychism, and what I know of the intimate relationship between the mind and the physical brain, I do think minds are shaped like physical things. I think we'll just disagree on this.


I don't say the mind is constituted of protoconscious units by way of the brain because I want to be conservative. I say it because it seems to be a logical conclusion based on what we seem to know about what-is.

The hard problem leads us to fundamental protoconsciousness. The strong relationship between the physical brain and consciousness/mind leads us to: brain shapes the mind from protoconsciousness.

Here is another response I could have made:

It's not easy for me to see how qualia or whole minds could be fundamental.

For me either, it's kind of scary to step out into this unknown, isn't it? To think about things in a new way that seems to go against out intuitions. But what are intuitions, after all? Aren't they shaped by culture, education, etc - in part? So why should we give them more status than they deserve - especially if we're in unknown territory anyway - intuition may work very well, indeed in direct proportion to the familiarity of the environment we are in.

In the context of panprotopsychism, and what I know of the intimate relationship between the mind and the physical brain, I do think minds are shaped like physical things. I think we'll just disagree on this.

It's at least as easy for me, based on the idea at the end of my last post, to say that physical things, brains, are shaped like/by mental/mind things ...

I'll end with this quote from John Michael Greer:

What is this thing called "the brain"? Another construct of the mind, assembled from the data of the senses. The blind faith in the solidity of our constructs that pervades modern rationalism makes a great many such questions all but impossible to sort out!
 
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from that entry:

The biologist Martin Heisenberg, in a recent article called “Is Free Will An Illusion?” makes a similar point about the “decisions” made by biological organisms. Arguing from experiments on bacteria, fruit flies, and other organisms,

Heisenberg states that such organisms exhibit “behavioral output” that is independent of “sensory input”;

that is to say, these organisms “actively initiate behavior” that is “self-determined,” rather than being “determined by something or someone else.” Studies of plants and slime molds, as well as bacteria and fruit flies, have isolated instances of “decision” that are not causally determined by the circumstances in which they occur, or the conditions to which they are a response.
 
@Constance - here is the article we discussed and my response (below the link) that you asked me to post to the thread:

The Metaphysics of Free Will: A Critique of Free Won’t as Double Prevention | Matteo Grasso - Academia.edu

I think the gist is that it's an attempt to argue free will while assuming causal closure over physics. I don't think such arguments can ever work - free will arguments to me have to break causal closure, I posted something a while back that argued this and Chalmers psycho-physical nexus or idea that the laws of the universe may have to be expanded to include mental causation, are one way to go. But Chalmers idea kind of reduces the mental to the physical in the sense of it being law abiding and I don't think we'd have any more satisfying sense of free will from it ... the whole idea is to get away from causation and laws.

Those who argue compatibilism are simply saying that you have the kind of free will you want as it is or that if it feels like free will, who cares? But it's to me a very interesting thing about human beings that some do care ... in fact many who do say there is no free will seem to say so regretfully or say they would like to believe in free will (not realizing that is still currently an option!) and if we discovered tomorrow that free will didn't exist, although the world would not change, it would make a great deal of difference.

So, if the free will we want involves a kind of spontanteity, a kind of ability to will and to try and make it so regardless - then it must break physical (and any other kind of) law, it must also involve perveristy. To me, the perveristy of man is one of the stronger arguments for free will and thus a higher kind of moral order.

You won't convince many people with this kind of talk though! ;-)
 
blindsight.png

Bats, Dogs and Posthumans
Bats, Dogs, and Posthumans « The Pinocchio Theory
unconscious aliens & blindsight

transparency is a special form of darkness

The price we pay for conscious access to the world is an inability to grasp the mechanisms that provide us with this access. We cannot “see” the processes that allow us to see ... “transparency is a special form of darkness.” - Thomas Metzinger

If I do not know what it is like to be a bat, this is because I also do not know what it is like to be a human being. Indeed, I do not even really know “what it is like” to be myself. My consciousness is radically incomplete, and it never “belongs” only to myself. Descartes’ “I think” is generated, and driven, by all sorts of nonconscious (and non-first person) mental processes. Other things think through me, and inside me. My own thought is merely the summation, and to some degree the transformation, of all these other thoughts that think me, and of which I am not (and cannot ever be) aware.
  • Such nonconscious thought may well include — but is surely not limited to — what has traditionally been known as the Freudian unconscious.
  • My thought processes are not self-contained, but broadly ecological or environmental.

In part, this is because all thought is embodied.

In part, this is because all thought is embodided. As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, “we see with our eyes, we taste with our palates, we touch with our hands.” Today we might add that we see with our neurons and cortex, as well as with our eyes.

But even this does not go far enough.

(We should also say that we see with the objects that reflect photons into our eyes. We hear with our ears, but we also hear with the things whose vibrations are transmitted through the air to us.)

We sense and feel by means of all the things in our surroundings that incessantly importune us and affect us. And these include, but are not limited to, the objects of which we are overtly aware. For the greater part of our environmental surround consists of things that, in themselves, remain below the threshold of conscious discrimination. We do not actually perceive such things, but we sense them indirectly, in the vague form of intuitions, atmospheres, and moods.

-------------------------
Blindsight - a novel

Peter Watts’ science fiction novel Blindsight tells the story of a First Contact with aliens who are more advanced than us by any intellectual or
technological measure, but who turn out not to be conscious at all, in any sense that we are able to recognize or understand.
P.S. Watts suggests that consciousness might well be evolutionarily maladaptive by reducing our efficiency and ability to compete with other organisms.
 
from the page you linked:

"This puts the whole question of “what it is like” on a different footing. If I do not know what it is like to be a bat, this is because I also do not know what it is like to be a human being. Indeed, I do not even really know “what it is like” to be myself. My consciousness is radically incomplete, and it never “belongs” only to myself. Descartes’ “I think” is generated, and driven, by all sorts of nonconscious (and non-first person) mental processes. Other things think through me, and inside me. My own thought is merely the summation, and to some degree the transformation, of all these other thoughts that think me, and of which I am not (and cannot ever be) aware. Such nonconscious thought may well include — but is surely not limited to — what has traditionally been known as the Freudian unconscious. My thought processes are not self-contained, but broadly ecological or environmental.

In part, this is because all thought is embodied. As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, “we see with our eyes, we taste with our palates, we touch with our hands.” Today we might add that we see with our neurons and cortex, as well as with our eyes. But even this does not go far enough. We should also say that we see with the objects that reflect photons into our eyes. We hear with our ears, but we also hear with the things whose vibrations are transmitted through the air to us. We sense and feel by means of all the things in our surroundings that incessantly importune us and affect us. And these include, but are not limited to, the objects of which we are overtly aware. For the greater part of our environmental surround consists of things that, in themselves, remain below the threshold of conscious discrimination. We do not actually perceive such things, but we sense them indirectly, in the vague form of intuitions, atmospheres, and moods."

Steve, is this Steven Shaviro? Do you have a link to his blog's contents as a whole? I cited a book or paper by him not too long ago and want to relink it here when I locate it again. His ideas, even his style of expressing them, are inspired by Merleau-Ponty philosophy and essential to progress in understanding what consciousness is.
 
from the page you linked:

"This puts the whole question of “what it is like” on a different footing. If I do not know what it is like to be a bat, this is because I also do not know what it is like to be a human being. Indeed, I do not even really know “what it is like” to be myself. My consciousness is radically incomplete, and it never “belongs” only to myself. Descartes’ “I think” is generated, and driven, by all sorts of nonconscious (and non-first person) mental processes. Other things think through me, and inside me. My own thought is merely the summation, and to some degree the transformation, of all these other thoughts that think me, and of which I am not (and cannot ever be) aware. Such nonconscious thought may well include — but is surely not limited to — what has traditionally been known as the Freudian unconscious. My thought processes are not self-contained, but broadly ecological or environmental.

In part, this is because all thought is embodied. As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, “we see with our eyes, we taste with our palates, we touch with our hands.” Today we might add that we see with our neurons and cortex, as well as with our eyes. But even this does not go far enough. We should also say that we see with the objects that reflect photons into our eyes. We hear with our ears, but we also hear with the things whose vibrations are transmitted through the air to us. We sense and feel by means of all the things in our surroundings that incessantly importune us and affect us. And these include, but are not limited to, the objects of which we are overtly aware. For the greater part of our environmental surround consists of things that, in themselves, remain below the threshold of conscious discrimination. We do not actually perceive such things, but we sense them indirectly, in the vague form of intuitions, atmospheres, and moods."

Steve, is this Steven Shaviro? Do you have a link to his blog's contents as a whole? I cited a book or paper by him not too long ago and want to relink it here when I locate it again. His ideas, even his style of expressing them, are inspired by Merleau-Ponty philosophy and essential to progress in understanding what consciousness is.

Steven Shaviro, yes - from his blog "The Pinnochio Theory": The Pinocchio Theory

And here is his interview on Expanding Mind: The Mind of Rocks - 05.07.15 at Expanding Mind
 
@Soupie

It's not easy for me to see how qualia or whole minds could be fundamental.

1. Are you confusing minds with brains?
2. is there such a thing as part of a mind? if not ... at what point does it become a mind? (emergence)
3. if qualia isn't fundamental, then something entirely novel has to emerge ... how do we account for that? is emergence fundamental?
4. if we think of brains as networks that filter or move consciousness around, then we are picturing consciousness as a field or a fluid, would it be possible then to empty a brain of this field or fluid? Sometimes this field or fluid is called "information" there the picture is that somehow the electro-chemical "signals" (which are also a kind of fluid) give rise to (emergence) information/consciousness, it leaks or bubbles up out of electricity and chemistry and then this whole thing is moved around in the brain to produce "what it is like". I think such pictures stand behind our mainstream concept of the briain and are very misleading.

Another way to think about "what it is like" is to think that when I look at the sun, there is something it is like for me and the sun to be in a relationship of looking and being looked at that is not contained inside my skull.

The way I think about this is to try not to use metaphors or images. Think only with the words - this is what people gripe about with mystical writing because it leads to paradox or (non)-sense. That may be OK - Zeno's Paradox is non-sense but leads to the idea of limits which is fundamental to Calculus. There may not be a physics of consciousness, we may not be able to move from object to subject continuously - if so, this argues against a physicalist view of the world.

The bone boundary of the skull is what demaractes these two philosophies, nicht wahr?
 
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Excellently summarized, Steve.

I would just like to add that 'emergence' is not an explanation or even a process well defined in its details, its sequences of influence and interaction, leading from one state of nature to another in a variety of evolving phenomena of which we are aware. While it is a reasonable general theory of emergent physical processes in nature, it becomes merely a hypothesis -- and an inadequate one -- when applied to the consciousness and subconsciousness we experience and recognize in ourselves and many other animals.
 
An extract from an incisive paper by Shaviro posted at his blogsite (fourth item down) at:

The Pinocchio Theory


Whitehead on Causality and Perception
December 6th, 2014

". . . Without this conformation of the present to the past, this physical experience of causal efficacy, the clarities and intensities of presentational immediacy could not even arise for us in the first place. Even our most clear and distinct perceptions are grounded in a deeper sense that is "vague, haunting, unmanagable" (S 43). Our very awareness of sharp and delicious sensations, and our ability to make subtle discriminations among them – what Whitehead describes as our "self-enjoyment derived from the immediacy of the show of things" – is underwritten and made possible by "the perception of the pressure from a world of things with characters in their own right, characters mysteriously moulding our own natures" (S 44). A heavy otherness insinuates itself into even our clearest and most distinct perceptions, which is why there can be no "solipsism of the present moment" (S 29).


This massive underlying pressure of causal efficacy is also what produces and accounts for our apprehension of things as more than just bundles of qualities:


These primitive emotions are accompanied by the clearest recognition of other actual things reacting upon ourselves. The vulgar obviousness of such recognition is equal to the vulgar obviousness produced by the functioning of any one of our five senses. When we hate, it is a man that we hate and not a collection of sense-data – a causal, efficacious man. (S 45)

The vagueness of the emotional experience of causal efficacy does not prevent, but rather actually calls forth, an awareness that things actually do exist outside us and apart from us. In other words, "we encounter the… object directly in experience from the start," as Harman insists, rather than building up a representation of the object from a bundle of separate sense impressions. My direct experience of the object in the mode of causal efficacy subtends my identification of it in the mode of presentational immediacy. And it is only by abstracting away from causal efficacy, with its "overwhelming conformation of fact, in present action, to antecedent settled fact" (S 41) that we can enjoy the subtle and disinterested aesthetic pleasures of presentational immediacy.

This is why, following Whitehead, I dissent from Harman’s insistence that "real objects cannot touch" (The Quadruple Object 73), and that causation can only be "vicarious" (128). For this is only the case from the viewpoint of presentational immediacy. In causal efficacy, objects do literally touch one another. This immediacy of touch follows directly from "the principle of conformation, whereby what is already made becomes a determinant of what is in the making… The present fact is luminously the outcome from its predecessors, one quarter of a second ago" (S 46). The principle of conformation applies equally to my own continuity with who I was a quarter of a second ago, and to my contact with things that have impinged upon me in the past quarter second.

Harman worries that all distinction would be lost if actual contact were possible. He argues that the idea "of indirect-but-partial contact cannot work… Direct contact could only be all or nothing" (Bells and Whistles 34). Harman’s problem is to maintain separation at the same time that he accounts for causal influence. As Harman puts it, even when fire burns cotton, there is no direct contact between these two entities. The fire may well obliterate the cotton with no remainder. But even then, Harman says, "fire does not interact at all" with such qualities as "the cotton’s odor or color" (The Quadruple Object 44). Therefore fire and cotton remain ontologically separate, in accordance with Harman’s dictum that "the object is a dark crystal veiled in a private vacuum" (47).

Now, Isabelle Stengers insists that Whitehead always works as a mathematician, even when he is engaged in philosophical speculation. Whitehead does not posit absolute principles; rather, he always confronts specific problems, by producing a construction that observes all "the constraints that the solution will have to satisfy" (Thinking With Whitehead 33). In this sense, Whitehead’s distinction between presentational immediacy and causal efficacy is itself constructed as a way to resolve the problem of error, and scepticism about causality, that are found in the Humean and Kantian traditions.

I would like to suggest that, in this way, Whitehead offers a construction that resolves what I have just called Harman’s problem. He argues that, at one and the same time, "actual things are objectively in our experience and formally existing in their own completeness… no actual thing is ‘objectified’ in its ‘formal’ completeness" (S 25-26). This allows him to assert both:

  1. that things actually do enter into direct contact with other things, as they partially determine the composition of those other things; and
  2. that no particular thing is entirely subsumed, either by the other things that entered into it and helped to determine its own composition, nor by the other things into which it subsequently enters.
In this way, Whitehead’s construction satisfies – ahead of time – all the conditions of Harman’s problem, without accepting Harman’s vision of objects as inviolable substances. I will note as well that Whitehead’s reappropriation of the old scholastic distinction between "formal" and "objective" existence has an affinity with Tristan Garcia’s version of object-oriented philosophy, according to which a thing is defined as the difference between "that which is in a thing and that in which a thing is, or that which it comprehends and that which comprehends it" (Form and Object 11). Garcia, like Whitehead, refuses to explain away causal efficacy, while at the same time recognizing what Whitehead calls "the vast causal independence of contemporary occasions" which "is the preservative of elbow-room within the Universe. It provides each actuality with a welcome environment for irresponsibility" (AI 195).

The larger point here is that causal efficacy is at one and the same time a mode of perception and an actual physical process. It encompasses both "the perceived redness and warmth of the fire" and "the agitated molecules of carbon and oxygen… the radiant energy from them, and… the various functionings of the material body" (CN 32). In this double functioning, causal efficacy is irreducible to rigid determinism, but also impregnable to philosophical scepticism. . . ."
 
Shaviro really is exceptionally good. Here is the amazon link to his recent book The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Posthumanities). Be sure to check the table of contents and the samples from the book at:


Book Description:

"From the rediscovery of Alfred North Whitehead’s work to the rise of new materialist thought, including object-oriented ontology, there has been a rapid turn toward speculation in philosophy as a way of moving beyond solely human perceptions of nature and existence. Now Steven Shaviro maps this quickly emerging speculative realism, which is already dramatically influencing how we interpret reality and our place in a universe in which humans are not the measure of all things.

The Universe of Things explores the common insistence of speculative realism on a noncorrelationist thought: that things or objects exist apart from how our own human minds relate to and comprehend them. Shaviro focuses on how Whitehead both anticipates and offers challenges to prevailing speculative realist thought, moving between Whitehead’s own panpsychism, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and the reductionist eliminativism of Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier.

The stakes of this recent speculative realist thought—of the effort to develop new ways of grasping the world—are enormous as it becomes clear that our inherited assumptions are no longer adequate to describe, much less understand, the reality we experience around us. As Shaviro acknowledges, speculative realist thought has its dangers, but it also, like the best speculative fiction, holds the potential to liberate us from confining views of what is outside ourselves and, he believes, to reclaim aesthetics and beauty as a principle of life itself.

Bringing together a wide array of contemporary thought, and evenhandedly assessing its current debates, The Universe of Things is an invaluable guide to the evolution of speculative realism and the provocation of Alfred North Whitehead’s pathbreaking work."
 
My mother-in-law has dug out the Being and Time review written in July 1964 for the Philosophical Quarterly by my late father-in-law. Very interesting...
You can see it at:
B&T review | Philosophy of Consciousness
To access the post you need the password which is Soupie's first name with the first letter capitalised... and please keep the review to yourself. I'll take it off my website in about a week.

Recently read this. Found it very engaging and interesting:
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=ve-lexical-concepts.pdf&site=1
It is great to see (at last!) a paper on concepts and language that is consistent with HCT.
 
Hi Pharoah. In what ways do you find the author's approaches to concepts and language to be consistent with HCT? Thanks.

I was going to ask the same thing! I didnt get past the abstract, I'm re-writing that now to see if I can understand it.
 
Hi Pharoah. In what ways do you find the author's approaches to concepts and language to be consistent with HCT? Thanks.
Firstly, he argues against the received Fregean view of compositionality!
"The point of the foregoing discussion has been to show that the received view of open class words such as adjectives, nouns and verbs, which have often been assumed to have fixed meanings associated with them, is simply untenable on closer scrutiny."
"The traditional view of meaning-construction is based on the assumption that words have sense-units, or ‘meanings’, which are typically conceived as static ‘lexical entries’ (Pustejovsky 1995; Tyler and Evans 2001). Lexical entries are thought of in many formal and computational approaches to linguistic semantics as being tagged with syntactic, morphological and semantic features. These lexical entries combine, together with the grammatical structure of the sentence, to produce sentence-meaning, known technically as a ‘proposition’. The combinatorial property of language that facilitates the integration of word ‘meanings’ with syntactic structures producing sentence-meaning is referred to as the principle of compositionality"

Then Evans articulates his notion of "lexical representation" and "concept integration". In this view, words have multiple lexical concepts associated with them through a network of conceptual referencing. This referencing is to a rich conceptually constructed world-view (or conceptually constructed representation about reality in HCT terminology), and it is from this network of what Evans calls 'conceptual knowledge' that 'lexical concepts' are selected in the construction of meaning through language.
The key support of HCT is in the idea that concepts come first and are not primarily linguistic in construction: the conceptual representation of our world-view is not primarily linguistic and exists before language emergence (historically) and language acquisition (developmentally).
Following 'conceptual knowledge' comes language through the referencing of words with associated lexical concepts that articulate meaning in a dynamic (or fluid) way. Evans gives lots of examples of the nature of the fluidity of 'lexical concepts' and gives technical analysis.

Super article. Very well explained: didn't understand the terms at first but the writing is very clear in explaining the terminology.
 
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