Representationalism (to symbolically present)

From: Immortalist (Reanimater_2000_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 01/13/05 

Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:06:03 -0800

...representation is central to psychology as well, for the mind too is a
system that represents the world and possible worlds in various ways. Our
hopes, fears, beliefs, memories, perceptions, intentions, and desires all
involve our ideas about (our mental models of) the world and other worlds.
This is what humanist philosophers and psychologists have always said, of
course, but until recently they had no support from science...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0162.html?

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In discussing capital and how it is created here are some of the
interesting/highly correlated quotes I found in the book and who he quotes
them from. Many are EXCELLENT points.

o "Karl Marx - The production of the human brain appeared as independent
beings endowed with life. Capital was "an independent substance.in which
money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in
turn."

o In talking about representational systems. the philosopher Daniel Dennett
has called "prosthetic extensions of the mind."

o Through representational systems we bring key aspects of the world into
being so as to change the way we think about it, according to Viviane
Forrester in L'Horreur Economique "capitalism has invaded physical as well
as virtual space.it has confiscated and hidden wealth like never before, it
has take it out of the reach of the people by hiding it in the form of
symbols. Symbols have become the subjects of abstract exchanges that take
the place nowhere else than in their virtual world."

o Margaret Boden put it "Some of the most important human creations have
been new representational systems."

The basic point of the above comments is that capital is not necessarily a
monetary amount. Capital is an invisible thing. The importance of a
representational system is that it transforms assets (money) from a less
accessible condition to a more accessible condition, so that they can do
additional work. Representations, unlike physical assets, can be easily
combined, divided, mobilized, and used to stimulate business deals. By
uncoupling the economic features of an asset from their rigid, physical
state, a representation makes the asset "fungible" - able to be fashioned to
suit practically any condition.

The classic example, in my opinion, is financial innovations that have
occurred during the 20th century that have led to an explosion of different
financial vehicles. Mr. Desoto states, "As representations become less
ponderous and more virtual, people are understandably skeptical. New forms
of property derivatives (such as mortgage-backed securities) may help form
additional capital, but they also make understanding economic life more
complex."

So, think about this within the context of home equity loans, collateralized
loans, mortgage-backed securities. From a Federal Reserve or IMF report I
recently read I recall the comment that the number of asset categories
within the financial markets had multiplied from roughly 2,500 to 25,000
during the years 1990-2000. If I recall correctly, and I know I am quoting
fairly accurately, this truly is an amazing number. We have learned how to
have money create additional money because some people want risky assets and
others don't. Now if you want to own mortgage notes (defaults are
historically low) you can own any class of risk you choose from those with
pristine credit ratings and tons of cash on their balance *** to those who
are taking out a 2nd mortgage to finance additional spending or to pay down
other debts.

Like all of us Marx was influenced by the social conditions and technologies
of his time. Much of today's surplus value in the West has originated not in
the scandalously expropriated labor time but in the way that property has
given minds the mechanism with which to extract additional work from
commodities.

I believe it is also important to note that Karl Marx did not fully
understand that legal property is an indispensable process that fixes and
deploys capital and that without property mankind cannot convert the fruits
of its labor into fungible, liquid forms that can be differentiated,
combined, divided, and invested to create surplus value. (quote from Mystery
of Capital)

So Mr. DeSoto's conclusion is essentially that the West set up a legal
framework that gave most people access to property and the tools of
production and other nations haven't. Western nations should help communist
nations recognize this and evolve their legal and financial institutions so
that capital is not only freed up but created from the capital unleashed.

When I think about representational systems I think of a lot more than
property rights. For example, some other representational systems noted in
Mr. DeSoto's book include:

Formal notions such as:
" Arabic numbers, not forgetting zero
" Chemical formulae
" Staves, minims and crotchets used by musicians
" Computer programming languages are a more recent example.
" Representative paper money was resisted into the nineteenth century.

Anyways, I hope to discuss what I believe is the impact of representational
systems by the end of the year in a full blown report, probably some 50
pages in length with lots of pictures and graphs so they don't bore everyone
to death.

To me Mr. DeSoto's book was extremely refreshing because it highlighted how
I take for granted certain rights that I have. Many of these rights have
been with the country for hundreds of years but they continue to evolve and
were shaped by history and its events.

In the book Mr. DeSoto talks about property rights.

It is my belief that the real estate market, which is much of the
accumulated wealth in the Western world, would not be what it is today if it
wasn't for property rights. Therefore, think about your home or apartment
complex you live in. Many of these homes or complexes wouldn't have been
built had property rights not evolved because our growth rates wouldn't have
evolved with them.

Additionally, due to economic growth the standard home increasingly has more
and more luxuries. Did you know that central air conditioning wasn't
invented until the 20th century? Heck, the first air conditioners were the
ones that people put outside their windows and it was marketed as a
convenience or luxury. The population migration to the southern U.S.
wouldn't have occurred had it not been for air conditioning temperatures are
110 in Dallas in the summer - air conditioning saves lives, no pun
intended.)

http://www.betterbizbooks.com/bb/art/BkClub/MysteryofCapital.htm

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REPRESENTATION AND COMPUTATION

The widely held assumption that the mind is basically an
information-processing device is normally supplemented by two other
relatively uncontroversial foundational claims. These claims complement that
assumption by providing further specifications of what is going on as part
of the information-processing activity. In particular, they can be seen as
providing answers to the following two questions. (a) What in general is
processed by the cognising mind (or brain)? In other words, what is the
nature of the information manipulated by the mind (or brain)? (b) What is
the general form of the processing? What is it like and how does it proceed?

The first claim answers question (a) by specifying the objects over which
the information-processing activity is defined as being essentially mental
representations. Roughly, these are items in the mind or brain of a given
system that in some sense "mirror", or are mapped onto, other items or sets
of items; the latter are typically items external to the system: objects,
events, situations, etc., in the world (typically, in the immediate
environment of the system). Thus, it is assumed that cognition operates on
mental representations, in the sense that these are basically what is being
processed by the minds or brains of intelligent information-processing
systems when they are performing given cognitive tasks. These tasks range
from relatively simple ones, such as detecting the presence of a predator in
the surroundings, to very complex ones, such as proving a mathematical
theorem.

Note that mental representations might come in a wide variety of forms,
there being no commitment in the claim itself to a specific kind of
representation or to a particular sort of representational vehicle.
According to taste, or theory, or purpose, mental representations might be
thought of as images, schemas, symbols, models, icons, sentences, maps, and
so on. Their job is to provide systems with the information they need to
control their behaviour and guide their interactions with the environment.
Mental representations are thus supposed to depict, by means of any vehicle
that turns out to be appropriate to do that job, not only aspects and states
of the outer world, but also aspects and states of the inner world, namely
internal states of the system.

The second claim answers question (b) above by identifying the nature of the
processing, by describing in general what goes on inside the "black box" (to
use a familiar metaphor). The processing is characterized as being
essentially computational, as consisting of a series of computations
executed by the system (or by its mind, or brain). Given the first claim, it
follows that the computations involved in cognition are defined over a set
of mental representations. Roughly, this means that the cognitive tasks
performed by the mind or brain characteristically consist in generating, in
an effective way, certain mental representations as outputs, on the basis of
certain mental representations given as inputs. The operations performed by
the visual system or by the language faculty in humans are clear cases of
computations in this sense: in the former case they take 2D patterns
(retinal images) as inputs, and yield representations of 3D scenes as
outputs; in the latter case they take acoustic representations of utterances
as inputs, and yield semantic representations as outputs.

http://pwp.netcabo.pt/0154943702/intro.htm

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representationalism

Also called representativism or representative theories of perception,
memory, thinking, and so on. Any theory holding that these activities
(perception is usually meant) involve the existence of mental objects (such
as images or 'sense-data') which facilitate the activity by representing the
external object.

We may be said to perceive the representative instead of perceiving the
object (which is then inferred to exist - but on what grounds?); or to
perceive the object indirectly by perceiving the representative directly
(but what do 'directly' and 'indirectly' amount to?)

A representative theory of memory may say we have an image which represents
the past event (but how can we know it does?), as against saying we are
somehow in direct contact with the past (despite its no longer existing).

Representatives, therefore, which also are not always easy to find, may end
up as barriers rather than bridges to what they are supposed to represent.

http://www.philosophyprofessor.com/philosophies/representationalism.html

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They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not
statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of these essential
representations that explains why people who have adopted every other
Western invention, from the paper clip to the nuclear reactor, have not been
able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic market economy
work. In his book Mystery of Capital Hernando de Soto summarizes years of
research into the reality of economic life in places as disparate as Haiti,
Egypt, the Philippines, and his native Peru, and comes to a set of
conclusions as to the causes of their failure to make their economies work.
He starts by establishing the idea that Capitalism is in crisis outside the
rich nations, and that is because developing and centrally planned nations
have been unable to "globalize" capital within their own countries.

He also states that the basis of a market economy is capital and the basis
of capital as an economic tool is rational property law. Without a complex
system to delineate and protect rightful ownership, capital is "dead" It
cannot be used as collateral for a mortgage; it's not attractive as an
enticement to investors. Its potential as a wellspring for further
production can't be tapped, because owners, lenders and investors have no
certainty of ownership beyond the moment. De Soto's team documented the
existence of trillions of dollars in "dead capital" in the economically
blighted areas of the developing world far in excess of every World Bank
loan, foreign aid package and foreign investment portfolio combined. Most of
the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of their
businesses. What they lack is not the asset base necessary to economic
success, but the framework in which those assets can become capital.

http://www.fetp.edu.vn/shortcourse/0102/Eco_Management/English/2-Fri-Jan11/Mystery%20of%20Capital-Abstract-English.pdf

http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:_-XyxV1_8-cJ:www.fetp.edu.vn/shortcourse/0102/Eco_Management/English/2-Fri-Jan11/Mystery%2520of%2520Capital-Abstract-English.pdf+%22representational+system%22+desoto&hl=en

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A critical component of a functional, capitalist legal system is that it
enables property to be represented in writing, in titles, securities,
contracts, and other documents. These representations, in order to form the
basis of a full-fledged capitalist economic order, require systematic
integration. "The reason capitalism has triumphed in the West and sputtered
in the rest of the world is because most of the assets in Western nations
have been integrated into one formal representational system," notes De
Soto. "This integration did not happen casually. Over decades in the
nineteenth century, politicians, legislators, and judges pulled together the
scattered facts and rules that had governed property throughout cities,
villages, buildings, and farms and integrated them into one system. This
'pulling together' of property representations, a revolutionary moment in
the history of developed nations, deposited all the information and rules
governing the accumulated wealth of their citizens into one knowledge base."
[52]

It should be understood that, in the absence of the state, this "pulling
together," this integration of property representations systems, could not
have taken place. In the nineteenth century, and even today, people are too
scattered and too disputatious to bring together and enforce a common
representative standard. Only a centralized government could accomplish such
a task. One standard had to be imposed on all, even if no single locality
was completely satisfied with it. The American Articles of Confederation
failed because they were unable to impose the economic uniformity necessary
to develop a strong and flourishing national economy. The American
constitution, which laid the groundwork for a strong central government,
helped create the conditions out of which American capitalism arose. America
would have never become the world's greatest economic nation were it not for
the Constitution.

The need for a legal framework is not the only reason why capitalism can
only exist and flourish under the auspices of the nation-state. The state
also plays an instrumental role in helping business deal with the problem of
uncertainty. I have already mentioned how uncertainty leads to the
development of massive corporations. But this development also depends on
the formation of legal rules regulating business organization. Corporations
depend on legal privileges that provide limited liability to shareholders,
thus reducing the risk of investing in new and daring enterprises. Many
other examples could be cited demonstrating how the state, by reducing
uncertainty, creates the environment necessary for the capitalist engine to
function. Even something as simple as maintaining law and order is
absolutely critical to capitalist enterprise. Investors must feel that they
are safe in both their persons and their property before they can even begin
to consider investing their assets in risky ventures. No rational person
will make the sacrifices involved in saving and investing their wealth if
they fear that some criminal can take it all away.

http://homepage.mac.com/machiavel/Text/machiavellianecon.html

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In his new book, The Mystery of Capital, de Soto pursues two objectives:

First, he demonstrates that the obstacle blocking the Third World from the
benefits of capitalism is precisely its incapacity to produce capital.
Capital is the force behind an increase in work productivity and is what
creates the wealth of nations. Capital is the vital essence of capitalism
and it is the only source that poor nations seem to not be able to generate
on their own despite entering in all the activities and rituals
characteristic of a capitalistic economy.

The second objective is to show, based on ten different research projects
conducted in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America (especially in
Haiti), that the majority of poor countries have the necessary assets to
move successfully toward capitalism. Even in the poorest nations on earth,
the poor save and their savings are immense: 40 times all the foreign aid
distributed throughout the world since 1945! In Egypt the wealth accumulated
by the poor is 55 times greater than all the foreign direct investment in
Egypt (up to 1996) including the Suez Canal and the Assuan Dam.

Hernando, with help from his team at the Institute for Liberty and Democracy
(ILD) and experts from the Center for Free Enterprise and Democracy (CLED),
have established that In Haiti, ranked the poorest nation in the hemisphere,
the accumulated value of the poor's assets is 150 times greater than the
total amount of foreign investment in the country since its independence in
1804.

The poor's assets take many forms: dwellings built on land whose property
rights have not been clearly established, companies that operate on the
fringes of the legal system and small industries located in areas that make
them invisible to investors and financiers.

Given that the property rights of landholders have neither been validly
established nor delineated, these assets cannot be transformed into capital.
Consequently, they cannot by the object of any market transaction, except in
the restricted circle of people that are personally known to the landholders
and in whom there is mutual trust. The effect of this is that transactions
are carried out with undervalued good and thus do not reflect the real value
of the goods being exchanged. For Hernando these assets are dead capital.

In the West on the other hand, each plot of land, building, cabin and piece
of equipment are represented by a document. This document is the invisible
symbol of a large occult process through which all assets are connected to
the rest of the economy. Such is the power of representation that, via a
symbol, tangible assets can lead an existence parallel to their material
one. This double life is occult and manifests the true force of capital:
that of generating new capital, serving as collateral and thereby providing
access to credit. The mortgage on a building, equipment pledged as
collateral, a stocked warehouse or a crop, are additional assets that were
generated by an initial resource, and already existed as potential within
the initial resource. These assets link their owner to a new network where
the relationship between his/her personal credit history can be established,
where the agent has a corroborated domicile which makes him a potential
client for public services (electricity, mail, telephone, potable water and
why not Internet?) or a citizen with tax obligations.

The Third World and the majority of former Communist-Block nations neither
possess nor fully comprehend the representational system. Most assets do not
have a double life since the property rights of the holders are not validly
documented. At the same time, said representational system is necessary to
make a market economy work. Throughout history human beings have developed
several systems of representation: writing, algebra, musical notation,
double entry accounting. Said systems allow the human spirit to understand
that which is not tangible, and it is within the universe of representations
that the most important decisions are made, where capital lives out its true
life and where wealth is created and exchanged and what also ultimately
determines poverty. Who was the Haitian that said: Konstitisyon se papye,
bayonet se fe? [The constitution is paper, a bayonet is iron] Is there a
better formula to negate the power of representation and console oneself
with the illusion of the tangible? What better way to affirm -as we have
been doing for over two centuries now- the supremacy of the consummated act
(de facto) over rights? Unfortunately, one forgets that by negating
representation we negate rights and wealth to 5/6ths of humanity. Without
representation the poor possess things but not property rights, they have
dwellings but are not owners, they have tools and skills, but not a
business, such is the mystery of capital.

This idea was not foreign to Marx, who recognized that the power of capital
was independent of the forms it could take. For Marx, physical assets could
lead a double life in the economic world. De Soto's intuition is promising
for economic thought because it understands that formal property, still
being (as seen from a Marxist point of view) an instrument of appropriation,
intrinsically possesses the mechanisms that allow assets and the work
invested in them to create capital.

Nevertheless, is there a solution to this mystery? Are the poor definitely
condemned to economic failure? De Soto is not satisfied with merely
explaining he also seeks to explore alternatives to solutions. How? He
attempts to understand how the West developed. By analyzing the example of
England and above all the United States, Hernando de Soto argues that as its
cities and industries developed these countries began to progressively
integrate citizen's property rights into a unified legal system. We are
still far from the tomahawk land claims where in the 19th century US
settlers could consolidate their possession of land by marking their
initials with a tomahawk in the bark of one or several trees or from the
log-cabin rights or corn rights, where the occupier could activate his/her
rights by building a cabin or growing corn on the occupied plot. This
process developed gradually and underwent more than a century of successive
adjustments. The West gives the impression of having come very far;
nevertheless the present day situation of the majority of Third World
countries and that of the former communist nations is but the West's past.

http://www.ild.org.pe/nouvelliste-en.htm

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Representationalism, or the representational theory of perception, is a
philosophical doctrine that in any act of perception, the immediate (direct)
object of perception is a sense-datum that represents an external object,
which is the mediate (indirect) object of perception.

Two 17th century philosophers, René Descartes, and John Locke most
prominently advocated this theory. The term they used was not "sense-datum"
but "idea." This article does not discuss any differences in meaning that
these terms might have. "Idea" as used in the theory of perception is a
technical term, meaning roughly the same thing as sense-datum.
Representationalism is one of the key assumptions of cognitivism in
psychology.

Representationalism asserts that sense-data represent external objects --
physical objects, properties, and events. But this immediately raises a
question: How well do sense-data represent external objects, properties, and
events? At least sometimes, they do not represent them at all well. It is
often the case that our perceptions do not correlate at all well with
physical reality and this aspect of representationalism has led to
psychologists questioning such things as police identity parades.

Representationalism also has the advantage that it allows dreams and
imaginings to be considered on the same basis as perceptions, perhaps, as
recent fMRI studies have shown, using similar areas of the brain.

An apparent problem with representationalism is that it seems to assume that
something in the brain, a homunculus is viewing the content of the brain.
This suggests that some physical effect or phenomenon other than simple data
flow and information processing must be involved in perception.

The failure of information processing theory to explain representationalism
has led many psychologists to reject it in favour of other approaches. This
rejection of representationalism has been encouraged by a widespread
misunderstanding of the homunculus argument. The need for a homunculus in a
theory of mind shows that the theory is either incomplete or invalid, in the
case of representationalism the theory is clearly incomplete, not invalid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representationalism

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Representationalism (or indirect realism) with respect to perception is the
view that "we are never aware of physical objects, [but rather] we are only
indirectly aware of them, in virtue of a direct awareness of an intermediary
[mental] object. (Dancy, 145) Because there are both direct and indirect
objects of awareness in representationalism, a correspondence relation
arises between the mental entities directly perceived and external objects
which those mental entities represent. And thus perceptual error occurs when
the two objects of awareness do not correspond sufficiently well. In
opposition to representationalism, both (direct) realism and idealism agree
that perception is direct and unmediated, despite their disagreements about
what the object of perception is. (Dancy, 145) In any form of direct
perception, no correspondence relationship is possible, since there is only
one object of perception. Thus only representationalism will give rise to
the view that perceptual errors exist and must be part of a theory of
perception. Nevertheless, both idealism and realism must still account for
the facts that are referred to as "perceptual errors" by the
representationalist.

http://www.dianahsieh.com/undergrad/rape.html

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Rowe DL (2001). Beyond representationalism: A dynamical approach
transcending symbolism incognitive psychology.In JR Morss, N Stephenson & H
Van Rappard (Eds.). Theoretical Issues in Psychology,, 131 - 144. Cambridge,
MA:Kluwer PDF (37KB)

Abstract. Representationalism has defined the premise that cognition must
involve a capacity to manipulate symbolic information. Although this
approach has provided a good metaphoric and descriptive view of cognition,
it ignores the distinct neural properties of the brain. This chapter has
explored this problem by providing a more neurologically plausible account
through the use of dynamical and chaotic systems theory. Symbols or
representations were suggested to be epiphenomenonal to actual neural
function and were considered as descriptions of behaviour rather than
cognition. Instead such entities were presumed to be embedded and decomposed
in low level chaotic activity of the brain in such a manner that their
localisation to specific neural entities was not a critical factor. The
formation of knowledge, memories, or action was considered as an emergent
property of distinct neural patterns of activity that result from the
interaction of various neural groups.

http://www.brain-dynamics.net/braindynamics/publications/pubs_abstract.jsp?PubID=4

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Computation without representation: Nonsymbolic-analog processing
http://www.uno.edu/~rstuffle/pages/papers/IOS.html

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