Problems understanding the "camera" idea

[Blanquist]

When Trotsky talks about the brain being like a camera, what does he mean exactly?

Does it mean that everything we see is like a camera in the sense that we don't see everything? In that we can't pick up all the colors and all the matter?

[Blanquist]

I have trouble understanding these things

“The dialectic of consciousness is not ... a reflection of
the dialectic of nature, but is a result of the lively interaction between consciousness and
nature and - in addition - a method of cognition, issuing from this interaction.”

“Consciousness acts like a camera”. “Since
cognition is not identical with the world (in spite of Hegel’s idealistic postulation),
dialectical cognition is not identical with the dialectic of nature.”

“The brain is the
material substrate of consciousness. Does this mean that consciousness is simply a form of
‘manifestation’ of the physiological processes in the brain? If this were the state of affairs, then
one would have to ask: What is the need for consciousness? If consciousness has no independent
function, which rises above physiological processes in the brain and nerves, then it is
unnecessary, useless; it is harmful because it is a superfluous complication - and what a
complication!”

What is he saying?

[Luís Henrique]

Hope this article helps.

Luís Henrique

[MotherCossack]

i have had a little think..... what i come up with is this......
a camera can only show, in the photo, one view, one aspect .... it can only photogragh what is in front of it ... and .... only as much as the lens is wide enough to include.

- it is like we only see what goes on in front of us..... not in more than one location at a time
and
- we only see what we are looking at not behind us...
we cant look in 2 places at once....
we have to choose where to look .... and accept we will miss the rest...

the last bit seems to be suggesting .... that we have consciousness but it is so tied up with personal circumstance andexperience that it is inevitably highly subjective and rather more of a nuisance than an enabler.

[Hit The North]

This article should help, as well.

From this and other fragments we can infer that the key theme that unites the notes on
dialectics, psychoanalysis and evolution, is Trotsky’s anti-reductionism. This theme is
evident in the following remark: “The dialectic of consciousness is not ... a reflection of
the dialectic of nature, but is a result of the lively interaction between consciousness and
nature and - in addition - a method of cognition, issuing from this interaction.” What
Trotsky means by this is evident a few paragraphs later, when he invokes one of his
favorite analogies – “Consciousness acts like a camera”. The process at work in the mind
(like the process at work in the camera) isn’t identical to the process of the reality it is
reflecting. To argue otherwise isn’t materialism but rather Hegelian idealism: “Since
cognition is not identical with the world (in spite of Hegel’s idealistic postulation),
dialectical cognition is not identical with the dialectic of nature.”
The camera analogy demonstrates this point: still photography “tears from nature
‘moments’ [while] the ties and transitions among them are lost”; motion pictures are
more like nature in their “uninterruptedness,” but the latter is an illusion created by
“exploit[ing] the eye’s imperfection,” i.e. by stringing together separate moments (or
shots) with breaks between them too short for the retina to register. In other words, by a
process of illusion, the camera produces a (more or less accurate) reflection of reality.
Needless to say, the process (or dialectic) of consciousness must be a good deal more
complicated. This brings Trotsky to the following conclusion: “Consciousness is a quite
original part of nature, possessing peculiarities and regularities that are completely absent
in the remaining part of nature. Subjective dialectics must by virtue of this be a
distinctive part of objective dialectics - with its own special forms and regularities.”
There is, to put this another way, an important degree of autonomy to the processes of the
mind.

[Rafiq]

I have trouble understanding these things







What is he saying?

He's just being a difficult bastard.

He is trying to say that our Brains function as a kind of a mirror, a machine, if you will, that acts in direct reflection to material conditions. All human conciousness is a reflection of the material world, not just "Matter", but the very structural composition of our societies, and the mode of production which is dominant, and the social relations which exist within it, etc.

Then there's also Commodity fetishism, in which these material beings carry an influential potential beyond themselves, re shaping the very nature in which we interact and behave with each other and to ourselves, over riding our puny, useless false conscious thoughts.

This is a basic tenet for all Marxists. Trotsky is just a shit writer. Basically, we are robots who act as agents of the production process, and the productive forces themselves influence everything that has to do with us.

[Kronsteen]

He is trying to say that our Brains function as a kind of a mirror, a machine, if you will, that acts in direct reflection to material conditions.

You seem to be trying to blend Plekhanov's 'mirror' theory of perception with the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Lenin vociferously denounced the mirror theory - though the alternative he laid out in Empiriocritisicim is a more extreme version of the same idea. In philosophical matters the later Trotsky (AFAIK) always followed Lenin.

Strong Sapir-Whorf, were the semantic and grammatical categories of our language make it nearly impossible to conceive of others, was unknown to Trotsky, and he'd have called it idealist. Probably rightly.

As for the quotes, the first two seem to be saying our impressions of the world don't resemble their causes, in the same way as a bootprint doesn't resemble a boot.

The third could be taken as an argument against behaviorism, or an argument that consciousness is something special, mysterious and extra, in addition to the brain's operations. The first seems more likely.

In any case, if you want to know something about neurology and consciousness, ask a neurologist.

[JustMovement]

I imagine he means something like: information (light) comes through our eyes, it get converted into nerve impulses and then recreated as an image that we see in our head, so we are watching a movie in our heads, so we don't have "direct" access to reality.

The reason you don't get it is because that idea is incoherent. If there is a little man in our heads watching a movie, then there needs to be a little man in his head as well so he can watch it, and so on to infinity.

[JustMovement]

You seem to be trying to blend Plekhanov's 'mirror' theory of perception with the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Lenin vociferously denounced the mirror theory - though the alternative he laid out in Empiriocritisicim is a more extreme version of the same idea. In philosophical matters the later Trotsky (AFAIK) always followed Lenin.

Strong Sapir-Whorf, were the semantic and grammatical categories of our language make it nearly impossible to conceive of others, was unknown to Trotsky, and he'd have called it idealist. Probably rightly.

As for the quotes, the first two seem to be saying our impressions of the world don't resemble their causes, in the same way as a bootprint doesn't resemble a boot.

The third could be taken as an argument against behaviorism, or an argument that consciousness is something special, mysterious and extra, in addition to the brain's operations. The first seems more likely.

In any case, if you want to know something about neurology and consciousness, ask a neurologist.

If you want to know something about brain states, then certainly, ask a neurologist. I don't see what they can tell you about consciousness though, other than the fact that you need a brain to have it.

[Anarpest]

1st quote: Dialectical views don't simply arise from passive observation of nature, and summing up what we see in a detached manner, but rather from interacting with it practically. Consciousness is not simply a passive 'mirror' of nature, but rather only learns about nature through and in interaction with it. Theory arises from practice, etc.

2nd quote:

Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

3rd quote: If the function of consciousness could be reduced to simply the physical, mechanical effect of particles moving in the brain (in the same way as the function of a hammer can be explained by its physical effect on an anvil or pin), then ultimately this makes consciousness superfluous because the same physical effects could be performed without it. I suppose that this is part of an argument that life and consciousness can't be summed up in purely mechanical categories, and that human consciousness and knowledge are capable of performing functions in human practice which would be impossible for a non-purposive, purely mechanical being.