Here is my conundrum: One cannot be inside a group and outside of it at the same time. It is impossible to say anything about a group of which one is a member.

This is a fascinating philosophical paradox that touches on self-reference, group identity, and the observer's position.

The tension I describe exists in many domains. When we're embedded within a group, our perspective is inherently limited by our participation in it - we have blind spots, assumptions, and shared biases that may be invisible to us. Yet complete detachment also seems impossible, as our very observations would be shaped by our own position relative to the group.

This recalls Gödel's incompleteness theorems in mathematics - a system cannot fully describe or analyze itself from within. Similarly, anthropologists face the insider-outsider dilemma: total immersion in a culture risks losing analytical distance, while pure objectivity misses lived experience.

Wes,

A very good response.

My position comes via psychology and fitting in individuality into squares as it were. It does seem to me that individuality is a recent explanation, important in psychology and psychiatry, but at no point can the involvement in groups or group be detached.

Hi Stanley,

In my research, I adopted a cognitive linguistics (CL) perspective which emphasizes the importance of the body for cognition. Unfortunately, despite the extensive use of the body concept, CL does not define the body to any significant degree. So, I had to develop my own definition. Basically, I view the body as a social collective of cells bonded together by connective tissues that the cells themselves produce. From this vantage point, the relation between individuals and the group is that of scale: multicellular collections (called individuals) constitute a larger scale social group, which in turn is likely to constitute an even larger scale social group, and so on.

My “cellular collective” approach offers a bridge between biological and social perspectives that isn't typically emphasized in mainstream psychology, which tends to treat the body as either a biological system or a socially constructed entity, rather than explicitly viewing the body itself as a social collective across scales.

Something to think about:

See the attachment

Wes, first I have been going on the same lines, although differently. Slightly. The single focus on the brain comes from psychiatry and simply cannot be right in the way they pose it.

But you touch on my recent work which involves the external and internal as composing the understanding we so believe in. We do not actually think like computers, another myth of several decades ago and still involved in our estimates of the mind.

I will look at your work as although you use different wordings, there are similar observations.

There are ancient social and cultural events in the very ancient past that cannot have occurred through 'learning' as the participators were hunter gatherers. Other processes must have occurred and are occurring now.

Interesting, discussion Stanley Wilkin and Wes Raykowski.

On Wes' conundrum: "One cannot be inside a group and outside of it at the same time. It is impossible to say anything about a group of which one is a member."

I agree and would extend it further and say an observer in a group can make an intra-axiom observation about the group (as Godell's would allow). However, a true extra-axiom of the group is impossible if the observer is inside it.

At risk of getting too far off topic – it leads me to question an even further extension of Wes’ comment.

How many extra-axiom observations can an individual make about a group before it effects the intra-axioms of said group, and the once-external observer now becomes internal to the group's dynamics.

I.e. think of a low-level news reporter that is writing about a low-level scientist. Consider that initially the news report doesn’t think much of the article they are writing. However, after publishing it goes viral. Now technically that extra-axiom news report just affected the intra-axiom relations of the scientist/scientists group. Given the news report is now conscious of his control of the scientist's work, does that make the news report intra-axiom and subject to the internal self-reference biases that you discuss above Wes and Stanley? It makes me wonder how this system affects governing dynamics and game theory.

I can see you two are going down a route I haven't but i find it hard to understand quite how someone cannot be inside and outside a group. Still, I am interested in your involvement of game theory as this might help my thinking on this.

My position remains that doubt must be passed on individuality as it is a recent claimed phenomenon and is usually perceived within political activity. Which I have considered. The reasoning I have gone on is a top down process where groups are dynamic and not the perpetual present, and individuality, or its apparent form, is an aspect of the group. Many large and professionally defined groups might identify an area within the group, or the impulse come from another attached or contingent group, and further groups, with defining thinking, developing.

Hi everyone,

I will start with a preamble: My argument is based on certain assumptions which I try to make clear. Because of this, my findings are neither complete nor absolute as they describe a view from a particular vantage point. On this assumption, no single argument can describe reality, if at all. What is more, to discuss anything properly, we need to present our assumptions.

Regarding "The reasoning I have gone on is a top-down process where groups are dynamic and not the perpetual present, and individuality, or its apparent form, is an aspect of the group."

You describe your view as that of top-down, suggesting at least two scales/levels: the social group and the individual. This raises questions such as:

1) How do we (human individuals) know that there are groups and other individuals? I hope that we all agree that we are aware of all this through our sensations and that these sensory systems are located in the human body.

2) What is the body and what is the group? To answer this, one needs to describe the relationship between the two either as a (multilevel) hierarchy or as a (single scale) collection.

Could you elaborate your position and assumptions on which it is based?

Dear friends,

I would like to throw in my little two cents' worth, (or less possibly). Can't it be that humans just are social animals, like bees, horses, wolves and all of these in nature, and yes, as any organism which consists of more than one cell, in which at least two cells agree to cooperate and differentiate their function? There was some work in tying biology to game theory some years ago by Ken Binmore, Samir Okasha and Christopher Clarke at the University of Bristol. I think it was a live debate within biology (what is the individual, for example in a big forest full of cloned trees - apologies for my rusty references, i've been away from academia for a while) after they moved on from the selfish gene and Dawkin's theories.

As an addendum, yes, I'd add that it's possible that despite it being quite powerful characteristic of what are labeled as 'western societies', the homo economicus is both a relatively recent invention and perhaps a quite obsolete one, perhaps even in economics.

Best Wishes,

Haris

Haris, some of which you write can b agreed with and more work has already been done by others on here. The tree notion is interesting as it provides understanding of colonies of plants that communicate, just not in human ways. We need to investigate every example, and compare equally and maybe be less human and brain centred for genuine understanding.

Dear Stanley Wilkin , apologies if i sounded a bit too simplistic, i admit that I'm a bit of a dilletante :-)

As for being less human and brain-centred for genuine understanding however, isn't that a bit of a paradox, as our genuine understanding will have to be mediated only (ie centred) on our human brains? :)

Best Wishes,

Haris

Haris,

This has gone beyond this. At least on here and of course elsewhere. Nevertheless, these matters need repeating as the Descartes model is alive and kicking in psychiatry and Neurology, two of the worst pseudo-sciences of our time.

The complexity of the human consciousness, especially its engagement with the environment, is lost and is translated by the interplay of dopamine in the brain. A silly reductionism, all our capacities are reduced to often one chemical and every other aspect of the universe has no existence. An idea of such arrogance and implausibility it is of course widely accepted.