ELEPHANT TO PETER, ALL:
PETER WROTE:
> I think you can have sensationless perception ( as when an object passes
> behind another: the sensation of signals from said object ceases, but this
> does not result in the perception that the object has ceased to exist). I also
> think you can have perceptionless sensation; when asleep, many sensations are
> present but, by and large, perception of the causes of the sensations is
> absent.
> Admittedly, the distinction is not 'hard', in that one might easily argue that
> without any sensation *ever*, perception would hardly be possible.
ELEPHANT:
Wonderfully condensed bit of good thinking going on here Peter. Some
thoughts in return.
(As you know...) Perceptionless sensation is an important topic in the
philosophical thought of Leibniz, the German Platonist
Philosopher-Mathematician whose mathematical work parralleled his
contemporary Newton's, except in that Newton was famous. Perceptionless
sensation is such an important topic for Leibniz that he has to give it a
special name: "apperception" (writing in Latin, but what of it?).
Leibniz's favourite example of apperception concerns a watermill and the
mill owners, who live "above shop". Every time we go to visit we are
defined by the dinn of the cascade and the waterwheel. And yet the mill
owner and his frolicsome wife seem to get by just fine - they talk, eat,
sleep and do unmentionables without even appearing to notice this racket
going on. "How can you do it?" our inquirer asks. "Oh, I dunno really, I
haven't really heard the water much these last ten years". Now the natural
thing to assume is that these people have had their eardrums blown in - but
not a bit if it. The can still hear our questions right enough, and seem
better able to carry on this conversation than we are, distracted as we are
by the need to cover our ears and the constant longing to go to the
toilet... Rush Rush Tinkle Tinkle. So how do they manage it? Leibniz's
conclusion is:
they do not hear the mill because they are not listening to it.
Now, to an empiricist way of thinking, that sounds a bit arse about face,
given that empiricists generally assume that what we perceive is a product
of the environment making an impression on us, not of us selecting an
environment we wish to attend to. But in fact there's actually a logic to
Leibniz's far reaching observation which is backed up by all the latest
experimental observation, a few centuries later. It turns out that, just as
Leibniz said, what interests us in sensations, and what we perceive, are
differences. No-change is not an item on the news report.
Someone might say that Leibniz is simply observing that the mill owner
learns to "filter out" the mill - that's not the half of it. Rather it's
the visitor to the mill that is *filtering in* the sound of the mill -
because this is something that constitutes a change in the environment he
habitually attends to, and is therefore noticeable.
It's not as if there is some objective default setting for all our filters
as to what is and is not noticeable, and that the mill owner has fiddled
with his so as to accomodate the mill - oh no. When the mill owner goes to
Church on sunday (his only outing) he is overcome by the silence - "how do
you manage it?" he says to the priest, for whom this is of course his
busiest and noisiest day.
There is no "default setting" for what should register: rather different
things register to different people because they are different people,
inhabit different lives, are interested in and bored by different things -
all too obvious, right?
Well if this is obvious, it nevertheless has some rather unobvious
implications for your idea of what perception is. Because if we are not
"filtering out" but instead "filtering in", then the order in which we place
perception and sensation might have to be reversed accordingly....
Peter is worried that:
> one might easily argue that
> without any sensation *ever*, perception would hardly be possible.
.... but au contraire, now we find that it's the perception, the "filtering
in", which is responsible for the sensation. "I hear the water wheel
because I listen for it", and not "I can listen to the water wheel because I
hear it". See? The mill owner was genuinely shocked when you asked about
the noise - just didn't know what you were talking about. He was reminded
that he had a dim memory of a time, many years ago, when he had bothered to
listen to the wheel - and in that time he had heard it. So he could imagine
vaguely what you were on about. But it wasn't a present concern - hence the
surprise, like some girlfriend turning up that you parted from ten years
ago.
"Ah, now you mention it, yes, it is a bit loud isn't it" might be his
response, which is really very telling. "Now you mention it".... Think of a
scratch and you get an itch. State something, and you can filter it in as a
novel phenomenon - it's not that you let down your guard or drop your
filtering our system for a moment (that would really imply too much: is the
mill owner thinking about the noise all the time so as not to think about
the noise? too absurd) - no, what's happening is that suddenly we go out
looking for noise because noise is a living concern, because it's the topic
of the conversation, a conversation you have to strain to follow over the
sound of running water, but which the mill owner follows with ease.
There is justice, after all, in the thought that the way to make something
go away is not to think about it. The twist is: that this "way" cannot be a
"technique": adopting it as a method simply aggravates the "thinking about"
which it is supposed to do away with. "Stop thinking about that noise!" -
'What, *that* noise, the one that sounds like an entire army constantly
peeing?'.......
----------------------------------
I guess this is why, if want to direct our attention away from the cycle of
generation and distruction, we do need something genuinely other to think
about and "occupy our minds" - atleast to begin with. The spiritual content
of Pythagoras' theorum. Or the Monadology.
--------------------------------
tell application finder
activate
sleep
end tell
Elephant
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