Peter, interesting post.
PETER WROTE:
> Now, one of the problems facing various brain researchers is "how can you
> possibly filter something out without perceiving it?". One way is to say that
> there is a level of preconcious processing which does, in fact, recognise the
> stimulus, or information, or (Gibson) 'stimulus-information', which then
> 'blocks it out' - filters it out of concious representation. A more recent
> model, like Susan Greenfield's, would say something like "this particular
> information fails to occasion 'resonance' in the brain". (For those of you who
> haven't really thought about "resonance" for a while, it refers the particular
> property whereby, at a certain point, the energy output of a system rises
> disproportionately to the energy input. An example is obviously found in
> 'sound'; most of the things you actually hear are actually bodies in resonance
> - vocal chords, drum skins, trombones, etc) But note that this still seems to
> be a signal-processing term. And it still begs the question as to how
> 'information' has come to impact on the physical world (in the form of
> physical signals in the brain, in this case) - what mechanism actually is
> responsible for 'filtering' or 'gating' the appropriate complex signal?
ELEPHANT:
The "gibson" model appears to imply (1) that the brain goes through every
process of cognition twice, once unconsciously, and once conciously, and
also (2) that the unconscious processing is problematically extended: i.e.
we are aware of "everything" and then edit this "everything" for concious
representation. While this might be a plausible account for spoon-benders
and other charlatans (i.e. they could claim that, but for the conscious
editor we could 'know' anything we choose too about other times and places,
have miraculous psycho-kinetic powers etc), I don't find it a very elegant
explanation. The extention problem seems to me to be the decisive
uglification. If this second layer of processing is invented solely in
order to explain how we can become aware of what we were not aware of
before, if follows that it should not be possible to cite this same problem
in the case of the second-level. That being the case, the second level
would have to embrace Everything with a capital 'E'. Not just what happens
to be 10 feet from you now, but the entire universe, history and future of,
laws of physics, the interiors of black holes, etc etc: anything it might be
theoretically possible for you to be aware of at any future time. I just
don't credit my brain cells with that kind of processing power.
And the greenfeild business about "resonace" in the brain? Preferable over
dual-process, I should say, but, as you point out, "resonance" is left
undefined and meaningless, and thus we have the same question that we
started out with: "what leads me to attend to this and not that?",
translated into "what leads me to resonate with this and not that?".
Frankly My Dear, I don't think the neat word substitution advances us any.
Aren't these people overlooking something rather too obvious: that we
*choose* what to attend to? I guess that doesn't cut the mustard with the
Engineering and Science Reseach Council.
PETER:
> Another example, to do with sound - "reverberation" - as in a reverberant
> room; how come you can hear someone speaking, and understand them etc, and yet
> the multitudinous echoes, reflections and local resonances are (usually)easily
> separated out, and ignored as sound sources in their own right? Are they just
> 'filtered out', or rather do they constitute another class of 'potential
> information' (about the shape of the room, and so on.) If the latter, then
> this "filter" seems to be an unusually clever thing, not at all like the dumb
> mechanical filters as mentioned earliier. So, this 'filtering out' and
> 'filtering in' process does seem to be due to two different processes,
> occasioned by two different neurological substrates. So, it might be said that
> 'noticing' something is a product of a votive system, and that this type of
> votive system is what we call perception.
ELEPHANT:
"Votive system" - is that code for: "we choose"?
PETER:
> Now, I have no problem at all with the notion that 'perception' causes
> 'sensation', in that perceptual processes (thinking) cause us to go out and
> about in the world in order to gather more 'potential information' (or 'signal
> patterns' as classical physicists would have it).
ELEPHANT:
Well I suppose my thought includes that point, but really it goes further.
I was thinking that perception causes sensation in the more radical sense
that only what we *perceive as* a distinct phenomenon or sensation can then
get officially stamped *sensation*, and that actually "sensation" doesn't
have any role outside of these little naming ceremonies. Like a court where
the judge pronouces sentence. "And you sir, being ajudged by this court an
incorrigable Sensation of the first order, I sentence to fifteen mentions in
a book of philosophical counter examples. May god have mercy on your soul."
PETER:
> So, behaviour isn't just the
> result (or even just the 'sign') of perception, it's one of the primary tools
> for gathering 'potential information'. Behaviour *is* perception-in-action.
ELEPHANT:
I like that way of putting it alot - particularly because it puts the
Behaviourists in their place. You can't go explaining perception in terms
of Behaviour if what behaviour means is perception-in-action (the proposed
explanation contains the to-be-explained).
PETER:
> Interestingly, there's a very readable writer on this: R.L Gregory, who
> pointed out in an essay/paper called something like "Eyes and Brains; a
> 'Hen-and-Egg' Problem", that we could hardly have evolved 'eyes' without the
> processing equipment to deal with their output, on the other hand we are
> hardly likely to evolve spurious processing capability without the likelyhood
> of appropriate input. So there's a kind of 'bootstrap' operation here, and
> sensory equipment evolves as much from a species' need for a particular kind
> of information as from the fact of the presence of that type of potential
> information in the world about us.
ELEPHANT:
My suggestion is: give up on all the complicated ways of kidding yourself
that human evolution is likely. It's bloody unlikely. But who cares. Here
we are. Since these problems can only be discussed in the unlikely event
that this paradoxical eye-brain co-development felicity took place, it's
kind of apriori that they did. It is even a necessary truth that they did,
given that "truth" as such only exists on such an assumption.
Besides, all the proto-eyes and proto-brains that arose in isolation: they
never had to bother about this problem. Why should we?
PETER:
> Ron Shephard called this "psycho-physical
> complementarity" - the apparently remarkable correspondence between the
> 'external' patterns of potential information, and the 'internal' abilities to
> process that.
ELEPHANT:
Remarkable. Trully remarkable. Could it be that the "external" patterns
aren't "external" at all?..... (surely not: that would be too easy!- we'd
much prefer a complicated self-created paradox to a simple coherent truth -
leastways, we would if we were empiricists).
PETER:
> But there's something else here, as elephant reminds me: that kind of
> 'external world' which we sometimes think of as objective, independant of any
> one particular viewpoint is only known to each of us via a highly individual
> perspective. In essence, when you think about it, it's very hard to think of
> 'perception' and 'world' as a closed system; how on earth can such a finite
> entity such as ourselves even begin to 'understand' the infinity of the
> 'world'? Even one of the things in the world - say, a 'pebble' - if you try to
> enumerate the potential information associated with it, you realise there is
> no end to the list - you can never actually get to a position where you can
> say "there, I've said absolutely everything I can about this pebble, where it
> fits into the world, and so on".
ELEPHANT:
Exactly - this was really my problem with the dual process story. To know
your pebble completely you'd eventually have to know the entire universe
down to the smallest atomic particle (assuming there to be such).
PETER:
> From this, it's obvious that when we perceive
> even just this one thing, we don't do so by 'choosing' what we want to attend
> to and what we don't from a great long list, and discarding the rest.
ELEPHANT:
Good point. I haven't been so clear about that in my talking about
"choice". One way of saying it is that at bottom this isn't a choice
between "options" like at a crossroads or a supermarket - more like the
choice involved in "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.".
Because what's involved is a kind of artistic creation, if not a divine one,
Iris Murdoch uses a word from the experience of an artist to describe this:
'Vision'. She contrasts "vision" with "choice" as diametrically opposed in
their application to morality, for example. "Choice" implies an entirely
self-contained agent. "Vision" implies a creative intelligence struggling
to establish order (a picture) in a world, and also trying to reproduce, in
that picture, a goodness (or Quality) that is outside the agent and the
picture and is the whole goal of agency, of picture making. This is a good
of which he has a "vision". Still "choice" is not such a bad word: it is
there to remind us that we have freewill in the matter. We attend to what
we choose/envision as noteworthy. Like, I am now supersensitive to noises
in the back garden in the dead of night. This is because I have come to the
conclusion (through experience) that large sections of the population are
vandals pure and simple. This is not because of some biological equivalent
of a computer 'filter'. It is because I have visions of people breaking
into the greenhouse, perhaps throwing a pepple at it.
PETER:
> We know
> the pebble by some yardstick of appropriateness which has to do with context,
> -the 'properties' which we perceive are those which locate the thing in a
> mental scheme of things which (some would maintain) is deeply bound up with
> continued survival. And "immediateness" seems to be a part of this relevance.
> So it takes quite a bright animal to be able to think.."I've just remembered a
> property about this pebble which might help me make a weapon, or a tool, etc",
> because generally, the immediateness principle (with respect to survival)
> seems to tell against abstract reflection on properties which are no use
> (here, and now, to me)
ELEPHANT:
Sounds true. But don't forget that here-now is also an abstraction. Does a
buffalo live in the here and now? A wolf?
Wouldn't one *experience* the possible future use of the pebble, and only
latter *think* or *remember* something of it? We have this idea that moving
beyond 'the immediate moment' requires language, and that direct experience
is of the here and now - I don't think so. It's languge that gets us into
such stuff as 'immediate moments', not language that gets us out of them.
Is the "immediateness principle" involed in the survival instinct of a wolf:
no. Still, wolves use "properties" of geography which make them tools in
their ambush and hunting behaviours. This isn't "thinking" as such, because
referents and objects (and "properties") are not invoked.... but that makes
it no less effective. In general we underestimate intuition. Knowing how,
as the hand know how, not as the mind knows that. Maybe we can train a bit
of knowing how as the hand knows how into the mind too. What would that be
called? Good judgement.
PETER:
> So it might be that our much vaunted intelligence has less to do with an
> ability to 'notice things' (:"filter in") than our ability to have a detailed
> mental "background context" made of quite complex concepts, which we can call
> on, and choose to attend to certain details previously not 'noticed'. The
> things were not filtered out completely, but rather, (as with mechanical
> filters such as centrifuges) "separated" according to some principles of
> potential usefulness, and codified in a simple form ("compressed files"!) for
> possible later use. Hence, language?
ELEPHANT:
Ok - this is one function of language. But a compressed file started out as
a file. Language doesn't, at least not in the first place, exist as a means
of codifing other bits of language. So the file-compression metaphor isn't
quite radical enough. I think it's more like what happens when we see faces
in the clouds. Ah yes - "imagination", that's the word.
PETER:
> So, as you imply, El, perhaps various forms of meditation are ways to pay less
> attention to this sorting process (which, after all seems to consume quite a
> lot of energy), by introducing another 'noise' but one which doesn't
> automatically trigger off all sorts of associations, categorisations, and so
> on. I would have thought that "One" would be as good as any. Anyway, I've
> meandered a bit; I'll bugger off and let someone else have a say!
ELEPHANT:
Meander? A river has to have a certain depth to it before it can do that.
Yes, I think we've been meandering delightfully.
tooplepip
el
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