About confabulation. I've tried to express my view on this before, but without much agreement from others. Our conscious experience is make believe, by which I mean we construct an ongoing narrative from sense impressions to shape it coherently. Then we continually act out those narratives, always correcting, altering them as we experience, according to new sensory impressions. That's confabulation.
A moment's reflection on the nature of sense impressions reveals that we do select what seems pertinent to the moment because much of what we sense is irrelevant to our make believe narratives. When we are interrupted by a sound or sight, etc., that does not seem to "fit" then our attention urges us to make a quick judgment to either ignore the intrusion or adapt our ongoing narrative to it. Try being aware of this in your everyday experience. I think you'll agree that we make up pieces the next few moments and then try to follow the script. Anything we say will occur in future time is make-believe since nothing in future time is truly assured, beginning with our own existence. I also go a further step. Our make-believe is nested in beliefs. We have sets of beliefs that may or may not (and can't fully) correspond to reality and these shape our invention of narratives. Sometimes, we discover that our narratives are based on very faulty beliefs (about reality) but we retain those beliefs anyway because they are comforting in the contexts of larger group narratives. I think it is very possible to essentially shut off the real-world corrections of our sensory impressions and to rely on make-believe that is all but fantastic, and thus "insane", even though our underlying beliefs -- and group approbation -- provide convincing plausibility. WC ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 7:14:17 AM Subject: Re: Changing my mind confabulation? While I don't agree with Miller's position that his feelings as he describes them are necessarily an aesthetic position or experience, I do think that the ability to describe clearly and accurately the feelings or sensations of seeing a painting are an integral part of determining an aesthetic position or experience. If one feels that describing this experience contains a large part of confabulation,how many assumptions are contained in the confabulation part of the experience. To start with, what is meant by confabulation? Kate Sullivan
