In a message dated 8/31/09 9:18:10 AM, [email protected] writes:
> 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. > Conger's description seems reasonably accurate. It is essentially filling in the gaps in the peception of reality with bits and pieces we already had drifting about. It is not noticing the gaps in perception and then trying to figure out what was there. It doesn't seem to be the reverse of argument since I think an argument could be conducted by two people confabulating on logical terms. It is a word which can be used to describe the kind of conversation which consists of swapping various acceptable remarks without taking account of what actually happened, as in describing a criminal's execution as a blessed release. Keeping track of one's own experience is difficult but surely not impossible. It has been done many times before. KAte Sullivan
