118 said to dmb:
I am interested in learning more about this preselection process which seems to
happen before intellectual or emotional awareness, if I read you post correctly
below. How does Empiricism fit into this process?
dmb says:
It's a very big question with a complicated answer involving psychology and
epistemology.
One of my favorite James scholars, Charlene Seigfired, might help:
"We do not select a portion of the world to interact with because it is there
but because we are interested in doing one thing rather than another. If the
world answers to our desires, well and good, if not, we try something else. As
James says, something is there, to be sure, but what and how it is, is up to
us. The least unit is the 'full fact,' saturated with awareness of past,
present, and future, of bodily awareness, and fringed by "who knows how much
more?" To talk about what is really there apart from "my present field of
consciousness [which] is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly
into a subconscious more" violates this radically empiricist fact of an
irreducible perspectivism of fringe and focus and thus spins off into
speculation."
She takes the whole of James's work into view, but quite a lot of his thinking
on this topic occurred when he was still a psychologist. Chapter 11 of his
"Principles of Psychology" is titled "Attention". Here are the first couple of
paragraphs:
Strange to say, so patent a fact as the perpetual presence of selective
attention has received hardly any notice from psychologists of the English
empiricist school. The Germans have explicitly treated of it, either as a
faculty or as a resultant, but in the pages of such writers as Locke, Hume,
Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer the word hardly occurs, or if it does so, it is
parenthetically and as if by inadvertence.[1] The motive of this ignoring of
the phenomenon of attention is obvious enough. These writers are bent on
showing how the higher faculties of the mind are pure products of 'experience;'
and experience is supposed to be of something simply given. Attention, implying
a degree of reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the circle of
pure receptivity which constitutes 'experience,' and hence must not be spoken
of under penalty of interfering with the smoothness of the tale.But the moment
one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion of experience th
at is which would make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an
outward order. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses
which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no
interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items
which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is an
utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade,
background and foreground - intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in
every [p. 403] creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature
would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.
Such an empiricist writer as Mr. Spencer, for example, regards the creature as
absolutely passive clay, upon which 'experience' rains down. The clay will be
impressed most deeply where the drops fall thickest, and so the final shape of
the mind is moulded. Give time enough, and all sentient things
ought, at this rate, to end by assuming an identical mental constitution - for
'experience,' the sole shaper, is a constant fact, and the order of its items
must end by being exactly reflected by the passive mirror which we call the
sentient organism. If such an account were true, a race of dogs bred for
generations, say in the Vatican, with characters of visual shape, sculptured in
marble, presented to their eyes, in every variety of form and combination,
ought to discriminate before long the finest shades of these peculiar
characters. In a word, they ought to become, if time were given, accomplished
connoisseurs of sculpture. Anyone may judge of the probability of this
consummation. Surely an eternity of experience of the statues would leave the
dog as inartistic as he was at first, for the lack of an original interest to
knit his discriminations on to. Meanwhile the odors at the bases of the
pedestals would have organized themselves in the consciousness of this breed of
d
ogs into a system of 'correspondences' to which the most heredity caste of
custodi would never approximate, merely because to them, as human beings, the
dog's interest in those smells would for ever be an inscrutable mystery. These
writers have, then, utterly ignored the glaring fact that subjective interest
may, by laying its weighty index-finger on particular items of experience, so
accent them as to give to the least frequent associations far more power to
shape our thought than the most frequent ones possess. The interest itself,
though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural, makes experience more than
it is made by it.
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