Hi dmb, Thanks for the quotes which I mostly agree with. Selective attention as presented therein is a field in today's physical psychology. However, I find it to mislead away from Quality.
I am seeking to put together some analogies on how the presented concepts of DQ and sq "interact". Any personal opinions on this would help. Cheers, Mark On Oct 20, 2011, at 10:53 AM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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. > > > > > Moq_Discuss mailing list > Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. > http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org > Archives: > http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ > http://moq.org/md/archives.html Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
