thanks, Rikus, for your thoughts.
I find myself in agreement with a lot that you say. It is not controversial to
me to say that the viewpoint that is you has your body within its field of
view, and that you can "see" some things about you that I cannot see. . I
only want to insist that your experience of your "inner mind" is arrived at by
the same cognitive means as your experience of my "inner mind". It is less a
direct experience than a cognitive achievement. I ask you only to recmember
that I can "see" many things about you that you cannot see. One aspect of you
that (when I am in the room with you) I can see better than you is the
arrangement of your body with respect to people and objects in the room. Your
deployment of your body, so to speak. Your staging is something much better
seen by the audience than by the actor himself.
Most of psychology has been taken up with understanding the contradiction
between our understandings of what a person is about that we can derived from
what they say about themselves, and our understanding of what a person is about
derived from our own observation of him.
It is wonderful to hear from you.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Rikus Combrinck
To: FRIAM
Sent: 6/22/2009 3:14:42 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Direct conversation
I've been following the thoughts on conscious experience of self and have
nearly dipped in a couple of times, but lack of clarity on my own thoughts
keeps on preventing me. (And Russ, I do love clarity and direct communication.)
I'm still torn between various aspects of the points of view that, mostly, Nick
and Russ presented. Though clarity still eludes me, I would like to share the
following before it just slips away unused again.
I think things pretty much work as Nick painted them. Still, this set of
interacting structures and processes that I think of as myself, can't quite
banish from it's processing space the nagging awareness of something like the
experiencer that Russ argues for. I wonder if it might arise in the manner
outlined below.
I'll start from Nick's model. My brain has learned to turn back it's
third-person perception and modelling functionality on a subset of the
environment that is always present, i.e. self.
Semi-aside: there is something added in the case of self -- richer sensory data
that is not available on other people: touch, pressure, pain, temperature from
skin, breathing and heart rate, proprioception, stress and pain in joints,
vestibular sense, stretch receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, etc. I do
think all of this enriches the model of self to the point where the experience
might be qualitatively different from the models of other people.
But more significant is the fact that I can create an abstracted model of
myself (i.e. imagine myself) and that the model can be made to interact with a
model of the environment, other people, and even internally created models with
no counterpart in direct experience. Consider that usually this model's
usefulness is in projecting it into the future (and, I think, into the past,
when we reconstruct events from memory).
Now, what happens when that model is dragged back into real-time, and held
right next to the more direct perceptual awareness of self? It seems like one
might end up with two selves, and I'm wondering if that experience might not
account for that elusive experience that Russ is referring to.
Regards,
Rikus
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