On Dec 25, 2008, at 9:42 PM, [email protected] wrote:
I don't think the analogy works. This is just a guess, but I'd bet
money on it: The molecules of water that are right next to each
other in the originating water pipe until they are divided into
those for cold water and those for hot do not arrive in your sink
simultaneously. The ones that have to be heated will take longer.
I think William's Water Pipe is a pretty good analogy, and like all
analogies, it's not a perfect fit for all aspects of the topic. (If it
were a perfect fit, it would be identical!)
Some kinds of raw sensory input immediately trigger built-in,
reflexive reactions. Consider your field of vision. The extreme edges,
the periphery, of the retinal field respond *only* to movement. Then,
moving in from that is a region of shape response, but not color, and
then further in to the center is color vision. Have you noticed that
you cannot perceive the end of your visual field? You have no ability
to recognize and discern what is on the edges, or for that matter,
where the end of your vision is. To me, it seems that I cannot, pardon
the pun, "focus" my attention on that area, which may literally be so
because the iris and lens of the eye is optimized to resolve the image
in the center of the field, not at the edges.
The point is that our conscious, interpreting, recognizing mind does
not attend to the visual periphery. That is where the reflexive,
involuntary, survival-primed part of our brain's visual processing is
on duty, keenly alert for the first appearance of unseen and perhaps
hostile or dangerous things approaching us.
Later in your post, which I didn't excerpt at length here, you
describe the "'secondary' emotions that arise from what ... I'll call
the 'meaning' of awareness," referring to being frightened when you
see the oncoming car. Seeing the car leads you (extremely quickly) to
predict that it will hit you if you do not react, and that leads to
fright. That comment gives rise to a notion that, by extension,
squirrels generate a "meaning" when I open the door to my front porch
and they scurry rapidly away when they hear the door or see me. Do
squirrels' brains produce "meanings"? Or is this entirely what the
animal folks call instinctive behavior, a fixed reaction?.
Sharp new sound [door] => threat => run away
Rumble on the road => threat => run away
That is, there is no meaning beyond a raw if-then kind of stimulus and
response. Hear the sound, run away. (More like a when-then reaction:
when you [squirrel] hear the sound, then you run away.) They're all
threats.
More to the point here, in either example, as a matter of survival
responses, can your mind, or the squirrel's, afford to ignore or
disregard the first "meaning" of the stimulus, that the car or the
door is not a threat. When you see the car, do you think, "Oh, red
Taurus"? Or do you say, "Holy cow, it's going to hit me"? For the
squirrel, it's always "Threat! Run away!"
Does "meaning" arise when the stimulus can be interpreted in different
ways? Is the human's fright at the oncoming car any different from the
squirrel's? If there is no alternative "meaning"--if the door opening
and the sight of the car are both equally just adrenaline triggers,
does that constitute "meaning" or just an instinctual trigger?
By the way, this discussion is beginning to circle back to my earlier
notion that aesthetics serves as a form or aspect of cognitive
processing. The more removed we are from the need for immediate action
(the oncoming car, or the door and the squirrel), the more we can
allow time for other kinds of conditions to enter into how we process
our thoughts, how we think about things and reflect on them. When the
visceral reactions of necessity or appetite take over, we don't think
reflexively. When we are extremely hungry or thirsty, we don't care a
great deal whether it's sourdough bread or Wonder bread, nor when we
are in the throes of sex do we think about the aesthetic qualities of
our partner's (or partners') appearance. And when we slam a door on
our hand, we don't modulate the sound of our voice when we scream in
pain.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
