Yes, I hadn't been thinking of the popular songsters : "Leibnitz and the
Monads", so thanks for the reminder.
It's intresting, because I'm working on a model of perception (for the last
6 years!) which includes "selective inattention" which is kind of the
opposite to the more widely known "selective attention". Now, how that's
achieved is a matter for speculation. Certainly, I remember an author I
respect writing that we tend to try to understand the world with the
concepts which are current; "filter" is often used to talk about what might
be happening in the brain, and it usually stems from the kind of electronic
filters used in various circuits. These are substantially different in many
ways from the sort of mechanical filter that you would use to sort,say,
coffee grounds from the liquid you want to drink. And they'r different from
the more recent 'digital filters' used in current signal processing
technology. but we know what we mean by 'filter'.
Now, one of the problems facing various brain researchers is "how can you
possibly filter something out without perceiving it?". One way is to say
that there is a level of preconcious processing which does, in fact,
recognise the stimulus, or information, or (Gibson) 'stimulus-information',
which then 'blocks it out' - filters it out of concious representation. A
more recent model, like Susan Greenfield's, would say something like "this
particular information fails to occasion 'resonance' in the brain". (For
those of you who haven't really thought about "resonance" for a while, it
refers the particular property whereby, at a certain point, the energy
output of a system rises disproportionately to the energy input. An example
is obviously found in 'sound'; most of the things you actually hear are
actually bodies in resonance - vocal chords, drum skins, trombones, etc)
But note that this still seems to be a signal-processing term. And it still
begs the question as to how 'information' has come to impact on the physical
world (in the form of physical signals in the brain, in this case) - what
mechanism actually is responsible for 'filtering' or 'gating' the
appropriate complex signal?
Another example, to do with sound - "reverberation" - as in a reverberant
room; how come you can hear someone speaking, and understand them etc, and
yet the multitudinous echoes, reflections and local resonances are
(usually)easily separated out, and ignored as sound sources in their own
right? Are they just 'filtered out', or rather do they constitute another
class of 'potential information' (about the shape of the room, and so on.)
If the latter, then this "filter" seems to be an unusually clever thing, not
at all like the dumb mechanical filters as mentioned earliier.
So, this 'filtering out' and 'filtering in' process does seem to be due to
two different processes, occasioned by two different neurological
substrates. So, it might be said that 'noticing' something is a product of a
votive system, and that this type of votive system is what we call
perception.
Now, I have no problem at all with the notion that 'perception' causes
'sensation', in that perceptual processes (thinking) cause us to go out and
about in the world in order to gather more 'potential information' (or
'signal patterns' as classical physicists would have it). So, behaviour
isn't just the result (or even just the 'sign') of perception, it's one of
the primary tools for gathering 'potential information'. Behaviour *is*
perception-in-action. [ I wonder if David Prince is still lurking - he might
have something to say on this]
Interestingly, there's a very readable writer on this: R.L Gregory, who
pointed out in an essay/paper called something like "Eyes and Brains; a
'Hen-and-Egg' Problem", that we could hardly have evolved 'eyes' without the
processing equipment to deal with their output, on the other hand we are
hardly likely to evolve spurious processing capability without the
likelyhood of appropriate input. So there's a kind of 'bootstrap' operation
here, and sensory equipment evolves as much from a species' need for a
particular kind of information as from the fact of the presence of that type
of potential information in the world about us.
Ron Shephard called this "psycho-physical complementarity" - the apparently
remarkable correspondence between the 'external' patterns of potential
information, and the 'internal' abilities to process that.
But there's something else here, as elephant reminds me: that kind of
'external world' which we sometimes think of as objective, independant of
any one particular viewpoint is only known to each of us via a highly
individual perspective. In essence, when you think about it, it's very hard
to think of 'perception' and 'world' as a closed system; how on earth can
such a finite entity such as ourselves even begin to 'understand' the
infinity of the 'world'? Even one of the things in the world - say, a
'pebble' - if you try to enumerate the potential information associated with
it, you realise there is no end to the list - you can never actually get to
a position where you can say "there, I've said absolutely everything I can
about this pebble, where it fits into the world, and so on". From this, it's
obvious that when we perceive even just this one thing, we don't do so by
'choosing' what we want to attend to and what we don't from a great long
list, and discarding the rest. We know the pebble by some yardstick of
appropriateness which has to do with context, -the 'properties' which we
perceive are those which locate the thing in a mental scheme of things which
(some would maintain) is deeply bound up with continued survival. And
"immediateness" seems to be a part of this relevance. So it takes quite a
bright animal to be able to think.."I've just remembered a property about
this pebble which might help me make a weapon, or a tool, etc", because
generally, the immediateness principle (with respect to survival) seems to
tell against abstract reflection on properties which are no use (here, and
now, to me)
So it might be that our much vaunted intelligence has less to do with an
ability to 'notice things' (:"filter in") than our ability to have a
detailed mental "background context" made of quite complex concepts, which
we can call on, and choose to attend to certain details previously not
'noticed'. The things were not filtered out completely, but rather, (as with
mechanical filters such as centrifuges) "separated" according to some
principles of potential usefulness, and codified in a simple form
("compressed files"!) for possible later use.
Hence, language?
So, as you imply, El, perhaps various forms of meditation are ways to pay
less attention to this sorting process (which, after all seems to consume
quite a lot of energy), by introducing another 'noise' but one which doesn't
automatically trigger off all sorts of associations, categorisations, and so
on. I would have thought that "One" would be as good as any.
Anyway, I've meandered a bit; I'll bugger off and let someone else have a
say!
cheers
ppl
----- Original Message -----
From: "elephant" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: 15 March 2001 23:21
Subject: Re: MD Glenn, Platt, Ant and the creation of patterns
> ELEPHANT TO PETER, ALL:
>
> ELEPHANT:
> Wonderfully condensed bit of good thinking going on here Peter. Some
> thoughts in return.
>
> (As you know...) Perceptionless sensation is an important topic in the
> philosophical thought of Leibniz, the German Platonist
> Philosopher-Mathematician whose mathematical work parralleled his
> contemporary Newton's, except in that Newton was famous. Perceptionless
> sensation is such an important topic for Leibniz that he has to give it a
> special name: "apperception" (writing in Latin, but what of it?).
>
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