Attention, according to William James, is "the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought." Any model of attention must account for its selectivity, for the fact that, after an animal learns a skill, it becomes automatic (or unconscious), for the ability to interrupt automatic acts by attention to novelty, and for the ability to direct attention specifically by conscious means. (Edelman)
Read Moreconsciousness
Hanna Wilke from IntraVenus
body image
Two English neurologists, Lord Russell Brain and Henry Head (!) coined the phrase "body image" for the internal image and memory of one's body in space and time. The body-image mediates the mind / body polarization. It requires input from both sides to be effective.
Read Moreconsciousness
"Consciousness. The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness....When asked what consciousness is, we have no better answer than Louis Armstrong's when a reporter asked him what jazz is: "Lady, if you have to ask, you'll never know." (quoted in Pinker, How the Mind Works, p.60)
Read Moredurée
For Henri Bergson, duration is not an objective mathematical unit, but the subjective perception of space-time. Bergson believed that the conventions of scientific practice were incompatible with lived experience. In his "Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness" (1889), Bergson argued that experience viewed as a succession of separate, thinglike states is no less an abstraction from lived consciousness than time as measured by the hands of a clock. Both are fundamentally spatial. Lived consciousness, on the other hand, is a spatiotemporal continuum, "like a mutual penetration, a solidarity, an intimate organization of elements, each of which is representative of the others and neither distinguished from nor isolated by abstracting thought." (see also memory)
For Bergson, we can describe the movement of an object in space, for example, by postulating an infinite number of reference points, through which the object may be said to move. But "they are not parts of the movement; they are so many views taken to it; they are, we say, only supposed stopping points. Never is the mobile reality in any of these points; they most we can say is that it passes through them." Bergson proposed a division of labor between the analytical methods of scientists and the intuitions of the metaphysicians, who would strive for a "true empiricism" that would seek to keep "as close to the original itself as possible."
Read Moreembodiment
Embodiment is the line between psychology and biology. One important feature of embodiment is that the interaction between the body and cognition is circular. Thus posture, facial expressions, or breathing rhythm are in a feedback loop with motor movement, mood, and cognition. I am bouncing along the street because I am happy but I am also happy because I am walking with a spring in my step.
Read Moreeye movement
One form of visual attention is eye movement (often assisted by head movement). Because we see more clearly close to the center of our gaze, we get more information about an object if we direct our eyes in that direction. We get coarser information (at least about shape) from objects we are not looking at directly.
Read Moreforgetting
Are all memoriespermanently stored somewhere in the mind, so that details we cannot remember at a particular time could eventually be recovered with the right technique? Or are some experiences permanently lost from memory?
Read Morehaptic/optic
In contrast to the optic, the haptic sense, or sense of touch, has a "closeness" and immediacy which seems to escape technological mediation and evokes a more interior sense. The sense of touch is usually subordinated to the visual, which is identified with the conceiving mind over the perceiving body. (cf. also proprioceptive)
Read Moreimaginary / symbolic
In the sense given to these terms by Jacques Lacan, the three essential orders of the psycho-analytic field are the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The concept of the "imaginary" can be grasped through initially through Lacan's theme of the " mirror stage." Lacan proposed that the ego of the infant -- as a result of its biological prematurity -- is constituted on the basis of the image of the counterpart (specular ego). Following from this primordial experience, the Imaginary defines the basically narcissistic relations of the subject to his ego, the intersubjective relations of a counterpart -- an other who is me, a type of apprehension characterized by resemblance and homeomorphism -- a sort of coalescence of the signifier and signified. (from Laplanche and Pontalis) While Lacan's use of the term "Imaginary" is highly idiosyncratic, he insists that all imaginary behavior and relationships are fundamentally deceptive, and that the intersubjective realm of the symbolic must be separated out from the Imaginary in analytic treatment.
First page of Robert Fludd's Ars Memoriae 1619, showing the "eye of the imagination."
imagination
in psyche, consciousness
For Aristotle, in De anima, imagination is the intermediary between perception and thought. The perceptions brought in by the five senses are first treated or worked upon by the faculty of imagination, and it is the images so formed which become the material of the intellectual faculty. (Yates, p 32) Hence "the soul never thinks without a mental picture."
In the eighteenth century, "Fancy" or "imagination" applied to non-mnemonic processions of ideas. When images move in the mind's eye in the same temporal and spatial order as in the original sense-experience, we have "memory" This relation between imagination and memory follows Aristotle as well, for whom memory is a collection of mental images from sense impressions of things past. How do we distinguish between our own memories and our imagination? Modern researchers focus on "source memories" -- where and when we experienced something. Memories are generally accompanied by source memories, while imaginative thoughts do not have the same contextual components in time and space. But the loss of source memories or the imagined sense of location in time and space that can accompany dreams or vivid fantasies can make us unable to distinguish between memory and imagination.
Coleridge distinguished fancy from imagination, paralleling his distinctions between mechanical and organic. His theory of fancy singled out the the basic categories of the associative theory of invention: the elementary particles, or "fixities and definites" derived from sense, which he distinguished from the units of memory only because they move in a new temporal and spatial sequence determined by the law of association, and are subject to choice by a selective faculty -- the judgement of eighteenth-century critics. (Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, p 168. Coleridge Bigraphia Literaria chapt. 13)
As opposed to this "aggregative" mechanical combinatory, Coleridge developed an organicist theory of the imagination, which is modifying and "coadunating." (a term from contemporary biology meaning to 'grow together as one.') He described the imagination as "vital" as "generating and producing a form of its own," whose rules "are the very powers of growth and production." For Coleridge, the imagination is "that synthetic and magical power, which reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant tendencies." This faculty "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital , even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead."
Thus the free play of the creative imagination makes up its own rules as it goes along and sets them according to the nature of the subject and the inspiration of the poet. "Imagination is no unskillful architect", for "it in a great measure, by its own force, by means of its associating power, after repeated attempts and transpositions, designs a regular and well-proportioned edifice." (Gerard, Essay on Genius, 1774) The "architectonic" impulse of the theoretical imagination renders phenomena intellectually manageable by presenting them in a "corrected fullness." (Sheldon Wolin).
The products of imagination Coleridge adduces most frequently are instances of the poet's power to animate and humanize nature by fusing his own life and passion with those objects of sense which, as objects, 'are essentially fixed and dead.' (Abrams Mirror and the Lamp, p 292) M. S. Abrams points out that almost all examples of this secondary or 're-creative' imagination would fall under the traditional headings of simile, metaphor, and (in the supreme instances) personnification.
"What distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality." Karl Marx, Grundrisse
"Imagination is an act by which we mentally simulate something that previously existed as a vague content of our sensation as sensuous, concrete form. If we then apply the same word to abstract thoughts, we thereby imply that these too are accompanied by mental images. " (Robert Vischer, "On the Optical Sense of Form," 1873) For Robert Vischer, the artist's imagination reunites the senses and the soul. "Both, in fact, were originally one, but in the course of its development the intellect placed itself in opposition to the senses, and only the artist succeeds in achieving their reunion." (p116)
For Kant, the imagination,(Einbildungskraft ) as a productive faculty of cognition, is very powerful in creating another nature, as it were, out of the material that actual nature gives it. Imagination is the faculty of mind which enables us to combine representations. (see Critique of Judgement sect. 49. see also intuition.) Using the etymology of Bild, one can say that the imagination synthesizes the manifold of intuition into a tableau-like unity, and Kant assigns an essential role to the imagination in synthesizing the disparate mental realms of sensibility, understanding, and reason. (See Gasché , p 217) Yet for Kant, the imagination is unequal to the ideas of Reason. The experience of the sublime, either in the form of magnitude or power, causes a painful awareness of the inadequacy of the imagination, but for a rational being there is a pleasure in this awareness, a harmony in this contrast. (see sect. 27)
Freud, too, stressed the inadequacies of the imagination, which he described as "the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality." (Das Unheimliche , p.244) In his descriptions of the uncanny (unheimlich ), Freud observed a weakening of the value of signs, in which the symbol ceases to be a symbol and "takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes." For Freud, this assertion of "the omnipotence of thought" requires the invalidation of the arbitrariness of signs and the autonomy of reality as well, placing them both under the sway of fantasies expressing infantile desires or fears. (Kristeva, p. 186)
For Gilles Deleuze, imagination is a circuit between the actual and the virtual. Imagination means how we see and how we learn to see, how we suppose the world works, how we suppose that it matters, and what we feel we have at stake in it.
In a very different context, Arjun Appadurai describes the joint effects of media and migration on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity. This is a collective imagination, not the faculty of a gifted individual, and it forms the basis for a "community of sentiment." (what anthropologists call a sodality) Here Appadurai follows Benedict Anderson's analysis of the modern nation as "an imagined political community." For Anderson, "it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." (Imagined Communities, p. 6) Appadurai describes media and migration as resources for experiments with self-making in all sorts of societies, for all sorts of persons. The mobile and unforeseeable relationship between mass-mediated events and migratory audiences defines the core of the link between globalization and the modern. In this context, the work of the imagination is neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined, but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern. (p.4)
(see also public / private)
For Appadurai, "The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape." (an expression which should gratify those whose slogan in 1968 was "l'imagination au pouvoir." ) He describes "culturalism" as a mobilization of identities consciously in the making and as the most general form of the work of the imagination.
intentionality
Franz Brentano called intentionality the property of awareness that is an awareness of something. For Brentano consciousness always has an object. For Heidegger, time is intentional insofar as it is always directed; it is time for___.
Read MoreKant Copernicus
Introducing the revised version fo the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, in a now proverbial analogy, likened the procedure of his philosophy to that of Copernican astronomy: both propose a change in the position of the observer in order to explain apparently errant or contradictory phenomena.
Read Morenetwork
a child's definition of a net: "a lot of holes tied together with string"
Stuart Kaufman has described the formation of networks as a phase transition that occurs as the number of connections is increased between a random graph of points. As a general feature, when the number of connections reaches half of the number of points, the majority of the points become linked in a giant cluster. Kauffman believes that we should think of the genetic program not as a serial algorithm but as a parallel distributed regulatory network .
As a general model, the network applies not only to the "intertwingled" pieces of text in a hypertext but also to the linked computers in a connected system such as Internet, to pattern-recognition systems such as the immune system, or to organisms such as the slime mold, that are made up of individual cells responding to gradients and forming larger and more differentiated entities. The ability of the brain to synchronize and coordinate activities in different parts, called reentry, is another networked process. Theorists of complexity describe the behaviour of such systems as emergent.
Problems are assumed to become intractable when they become tangled, yet models of rhizomes and networks that value links are a kind of countermodel.
Read Morepain
For Nietzche, "pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics." "Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself." "If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory." (Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo)
On the other hand, ritual may be seen as a way to keep memory alive without the experience of pain. Bataille echoes Nietzche's description of the role of religious sacrifice. He describes sacredness as the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. (p.22)
"Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt." Samuel Johnson. "To have pain is to have certainty , to hear about pain is to have doubt." (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 13)
Like consciousness, pain as a philosophical issue raises the questions of subjectivity and of other minds. Wittgenstein rejected the classical status of pain as the paradigm of direct intuition. When one is in pain, he said in the Philosophical Investigations, one cannot say, except perhaps as a joke, that one knows one is in pain. Say that one cannot doubt it and leave it at that, he suggested.
Read Morerepression
For Freud, "...the essence of repression lies simply in the turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious." (Sigmund Freud, "Repression" 1915) Freud's early writings described repression as the intentional rejection of distressing thoughts and memories from consious awareness. But his idea changed gradually over time, and Freud began to use the term repression in a much more general sense, to refer to a variety of defense mechanisms that operate outside a person's awareness and automatically exclude threatening material from consciousness. While repression is often equated with defense, repression is more a mode or moment in defense. ( Abwehr ) When Freud referred to repression as "the foundation stone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests," he was referring to a multiplicity of specific techniques, of mechanisms that include Denial, Repression, Reaction Formation, Rationalization, Humor, and Projection. In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926) Freud sought to clarify the confusion between the narrow meanings of repression and the broader concept of defense.
Read Moresubject
in philosophy, theory, consciousness, psyche
At issue within the philosophical tradition is the relation of the subject to thought. (see also consciousness ) Ever since Aristotle the nous had been separate from the psyche. "At the moment of its manifest emergence in the Cartesian formulation, the subject is not in fact a psychic reality, but a pure Archimedean point." (Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History)
Read Morevision
Any theory of vision must describe some relation between the eye and the brain. Humberto Maturana studied the visual cortex of the frog and summarized his research in an article entitled, "what the frog's eye tells the frog's brain." Maturana and his co-authors demonstrated that the frog's sensory receptors speak to the brain in a language that is highly processed and species specific. If every species constructs for itself a different world, which is the world? Thus Maturana's credo: There is no observation without an observer.(K. Hayles, "Simulated Nature and Natural Simulations," in Uncommon Ground.) Further research led Maturana to conclude that perception is not fundamentally representational, that the perceiver encounters the world through his own self-organizing processes, through autopoesis.
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