Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Perception

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-182
Author(s):  
Justin London
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Linear Chain ◽  
External World ◽  
Perceptual Process ◽  
Musical Rhythm ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Perceptual Systems

Chapter 11 discusses the limits and mechanisms of our perceptual faculties for auditory rhythm. Perhaps more than vision, a consideration of auditory perception, and our auditory perception of rhythm in particular, reminds us that the perceptual process is not a linear chain of information from the external world to the mind, but an active interplay between mind and world. But while considering our senses as perceptual systems—as cross-modal—solves some problems of perception, it creates other, perhaps deeper ones, the author argues. In the case of musical rhythm, our rhythmic percepts are often non-veridical, as we add accents, beats, and grouping structure to otherwise undifferentiated stimuli.

scholarly journals Archetype, Psyche, World

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Jon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
External World ◽  
Analytical Psychology ◽  
Metaphysical Realism ◽  
Internal Parameters ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Ontological Position

Abstract In our dialogues over the nature of archetypes, essence, psyche, and world, I further respond to Erik Goodwyn’s recent foray into establishing an ontological position that not only answers to the mind-body problem, but further locates the source of Psyche on a cosmic plane. His impressive attempt to launch a neo-Jungian metaphysics is based on the principle of cosmic panpsychism that bridges both the internal parameters of archetypal process and their emergence in consciousness and the external world conditioned by a psychic universe. Here I explore the ontology of experience, mind, matter, metaphysical realism, and critique Goodwyn’s turn to Neoplatonism. The result is a potentially compatible theory of mind and reality that grounds archetypal theory in onto-phenomenology, metaphysics, and bioscience, hence facilitating new directions in analytical psychology.

scholarly journals Changing what you see by changing what you know: the role of attention

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Lupyan
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
Cognitive State ◽  
Perceptual Process ◽  
Cognitive Influences ◽  
Cognitive States ◽  
Visual Hierarchy ◽  
Visual Inputs ◽  
Perceptual Representations ◽  
Perceptual Systems

Attending is a cognitive process that incorporates a person’s knowledge, goals, and expectations. What we perceive when we attend to one thing is different from what we perceive when we attend to something else. Yet, it is often argued that attentional effects do not count as evidence that perception is influenced by cognition. I investigate two arguments often given to justify excluding attention. The first is arguing that attention is a post-perceptual process reflecting selection between fully constructed perceptual representations. The second is arguing that attention as a pre-perceptual process that simply changes the input to encapsulated perceptual systems. Both of these arguments are highly problematic. Although some attentional effects can indeed be construed as post-perceptual, others operate by changing perceptual content across the entire visual hierarchy. Although there is a natural analogy between spatial attention and a change of input, the analogy falls apart when we consider other forms of attention. After dispelling these arguments, I make a case for thinking of attention not as a confound, but as one of the mechanisms by which cognitive states affect perception by going through cases in which the same or similar visual inputs are perceived differently depending on the observer’s cognitive state, and instances where cuing an observer using language affects what one sees. Lastly, I provide two compelling counter-examples to the critique that although cognitive influences on perception can be demonstrated in the laboratory, it is impossible to really experience them for oneself in a phenomenologically compelling way. Taken together, the current evidence strongly supports the thesis that what we know routinely influences what we see, that the same sensory input can be perceived differently depending on the current cognitive state of the viewer, and that phenomenologically salient demonstrations are possible if certain conditions are met.

The Non-existence of the Internal World

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-151
Author(s):  
Jan Westerhoff
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Complete Control ◽  
Limited Knowledge ◽  
Natural Place ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
The Mind

A natural place of retreat once the reality of the mind-independent world has been challenged is that of the certainty of our inner world, a world which, we assume, is perfectly transparent to us and over which we have complete control, which provides a sharp contrast with an external world of which we have limited knowledge, and which frequently resists our attempts to influence it. The second chapter considers a set of reasons against the existence of this kind of internal world. I consider arguments critical of introspective certainty and query the existence of a substantial self that acts as a central unifier of our mental life. The chapter concludes that a foundation in the internal world remains elusive: our introspective capacities do not give us any more of a secure grasp of an internal world than our five senses perceiving the external world.

Collier, Arthur (1680–1732)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth P. Winkler
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
The Mind

Arthur Collier was an English parish priest who arrived, independently, at a version of immaterialism strikingly similar to that of Berkeley. In his 1713 work Clavis Universalis (‘universal key’), Collier contends that matter exists ‘in, or in dependence on’ the mind. Like Berkeley, he defends immaterialism as the only alternative to scepticism. He admits that bodies appear to be external, but their apparent or ‘quasi’ externeity is, he argues, merely the effect of God’s will, and not a sign of ‘real’ externeity or mind-independence. In Part I of the Clavis, Collier argues (as Berkeley had in his New Theory of Vision) that the visible world is not external. In Part II he argues (as Berkeley had in both the Principles and the Three Dialogues) that the external world ‘is a being utterly impossible’.

scholarly journals Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain?

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Romain Brette
Keyword(s):  
Brain Function ◽  
Neural Coding ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Linear Chain ◽  
Neural Codes ◽  
Experimental Parameters ◽  
Representational Power ◽  
Causal Structures ◽  
Perceptual Systems ◽  
The Brain

Abstract “Neural coding” is a popular metaphor in neuroscience, where objective properties of the world are communicated to the brain in the form of spikes. Here I argue that this metaphor is often inappropriate and misleading. First, when neurons are said to encode experimental parameters, the neural code depends on experimental details that are not carried by the coding variable (e.g., the spike count). Thus, the representational power of neural codes is much more limited than generally implied. Second, neural codes carry information only by reference to things with known meaning. In contrast, perceptual systems must build information from relations between sensory signals and actions, forming an internal model. Neural codes are inadequate for this purpose because they are unstructured and therefore unable to represent relations. Third, coding variables are observables tied to the temporality of experiments, whereas spikes are timed actions that mediate coupling in a distributed dynamical system. The coding metaphor tries to fit the dynamic, circular, and distributed causal structure of the brain into a linear chain of transformations between observables, but the two causal structures are incongruent. I conclude that the neural coding metaphor cannot provide a valid basis for theories of brain function, because it is incompatible with both the causal structure of the brain and the representational requirements of cognition.

scholarly journals Apprehension and Existence, Appearance and Reality: The Reception of Nafs al-amr Debates after the 13th Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-39
Author(s):  
Murat Kaş
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
The Real ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Muslim Scholars ◽  
The Way

The structure of human cognition and the means of apprehension is suitable only for partly and gradually conceiving reality. This limitation has led to a certain distance between appearance and reality. This means that there will always be a gap between the judgments of the mind about the external world and its contents, which are entities, cases, facts, and states. This partiality and partiteness of human understanding has produced the truth-maker problem with regard to mind judgments. Muslim scholars who admit the correlation between the structure of reality and the categories of the mind but reject the notion of the construction and the determination of reality by the mind refer to the realm that is independent of the mind’s personal judgments as nafs al-amr. This realm is concerned with the all degrees of reality, namely—from the existent to the non-existent, from the necessity to the contingency and impossibility, from the absolute to the relative, from the material to the non-physical, from the external to the mental, and from the real entities to the abstracted ones—which step into the shot of human cognition or not. Carrying the concept of nafs al-amr from the logical plane to the metaphysical realm that intersects epistemology and ontology has led to debates that pave the way for various treatments. In particular, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī’s (d. 672/1274) nafs al-amr epistle that posited it to the cosmic sphere resulted in criticisms of this conception of nafs al-amr, and these criticisms are the same ones directed to the Avicennian theory of emanation and its epistemological implications. Scholars who use this concept free from any metaphysical presumption and implication argue against his leap from the logical to the cosmic sphere. During the following period, this tension occasioned debates that led to the approaches that refer to the various degrees of reality, i.e., to the cosmic spheres, the spiritual realms, and the divine realms. This work aims to create a map of treatments, arguments and problems with regard to the concept of nafs al-amr.

scholarly journals How Not to Know the Principle of Induction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Howard Sankey
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
External World ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Interpretation Of Probability ◽  
Subjective Interpretation ◽  
Objective Interpretation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

Abstract In The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell presents a justification of induction based on a principle he refers to as “the principle of induction.” Owing to the ambiguity of the notion of probability, the principle of induction may be interpreted in two different ways. If interpreted in terms of the subjective interpretation of probability, the principle of induction may be known a priori to be true. But it is unclear how this should give us any confidence in our use of induction, since induction is applied to the external world outside our minds. If the principle is interpreted in light of the objective interpretation of induction, it cannot be known to be true a priori, since it applies to frequencies that occur in the world outside the mind, and these cannot be known without recourse to experience. Russell’s principle of induction therefore fails to provide a satisfactory justification of induction.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-164
Author(s):  
Angela Frattarola
Keyword(s):  
Inner Ear ◽  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Modernist Novel ◽  
The Mind

Modernist Soundscapes encourages the reader to become receptive to the arousal of the inner ear that the modernist novel so often elicits. The novels discussed are aligned with the modernist movement, where there is a sincere drive to record the seemingly insignificant details of life, the psychological oscillations of the mind, and heightened moments—epiphanies—in the ordinary. Modernist Soundscapes shows how these gradual and small changes in auditory perception may have prompted modernist writers to take up the challenge of making their narratives auditory. Celebrating the breaking of literary conventions, as well as of the dominant ideologies of patriotism, sexism, and classism, modernists made music from the noises crashing around them.

Vasubandhu (4th or 5th century AD)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Hayes ◽  
Marek Mejor
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
External Object ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Prolific Author ◽  
External Objects ◽  
Direct Awareness ◽  
The Mind

An Indian Buddhist philosopher of the fourth or fifth century, Vasubandhu was a prolific author of treatises and commentaries. Best known for his synthesis of the Sarvāstivāda school of Abhidharma, he was sympathetic with the Sautrāntika school and frequently criticized Sarvāstivāda theory from that perspective. Vasubandhu eventually became an eminent exponent of the Yogācāra school. He also wrote short treatises on logic that influenced Dignāga, traditionally said to have been his disciple. Probably the most original of Vasubandhu’s philosophical works are his two short works in verse, known as the Viṃśatikākārikāvṛtti (Twenty-Verse Treatise) and the Triṃśikākārikāvṛtti (Thirty-Verse Treatise). In these two works, he argues that one can never have direct awareness of external objects, but can be aware only of images within consciousness. Given that some of these images, such as those in dreams and hallucinations, are known to occur without being representations of external objects, one can never be certain whether a given image in awareness corresponds to an external object. Because one can never be sure of what is externally real but can be sure of internal experiences, he concludes, a person seeking nirvāṇa should focus attention on the workings of the mind rather than on the external world.

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