I doubt anyone’s interested in this, but one of the purposes of this blog is to act as an archive of all my Serious Thinking regardless of anyone’s interest in it but me.
Recently a squabble about people like me who compare the thinking of those who don’t believe Shakespeare to have written the works attributed to him to Holocaust-deniers made me again think about people over-prone, in my opinion, to taking things personally, in this case those who automatically think themselves insulted as Nazis if their kind of reasoning is compared to the kind of reasoning of people they consider (in many cases wrongly) to be Nazis. Consequently, I went back to my concept of the Anthroceptual Awareness. My theory of psychology supposes, among other things, that we have many different awarenesses, ten or so being major. The anthroceptual awareness, or people-centered awareness is one of them.
I’ve always claimed that each person puts his awarenesses in a near unique order of importance. Where an awareness is in an individual’s order will determine how much attention he will pay to it in comparison to the attention he devotes to other awarenesses, and how strongly he’ll resist the environment’s urges to go to another awareness.
For some the Anthroceptual awareness is primary, for others it is of little importance, and for everyone else it is of varying intermediary importance. The first reason some people can’t reason without taking things personally is that for them the anthroceptual awareness is stronger than those of their awarenesses in which objective reasoning takes place (the scienceptual awareness and reducticeptual awareness, for the most part).
It’s more complex than that, I believe. For sometimes how personally we take something depends on the relative power of the sub-awarenesses I consider the Anthroceptual Awareness to contain. That there are three of them is what is new. For several months I felt there should be three but couldn’t fit the third in smoothly until now (if indeed I’ve done it).
My first two have to do, respectively, with the self alone and with the self in society. These are close to identical to Howard Gardner’s two “personal intelligence.” The first I considered calling the “solipceptual subawareness.” It has to do with all of an individual’s thoughts and activities about what he does as a person alone, society not being or seeming relevant. It needn’t concern only “selfish” activities, but simply asocial activities, like what to make himself for dinner if he’s alone in his kitchen. The other sub-awareness had to do with how he relates to other beings, and they to him. And it can concern “selfish” activities as easily as the other sub-awareness can contain “unselfish” activities–for instance, some plan he has for stealing something from a friend.
I called the first sub-awareness the “egoceptual sub-awareness,” the second the “scoioceptual sub-awareness.” But I came to feel the need for a wholly objective people-involved sub-awareness, where one might analyze others–and oneself–scientifically or in some other way with no consideration of them as “people.” What kept me from adding it to my system was that I couldn’t think how it would work. Then, coming back to it because of the holocaust-denial baloney, I saw a way to make it work–as far as I could tell. I also saw more precisely what it would do, what may be more important, and is related to finding a way it could work.
Now to one of the elements in my theory that is wholly uncertified, my theory about this being to this point being close enough to being shared with Harvard professor Howard Gardner’s to be sort of semi-certified. Where I become less superficial than Gardner and the others in this field is that I try to give a theoretical neurophysiological explanation of my awarenesses–the knowlecular psychology I brought up now and again. When it comes to the anthroceptual awareness, I believe in cerebral mechanisms unique to that awareness. They are closely related to my (probably incomplete) understanding of Jung’s personae.
In any event, to put it roughly, I believe in little men (stick figures) who inhabit our Anthroceptual Awarenesses and represent ourselves and others. The main one is the Urceptual Self. Almost as important is the Urceptual Other. I’ve explained these elsewhere, so will only say here that they consist of innate combinations of knowlecules, and are modified over a lifetime by one’s experience.
At the explanatory level I want to stay at here, all that needs to be known is that the Urceptual Self is by itself in the egoceptual sub-awareness. But it is connected to a replica of itself that’s in the socioceptual sub-awareness, and to a second replica of itself in the third anthroceptual sub-awareness, to which I’ve given the name “anthrobjecticeptual awareness” (at least until I come up with a better one). The urceptual other occupies the sociceptual sub-awareness and is connected to a twin in the anthrobjecticeptual awareness.
I won’t explain how that makes the system work, except to say it that when nothing in the environment tells the average individual that other people are around and important, and no other awareness is making any demands on him, he will tend to view life out of his eogceptual Self. If people start to seem important, he may switch to his socioceptual Self, or view life out of both his egoceptual and sociceptual selves. When something involving ideas about people intrudes, he will go to his anthrobjecticeptual Self to some degree.
That sub-awareness’s importance for him will determine to a great extent how able he is to attend to some idea about people without getting personally involved. To put it another way, the sub-awareness’s importance will determine how easy it will be for him to shut down both his egoceptual and socioceptual awarenesses to focus objectively on some idea about people.
That really is all there is to the matter. People without strong anthrobjecticeptual sub-awarenesses, though, will never be able to understand people who do. Ditto, people with strong anthroceptual awarenesses will never be able to understand people with weak ones–and strong scienceptual awarenesses. Nerds, say.
