Archive for the ‘Awarenesses’ Category
Entry 1708 — HSAM
Thursday, January 29th, 2015
What does HSAM stand for? HSAM stands for Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. I recently read about it in Steve Mirsky’s Anti Gravity in the November 2014 issue of Scientific American. Mirsky didn’t say much about it, so I looked it up in Wikipedia where I found an excellent article about it here (which terms it “hyperthymesia,” and connects it to the super-memory abilities of the autistic, as well as to obsessive compulsion disorders. It resembles the latter inasmuch as it seems to cause those with it obsessively to remember their personal pasts.
Mirsky mentions that the uncinate fasciculus may be involved in HSAM, so I looked that up in Wikipedia, too, stole the following from it:
The uncinate fasciculus is a white matter tract in the human brain that connects parts of the limbic system such as the hippocampus and amygdala in the temporal lobe with frontal ones such as the orbitofrontal cortex. Its function is unknown though it is affected in several psychiatric conditions. It is the last white matter tract to mature in the human brain.
Needless to say, I immediately began forming a knowlecular psychology understanding of HSAM. Does is indicate I’m right that the brain records everything that its sensors bring to it about the environment? Actually, my quick processing of the Wikipedia article left me thinking that those with HSAM don’t fully re-experience previous moments or days in their lives, although perhaps do fully re-experience portions of them, but mainly remember them the same way all of us remember vivid durations of our pasts; they just bring to mind many many more such durations.
I wondered if the anthroceptual awareness occupies the uncinate fasciculus. I think too little is known of it to be sure, although it either contains at least a portion of the awareness or connections to it. The existence of HSAM seems to me to come close to proving the existence of the anthroceptual awareness. Similar, various autistic persons’ abilities indicate the existence of certain sub-awarenesses like the matheceptual awareness.
I am also wondering if I should add a new awareness to my theory, the chronoceptual awareness. I’ve thought about some kind of urceptual mechanism that tags memories throughout life with day-indicators: day 1, day 2, etc. I haven’t gone anywhere much with it. HSAM got me thinking about it because people with HSAM seem to date the records of the past: if given a date, they can tell you what happened to them on that date. If there is a chronoceptual awareness, it could explain HSAM as the result not of an anthroceptual awareness with high charactration but a chronoceptual awareness with that. In the latter case, the chronoceptual awareness would pretty much co-exist (i.e., be simultaneously active) with the anthroceptual awareness.
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I’d love to have a map of all the areas of the brain like the ones above, with a list of what each one has been implicated with. This, of course, is a point against my being mostly an autodidact rather than someone properly trained. Which makes me immediately think that someone with HSAM may remember the specifics of his past life because he lacks the ability to generalize–by which I (vaguely) mean the ability to form knowleplexes in which repeating data of significance merge into understandings of . . . things like kindergarten–as, say a jungle gym, a particular teacher (mine was Miss Sherman), drawing, the schoolyard where we played during recesses) instead of a series of days.
A healthy memory would form a hierarchy of memories–not the name of every kid in one’s kindergarten class, just the names of the few important ones. Ergo, another possible explanation of HSAM would be an inability to increase or decrease the brain’s ability to activate a given memory, so no memory would be too available to keep one from easily remembering smaller details from one’s past. I strongly feel animportant characteristic of one with high cerebreffectiveness is the ability to remember essences–at the expense of details.
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Entry 1674 — The Sun & My First House
Saturday, December 27th, 2014
For the past two days or so I have been feeling like I am on the verge of really getting started on a Major Work beginning with an in-depth survey of my theory of awarenesses. I couldn’t figure out why until I thought of the transitting sun. That’s what the sun is called when one is considering its location in one horoscope: right now the Sun is at 6 degrees Capricorn in the sky, which puts it just in my horoscope’s first house, which begins at around 3 degrees Capricorn. This house, as you might guess, has to do with beginnings!
It’s all rot, but fun. And I have to admit, when my life is suddenly doing something good that my horoscope says it should be doing, it encourages me, however many more times I’ve compared what my horoscope said my life should be doing with what my life was doing and found no similarity at all between the two. I think it’s because nothing in my life is ever encouraging. Okay, exaggeration. What’s more true is that the few things in my life that have been encouraging resulted in nothing but disappointment: get the gig at the Scientific American website, for instance. To be maximally accurate, I should say that the stars are no worse at predicting good things for me than real life is, and not as depressing when their predictions are full of hooey, because I don’t really believe in them.
On the other hand, anything encouraging is good for me, if I can even half believe in it for a few minutes because I think people like me may have an urceptual optimist in us that is sensitive to any sign of encouragement, and able to minimize all that our internal pessimist tries to warn us about.
Note: you have just had a front eye on the birth of the urceptual optimist and urceptual pessimist: neither existed until I began writing the paragraph above. They make sense to me, particularly the urceptual optimist. How else explain the insanity that keeps people like me going no matter how unarguably quickly the unreachability of our goals is increasing?
Hey, I also have three new terms for you: “magni-cerebrevalu-ceptual,” “practi-cerebrevaluceptual,” and “reflexevaluaceptual.” I’ll save my discussion of these till tomorrow.
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Entry 1668 — Additions & Blither
Sunday, December 21st, 2014
First an addition to my taxonomy of awarenesses: I’ve decided to give what I was temporarily calling the “X-ceptual Awareness” one of the names I previously considered, then junked, “the Magniceptual Awareness.” My problem with it was that it was too similar to “the Supraceptual Awareness,” the name I had given to my system’s over-all awareness. I made that problem go away by simply changing “Supraceptual Awareness” to “Cerebral Awareness.” Pretty clever, wot? It makes sense since both the Practiceptual Awareness and the Magniceptual Awareness are in, or mostly in, the cerebrum. And I’m comfortable with the idea of a Sub-Cerebral Awareness located in the cerebellum and other parts of the brain, as well as various places in the secondary nervous system.
Next, a Noun cement that I hope will will cause those of you feeling guilty about getting all this blog’s incredible brilliance for free to express your gratitude with money–to someone on food stamps (due to his actual economic situation, not lies about it, although I did not report the $200 I made as a writer last year in my 2013 request to continue on the dole, nor will I report the $350! I made as a writer this year on my upcoming request). You can do this by sending me $5 or more for an autographed numbered copy of a limited edition of 4 More Poem Poems. It just came off the press. Only 8 copies printed, each with a different cover from the others–in fact, I have just decided to paste a unique original visual image on each cover. (Note: I really think $20 would be reasonable for anyone who is paying that or more for a subscription to any poetry-related magazine whatever.) I claim that no one who likes Joycean foolery with the language and surrealism will find at least one of the poems delightful. And there iz not one (1) but two (2) dreadfully wicked attacks in the collection on our country’s poetry gate-keepers–but only in passing! Remember, Posterity will really be angry with you for not sending me any money!
To take advantage of this Fabulous Offer, send check & your name&address to:
Bob Grumman
1708 Hayworth Road
Port Charlotte FL 33952
Sorry for the begging, folks. I’m really not badly off: I still have credit cards that will allow me to borrow over ten thousand dollar before I max them. I just used on of the cards for $1500, in fact–to have some company try to get the data in an external drive of mine that went bad about a year ago, and has the only copies of a few of my poems, and a lot of my only copies of others’ poems including four or five of Guy Beining’s the originals of which are lost. But I thought it’d be fun to play marketeer for a little while. And at least I didn’t bold-face the above.
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Okay, now to what seems to me an interesting question I just wondered into (note: it’s near impossible now for me not to qualify every opinion of mine in some way like this) while discussing Karl Kempton’s current central project, an exhaustively researched history of visual poetry from pre-history on: what poem should be considered the world’s first major full-scale visual poem? Very subjective, I fear, because of the difficulty in defining both a full-scale poem (for me, to put it simply, it would be a poem that’d be mediocre or worse if not for what it does visually) and a major poem.
I have no idea what poem is but don’t think any of Mallarme’s was because not depending on the visual for anything truly central to them. Nor Apollinaire’s, which seem primitive to me, although I’d have to look at them again to be sure. Such a poem would have to have a highly significant and original visual metaphor at its core to get the prize, in my opinion. Nothing before the twentieth century that I know about does. I think I’d aware the prize to something by Cummings (although I’m not sure what, and he may not have composed what I’d call a full-scale visual poem); if not Cummings, then Grominger’s “silence,” but not with confidence because I don’t know what other superior visual poems came before it.
Here’s a related question I didn’t send Karl: what poet could be said to have been the world’s first serious, dedicated, lyrovisual poets, by which I mean poet who concentrated a fairly substantial portion of his thoughts and energy to lyrovisual poetry–as opposed to Lewis Carroll who (1) was not a lyrical visual poet and (2) wrote light visual poems (which were nonetheless an important contribution to poetry, or Mallarme or Herbert, neither of whom composed more than a few poems that could be called visual–or, from my standpoint, made primary visual poems, or poems whose visual content was at least as important aesthetically as its verbal content.
I’m not even sure Cummings would qualify for consideration since he did not compose all that many poems I’d call primary visual poems. I’d have to go through my volume of his complete poetry to be sure of this, though. So, we have a preliminary question: what poets devoted a fairly substantial portion of his thoughts and energy to lyrovisual poems. My impression is that Kenneth Patchen was one of them. I think Apollinaire probably was, too. Most of the concrete poets seem to have been. I know I’ll annoy a number of you with my next pronouncement: it is that fewer and fewer people calling themselves visual poets devote much, or any, time to the composition of visual poems, preferring to make textual designs (and mostly doing extremely well at it).
Now another addition, this to my thoughts about urceptual personae:
It occurred to me that I made no attempt in yesterday’s entry to indicate the biological advantage of having . . . ursonae, so I’ll try to do that now. I’ll need to go into some detail about the way an urceptual persona is created. For an example, I’ll use the urnemy (no, I’m just foolin’ around: I won’t make that my new name for “the urceptual enemy”). When a baby first sees its father, it will automatically be thrust into its socioceptual awareness[1] where its urceptual persona recognition mechanism is. This mechanism will activate the baby’s urceptual other—due to such stimuli as the father’s face and arms. The father will be unfamiliar to it (probably, although he may have experienced enough of him while in the womb for him to be familiar; or perhaps any face will be familiar enough not to cause the baby pain, or even to cause it pleasure; assume here, though, that the father is unfamiliar to the baby, maybe because he has a beard and is first encountered while he is sneezing or farting). Since the unfamiliar causes pain according to my theory, and pain caused by another person has to be one of the stimuli causing the activation of a person’s urceptual enemy, the baby’s urceptual enemy will become active.
The baby will withdraw as much as possible from its enemy, the father, because urceptual personae automatically activate appropriate certain reflexive behavior. This is value #1 of an urceptual persona.
At this point, I am going to drop the urceptual enemy for not being as good a choice as an example as I first thought. I’ll go instead to the urceptual father. In the scenario I began, the father will almost certainly not continue to activate the baby’s urceptual enemy for long, if he even does so when the baby first encounters him. The baby’s mother will probably be with the father and say something like, “Here’s your daddy, Flugwick (or whatever the kid’s name is),” in a momvoice, accompanied by a mom smile, and many another mo0mfeature, so neutralize the father’s unfamiliarity. And the father will smile and say something in a gentle voice and perhaps, tickle the kid under the chin—certainly something likely to seem pleasant to the kid. In short, little Flugwick’s urceptual persona recognition mechanism will soon activate its urceptual father (I now think a baby will recognize the first male it encounters as its father—but be able to correct the error before long—rather than as a friend; if my hypothesis turns out valid, it will be easy to determine exactly what happens.
Be that as it may, eventually the baby will (in normal circumstance) automatically perceive its father as both a certain shape with a certain voice and smell—and as its urceptual father. The activation of the latter will help it more quickly react to the father appropriately. It will learn from its social environment—mainly its family—the details of appropriate reactions not instinctive like its smile will be until it learns enough to control it.
That an urceptual persona will double the ability of the real person it is attached to cause reactions is it second extremely important biological value. For one thing, this will make people more important than almost anything else to a person, which would obviously help a species survive.
What might be as important to a person as people? Here’s where my superspeculative nature takes over from my speculative nature. The goals a person shoots for may become as important to a person as others, or even himself Beauty, for an artist. As I’ve already tried to demonstrate, an artist will almost surely be motivated to some small or large degree to create an object of beauty to gain others’ approval. But simply to create something of beauty for its own sake can very well be his main motive, or even his only motive. I’m back to the magniceptual awareness where one might go to concentrate on beauty free of interpersonal concerns. Where I increase my speculativeness is in thinking puberty may open a person’s magniceptual awareness—give him doors into it, or significantly increase his doors into it. I strongly suspect a male’s magniceptual awareness is significantly large than a female’s. Just as a female’s anthroceptual awareness is much larger than a male’s. Of course, feminists will take this to be an insult to women, but I don’t see it as that. Well, as a male, I have to think of what I am as superior to females, but nonetheless trying to be objective about it, there’s no reason to say that interpersonal matters require less talent than impersonal matters.
[2] A major awareness is an awareness just under one of the primary awarenesses on my taxonomical chart of the awarenesses.
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Entry 1667 — Immortality and Posterity
Saturday, December 20th, 2014
There are few fantasies so absurd as the idea of living on through fame. So why does immortality still beckon?
There’s an interesting article by Steven Cave at Aeon here dealing with the question above. Since I am near-fanatically lustful for “Everlasting Glory” (although rational enough to realize that for me, and other mortals, “everlasting” can only mean a few hundred thousand years at most), I read the article, finding it provocative and therefore worth reading, although I pretty much wholly disagree with Cave’s ideas.
I’m groping here, but I think no one really wants immortal fame. What many want is genuine immortality–a trip to some heaven or endless reincarnations. When a person says, as I did at the age of 18, that he’d rather be a short-lived tubercular genius like Keats than live to be eighty or ninety without accomplishing anything to speak of, he may speak of his ambition as as desire to immortalize his name, but what I feel he really (only) wants is to live a life that will make his name immortal. In other words, I wanted to become (at age 18) a great writer like Keats and that meant producing a body of work that would “live forever.” I would not enjoy any fame posthumously, but could enjoy posthumous fame while alive. To put it simply: I could enjoy thinking of posterity’s admiring my work (and me) as much as I, as part of Keats’s posterity was admiring his, and him.
I think that at times we, in effect, live in the future. It’s our version of the future, just as the past we more often live in is only our version of the past, and it’s nowhere near as accurate as it, but it’s not entirely inaccurate. We often live in our futures as heroes. Which brings me to my concept of the sagaceptual awareness, and my concept of the urceptual hero. In my discussions of urceptual personae (or beings fully or potentially inside us from the very beginning of our lives) I posit that we start off with an urceptual self and an urceptual other. These are neurophysiological puppets, the urceptual self being activated by anything we do: that is, when a baby move its left arm, its urceptual self moves its left arm, and the baby experiences a sense of self in charge of the movement.
I hope I don’t go off in too many directions. I’ll try not to. What I’m hoping to do is account for the urceptual hero, which requires a lot background in urcept . . . ology.
The urceptual other is a neurophysiological puppet activated by any human being the baby encounters. It is activated by any (gross) movement of that being: when the baby’s mother playfully pokes the baby’s nose, the baby’s urceptual other pokes its finger somewhere. Assuming the situation allows it. To put it most simply, the baby’s attention must be on its anthroceptual awareness–that is, the baby has to be in the part of its brain that has to do with inter-action with other human beings. Mainly there, at least.
If so, various stimuli will enable the baby to make the urceptual other which is activated by its mother the basis of a secondary urceptual figure, an involved process I will ignore except to say I believe I can advance a plausible idea of how it works. My taxonomy of urceptual personae is incomplete, to say the least, but I think the urceptual friend may be the first positive secondary urceptual persona a baby will form. Its first negative urceptual persona will be its urceptual enemy. The baby’s mother will almost surely be perceived as positive, and fairly soon activate an urceptual friend, which in turn will form the basis of an urceptual mother. The reverse is equally likely, I should think.
In any case, the baby’s urceptual self will ten to make connections with the urceptual friend that will cause the baby’s urceptual self to imitate (i.e., learn from) its urceptual friend.
We have now gotten enough background, I hope, for me to jump to the urceptual hero. This persona becomes active due to a complex group of stimuli indicating friend and father or authority, and a highly admirable person. Many real living people may have some of the stimuli, but so may fictional people. A person’s final urceptual hero will be based on more than one person, possibly many more.
The first requirement to understanding the urceptual hero is to understand admirability. I think one of our most important innate mechanisms is the need for the approval of others. A major way we learn to get it is through imitating urceptual friends, adults or siblings who gain admiration. That we will tend empathetically to experience the admiration a friend gains (likely along with other emotions I will ignore here) will give us enough pleasure to want to experience it for ourselves. The empathetic experience will come about because our urceptual friend will not only tend to imitate what our actual friend does, but (albeit crudely) how he feels–through his expressions, and through what happens to him, like being given an ice cream cone).
We will also learn how to gain admiration directly whenever we do anything, accidentally or intentionally, that causes others to admire us.
The point: a person grows to particularly strive to make his urceptual self and urceptual hero. This is possible because the urceptual self becomes the basis of secondary urceptual personae the same way the urceptual other does.
Both genders strive for a heroic role they can play when appropriate, to put it in another way. But it differs significantly between males and females due to the biological division of labor feminists refuse to accept. Because of this the great majority of males strive for cultural heroism of many different sorts, and females mainly for biological heroism consisting of bearing and raising children and making life bearable. Males are more concerned with making life meaningful.
I ought to be speaking not of heroism here but of different degrees of cultural admirability. Few really strive for what I’d call cultural heroism. Cave, in the article I directed you to, uses Achilles as his example of a hero, and he’s a good one: he is still important to us. As is Imhotep, for there are many kinds of heroic admirability. I believe, to get back to the idea of simply living a life admirable enough for one to be esteemed for it by some posterity, if only one’s grandchildren, that most people and and do achieve “immortality.”
To undigress–that is, to go back to my idea of living in the future, that’s what we can and sometimes do when in our sagaceptual awarenesses, which I’ll now try to depict. I hypothesize that it began, evolutionarily, as a simple mechanism encouraging organisms to carry out more and more complex kinds of goal-directed activities. The mechanism could have been very simple, like many such now incorporated in various technological devices (as you will see, I hope). A primitive example: a mechanism causes a primitive organism to move toward food; the closer it gets to the food, the more energizing pleasure it experiences, and the more it continues to keep doing what it has been doing; but the more distant the food goes from it, the more pain it experiences, and the more the mechanism makes the organism change what it is doing, trying always to maximize the organism’s closeness to food. Guided missiles behave this way.
I think an urceptual proto-hero happened into one of these mechanisms, and the mechanism became the first sagaceptual awareness millennia later. I’m confident a plausible evolutionary path for all this could be worked out, but I haven’t done it. This awareness, so far as I know, is unknown to science, so far. I may be the only one who has intuited its presence, in fact. All I c an say in its defense is that it makes sense to me, and that I don’t know of anything that makes it ridiculously unlikely.
I will use mine as an example (and I’ll speak of myself only because I’m sure of what’s true of me, but of no one else, and also to avoid making controversial but not very important material about how a male’s sagaceptual awareness differs from a female’s, or an Irishman’s from an Englishman’s–although the similarities are much more pronounced than the differences). I think that at times my urceptual self enters my sagaceptual awareness because something I’ve encountered in the real world strikes me as desirably likely to gain me admiration. Once in my sagaceptual awareness, I (and my “I’ is, to all intents and purposes, my urceptual self¹) and my urceptual hero become one, and the combination takes up a quest. Its goal, in my case right now, is to gain my readers’ admiration, and others through them. Including posterity, whom they will tell about me, and in some cases be part of. Young persons visiting this discourse of mine are my posterity.
(Short digression to say that one enters one’s sagaceptual awareness for many other reasons than gaining admiration. A big one is to pursue a mate, especially when one is young. Pursuit of food is equally compelling at times. A big complication is the pursuit of beauty or truth with little or now interest in gaining admiration. I’m sure this is possible. I want truth and beauty and maximal admiration for all I do to attain the former and produce the latter. Another complication is that one may be in one’s sagaceptual while in other awarenesses as well, bouncing between them but sometimes simultaneously in more than one. In short, I have a lot more to work out than I will be seeing to in this entry.)
Back to posterity. I believe we may have an urceptual visitor-from-the-future. No, not a real one, but an urceptual other who comes to represent what may happen in the future. Someone our urceptual hero will try to convince that we deserve his admiration. I believe one’s sagaceptual awareness builds him out of one of our secondary or tertiary urceptual others, our urceptual judge. His make-up is strongly influenced by what we take from our reading about heroes. (A main function of the sagaceptual awareness is to plug us into novels and the like, to make us their heroes, thus allowing us expanded experience as heroes. Similarly, stories function to attract us into our sagaceptual awarenesses. Ditto spectator sports.)
I’m probably going from one speculation to another too quickly but hope you take it as brainstorming, and necessary touching on every idea that comes us so as not to lose it. In any case, I’m going back to Keats, whom I’ve been many times when on a quest to compose A Major Poem. (Note: my urceptual hero has many identities.) And it seems not absurd to me to believe that Keats’s posterity–all who have admired him including me–join Me-as-Keats. Hence, in a certain respect, his posterity becomes mine.
Be that as it may, I become accustomed to taking it for granted that I can have a posterity like he had. Making sure that it admires me thus becomes possible. But I want it to admire me now. I don’t really care what it does when I’m gone. So I struggle to do what I think it wants me to do–rather than what the present certifiers of repute seem to prefer that I do. Although I can’t keep from trying to find ways of gaining recognition from such people since I do believe the approval of one’s contemporaries does support the thesis that one’s admirability is “eternal,” so long as one has gained some approval from those one admires, and so long as the approval of gatekeepers is approval of what one is actually accomplishing.
That’s it for now. I have no idea how much I covered, how much left out. It’d probably be easier for me to tell if I were sure what my primary topic was.
¹ According to my metapsychology, my true self is my urwareness or that which senses the material reality that seems supplied to it by my brain. My urceptual self is not that but my brain’s “I”–the exploits of which my urwareness passively observes and experiences.
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Entry 1662 — More on Prac- & Cerebra-ceptuality
Monday, December 15th, 2014
Questions in the Night: Big words only make it into the cerebrasipience zone? Algebra and higher math goes to cerebraceptual awareness only? Only strongly activated anthroceptual data gets in the cerebraceptual awareness? High charactration required for use of cerebraceptual awareness?
Later I remembered enough of my model of the brain to begin making a little sense (I hope). First off, I remembered how many awarenesses it contains, from the main ones like the reducticeptual (or conceptual) awareness through lesser ones like the matheceptual (or mathematics) sub-awareness down to even smaller ones I have not yet gotten down to but know are there. Each basically contains little but master-cells (m-cells), associative-cells (a-cells) and a mnemoduct. It is the activation of m-cells that gives us our experience of existence in the form of knowlecules, those being a sort of understood datum: “horse,” for instance, or “hoof” or “mammal,” depending on the context. Each active m-cell contributes a knowicle to the experience—i.e., a unit of knowledge, perhaps a syllable or something much smaller. They are activated either by sensory-cells reacting to stimuli in the outer or inner environment, or to memories of previously experienced knowlicles stored in their associated mnemoduct.
The a-cells are what count for this new cerebral set-up of mine, for they connect to m-cells in lower-order awarenesses unlinked to sensory-cells. This allows me to hypothesize an entire cerebraceptual awareness with sub-awarenesses in touch through a-cells with many or all the awarenesses making up the practiceptual awareness. Hence, the possibility that the latter sends only certain, potentially-“higher” to the cerebraceptual awareness. Meanwhile, the cerebraceptual awareness may have sensory-cells in the practiceptual awareness (I’m really brainstorming here, so may not be making sense) that are aware of data beyond the competence of the practiceptual awareness—perhaps relationships in the latter’s knowlecules. Hence, some m-cells in the cerebraceptual awareness will be activated by what is going on in the practiceptual awareness—and cause one to experience some new kind of knowledge.
To try feebly to give an example: a cerebraceptual sensory-cell in the practiceptual awareness’s matheceptual awareness might perceive some knowlecule as algebraic, tag it as such and activate an m-cell in the cerebraceptual awareness that causes us to experience something the practiceptual awareness could not have: “a3,” say. But probably not.
The point is, that the cerebraceptual awareness could easily share only some data with the practiceptual awareness, and be sensitive to data the practiceptual awareness can’t be—except maybe in some roundabout way due to an exceptionally good popular science book for laymen.
In any case, I now believe that the brain’s attention center is important. It’s where the brain determines where one’s attention should be focused. I now think it could allow this new cerebral organization of mine by sensing when some awareness in the practiceptual awareness has been stymied by something requiring verosophical attention, and in effect shuts down the practiceptual awareness and turns on the cerebraceptual awareness.
Or a poet experiences something in his practiceptual awareness that becomes in effect a problem for him to solve as a poem. He has fragments of thoughts that strike him as material for a poem but they bewilder him enough to cause his brain to flip his attention (assuming nothing important is happening in this day-to-day, that always over-rides cerebraceptual needs, although the two awarenesses may struggle). Eventually he will be able to control his attention—more easily by simply by (1) reducing his day-to-day as much as possible, and (2) working his way into a frustrated mental state that will flip him into his cerebraceptual awareness.
Meanwhile, his cerebellum may help out by going automatic, thus leaving his practiceptual awareness with nothing to do, which will shut it down. (Until something environmental alerts it powerfully enough—a loud sound, for instance.) I think of Wordsworth’s turning his practiceptual awareness over to his cerebellum by taking long walks that the cerebellum tended to while he was (mostly) composing away in his cerebraceptual awareness.
Random thoughts: that much of the anthroceptual awareness is blocked from the cerebraceptual awareness. It is in the latter that a person becomes impersonal, and the people in his life become objects.
Superior minds are those able to stay in their cerebraceptual awarenesses the longest. This will require the ability to raise one’s cerebral energy and maintain a high level of it—although dropping it when appropriate.
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Entry 1618 — World Series Interruption
Saturday, November 1st, 2014
I grew up rooting for the New York Giants, whose evil owner, Horace Stoneham, followed the vile Dodgers to California a few years after the Giants were world champion–for the last time until 4 years ago. Much of that time, except the series they lost to the Yankees in spite of a great 7th-game pitching effort by Jack Sanford, I pretty much ignored them, and thought they’d gotten what they deserved for moving. I still don’t think any major league team should be allowed to moved. I don’t much like the idea of players’ being traded, either. Anyway, I finally did root for them in 2010, and again in 2012 and this year, the first time because I liked their pitchers, and their catcher, and this time because I liked the idea of their becoming a dynasty–just as they did a century ago.
I wanted to write about them here, though, because the world series gave me a new thought about my sagaceptual awareness and its Urceptual heroes: to wit, that I (and apparently a lot of others) tend to favor repeating heroes–individual heroes and heroic teams. Some root for teams that are successful because of their success, in fact. I’ve never been like that, but am never content with a team that only wins one championship. And this year, I was pleased with Madison Baumgartner because he was so outstanding during both the year and the post-season, which made me realize how much I prefer having an individual hero to admire in something like a world series to having several lesser heroes. My conclusion: the sagaceptual awareness is designed to send one vicariously on an individual quest to greatness. Or, to put it even more basically: a single hero is easier to follow vicariously than several.
Some sports heroes do overdo it, I think. Federer and Woods seemed too dominant to me. But I wasn’t big on either to begin with.
Back to the selves tomorrow, I hope.
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Entry 1614 — Self-Centeredness
Tuesday, October 28th, 2014
It’s absurd to criticize someone for being self-centered since we all are; what counts is thus how large a self one has. After writing that I wondered if perhaps I was wrong about all of us being self-centered: was is possible that some of us are unselved? Another possibility is one’s being uncentered. According to my theory, that’s quite possible. So what is meant by “self-centeredness” as a kind of defect I now see could be the subject of a book. First thought: that it is something afflicting a person whose concerns are excessively egoceptual. And/or socio-egoceptual–i.e., concerned with one’s relations with others as opposed in one respect to one’s self alone and in another respect to the socioceptual, which has to do with others, only.
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Entry 1613 — The Awarenesses
Monday, October 27th, 2014
Interestingly, the following attempt to make a list of the awarenesses I hypothesize is from my 3 November 2009 blog entry, almost exactly five years ago. Also interesting that it immediately gives what may be the proper name for what I had been calling, and still usually call, “the fundaceptual awareness.”
My list begins with the Protoceptual Awareness. It begins there for two reasons: (1) to get rid of the halfwits who can’t tolerate neologies and/or big words, and to ground it in Knowlecular Psychology, my neurophysiological theory of psychology (and/or epistemology). The protoceptual awareness is one of the ten awarenesses I (so far) posit the human mind to have. It is the primary (“proto”) awareness–the ancestor of the other nine awarenesses, and the one all forms of life have in some form. As, I believe, “real” theoretical psychologists would agree. Some but far from all would also agree with my belief in multiple awarenesses, although probably not with my specific choice of them. It has much in common with and was no doubt influenced by Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.
The protoceptual awareness deals with reality in the raw: directly with what’s out there, in other words–visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory stimuli. It also deals directly with what’s inside its possessor, muscular and hormonal states. Hence, I divide it into three sub-awarenesses, the Sensoriceptual, Viscraceptual and Musclaceptual Awarenesses. The other nine awarenesses are (2) the Behavraceptual Awareness, (3) the Evaluceptual Awareness, (4) the Cartoceptual Awareness, (5) the Anthroceptual Awareness, (6) the Sagaceptual Awareness, (7) the Objecticeptual Awareness, (8) the Reducticeptual Awareness, (9) the Scienceptual Awareness, and (10) the Compreceptual Awareness.
Note: I sometimes include the Urceptual Awareness on my list.
The Behavraceptual Awareness is concerned with telling one of one’s behavior, which this awareness (the only active awareness), causes. For instance, if someone says, “Hello,” to you, your behavraceptual awareness will likely respond by causing you to say, “Hello,” back, in the process signaling you that that is what is has done. You, no doubt, will think of the brain as yourself, but (not in my psychology but in my metaphysics) you have nothing to do with it, you merely observe what your brain chooses to do and does. But if you feel more comfortable believing that you initiate your behavior, no problem: in that case, according to my theory, your behavraceptual awareness is concerned with telling you what you’ve decided to do and done.
The Evaluceptual Awareness measures the ratio of pain to pleasure one experiences during an instacon (or “instant of consciousness) and causes one to feel one or the other, or neither, depending on the value of that ratio. In other words, it is in charge of our emotional state.
The Cartoceptual Awareness tells one where one is in space and time.
The Anthroceptual Awareness has to do with our experience of ourselves as individuals and as social beings (so is divided into two sub-awareness, the egoceptual awareness and the socioceptual awareness).
The Sagaceptual Awareness is one’s awareness of oneself as the protagonist of some narrative in which one has a goal one tries to achieve.
The Objecticeptual Awareness is the opposite of the anthroceptual awareness in that it is sensitive to objects, or the non-human.
The Reducticeptual Awareness is basically our conceptual intelligence. It reduces protoceptual data to abstract symbols like words and numbers and deals with them (and has many sub-awarenesses).
The Scienceptual Awareness deals with cause and effect, and may be the latest of our awarenesses to have evolved.
Finally, there is the Compreceptual Awareness,which is our awareness of our entire personal reality. I’m still vague about it, but tend to believe it did not precede the protoceptual awareness but later formed when some ancient life-form’s number of separate awarenesses required some general intelligence to co:ordinate their doings.
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Entry 924 — Selves
Friday, November 16th, 2012
This series on literary characterization got me back into an area I’ve spent a lot of time in, not just my own self, but the many selves it consists of–and that almost anyone’s self consists of. It is thus necessary for me to go back, yet again, to my theory of different awarenesses (what Howard Gardner calls “intelligences:), for most of a person’s awarenesses have some sort of self representing it. At this point, a confession: I often write here and elsewhere (mostly privately) about my theory of awarenesses, and related hypotheses concerning what I call urceptual personae (I think) such as the urceptual mother and father, and those urceptual personae that act as various selves. I usually quit after feeling I have an understanding of my subject between fifty and seventy percent valid. Than I come back to it after bumbling through ten to thirty other fields and find my understanding of it to have dropped by a minimum of thirty percent. That’s where I be now. So, to get myself going again, I must first list the awarenesses. Which will take some time, because the idiots supposedly interested in subsidizing genius don’t care about super-genius–or do, but misread it as sub-mediocrity. Hence, I don’t have the huge house I need, with a different large room for each of my specialties, the one for psychology having a list of my awarenesses on the wall. In a flat-screen, in fact, so I could push a button in the central room where my main computer is and have the list uploaded into a blank monitor in from of my computer desk.
So, I had to look through computer files for what I want. I found a version of it, but am not sure it’s the up-to-datest one. But it’s close enough for this entry:
1. The Fundaceptual Awareness Where we experience all the stimuli we encounter in either our internal or external environment.
2. The Behavraceptual Awareness Where our voluntary motor actions are initiated, and we experience a sense of carrying out actions as they take place.
3. The Evaluceptual Awareness Where we experience pain and pleasure, or the “moral” value of anything else we experience–the good being in the final analysis that which causes pleasure, the bad being the opposite.
4. The Cartoceptual Awareness Where we experience our sense of location, up/down, forward/backward, east/west, then/now, being in chapter 2/chapter 9, etc.
5. The Objecticeptual Awareness Where we experience specifically those stimuli in our internal or external environment that are inanimate objects, or seem to be such.
6. The Reducticeptual Awareness Where we experience numbers, numbering, concepts, words (spoken and written)
7. The Sagaceptual Awareness Where we experience out sense of destiny, of going somewhere meaningful, of life as a saga
8. The Anthroceptual Awareness Where we experience ourselves as beings separate from the rest of existence, and other human beings–as well as social interactions
9. The Scienceptual Awareness Where we perceive existence scientifically, primarily it is where we recognize cause and effect
10. The Compreceptual Awareness (formerly the “combiceptual awareness”) Where we experience everything we are aware of at any given instant–in other words, our consciousness
This is tentative; in fact, I just made changes to it as I formatted it.
The Fundaceptual Awareness contributes the “feeling” self to our set of selves–the sensually feeling, not the emotionally feeling self. The Behavraceptual Awareness contributes the physical self, the self that walks, talks, sleeps, et cetera. The emotionally feeling self is the contribution of the Evaluceptual Awareness, but this awareness may also contribute other selves. As I recall, it will contribute an urceptual judge responsible for morally judging us and others. As for the Cartoceptual Awareness, I tend (now, for the first time thinking about it) to believe it contributes no selves, just providing locational data to the physical self. Similarly, the Objecticeptual, Reducticeptual, and Scienceptual Awarenesses contribute data rather than selves, in all three cases to the compreceptual self.
I’m vague about the selves the Anthroceptual Awareness contributes; there have to be at least two: the introverted and the extraverted selves, one where one is when all alone with one’s self–as opposed to being alone but working math problems or playing solitaire, and one for functioning with people.
I’m just now trying more than previously to develop a reasonably full idea of what the compreceptual self is. I’m toying with considering its basis the “thinking self,” of the self which uses subliminal speech to comment on what’s going on. I don’t think this is our “true” self, or the self a person feels is his “me.” That, I think, is his physical self. But the physical self may share dominance of the compreceptual self with the thinking self.
Certainly, to get back to literary characterization, it’s the thinking self who narrates first-person fiction and non-fiction. But often telling us about other selves of his.
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Entry 559 — My Self-Image
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
I think the main thing that keeps me from being Completely Obnoxious is my sincere sense of humor about myself. Depending on my mood, I think I’m the greatest super-genius ever, a joke (well, make that the Greatest Joke Ever, since I never quite escape megalomania), or the Most Contemptible Failure Ever. Actually, when I’m in the kind of mood I’m in now in (10 November, around noon)–after my first dose of APCs in over two weeks (because my head felt too blitzed for me to get anywhere with my Shakespeare chapter) *, I tend simultaneously to believe I’m terrific and a colossal joke.
*Gad, how good it made me feel to close my parenthetical expression as soon as I’d finished typing it! How rarely I do.
My self-image intrigues me, not only because it’s mine. It is important to me, perhaps more important to me than most people’s self-images are to them. (A few of them may not even have one!) True, when I take off into a project, small of huge, the project consumes my every thought. But my self-image is usually instrumental in igniting my take-off. I usually (I think–I really haven’t thought that much about this before) need to feel that I’m a hero with a grand quest ahead of me. Even when merely shelving scattered books, for–behold–I am then preparing the field for the greater project to follow, whatever it is. This has a lot to do, I suddenly see, with why I hate jobs like brushing my teeth or shaving in spite of how little time they steal: they seem to me to have nothing to do with anything of importance. Such jobs are what we have slaves for, or should have them for!!!! (Oops, gotta watch that elitism of mine. Know, I implore you, that the slaves I have in mind are of all the human skin-shades.)
On the other hand, while I often wished I could get out of it when I used to run three or more miles daily four or five times a week, each run was a mini-quest, with a time to shoot for–as well as exercise to make me fit for greater quests. Shopping wasn’t quite the same but even it had a bit of questness to it. And the pleasure the food or drink would give me could make up for its not being much, if anything, of a quest. It occurs to me that normal men dislike shopping for clothes because clothes lack the pleasure, for them, of food and drink, and we have no instinct for capturing clothing.
Those of you familiar with my theory of psychology will have realized that I’ve been speaking of what I call the sagaceptual awareness. That’s one’s innate system of brain-cells and interconnections that causes one, when it is active, to feel oneself to be the hero of some archetypal saga–chasing one’s Venus, for instance; starting one’s ascent of Parnassus; going out on the tennis court to compete for first place in the Charlotte County B-3 over-55 men’s league . . . This awareness becomes active much more easily for me than for others, it seems to me. Once enheroed in it, I stop thinking of myself as a hero, from that point on it being sufficient for me to be the hero in whatever saga I’ve become a part of. But I become aware of my self-image in flashes. More often, the glory, or the equivalent thereof, that I will win, breaks through my concentration on the task at hand.
My impression is that the sagaceptual awareness is stronger for the greatest achievers than for others, and that most of them have no shyness about indicating it–Keats, for instance, writing somewhere (in a letter, I believe) that he wanted to be remembered “among the English Poets,” or something close to that. Unconcealed ambition. Others don’t want to be caught being proud. It may be that our age is particularly harsh on those who want to rise above others. Even I have worked out ways around that, which I actually believe in (intellectually, at any rate): for instance, I have said that followers are as necessary as leaders; an effective leader is just another necessary component of the greatness (however defined) that can only be achieved by a group of people, which includes effective followers (and their effect cats and dogs). Actually, this is unarguable true, but I have to admit that I tend not finally to believe anyone counts but me. . . .
I believe that existence simple is, it has no meaning. But for biological reasons, we have to act as though it does have some meaning–which in the final analysis comes always down to the triumphant attainment of a sagaceptual goal. Meaning is the finding of meaning.
One last thought before I leave this for an attempt to continue my Shakespeare chapter (into Greatness): that there is a role in the sagaceptual awareness for each of us to take, that of the spectator. This allows us to root for ourselves, something too few others generally seem willing to do. The best because they are busy rooting for themselves; the non-best because they’re too dumb to recognized our worthiness of cheers. Until we’re safely dead, of course.
Whee.
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