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On Psychology, the Briefer Course (1892), chapters on "The Self," "Will," and "Emotions."
Continuing from ep. 179, we talk about the various aspects of self: The "Me" (the part of me that I know) that's divided into physical, social, and spiritual aspects, and the "I" (the part of me that has experiences), which is pretty problematic, but which we need not posit as a "soul," but which should play some role in the problem of what unifies experience over time so that we consider it all belonging to the same person.
Part 2 will cover James's influential theory of emotions, which suggests that an emotion is just our experience of certain physical feelings: Danger gives rise to increased heart rate, dry mouth, etc., and we feel those changes and call them "fear." We then turn to James's take on what willing is and how willed acts differ from reflex and habitual acts. This gets us going on animal consciousness, ethics, and of course free will. You can also get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!
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James image by Charles Valsechi.
this was a pleasure thanks fellows, nice marriage of interesting text and interesting reflections on the text, one can see the long and unfinished move from theology to post-darwinian philosophical anthropology in these modern philosophers, reminds me to go back and reread Heidegger’s complaints about American pragmatism and cybernetics, interesting related bit of Dennett over at edge(dot)org on differences that make a difference in terms of Information theorizing.
Riccardo Manzotti: The Spread Mind, How to Locate Consciousness in the Physical World
Dr. Daniel Siegel on the Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human
http://scottbarrykaufman.com/podcast/dr-daniel-siegel-on-the-mind-a-journey-to-the-heart-of-being-human/
Mindsight and the Plane of Possibility – Dr. Dan Siegel #86
http://www.danielvitalis.com/rewild-yourself-podcast/mindsight-and-the-plane-of-possibility-dr-dan-siegel-86
what’s the connection to text for this podcast?
in the introspection generelly in the first person experience and analysis and with comments in the episode about it’s connections and/or contrasts with Buddhist and Stoic intropection and what made it come to mind was watching the video with Manzotti’s “Spread Mind” assertion that “consciousness” is not only internal but “out” in the physical world that “mind” is not merely brain activity but something more, something that is fully embodied, not just enskulled, and something that is also deeply relational and emergent with other people and the physical world
““Where is my mind?”. UCLA psychiatry professor Dr. Daniel Siegel has a revolutionary answer. We’ve come to accept that the brain is the instrument that plays the mind, but Siegel takes it one step further by positing that your mind isn’t limited to the confines of your skull, or even the barrier of your skin anywhere in your body. Your mind is emergent – it’s beyond your physiology, and it exists in many different places at once.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3aP905vW-c
much respect
thanks q, there is a tension I think in James between the pluralism of his radical empiricism and his understandable desire for some peace, some civility, something akin to the Oversoul of his comrades.
” In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt, remain forever inacceptable. A friend with such a mind once told me that the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.
But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminism with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the native absolutism of my intellect,—an absolutism which, after all, perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinism with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral reality through and through. When, for example, I imagine such carrion as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature without shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And I deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of the whole, is not carrion.”
I don’t know. I read him in the way I listened to the podcast in a kind of phenomenological way and connected it with Buddhist analysis but I admit I may be influenced here by reading books by B. Allen Wallace like “The Attention Revolution” in which he connects and references William James repeatedly
I see, good to keep in mind I think that phenomenology doesn’t lead straight to buddhist conclusions and that phenomenology isn’t limited to ‘mindfulness’, also in philosophy introspection has been used for transcendent and immanent ends, you might find http://cplong.org/2010/03/digital_dialogue_28_friends_of_passage/
interesting.
look for the Self of individuation rather than the individuation or individual of the Self.
first I will say that I think the stream of consciousness is continuous, that is to say collective. “treating the predecessor as warm” is where each interfaces the shared stream of consciousness.
as far as the “snowball” analogy is concerned I agree with wes that it doesn’t necessarily imply an excluded sense of flux and transformation. not all past experiences of consciousness get carried over to the next ‘me’ that is in a position to subjectivize them as some kind of conscious aggregate. instead of a mechanistic perspective I am reminded of Leibniz’s monads. each point-of-view no matter how lowly has a certain locality which is proper to them. their job is to recognize when THEIR sector of the stream of consciousness arrives and to be prepared to display or unfold thereby bringing a further fold of exteriority inside where it is protected. the goal is to have an adequate knowledge of what is going on outside so as to bring it inside making way for the new to appear outside. after that they are like octopuses after mating in that they are relieved of their duty and death is inconsequential. notice how I am trying to get at how the process of development of forces in relation to one another could be taking place in a person or could pertain to a collective.
some monads share common perceptions but each monad is shut in on itself as it were displaying it’s conception of the universe. from this I gather that a certain constellation of monads amounts to something like a Self. This Self reveals itself similar to the way a piece of artwork has a style. So the way in which the Self(or spiritual me) relates to itself is the same manner in which the Self relates to the world.