Philosophy 207: Mind (Part One): Sorts of Experience - revised

Contents

Introduction
Section 1: Memory - the common faculty
Section 2 (G1): Pre-cognitive experience
Section 3 (G2): Cognitive experience
Section 4 (G3): Non-cognitive experience
Appendix: The Three Groups in this topic

Introduction

Here the word 'experience' is broadly defined to include anything that can be present in the mind's 'awareness' or consciousness. I include in this our awareness of dreams, but I exclude the supposed 'subconscious' mental states.

The various sorts of experience occur at three levels: the pre-cognitive (the ingredients of thinking), the cognitive (thinking), and the non-cognitive (non-thinking).

At each level there are two modes: active experience and passive experience. Active experience accompanies the exercise of the will. Passive experience occurs without the exercise of the will.

And for each sort of active or passive experience there are two orientations: sorts that are internally oriented and sorts that are externally oriented. The internal orientation is self-regarding, and the external orientation is other-regarding.

At each level of experience there are four faculties. Only one faculty, memory, is common to all three levels.

Perception, a faculty at the pre-cognitive level, is also special in that it has three casts. The casts are ways of interpreting perception as a whole.

The levels, modes, orientations, faculties and casts will become evident to the reader with careful reading and reference to the reader's own experience.

The author welcomes any suggestions of sorts of experience he has failed to include.

Note: My use of Group 1, Group 2 and Group 3 refers to my thesis that most philosophical concepts can be placed, non-arbitrarily, into three groups.

Section 1: Memory - the common faculty

There are three main sorts of memory:

G1. Recognition.

To recognise X is to identify X, and to identify X (pre-cognitively) is to associate it with its concept. Oddly enough, the word 'recognition' is a misnomer - recognition is not cognitive, it is not part of thought.

G2. Recall.

Recall is memory of sequences of perceptions and sequences of concepts. To recall a sequence of perceptions is to 'replay' them in your mind. Recall *about* X is recall of a proposition (a candidate for true or false) about X. Recall is cognitive, it is the simplest kind of thought.

It is important to note that to recall a proposition is not to recall a belief. A belief is a proposition that has been fixed (frozen) as either true or false. Unfixed propositions are the fluid ingredients of the processes we call 'thought'. Belief is pre-cognitive in that the propositions it contains can be 'released' from being held as either true or false and as such can be fed into the thought processes.

G3. Skill.

Skill is memory of how to do things. That is, it is memory of causes and effects. Skill is non-cognitive, it can proceed without thought.

Memory is the only faculty of the mind that occurs at all three levels of experience. More evidence of this will be shown in Sections 2, 3, and 4 collectively.

Section 2 (G1): Pre-cognitive experience

The four faculties at this level are perception, memory (recognition), belief, and will.

1.P.I.1 Passive mode, internal orientation, faculty of perception: self perception (qualities).

The experience of perceiving your bodily qualities (colors, sounds, smells, etc.) by abstracting them from your bodily self-sensations.

1.P.I.2 Passive mode, internal orientation, faculty of perception: self perception (relations).

The experience of perceiving your bodily relations (structures and their relative positions) by abstraction from your bodily self-sensations.

The technical term for this is 'proprioception' and some definers claim it to be unconscious, which is absurd. What they mean is that it is pre-cognitive.

1.P.I.3 Passive mode, internal orientation, faculty of perception: self perception (quantities).

The experience of perceiving your bodily quantities (sizes and durations) by abstracting them from your bodily self-sensations.

1.A.I.0 Active mode, internal orientation, faculty of memory: self recognition. This is the experience of recognising yourself (your mind and body) as yourself. It is associating your self-perception (see below) with your self-concept.

1.P.E.1 Passive mode, external orientation, faculty of perception: other perception (qualities).

The experience of perceiving the qualities (colors, sounds, smells, etc.) of X, where X is not yourself, by abstracting them from your sensations of X.

1.P.E.2 Passive mode, external orientation, faculty of perception: other perception (relations).

The experience of perceiving the internal relations (structures and their relative positions) of X and the external relations (positions relative to you and to other things that are neither you nor X) of X by abstracting them from your sensations of X and of other things.

1.P.E.3 Passive mode, external orientation, faculty of perception: other perception (quantities).

The experience of perceiving the quantities (sizes and durations) of X, where X is not yourself, by abstracting them from your sensations of X.

Note that there are three casts of perception. They are three ways of interpreting perception (both self and other) as a whole. In other words, they are three ways of 'seeing' the objects of perception.

G1: The aesthetic cast of perception, otherwise termed 'aesthetic sensibility'. This is the identification of object X by associating it with aesthetic value concepts (positive or negative).

G2. The religious cast of perception, otherwise termed 'religious experience'. This is the identification of object X by associating it with religious concepts (metaphysical and evaluative).

G3. The mundane cast of perception, otherwise termed 'normal perception'. This is the identification of object X by associating it with either (i) ordinary descriptive and evaluative concepts, or (ii) scientifically descriptive concepts.

1.A.E.0 Active mode, external orientation, faculty of memory: other recognition.

The experience of identifying X (where X is not yourself) by perceiving X as X and thus associating that perception with your concept of X.

1.A.I.1 Active mode, internal orientation, faculty of belief: self-belief and intention.

Belief is pre-cognitive. It is a static product of the dynamic process of thinking (see also Section 1 (G2)). However, propositions are not made static (made beliefs) by thinking, they are made static by the will, and they are released back into the cognitive processes by the will.

Self-belief is the experience of holding propositions about yourself, held by you to be true or held by you to be false.

An intention to do something is a fixed proposition (a belief) about the course of your own future behaviour.

1.A.E.2 Active mode, external orientation, faculty of belief: other belief and intention

The experience of having a belief about X, where X is not yourself. A belief is a proposition that is 'in stasis' in that it held to be true or held to be false. A proposition is fixed or held in stasis as a belief by the will.

Note that the 'grip' of the will on a belief can be more or less strong. The faculty of will is often influenced in this by the faculty of reasoning, but sometimes not. Belief that is willed so strongly as to be beyond the influence of any reasoning is termed 'dogma' or 'faith'.

This not to say that a dogmatically held belief cannot enter into thought, but only that its release into thought is not as a proposition (a candidate for truth or non-truth) but as a pseudo-proposition (a candidate for truth only, or a candidate for non-truth only).

Pseudo-propositions are not limited to religion, there are also philosophical and even scientific pseudo-propositions. Arguably, pseudo-propositions are classifiable under the concept of mental pathology.

An other-regarding intention is a belief about the effects on other things (things other than yourself) of the course of your own intended behaviour (see also 1.A.I.1).

1.A.I.3 Active mode, internal orientation, faculty of will: self-willing

The will is pre-cognitive. It is the experience of being a cause of effects. The will is a cause of effects both in the self and in the other (the non-self). Self-willing is the experience of being the cause of effects in yourself (either your mental self or your bodily self). Will causes, but is not part of, active cognition and the use of skills.

1.A.E.3 Active mode, external orientation, faculty of will: other willing.

The experience of causing an effect in X where X is not yourself.

It is important to note that this is distinct from the experience of having a technical skill (see 3.A.E.3). The possession of a skill is in the faculty of memory, not the faculty of will.

Section 3 (G2): Cognitive experience

Cognitive experiences are experiences that involve thinking. What is meant by thinking will become clear in reading this section.

Basically, thinking is the ordering of concepts to form chains and webs of concepts of various lengths and kinds. A sequence or group of concepts that constitutes a possible truth or non-truth is termed a proposition. In thought, propositions are 'unfixed' - that is, they are not held: not held to be true and not held to be false. Once a proposition is held either way it becomes a belief and as such is not cognitive but pre-cognitive. Thought is a dynamic process, belief is a static product of the intervention of the will in that process.

Thinking is also an abstractive process - the most abstractive of the mind's processes (see Philosophy 207a: Mind - The Levels of Abstraction). The ultimate abstractions in religious thinking are the concepts of and propositions about God. The ultimate abstractions in philosophical thinking are the concepts of and propositions about the categories of thought (hence the succinct definition of philosophy as 'thinking about thinking'). And the ultimate abstractions in scientific / technological thought are the concepts and propositions of mathematics.

The four faculties of thought are memory (recall), reasoning, active imagination and dreaming (passive imagination). All of these are experiences in the active mode, except for dreaming.

2.A.I.0 Active mode, internal orientation, faculty of memory: self recall.

This is the recall of (i) self-perceptions, and (ii) propositions about yourself that have been 'unfixed' from your beliefs about yourself. These unfixed propositions are the content of your reasoning about yourself.

2.A.I.1 Active mode, internal orientation, faculty of reasoning: self reasoning.

This is the experience of reasoning about yourself using recalled propositions about yourself. In such reasoning the premises are about your past self and the conclusion is about either your past, present, or future self.

In self-analogy your present self is compared with your past self and the conclusion is about your present self. In self-deduction the premises are about your future or past self and the conclusion is about your present self. In self-induction, the premises are about your past and present self and the conclusion is about your future self.

2.A.I.2 Active mode, internal orientation, faculty of active imagination: self imagination.

The reasoning process is consrained by strict rules. The process of imagination proceeds more freely but with reference to the conceptual categories of

(G1) possibility and impossibilty,
(G2) actuality and potentiality,
(G3) necessity and sufficiency.

For example, self-love is possible but self-jealousy is not.

For example, An actual self is several potential selves.

For example, the concepts 'self' and 'other' are each necessary to the concept 'me', but each alone is not sufficient to it. Only both together are sufficient to it.

2.A.E.1 Active mode, external orientation, faculty of memory: other recall

This is the experience of remembering (recalling) (i) perceptions of things other than yourself, (ii) propositions about things other than yourself.

Recalled perceptions are the content of perceptual 'replay', such as when you replay a piece of music in your mind. They are also the primary content of musical imagination (composition).

Recalled propositions are the content of reasoning and imagination about things other than yourself, such as when you compose a poem or a philosophical essay.

2.A.E.2 Active mode, external orientation, faculty of reasoning: other reasoning

This is experience of the cognitive process of reasoning, the use of one set of propositions (the principles and laws of reasoning) to reorder the concepts in some propositions (premises) so as to form other propositions (conclusions).

It is important to note that reasoning is the reordering of concepts according to strict rules. It is not the creation of new concepts, merely the creation of new propositions using pre-existing concepts. The creation of new concepts is a product of the faculties of perception and imagination.

2.A.E.3 Active mode, external orientation, faculty of imagination: other imagination

This is the experience of creating new concepts of and propositions about things other than yourself. Like self-imagination, it is influenced by the categories of

possibility and impossibility,
actuality and potentiality,
necessity and sufficiency.

For example, a golden mountain is possible, but a golden calculation is not. (A concept combination such as 'golden calculation' is termed a category-mistake).

For example, an actual golden mountain would be a large number of potential gold rings.

For example, the concepts 'golden' and 'mountain' are each necessary to the concept of a golden mountain, but each alone is insufficient to it. Only both together are sufficient to it.

2.P.I.0 Passive mode, internal orientation, faculty of imagination: self dreaming

This is dreaming (passive (unwilled) imagination) about yourself. The three sorts are about your qualities, relations and quantities. It would be tedious to devote a section to each of these, hence the zero in the designation of this sub-section and the next.

Arguably, unwilled imagination is not subject to the three categories willed imagination is subject to. This would account for the extravagant character of dreams.

2.P.E.0 Passive mode, external orientation, faculty of imagination: other dreaming

This is dreaming (passive (unwilled) imagination) about things other than yourself, their qualities, relations and quantities.

Other-dreaming includes dreaming about other people and other non-people. Of course, you yourself are rarely if ever entirely absent from such dreams.

Section 3: Non-cognitive experience

Non-cognitive experience is experience of faculties that can proceed without thought.

The four faculties at the non-cognitive level are sensation, emotion and mood, memory (somatic skills) and memory (mechanical skills).

3.P.I.1 Passive mode, internal orientation, faculty of sensation: sensations caused by the environed

The environed in this case is your non-cognitive mental self. Sensations caused by this self are the so-called psycho-somatic sensations. An example is the sensation interpreted as a 'phantom limb' in those who have lost a limb.

3.P.I.2 Passive mode, internal orientation, faculty of sensation: sensations caused by the internal environment

Your genes (genotype) are your internal environment. Your body (phenotype) is the product, primarily, of your genotype. Sensations caused by your body are your bodily sensations.

3.P.E.3 Passive mode, external orientation, faculty of sensation: sensations caused by the external environment

These are the sensations that are perceived as sights, sounds, smells, etc.

3.P.I.1 Passive mode, internal orientation, faculty of emotion: emotions and moods caused by the environed

The environed is yourself. The emotions caused by yourself are self-regarding emotions caused by beliefs you have about yourself. Examples: narcissism, self-disgust. Moods: Feeling 'pleased with yourself'.

3.P.I.2 Passive mode, internal orientation, faculty of emotion: emotions and moods caused by the internal environment

The internal environment is the genetic/familial environment. The emotions caused by this environment are such as: love, hate, pride, disappointment. Moods: feeling 'in the bosom of he the family', feeling 'crowded'.

3.P.E.3 Passive mode, external orientation, faculty of emotion: emotions and moods caused by the external environment

The external environment is the social/biological/physical environment. Examples (emotions) : fear, awe. Examples (moods): It is common for some people to get 'the blues' when the weather is dull and rainy. It is often observed that windy weather makes some people 'impulsive'.

3.A.I.0 Active mode, internal orientation, faculty of memory: somatic skills

Somatic skills are skills in using your own body. Examples are walking, talking (as distinct from thinking), and handling.

That talking is quite distinct from thinking is evident in the observation that young children can clearly have thoughts they cannot talk about. This is also clearly a cause of the emotion of frustration in children.

3.A.E.0 Active mode, external orientation, faculty of memory: mechanical skills

These are skills in the use of tools.

Appendix: The Three Groups in this topic

The levels of experience:
G1: Pre-cognitive
G2: Cognitive
G3: Non-cognitive

The main sorts of memory:
G1: Recognition
G2: Recall
G3: Skill

The mind's pre-cognitive faculties:
G1: Perception
G2: Belief
G2: Will

Casts of perception:
G1: Aesthetic
G2: Religious
G3: Mundane

The mind's cognitive faculties:
G1: Reasoning
G2: Active imagination
G3: Passive imagination (dreaming)

The categoric influences on imagination:
G1: Possibility and impossibility
G2: Actuality and potentiality
G3: Necessity and sufficiency

The mind's non-cognitive faculties:
G1: Sensation
G2: Emotion and mood
G3: Mechanical skill