Buster Mudd wrote:
wrote:
Buster Mudd wrote:
wrote:
First of all, it is obvious to me that purposeful hunting exists as an
activity separate from spontaneous noticing (good terminology!).
Right...*when* it is obvious to you that you are conciously doing one
or the other activity, then it seems easy to confidently state which
one you are doing. But that doesn't mean you are acurately reporting
your concious state, only that you are reporting your perception of
your concious state to the best of your abilities. IOW, you might
*think* you are in Spontaneous Noticing mode, but you may be deluding
yourself.
Secondly, I have no problem with an awareness of which activity I'm
engaged in, and making an observation does not overwrite this
awareness.
That's what you think. However, there is a substantial body of
literature in the fields of cognitive science and neuropsychology that
suggest A) that what we think is going on in our brain is not the same
as what is going on in our brain; and B) that concious discriminations
do indeed overwrite the perceptions which prompted these
discriminations; the determination "I have perceived this" takes
precedence over whatever stimuli you were (temporarily)
perceiving...and often they are not the same!
All this is to say we don't know exactly what we were doing, and I
agree. That makes it even harder to control for these factors in a
blind test. I think that what you are doing with your awareness affects
what you hear
Which gets right back to my earlier points: 1) It doesn't matter what
we are "doing with our awareness" because once we have made a conscious
discrimination about what we have become aware of, we are doing
something different from whatever we might have been doing before,
something which overwrites our ability to make use of that previous
awareness.
I don't follow this. Say that a conscious impression impression
overwrites the previous mental process--that doesn't in itself mean the
previous mental process doesn't matter.
Secondly, I don't think that this "overwriting" function necessarily
destroys all previous awareness. I would agree that it is hard to be
aware of a subtle internal process without influencing it; but this is
something that can practiced. Zen meditators do.
And 2) that making conscious discriminations about sonic
qualities is the same cognitive process regardless of what we were
"doing with our awareness" prior to making the discrimination.
I didn't use the word "discrimination." "Impression" is more like it.
However, I still don't see how this follows from the presumption that
we aren't aware of what we do. We can still be doing different things
while being unaware.
I also don't see how any of this contradicts the simple observation
that you tend to notice what you're paying attention to, and that you
can choose what to pay attention to, and that sometimes things you
aren't paying attention to come to your awareness. Your assertion that
awareness itself "destroys" the prior awareness seems to reinforce the
idea that one will be aware of different things depending on what one
is paying attention to.
Mike