| Abram, D. (2017). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1997). |
 
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 13/08/2023, 12:28 |
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| Following Merleau-Ponty, Abram acknowledges the primacy of the body in fashioning a self by engaging with other selves and with space. Yes, perhaps there is something genetically dictated in our behaviours but, like the spider spinning a web, these genetic 'programs' must also interact with the present through its bodily sensing of the terrain, and its specific features and dimensions, in which the web must be spun. "[T]he genome could not explicitly have commanded the order of every flexion and extension of her various limbs as she weaves this web into its place. However complex are the inherited "programs," patterns, or predispositions, they must still be adapted to the immediate situation in which the spider finds itself. However determinate one's genetic inheritance, it must still, as it were, be woven into the present, an activity that necessarily involves both a receptivity to the specific shapes and textures of that present and a spontansous creativity in adjusting oneself (and one's inheritance) to those contours. It is this open activity, this dynamic blend of receptivity and creativity by which every animate organism necessarily orients itself to the world (and orients the world around itself), that we speak of by the term "perception"." |
| Discussing the participatory nature of perception through the analogy of a magician using sleight of hand on a coin: "he uses his sleights to enhance the animation of the object, generating ambiguous gaps and lacunae in the visible trajectory of the coin. The spectators' eyes, already drawn by the coin's fluid dance across the magician's fingers, spontaneously fill in those gaps with impossible events, and it is this spontaneous involvement of the spectators' own senses that enables the coin to vanish and reappear, or to pass through the magician's hand [...] The perceiving body does not calculate logical possibilities; it gregariously participates in the activity of the world, lending its imagination to things in order to see them more fully." |
| Anzieu, D. (1989). The skin ego: A psychoanalytical approach to the self. C. Turner, Trans. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. |
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| The Self is "a pre-individual psychical cavity possessing a rudimentary unity and identity." |
| Citing number of studies of babies, these "suggest that mental capacities operate first on acoustic material [the suggestion] that the differentiations of gestures and mimicry [...] are at the root of social communication and mental representation, comes to seem improbable. It appears that feedback loops with the environment are formed much earlier in the baby. These are audio-phonological in nature" |
| "the Self forms as a sound envelope through the experience of a bath of sounds [...] This sound-bath prefigures the Skin Ego with its double face, one half turned towards the outer world, the other towards the inner, since the sound envelope is composed of sounds emitted either by the baby or the environment. The combination of these sounds therefore produces (a) a common space-volume permitting bilateral exchange [...] (b) a first (spatio-auditory) image of one's own body" |
| Brewer, W. F. (1986). What is autobiographical memory? In D. C. Rubin (Ed.), Autobiographical memory (pp. 25–49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |
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"I intend to argue that the self is composed of an experiencing ego, a self-schema, and an associated set of personal memories and autobiographical facts.
Ego. By ego I mean the conscious experiencing entity that is the focus of our phenomenal experience. The ego is the aspect of a person that experiences things from the "inside." The ego is the conscious aspect of the mind that moves through space and time. It is the memory for the ego's moment-to-moment experience that we call personal memories.
Self-schema. The self-schema is the cognitive structure that contains generic knowledge about the self. In the same way that individuals have knowledge about the solar system or knowledge about Walter Cronkite, individuals have knowledge about themselves. This knowledge is presumably organized into unconscious mental structures that interact with incoming information about the self (Brewer & Nakamura, 1984; Rumelhart, 1980). Some of the information that goes into making up the self-schema is private and available only to the self; other information is public and available to an observer. The self-schema must be one of the richer knowledge structures in an individual's long-term memory; hence, once it has developed, it probably changes only slowly, thus providing consistency to the self over time.
Self. The self is the complex mental structure that includes the ego, the self-schema, and portions of long-term memory related to the ego-self (e.g., personal memories, generic personal memories, and autobiographical facts).
Individual. The individual is the larger entity that includes the self, the de-personalized (nonself) aspects of the mind, and the body. Thus, it is the individual who has depersonalized knowledge about biology (e.g., a robin has wings) and who possesses cognitive skills (e.g., can carry out long division), motor skills (e.g., can ride a bicycle), and rote skills (e.g., can recite Lincoln's Gettysburg Address)."
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| Connor, S. (2004). Sound and the self. In M. M. Smith (Ed.), Hearing History (pp. 54–66). Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. |
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| In the context of the invention and reception of the telephone which led to "perhaps the most important distinguishing feature of auditory experience, namely its capacity to disintegrate and reconfigure space." |
| "Since traversal and transference are in the nature of sound, it also becomes the privileged figure of sensory interchange." |
| Damasio, A. (2006). Descartes' error. Revised ed. London: Vintage. (Original work published 1994). |
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| Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 11/05/2012, 09:04 |
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| "the self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state" |
| The outside world, the environment, is represented in the mind through the modifications it leads to in the body. The environment is represented "by modifying the primordial representations of the body proper whenever an interaction between organism and environment takes place." [...] The mind does this because it evolved to "ensure body survival as effectively as possible" |
| Erlmann, V. (2000). Reason and resonance: A history of modern aurality. New York: Zone Books. |
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| Adapting Foucault's author function, "one might say that the listener is not simply the recipient of an indefinite number of significations that fill his or her hearing, nor does he or she come after the work. Rather, the listener is a function that fixes these meanings with the goal of circumscribing and prescribing the auditory ways in which individuals acknowledge themselves as subjects." |
| "ample evidence of the fact that the sense of time is of fundamental importance to humans' sense of self". Erlmann relates this to Freud's Zauderrhythmus (vacillating rhythm) that governs the "proper interaction of consciousness and unconsciousness" -- thus perception is subject to "a "periodic" motion that wards off or at least slows down the "haste" of excessive excitations." According to Freud, this "apparatus not only sustains the organism and enlarges the domain of the ego by allowing us to step back from the urge to respond to each and every stimulus, it also determines our concept of time. Our entire time consciousness is based on the breaks that occur in the interplay between consciousness and the unconscious." |
| Heeter, C. (1992). Being there: The subjective experience of presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1(2), 262–271. |
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| Personal presence is subjective and "is a measure of the extent to which and the reasons why you feel like you are in a virtual world." |
| "Social presence refers to the extent to which other beings (living or synthetic) also exist in the world and appear to react to you." |
| "[The virtual world responds like the natural world] and in a way that differentiates self from world. You move and the world stays still." |
| Ihde, D. (2007). Listening and voice: Phenomenologies of sound. 2nd ed. Albany (NY): State University of New York Press. (Original work published 1976). |
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| In Heideggerian terms, Ihde describes the auditory horizon as the point at which sounds are given over into the present. Sound is a giving and listening is what "lets come into presence the unbidden giving of sound." |
| What is present, our central focus on our self, is always inside or contained within horizons. |
| "My "self" is a correlate of the World, and its way of being-in that World is a way filled with voice and language. |
| Strawson, P. F. (1971). Individuals: An essay in descriptive metaphysics. London: Methuen. (Original work published 1959). |
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| "Coud there be reidentifiable sound-particulars in the purely auditory world? . . . Could a being whose experience was purely auditory make sense of the distinction between himself and his states on the one hand, and something not himself or a state of himself, on the other? . . . these question are not independent. An affirmative answer to the second entails an affirmative answer to the first. For to have a conceptual scheme in which a distinction is made between oneself or one's states and auditory items which are not states of oneself, is to have a conceptual scheme in which the existence of auditory items is logically independent of the existence of one's states or of oneself. Thus it is to have a conceptual scheme in which it is logically possible that such items should exist whether or not they were being observed, and hence should continue to exist through an interval during which they were not being observed. So it seems that it must be the case that there could be reidentifiable particulars in a purely auditory world if the conditions of a non-solipsistic consciousness could be fulfilled for such a world. Now it might further be said that it makes no sense to say that there logically could be reidentifiable particulars in a purely auditory world, unless criteria for reidentification can be framed or devised in purely auditory terms. And if this is correct, as it seems to be, we have the conclusion that the conditions of a non-solipsistic consciousness can be satisfied in such a world only if we can describe in purely auditory terms criteria for reidentification of sound-particulars." |
| Waterworth, J. A., & Waterworth, E. L. (2014). Distributed embodiment: Real presence in virtual bodies. In M. Grimshaw (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality (pp. 589–601). New York: Oxford University Press. |
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| "being present in an external environment has its roots in the animal feeling of something happening outside the self rather than from within. In other words, the sense of presence distinguishes self from nonself [...] Presence arises from active awareness of our embodiment in a present world around us." |
| Westerhoff, J. (2011). Reality: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
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| Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 20/07/2021, 11:22 |
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Discussing Libet's (1985) experiment. While we prefer to believe that we have willed our hand to rise, our intention, there is a precursor in the subconscious, the readiness potential, that can be measured using EEG and that precedes the hand movement and the reported time at which subjects noted their intention to lift the hand. The conclusion is that intention (and thus free will?) is manufactured after the event. See also (Rosenberg 2018, p.99).
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4), 529–566.
Rosenberg, A. (2018). How history gets things wrong: The neuroscience of our addiction to stories. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. |
| "The different information coming in from our senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory sensations are processed in different regions of the brain. They have to travel different distances [...] and arrive at different times. The processing speed for different kinds of sensory information varies; visual stimuli take longer to process than other stimuli. (The difference is about 40 milliseconds. [...]) On the other hand, light travels much faster than sound. Putting together these different speeds means that sights and sounds from about 10 metres away are available to consciousness at about the same time; for everything closer or further away information about its sight or sound arrives at different times. In these cases, the apparent simultaneity of, for example, hearing a voice and seeing the speaker's lips move has to be constructed by our brain." |
Detailing a set of experiments by Libet helping to explain how our brain builds a consciousness of the present and the time delay involved.
- Stimulating the brain directly, an electrical impulse must be applied for at least 500 milliseconds to produce a perception (see, for example Libet 1985). Shorter impulses had no effect neither did increasing the intensity (with shorter times). Sensation can be detected by the brain within 500msecs but the subject is not consciously aware of it (e.g. we can react 'instinctively').
- Stimulate the skin then, 200 milliseconds after, stimulate the brain – the skin stimulation is not perceived but is masked by the brain stimulation. The brain edits past events to give an impression of the 'present'.
- Stimulate the brain then, 200 milliseconds later, stimulate the skin. Brian stimulus is perceived after about 500msecs but the skin stimulus is perceived as being before the brain stimulus. A temporal reordering: "There is no guarantee that the order in which we perceive events actually corresponds to the order of their occurrence" (Westerhoff 2011, p.100).
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4), 529–566.
Westerhoff, J. (2011). Reality: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
| Zahorik, P., & Jenison, R. L. (1998). Presence as being-in-the-world. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 7(1), 78–89. |
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| Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 11/09/2018, 17:15 |
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| Relating Gibson to presence, "the perception of self-existence is completely determined by physical stimulation. To the extent that successful action is supported, perceptions of self-existence are veridical [cf 'throwness'] Hence, presence is tied to action in the environment." |
