Dr. Stephen Hicks
speaker
174 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Stephen Hicks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Sometimes narratives are wildly on the basis.
That's for sure. But rather than seeing the narrative as a screen or as an obstacle or an intermediary, it itself is a tool. It's a state that our psychological conscious apparatus is in when we are relating to reality. That's if we get it right. But if we mess it up, then it does become something that we try to see reality through, and we're in a problematic situation.
But then you've dropped reality out of the picture.
The scientist who's studying the wolves is creating a story. That's right. No, not creating, I want to say constructing a story. Yes. But it's a story about something that's not happening mediated through stories in the wolves.
Well, I think you're putting two kinds of examples out on the table. They're going to be related. I think the first one where we are looking at a human being, say an actor on a screen, putting ourselves in that person's shoes and reading all sorts of things.
I think that's very extraordinarily complicated. And I think the interesting thing there is going to be, while you say that we humans are very good at that, the interesting thing is going to be how much of that is learned, because it does seem to be a highly fallible process.
I know, I don't want to get too personal here, but there will be lots of times I've been in social circumstances, and I think I'm pretty savvy about reading people, but I'll be with my wife, and she will say, after we've had a conversation with someone, Boy, did you notice how upset that person was about blah, blah, blah.
So there may be sex, gender differences that are going on, but also at the same time, it's not to say that I couldn't learn how to do that. So when we say people are very good at that, I think that's true, but we still have to epistemologically unpack everything that goes into what makes us good at being able to do that. I think that's going to be a very, very sophisticated story.
But then the other example, it takes us back to perceptual cases where you're talking about, are you looking at me or me looking at you, and we're also aware that we're in a room that there are other people in the room who are filling and so on. But getting right down to issues of, if I choose to focus right on one thing, then it is true that everything else Pales by comparison.
Yeah, that's right. And pales is metaphorical. So if we're going to try to then unpack the metaphor, I think we would say we focus and unfocus. And then we can give descriptors of what the state of unfocus is and what the state of focus is. And I would prefer using that language to the language of screen. Because screen really is something that is in the way. It's a thing itself.
That's another obstacle. So if there's a dressing screen between the two of us and I'm undressing for privacy, the whole idea of the screen is that it's blocking. So the metaphor is too simple. Sorry, that would be different from, and I think a better metaphor would be to say to filter. And I think sometimes our sensory apparatuses are engaging in filter.
They're just attending to some things and not attending to other things. But a filter is different from a screen. But also just to stay on this one issue here, the issue of focus and unfocus, I think it's not a filter either.
Okay, remind me what element of the tabernacle... I will, I will, I'll lay it out.
It's partly because... So, is this a metaphor for what?
You live in a dynamical environment.
Yeah, let me try a different, I don't want to use the tabernacle example, I'm not as familiar with it, but suppose you think of the difference between a place, let's say you're walking through, this is an example I heard from another philosopher, you're walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, right, at night, and you think it's a slightly dangerous neighborhood.
And so what you're trying to do is take in as much as you can.
And so the language that comes to me more naturally is the language of a field. It's a magnetic field or electric field or energy field.
Yes, that's right. And in that case, what I'm trying to do is not focus on any one thing in particular. like I might when I'm reading. Then I'm using my visual attention and I'm focusing on this particular thing. Or I'm an artist and I'm trying to do the glint on the eyeball for the finishing touch.
So my eyes are wide open and I'm concentrating and I'm trying to do this and everything else is in the field. But that I think is coextensive in terms of how our perceptual faculty works as if I am in the bad neighborhood, at night. And what I've tried to do is just expand my attention to encompass this whole field so that if anything moves in that entire field, then I can zoom in on that.
Showing 101–120 of 174 · page 6 of 9
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