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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Now, where I think it immediately gets more complicated, and you psychologists know more about this than I do, is even if we stay with those examples, the question about what happens automatically and what is under our volitional control is another dimension that has to cut across.
Even if we grant that in both cases, whether I'm focused or whether I'm diffused attention, I'm aware of reality in some Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes sense. It is true that if in either of those cases, if I'm the artist focusing on the particular dot and my child suddenly screams, then I will involuntarily or automatically lose that focus and go to attend.
Import.
But then even another interesting case would be you're the artist and you know that sometimes your kid cries out and screams, but you've given yourself a signal. I'm angry at my kid right now. He's been a brat. I'm going to ignore him when he screams. So I'm focusing, exact same scenario, kid screams, I register it, but my reaction is quite different. I stay focused.
That's right. That's going to be a back-feed loop.
Yeah. To come back to like your pen example and the issue of as sophisticated cognizers, when we are perceiving the world, that we have their use function kind of built into the... The perception. Yeah. I'm going to put that in quotation marks right now.
And then the action that's going to be embodied in that use also in many cases seems to be built into the perception. I think if we unpack that more, there's still going to be a very sophisticated set of learning we have to do about what is built into the physiological system and the psychological system at birth and how much of it is learned. Definitely.
Yeah, because I don't think we want to say that, you know, even in the 21st century where we come into the world born with kind of a precognized understanding of pens.
And how to use pens. I don't even know if we have that. We have a certain physiological structure that, and a certain conceptual structure that's built on that, such that, and it's going to be very flexible and amenable to different environmental circumstances to adapt to and conceive of things, whatever their intrinsic properties, as potential tools.
yeah well a lot of that so let me just it's just to try another example to get to uh because i like the the earlier movie example and the male female difference one thing that comes up in couples is how they learn to be tuned to each other's voices and the sound of their own voice. So couples who, before they met each other, would go to a loud party and they would be talking to each other.
Yeah, that's a really good example. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, there's just noise and it's a big decibel level, right? But then once they become couples and they have heard each other say their name, say Jordan, Stephen, right, or whatever, they can be in a relatively loud party separated across the room, right? And the guy's wife says, Stephen, right?
And he can pick that out of that incredible instrument of sounds.
Yeah, because you've automated certain... Yeah, that's right.
So that centers now... What the postmoderns do, right, is that they take what I think is a virtue, right? That we can automate all of these things and we can learn to detect various things and focus on this, that, and the other thing. all of which are great strengths of the human consciousness, and they turn them into negatives, they turn them into vices.
So, what they say is, right, an interpretation then becomes, in their language, because they've already got an epistemological theory, a negative epistemological theory, as something that is necessarily subjective.
And the idea for them then is that somehow, if we were going to be actually aware of reality and not through this interpretation, we would have to not have any interpretations at all, that somehow reality would just have to stamp itself on our minds without any intermediary actions. Or what they will then do is to say, I can choose to prioritize this over that in my visual field.
They will say, and they're right to say this, that's a value judgment. I think this is more important now, and this is more important over that. But then by the time they start using the words value, they're coming at a very sophisticated negative judgment. Evaluative theories that say values are just subjective and have nothing to do with any sort of external reality.
Well, maybe it's worse than that. So for both of them, it's on the cognition side and on the evaluative side that they're deep into subjective territory and so those then become negative words for them. Instead, and this is my only hope as a philosopher, I think philosophers have a very small part of this project just attending to the language that we're using at the foundations of cognition.
All these metaphors of screens and filters and tabernacles and visual fields and so on. That's where we have to get that sorted out, because if we don't get those foundations correct, then we're going to be messed up.
Yeah, that's a good question. I think the postmodern use of the word power is another example of turning a virtue into a vice. Power properly conceived could be coextensive with our ability to get stuff done.
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