It comes from many sides at once . . . or does it?

Big Frank has been thinking lately about the phenomenon of being exposed on many fronts at the same time by a particular idea. Does this mean anything? Well, Big Frank does not mean such common assaults as tighten your abs, take advantage of this credit card offer, or send your bank account number to a friendly former government employee in Nigeria in order to receive 10 million dollars. No, these are ideas that assault everyone at the same time everywhere. They have no particular significance to anyone. What about the idea that seems to pop out un-expectantly over and over again, from a variety of sources but seemingly aimed particularly you you?

Big Frank was reading a blog of the other regular attendee of the Spokane Weblogger’s meetup and on his blog there was a link to a philosopher’s page on which was a list of her favorite philosophy books. One of these books was David Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature. So Big Frank, never having read this, went out and bought it. In the opening pages of this book he came upon this: in section 3.5.2: "As to those impressions which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and ‘twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produc’d by the creative power of the mind, or are deriv’d from the author of our being.” Basically Hume was not going to address the physical causes in any detail, but rather examined the immediate object of the mind, which he believed was always something mental or internal.

Then in a recent issue of the New Yorker Big Frank was reading an article by Atul Gawande entitled “The Itch” and came across this idea of the separateness of reception from perception. The commonplace notion that reception = perception is rarely challenged (other than by philosophers), and if so with the kind of derision of Samuel Johnston’s refuting kick “I refute it thus”’ by which he claimed to refute Berkely’s notion that people do not know the external world, they only know their mental ideas of object. The article demonstrates how the mind itself without any external prompt creates perceptions that can linger for years, for example itches, and phantom limbs. Most amazingly, however, the article then shows how through a very clever manipulation of the mind these “misperceptions” can be removed. However, that can only happen through the creation of a counter misperception through a tricky set of mirrors. OK, so now Big Frank has been exposed, within two days, to views questioning the reliability of the reception = perception notions.

Then – here comes number three – an article in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books entitled: “How the Mind Works: Revelations” that reviews primarily two recent books by Jean-Pierre Changeux - The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge, and Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors: From Molecular Biology to Cognition. Once again the idea at the forefront of this review is that external reality is a construction of the brain. He even sites the same experiments mentioned in Gawande’s article: a therapeutic devise invented by the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran – mirror box therapy to rid patients of phantom limb pain.

There are more, but Big Frank has already pushed this blog entry to the limit. What does this all mean. Well, for Big Frank it means that he had better start paying attention to the external reality that he has constructed. The shared perception that we have with others is secure territory (perhaps); however, those uniquely personal constructs – and we have a ton of those – are what are interesting: memories of events, emotional readings of others, judgments, and by extension – dreams (the topic of the next blog), where the mind reigns supreme and the “perceptions” are interpreted as “real” as long as we are “in” the dream. When we are in the dream we grant the mind preeminence and when we awake we like to think that external reality holds sway, but in both cases there is an influence from the other: external reality colors our dreams, and our mind colors external reality. "Color" is a good word to choose because contrary to our visual experience there are no colors in external reality - only electromagnetic waves of differing frequencies. All of this, of course, has profound implications for representation, meaning, and memory.