Anticipation in Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, and The Dilbert Future by Scott Adams

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett provides an excellent explanation of hallucinations. Normally, the mind anticipates and sensory input either confirms or denies. If sensory input is shut off or becomes random, then the confirmations and denials take the mind down false tracks, leading to the generation of wild and vivid images that bear no relationship to immediate reality.

In normal mode, anticipation of this kind means that we are ready to respond to threats and opportunities very quickly -- often acting before the related sense data has arrived at the brain, much less been analyzed and understood. That could be an enormous survival advantage (from the perspective of evolution). It's a bit like "cache" memory in computers, being ready with answers to familiar questions in RAM, without having to go through the whole process of retrieving information from the hard drive.

This works very well when change is predictable. When what happens next fits neatly into the pre-existing context. But when change is discontinuous, when something significantly new occurs, this process can get in the way of our recognizing it. Anticipation in this sense is a habit of perception -- we see what we expect to see, and it takes a major shift, a major perceptual denial of what we anticipated for us to take a good hard look at what is actually happening and make sense of it, and change our judgments and our actions and our plans.

In the How Proust Can Change Your Life, true art breaks the habit -- leads to a temporary suspension or modification of the process of habitual anticipation -- helping us to see the world as if it were fresh, with new eyes.

Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct Instinct provides an explanation of part of the mechanism involved. He talks in terms of built-in wiring in the brain and its subsequent language-specific elaboration of anticipation and habit (though he doesn't use those words). We, as adults, truly cannot hear sounds of a new language because we haven't been wired to anticipate them.

When I was visiting at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe [January 1998], anticipation played a major role in my experience. We all heard about the dangers and beauties of the Zambezi River and the Falls. The resultant fear, anxiety, excitement all led to a suspension of habitual anticipation. That meant that more sense data were noticed and saved than normal.

(The anticipation process is very efficient, making it so I can operate with a minimum of input, paying minimum attention to what is happening to me, selecting only a small part of the multitude of sense data which assails me at every minute.)

Note the change in how I'm using the word "anticipate." Normally we say that we "anticipate" an experience and that the anticipation is actually greater than, more memorable than the event itself. In fact, what we have done is suspend or tone down our habitual anticipation, which enables us to operate efficiently with just an occasion confirm/deny glance at the world, but which means that it takes a real jolt for us to notice something new.

This is the phenomenon noted by Scott Adams in The Dilbert Future, that we actually react to sounds and other sense data before the stimulus signal reaches our brain. We are making our judgments based on anticipation. hence we can judge/react at lightning speed (which is good for survival in the wild or in competitive sports; this is the "instinct", the "feel", the "flow" that comes form mastery of a skill or sport [e.g., chess]). We anticipate rapidly and accurately and in great detail, based on minimum sensory input.

Consciousness consists largely of this continuous interplay of habitual anticipation (images generated from memory and imagination) and sense data, which confirm, deny, or modify what has been anticipated.

In habitual mode, sense data are barely needed at all. And in heightened consciousness (normally associated with the word "anticipation" or "awe" or religious experience) the emphasis is on the sense data which we then allow to pour in on us in prodigious quantities at prodigious speed, providing memories to be mulled over and "explained" and interpreted over and over again, long into the future.

No wonder science is so difficult. Obviously, our hypotheses color (anticipate) our results.

The moral code is part of the anticipation/perception process, determining what you "see" as well as what you immediately presume it means.

Hence the difficulty in appreciating (directly getting involved in) works of art (writing in particular) far from your own moral code (e.g., Dryden and Corneille's plays). If the shift is slight, you make adjustments; you become used to the author's voice and perspective and suspend disbelief for the duration of reading and become involved in the story,. If the shift is major -- a significantly different contemporary culture or a culture form the past -- it will take work and study to come to understand the context in a way that the situations and reactions begin to seem real and human to you.

Works from other cultures and times are suddenly "discovered" when some element of that code happens to be in harmony with a contemporary one -- not that you appreciate the work in its original context, but rather it seems to speak to you today (often a partial experience, that selectively edits out and doesn't perceive all that is dissonant form that view in the work itself.)

The work that was "before its time" didn't speak to the people of the context when it was written. That is not a sign of pre-science, and should not be a criterion of quality.

(Consider anticipation/hallucination and 3D effects and other Hollywood special effects.)

This site is published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132-002. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com

Book collections on CD and DVD. A library for the price of a book.
Limited time offer: 2 for the price of 1

Return to B&R Samizdat Express

Sitemap with links to every page at this site

	Websamizdat.com