Lonny:

Sure (note the thread name change) . . . !!

As you probably know, *perception* is treated by most modern  
psychologists as a "blackbox" or, worse, collapsed altogether into  
"sensation" and ignored all together (as per J.J. Gibson &al.)

One of the few who didn't do that seems to be Richard Gregory (who  
focused on vision and "illusion," pun intended) -- discussed by Gregg  
in one of his blogs -- who suggested something called the "Hypothesis  
Generator."  Others, who I've identified who also tried to describe  
this "faculty" include Irvin Rock in his 1983 "The Logic of  
Perception."  If you happen to know of others, I'd appreciate hearing  
about them.

As you might have gathered, however, my interest is much more with  
"medieval" psychology than with its modern 550-flavor versions.  In  
those days, there was a richly developed understanding of the  
*interior* senses (also sometimes called "inward wits") -- as  
described by Simon Kemp in his books and Ruth Harvey in her monograph.  
  These earlier efforts trace back to Aristotle, sometimes through  
Avicenna, and his "On the Soul" (about which my Center has just  
concluded a 12-lecture course taught by Jeff Martineau.)

In these earlier accounts -- comprising Western psychology from 400BC  
until the 19th-century -- these *interior* senses have an "input" in  
the "Common Sense" and an "output" with various names.  The medieval  
one was "cogitative reason."  The point was that there is a kind of  
"reason" that produces percepts and, in modern terms, it is  
"pre-conscious."

The "guts" of *perception* in any case, for 2000+ years in the West,  
were the two faculties called Imagination and Memory.  Much has been  
written about them both, as any "classical" scholar can attest but,  
from what I can tell, few modern psychologists are aware.

Our contribution to all this has been to ask: What to new technologies  
do to our *interior* senses?

It is our view that ELECTRICITY, starting in the mid-19th century, and  
TELEVISION more forcefully, in the middle of the 20th, generated  
techno-psychological environments (or what McLuhan called "mediums")  
that drove the humans habituated with these technologies towards an  
"imbalance" in favor of Imagination.  In the extreme, this becomes  
Fantasy and it drives a great deal of our world today.  Thus Virtual  
Reality &c.

Television, as you know, is a technology that is designed to generate  
illusions.  The display is raster-scanned and relies on fusion-flicker  
to "fool" us.  There is no picture there.  No colors.  No motion.  It  
is all an "optical illusion."  This is compounded by the fact that it  
is "produced" by skillful illusionists and often supported by a  
business-model based on advertising, also requiring skillful illusions.

In sharp contrast, Digital technology is structured entirely around  
memory.  In fact, the precision of that memory is remarkable.  If a  
single "bit" is misplaced, errors occur (which is why there is no much  
"error correction" and "redundancy" in these designs.)  I learned a  
lot about all this when I was a computer architect many years ago.  It  
is fair to say, computers don't really "compute," instead what they do  
is "remember."

So, as we shift from a TELEVISION *paradigm* (in terms of our dominant  
communications technology, recalling that "language," which is just  
another name for technology, defines Culture) -- based on extreme  
illusion, or Fantasy -- to one based on precise Memory, we should  
expect dramatic cultural (and psychological) effects.

In particular, imagine a world in which *everything* that happens (at  
some level) is digitally recorded, indexed and made searchable.  What  
would human life be like if we could no longer "forget" (unless we  
made that a deliberate goal.)  What will happen when humans can  
"Google" their entire life?

Of all the technological shifts in human history, I suspect that none  
could be more *fundamental* that this one.  Our minds will be  
literally "blown" compared to how we once thought -- when our Memory  
was simply "organic" and, therefore, imprecise, partial and tasked  
only for human purposes.

I hope that makes some sense.  Or, as we often say, "Toto, I don't  
believe we are in Kansas anymore . . . "

Mark

P.S. Accompanying all this, of course, will be the "takeover" of what  
we now think of as "jobs" by robots.  We estimate that only 30% of the  
population in developed economies will have a job by 2050.  My  
godfather, Nobert Wiener, first tried to alert people to that outcome  
in 1950 with his "The Human Use of Human Beings."  He was effectively  
run out of cybernetics for doing that.  He thought that no one in  
those times could comprehend what was coming, so he started his  
"Genius Project" including my father, as I've described in my 2014  
IEEE paper on the topic.  Mental disorders?  We will have them coming  
out of our ears.  Never has a therapy suited to such a dramatic change  
been more needed.

LoQuoting Lonny Meinecke <[log in to unmask]>:

> Thank you for sharing this Mark. I'd like to hear more about the  
> "fantasy --> memory" paradigm shift concept. I have a lot of notes  
> on a similar topic, so this really caught my eye :)
>
> Could you share more about that?
> --Lonny

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