Nancy:

> I agree that the digital world is with us for good or for ill. The  
> focus for me has been trying to figure out how we got here. If we  
> could detect a repeating pattern in the past, then we might be  
> better prepared for what will come next.

Excellent suggestion . . . !!

Gregg likes to draw pictures.  Or, perhaps we should call them  
"flow-charts." I even have a few of the IBM "Flowcharting Template"  
(dated 1975.) I'm here, for good or for ill, for only one reason.   
Gregg separated "sensation" from "perception" in his "mind map."  Two  
separate boxes.  That is the key.

The "how we got here" isn't all that complicated if you pay attention  
to forms.  Since we are "communicating animals," our *forms* of  
communications have undergone a fairly uncontroversial progression.   
We call them psycho-technological environments and, indeed,  
understanding the "how we got here" should be helpful to understand  
the consequences of the digital world -- our new environment -- in  
which we all now live.

The sequence -- all of which is "above" the Culture "joint-point" in  
Gregg's ToK diagram -- seems to have been:

ORAL      (???? -- 500BC, aka "Mythic")
SCRIBAL   (c. 500BC -- 1600AD, aka "Symbolic" or "Literate")
PRINT     (c. 1600 -- 1850)
ELECTRIC  (c. 1850 -- 2000, including Telegraph, Radio, Television &c)
DIGITAL   (c. 2000 -- ????)

Gregg's intuition that we need a *new* psychology is correct.   
However, collecting bits-and-pieces from the panoply of ELECTRIC  
psychologies will only generate a "camel" (i.e. a "horse designed by a  
committee") . . . <g>

For roughly 2000 years -- from Aristotle to Brentano, stretching from  
the Greeks to the Arabists to the Latins and beyond -- there was a  
very different understanding of human psychology.  That now-forgotten  
approach was uniform in its separation of sensation from perception.   
The details of this separation, illuminated by our greater  
comprehension, are what we now need to retrieve.

This is the separation between what were called the "internal"  
(perceptual) and "external" (sensatual) senses.  And, at the crucial  
juncture in the internals of the "internals," there is something  
called the "passive intellect."  This is where we humans first  
distinguish "kinds" (not just "particulars") and where we perceive  
(not intellectually "abstract") the all-important "forms."

This internal sensory "faculty" is altered by the environment in which  
we live.  The structures in our culture generated by the technologies  
that shape our world, in turn, shape us.  This is the origin of the  
phrase, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us," by John  
Culkin in 1967, which he used to introduce Marshall McLuhan to the  
wider world, on the eve of McLuhan's 1967-68 sabbatical at Fordham.   
It's also the meaning of "The Medium is the Message."

Since it was described by many people, over millennia, the passive  
intellect has many names.  One of the more evocative is "cogitative  
reason."  This, in turn, is what modern-day psychologist Richard  
Gregory, referenced by Gregg, called the "Hypothesis Engine." It is  
"sub-conscious" and it would be interesting to trace its trajectory  
through Freud's "super-ego" and, indeed, Gregg's "Justification  
Hypothesis."

In 1942, The French-Canadian Julien Peghaire, published his "A  
Forgotten Sense, the Cogitative According to St. Thomas Aquinas," in  
the "Modern Schoolman," a journal at St. Louis University, where  
McLuhan had just completed his PhD "The Classical Trivium" (awarded by  
Cambridge University in 1943.)  It begins with --

"The concept of psychology in vogue today is quite different from that  
which was in favor some two centuries and more ago.  Modern  
psychologists are in search of psychical facts and seek for them will  
the care and exactness that characterize the positive sciences.  They  
frequently subject these facts to complex experiments and, with no  
consideration whatever for metaphysics, elaborate laws and theories in  
need of constant correction and completion.  The ancients also take  
facts and experience as their starting point, but only as a  
springboard to rise to a metaphysical explanation of the reality of  
the soul and its operations . . . "

The "forgotten sense" -- inside Gregg's box marked "perception" -- was  
long understood to be only one of four *internal* senses (or  
"faculties"): the "sensus communis," imagination, memory, and  
"cogitative reason."  This is why Gregg is trying to somehow  
accommodate memory on his chart, based, in part, on his interactions  
with me.  But where should he put it?

This is critical because this is the "faculty" that is now being  
radically up-graded in our new environment.  Whereas the ELECTRIC  
environment emphasized "imagination" to the point of Fantasy, the  
DIGITAL environment emphasizes "memory."  This distinction comes from  
the structures/forms of the underlying technologies and their  
"shaping" impact on our mentality -- via the "passive intellect."  Or,  
as McLuhan put it in the "retrieval" quadrant of his Tetrad for  
computers:  Perfect Memory -- Total and Exact.

Yes, intellectuals tend to miss this point -- absorbed as they are in  
exercising their "active intellect."  But the "sub-conscious" isn't  
just the "Monster Id" as depicted in the 1956 classic "Forbidden  
Planet," where we first met "Robby the Robot," later reappearing in  
the 1960s TV-series "Lost in Space."  It also wasn't discovered by  
Freud, although he did rename it the "un-conscious," while confusing  
its operations, frantic as he was to appear "scientific" and to avoid  
anything "metaphysical."

Freud was trained, perhaps badly but nonetheless actually schooled, in  
"faculty psychology" by his teacher at the University of Vienna, Franz  
Brentano.  This schooling likely generated his final "mind map," after  
the previous ones failed to align with his "experiments": Ego,  
Superego and Id.  This can be thought of as Freud's attempt, clumsy as  
it was, to retrieve the earlier "wisdom of the ancients."

Your intuition about the importance of "how we got here" is the  
correct one.  For psychologists, trying to design a new psychology  
appropriate for the DIGITAL era, it is important to literally remember  
"how we got here" in the history of psychology.  As Max Weber put it  
in his 1917 lecture "Science as a Vocation," the world had become  
"disenchanted" (i.e. forgotten metaphysics.) He didn't know it but  
that was a result of ELECTRIC structures and their "shaping" of our  
perceptions by de-emphasizing memory.

But now that we're DIGITAL, we don't have to do that anymore.  Now,  
finally, we can remember "how we got here" . . . !!

Mark

############################

To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list:
write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
or click the following link:
http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1