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SURFING UNCERTAINTY
Surfing Uncertainty
Prediction, Action,
and the Embodied Mind

Andy Clark

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clark, Andy, 1957—
Surfing uncertainty : prediction, action, and the embodied mind / Andy Clark.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-021701-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Prediction (Logic) 2. Metacognition.
3. Uncertainty. 1. Title.
BC181.C534 2016
128".2—dc23
2015004451

987654321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Christine Clark and Alexa Morcom
Encoder, Decoder, and Everything in Betweer
Contents

Preface: Meat That Predicts xiii

Acknowledgements xvii

Introduction: Guessing Games 1

I: THE POWER OF PREDICTION

1. Prediction Machines 13
1.1 Two Ways to Sense the Coffee 13
1.2 Adopting the Animal’s Perspective 14
13 Learning in Bootstrap Heaven 1
1.4 Multilevel Learning 19
1.5 Decoding Digits 22
1.6 Dealing with Structure 23
17 Predictive Processing 25
1.8 Signalling the News 28
1.9 Predicting Natural Scenes 29
1.10 Binocular Rivalry 33
1.11 Suppression and Selective Enhancement 37
1.12 Encoding, Inference, and the Bayesian Brain 39
1.13 Getting the Gist 41
1.14 Predictive Processing in the Brain 43
vii
 CONTENTS

115 Is Silence Golden? 45

116 Expecting Faces 47
117 When Prediction Misleads 49
1.18 Mind Turned Upside Down 51

Adjusting the Volume (Noise, Signal, Attention) 53

2.1 Signal Spotting 53
2.2 Hearing Bing 54
23 The Delicate Dance between Top-Down and Bottom-Up
2.4 Attention, Biased Competition, and Signal Enhancement
25 Sensory Integration and Coupling 64
26 A Taste of Action 65
27 Gaze Allocation: Doing What Comes Naturally 66
2.8 Circular Causation in the
Perception-Attention-Action Loop 69
2.9 Mutual Assured Misunderstanding 71
2.10 Some Worries about Precision 75
2.11 The Unexpected Elephant 78
2.12 Some Pathologies of Precision 79
2.13 Beyond the Spotlight 82

. The Imaginarium 84
3.1 Construction Industries 84
3.2 Simple Seeing 8y
33 Cross-Modal and Multimodal effects 86
3.4 Meta-Modal Effects 87
35 Perceiving Omissions 89
3.6 Expectations and Conscious Perception g2
3.7 The Perceiver as Imaginer 93
3.8 ‘Brain Reading’ During Imagery and Perception 94
3.9 Inside the Dream Factory 98
3.10 PIMMS and the Past 102
311 Towards Mental Time Travel 104
3.12 A Cognitive Package Deal 107

I: EMBODYING PREDICTION

. Prediction-Action Machines 111

4.1 Staying Ahead of the Break 111
4.2 Ticklish Tales 112
43 Forward Models (Finessing Time) 115
4.4 Optimal Feedback Control 117
45 Active Inference 120
 CONTENTS

4.6 Simplified Control 124

47 Beyond Efference Copy 126
4.8 Doing Without Cost Functions 128
4.9 Action-Oriented Predictions 133
4.10 Predictive Robotics 134
411 Perception-Cognition-Action Engines 135

Precision Engineering: Sculpting the Flow 139

51 Double Agents 139
5.2 Towards Maximal Context-Sensitivity 140
53 Hierarchy Reconsidered 143
5.4 Sculpting Effective Connectivity 146
55 Transient Assemblies 150
56 Understanding Action 151
57 Making Mirrors 154
58 Whodunit? 157
59 Robot Futures 159
5.10 The Restless, Rapidly Responsive, Brain = 163
5.11 Celebrating Transience 167

Beyond Fantasy 168

6.1 Expecting the World 168
6.2 Controlled Hallucinations and Virtual Realities 169
63 The Surprising Scope of Structured
Probabilistic Learning 171
6.4 Ready for Action 175
65 Implementing Affordance Competition 181
6.6 Interaction-Based Joints in Nature 184
6.7 Evidentiary Boundaries and the Ambiguous
Appeal to Inference 188
6.8 Don't Fear the Demon 192
69 HelloWorld 194
6.10 Hallucination as Uncontrolled Perception 196
6.11 Optimal Illusions 197
6.12 Safer Penetration 199
6.13 Who Estimates the Estimators? 201
6.14 Gripping Tales 202

Expecting Ourselves (Creeping Up On Consciousness) 203

7.1 The Space of Human Experience 203
7.2 Warning Lights 204
73 The Spiral of Inference and Experience 206
ZONTENTS

7.4 Schizophrenia and Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements 2

75 Simulating Smooth Pursuit 209
76 Disturbing the Network (Smooth Pursuit) 211
77 Tickling Redux 213
7.8 Less Sense, More Action? 216
7.9 Disturbing the Network (Sensory Attenuation) 218
710 ‘Psychogenic Disorders’ and Placebo Effects 219
711 Disturbing the Network (‘Psychogenic” Effects) 221
712 Autism, Noise, and Signal 223
713 Conscious Presence 227
714 Emotion 231
7.15 Fear in the Night 235
716 A Nip of the Hard Stuff 237

[I: SCAFFOLDING PREDICTION

. The Lazy Predictive Brain 243

8.1 Surface Tensions 243
8.2 Productive Laziness 244
83 Ecological Balance and Baseball 245
8.4 Embodied Flow 249
85 Frugal Action-Oriented Prediction Machines 250
86 Mix ‘n’ Match Strategy Selection 252
87 Balancing Accuracy and Complexity 255
8.8 Back to Baseball 256
89 Extended Predictive Minds 260
8.10 Escape from the Darkened Room 262
8.11 Play, Novelty, and Self-Organized Instability 26
8.12 Fast, Cheap, and Flexible Too 268

. Being Human 269

9.1 Putting Prediction in Its Place 269
9.2 Reprise: Self-Organizing around Prediction Error 270
93 Efficiency and ‘The Lord’s Prior” 271
9.4 Chaos and Spontaneous Cortical Activity 272
95 Designer Environments and Cultural Practices 275
9.6 White Lines 279
97 Innovating for Innovation 281
9.8 Words as Tools for Manipulating Precision = 282
9.9 Predicting with Others 285
9.10 Enacting Our Worlds 288
g.11 Representations: Breaking Good? 291
9.12 Prediction in the Wild 294
10. Conclusions: The Future of Prediction 295
101 Embodied Prediction Machines 295
10.2 Problems, Puzzles, and Pitfalls 297

Appendix 1: Bare Bayes 301

Appendix 2: The Free-Energy Formulation 305

Notes 307
References 329
Index 377
Preface: Meat That Predicts

‘T'hey’re made out of meat.’

‘Meat?’
‘Meat. Theyre made out of meat.’
‘Meat?’
‘“There’s no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the
planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way
through. Theyre completely meat.

Such are the opening remarks of the very puzzled non-carbon-based

aliens whose conversation is reported in the wonderful short story
‘Alien/Nation’ by science-fiction writer Terry Bissom (Omni, 1991). The
aliens’ puzzlement increases upon learning that the meaty strangers
were not even built by non-meat intelligences and do not harbour even
a simple non-carbon-based central processing unit hidden inside their
meaty exteriors. Instead, it’s meat all the way down. Even the brain, as one
of them exclaims, is made of meat. The upshot is startling:
“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming
meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?’
Unable to overcome their initial surprise and disgust, the aliens soon
decide to continue their interstellar journey, casting us short-lived

xiii
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Xiv PREFACE: MEAT THAT PREDICTS

meat-brains aside with the inevitable quip ‘who wants to meet

meat?’,
Such carnophobia aside, the aliens were surely right to be puzzled.
Thinking meat, dreaming meat, conscious meat, meat that under-
stands. It seems unlikely, to say the least. Of course, it would be no
less surprising were we made of silicon, or anything else for that mat-
ter. The mystery is, and remains, how mere matter manages to give
rise to thinking, imagining, dreaming, and the whole smorgasbord of
mentality, emotion, and intelligent action. Thinking matter, dream-
ing matter, conscious matter: that’s the thing that it’s hard to get your
head—whatever it’s made of—around. But there is an emerging clue.
It is one clue among many, and even if it’s a good one, it won't solve
all the problems and puzzles. Still, it’s a real clue, and it’s also one that
provides a handy umbrella under which to consider (and in some cases
rediscover) many of the previous clues.
The clue can be summed up in a single word: prediction. To deal
rapidly and fluently with an uncertain and noisy world, brains like ours
have become masters of prediction—surfing the waves of noisy and
ambiguous sensory stimulation by, in effect, trying to stay just ahead
of them. A skilled surfer stays ‘in the pocket” close to, yet just ahead of
the place where the wave is breaking. This provides power and, when
the wave breaks, it does not catch her. The brain’s task is not dissimilar.
By constantly attempting to predict the incoming sensory signal we
become able—in ways we shall soon explore in detail—to learn about
the world around us and to engage that world in thought and action.
Succesful, world-engaging prediction is not easy. It depends crucially
upon simultaneously estimating the state of the world and our own
sensory uncertainty. But get that right, and active agents can both know
and behaviourally engage their worlds, safely riding wave upon wave
of sensory stimulation.
Matter, when organized so that it cannot help but try (and try, and
try again) to successfully predict the complex plays of energies that
are washing across its energy-sensitive surfaces, has many interest-
ing properties. Matter, thus organized, turns out, as we’ll see, to be
ideally positioned to perceive, to understand, to dream, to imagine,
and (most importantly of all) to act. Perceiving, imagining, under-
standing, and acting are now bundled together, emerging as different
aspects and manifestations of the same underlying prediction-driven,
uncertainty-sensitive, machinery.
For such properties to fully emerge, however, several more condi-
tions need to be met. The energy-sensitive surfaces whose time-varying
(and action-relevant) perturbations are to be predicted need to be many
 PREFACE: MEAT THAT PREDICTS Xv

and variegated. In us humans they include eyes, ears, tongues, noses,

and the whole of that somewhat neglected sensory organ, the skin.
They also include a range of more ‘inward-looking’ sensory channels,
including proprioception (the sense of the relative positions of bodily
parts, and the forces being deployed) and interoception (the sense of the
physiological conditions of the body, such as pain, hunger, and other
visceral states). Predictions concerning these more inward-looking
channels will prove crucial in the core account of action, and in account-
ing for feelings and conscious experiences.
Most important of all, perhaps, the prediction machinery itself
needs to operate in a distinctively complex, multilevel, variegated
internal environment. In this complex (and repeatedly reconfigu-
rable) neural economy, what gets traded are probabilistic predictions,
inflected at every level by changing estimates of our own uncertainty.
Here different (but densely interanimated) neuronal populations learn
to predict various organism-salient regularities obtaining at many spa-
tial and temporal scales. In so doing they lock on to patterns specifying
everything from lines and edges, to zebra stripes, to movies, mean-
ings, popcorn, parking lots, and the characteristic plays of offense and
defence by your favourite football team. The world thus revealed is a
world tailored to human needs, tasks, and actions. It is a world built
of affordances—opportunities for action and intervention. And it is a
world that is exploited, time and time again, to reduce the complexities
of neural processing by means of canny action routines that alter the
problem-space for the embodied, predictive brain.
But where, you might well ask, do all these predictions and
estimations of our own sensory uncertainty come from? Even if
prediction-based encounters with the play of energies across our
sensors are what reveal—as I shall argue they do—a complex struc-
tured world apt for engagement and action, the knowledge those
predictions reflect still needs to be accounted for. In an especially
satisfying twist, it will turn out that meat that constantly attempts
(using a multilevel inner organization) to predict the plays of (par-
tially self-caused) sensory data is nicely positioned to learn about
those regularities themselves. Learning and online processing are
thus supported using the same basic resources. This is because
perceiving our body and the world, if this story is correct, involves
learning to predict our own evolving sensory states—states that are
responding both to the body-in-action and to the world. A good way
to predict those changing sensory states is to learn about the world
(including our own body and actions) that is causing the changes.
The attempt to predict the play of sensory stimulation can thus itself
xvi PREFACE: MEAT THAT PREDICTS

be used gradually to install the very models that will enable the pre-
dictions to succeed. The prediction task, as we shall see, is thus a
kind of ‘bootstrap heaven’.
Meat like this is imagining and dreaming meat too. Such meat
becomes able to drive its own internal states ‘from the top-down’
using the knowledge and connections that enable it to match incom-
ing sensory data with structured predictions. And meat that dreams
and imagines is (potentially at least) meat that can harnass its imag-
inings to reason—to think about what actions it might, or might
not, perform. The upshot is a compelling ‘cognitive package deal” in
which perception, imagination, understanding, reasoning, and action
are co-emergent from the whirrings and grindings of the predictive,
uncertainty-estimating, brain. Creatures that perceive and act on the
basis of such subterranean flows of prediction are active, knowledge-
able, imaginative beings in rich cognitive contact with a structured and
meaningful world. That world is a world made of patterns of expecta-
tion: a world in which unexpected absences are as perceptually salient
as any concrete event, and in which all our mental states are coloured
by delicate estimations of our own uncertainty.
To complete the picture, however, we must locate the inner pre-
diction engine in its proper home. That home—as the surfing image
is also meant to powerfully suggest—is a mobile embodied agent
located in multiple empowering webs of material and social struc-
ture. To make full and satisfying contact with the thinking and rea-
soning of agents like us, we must factor in the myriad effects of the
complex social and physical ‘designer environments’ in which we
learn, act, and reason. Without this environment, our kind of selec-
tive response to the world could never emerge or be maintained. It is
the predictive brain operating in rich bodily, social, and technologi-
cal context that ushers minds like ours into the material realm. Here
especially, the focus on prediction pays rich dividends, offering new
and potent tools for thinking about the moment-by-moment orches-
tration of neural, bodily, and environmental resources into effective
transient problem-solving coalitions. By the end of our story, the pre-
dictive brain will stand revealed not as an insulated inner ‘inference
engine’ but an action-oriented engagement machine—an enabling
(albeit, as it happens, meaty) node in patterns of dense reciprocal
exchange binding brain, body, and world.
AC
Edinburgh, 2015
Acknowledgements

This book has benefitted enormously from the help and advice of a
large number of people. Very particular thanks go to Karl Friston,
Jakob Hohwy, Bill Phillips, and Anil Seth. Your patience and encour-
agement made this whole project possible. Also to Lars Muckli, Peggy
Series, Andreas Roepstorff, Chris Thornton, Chris Williams, Liz Irvine,
Matteo Colombo, and all the participants at the Predictive Coding
Workshop (School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, January
2010); to Phil Gerrans, Nick Shea, Mark Sprevak, Aaron Sloman, and
the participants at the first meeting of the UK Mind Network held at
the Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University, March 2010; to Markus
Werning, Albert Newen, and the organizers and participants of the 2010
meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, held
at Ruhr-Universitdit Bochum, August 2010; to Nihat Ay, Ray Guillery,
Bruno Olshausen, Murray Sherman, Fritz Sommer, and the participants
at the Perception & Action Workshop, Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico,
September 2010; to Daniel Dennett, Rosa Cao, Justin Junge, and Amber
Ross (captain and crew of the hurricane-Irene-blocked 2011 Cognitive
Cruise); to Miguel Eckstein, Mike Gazzaniga, Michael Rescorla, and
the faculty and students at the Sage Center for the Study of Mind,
University of California, Santa Barbara, where, as a Visiting Fellow in
September 2011, I was privileged to road-test much of this material; toall
xvii
xviii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

the commentators on my 2013 Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper, with

special mentions for Takashi Ikegami, Mike Anderson, Tom Froese,
Tony Chemero, Ned Block, Susanna Siegel, Don Ross, Peter Konig,
Aaron Sloman, Mike Spratling, Mike Anderson, Howard Bowman,
Tobias Egner, Chris Eliasmith, Dan Rasmussen, Paco Calvo, Michael
Madary, Will Newsome, Giovanni Pezzulo, and Erik Rietveld; to Johan
Kwisthout, Iris van Rooij, Andre Bastos, Harriet Feldman, and all the
participants at the Lorentz Center Workshop ‘Perspectives on Human
Probabilistic Inference’ held in Leiden, Netherlands, in May 2014; to
Daniel Dennett, Susan Dennett, Patricia and Paul Churchland, Dave
Chalmers, Nick Humphrey, Keith Frankish, Jesse Prinz, Derk Pereboom,
Dmitry Volkov, and the students from Moscow State University, who in
June 2014 discussed these (along with many other) themes on an unfor-
gettable boat trip among the icebergs of Greenland. Thanks also to Rob
Goldstone, Julian Kiverstein, Gary Lupyan, Jon Bird, Lee de-Wit, Chris
Frith, Richard Hensen, Paul Fletcher, Robert Clowes, Robert Rupert,
Zoe Drayson, Jan Lauwereyns, Karin Kukkonen, and Martin Pickering
for informative and provocative discussions of some of this material.
Thank to my OUP editor Peter Ohlin for his constant interest, help, and
support, to Emily Sacharin for her patient work on the figures, to Molly
Morrison for final-stages editorial support, and to Lynn Childress for
the fantastic copy-editing. Heartfelt thanks to my wonderful partner
Alexa Morcom, my amazing mother Christine Clark, the entire Clark
and Morcom clans, Borat and Bruno (the cats), and all our friends and
colleagues in Edinburgh and beyond. Finally, this one is also in mem-
ory of my wonderful brother James (‘Jimmy”) Clark.
Most of the present text is new, but some chapters reproduce or
draw on material from the following published articles:
Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of
cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 2013, 181-204.
The many faces of precision. Frontiers in Psychology, 4(270), 2013.
doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00270.
Perceiving as predicting. In D. Stokes, M. Mohan, & S. Biggs (Eds),
Perception and its modalities. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Expecting the world: Perception, prediction, and the origins of
human knowledge. Journal of Philosophy, 110(g), 2013, 469—496.
Embodied prediction. Contribution to T. Metzinger and J. M. Windt
(Eds.), Open MIND Project. Frankfurt am Maine: MIND Group
open access publication. 2015, online at: http://open-mind.net
Thanks to the editors and publishers for permission to use this
material here. Sources of figures are credited in the legends.
SURFING UNCERTAINTY
Introduction

Guessing Games

This is a book about how creatures like us get to know the world and
to act in it. At the heart of such knowing engagements lies (if these sto-
ries are on track) a simple but remarkably powerful trick or stratagem.
That trick is trying to guess the incoming sensory stmulations as they
arrive, using what you know about the world. Failed guesses generate
‘prediction errors’ that are then used to recruit new and better guesses,
or to inform slower processes of learning and plasticity. Rooted in the
dynamics of self-organization, these ‘predictive processing’ (PP) mod-
els deliver compelling accounts of perception, action, and imagina-
tive simulation. They deliver new accounts of the nature and structure
of human experience. And they place centre stage a self-fuelling cycle
of circular causal commerce in which action continuously selects new
sensory stimulations, folding in environmental structure and opportu-
nities along the way. PP thus provides, or so I will argue, the perfect
neuro-computational partner for recent work on the embodied mind—
work that stresses the constant engagement of the world by cycles of
perceptuo-motor activity. The predictive brain, if this is correct, is not an
insulated inference engine so much as an action-oriented engagement
machine. It is an engagement-machine, moreover, that is perfectly posi-
tioned to select frugal, action-based routines that reduce the demands
on neural processing and deliver fast, fluent forms of adaptive success.
1
2 INTRODUCTION

Prediction is, of course, a slippery beast. It appears, even within

these pages, in many subtly (and not-so-subtly) different forms.
Prediction, in its most familiar incarnation, is something that a per-
son engages in, with a view to anticipating the shape of future events.
Such predictions are informed, conscious guesses, usually made well
in advance, generated by forward-looking agents in the service of their
plans and projects. But that kind of prediction, that kind of conscious
guessing, is not the kind that lies at the heart of the story I shall present.
At the heart of that story is a different (though not ultimately unrelated)
kind of prediction, a different kind of ‘guessing’. It is the kind of auto-
matically deployed, deeply probabilistic, non-conscious guessing that
occurs as part of the complex neural processing routines that under-
pin and unify perception and action. Prediction, in this latter sense,
is something brains do to enable embodied, environmentally situated
agents to carry out various tasks.
This emphasis on prediction has a long history in the sciences
of mind.! But it is only in the last decade or so that the key elements
have come together to offer what is (potentially at least) the first truly
unifying account of perception, cognition, and action. Those ele-
ments include practical computational demonstrations of the power
and feasibility of prediction-driven learning, the emergence of new
neuroscientific frameworks that complement the computational ones,
and a wealth of experimental results suggesting an inner economy in
which predictions, prediction-error signals, and estimates of our own
sensory uncertainty play a large and previously underappreciated
role. Such work straddles the once-firm divide between accounts that
stress the importance of inner, model-building activity and those that
recognize the delicate distributions of labour between brain, body,
and world.
PP, as I shall describe it, may best be seen as what Spratling (2013)
dubs an ‘intermediate-level model’. Such a model leaves unspecified a
great many important details concerning neural implementation, aim-
ing instead to ‘identify common computational principles that operate
across different structures of the nervous system [and] provide func-
tional explanations of the empirical data that are arguably the most
relevant to neuroscience’. It thus offers a distinctive set of tools and
concepts, and a kind of mid-level organizational sketch, as a means
of triangulating perception, cognition, emotion, and action. The PP
schema is especially attractive because it deeply illuminates the nest-
ing of the neural economy within the much larger nexus of embodied,
world-involving action. Applied to a wide variety of both normal and
pathological cases and phenomena, PP suggests new ways of making
 INTRODUCTION 3

sense of the form and structure of human experience, and opens up

an interesting dialogue with work on self-organization, dynamics, and
embodied cognition.
Brains like ours, this picture suggests, are predictive engines, con-
stantly trying to guess at the structure and shape of the incoming sen-
sory array. Such brains are incessantly pro-active, restlessly seeking to
generate the sensory data for themselves using the incoming signal (in
a surprising inversion of much traditional wisdom) mostly as a means
of checking and correcting their best top-down guessing. Crucially,
however, the shape and flow of all that inner guessing is flexibly modu-
lated by changing estimations of the relative uncertainty of (hence our
confidence in) different aspects of the incoming signal. The upshot is
a dynamic, self-organizing system in which the inner (and outer) flow
of information is constantly reconfigured according to the demands
of the task and the changing details of the internal (interoceptively
sensed) and external context.
Such accounts make tempting contact with the form and structure
of human experience itself. That contact is evident, for example, in the
ease which such models accommodate the perceptual strangeness of
unexpected sensations (as when we take a sip of tea under the strong
expectation of coffee) or the remarkable salience of omissions (as when
the note that is suddenly absent from a well-predicted musical sequence
seems almost present in experience, before being replaced by a strong
sense of a very specific absence). PP models also illuminate a variety of
pathologies and disturbances, ranging from schizophrenia and autism
to ‘functional motor syndromes’ (in which expectations and altered
assignments of confidence (precision) result in false sensory ‘evidence’
of illness or injury).
More generally still, the PP framework delivers a compelling and
unifying account of familiar human experiences such as the capacity
to produce mental imagery, to reason ‘off-line” about possible future
choices and actions, and to grasp the intentions and goals of other
agents. All these capacities, we shall see, emerge naturally from the use
of a top-down ‘generative model’ (more on which shortly) as a means of
intelligently guessing (predicting) the play of sensory data across mul-
tiple spatial and temporal scales. This same apparatus delivers a firm
and intuitive grip upon the nature and possibility of meaning itself.
For to be able to predict the play of sensory data at multiple spatial and
temporal scales just is, or so I shall argue, to encounter the world as a
locus of meaning, It is to encounter, in perception, action, and imagina-
tion, a world that is structured, populated by organism-salient distal
causes, and prone to evolve in certain ways. Perception, understanding,
4 INTRODUCTION

action and imagination, if PP is correct, are constantly co-constructed

courtesy of our ongoing attempts at guessing the sensory signal.
That guessing ploy is of profound importance. It provides the
common currency that binds perception, action, emotion, and the
exploitation of environmental structure into a functional whole. In
contemporary cognitive scientific parlance, this ploy turns upon the
acquisition and deployment of a ‘multilayer probabilistic generative
model”.
The phrase, when first encountered, is a little daunting. But the
basic idea is not. It can be illustrated right away, using as a springboard
a tale told to me by one of my true philosophical and scientific heroes,
Daniel Dennett, while we were rather splendidly marooned in his
Maine farmhouse late in the summer of 2011, courtesy of Hurricane
Irene. Back in the mid-1980s, Dennett encountered a colleague, a
famous palaeontologist who was worried that students were cheating
at their homework by simply copying (sometimes even tracing) the
stratigraphy drawings he really wanted them to understand. A stra-
tigraphy drawing—literally, the drawing of layers—is one of those
geological cross-sections showing (you guessed it) rock layers and lay-
erings, whose job is to reveal the way complex structure has accrued
over time. Successful tracing of such a drawing is, however, hardly a
good indicator of your geological grasp!
To combat the problem, Dennett imagined a device that was later
prototyped and dubbed SLICE. SLICE, named and built by the soft-
ware engineer Steve Barney? ran on an original IBM PC and was
essentially a drawing program whose action was not unlike that of the
Etch-a-Sketch device many of us played with as children. Except that
this device controlled the drawing in a much more complex and inter-
esting fashion. SLICE was equipped with a number of ‘virtual” knobs,
and each knob controlled the unfolding of a basic geological cause
or process, for example, one knob would deposit layers of sediment,
another would erode, another would intrude lava, another would con-
trol fracture, another fold, and so on.
The basic form of the homework is then as follows: the student is
given a stratigraphy drawing and has to recreate the picture not by trac-
ing or simple copying but by twiddling the right knobs, in the right
order. In fact, the student has no choice here, since the device (unlike
an Etch-a-Sketch or a contemporary drawing application) does not
support pixel-by-pixel, or line-by-line, control. The only way to make
geological depictions appear on screen is to find the right ‘geological
cause’ knobs (for example, depositing sediment, then intruding lava)
and deploy them with the right intensities. This means twiddling the
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 The same effect may arise in connection with the alimentary feelings. A person
very much engrossed with a subject is unconscious of hunger, and does not feel
the pleasures of eating. Should any one be absorbed habitually with some
occupation or pursuit, such an one may contract a settled indifference to the
recurring phases of alimentary sensation; but this is an extreme and unusual case.
Any ordinary degree of interest in the avocations and pursuits of business is
compatible with full attention to the feelings of hunger, and of repletion, as well as
to the occasional pains and discomforts of indigestion. We do not often choose to
contract an indifference to pleasures, and we seldom succeed in acquiring an
indifference to pains, although we may have moments of such indifference, under
some special engrossment of mind by other things.

It is over-rating the influence of association to make it a 50 chief element in the

pleasure of intoxicating stimulants, or in the wretched feelings of diseased
digestion. These states are direct results of physical agency, and are the same
throughout all stages of life, with many or with few opportunities of being
associated with other feelings. They are not the cases favourable for illustrating
the power of association, in the important department of the feelings.—B.

51
CHAPTER II.
 IDEAS .

“Hæc in genere sors esse solet humana, ut quid in quovis genere recte aut
cogitari aut effici possit sentiant prius quam perspiciant. Laborem autem haud ita
levem illum veriti, qui in eo impendendus erat ut, ideas operatione analytica
penitus evolventes, quid tandem velint, aut quænam res agatur, sibi ipsis rationem
sufficientem reddant, confusis, aut saltem haud satia explicatis rationibus,
ratiocinia, et scientiarum adeo systemata superstruere solent communiter, eoque
confidentius, quo ejus quam tractant scientiæ fundamentum solidum magis
ignorant.”—Schmidt-Phiseldek, Philos. Criticæ Expositio Systematica, t. i. p. 561.

“Pour systematiser une science, c’est-à-dire, pour ramener une suite de

phénomènes à leur principe, à un phénomène élémentaire qui engendre
successivement tous les autres, il faut saisir leurs rapports, le rapport de
génération qui les lie; et pour cela, il est clair qu’il faut commencer par examiner
ces différens phénomènes séparément.”—Cousin, Fragm. Philos., p. 8.

THE sensations which we have through the medium of the senses

exist only by the presence of the object, and cease upon its
absence; nothing being here meant by the presence of the object,
but that position of it with respect to the organ, which is the
antecedent of the sensation; or by its absence, but any other
position.

It is a known part of our constitution, that when our sensations

cease, by the absence of their objects, something remains. After I
have seen the sun, and 52 by shutting my eyes see him no longer, I
can still think of him. I have still a feeling, the consequence of the
sensation, which, though I can distinguish it from the sensation, and
treat it as not the sensation, but something different from the
sensation, is yet more like the sensation, than anything else can be;
so like, that I call it a copy, an image, of the sensation; sometimes, a
representation, or trace, of the sensation.

Another name, by which we denote this trace, this copy, of the

sensation, which remains after the sensation ceases, is IDEA. This is a
very convenient name, and it is that by which the copies of the
sensation thus described will be commonly denominated in the
present work. The word IDEA, in this sense, will express no theory
whatsoever; nothing but the bare fact, which is indisputable. We
have two classes of feelings; one, that which exists when the object
of sense is present; another, that which exists after the object of
sense has ceased to be present. The one class of feelings I call
SENSATIONS; the other class of feelings I call IDEAS.

It is an inconvenience, that the word IDEA is used with great

latitude of meaning, both in ordinary, and in philosophical discourse;
and it will not be always expedient that I should avoid using it in
senses different from that which I have now assigned. I trust,
however, I shall in no case leave it doubtful, in what sense it is to be
understood.

The term Sensation has a double meaning. It signifies not only an

individual sensation; as when I say, I smell this rose, or I look at my
hand: but it also signifies the general faculty of sensation; that is, 53
the complex notion of all the phenomena together, as a part of our
nature.

The word Idea has only the meaning which corresponds to the
first of those significations; it denotes an individual idea; and we
have not a name for that complex notion which embraces, as one
whole, all the different phenomena to which the term Idea relates.
As we say Sensation, we might say also, Ideation; it would be a very
useful word; and there is no objection to it, except the pedantic
habit of decrying a new term. Sensation would in that case be the
general name for one part of our constitution, Ideation for another.

It is of great importance, before the learner proceeds any farther,

that he should not only have an accurate conception of this part of
his constitution; but should acquire, by repetition, by complete
familiarity, a ready habit of marking those immediate copies of his
sensations, and of distinguishing them from every other
phenomenon of his mind.

It has been represented, that the sensations of sight and hearing

leave the most vivid traces; in other words, that the ideas
corresponding to those sensations, are clearer than others. But what
is meant by clearer and more vivid in this case, is not very apparent.

If I have a very clear idea of the colour of the trumpet which I

have seen, and a very clear idea of its sound which I have heard, I
have no less clear ideas of its shape, and of its size; ideas of the
sensations, neither of the eye, nor of the ear.

It is not easy, in a subject like this, to determine what degree of

illustration is needful. To those who are in the habit of distinguishing
their mental 54 phenomena, the subject will appear too simple to
require illustration. To those who are new to this important
operation, a greater number of illustrations would be useful, than I
shall deem it advisable to present.

It is necessary to take notice, that, as each of our senses has its

separate class of sensations, so each has its separate class of ideas.
We have ideas of Sight, ideas of Touch, ideas of Hearing, ideas of
Taste, and ideas of Smell.

1. By Sight, as we have sensations of red, yellow, blue, &c., and of

the innumerable modifications of them, so have we ideas of those
colours. We can think of those colours in the dark; that is, we have a
feeling or consciousness, which is not the same with the sensation,
but which we contemplate as a copy of the sensation, an image of
it; something more like it, than any thing else can be; something
which remains with us, after the sensation is gone, and which, in the
train of thought, we can use as its representative.

2. The sensations of Touch, according to the limitation under

which they should be understood, are not greatly varied. The gentle
feeling, which we derive from the mere contact of an object, when
we consider it apart from the feeling of resistance, and apart from
the sensation of heat or cold, is not very different, as derived from
different objects. The idea of this tactual feeling, therefore, is not
vivid, nor susceptible of many modifications. On the other hand, our
ideas of heat and cold, the feelings which we call the thought of
them, existing when the sensations no longer exist, are among the
most distinct of the feelings which we distinguish by the name of
ideas.

55 3. I hear the Sound of thunder; and I can think of it after it is

gone. This feeling, the representative of the mere sound, this
thinking, or having the thought of the sound, this state of
consciousness, is the idea. The hearing of the sound is the primary
state of consciousness; the idea of the sound is the secondary state
of consciousness; which exists only when the first has previously
existed.
 The number of sounds, of which we can have distinct ideas, as
well as distinct sensations, is immense. We can distinguish all
animals by their voices. When I hear the horse neigh, I know it is
not the voice of the ox. Why? Because I have the idea of the voice
of the ox, so distinct, that I know the sensation I have, is different
from the sensation of which that is the copy or representative. We
can distinguish the sounds of a great number of different musical
instruments, by the same process. The men, women, and children,
of our intimate acquaintance, we can distinguish, and name, by their
voices; that is, we have an idea of the past sensation, which enables
us to declare, that the present is the voice of the same person.

4. That the sensations of Taste recur in thought, when the

sensation no longer exists, is a point of every man’s experience. This
recurring, in thought, of the feeling which we have by the sense,
when the feeling by the sense is gone, is the idea of that feeling, the
secondary state of consciousness, as we named it above.18 That we
can distinguish a very 56 great number of tastes, and distinguish
them accurately, is proof that we have a vast number of distinct
ideas of taste; because, for the purpose of making such distinction,
we have just seen that there must be a sensation and an idea; the
sensation of the present object, and the idea of the sensation of
each of the other objects from which we distinguish it. You have
tasted port wine, and you have tasted claret; when you taste claret
again, you can distinguish it from port wine; that is, you have the
idea of the taste of port wine, in conjunction with the sensation of
claret. You call it bad claret. Why? Because, along with the present
taste, you have the idea of another, which, when it was sensation,
was more agreeable than the present sensation.
18 Discrimination and Retentiveness (the having of Ideas as the produce of
Sensations) are different functions, although mutually involved, and, in all
likelihood, developed in proportionate degrees in the same organ. We begin by
discriminating changes of impression; this process is necessary in order to our
having even a sensation; the more delicate the discriminating power, the greater
the number of our primary sensations. He that can discriminate twenty shades of
yellow has twenty sensations of yellow; the two statements express the same fact.
These various sensations being often repeated, acquire at last an ideal
persistence; they can be maintained as ideas, without the originals. The function
or power of the Intellect whereby they are thus rendered self-subsisting as ideas,
is not the same function as discrimination; we call it Memory, Retentiveness,
Adhesiveness, Association, and so on. What may be affirmed about it, on the
evidence of induction, is, that where discrimination is good, memory or
retentiveness is also good. The discriminative eye for colour is accompanied with a
good memory for colour; the musical ear is both discriminative and retentive.—B.

5. Since we distinguish smells, as well as tastes, 57 we have the

same proof of the number and distinctness of the ideas of this class
of sensations. There is none of the numerous smells to which we
have been accustomed, which we do not immediately recognise. But
for that recognition the idea of the past sensation must be conjoined
with the present sensation.

6. Of that class of sensations, which I have called sensations of

disorganization, we have also ideas. We are capable of having the
thought of them when the sensation is gone; and that thought is the
idea. A spark from the candle flew upon my hand: I had the
sensation of burning. I at this moment think of that sensation; that
is, I have the idea of that sensation; and I can think of it, as
different from ten thousand other painful sensations: that is, I have
ideas of as many other sensations of this class.

7. The ideas of the sensations which attend the action of the

muscles are among the most important of the elements which
constitute our being. From these we have the ideas of resistance, of
compressibility, of hardness, of softness, of roughness, of
smoothness, of solidity, of liquidity, of weight, of levity, of extension,
of figure, of magnitude, of whole and of parts, of motion, of rest. It
is, indeed, to be observed, that these are all complex ideas, and that
other feelings than the mere muscular feeling are concerned in their
composition. In almost all the ideas referrible to the muscular
feelings, of sufficient importance to have names, the Will is included.
The muscular action is the consequent, the Will the antecedent; and
the name of the idea, includes both. Thus the idea of resistance is
the thought, or idea, of 58 the feelings we have, when we will to
contract certain muscles, and feel the contraction impeded.19 20
19 Rather, when we will to contract certain muscles, and the contraction takes
place, but is not followed by the accustomed movement of the limb; what follows,
instead, being a sensation of pressure, proportioned to the degree of the
contraction. It is not the muscular contraction itself which is impeded by the
resisting object: that contraction takes place: but the outward effect which it was
the tendency, and perhaps the purpose, of the muscular contraction to produce,
fails to be produced.—Ed.
20 It is unnecessary to advert to the operation of the Will, (in the first instance
at least,) in considering the feelings of muscular action. The will is the principal,
but not the only, source of our activity. The mere spontaneous vigour of the
system may put the muscles in motion. Likewise the muscular pleasure itself
operates, by the fundamental law of the will, for its own continuance; a process
not commonly called voluntary. In these circumstances, it seems advisable to
consider and describe the consciousness of muscular exertion by itself, and
without reference to the will.—B.

There is no feeling of our nature of more importance to us, than

that of resistance. Of all our sensations, it is the most unintermitted;
for, whether we sit, or lie, or stand, or walk, still the feeling of
resistance is present to us. Every thing we touch, at the same time
resists; and every thing we hear, see, taste, or smell, suggests the
idea of something that resists. It is through the medium of
resistance, that every act by which we subject to our use the objects
and laws of nature, is performed. And, of the complex states of
consciousness, which the philosophy of mind is called upon to
explain, there is hardly one, in which the feeling or idea of resistance
is not included.

It is partly owing to this combination of something 59 else with the

muscular feeling, in all the states of consciousness to which we have
given names, that it is so difficult to think of the mere muscular
feeling by itself; that our notion of the muscular sensations is so
indistinct and obscure; and that we can rather be said to have ideas
of certain general states of muscular feeling, as of fatigue, or
activity, composed of a great number of individual feelings, than of
the individual feelings themselves.

8. As the feelings, or sensations which we have in the intestinal

canal, are almost always mixed up indistinctly with other feelings,
and, except in the cases of acute pain, are seldom taken notice of
but as constituting general states, we hardly have the power of
thinking of those sensations one by one; and, in consequence, can
hardly be said to have ideas of them. They are important, as forming
component parts of many complex ideas, which have great influence
on our happiness. But to unfold the mystery of complex ideas, other
parts of our mental process have yet to be explained.

There is a certain distressful feeling, called the feeling of bad

health, which is considerably different in different cases, but in which
sensations of the intestinal canal are almost always a material part.

Indigestion is the name of an idea, in which the feelings of the

intestinal canal are mainly concerned.
 Hunger, and thirst, are also names of ideas, which chiefly refer to
sensations in the same part of our system.21 22
21 Thirst is a sensation of the fauces and of the stomach; it is also a feeling of
the body generally, due to a deficiency of water in the blood. It is also caused by
an excess of saline ingredients in the system. In like manner, a distinction is to be
drawn between Inanition, from deficiency of nutritive material in the body, and
Hunger, or the state of the stomach preparatory to the act of eating. The two
states must in a great measure concur: yet they may be distinct.

The account of the organic states given in this chapter would have come in
appropriately under Sensation—B.
22 I venture to think that it is not a philosophically correct mode of expression,
to speak of indigestion, or of hunger and thirst, as names of ideas. Hunger and
thirst are names of definite sensations; and indigestion is a name of a large group
of sensations, held together by very complicated laws of causation. If it be
objected, that the word indigestion, and even the words hunger and thirst,
comprehend in their meaning other elements than the immediate sensations; that
the meaning, for instance, of hunger, includes a deficiency of food, the meaning of
indigestion a derangement of the functions of the digestive organs; it still remains
true that these additional portions of meaning are physical phenomena, and are
not our thoughts or ideas of physical phenomena; and must, therefore, in the
general partition of human consciousness between sensations and ideas, take their
place with the former, and not with the latter.—Ed.

60 It is proper to remark, that, beside the internal feelings to

which I have hitherto directed the reader’s attention, there are
others, which might be classed, and considered apart. The blood-
vessels, for example, and motion of the blood, constitute an
important part of our System, not without feelings of its own;
feelings sometimes amounting to states which seriously command
our attention. Of the feelings which accompany fever, a portion may
reasonably be assigned to the change of action in the blood-vessels.
 There are states of feeling, very distinguishable, 61 accompanying
diseased states of the heart, and of the nervous and arterial
systems.

Beside the blood and its vessels, the glandular system is an

important part of the active organs of the body; not without
sensibility, and of course, not without habitual sensations. The same
may be said of the system of the absorbents, of the lymphatics, and
of the vascular system in general.

The state of the nerves and brain, the most wonderful part of our
system, is susceptible of changes, and these changes are
accompanied with known changes of feeling. There is a class of
diseases which go by the name of nervous diseases: and though
they are not a very definite class; though it is not even very well
ascertained how far any morbid state of the nerves has to do with
them; it is not doubtful that in some of those diseases there are
peculiar feelings, which ought to be referred to the nerves. The
nerves and brain may thus be, not only the organs of sensations,
derived from other senses, but organs of sensations, derived from
themselves. On this subject we cannot speak otherwise than
obscurely, because we have not distinct names for the things which
are to be expressed.

It is not, however, necessary, in tracing the simple feelings which

enter into the more complex states of consciousness, to dwell upon
the obscurer classes of our inward sensations; because it is only in a
very general way that we can make use of them, in expounding the
more mysterious phenomena. Having never acquired the habit of
attending to them, and having, by the habit of inattention, lost the
power of remarking them, except in their general results, we 62 can
do little more than satisfy ourselves of the cases in which they enter
for more or less of the effect.

We have now considered what it is to have sensations, in the

simple, uncompounded cases; and what it is to have the secondary
feelings, which are the consequences of those sensations, and which
we consider as their copies, images, or representatives. If the
illustrations I have employed have enabled my reader to familiarize
himself with this part of his constitution, he has made great progress
towards the solution of all that appears intricate in the phenomena
of the human mind. He has acquainted himself with the two primary
states of consciousness; the varieties of which are very numerous;
and the possible combinations of which are capable of composing a
train of states of consciousness, the diversities of which transcend
the limits of computation.23 24
23 The Sensation and the Idea compared.—Great importance, in every way,
attaches to the points of agreement and of difference of the Sensation and of the
Idea. By the Sensation, we mean the whole state of consciousness, under an
actual or present impression of sense, as in looking at the moon, in listening to
music, in tasting wine. By the Idea is meant the state of mind that remains after
the sensible agent is withdrawn, or that may be afterwards recovered by the force
of recollection.

1. For many purposes the sensation and the idea are identical. They are
compared to original and copy, which, although not in all respects of equal value,
can often answer the same ends. A perfect recollection of a process that we wish
to repeat, is as good as actually seeing it. For all purposes of knowledge, and of
practical guidance, a faithful remembrance is equal to the real presence. So, as
regards the emotional ideas, or the recollection of states of pleasure and of pain,
which 63 prompt our voluntary actions, in pursuit and in avoidance, the memory
operates in the same way as the original fact, allowance being made for difference
of degree. A pleasing melody induces us to listen to it, and to crave for its
repetition; the after recollection of it, also moves us to hear it again. If we find
ourselves in the midst of distracting noises, we are impelled to escape; the mere
remembrance, at an after time, has the same influence on the will.

2. It is highly probable, if not certain, that the same nervous tracks of the brain
are actuated during the sensation, and during the idea, with difference of degree
corresponding to the difference of vivacity or intensity of the actual and
remembered states.

Of the points wherein the Sensation and the Idea are found to differ, the most
obvious is their degree of intensity. We are able to maintain in idea, the state of
mind corresponding to the sight of the sun, the sound of a bell, or the smell of a
rose, but we are conscious of a great inferiority in the degree or vividness of the
state. The bright luminosity of the original sun turns into a feeble effect, without
dazzle or excitement. The thrill of a fine musical air cannot be sustained by the
mere memory of it, even in the freshness of the immediately succeeding moment.
A certain pleasing remembrance attaches to a good dinner, but how far below the
original! Moreover, in a complicated object of sense, a great many of the parts and
lineaments drop entirely out of view. Memory is unequal to retaining, without long
familiarity and practice, the exact picture of a landscape, a building, or an interior.
The difference in the fulness of the idea, as compared with the sensation, is no
less remarkable than the difference of vivacity or intensity. This inferiority in the
idea as compared with the actuality is of very various amount; being in some
cases very great, and in others very slight. The difference is in proportion to the
mind’s power of retentiveness, a power varying according to several circumstances
or conditions, which have to be distinctly enunciated by the Psychologist. For
example, it is well known, that frequency of repetition enables the idea to 64 grow
in vivacity and in fulness, and to approximate in those respects to the original. It is
also known, that some minds are by nature retentive, and, by a small number of
repetitions, gain the point that others reach only by a greater number.

Now, that the vivacity and fulness of a remembered idea should constitute the
exact measure of the mind’s retentiveness in that particular instance, is a thing of
course. There is no other measure of retentiveness but the power of reproducing
in idea, what has been before us, in actuality, or as sensation; and the greater the
approach of the idea to the original sensation, the better is the retaining faculty.

There is an apparent exception to this general principle. The memory of the

same idea, or the same feeling, in the same person, may be at one time full and
vivid, and at another time meagre and faint. In particular moments, we may recall
former experiences with especial force, as if there were something that co-
operated with the proper force of retentiveness. What, then, are these additional
or concurring forces? Hume recognises the influence of disease in giving
preternatural intensity to ideas.

The answer is that some other recollection concurs with, and adds its quota to
the support of, the one in question. When, in the view of one natural prospect, we
recall another with great fulness, the present sensation supplies or fills in the parts
of the remembered scene; which scene, therefore, does not exist in the mind by
memory alone, but as a compound of memory and actuality. So while listening
with pleasure to a band of music, we remember strongly the pleasure of some
previous musical performance; yet, the vivid consciousness of the past is not
dependent upon the memory of the past, but upon the stimulus of the present; we
are more properly under sensation, than under idea. In all mental resuscitation,
there is a degree of vividness and of fulness, due to the proper retentiveness of
the mind for each particular thing, according to natural power, repetition, &c.
Whatever is beyond this, must be ascribed to the accidental concurrence of other
stimulants, either of present sensation, or of remembered impressions.

65 In recollection, there is an influence designated by the term “excitement,"

which means that portions of the brain are in a state of exalted activity. Any ideas
embodied in the parts so excited, if in operation at all, are more than ordinarily
vivid. Thus in fever, faded memories brighten up into vivacity and clearness. To
this case the same remark applies; the result is partly memory, or the proper
retentiveness of the system, and partly an excitation of the brain, through present
influences. The proper power of memory is a constant quantity, varying only with
repetition, and the strict conditions of memory; the intensity or fulness of a
resuscitated idea is a complex result of memory proper and present stimulants, or
sensations.

Difference of vividness was the only distinction adverted to by Hume in his

Psychology, which resolved all our intellectual elements into Impressions and
Ideas. His opening words are:—“All the perceptions of the human mind resolve
themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call impressions and ideas. The
difference between these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with
which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or
consciousness.” He afterwards allows that in particular circumstances, as in sleep,
in fever, or in madness, our ideas may approach in vividness to our sensations.

Another distinction between the Sensation and the Idea, is of the most vital
importance. To the Sensation belongs Objective Reality; the Idea is purely
Subjective. This distinction lies at the root of the question of an External World;
but on every view of that question, objectivity is connected with the Sensation; in
contrast to which the Idea is an element exclusively mental or subjective.

Meanings of Sensation.—The word Sensation has several meanings, not always

clearly distinguished, and causing serious embroilments in philosophical
controversy.

1. There being, in Sensation, the concurrence of a series of physical or

physiological facts with a mental fact, the name may be inadvertently employed to
express the physical, as well 66 as the mental element, or at all events to include
the physical part as well as the mental.

The change made on the retina by light, and the nervous influences traversing
the brain, may very readily be considered as entering into the phenomenon of
sensation. This, however, is an impropriety. The proper use of “Sensation” is to
signify the mental fact, to the exclusion of all the physical processes essential to its
production.

2. In ordinary Sensation, as in looking round a room, there is a double

consciousness,—objective and subjective. In the objective consciousness, we are
affected with the qualities named magnitude, distance, form, colour, &c.; these are
called object properties, properties of the external and extended universe. In the
subject consciousness, we are alive to states of pleasure or of pain, which may go
along with the other. We do not usually exist in both modes at one instant; we
pass out of one into the other. Now the word Sensation covers both, although, to
the object consciousness, “Perception” is more strictly applicable; and in contrast
to Perception, Sensation would mean the subjective consciousness, the moments
when we relapse from the object attitude and become subjective or self-conscious,
or alive to pleasure and pain. When the mind is in the object phase, it is neutral or
indifferent as respects enjoyment.

3. In Sensation, a distinction may be drawn between the present effect upon the
mind, or the impression that would arise if the outward agent had operated for the
first time, and the total of the past impressions of the same agent, which by its
repetition are recalled to fuse with the present effect. The present view of the
moon reinstates the sum total of the previous views held by memory, and is not
what we should experience if we saw the moon for the first time. Now, if the recall
of the previous impressions, or of the joint and iterated idea, be considered an
addition made by the Intellect, being dependent on the retentive power of the
mind, Sensation, as opposed to Intellect, would mean the force of the present
impression and nothing more; or the difference between the 67 vividness of
reality, and the inferior vividness of recollection. What we can retain when we shut
our eyes would represent the force of our intelligence; the additional intensity
when we resume our gaze, would represent the power of sensation or the actual
experience.

This distinction suggests an important remark as to the whole nature of

Sensation, namely, that there can hardly be such a thing as pure Sensation,
meaning Sensation without any admixture of the Intellect. We may attribute this
purity to the earliest impressions made upon the mind, but not to anything known
in the experience of the adult. This mixture of Intellect with Sense is not confined
to Retentiveness; the other intellectual functions, Discrimination and perception of
Agreement, are inseparable from the exercise of the senses. We cannot have a
sensation without a feeling of difference; warmth is a transition from cold, and a
conscious discrimination of the two facts. So, whenever we repeat a sensation, we
have the consciousness of the repetition, or agreement. Were not these modes of
consciousness present, we should have no sensation, indeed no consciousness.
There is thus no hard line between sense and intellect. The question as to the
origin of our Ideas in Sense is not a real question, until we explain what we mean
by Sense, and make allowance for this unavoidable participation of Intellect in
sensation.

4. Sensation is commonly used to employ the whole of our primary feelings and
susceptibilities, as opposed to the Emotions which are secondary or derived. It
thus confounds together two different sides of our susceptibility, the active and the
passive; the feelings arising in connection with our exertion of inward force or
energy, and those arising under impressions from external things. Both are
primary states of consciousness; they are alike dependent on modifications of our
sensitive tissues. But, between the two, there is a contrast, wide, deep, and
fundamental, completely missed by the older Psychologists, to the detriment of
their handling of such vital questions as the origin of knowledge, and the
perception of a material world. The name Sensation, pointing immediately to 68
the operation of the five senses, gave the slip to the feelings of energy, or brought
them in partially and inadequately. Yet it is the only name we have for the primary
susceptibilities of the organism including both movement and passive sensibility.—
B.
24 A question which, as far as I know, has been passed over by psychologists,
but which ought not to be left unanswered, is this: Can we have ideas of ideas?
We have sensations, and we have copies of these sensations, called ideas of
them: can we also have copies of these copies, constituting a second order of
ideas, two removes instead of one from sensation?

Every one will admit that we can think of a thought. We remember ourselves
remembering, or imagine ourselves remembering, an object or an event, just as
we remember or imagine ourselves seeing one. But in the case of a simple idea of
sensation, i.e. the idea or remembrance of a single undivided sensation, there
seems nothing to distinguish the idea of the idea, from the idea of the sensation
itself. When I imagine myself thinking of the colour of snow, I am not aware of
any difference, even in degree of intensity, between the image then present to my
mind of the white colour, and the image present when I imagine myself to be
seeing the colour.

The case, however, is somewhat different with those combinations of simple

ideas which have never been presented to my mind otherwise than as ideas. I
have an idea of Pericles; but it is derived only from the testimony of history: the
real Pericles never was present to my senses. I have an idea of Hamlet, and of
Falstaff; combinations which, though made up of ideas of sensation, never existed
at all in the world of sense; they never were anything more than ideas in any
mind. Yet, having had these combinations of ideas presented to me through the
words of Shakespeare, I have formed what is properly an idea not of an outward
object, but of an idea in Shakespeare’s mind; and I may communicate my idea to
others, whose idea will then be an idea of an idea in my mind. My idea of Pericles,
or my idea of any person now alive whom I have never seen, differs from these in
the circumstance that I 69 am persuaded that a real object corresponding to the
idea does now, or did once, exist in the world of sensation: but as I did not derive
my idea from the object, but from some other person’s words, my idea is not a
copy of the original, but a copy (more or less imperfect) of some other person’s
copy: it is an idea of an idea.

Although, however, the complex idea I have of an object which never was
presented to my senses, is rightly described as an idea of an idea; my
remembrance of a complex idea which I have had before, does not seem to me to
differ from the remembered idea as an idea differs from a sensation. There is a
distinction between my visual idea of Mont Blanc and the actual sight of the
mountain, which I do not find between my remembrance of Falstaff and the
original impression from which it was derived. My present thought of Falstaff
seems to me not a copy but a repetition of the original idea; a repetition which
may be dimmed by distance, or which may, on the contrary, be heightened by
intermediate processes of thought; may have lost some of its features by lapse of
time, and may have acquired others by reference to the original sources; but
which resembles the first impression not as the thought of an object resembles
the sight of it, but as a second or third sight of an object resembles the first. This
question will meet us again in the psychological examination of Memory, the
theory of which is in no small degree dependent upon it.—Ed.

70
CHAPTER III.
 THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS .

“To have a clear view of the phenomena of the mind, as mere affections or
states of it, existing successively, and in a certain series, which we are able,
therefore, to predict, in consequence of our knowledge of the past, is, I conceive,
to have made the most important acquisition which the intellectual inquirer can
make.”
Brown, Lectures, i. 544.

THOUGHT succeeds thought; idea follows idea, incessantly. If our

senses are awake, we are continually receiving sensations, of the
eye, the ear, the touch, and so forth; but not sensations alone. After
sensations, ideas are perpetually excited of sensations formerly
received; after those ideas, other ideas: and during the whole of our
lives, a series of those two states of consciousness, called
sensations, and ideas, is constantly going on. I see a horse: that is a
sensation. Immediately I think of his master: that is an idea. The
idea of his master makes me think of his office; he is a minister of
state: that is another idea. The idea of a minister of state makes me
think of public affairs; and I am led into a train of political ideas;
when I am summoned to dinner. This is a new sensation, followed
by the idea of dinner, and of the company with whom I am to
partake it. The sight of the company and of the food are other 71
sensations; these suggest ideas without end; other sensations
perpetually intervene, suggesting other ideas: and so the process
goes on.
 In contemplating this train of feelings, of which our lives consist, it
first of all strikes the contemplator, as of importance to ascertain,
whether they occur casually and irregularly, or according to a certain
order.

With respect to the SENSATIONS, it is obvious enough that they

occur, according to the order established among what we call the
objects of nature, whatever those objects are; to ascertain more and
more of which order is the business of physical philosophy in all its
branches.

Of the order established among the objects of nature, by which

we mean the objects of our senses, two remarkable cases are all
which here we are called upon to notice; the SYNCHRONOUS ORDER, and
the SUCCESSIVE ORDER. The synchronous order, or order of
simultaneous existence, is the order in space; the successive order,
or order of antecedent and consequent existence, is the order in
time. Thus the various objects in my room, the chairs, the tables,
the books, have the synchronous order, or order in space. The falling
of the spark, and the explosion of the gunpowder, have the
successive order, or order in time.

According to this order, in the objects of sense, there is a

synchronous, and a successive, order of our sensations. I have
SYNCHRONICALLY, or at the same instant, the sight of a great variety of
objects; touch of all the objects with which my body is in contact;
hearing of all the sounds which are reaching my ears; smelling of all
the smells which are reaching my 72 nostrils; taste of the apple
which I am eating; the sensation of resistance both from the apple
which is in my mouth, and the ground on which I stand; with the
sensation of motion from the act of walking. I have SUCCESSIVELY the
sight of the flash from the mortar fired at a distance, the hearing of
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