on 13-Jun-2020 (Sat)

Many contextual features like these have common names, but many oth- ers have no such words, just as we have no expressions for most flavors and aromas, gestures and intonations, attitudes and dispositions.

learning to learn is one of the things that we cannot learn entirely from experience

Which of your goals and beliefs are your "genuine" ones? The Single- Self view suggests that some of your intentions and values are "authentic" and "sincere"—whereas the models of mind dis- cussed in this book leave more room for conflicting views.

Accordingly, it seems to me that there is something wrong with most dumbbell distinctions: those divisions appear to be so simple and clear that they seem to be all that you need—and that satisfaction tempts you to stop. Yet most of the novel ideas in this book came from finding that two parts are rarely enough—and eventually my rule became: when thinking about psychology, one should never start with less than three different parts or hypotheses!

Why don't we have words for trichotomies or trifferences!

We solve easy problems in routine ways, scarcely thinking about how we accomplish these—but when our usual methods don't work, we start to "reflect" on what went wrong and find ourselves to be switching around in a network of "models," each of which purports to represent some facet or aspect of ourselves, so that we end representing ourselves with a loosely connected collection of images, models, and anecdotes. Still, if this is how one represents one's Self, there is nothing special about this—because that's how we represent everything else. Thus, when you think about a telephone, you keep switching among different views of its appearance, its physical structure, and the feelings you have when you use it, and so forth, as though exploring the facets of a. panalogy.

Artist: nothing surpasses the thrill of conceiving a new kind of method or representation and then confirming that this will produce new effects in my audience.

when you look at a color and sense that it's red, no intermediate steps seem to intervene—and so you can find nothing to say about it.

although we find it hard to speak about the character of any particular, single, sensation, we find it far easier to compare or contrast two different but similar kinds of sensations. For example, one can say that sunlight is brighter than candlelight, or that pink lies in between red and white, or that a touch on your cheek is somewhere between your ear and your chin.

However, this says nothing about how each separate sensation "feels." It's like describing the distance between two towns on a map, while say- ing nothing about those individual towns. Similarly, if I were to ask what the color red means to you, you might first say that it makes you think of a rose, which then reminds you of being in love—and then you'll find yourself relating this to other kinds of sensations and feelings; red might also remind you of blood, and make you feel some sense of dread or fear. Similarly, green might make one think about pastoral scenes and blue might suggest the sky or the sea. Thus, a seemingly simple stimulus can lead to many other kinds of mental events, such as these other feelings and reminiscences.

when you try to describe the feelings that come with being in love, or from suffering fear, or when seeing a pasture or a sea, you'll soon find that you are merely mentioning yet other things that these remind you of. And then, perhaps, you will come to suspect that one can never really describe what anything is; one can only describe what that thing is like.

more signals flow downward to the brain's sensory cortex than in the opposite direction, presumably to help us see what we expect to see—by priming us with an appropriate "simulus." This could help to explain, for example, how we frequently "see" things that do not exist—such as the "square" in the image.