William James at CERN (1995)

Summary

William James at CERN Some Examples of Selection in Minds and Computers 1. William James In the famous chapter on ``The Stream of Thought'' in his Principles of Psychology --- the one where he coins the phrase ``stream of consciousness'' --- William James considers as the last of the five ``important characters'' of the stream, the fact that ``It is always more interested in one part of its object [thought] than in another, and welcomes or rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.'' This is obviously true of action. Whatever views your views on free will, it is indubitable that differing options occur to us, that we compare them, that we prefer some to others, that eventually we elect one and dismiss the rest. More interestingly, James describes the role of selection in perception, and finds it at every level of neural and mental life. The sense organs, to begin with, are insensitive to almost all that happens around them. When they are excited and transmit nervous impulses to the brain, these are sifted for significant patterns (often found on dubious grounds). News of these is relayed to other parts of the brain, which look for more subtle, more detailed, and more broad patterns, until at last we reach our perceptions, grouped together by another process of selection into things. Some of these we attend to; the rest we ignore. ``The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from e...