https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OwejEP-uLvI
This is from Alexander Luria, who was the greatest, perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist who ever lived. He was a Russian, worked mostly after the Second World War, mostly on people who had brain damage. And he was interested in trying to outline the overarching picture of brain function. And so he did that partly by looking at its function, but also partly by looking at its structure, trying to get both of those things working simultaneously. And so we’ll go through a brief picture of how the brain works. And so one of the ways of… So you can look at the brain from front to back, and you can divide it roughly into two sections. And one section has to do with sensory processing, and that’s roughly the back half. And one section has to do with motor output. Now those things aren’t as clearly differentiated as you might think, because there’s very little sensation without motor output. Maybe the closest to an exception is smell, I would say, but you at least have to breathe in. You know, and when an animal is actively searching on a scent trail, it’s breathing in. So it’s using its motor output constantly to modify the sensory stream. It’s really difficult to dissociate the two. When you’re looking at something, you know, it kind of feels to you like you’re a passive recipient of sense data. But you’re no such thing. Your eyes are moving back and forth in multiple ways all the time, including the ways that you can control voluntarily. So there’s multiple involuntary systems that are moving your eyes in multiple ways. And really what you’re doing is feeling the array of the electromagnetic spectrum with your eyes. You’re feeling it, and you’re actively exploring if you’re not a passive recipient at all. So even in sensation, you can’t purely pull sensation out from motor processing and say, I’m getting untrammeled, unbiased sense data. Because you can’t look at something without focusing. And you can’t focus without wanting to look at something. You know, you can’t just lie there while you could with your eyes half crossed. But, you know, that’s sort of like imagine you dropped a video recorder from an airplane and it just spun around in an unfocused manner. Well, that’s the world sampled randomly. You know, what are you going to do with that? Nothing. And you know, you’re concentrating on the auditory stream constantly, and segregating out some things and suppressing others. Like if you listen in the classroom, you can hear probably four or five different types of mechanical noise going on at the same time. Most of the time in the classroom, that’s silent. You don’t hear it. Like you don’t hear your fridge except when it turns on or off, right? You zero that out. And so you’re very selective in your perception. So you can’t really technically separate out motor output from sensory input. And that’s really useful to know because it destroys the idea that you’re just a path, you know, that there’s a world of sensation out there that’s imprinting itself on you. And that’s how you get your information, which is really the that’s the fundamental presupposition of the empiricists, of the raw empiricists. There’s a world of sense data out there. You sample it randomly and that’s what informs you. It’s like, yes, except that you’re always an active harvester of the information. So you can’t get rid of the interpretive structure a priori. That was Immanuel Kant, by the way, who first established that in his critique of pure reason. You can’t get away from the fact that you’re actively harvesting the data. So you can say, well, where does human structure come from? The sense data. That’s sort of the blank slate idea. It’s like, no, wrong, because a blank slate cannot process information. You’re actively engaged right at the beginning. So that’s another example of the knower and the unknown, you know, working in a cyclical manner because you interact with something. You divide it up into you and the world, roughly speaking. And I mean, you really make it that way because you build yourself out of the information. And then, of course, that makes you a more differentiated processor with a broader range of skills. Then you interact with the unknown. Again, you gather more information that differentiates the world. It makes you a more differentiated harvester. And then so it’s just continually cycling. And that consciousness, the logos, the knower, is that thing that’s doing that harvesting. And you can never say it’s not there. Now, what happens is that it’s in its nascent form to begin with. Low resolution, nascent form. Low resolution knower. Low resolution category system. Low resolution world. But that’s enough to kickstart it and to start it differentiating. And that happens as you develop as an individual, because you start out as a single-celled organism for all intents and purposes. A very low resolution thing in a very low resolution world. And that differentiates itself across time. But exactly the same thing happened over evolutionary time. So there isn’t a time when those three elements aren’t there for all intents and purposes. They’re always there. They’re permanent.