Monday, July 06, 2009

George Lakoff - Unconscious Imaginitive Perception

http://www.prairiefrontier.com/pages/pfmixpg/img/ButterflyMeadow.jpg

Sorry, but I can't give you a page number for this passage from Philosophy in the Flesh because it' on my Kindle DX, but I can tell you that it's locations 428-35 (Chapter 3).

As you read this short passage, try to contemplate the complexity of what our brains do without us even being aware of what is happening.
We use spatial-relations concepts unconsciously, and we impose them via our perceptual and conceptual systems. We just automatically and unconsciously "perceive" one entity as in, on, or across from another. However, such perception depends on an enormous amount of automatic unconscious mental activity on our part. For example, to see a butterfly in the garden, we have to project a nontrivial amount of imagistic structure onto a scene. We have to conceptualize the boundaries of the garden as a three-dimensional container with an interior that extends into the air. We also have to locate the butterfly as a figure (or trajector) relative to that conceptual container, which serves as a ground (or landmark). We perform such complex, though mundane, acts of imaginative perception during every moment of our waking lives.

No comments: