Reading Proust for the first time, I was amazed and incredulous that this man claimed to remember such trivial events of his life in such amazing detail.  I then read the Lerer article which relieved my suspicions by saying that Proust himself knew that his memories were inaccurate.  The article then goes on to describe Freud and his possibly lying patients, who may have created memories simply by imagining them.  I think the ideas of planted and false memories are different from what Proust is doing; he probably knows a vague account of what he has done, he is simply filling in the gaps, fleshing out an outline.  Since Proust writes mainly about himself, he only has to fill in gaps that pertain to what he was thinking; and since Proust knows himself, maybe he can fill in these gaps fairly accurately by imagining what he would do in certain situations.  Of course, this is all conjecture.


On a different tack, I disagree with Bergson's (and Proust's) idea of intuition, or the idea that you can discover truths about yourself simply by thinking for long enough.  Proust did indeed describe many truths that are now known to modern neuroscientists (memories are inaccurate; odor and taste have strong links to memory in mammals) but he had no way of knowing that they were indeed true.  It's likely that Proust also described many aspects of himself and his memory that were simply due to his own idiosyncrasies and misperceptions.  It is for this reason that I think intuition is a faulty way of discovering significant truths about human consciousness.


Regarding Tristram Shandy, I think the author's method of making Tristram's recollections a scattered and dissociated affair is perhaps a more accurate depiction of memory than Proust's; when I remember things, I do not remember them in great detail and so linearly (this also relates to the issue brought up in class where literature is linear but thought isn't necessarily).  Instead, I remember things more like Tristram.  I will remember one thing for a while, then it will remind of of another thing and I will start to think about that.  

One thing that stood out to me was the difference in the method of explanation between Practical Attention  and the more modern Attention:  Theory and Practice.  Practical Attention lays out an explanation of attention and educational methods which is not well cited or supported by anything except anecdotes, but it makes sense and seems logical, regardless of whether or not it is correct in its assumptions.  When Attention: Theory and Practice talks about modern theories of attention, the knowledge presented is perhaps less intuitive, but is always supported by citation to (hopefully) sound research.  Practical Attention may be wrong in some of its assumptions, but all of them made sense to me as I was reading.  Sometimes I find myself wondering how ancient peoples managed to believe things that we know today to be obviously false (such as the animal-spirit theory, for one), but things like Practical Attention are the answer.  Explanations for certain things that make sense seem to be correct; it is easy to accept them.  The problem is that many explanations which make sense can be conceived and not all of them are going to be correct.  This is why the scientific method of testing logical assumptions to see if they hold up is important.

Another thing I found interesting in Practical Attention was the relationship discussed between unknown language and attention; I had never really thought about it before, but I think it's valid.  Tristram Shandy is hard for me to focus on for any prolonged period of time, but I can read more modern texts easily.  It also gives me some hope that slogging through Tristram Shandy as well as the other centuries-old texts in class will become easier over time.

Tristram Shandy is written in a different dialect of English than people speak today, and this makes it hard to understand for the unaccustomed.  Older texts are yet more deviant from modern language.  Because thought is so closely tied to language for most people, this leads me to wonder if the evolution of language has also caused an evolution in structure of thought over the centuries, faster than genetic evolution.  It is possible that people today think in completely different ways than people two hundred years ago, but of course it is impossible to know for sure.  Literature from different periods tells us some things, but literature is only the output of a mind, not the inner workings.  Studies of differences in thinking in native speakers of different languages could perhaps shed some light on the study of this subject.

Reading response 1; "Consciousness and the Novel" and "When I have fears that I may cease to be"

In the selection from Consciousness and the Novel, Lodge defines phenomena called qualia as the subjective perceptions experienced by everyone with a human consciousness.  He also portrays qualia as difficult to describe with language.  He sets it up as one of the main arguments for a dualistic view of the mind/soul and the brain.  However, as a person who personally thinks brains are naught but a collection of neurons, I fail to see the problem with qualia.  I just don't see the connection between the premise that people have subjective experiences and the conclusion that there must be some kind of separate and non-corporeal mind.  People's neurons become connected in different ways due to both development and experience, this is enough to explain these differences.

Maybe I'm not quite grasping the concept, but it also seems to me that qualia would be more of a challenge than a support to a dualistic view of humans.  Qualia, as I understand them, are basically pure sensory input with the tinge of emotion you've attached to the stimulus, independent of language.  Under this definition, nearly any mammal would be capable of experiencing qualia.  Do cows have souls as well?  (I suppose that some would say they do...)

Either way, Lodge's discussion of qualia is relevant because he also goes on to describe poetry as man's most successful attempt to describe qualia, which fits in with our primary readings of Keats' poetry.  I find Lodge' s characterization of poetry and qualia amusing when paired with Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be".  I interpret the poem as Keats' acceptance of the fact that there is no afterlife, and no therefore no separate soul.  He sends this message using mainly sensory perceptions, qualia, which are supposed to be proofs of a soul of some sort.

In the poem, Keats basically says that he fears the day his existence will end, though he may be surrounded by and currently experiencing all of the things which seem to matter during our lives - but no matter our capacity for reflection on this, we will still cease to be when we die, and so too will all of the things that we previously cherised.  The last two lines of the poem state that

"Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink."

This is Keats stating that he can worry about his inevitable demise, but ultimately it will happen anyway.  This is the end of the poem - his solace is not an afterlife, but the fact that after a while he won't be able to worry about such things anyway.