2020-07-05, 12:57 AM
Re: History of the Filter Theory:
The transmission theory also puts itself in touch with a whole class of experiences that are with difficulty explained by the production theory. I refer to those obscure and exceptional phenomena reported at all times throughout human history, which the “psychical researchers,” with Mr. Frederic Myers at their head, are doing so much to rehabilitate; such phenomena, namely, as religious conversions, providential leadings in answer to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic capacities, to say nothing of still more exceptional and incomprehensible things.
-William James
As per the book Beyond Physicalism ->
Two ideas are crucial to James’s model. The first concerns the “transcendental world.” Myers would call it the metetherial environment or World-Soul; Emerson, the Over-Soul; Aldous Huxley, Mind at Large; Carl du Prel, the Transcendental Ego, etc. Our individual minds are surface growths that appear separate and distinct but whose roots lie in a deeper psychic underground; there we are mutually entangled and part of a more extended mental system.
The second idea is one that James owes to Gustav Fechner, concerning the notion of a psychophysical threshold (see James, 1898/ 1961, pp. 295– 298, long footnote). It is the mobility of this threshold upon which turns the explanatory and the experimental potential of the transmission model. Lower the threshold and the contents of the subliminal mind become more accessible; this can come about by deliberate shamanic or mystical practice or by chance, blows to the head, or near-death experiences. In the normal struggle to adapt to the physical world, consciousness is confined and colored by contingent, body-mediated experience; we therefore mostly live our lives oblivious to any hint of our deep interior selves.
Technically, James’s move in this work is to posit substance dualism, a step beyond property dualism. According to the latter, mind is an irreducible property of living brains but is causally inert and supervenes on brain activity. Hence property dualism is not strong enough to carry the burden of survival or of any paranormal or mystical phenomena. It is a feckless philosophical position deeply at odds with human experience. According to the transmission model, however, mind is not a property of the brain but a user of the brain, indeed a person who enjoys autonomous self-existence. Few academically trained people are prepared to entertain substance dualism nowadays;[ 2] but few of them pay much attention to experiences characterized as supernormal, mystical, and the like, experiences that challenge mainline views of mind and body.
Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality (Kindle Locations 1913-1927). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
The transmission theory also puts itself in touch with a whole class of experiences that are with difficulty explained by the production theory. I refer to those obscure and exceptional phenomena reported at all times throughout human history, which the “psychical researchers,” with Mr. Frederic Myers at their head, are doing so much to rehabilitate; such phenomena, namely, as religious conversions, providential leadings in answer to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic capacities, to say nothing of still more exceptional and incomprehensible things.
-William James
As per the book Beyond Physicalism ->
Two ideas are crucial to James’s model. The first concerns the “transcendental world.” Myers would call it the metetherial environment or World-Soul; Emerson, the Over-Soul; Aldous Huxley, Mind at Large; Carl du Prel, the Transcendental Ego, etc. Our individual minds are surface growths that appear separate and distinct but whose roots lie in a deeper psychic underground; there we are mutually entangled and part of a more extended mental system.
The second idea is one that James owes to Gustav Fechner, concerning the notion of a psychophysical threshold (see James, 1898/ 1961, pp. 295– 298, long footnote). It is the mobility of this threshold upon which turns the explanatory and the experimental potential of the transmission model. Lower the threshold and the contents of the subliminal mind become more accessible; this can come about by deliberate shamanic or mystical practice or by chance, blows to the head, or near-death experiences. In the normal struggle to adapt to the physical world, consciousness is confined and colored by contingent, body-mediated experience; we therefore mostly live our lives oblivious to any hint of our deep interior selves.
Technically, James’s move in this work is to posit substance dualism, a step beyond property dualism. According to the latter, mind is an irreducible property of living brains but is causally inert and supervenes on brain activity. Hence property dualism is not strong enough to carry the burden of survival or of any paranormal or mystical phenomena. It is a feckless philosophical position deeply at odds with human experience. According to the transmission model, however, mind is not a property of the brain but a user of the brain, indeed a person who enjoys autonomous self-existence. Few academically trained people are prepared to entertain substance dualism nowadays;[ 2] but few of them pay much attention to experiences characterized as supernormal, mystical, and the like, experiences that challenge mainline views of mind and body.
Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality (Kindle Locations 1913-1927). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.