Myers/James Filter Theory and Contemporary Science: Toward Reconciliation

Esalen is offering this excerpt for free: From Chapter 9, Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century,  Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, et al ->

Myers/James Filter Theory and Contemporary Science: Toward Reconciliation

We also need to specify more carefully our interpretation of James’s “transmission” or “filter” theory, originally introduced in Chapter 1 and recurring intermittently thereafter throughout this book. As invoked informally and loosely so far, this amounts only to a family of related but somewhat cloudy metaphors bearing a variety of unexamined connotations and implications regarding the role of the brain in our mental life.

“Transmission,” for example, suggests faithful conveyance from one place to another, but this is certainly not what Myers had in mind with his the ory of the Subliminal Self and its relations with the supraliminal self. The related term “filter,” which like Aldous Huxley’s “reducing valve” suggests selection, narrowing, and loss, is much more appropriate to that relationship, and for that reason we greatly prefer it as a shorthand description of Myers’s theory.

But how does this relate to the brain? Myers’s theory as he himself developed it is entirely psychological, not philosophical, and he also says extremely little about the brain. It is rather James, the psychologist and philosopher, who explicitly links these notions of transmission and filtering with the brain. James in fact suggests a variety of metaphors, but the one that has most commonly been seized upon by others is that of optical devices such as colored glass, lenses, and prisms. The common feature is that a beam of integral white light presented to such devices comes out the other side filtered, reduced, focused, redirected, or otherwise altered in some systematic fashion.

Credit to Eslaen -> Adam Crabtree