Brain Fiction and Confabulation
July 12th, 2008 — themezoomPhilosopher Henri Bergson argued in the early 1900s that we have ways of understanding, and that these two ways are applied to objects well as people.
As Kolakowski put it: “We get to know a thing, Bergson says, either by circling around it, or by entering into it.
If we stay outside, the result depends on our standpoint and is expressed in symbols [Bergson called this analysis], whereas in the second kind of cognition we follows the life of the thing in an empathic identification with it [Bergson called this intuition]” (1985, 24). We even apply intuition to objects. For instance, if we see a piano fall out of a moving truck and smash on the pavement, we cannot help feeling squeamish, as if we are imagining what it might be like to experience that ourselves.
If Bergson is correct, this shows that the abilities we use are not applied only to humans, but are generalized to all objects.
The existence of animism among primitive peoples (in which trees, clouds, mountains, and so on are given human attributes) lends support to this idea. We (human brains) naturally tend to use intuition on everything, at least until we become “convinced” that doing so is no longer effective.
