(BORGES, 1967, The Book of Imaginary Beings)
The problem of the origin of ideas contributes two curious creatures to the fauna of mankind’s imagination. One was invented sometime in the mid-eighteenth century; the other, a hundred years later.
The first creature is Condillac’s ‘sentient statue.’ Descartes professed the doctrine of innate ideas; in order to refute him, Étienne Bonnot Condillac imagined a marble statue shaped like a man’s body and animated by a soul that has never perceived, never thought. Condillac begins by endowing the statue with a single sense – smell, perhaps the least complex of the five senses. The fragrance of jasmine is the beginning of the statue’s biography; for one instant, there shall be nothing in all the universe but that odor. More precisely, that odor shall be the universe, which a second later will be the fragrance of a rose, and then a carnation. Let there be a single odor in the consciousness of the statue, and we have attention; let a fragrance last beyond the moment when the stimulus has passed, and we have memory; let one impression in the present and one from the past occupy the statue’s attention, and we have comparison; let the statues perceive analogies and differences, and we have judgment; let comparison and judgment occur again, and we have reflection; let a pleasant memory be more vivid than an unpleased one, and we have imagination. When the faculties of the understanding have been engendered, the faculties of the Will must follow – love and hate (attraction and aversion), hope and fear. The awareness of having passed thorough many states will give the statue as abstract notion of number; the awareness of being the odor of carnation yet of having been the odor of jasmine will endow it with the idea of Self.
Condillac would then grant his hypothetical man hearing, taste, sight, and, lastly, touch. This last sense reveals to the creature the fact that space exists and that within space, he himself is within a body; sounds, fragrances, and colors will have seemed to him, before that moment, simple variations or modifications of his consciousness.
The allegory we have just retold is titled Traité des sensations, and it was published en 1754; for this account of it, we have used the second volume of Bréhier’s Histoire de la philosophie.
The other creature engendered by the problem of the knowledge is Lotze’s ‘ hypothetical animal.’ More solitary than the statue that smells roses and at least becomes a man, the animal has but one sensitive spot on its skin, on the end of an antenna and therefore movable. The structure of this animal prevents it, as one can see, from receiving simultaneous perceptions, but Lotze believed that the ability to retract or project its sensitive antenna was enough to allow the all-but-isolated animal to discover the outside world (without the aid of Kantian categories) and to perceive the difference between a stationary object and a mobile one. Vaihinger admired this fiction; it is contained in the work titled Medizinische Psychologie, published in 1852.
* First impression – impression – attention – memory – comparison– judgment – reflection – imagination
This text is the main reference to guide the creative process of Instants of Metamorphosis v.02 and I think it could be a very interesting start point/structure to model the methodology based on systemic measures of complexity and organization. A mapping-narrative to help in capturing the flow of information – the emergence/transformations in the subject’s (the trans-actor) level.
As emergences, that represent different levels of organization and complexity of the system, we can have: the whole system/experience(the system as a whole, the installation as a process/Space-temporal structure one could experience through his senses); a second later we can have the ‘first impression’ and, after, a transformation of this impression into a instantaneous memory, according to our references stored. Then, there will be a single impression stored ( something that is ‘printed inside’, candidate to became a memory) in the consciousness of the trans-actor, and we have attention; let this impression “[…] last beyond the moment when the stimulus has passed, and we have memory;” let one impression in the present and one from the past occupy the trans-actor’s attention, and we have comparison; “[…] let the trans-actor “[…] perceive analogies and differences, and we have judgment; let comparison and judgment occur again, and we have reflection; let a pleasant memory be more vivid than an unpleased one, and we have imagination.”
links//
Rudolph Hermann Lotze, Medizinische Psychologie, Leipzig, 1852
Hans Vaihinger
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac,Traité des sensations
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