“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Anticipation

...Now here's an interesting Heideggerian theme. It turns out that there has been some recent neuroscience on memory that shows that a lot of it is proleptic. In other words, memories are used not to dredge through the past, but to anticipate the future. The brain is futural. HT Dirk Felleman.

1 comment:

Bill Benzon said...

Oh, yes yes yes. The brain is an anticipatory machine. For one thing, you move through the world, right? That means that what you see will change as a function of your movement. Well, vision is enormously computationally expensive. So the visual system is primed to anticipate changes in visual input attributable to your own motion. That lessens the computational load on 'bottom-up' processing. And more.