Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

gibberings of someone outraged by some trivial thing — well, that paints a different picture. There’s a sequence of things that I think clearly defines how we really see the world. The sequence goes — Sensation, Perception,

Impulse, Image, Symbol. In many ways it’s a disturbing sequence, and I’d like to try and explain it a little in the following paragraphs and to try to draw some conclusions.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that the sequence also occurs in many other creatures besides the human — with the exception of Symbol. Image occurs in only a few creatures besides our own. But Sensation, Perception, Impulse — they occur in all creatures we would properly call conscious.

So let’s start with Sensation. The word is used here to mean not only information reaching us by our five senses, but also our inner emotional state. But, as the reader is probably aware, we are flooded with sensations every moment of every day. Perhaps all of them are registered in some way, but there needs to be a filtering process to stop us being overwhelmed. Hence, Perception.

Perception, in the sequence, is again used in a particular way. Normally we might claim to start with our perception of the world and might see perception to be some kind of cool and dispassionate assessment of facts as they present themselves to us through our senses. But no. The sequence suggests that there’s a filter that picks out — and not in any obviously rational way — the sensations that we are going to choose to pay attention to. Perhaps there are deeper reasons for why we pick out certain

120