Miscellany: On complementary modes of perception, ethics, freedom, and other topics

On “top-down” versus “bottom-up” perceptual modes: This dichotomy seems to be another facet of the same polarity that it is possible to encounter in myriad contexts under such diverse rubrics as deduction/induction, left-brain/right-brain, and, transposed into the key of seventeenth century European Enlightenment schools, rationalism/empiricism. People tend to pit these modes of cognition as antitheses…

Waves of Thinking Lap the Shore of Consciousness

Thinking issues forth from the I and joins in identity with every object. On its return, it stamps the inverse, frozen, and summary image of this gesture into the nervous system. This impression shocks the sleeping I awake as it flashes up as representations in consciousness. But could the I remain awake and go together…