#3 Locke in Detail - What is the Perceiver?

Transcript Philosophy Unveiled 3 Hello, this is the third episode of Philosophy Unveiled, by the author Lane Friesen. My name is Rachel, and I will be doing the reading today. We’re doing to take a look at the cognitive style of Perceiver, an example of which is the philosopher John Locke. Just a reminder. The resources available are at the website www.cognitivestyles.com, where you can find more information about personality styles, and you may also view the pdf file, orderedcomplexity.pdf. Now, first of all, the Perceiver is a very idea-oriented individual. I’d like to refer back to the first episode, in which we discussed object binding and remind you that it was done quite differently by the two philosophers. If George Berkeley the Mercy saw Rufus the cat, it would be a different object than if he touched Rufus the cat, and if he heard Rufus the cat say miaow, that would be yet a different object, and his perception of the idea of cat would be the combination of all those three sensory inputs. Now, John Locke the Perceiver had a very different perception of an idea. If he saw Rufus and he petted Rufus, and he heard the cat Rufus purr, it’s still Rufus for him, the same cat. His idea of a cat is the characteristics of Rufus combined with perhaps the characteristics of Tigger and Tinkerbell. Together, they form his idea of a cat. You see, it’s quite a higher level of object linking. OK, I’ll now move to a reading of the Perceiver profile from the book Ordered Complexity. You have strong principles. Your convictions are not affected by peer pressure, opposition or the opinions of experts. You become even more determined when people put pressure on you. Only facts will change your mind. These facts, however, can come from anyone, even from a five-year-old. When facts are reasonable and make sense to you, then it does not matter who has said them, you must accept them - even when no one else does. You have a good memory for trivia and statistics, especially in your area of interest. Somehow you remember the small and unrelated things. For example: you might just happen to know how many pounds of apples were sold in America in 1976. You heard it, knew it was true, and accepted it without thinking. For some reason, it stuck. You are probably not that good with names, though, for they link words and faces. Often, your thoughts come together in strange ways to produce new ideas. You think of one thing, then another; suddenly it all fits together in a novel way. “Aha,” you say. It surprises you. Let’s see what the Perceiver does with his ideas. You find it easy to tell the extent to which ideas or experiences are feasible or possible. In your mind there are circles of reasonableness: when things are out near the edges, you might say, “I suppose this could be possible.” As things link to more things that you know are right, you become increasingly certain. When something new seems like something else that you know is wrong, you may reject it without thinking. When facts that are right become similar to facts that are wrong, you find it hard to tell them apart. You have to see the Big Picture before you can understand and evaluate ideas. Often you learn in multiple passes - major principles first, then details. You may skim through points to get a general idea, then look at them more carefully. It makes it hard for you to learn something com­pletely new, such as this. You look for facts that are wrong; they become labeled as bad. People some­times accuse you of being negative: you are simply very good at seeing the problem; it is harder for you to come up with a solution. Let’s see how the Perceiver links ideas. You think associatively. One word triggers others that sound the same and are spelled differently. You think of alternate meanings of the same word. It doesn’t take conscious thought; it happens automatically. You may form matching words into puns or short jokes. Often, you are a ‘black and white’ person. Principles sort into ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ everything you see is compared to them, and you judge accord­ingly. Three-dimensional images form within you as moral decisions become visual structures in your mind. An insight into boundaries makes you the conservative watchman on walls of thinking around you. You are usually able to deflate people’s ideas with short humorous comments. They almost say themselves. In subtle ways, you use these pointed remarks to make other people face reality. Even as you speak out, though, you wish profoundly that you could be less outspoken and more gentle - less of the fool tilting at every windmill. You admire those able to compromise on method while guarding princi­ple. Yet you also hate dishonesty and hypocrisy. If someone is wrong, and you know it, but he acts consistently with what he believes, you will respect him. At least he has a conscience. When some individual continually violates his own beliefs, however, it becomes impossible to discuss things with him any further - even if you could convince him that he was wrong, nothing would change! You may speak very forcefully to him; you know how to use sarcasm and irony effectively. You may complain about his behavior to others. At some point, though, he suddenly ceases, for you, to be a ‘person,’ and you ignore him. When you see such a one hurting others, though - violating their personalities, restricting their personal freedoms - then disgust flames up again into white-hot outrage and moral indignation. Suddenly, ‘conserva­tive you’ turns into the crusader, the knight of old, the gun-slinger on the white horse enforcing law, order, and justice, calling for repentance or reform. Concepts such as justice, duty and honor mean a lot to the Perceiver. You have a very strong sense of duty: when something needs to be done, and can be done, then it should be done. If you sense, however, that your effort is almost certain not to change anything, then suddenly you too can live with doing nothing - ”Nobody can expect me to do the impossi­ble!” It eats at you, though, and you may become quite cynical. You like to be a pioneer, away from the group, working on the new and exciting; when you are out on the frontiers, then you know that what you are doing is important. You can even live without acceptance or approval from others for a time, if you must, as long as you see results from your efforts. You are one who makes quick decisions based on the available informa­tion, and makes them now; yet you can also make other varying or even opposing decisions when new information comes in. You tend to become many-sided as you implement widely divergent ideas. Implementation excites you; cohesiveness can be secondary. The fact that all of the many sides find union in your thinking is for you often sufficient unity, adequate organization. Your speaking, similarly, is off-the-cuff, triggered by the environment. It is as everything hangs in mid-air before you that one idea sparks an­other, that you can respond to the comments or asides of others, and create the Big Picture that says it clearly and concisely. When someone asks you to repeat the same talk again later, you may not be able to do it: “I can’t perform on demand.” There is a secret admiration for those with the patience to formulate effective long-range plans, and then the discipline to communicate them and see them brought into reality. You procrastinate easily. You hate the little details: they are not worth the effort, and so they pile up. They nag at you. Finally you may give up: “I can’t do it all.” Perhaps you have learned not to procrastinate - it takes effort to maintain your discipline. The Perceiver, who holds the links, may link to very differing environments. You can be a real pack rat. Again, it takes effort to throw things away. Even when something is useless, you hate to get rid of it, because it might become useful in the future. You may have multiple bank accounts in many banks. You can have relationships with very differing groups and kinds of people; each may be quite unaware of your connections with the others. If work is boring or your principles are not working - or if your procras­tination and the mess around you push you into a mental hole - you can escape to an alternate world. You may get involved in things like science fiction, westerns, medieval chivalry, or computers. It is a world in which principles really work, where the hero stands against all odds, and single­handedly saves the world. Success comes without much prepara­tion, results are almost instant, and there are multiple personhood expanders such as horses, cars, communicating computers, rockets, tanks, and jet fighters. The fact that the Perceiver is at a higher level of processing means that he can very easily judge Mercy experiences - that’s conscience. In all of this, one thing is sure: you, the Perceiver, are very sensitive to personal criti­cism. You don’t feel personal criticism is fair, for you always speak to the problem, not to the person. Also, you cannot repent of what you are, and to become something else would be hypocrisy on your part. Your conscience is highly developed. And you know it, for you can suffer terribly from self-condemnation. Mistakes on your part are associ­ated naturally with judgment. To link in a balanced way with mercy, and to receive forgiveness from those you have hurt, is not always easy. Yes, you are innovative, and conservative, as well as very sensitive. Yet you are also naturally optimistic, for action rooted in right principle must, in the final analysis, produce right result. And you carry that optimism to others around you. That wraps up our reading from the Perceiver. I’d like now to give an overview of where we’re headed in the next few sessions. Next time we’ll be bringing in another philosopher, Descartes, and we’ll look at how he views the senses - senses that we discussed in this episode, seeing, and touching and hearing. And that will prepare us for the profile of the Facilitator, which is a separate cognitive style. We’ll look also at Locke and the substratum. Then we’ll go into the profile of the Exhorter, which is yet another cognitive style, and that will wrap up our topic of object recognition. After that we’ll go on to epistemology, and for those of you who don’t know, the science of epistemology is how we know what we know. That concludes episode number three of Philosophy Unveiled. Thank you for listening.

Blip | December 23, 2007

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