Knowing
If affect is embedded in and emanates from the world and perception is embedded in affect and guided by the world and into the world, then at the intersection of affect and perception emerges the image—the imagined, ‘image-minded’ objects of knowing. Gradually, over a lifetime, the mind constructs mental models of the world from the representational images it has accumulated. As the affect and sensory channels recapitulate the evolution of sensory-perception systems passed down through deep evolutionary time, human cognitive development recapitulates the evolutionary stages of increasing capacity for storing, organizing, and retrieving information. Over our lifetime, the number and also the kinds of mental models we carry increase and complexify.
The modern mind is a hybrid mind, which operates four different and quasi-independent cognitive systems: episodic, mimetic, oral/narrative, and theoretic. Each represents the evolution of cognitive capacity from the more primitive episodic system that we inherited from our mammalian ancestry: the mimetic, which we share with higher mammals, apes, and some avian species; oral/narrative, which is primarily a human capacity; and theoretic, which is exclusively human. Up the evolutionary ladder of our mind, each system is responsible for a representation of the world coded and internalized as knowledge about the world.
Episodic memory organizes gestalts of events, stored as deep psycho-somatic memory, and expresses them through unconscious patterns of behaviors—what psychologists call ‘primary schemas.’ Mimetic memory organizes event sequences, stores them as automatic patterns of behavior, and expresses them through the kinds of pre-verbal but explicit gestures that make our general culture, personality, mood, and intention recognizable to others.
Oral/narrative memories store oral and semantic stems and organize them into culturally shared stories that can be retrieved from the higher cognitive and linguistic systems of the human mind and that are expressed as implicit or explicit beliefs about how the world works, about ethical and normative concerns, and about our origins and destiny as a people.
Theoretic memory stores abstract and conceptual objects and organizes them into systems of representations that complexify hierarchically. These conceptual models are stored through complex processes in the most recently evolved regions of the human mind. They are expressed implicitly as mental modes of reasoning, like mathematics and logic, and as the cognitive architecture of our knowledge systems.
The Phenomenal Self pt 4 - Knowing
Thank you! What would you say that the main points of divergence with JV's 4P types of knowledge are?
In psychological/psychoanalytical discourse, your 4 types of knowing would be mainly 'intrapsychic', not that much intersubjective/extended. Would you agree? Thanks!