# Observation, Overflow, and Attention  ## Metadata - Author: [[Robert Hopkins]] - Full Title: Observation, Overflow, and Attention - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses the differences between perceiving and imagining, highlighting how what we perceive overflows awareness, unlike what we imagine. It explores the concept of attention in imagining and how it differs from attention in perception. The text concludes that imagining does not exhibit attentional overflow and is limited in its ability to capture the phenomenology of attention. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/192690733 - Source File: The Sculpted Image by Robert Hopkins (2021-04-16 15-58-42).pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > The interest lies instead in the thought that this overflow is reflected in perception’s phenomenology. In contrast, the denial that distal overflow is found in imagining is substantive, whether read as metaphysics or phenomenology. All along I have presented that denial, no unconscious imainin, as intended to capture both how things are, and how they seem to imaginers to be. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3cq489janmgvbkr6eqa61bz)) > To imagine some object O as bearing some non-perspectival property NP is to place the perspectival property conjured for O, PP, in the profile of NP. A profile is an ordered series of perspectival properties that an object manifests, given various perceptual relations to it. So imagining NP involves imagining O as such as to manifest other perspectival properties, given other relations. So O is given in imagining as having perspectival properties not currently presented to the subject. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3cq71hfv17z7f50j49sdcvw)) > Observation is the active extension of receptive awareness. If we are aware of every aspect of what we imagine simply in imagining it, there is no realm into which awareness can be extended. no unconscious imagining entails no observation. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3cnn6hhemcf121chzxzr0p8)) > The profiling view offers resources for capturing the difference. The subject imagines the front ofthe cube by conjuring its visible figure. She imagines the rear, not by conjuring its visible figure, but by undertaking commitments to conjure that figure, should the occasion arise (e.g. should she go on to imagine the cube rotated). She is indeed aware of both, but in different ways. Conjuring is one kind ofawareness, committing is another. The visible figure ofthe rear, like all the other ‘hidden’ visible figures the cube manifests, is imagined at all only because she undertakes commitments to conjure it. Undertaking those combined commit- ments enriches the phenomenology ofher imagining, so that what is imaginatively present to her, even in this initial phase, is not simply the visible figure she conjures, but a whole cube. And in having a whole cube imaginatively present to mind, she is in that way aware of all its visible figures. Her awareness goes far beyond the visible figure she presently conjures, and for that matter beyond the parts of the cube whose figure it is. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3cp6shxh1jkax7wh9asfgwt)) > Imagining is a kind ofrepresenting that arises within, it is connected to our agency in the way Chapter 1 describes. Since it is experienced as representational, is connected to our agency in this way, and is experienced by us as so connected, a natural gloss is that imagining is a way ofrepresenting things to ourselves. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3dgwzjspjc4ry6epgc1kh0x)) > But if we do mistake dreaming for perceiving, doesn’t that show that, here at least, imagining exhibits the phenomenology of perception? Hallucinations might be taken to pose the same challenge. Here too, don’t we mistake imagining for perceiving? Some think the we sometimes make the converse mistake. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j3dde0ecnqcttnywd9bmg3mx))