From the very beginning of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke makes it very clear that he is of the strictly empiricist disposition, going as far as to dedicated the entire first book of the essay to tearing down the idea that humans posses any sort of innate knowledge.
As I read a philosophy text, I find that the experience is the most enriching when one ‘goes along’ with the point the author is trying to make, despite any reservations the reader may have. However, having just finished book one of the aforementioned Locke text, I found myself fully on the anti-innate idea train until I stumbled upon a post of a three eyed snake. The trioptic reptile actually had little to do with the sudden change of intellectual allegiance, rather it was a comment about how the snake would be able to perform ‘triangulation’ with its three eyes. Issues with the use of the world triangulation in that instance aside, this prompted me to consider some of the implicit subconscious processes that our brain does just in developing the perceptual experience, such as all of the organic mathematics that allow for depth perception or the sensing of the direction of a noise. Clearly, if these things are ideas, than they are completely innate by the standards of Locke, as they require no experience at all to perceive and be completely assented to.
(From BBC.com)
But this point rests mostly on what one considers to be an idea, as compared to an instinct or a reflex. Locke makes this delineation in the first book by discussing the fact that feelings of hunger and pain are merely instincts, and not necessarily thoughts. This certainly makes sense when one adopts the definition of idea as a mental image on pictures in their mind, as hunger and pain don’t have any associated mental image or abstract content besides the sensation itself. It is not an idea in the way that any of the raw data of the senses is not an idea. However, what we are considering here is not the raw data, but rather the subconscious, automatic processing that uses this raw sensory data as fodder for deriving further information. I think this is more debatably considered an idea on the basis that this derived information has a direct impact of the perceptual experience. It helps inform the mental image that one calls their view of the world, which is one of the most fundamental ideas of all.
Does this mean that this set of organic algorithms is an innate idea? Locke and his 1600s attitudes towards life would likely respond in the negative, since animals and the like can have depth perception and clearly are not capable of thinking in the same way that you or I am. If one wants to adopt the conception of animals as mere biological machines, then this would make a lot of sense as it did to many of the people at the time. Another objection likely to be mention by Locke is the fact that one cannot remember the idea of depth perception, thus it is not innate. However, going by the same logic that Locke presents in his text, the thought is always present in any use of the senses, so what is constantly in the scope of the mind need not ever been remembered.
So it appears that a line needs to be drawn between instinct, reflex and idea. I will adopt Locke’s convention regarding instinct as feelings with no associated through. Reflexes, although awfully similar to instincts, I will consider to be automatic thoughts or actions that present themselves when certain stimuli arises. In the following sections, I will see to form the argument that the implicit spatial computations of the brain fall into neither of these categories and warrant themselves as innate ideas. Or, at the very least, an innate behavior of the brain that lies somewhere between physiology and the experience of lucidity.
One large issue with Locke’s consideration of the nature of thought is that he makes the strong claim in the beginning of his second book that one will always be aware of the thoughts occurring in their head (57). This cannot be seen as further from the truth, and all we must do to realize this is consider how the mind can ‘work in the background’ on issues while not concerning our conscious attention. Think of the scientist who has a scientific revelation while doing the dishes, or wiping the table. Though their mind was clearly not consciously concerned with the content of the spontaneous breakthrough, progress in that thought was made. This is suggestive of the fact that the apparatus of reasoning continues its work, even without the spotlight of conscious attention. This fact is further corroborated by advances in our modern understanding of how the brain works, which claims that most learning is done while asleep, while the limelight of lucidity is wholly shut off.
So if an idea need not be consciously recognized as occurring to oneself, what does this mean for the spatial processing of the mind? Here we must discuss whether this processing is to be considered an part of the sensory data with which the mind engages or whether it is a thought that acts upon this sensory data. While one might initially go with the former characterization, I find that there is a strong divide between the action of the senses and the action of the mind (where action of the mind could be considered an idea). While all sensory data must undergo some processing to become a recognizable sensation in the mind (lest it be just a series of impulses), there is quite a greater degree of sophistication in the processing of this sensible data when compared to the conversion of the raw-sense data into something that the mind can seize.
Consider the sense of touch, which is primarily governed by the somatosensory system.
To be continued upon receipt of response from OiU