Radical Empiricism

Radical Empiricism is a concept that was explored by William James. This blog (if it endures long enough) will eventually get around to philosophical and psychological speculation.

But for now, I take the term not in a Jamesian sense, but as an imperative. One must be radically empiricist to have a chance of correctly apprehending reality. Even then, the odds are against us.

All of us exert some control over our own experience of reality. We to some extent choose what to attend to. We foreground particular cognitive or ethical frameworks to initially parse reality. We take actions that bring us into contact with different parts of reality and that influence reality. We make predictions with simulations of ourselves and reality and compare our evoked experiences to these simulations. We use the error signals to correct our simulations so that they more accurately predict reality.

But there are times when reality is too painful. We protect ourselves from aspects of reality that we predict will cause us to suffer. We take actions to limit our samplings of reality to those that we predict will allow us to adhere to more pleasant or more tolerable models of the world and of ourselves.

The maps of potential danger we use to shape our choices are of extreme importance because they designate the experiential borders we try to defend. In normal times, we seek to live our lives within these borders. The borders define the "size" of our life. Perhaps a better analogy is to dynamic range. We seek to have experiences that belong to a limited set of all possible experiences we could potentially choose to have.

One of the main goals of psychological development is to examine and refine our heuristics for choosing among possible experiences.  These heuristics are usually not obvious to us. We are generally easily persuaded that our model of reality is good enough. It doesn't occur to us that much of what we've ruled out as dangerous or uninteresting, is not. In fact, our heuristics may give rise to an impoverished model of reality that we never notice to be so, because we know no other.