The Sensory Order Quotes

“The very conception of such a completion of the task of science is a contradction in terms. The quest of science is, therefore, by its nature a never-ending task in which every step ahead with necessity creates new problems.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“We have seen that the classification of the stimuli performed by our senses will be based on a system of acquired connexions which reproduce, in a partial and imperfect manner, relations existing between the corresponding physical stimuli. The “model” of the physical world which is thus formed will give only a very distorted reproduction of the relationships existing in that world; and the classification of these events by our senses will often prove to be false, that is, give rise to expectations which will not be borne out by events.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“Perception is . . . always an interpretation, the placing of something into one of several classes of objects. An event of an entirely new kind which has never occurred before, and which sets up impulses which arrive in the brain for the first time, could not be perceived at all.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“At the same time it should be pointed out, however, that in one respect in which the task we are undertaking is most in need of a solid foundation, theoretical biology is only just beginning to provide the needed theoretical tools and concepts. An adequate account of the highly purposive character of the action of the central nervous system would require as its foundation a more generally accepted biological theory of the nature of adaptive and purposive processes than is yet available.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“We must probably assume that, in the course of evolution, the original direct connections between particular stimuli and particular responses are being preserved, but that control mechanisms are being superimposed capable of inhibiting or modifying these direct responses when they are inappropriate in view of other simultaneously acting stimuli.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“Sense experience … presupposes the existence of a sort of accumulated ‘‘knowledge,’’ of an acquired order of the sensory impulses based on their past cooccurrence; and this knowledge, although based on (pre-sensory) experience, can never be contradicted by sense experiences and will determine the forms of such experiences which are possible.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“We have seen that the classification of the stimuli performed by our senses will be based on a system of acquired connections which reproduce, in a partial and imperfect manner, relations existing between the corresponding physical stimuli. The “model” of the physical world which is thus formed will give only a very distorted reproduction of the relationships existing in that world; and the classification of these events by our senses will often prove to be false, that is, give rise to expectations which will not be borne out by events.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“The classification of events in the external world effected by our senses proves not to be a 'true' classification, i.e. not one which enables us adequately to describe the regularities in this world, and...the properties which our senses attribute to these events are not objective properties of these individual events, but merely attributes defining the classes which our senses assign them.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“What we call mind is thus a particular order of a set of events taking place in some organism and in some manner related to but not identical with, the physical order of events in the environment.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“[Our “explanation” of mental processes] agrees with empiricism in assuming that all our knowledge stems from experience. But according to our interpretation, a large part of this knowledge stems from a strange kind of experience: one that antecedes conscious sensation and perception and that first creates that order of nerve stimuli that gives them a conscious value or significance. Conscious experience thus presupposes the existence of an order which is indeed created by a sort of pre-conscious or pre-perceptive experience, but which itself is not accessible by conscious experience. Every experience thus implies an inclusion into an existing system that must be considered as given and that is incapable of being falsified by experience. Kant’s categories are here resurrected as ordering principles that the organism does indeed acquire via the kind of impact of the outside world that I call pre-perceptive experience, but which themselves then become a condition of any conscious experience and cannot on their part be verified thereby.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“We may conceive of a machine constructed for the purpose of performing simple processes of classification of this kind. We can, for instance, imagine a machine which “sorts out” balls of various size which are placed into it by distributing them between different receptacles. . . . Another kind of machine performing this simplest kind of classification might be conceived as in a similar fashion sorting out individual signals arriving through any one of a large number of wires or tubes.We shall regard here any signal arriving through one particular wire or tube as the same recurring event which will always lead to the same action of the machine. The machine would respond similarly also to signals arriving through some different tubes or wires, and any such group to which the machine responded in the same manner would be regarded as events of the same class. Such a machine would act like a simplified telephone exchange in which each of a number of incoming wires was permanently connected with, say a particular bell, so that any signal coming in on any one of these wires would ring that bell. All the wires connected with any one bell would then carry signals belonging to the same class. An actual instance of a machine of this kind is provided by certain statistical machines for sorting cards on which punched holes represent statistical data.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“The phenomena with which we are here concerned are commonly discussed in psychology under the heading of “discrimination.” This term is somewhat misleading because it suggests a sort of “recognition” of physical differences between the events which it discriminates, while we are concerned with a process which creates the distinctions in question. The same is true of most of the other available words which might be used, such as “to sort out,” “to differentiate,” or “to classify.” The only appropriate term which is tolerably free from misleading connotations would appear to be “grouping.” For the purposes of the following discussion it will nevertheless be convenient to adopt the term “to classify” with its corresponding nouns “classes” and “classification” in a special technical meaning. . . . By “classification” we shall mean a process in which on each occasion on which a certain recurring event happens it produces the same specific effect. . . . All the different events which whenever they occur produce the same effect will be said to be events of the same class, and the fact that every one of them produces the same effect will be the sole criterion which makes them members of the same class.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“To think of mind as a substance is to ascribe to mental events some attributes for whose existence we have no evidence and which we postulate solely on the analogy of what we know of material phenomena.
In the strict sense of the terms employed an account of mental phenomena which avoids the conception of a distinct mental substance is . . . the opposite of materialistic, because it does not attribute to mind any property which we derive from our acquaintance with matter. In being content to regard mind as a peculiar order of events, different from the order of events which we encounter in the physical world, but determined by the same kind of forces as those that rule in that world, it is indeed the only theory which is not materialistic.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“The formation of abstract concepts thus constitutes a repetition on a higher level of the same kind of process of classification by which the differences between the sensory qualities are determined.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“Science thus tends necessarily towards an ultimate state in which all knowledge is embodied in the definitions of the objects with which it is concerned; and in which all true statements about these objects are therefore analytical or tautological and could not be disproved by any experience. The observation that any object did not behave as it should could then only mean that it was not an object of the kind it was thought to be.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“[I]n so far as we have been led into opposition to some of the theses traditionally associated with empiricism, we have been led to their rejection not from an opposite point of view, but on the contrary, by a more consistent and radical application of its basic idea. Precisely because all our knowledge, including the initial order of our different sensory experiences of the world, is due to experience, it must contain elements which cannot be contradicted by experience.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“There is … a part of our knowledge which, although it is the result of experience, cannot be controlled by experience, because it constitutes the ordering principle of that universe by which we distinguish the different kinds of objects of which it consists and to which our statements refer.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“That in perception we do not merely add together given sensory elements, and that complex perceptions possess attributes which cannot be derived from the discernible attributes of the separate parts, is one of the conclusions most strongly emphasized by practically all recent developments in psychology.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“Certain mental processes which are normally based on impulses proceeding in certain fibres may, after these fibres have been destroyed, be relearned by the use of some other fibres. Certain associations may be effectively brought about through several alternative bundles of connexions, so that, if any one of these paths is severed, the remaining ones will still be able to bring about the result. Such effects have been observed and described under the names of “vicarious functioning” and “equipotentiality”.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“While we are clearly often not aware of mental processes because they have not yet risen to the level of consciousness but proceed on what are (both physiologically and psychologically) lower levels, there is no reason why the conscious level should be the highest level, and many grounds which make it probable that, to be conscious, processes must be guided by a supra-conscious order which cannot be the object of its own representations. Mental events may thus be unconscious and uncommunicable because they proceed on too high a level as well as because they proceed on too low a level.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“While our theory leads us to deny any ultimate dualism of the forces governing the realms of mind and that of the physical world respectively . . . we shall never be able to bridge the gap between physical and mental phenomena; and for practical purposes . . . we shall permanently have to be content with a dualistic view of the world.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“. . . it is impossible that our brain should ever be able to produce a complete explanation . . . of the particular ways in which it itself classifies external stimuli. . . . [T]o ‘explain’ our own knowledge would require that we should know more than we actually do, which is, of course, a contradictory statement.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“While there can thus be nothing in our mind which is not the result of past linkages (even though, perhaps, acquired not by the individual but by the species), the experience that the classification based on past linkages does not always work, i.e., does not always lead to valid predictions, forces us to revise the classification.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“. . . we do not first have sensations which are then preserved by memory, but it is a result of physiological memory that the physiological impulses are converted into sensations. The connections between the physiological elements are thus the primary phenomenon which creates the mental phenomena.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“The qualities which we attribute to the experienced objects are, strictly speaking, not properties of objects at all, but a set of relations by which our nervous system classifies them or, to put it differently, all we know about the world is of the nature of theories and all ‘experience’ can do is to change these theories. All sensory perception is necessarily ‘abstract’ in that it always selects certain aspects or features of a given situation. Every sensation, even the ‘purest,’ must therefore be regarded as an interpretation of an event in the light of the past experience of the individual or the species.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology

“The phenomena with which we are here concerned are commonly discussed in psychology under the heading of ‘discrimination’. This term is somewhat misleading because it suggests a sort of ‘recognition’ of physical differences between the events which it discriminates, while we are concerned with a process which creates the distinctions in question. The same is true of most of the other available words which might be used, such as ‘to sort out’, ‘to differentiate’, or ‘to classify’.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology