Do you feel pressure on your shoulder and then via thinking connect 'tapping' to it and know that somebody is tapping your shoulder?
That sounds not only too wordy but just wrong to experience.
Do you do all of that and then need to attach 'effect' to the 'tapping' in order to be curious about the cause?
Again, people say I can bee too wordy
I know this doesn't sound very spiritual. In fact, this can even sound naive when taken out of context.
But you actually do just feel the tapping on your shoulder. Very often that is the case.
Can we have a kind of experience in which we know that we don't yet know what we are experiencing. Of course!
But we should not reduce that kind of experience to being an example of what
really happens all the time. That is wrong. And it isn't fair to either that wonderful kind of experience nor is it fair to what it feels like when we feel somebody tap on our shoulder.
Well, then....
What about the times we know that we don't yet know how to label our experience.
Look at that kind of experience:
I'm at a coffee shop typing an important email. I notice myself annoyed because there is a rumbling that is distracting me. I keep ignoring it and going back to my typing. I haven't even tried to know what the rumbling is. Then I listen to it for a second and actually wonder, "What on earth is that sound?" I listen, curious about the sound now. The idea of a tractor pops into my mind. But I notice myself thinking< "No, not a tractor..." I keep listening.....suddenly I realize this is exactly the sound I read about in a newspaper article about the new trash trucks. I feel certain it must be one of those. By the time I turn to look, it has stopped and the vehicle is gone
Or we can pretend I listened to the rumble and after five seconds of really listening, suddenly the idea popped in "Dump truck" and I looked and was right.
Notice a few things:
1) hearing a 'rumble' is already very cognitive. Not abstract or intellectual. but cognitive in that 'rumbles' have their own connotations.
2) As I listen carefully, the ideas come to me. It would be a bad metaphor to say that I went and selected from a bunch of options.
I hear you saying, "But what about those rare cases where we DO INDEED have to select through a bunch of conceptual options?"
Okay, let's go back.
I listen to the rumble and the thought of it being a drill come to mind, then the thought of it possibly being a car, then a truck, then a plane. I notice that I am still confused. I notice myself visualizing each of these options. I carefully think of each one and then listen to the rumble. As I do this, other options come to mind. I have six or seven concepts. I notice that three of them feel more likely and that the others feel less likey the more I examine them. I start slowly holding each of the three concepts and listening and trying to see if it could be what the rumble is. As I do this a new idea pops into my mind and I feel certain that it must be it. I turn and it was actually one of the three. Or I turn and it was correct! Doesn't matter. The phenomenology is there.
So notice that even in the most extreme case where we hear a rumble and then spend five minutes trying to select a concept from out of 8 possibilities that the structure of experience remains the same.
Claiming that Rudolf Steiner is obviously talking about this kind of experience when he clearly states what must happen for us to notice an object is just sloppy thinking.
And, I think I've shown here, that EVEN IF Steiner said, "Indeed, there is always a VERY RAPID process that is just like the slower versions that can often take eight or ten minutes. The rapid process is nearly imperceptible but it must happen each time we encounter a percept." We would still be able to notice that a 'rumble' is a distinct kind of observation and each option that came to mind arose spontaneously. Even our motivation to stck with it for eight minutes arose spontaneously. Even if we said, "Oh, I'm going to do this for exactly four more minutes" THAT arose spontaneously. Even if we immediately ignored our intention to stick with it for four minutes, that was spontaneous.
So now that I've given a phenomenology to the objection that Steiner is talking about times we know we don't know what we are experiencing, my hunch is that the dance continues in the same popping away pattern.