Greta:
Thanks, it's The Hard Problem of moving from dynamic patterning from 'the theatre in our heads', so it's good that you are pushing in that direction. Still, this is more a matter of dynamics than patterning in the sense of neuroscientists associating certain patterns of brain activity with certain thoughts and emotions.
There is some depth to it, though. Consider what this looping means; this is not just about observing patterns but considering the dynamics that bring the patterns about, I suppose a kind of fundamental pattern. What does it mean to bring something of the outside world inside of you? What does it mean to take something within you and give it over to the outside environment?
Some concepts come straight to mind: connectedness, interdependence, love. Another notion springs from this is the fuzziness of the boundary between self and environment. We are surrounded by a cloud of bacteria and dead skin cells, the air around us at all times betraying your subtly unique chemical signatures; there is a magnetic field and a field of heat, plus the mental field around us that we refer to as "personal space". These things are as much a part of us as our our other insensate aspects such as hair, fingernails, internal waste products, the brain, and so on.
That's about where I'm up to. Do you have suggestions?
Well, I wouldn't call it a suggestion. I would call it two hundred years of philosophy. And once you cross over, there is no going back. But it does take, at first, a leap--not of faith so much, but wonder and inquiry. I think a person has to be dissatisfied with something to make changes. As Thomas Kuhn put it, changes in normal science require paradigm shifts that are not at first welcome at all. Most of the time it is just normal science. There has to be something, to proceed with Kuhn, some anomaly that stands in a researcher's midst that defy's accepted theory. Of course, here the anomaly is not one that empirical science can deal with. EO Wilson, Dawkins, and others do not give a fetid dingo's kidney about the matters presented by Kant, Husserl, Levinas, for there is nothing their years of training can say. Trouble is, it takes so much work, just as with any of the hard science disciplines, to truly assimilate what these people are talking about. Science produces, and it impacts culture clearly, dynamically; philosophy has never, say, ameliorated the human condition. This is not what it does. You simply have to insist on understanding right up until the threshold of knowing, where the words run out.
So, having said this, I'll be blunt: all of it, the magnetic field, cloud of bacteria, looping, the boundary between self and environment, and anything else you can thing of, literally, belong to, as you say, the theater in our heads. Only this is not quite right. For such theater implies an outside of the theater, and there is no outside of this theater. Hawkins' anecdote is about turtles, here it is theaters: theaters all the way down.
Why do people think like this? The answer is language and logic. When you behold a phenomenon and call it a magnetic field, you are first and foremost taking that thing AS something, and this is done in language. When scientists discuss stars and paramecia they are doing so inside, if you will, logic. And like counting elephants,the number you get is not an elephant, so when you measure, calculate, apply theory, classify, predict and so forth in science, you are not going to end up with that-out-there. You will get conformation of a thesis in language. You will get truth; the truth that, say, stars are made of gases that can be determined by spectral analysis is first, a function of the language that is applied to say anything at all. Truth is propositional and, as Rorty points out, there are no propositions "out there". He thinks that I no more can have knowledge of a star in the sense scientists take it, than a dented car fender can have knowledge of the offending guard rail. It is the myth of knowing that boils his noodle. What is knowledge for him? Have to go through other reading but the gist is knowldge is bound up in knowING, which occurs in time (Heidegger: we are not in time; we are time), and is dynamic in a very intuitive way: we solve problems when we learn, or learning is problem solving, so when you have that feeling that you've GOT IT, it is the culmination of got-its in your personal history. That is what knowing is ALL about for Rorty and his pragmatist forerunners.
In epistemological terms, foundationalism has bitten the dust, and the attempt to understand what is left, some kind of coherence of meaningful utterances rather than there being, well, a kind Moses tablet that binds ideas to the "outthereness" of things has led to the awfulness of postmodernism: the dismissal of all grand narratives, that is, narratives ABOUT absolutes; the insight that no term is stand alone and requires a language setting for meaning to make sense at all, leading to those annoying games in which language chases its own tail (my moniker is the snake that swallows its own tail. It was lifted from Hilary Putman's Many Faces of Realism and presents impossibility of language stepping out of itself in its propositional claims about the way the world is.)
But the issues are like this. I mean, how can you ever take empirical knowledge serious in a philosophically foundational way, if you can never get past the simple act of perception? And there is no outside of this theater, even in propositions like "I am" and "I have being". Being and Time?
Unless you go with Husserl, Kiekegaard, Levinas,and so on. That is when it gets interesting for me.
Hope this wasn't too bothersome.