Foci

 

Post-Impressionism / Jozsef Rippl-Ronai/ A Park at Night

So, I thought there was a pretty interesting article over at JMG’s yesterday.  As I have been thinking hard about thinking itself, along with the petty problem of what we can “know” and the current foray into what constitutes “self evident”, and JMG pretty much poured some gasoline onto the fire.  

So, silly me, I sent a link to Michael to make certain that he wasn’t becoming hypotensive and then started pondering on the nature of the beast.  The trouble is the more that I read and think the less clear things seem to become.  It may be possible that I am even more confused and uncertain after a good ponder than I was when I started this program a couple of weeks ago.

Mike’s response is apropos here:

Let’s walk through a bit of his reasoning. When you see an object—say, a cup of tea—what actually happens?  You experience a series of disconnected sensations of color and shape; one part of your mind assembles those into an image, and another part of your mind assigns a label to that image: “teacup.”  Without those processes of assemblage and labeling the world would be, in James’ useful phrase, nothing but “a blooming, buzzing confusion” of unconnected sensations. Try to follow the individual sensations back toward the object and you run into even more obstacles. How much does the image in your mind have in common with the game of electrochemical hopscotch in your optic nerve, how much information do the dancing electrons of the retina pass on from the antics of photons that spray through the eye, and how much does a splash pattern among photons really tell you about the quantum probability cloud of electrons that deflected those photons and set the process in motion?

From the JMG Piece

Michael’s Response:

The problem that I always notice now is that two different steps get combined when everybody automatically accepts the idea that what people become conscious of is determined by their mind, not the world.

Of course, it is, but consciousness needs to be distinguished the physical phenomena that the body perceives – because the latter are true, and nobody says they are not. Note that the “unconnected sensations “are not questioned. This is the physical world as true as a human can know, and there is no value in skepticism that questions the unconnected sensations. So humans do see the true world, but it does not matter due to the point made above about what happens to the unconnected sensations to make them mean something.

The patterns of light waves are true, so there is no such thing as misperception IF perception is distinguished from the subject of consciousness (the cup). The cup is not what is perceived, and this is why the cup is questionable. Water is not perceived with a mirage. What is perceived (and true), is patterns of light waves. What is not true, is that the warm earth is water, just because the patterns from warm earth look like those from water.

And there is no reason to make an issue of how an eye works. However, the eye perceives light waves is how the world is to that body, as long as the eye keeps working the same way. I crossed out the part that does not matter for that reason.

Thus, all the different ways that somebody can misunderstand the world have nothing to do with how their body perceives the world – IF perception is distinguished from the conscious object. People who thought that the sun went around the earth did not misperceive anything. When the earth rotates, it looks like the sun goes around the earth. There is no such thing as misperception.

So, when everybody accepts the idea that humans cannot understand the world, they do not realize that humans do indeed understand the world when they perceive it, because there can be no other world. This gets lost in the surrender.

Back to Me

So, now I am in some pretty deep water.  I am not certain that I am treading fast enough to keep up.  But it seems to me that all one can “know” is what one directly perceives, and even then you have to be careful because your perceptions really aren’t all that good.  Well enough for now.  I have a feeling that Diogenes would be quite pleased with this line of thought.

But again the project is worth it even by itself and I have a feeling that Diogenes was a bit of a dick that didn’t pay attention to other points of view, being so certain that he was right.  I am pretty certain that if I follow that path to the end I won’t get to the goal.

So I think that I will be spending my mornings in my soon to be dotage going over what other people think and writing cheerful misinterpretations of what I see in the world. 

I am thinking that I will need to put together a syllabus.