Foci

[degringolade]

 

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.

Comments

HOORAY FOR CONSCIOUSNESS

[mschmidt]

“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.”

*****

COMMENTS:
The world communicates itself to a human body via physical phenomena that the body is able to perceive such as light waves, sound waves, scent, force, etc. The physical world, whatever it is, does not communicate itself in beliefs about what the physical phenomena means. The world communicates itself in perceivable physical phenomena, not beliefs. Thus, nobody perceives a cup, and everybody perceives the truth from the world, which is patterns of light waves changing with time. Notice that neither the author nor the philosophers say that the unconnected sensations are not the real world. But they forget about this part - and this is my point in criticizing their conclusion that humans do not have access to the real world.

The author, who seems to be well-read in philosophy, describes what philosophers concluded about the separation between the mental and physical world, and what he says is accurate I think, but he does not analyze carefully enough what happens with consciousness if the goal is to understand consciousness itself. If somebody does not care about what they do unconsciously, then none of what I am saying matters and what the author says is fine. But the point seems to be that people are interested, and if they are, then I say the author is misleading them just like the early philosophers do.

Consciousness (patterns of light waves) MUST BE distinguished from consciousness (the cup), and then the former must not be forgotten about and disregarded. Everything would be fine with the above analysis if the conclusion is simply that the world itself does not determine what a body becomes conscious of; but the next step of concluding that the body does not perceive the world as it really is, is wrong. To see why it is wrong, perception and consciousness need to be distinguished. The unconnected sensations are what the body perceives, and the cup is what the body becomes conscious of.

And to prop up the automatically accepted idea that the world is unknowable, the author adds concern about the body’s ability to perceive the world:

“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?”

I propose that all this is beside the point with regard to understanding consciousness. If an experiment could show that the performance of the eye is repeatable, then there is no reason to imagine that the eye does not perceive the true physical world. A person can imagine this, but why should they?

What value can there be in a skepticism that imagines there is some other physical world than the only one the body can perceive? The value would be of the same type as imagining there is a God that a body cannot perceive – or electrons. But the fact that the eye does not perceive electrons does not mean that the light waves it does perceive are something other than the real world.

Also, if every set of eyes is slightly different, then so what? Apparently human eyes are similar enough for people to assume they see the same cup. If somebody is color blind, the question is, what do they perceive that is not real phenomena from the real world? I say nothing. They see a grey cup. How is the grey cup not real? Is the cup not the real cup because it is grey instead of light blue? Somebody might think so; but they will be wrong if they say that the colorblind person misperceived something. What the person realizes via experience and communication with others, is that they are not able to perceive certain features of the world just like they are not able to perceive electrons.

This is a bit of a digression from the main point, which is why the author and the philosophy he is discussing lead everybody into an erroneous conclusion. The mistake is in failure to distinguish between perception and consciousness. The former is physical, and the latter is not. The world communicates itself in physical phenomena, so the world is indeed a separate issue from consciousness (the cup) because the world never said it was a cup in the first place. The world never says it means anything other than the physical phenomena that a body can perceive. What does a pattern of light waves mean? The world never says, the perceiver must decide because meaning is not something physical.

What I am presenting here is basically the philosophy of Riccardo Manzotti and others like him who propose that the so-called “Hard Problem” defined by neuroscientist is a ruse. Science cannot explain consciousness because consciousness is not linked to time, and the only way science can study anything, is to abstract it from the process of the world. If consciousness is abstracted for study, it evaporates – consciousness results from an interconnection between a physical world and a nervous system and neither can be abstracted from the other because the physical world is not a THING, it is a PROCESS moving forward in time.

One conclusion that seems reasonable to me, is that the wonderful thing about consciousness, is that science has no access to it. Neuroscience has access to physical phenomena, and no matter how amazing its discoveries get, science is denied access to consciousness. Hooray for consciousness!

Correction

[mschmidt]

The first word in the third paragraph is supposed to be "Perception".