Perception and physical reality

@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Nothing says "kid with an inflated sense of his own understanding" like conscistent errors in simple grammar...

Good questions about epiphenomenality. What a word.

I actually like both you and fresco. It's obvious to me that you guys have a few things figured and I'm sure we both realize what types of insight are rare.

Why are they rare, though? Does it have to do with intelligence? I'll lay it down that it doesn't. Remember the times when insight came. Was there not a little something we call intuition involved? This intuition is available to everyone around you. Some people aren't going to access it because they can't. It's precluded by who they are. They're basically just as intelligent as you are... they're just different.

Being a blue meanie has no purpose if you're talking to somebody who can't get what you're saying. And if you happen to be talking to someone upon whom intuition has dropped a few packages you haven't received yet... well... yea, that's just ridiculous.

It's always cool to keep that "teach me" attitude. You never know when life has graced you with one who really can. Know what I mean?

1 Reply

@Arjuna,

I agree that intuition is vital in increasing understanding.
But more important still is the ability to think with a clear mind.
Sometimes our concepts mislead us.
A good example of this is the objections often raised when discussing the universe. We can speak of where the universe ends, but because of our understanding of the concept "end", we immediately jump to the question of what is beyond this end.
This is an example of a familiar concept that can be transferred to something where all it's meanings are no longer neccesarily applicable, and where drawing conclusions based on our knowledge of how this concept works can lead to misunderstandings, and I suspect that this is what is happening with Fil at the moment.

And I don't have to like someone to see the sense of their words, if there is sense in them. Another participant on a2k strikes me as a rather obnoxious fellow who talks to people in a way I find distasteful sometimes, but that doesn't change the fact that he has set me straight on several occasions, because he knew what he was talking about.

And I do not dislike Fil. I just don't agree with him that his views are as logical and sound as he seems to think.

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Another participant on a2k strikes me as a rather obnoxious fellow who talks to people in a way I find distasteful sometimes

Hmmmm! Me or kennethamy by chance? Razz

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@HexHammer,

No. None of you guys. I don't feel it's neccesary to name him, since I don't think he has participated in this particular thread. But he is an old member of a2k, and though we almost always disagree I still value his input.

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@Cyracuz,

Very well.

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Sometimes our concepts mislead us.
A good example of this is the objections often raised when discussing the universe. We can speak of where the universe ends, but because of our understanding of the concept "end", we immediately jump to the question of what is beyond this end.
This is an example of a familiar concept that can be transferred to something where all it's meanings are no longer neccesarily applicable, and where drawing conclusions based on our knowledge of how this concept works can lead to misunderstandings, and I suspect that this is what is happening with Fil at the moment.

Yes!

We went from looking at part of the whole, to the whole itself. But we didn't notice that these are two different points of view. The logic that works in one, can't be applied in the other.

If we keep feeling our way through the contours of the mind, what do we discover in regard to the whole? Do we find that just as our minds tell us "this must be true" of the part, are there things our mind tells us "must be true" of the whole?

Or does the mind draw a blank at this point? What do you think?

I'm not worried that the two perspectives might produce a contradiction. I love contradiction. In fact, all contradiction shows is that we changed perspectives.

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@Cyracuz,

The English line again...
So you do suppose that my English control has anything to do with my knowing A or B...your are a joker !
and by the way I´m 36 pal and sign the posts with my actual name...

Neither you or Fresco have produced a decent critique to whatever I said so far, but if you think so please show me the argument...

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@Arjuna,

No Arjuna this is not a question of being able to describe the Whole as a totality but simply to understand that without a True state of affairs to Reality the concept of change does n´t make any sense at all...whatever we are able or not to know is besides the point...

I pointed out earlier one simple question regarding the referents to the concept of change, and no answer came out so far...What is it that changes ? once that which has no true form cannot change at all..

If you jump back a few pages in this Thread you immediately get a clear reading on what this 2 gentleman´s understand by "language", "perception" and "observation"...now it happens that my academical educations is precisely in a field which deals with this concepts (Educational Sciences) which in turn does n´t stop me to go further deep in accessing and questioning the very primary route of those very same concepts...

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...I wish I could see some of you here at A2K expressing your ideas in Portuguese Spanish or French as you do in English once I can deal with those four languages in an acceptable way...confusing illiteracy with an informal attitude seams to be a convenient common trade on those who lack any kind of solid argument to step forward with in the first place...

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Hmm I see have all moved on to "summary mode" overnight (GMT).

I would add that the concepts of "order" (as in entropy) and "change" are both linked to the concept of "time" and "time's arrow". Note how these in turn underlie the issue of "prediction and control" which I discussed above as an anthropocentric activity. A basic move out of the anthropocentric box with respect to perception, is to contemplate "reality" with respect to physiologically different perceptual systems. That is where the non-duality of observer-observed becomes tangible. But in order to make that move, we need to re-examine the role of "prediction and control" in what we call a "satisfactory explanation", and that is where the hornets nest of epistemology and ontology is disturbed.

What I call "word salad" tends to occur when mental processes like "perception" are assumed to yield to traditional "science*" in which "a standard observer" axiomatically stands apart from the object of study. To quote Von Foerster:

Quote:

...a brain is required to write a theory of a brain. From this follows that a theory of the brain, that has any aspirations for completeness, has to account for the writing of this theory. And even more fascinating, the writer of this theory has to account for her or himself. Translated into the domain of cybernetics; the cybernetician, by entering his own domain, has to account for his or her own activity. Cybernetics then becomes cybernetics of cybernetics, or second-order cybernetics.

(* Perhaps Fil should examine his phrase "Educational Science" in that respect.)

1 Reply

@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Every scientific measurement is merely an extension of our senses.

Most definitively false and rife with myopic hubris. The process of scientific quantification need not involve the human senses; in fact it need not involve humans at all.

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Further more:

The lack of insight on the subtlety of my message concerning a necessary True state for Reality goes to the stupidifying point of confusing on cause of the underlying subjectivity on data senses perceptional input, its mental assembly and accommodation, and final cognitive interpretation, which obviously produces a representative symbolic construction of what the "Real" is, with an empiric naive realist positivist approach, from which I could n´t be further apart...this kind of vulgar mistake build upon a quick look on what actually I have being trying to convey along this last pages only further reveals the major importance on actually understanding the deep meaning of terms like "language" and "code" to realise that building meaning and personnel perspective does n ´t at all imply that our experience of the surrounding world won´t actually refer to a TRUE final holistic state of affairs as a Unifying substantiation based on a set of rules as a constant for reference...Einstein´s Relativity show´s exactly the very same problem on a more fundamental level concerning on how an event gets to be perceived differently by two different observers given different relative speeds...but thankfully what Einstein did n´t fall for, was to jump to the idiotic conclusion that no true event is happening only because there is a functional local discrepancy from observer A to observer B...both are True given perspective on account of local context...

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@fresco,

I don´t know how do you phrase it it the USA...in Portuguese it is called "Ciencias da Educação"= Sciences of/for Education, a close field to Psychology.
Thanks for the feedback on this "loss in translation" !

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@Chumly,

Quote:

Most definitively false and rife with myopic hubris. The process of scientific quantification need not involve the human senses; in fact it need not involve humans at all.

...then you are going to have a serious problem accounting for "the first level of measurement"...the "nominal" ( naming "one of something").
(Reference: Levels of measurement in statistics: nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio)

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@Chumly,

Chumly, you misunderstand me, I think.
The post you quote is an attempt to summarize ideas that seek to form a metaphysical understanding based on principles of quantum physics.

You cannot say that it is false to think of human senses as quantum measurements. As you may recall, following the sentence you quote I go on to suggest that quantum physics may have given us a way to "look past" the limitations of our senses. But such an idea is false, of course, if we understaned that reality is what occurs within perception, perception being more essential to it's continued existence than physical matter.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Fil
I do not think it is valid to think of a "true state of existence" as opposed to existence as it is experienced by living creatures. It is a distinction born out of our separating concepts in our mind that cannot exist apart.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Quote:

the idiotic conclusion that no true event is happening only because there is a functional local discrepancy from observer A to observer B

You are missing something."The event" (contextually described as the simultaneity issue) has social reality because either observer A is in communication with observer B , or some third party (meta observer) is re-defining and communicating the discrepancy of reports as "the event" to us (a fourth party). You cannot assume that "events" are things in themselves. (Note the associated problems that Einstein had with quantum theorists culminating in his "submission" when non-locality was empirically established)

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@Cyracuz,

Correct. As Rorty might say, the words "truth" or "actual" have no epistemological significance.

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@fresco,

Do you mean ontological significance? I don't see how truth can't be a significant word within the realm of epistemology.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

"The event" (contextually described as the simultaneity issue) has social reality because either observer A is in communication with observer B , or some third party (meta observer) is re-defining and communicating the discrepancy of reports as "the event" to us (a fourth party). You cannot assume that "events" are things in themselves. (Note the associated problems that Einstein had with quantum theorists culminating in his "submission" when non-locality was empirically established)

All you've really said is that an event may not be exactly what we imagine it to be. You can alter the anatomy and physiology of events. The word refers to the contents of experience.

Yea, I know the contents of experience are produced by the mind. I just made a comment from a trans-experiential point of view, though didn't I?

This is something we can't escape. As soon as we make any assessment of what experience really is, we've posited a viewpoint on it. From where exactly are we speaking? I'm going to say we're actually inside the mind now. We encounter shapes and patterns. This is the realm of a priori, so to speak.

To describe what we experience here will stretch any language to the breaking point. And this too is part of our experience.

So can't we lay aside concern over being fooled... as we realize we were when we took "motion" as a given and then found out that it can't be "true" the way we thought it was, and just give some honest account of this experience of reflection on the contours of our own minds? Call it poetry. The word truth will appear nevertheless. Right?

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Perception and physical reality

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