If I may adapt some words of Bertrand Russell in the interests of the scientific aspect of this debate I would say that it is natural to suppose that what an educational expert sees is in the classroom s/he is observing. The classroom is of course only one of many thousands of classrooms it is possible to observe all of which are different from each other in many important ways which I discussed at length in the early days of this thread.
But if we are speaking of physical space, what the expert, or even the amateur, sees is in his own brain. It is in no sense in the classroom and thus cannot be in the aggregate of classrooms of which the classroom is a hypothetical fraction. It may be said to be a part of the expert's perceptual space.
Light waves travel from the classroom being observed, which is a hypothetical one usually, to the eye of the expert, at which they arrive after a very short but finite time. This time lapse is greatly extended when the light waves reaching the expert's eye are from printed material which provide indistinct impressions, subject to limitations of language, of the sense impressions of others and have been mediated by the brains which conceived them and probably deriving from printed material these others have read or partially read and are likely to have emerged from a series of such events. Possibly a long one.
The expert, or dilettante, sees what he is observing only after the light waves from such sources reach his/her eyes. Thus, the events which constitute the seeing comes at the end of a series of events which travel from the classroom, either directly or, more commonly, indirectly through the mediated routes I have outlined very roughly, into the brain of the expert or casual know-all.
We cannot, without a preposterous kind of discontinuity, suppose that the expert's perception, which comes at the end of the series described, is anywhere else but in his or her head.
So long as we stick with a conventional view of mind and matter, which AIDs-ers claim to reject or should do unless they expect everybody else to adhere to their own conventional views unquestioningly, we are condemned to a view of perception which is miraculous and we all know that AIDs-ers reject miracles with some degree of emphasis.
Quote: We suppose that a physical process starts from a visible object, travels to the eye, there changes into another physical process, causes yet another physical process in the optic nerve, finally produces some effect in the brain, simultaneously with which we see the object from which the process started, the seeing being something "mental", totally different in character from the physical process which precede and accompany it.
Making it look like you can walk on water or change water into wine is tiny tots miraculous compared to that.
It is possible to discern that AIDs-ers on here believe in such miracles in relation to what their own brains are telling them and it is generally held that evolution demands that such subjective interpretations of reality are, to the brain doing the interpreting, identical with reality itself.
Under such contingencies, which don't exist in science or theology, the assertion becomes the only form of discourse.
The basic assertion being that the asserter is employing "critical thinking" which is a concept subject to the above miraculous conception.
