Synaesthesia

Atlantic,
I think there is compelling reason both to think that we generate our perception and that our perception has a meaningful relationship to the external world.

It is possible, after all, to discern systematic incongruities between our perception and the world. (Opitcal illusions, colour consistency, dreams, drugs) We can eludicate the extent to which they mislead us and even discover useful reasons for their existence.

Laurentius,
Historically, the search for certainty has primarily consisted of finding grounds that we can convince ourselves of as indubitable.

Mystics find self-justifying experiences which prove the nature of God/the soul/zen, classical empiricists have formulated various notions of self-evident sesnse data.

Despite the obvious seduction of these ideas, they run quite contrary to my philosophy. To be certain of an idea is simply to remove the possibility of improving upon it.


PS. Aside from the problem of being certain of certainty, I have difficulty explicating my objections to sense-data as being "given". This is my current focus of inquiry and I would appreciate anyone who could direct me to interesting criticism on the topic of foundationalism.

Regards,
Synaesthesia

tronvillain

Laurentius:
As I said, a mechanism external to my awareness is required. Apparently you think it is possible that something external to my awareness could be generating my perceptions and still accurately be considered part of me? Perhaps.

Laurentius

AVE


synaesthesia

<Synaesthesia> Historically, the search for certainty has primarily consisted of finding grounds that we can convince ourselves of as indubitable.

Mystics find self-justifying experiences which prove the nature of God/the soul/zen, classical empiricists have formulated various notions of self-evident sesnse data.

Despite the obvious seduction of these ideas, they run quite contrary to my philosophy. To be certain of an idea is simply to remove the possibility of improving upon it.

<Laurentius> Knowing something for sure does not limit our chance to increase knowledge since the (macro and micro) universe is infinite. Knowledge might expand infinitezimally from perfectly grasped parts toward perfect knowledge.

Just might. Yet, I wonder if this is, as many thinkers state it, philosophy's fundamental problem.

AVE

Laurentius

AVE

tronvillain

<tronvillain> As I said, a mechanism external to my awareness is required. Apparently you think it is possible that something external to my awareness could be generating my perceptions and still accurately be considered part of me? Perhaps.

<Laurentius> Sure. You aren't only the conscious part of you. It depends, therefore, on the definition one can give to the I/me unit.

AVE

Mr. Sammi

Absolute knowledge rings in a truth which can not be furthered. Can absolute knowledge be obtained through abstraction alone? OR is absolute knowledge only obtainable from experience?

In little pockets of experience, say a local-universe, I am sure the humans can attain the absolute themselves. To give an example, let us say to put one`s hand in a roaring bonfire for a long time implies pain, screaming, and an eventual useless hand. There is no other recourse. In this local-universe, we know all there is to know. If you continue to boil water the water will disappear and you will boil the pot. This knowledge is certain.

The relations between the seemingly extant yields the results. Such relations are repeatable and the scope of the local-universe is small.

This leaves me to ponder, if establishing a relation with the absolute is not tantamount to reaching the absolute.

Sammi Na Boodie ()

Ierrellus

Laurentius,

I thought the onus of proof of an absolute was the impetus for philosophy in the days of the Church Fathers and Scholastics. Didn't Hume do that one in?

In any event, here is a thought experiment. A person, {me}, contracts a cold. The virus involved has no concept of me {either I or it}. It becomes capable of reproducing only after it has attached to my innards. After a few days of living with the virus, I find that my perceptions of anything are becoming focused on misery and pain.

Since my throat hurts, I try the old army recipe of gargling salt. According to the box, it was pure salt. One teaspoon or a truckload would not have been any less pure salt; but the minute it mingles with my saliva and water, it is no longer pure. Ohmygod, I have defiled an absolute by partaking of it.

As I feel more miserable, I decide to get rid of the salt and try a fifth of Vodka. I start feeling better, but my perceptions are worse. My bed won't stay still. Neither will the room.
Nobody else drank the Vodka, so the perceptional problem has to be somewhere in my innards with the virus.

All in fun. I agree with syn. that an absolute would prevent me from any further knowing of what is happening in me or what I believe is happening outside of me. For me, absolute means done, finished, no more to say.

PS. the virus liked the Vodka!

Ierrellus,

PAX

[ June 25, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>

tronvillain

Laurentius:
Well, it's somewhat difficult to see how some part of me which yet totally unknown could be functioning in place of Descartes' Demon and creating a coherent illusion of a world. In what sense would it actually be part of me? Perhaps my conscious awareness might depend on its operation. In any case, such a virtual world is little different than an actual world.

Laurentius

AVE


My initial wonder was whether the absolute is philosophy’s fundamental problem.

Somehow, the replies seem to be in favor of a denial. Beside the fact that it is not stated clearly which might be philosophy’s fundamental question (or that there’s no such thing), the arguments for the rejection sounds quite caduceus: absolute knowledge should not be craved for because it presupposes the impossibility of improvement.

First of all, we’re not talking about the objective of a single individual here, but of a discipline, of an entire category of people, and maybe of all human kind.

Second, what kind of philosopher (you know, wisdom-lover) can one claim to be when he/she refuses to know stuff really well for fear he/she might get bored afterwards. Fear no more, I would tell him/her – there’ll always be a next level of knowledge where what has seemed perfectly comprehended before, i.e. from other perspectives, unveils new facets to be analyzed and understood.

Say you meet someone you instantaneously like. “I’d like to meet you again, you know, to get to know you,” you say. And then, after a second: “Or, we’d better not do it. I’d get bored to death if I really knew you.”

And lastly, absolute knowledge as an ideal goal may be desirable exactly because it is unattainable.

AVE

Laurentius

AVE

tronvillain

The unconscious, for instance, can significantly influence perception.

Here is an experiment conducted in the Psychological Laboratory at Harvard by Boris Sidis and reported in his 1898 monograph, The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society .
Sidis showed subjects cards containing a single printed digit or letter. The subjects were placed at such a distance from the card that the character was far out of their range of vision. They saw but a dim, blurred spot or dot. However, when Sidis asked his subjects to name the characters on the cards, their responses were correct more often than would be expected on the basis of simple guessing, even though many subjects expressed the belief "that they might as well shut their eyes and guess". Sidis concluded that his experiments indicated "the presence within us of a secondary subwaking self that perceives things which the primary waking self is unable to get at".

And here’s another example of a study using a behavioral measure of awareness reported by Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc in 1980. These investigators were interested in demonstrating that unconsciously perceived stimuli influence subsequent affective reactions.
They designed an experiment to show that preferences for particular stimuli can be based on unconsciously perceived events. In their study, subjects were initially shown 10 meaningless, irregular, geometric shapes. Each shape was presented five times for 1-msec each time, and no subject ever reported seeing any of the shapes. Following these initial presentations, perception of the shapes was evaluated by both a forced-choice recognition task (i.e., the measure of awareness) and a forced-choice preference task (i.e., the measure of unconscious perception). For both tasks, the subjects were shown 10 pairs of shapes, with each pair consisting of one "old" shape that had been presented during the initial phase of the experiment and one "new" shape that had not been presented previously. For the recognition task, the subjects were instructed to select the member of each pair that had been presented previously, whereas for the preference task, the subjects were simply told to choose the shape that they preferred. The interesting result was that the subjects performed no better than chance (i.e., 50% correct) when they were asked to select the shape in each pair that had been presented previously, but they performed significantly better than chance (i.e., 60% correct) when they were asked to select the shape in each pair that they preferred. In other words, when the subjects were asked to discriminate "old" from "new" shapes, their performance suggested that they had never perceived the shapes. However, when the subjects were simply asked to select the shape they preferred, their performance revealed that the previous brief exposures influenced their affective reactions.

In the experiments conducted by Murphy and Zajonc (1993), subjects were shown a clearly-visible, Chinese ideograph on each of a series of trials. The subjects were asked to indicate on a five-point scale whether they thought each ideograph represented a "good" or a "bad" concept. The critical aspect of the experiment concerned what happened immediately before each ideograph was presented. For one group of subjects, the presentation of each ideograph was preceded by a picture of a human face that expressed either happiness (e.g., a smile) or anger (e.g., a scowl). For this group of subjects, each face was presented for such a brief duration (i.e., 4 msec) that no subject reported awareness of the faces. For the second group of subjects, the same ideographs and faces were presented, but the duration of each face (i.e., 1000 msec) was sufficiently long so that all subjects reported awareness of the faces. The subjects in this second group were told to ignore the faces and to concentrate solely on rating the ideographs. The important result found by Murphy and Zajonc is that only the briefly-presented, unconsciously perceived faces influenced the subjects' ratings of the ideographs. When the subjects were unaware of the faces, they were more likely to rate an ideograph as representing a "good" concept if it was preceded by a smiling face and they were more likely to rate an ideograph as representing a "bad" concept if it was preceded by a scowling face. In contrast, when the faces were clearly visible and therefore consciously perceived, the faces had little or no influence on the subjects' ratings of the ideographs. Thus, the subjects were able to ignore consciously perceived faces and not let these faces influence their ratings of the ideographs. However, when the subjects were unaware of the faces, the emotion expressed by the faces colored their judgments of the ideographs. These results demonstrate an important qualitative difference between conscious and unconscious perception in that our affective reactions to stimuli may be influenced to a much greater extent by unconsciously perceived information than by consciously perceived information.

AVE

tronvillain

None of which is an example of some unknown part of "me" acting as Descrates' Demon and creating a coherent illusion of a world. Now, that's obvious, but it is difficult to see how one could jump from those examples to such a state of affairs.