From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 14:12:27 MDT
Technotranscendence wrote:
Sense perception is pretty easy. There's nothing underneath it. It
just is. Existence exists, as Rand put it. There ain't nothing else.
Sense perception is nonpropositional, so it can't be analyzed into
further concepts or propositions. It's the foundation.
### Well, only in the first pass. Once you learn (from your senses) about
the world, evolution and neurobiology, you come back, and self-referentially
start picking yourself apart. Your senses are not fundamental anymore, only
a way of analyzing data which evolved to help you survive, with all kinds of
imperfections which you can now go around. You can ignore illusions, deny
the "fundamental" perception of skewed lines and Kanizsa figures. We learn
to think by going in circles, we keep coming back but never the same - we
reinterpret ourselves, the world, our thoughts, the meaning of everything,
and I doubt that we can ever reach the foundation. No need to either, as
long as our current mind processes yield predictions conducive to our
continued existence. If they don't, well, you soon stop thinking about it :)
-------
Humans do seem to start off tabula
rasa -- at least, in terms of conceptual knowledge.
### No, we are born with a huge number of prewired cognitive modules,
designed by evolution to analyze specific types of information (e.g data
forming the images of faces), while largely ignoring others.
Rafal
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