From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Fri Aug 09 2002 - 19:24:30 MDT
On Wednesday, August 07, 2002 4:12 PM Rafal Smigrodzki
rms2g@virginia.edu 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.
Well, I admit, it's the foundation, not the penthouse or the heliport.:)
> Once you learn (from your senses) about
> the world, evolution and neurobiology, you come back, and
> self-referentially
> start picking yourself apart.
Ah, but if the senses here radically failed, then the knowledge you
gained thereby -- of the world, evolution, neurobiology -- would be
suspect for the same reasons. If you can trust your eyes to see, then
you can't trust what you read either. Etc.
> 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.
What it is your other means, then, of direct knowledge of reality? I've
nothing against not being a naive realist, but that doesn't mean the
senses are not foundational. It just means a more critical and more
dialectical approach to them and to knowledge is necessarily.
> You can ignore illusions, deny
> the "fundamental" perception of skewed lines and Kanizsa figures.
Not at all. Again, I'm not a naive realist. Perceptual illusions and
such are learned about by comparing perceptions. They are the way our
senses react to certain situations -- and the real problem is
misjudging, believing that a given percept, since it's similar to
another is exactly like the other in all respects. For example,
believing the shimmering on the horizon to be water when it's just a
mirage. It's not that the senses have been fooled, so much as one draws
the wrong conclusion from them. Water in the distance and rising air in
the distance look much the same. (A more mundane example is used by
Plato, IIRC, of seeing someone at a distance and confusing him with
someone else. The eyes, e.g., do not go outside the laws of optics and
such. They perform in certain ways. They have limits.)
> 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 :)
First, I return to my argument: how would you know any of this -- save
for through the evidence of the senses? You would not know of
evolution, death, survival, and the like. Second, my stance is not that
one stays at the foundation. Foundations are meant to be built on. The
human mind goes far beyond the evidence of the senses, even if this is
where knowledge is grounded. (All of it should be able to be traced
back there, though that is a complex chore at the higher levels, where
abstractions are built on further abstractions. E.g., one can form a
concept of "red," then one of "color," then one of "quality" and so on.)
>> 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.
This is not knowledge -- or not conceptual knowledge. The tabula rasa
idea doesn't mean that the mind has no structure. It just means it has
no conceptual content -- or, at least, that is how it's been used by
philosophers from Locke to Kelley. Here, we must make a distinction
between conceptual and perceptual, though the conceptual is ultimately
based on the perceptual. They're not the same. Also, even on the
perceptual level, humans aren't born with built in perceptions, but
propensity to have certain perceptions and not others. Things like edge
detectors and the like in the eye.
BTW, see David Kelley's _The Evidence of the Senses_ for more on this.
(I reviewed Kelley's work several years ago. See the links below for
more on this.)
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
See "Perception and Realism" at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Percept.html
See "A Dialogue On Happiness" at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Dialogue.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:59 MST