Complete vs. Incomplete Reality
I hesitate to write about this as it's hard to be concise and explain oneself without writing a novella-length post. Here is my attempt:
I think that the argument of the poverty of the stimulus (and the richness of the reply) to be true. Whatever stimulus hits us is extremely poor in comparison to how we react to it. We transform colourless, soundless phenomena and turn them automatically into the blue of the ocean and a symphony respectively.
As I understand it, a photon hits our retina, which then sends signals to our brain, which in turn takes the sense data and turns it into the images we take for granted. I think there is good reason to believe that in order to have an image of the world, we need to have an innate structure that presents us a version of the world which we experience as X and not X2 or Y, etc.
Our sight is limited, our hearing is limited, we can only withstand so much pressure, etc. Taking this to be true there seems to me to be two options.
Either all there is in the world is what we experience and what science may say about some of these topics (science says little about literature or politics) or there is the world we experience, what science says about it and whatever else we simply cannot assimilate or register in any way, which happens to be quite important.
On this last view, we only detect photons, see trees and oceans but there is also phenomena A, B and C which we simply cannot even detect in principle, but which plays a role in the way we construct the world. We cannot detect F and G because we don't have the capacity to discern it much the way we assume a frog would not be moved listening to Bach.
I toy with the idea that there are many important phenomena in the world, which play a crucial causal influence in the way we view the world, but which we utterly fail to detect because we are human beings and not God (or angles, or intelligent aliens) .
I have no way to prove this, but wanted to get a few reactions.
Any thoughts?
I think that the argument of the poverty of the stimulus (and the richness of the reply) to be true. Whatever stimulus hits us is extremely poor in comparison to how we react to it. We transform colourless, soundless phenomena and turn them automatically into the blue of the ocean and a symphony respectively.
As I understand it, a photon hits our retina, which then sends signals to our brain, which in turn takes the sense data and turns it into the images we take for granted. I think there is good reason to believe that in order to have an image of the world, we need to have an innate structure that presents us a version of the world which we experience as X and not X2 or Y, etc.
Our sight is limited, our hearing is limited, we can only withstand so much pressure, etc. Taking this to be true there seems to me to be two options.
Either all there is in the world is what we experience and what science may say about some of these topics (science says little about literature or politics) or there is the world we experience, what science says about it and whatever else we simply cannot assimilate or register in any way, which happens to be quite important.
On this last view, we only detect photons, see trees and oceans but there is also phenomena A, B and C which we simply cannot even detect in principle, but which plays a role in the way we construct the world. We cannot detect F and G because we don't have the capacity to discern it much the way we assume a frog would not be moved listening to Bach.
I toy with the idea that there are many important phenomena in the world, which play a crucial causal influence in the way we view the world, but which we utterly fail to detect because we are human beings and not God (or angles, or intelligent aliens) .
I have no way to prove this, but wanted to get a few reactions.
Any thoughts?
Comments (61)
Our instruments detect what we can't detect though our senses, although not yet dark matter.
Conscious experiences are of qualia as reality based 'apparitions' honed in the early years and onward from outward in and inward out into what is the best guess for the model and so soon one can tell a bottle of milk apart from what’s else. It’s not like the waves have a label on them saying that they came from the bottle but that one kept estimating the separate object into the best representation. Well, there is a bit of help in that light waves peel information of an object to help isolate it.
In a night dream, the apparitions and phantasms are as true ghosts in that they have no outside basis, but the same world-simulating model is being employed, already having its best guess available.
The identification of you as a self is also an experience as a best guess estimate.
Yes, that's true. What I'm trying to point out, is that there are things in the world which our instruments cannot capture, simply because we don't have the capacity to detect these phenomena at all. We can only make machines that greatly amplify what we have access to in small amounts such as the electromagnetic spectrum.
Quoting AJJ
I didn't intend to focus on the God aspect, so I modified the OP a little. I used the concept as an illustration of our limits.
As it stands now, the God we tend to postulate has "the good" we have, magnified infinitely. Something like that.
An idea that illustrates what I have in mind would be that an Intelligent Alien can, for example, perceive how quantum indeterminacy happens in an intuitive matter. Much the way we intuit how the Sun goes around the Earth.
Maybe, but then you’d have to ask if there are things not available to the alien’s consciousness. If there are, in what meaningful way do these things exist unless there is some other being conscious of them? If there is you meet the same question again. I’m actually agnostic about the existence of God, but questions of consciousness do seem to point in such a direction even if you don’t intend them to.
I suppose on an atheist view any things that we or any other being can’t be even indirectly conscious of may as well not exist, so they don’t matter.
Stove's Gem.
I hadn’t heard of Stove’s Gem, but at a glance what I referred to isn’t that argument. Hart isn’t saying we can only know things within a limited framework; he’s pointing out that if it’s not possible to be conscious of a thing then that thing may as well not exist.
Or does the process work backwards? Or in both directions? We could also say that certain devices can be made in our vivid and smelly world if we play this weird game of math and colorless concepts. It's that important practically, but I find the leap from useful models to metaphysical foundations unnecessary. The unconscious metaphor seems to be something like Neo seeing the code of the matrix. It flatters the physicist if ordinary life is 'really' made of mathematical abstractions. But doesn't that lead to a mess? Mathematical abstractions are (we'd be tempted to say) 'mental.' And code, in the matrix example, is a human convention that we build in to hardware in the first place.
Quoting Manuel
:up:
That sounds right, and this could be framed as us being likely to keep finding more useful patterns in experience (or rather inventing, projecting, and learning to trust such patterns.)
Actually, I think something like that is not completely crazy. Perhaps we have access to parts of the visual spectrum they do not have, as in, we can see purple, but they can't. They see some colour "bluelet", which we cannot. We could appreciate music which for them would be noise, and so on.
I agree, it is a problematic question to answer in what meaningful way do things exist if nobody could perceive them no matter a creature's cognitive makeup.
Quoting AJJ
I don't believe in the Abrahamic God, so I would be an atheist in this respect. As to the question of if such an "supreme entity" exists, well then I'd have to be agnostic too.
If we can't even be indirectly conscious or aware or cognizant of something, would that settle the question of if such entities could be said to exist in nature?
I know it goes completely off Occam's razor, but it's a useful exercise for thought, at least for me.
I think either there’s an entity which is conscious of everything, which we’d call God (and we in principle could experience “extra” things too); or there are things which no being is conscious of, in which case those things may as well not exist, even if they do.
And on each view I expect there’d remain things we can only experience indirectly, like electrons.
I think this depends on how one thinks about metaphysics. If by metaphysics one takes it that the world is described by physics and that physics tells us everything about the world, that is a poor metaphysics. As you seem to suggest, the world we experience is far richer than the surprising things physicist find out when they work on models.
And yes, I think that's the "tough cookie", as it were. Some "scientistic" types would say the world is just physics and biology. But physics is discovered via math. And I literally don't know something less "realistic" (mind-independent) than mathematics.
Quoting Zugzwang
Patterns which by necessity have to leave stuff out. Usually "noise" in the data, though not always.
That's fine. Though I find the God terminology to be quite loaded.
I think something like "things-in-themselves" (or noumena) , could serve as a concept which indicates this kind of talk.
Quoting AJJ
Yes. Which paradoxically is our most secure type of knowledge, outside of our own perceptions.
I suppose “noumena” could cover it as well. But in that case I think there would have to remain things that can only be experienced indirectly by any being—otherwise you’d be inviting back in an infinite consciousness you’d have to term “God”. So perhaps collectively we already experience reality as much as is actually possible.
Yes. I suspect this is the case. Perhaps the grounds of reality are non-representable in nature, but nevertheless we are able to perceive its effects indirectly, in the form of photons or even colour-experience in everyday life.
I know, this is wild, but there's something to this idea.
We're on the same page. Real numbers, Turing machines,...infinite fictions that (impressively) guide/inform the creation of all the tech we depend on.
Quoting Manuel
Same page again. I can imagine another clever species from some exoplanet that uses patterns we see only as noise.
Side issue: how would we recognize a superior intelligence? My vote is that we'd respect their greater ability to control and predict our common environment.
The Alien told me that instead the Earth goes around the sun; I explained that it was a typo.
The Alien further said that we shouldn't focus on just one probabilistic result but find the general pattern, which is that the probabilities are unitary in that they add up to one, showing precise group behavior; this is the pattern.
“Your Anton Zeillinger found that randomness is the bedrock of reality to a confidence level of 3-sigma.”
“I guess so, then, but why the randomness?”
“The bedrock as the eternal fundamental with no beginning can’t have any input to it.”
“Wow! That makes sense. Does this randomness carry through all the way up?”
“Obviously, no; there is consistency in the laws of nature, regularities amenable to mathematics.”
“When and how does the randomness go away?”
“Gravity overcomes the vibrations that underlie superpositions when things get as large as a tiny piece of dust.”
“How come we didn’t know that?”
“Roger Penrose did, maybe.”
“Or?”
“When entities no longer touch the bedrock, or both ways, or another way, called decoherence.”
“Ha, you don’t really know!”
“I’ll have to ask an even higher alien.”
Yes an advanced alien would say that. The fact is that we intuit the Sun going round the Earth, we can't help seeing this clearly every day. We know that this is a mistake when we compare our image to the way the structure of the world is set up mind-independently.
Yes, we find patterns, and we have an excellent pattern for 5% of the universe. Maybe it turns out that the postulated dark matter/dark energy is a miscalculation. Or it could be a particle we have difficulty detecting. It leaves the option open: some intelligent creature may have a more comprehensive pattern built up.
It would be nice to be able to ask. :)
Oh, greatest of aliens, tell me what the future holds.
No, for you won’t like it.
I really want to know.
OK; thus this thread can continue about what we can and can't know.
In the Near Future, via the Great Quantum Computer projecting, he saw that:
The Lake Tahoe area is mostly saved from the fires, but its ski chairlifts get charred.
Afghanistan becomes a safe haven for terrorists to operate from and the Taliban go back to their old torturous ways, strictly enforcing the Will of Allah.
What remained of Haiti from earthquakes was destroyed by a category 5 hurricane. They had but a few trees and none afterward, and so again the island suffered severe erosion. The hurricane kept right on going and ground Cuba into the ground.
…
The Hoover Dam in the western U.S. held back nothing, its lake having gone dry. People suggested building a water pipeline to the west from the east, for the east had plenty of water from all the remnants of hurricanes that used up all the names from three alphabets in one year. Congress bickered over it and then killed it.
Trump got reelected and still said that global warming was a hoax and defunded science. Evangelicals danced in the streets.
The Covid Zeta variant virus had evolved to be able to remain alive for 400 feet and so this became the main concern for a while, drawing resources and attention away from the planet’s heat crisis until all the unvaccinated had died. Booster shots were needed for the rest.
Meanwhile, the ice caps had melted and were gone. Greenland became truly green, whose name was but an advertising ploy after not so many had moved to Iceland, but then caught on fire and turned a charcoal color. Iceland had no more ice, and so was renamed ‘No-ice-land’.
Much of the world had been ablaze for years now, and recently, a high cyclone, one of so many, had killed 150,000 people in Myanmar, and earthquakes had done in many more in China and elsewhere, as well as did a record number of tornados that had continued to sweep across many countries.
Temperatures often hit 130F degrees.
A tsunami sprung from the Atlantic and washed over Florida, coast to coast. Another one came forth in the Pacific, from the deep Marianas trench, sinking Baja. Mexico City disappeared into a sinkhole. Quebec Province was severed from Canada by quakes, and floated back towards France, where they had always wanted to be. Africa sunk two feet in an hour. The Indian ocean washed out Sri Lanka and entered the Indian subcontinent.
Siberia sunk into a mush of methane gas, increasing the warming even more. Sicily got the boot from Italy. Alaska gushed oil all over the place. Gibraltar fell and sunk and closed off the Mediterranean Sea.
All were aghast to see the LAX airport fracture, and slide into the ocean. The Amazon Jungle flooded, what was left of it after all the trees had been cut for lumber. Mauna Kea erupted and buried Hilo, Hawaii. Krakatoa came back to life. Sumatra went under. Finally, the San Andreas fault could take it no more and moved 1200 feet. What was left of California had become a small island. New Orleans was washed away like silt from a river. What was left of Mexico moved into Texas, where it used to be. Notre Dame Cathedral in France crumbled away into dust. The Eiffel Tower (Le Tour-i-fell), lived up to its name and tipped over.
Trump declared martial law and gave himself another term in office. The Arizona county recount from 2021 was still going on.
Russia shook and shook, destroying their nuclear reactors. Japan went under. In the Philippines, only the mountains broke the sea. Australia just about cracked in half. Antarctica sunk ten feet and out of sight. The pyramids crumbled, exposing the rulers of old. The Panama canal closed. Vatican City was no more. Rome was waterlogged. Venice was long gone.
It was all the beginning of the mother of all near extinctions, one that might erase 99.99% of all life. A 50 mile section of the Alps disappeared from an earthquake, looking as if it were never there; you could see right through the gap. When all of Florida easily went under, being that it was already at sea level, the world had really woken up to the end of days, but it was much too late. Every very coastal city in the world had been inundated, for water always finds its way in. Northern Canada, along with its eastern and western sections, was no more, as part of the Great Lake of the North; only the now more temperate interior remained dry, it filling up with more and more people and tropical birds by the day.
A small portion of Siberia was quite usable, too, for a while, only being at 100F degrees, and an ‘iffy’ part of Argentina was OK. Alaska was gone to its mountains, as were Central and Latin America, and most of Mexico. There were no more islands but for if they had high mountains, of course.
The heat in the world had become totally unbearable, the temperatures now reaching 140 degrees F sometimes; crops would no longer grow. A new but rare and expensive form of food pill extended life for some of the rich. Most people really had no place to go. The pace of the disaster was startling, exceeding even the grimmest of predictions by scientists.
Australia’s population, being mostly coastal, had retreated somewhat to the thin edge between its useless interior and the deep blue sea. The Great Inland Sea reappeared, then evaporated, and then returned. Meteorology had become a fruitless science; summer was now year-round everywhere.
The Great Lakes were enlarging, even with their locks having been closed, for the water runneth over. Resistance was futile, for water was slippery stuff, its tiny hydrogen atoms easily rolling around the oxygen.
Various schemes and solutions had been endlessly debated, most of them being as tough on mankind as the heat, the rest of them unattainable. It was all happening much too quickly. The estimates had been way off. Nature was now a dragon and she had roared, and was spewing her fiery breath upon her own fragile planet.
Some ever had tried to live in their basements, but the heat still found them; some dug underground, but the floods came.
Eskimos bought refrigerators and air-conditioners.
Many near extinctions had happened before, one being only 174,000 years ago, when, at Toba, in northern Sumatra, a supervolcano erupted during an ice age. Six years of volcanic winter followed this eruption, bringing pre-humans to the very edge of elimination.
There were but a few thousand of them left around, since very little light could reach the dusty ground. It took twenty thousand years for them to recompose from the caldron of fire that had almost brewed humanity away. It was from this handful of hardy souls that we modern humans arose.
Due to the intense global warming and ice melting that reached a runaway exponential point, such as in calculus, the weather patterns had been greatly altered, and were bringing numerous and severe storms every day all over the globe, causing much interior flooding, plus wiping out most of the better crops that still had a chance to grow. Roads and tires had melted. The rate of destruction was becoming astronomical. No one could keep up with it; it was everyone for themselves.
Charon had started using a fleet of huge ocean liners to ferry the damned dead across the River Styx.
Billions had perished in a matter of a few years more, and there was little government infrastructure working anywhere. Humans were hardly a match for nature gone wild. It could and would only get worse unto the sure end.
Trump still said that the 2020 election was flawed.
…
Death seemed to be a way of life throughout history. That we were even here was due to the dinosaurs and 90% of all the species being wiped out. A small and nervous shrew-like creature looked out and ‘noted’: the dinosaurs, the forever Kings of the Earth, were gone. “Hurray, no I can evolve.” The shrews attached to a favorable evolutionary line. Every single one of our forbears on both sides had survived, they being attractive enough to locate a loving mate, with whom their love to celebrate.
It no longer mattered that humans were on a one way trip from the quantum fluke, that maximal disorder within old Planck’s nook… to the escalation caused by the Dark Energy, the Universe heading toward the oblivion of its sparse and accelerated expansion, all that we ever loved and knew going to extinction; for, our world was ending now, or at least it was the beginning of the end, for the temperatures were still increasing daily.
Al Gore had been the last one into the Washington bunkers, having steadfastly worked up to the end. Greta Thunberg went in with him.
Some of the remaining nations of the world noted that they had indeed squandered the good things of life, squabbling over their differences in culture. Many had all been looking for truth in the wrong direction, which was back into the past of myth instead of to and for the future. They had fiddled, and now the world was burning.
The Ninja Empire Grandmasters and their teams flew into Niihau on their last tanks of gas, there to take sanctuary and a vote for a desperate but uncertain plan. The landing strip now had a slight but tricky slope to it.
Mountainous Niihau was somewhat unaffected, as were other of the higher island regions, although they were few and far between, for which the trade winds still brought some moderation; yet, the subtropical and near tropical areas were now all very much overly tropical.
On Niihau, Jack, a young master, had to walk the last mile on the new beach that had formed inland. The world’s roulette wheel was rolling double zero on what might soon be the last survivable day on Earth, and a hurricane was headed in his direction. Tsunamis had washed deeper and deeper inland everywhere; most of the internet no longer functioned.
The top dragon, Old Rascal, as the new #1 West, awaited them all. A rainbow appeared as the spirit of the previous GrandMaster West, flying through, past them, as the scent on the breeze and as the vision of the courage to act.
The votes had been counted. Grandmaster Rascal had now engaged one of the last working underground silos. Grandmaster Trish, #1 East, keyed in the codes and nodded to him, saying “Would you like to do the honors?”
“Yes, for unto me falls life’s last duty. Nature will now have to contend with herself. It will be fire versus ice, dragon against dragon, just as shown by the picture on the great China wall; however, this could well be the end for all of us.”
“Or not, if it works,” she answered.
“Hopefully, global warming will be defeated by the worldwide dust in the atmosphere, stopping it. The years will tell; it is our only hope. Ashes will fall everywhere like snow, and then real snow will fall.”
Rascal pressed the button: Nuclear missiles were being fired deep into the heart of the Yellowstone caldera. At least seven surrounding states and two Canadian provinces would be obliterated; yet, winter would come, probably bringing its own array of problems to contend with, but, then, after that, could spring be far behind?
Much of that is probably true. But it goes well beyond the topic of the OP.
Not a criticism, but isn't this a fairly frequently postulated idea? It isn't just our senses that are at issue here but consciousness itself. Hence the work of phenomenology and its move away from the idea that we have access to an objective reality to their notion of intersubjectivity. @Wayfarer often points to the observer problem in science - human beings use their senses and conceptual frameworks to construct a version of reality which appears to be tentative and fallible and subject to revisions.
I personally find myself staring Stove's Gem fairly often.
It may be a common idea, there are quite a few in the idealist tradition who believe in this. But I at least wanted to narrow it down somewhat.
I personally don't know about the observer effect in QM. I know Wayfarer argues that it is important, highlighting some of the people who think observation is important. Most physicists do not. Doesn't mean the majority is right, but it makes one pause a bit.
I suppose Bryan Magee articulated this view quite well. I think it's likely true, in ways we can't comprehend.
I was referring more to the work of people like Evan Thompson and Michel Bitbol and the fabled 'blind spot' or observer problem - we seem not to see that the scientific worldview itself is a human perspective, not an objective one. Reality is only that which we are able to identify from a human perspective.
Wayfarer has posted this several times.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience
I'd like to read a physicalist response.
:clap: Happy that you've taken that on board, I think it's a really fundamental point.
Quoting Tom Storm
I posted that essay in 2019, it elicited a good discussion but also a fair amount of hostility which at one point turned into a pile-on. There's actually a kind of taboo associated with this topic.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6009/page/p1
Quoting Tom Storm
Oddly worded, but I will mention, if I haven't already, that I studied Hume under Stove when I did my undergraduate degree. He was a delight of a lecturer, impish, with an amazing ability to put things in different perspectives. He was very kind to me, considering what a self-opinionated New Ager I must have been. But his 'stove's Gem' invective is not against Kant per se, but against cultural relativism and post-modernism - 'perspectivism' in the vulgar sense. Jim Franklin, who was also around the Uni at that time and who is now a UNSW academic, has ventured this analysis. I don't think much of it ('Stove's Gem') myself. (Franklin also has written some very interesting things on Aristotelian philosophy of maths.)
To go back to the OP:
Quoting Manuel
Actually, photon-detectors detect photons. They're specialised bits of equipment to do just that. The idea that photons (and atoms) are what is 'really there' was really being called into question already by the time of Arthur Eddington's book, Nature of the Physical World, between the Wars. Obviously they're part of the story, but I think the notion of 'fundamental particles' is now rather passé'. Schrodinger called attention to that also in many of his later philosophical writings:
[quote=Schrodinger, Nature and the Greeks]I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.[/quote]
That is, not unless your Daniel Dennett, when you take them deadly seriously.
I would assume Dennett or Rosenberg or Churchland(s), would have something to say. Not that I can tolerate that literature for too long...
Yes. Correct. It's a shorthand description. We detect photons through equipment.
Eddington's book is quite good, if a bit dated. But he has the merit of pointing out the main issue of how much is left unsaid, once everything's been analyzed in physics.
I think Whitehead has merit too, but he is often too obscure. But if you take the classical pragmatists, they were quite sober in how they assessed the situation.
Contemporarily, I think only Tallis really stands out as making a similar point to Eddington.
On the other hand, people like Rovelli and Sean Carroll, though the latter a bit scientistic, are quite sensible. So times may be changing.
Thanks. Boy, that Aeon piece did stir the possum around here.
That we have senses indicates that they take something in, called noumena, and then makes it way through the brain and on into the phenomena of consciousness, and since we can navigate the world we know that we have a useful representation.
From the article:
To bring the point home, consider that in certain intense states of absorption – during meditation, dance or highly skilled performances – the subject-object structure can drop away, and we are left with a sense of sheer felt presence. How is such phenomenal presence possible in a physical world? Science is silent on this question.
However,
In meditation, the resulting quietus
Of the brain’s self-boundary & ID center
Via focus on mantras, hymns, or prayers
Is but a neurological effect, nothing more,
Thus one does not become one with the Cosmos.
(Tested via electrodes in Buddhist monk meditators)
Yes. The curious aspect of this, within the modern-day rationalist tradition exemplified by Chomsky and McGinn, is that the stuff "out there", is quite peripheral to the magnitude of impact we feel "in here".
That is to say, our exposure to any object in the world, is so brief, quick and fleeting, that only very brief exposure leads to an image which we have no reason to believe exists "out there", as far as manifest reality goes.
McGinn's short book,Inborn Knowledge: The Mystery Within, is quite instructive, I think. It's quite strange really. And if you consider not only the images we get, but the concepts we attribute to things, it's pretty amazing how much we bring forth in constructing the given.
I hope you find it to your liking.
Well, as far as I know, most mathematicians are Platonists in some sense.
As for "ordinary objects", it's hard to articulate such a view, given that what we perceive - including concepts - are likely unique to us, that is to say, a bird or a dog very likely has no such notions of ordinary objects. So our view of rivers and apples are unique to us, I'd venture to guess.
But the noumenal substratum would still apply to all creatures endowed with a certain level of perception. Something like that.
A few examples should help make my point. Sound is not a phenomenon viruses and bacteria need to be sensitive to and so, in a sense, they've evolved in ways that make them tune out sound (reduction in the causal field) but humans, at our scale, need sound sensing powers for survival and so we've developed ears, sound receptors (expansion of the causal field). By causal field I refer to all objects (matter/energy) that can elicit a response, produce an effect, in an organism.
In essence, the causal field is finely adjusted in terms of how important a particular, in your words, "stimulus" is for survival. Those stimuli like e.g. the gravitational pull of Saturn on our bodies that are always present and yet have no significance to our survival (astrology :chin: ) are those we become desensitized/habituated to i.e. we will no longer feel them and they lose their ability to influence our lives. Perhaps a particularly sensitive person or organism can, if it/fae tries, actually sense the gravity well of Saturn, other planets, the sun, the milky way and other galaxies; after all we are in their sphere of influence. :chin:
So, yes, we may have a fragmented picture of reality but, interestingly, our bodies are, let's just say, in the thick of everything going on, not just in your immediate vicinity, but also in the entire universe itself. We should then, in principle, be able to sense everything that's happening in the cosmos. Do we need to evolve sense organs or is the mind/brain, by itself, adequate (ESP)? I dunno, you tell me.
Just this ...
*Aspects of the territory recursively make & use (perspective-in/variant) maps of the territory. :eyes:
Like terra incognita or playing chess (or go), in the *naturalistic view, every un/known un/known is "hidden in plain sight" out in the open and is, therefore, a function of how we look and what we look for, or our discursive practices (i.e. search procedures).
"Reality" is not epistemically "incomplete"; rather, I think, human cognition is too wantonly meta-cognitive (Zapffe), that is, our intellects tend to neglect the unfamiliar and strange and intractably perplexing in order to simplify – reduce – "reality" to human scale familiarity and experience so that we feel more "at home" in our worlds (and in our skins). Thus, the appeal of self-flattering biases which prefer images to facts, believing to knowing, ideals to reals – "there must be more to existence than (this existence)" to "existence is gratuitous" – transcendence (the soul) to immanence (flesh), etc.
The "there must be more" occludes cognition and occults "reality" with, as Camus says, "nostalgias" and Feuerbachian "projections" (i.e. deities/demons, spectres, destinies, ego-fantasies, etc). And so they then fetishize their maps because they demand a "greater territory" than the territory itself, especially insofar as they fail to understand or accept that no map, not even a "sacred or magical" map, is ever equal to, let alone encompasses, the territory itself. They reflexively blot out much of reality and then, often pseudo-philosophically, take that "ideality" all the way to the bank of Woo. (Btw, who are "they"? The A, B & C designatees above.)
Of course, I could be mistaken. :smirk:
Is preference for images (over facts) self-flattering? If so, why?
I "seriously" disagree. Facts are the path of least effort, cognitive-wise, perceptive, or everything-wise. Facts are subject-variant, dependent on images we see in the mental world. The true nature of the world is revealed by imagery. Images can flatter (or expedite) self importance and they can light it up. But generally images are not involved in flattering at all (I'm not talking about the flattering that is involved in, say, nude photography).
In fact, I am right and you are wrong.
:up:
That's your image of the facts... :wink:
Lots of good stuff to go over in that post. Obviously, such an OP can be taken as not being satisfied with how much we have and can know and is thus seeking more than what we have available to us. Such an approach can invite naïve spiritualism a la "new age" types.
I can't help that too much, save to say that it's not the intention. As it currently stands, absolutely we look for shortcuts and ease of access when we construct our model of the world. It has to be (at least in part) a matter of efficiency in natural selection: if we had to spend several hours to make out an image of the world, we'd be eaten alive.
Yes, our maps can and often do mislead us when we try to navigate the territory. But our maps are quite a treasure too, it seems to me, even if it leads many to the edge of the world.
But the exposures get repeated and eventually coalesce into a useful representation…
Conscious experiences are of qualia as reality based 'apparitions' honed in the early years and onward from outward in and inward out into what is the best guess for the model and so soon one can tell a bottle of milk apart from what’s else. It’s not like the waves have a label on them saying that they came from the bottle but that one kept estimating the separate object into the best representation. There is some help in that light peels information off of an 'obect'.
In a night dream, the apparitions and phantasms are as true ghosts in that they have no outside basis, but the same world-simulating model is being employed, already having its best guess available.
The identification of you as a self is also an experience as a best guess estimate.
Sorry, I missed your post initially. I mean, if we were able to go to a habitable place, say, in the Andromeda galaxy, then we should be able to experience phenomena the way we do here. As of now, we can only experience the distant past of things in space - likely forever, unless some crazy new physics develops, which, while not impossible per se, seems highly unlikely.
We can experience the Sun here. If we were instantly dropped on Mercury we would either burn or freeze instantly. So there are practical parameters in which experience is possible for organisms.
However, when it comes to mental phenomena, I think it's not crazy to suspect other types of forms of organizing the world are available to other creatures. Perhaps they appreciate something which is meaningless to us. Or again, they can see infrared light, which we detect via instruments.
If we evolve aspects of our brain (or sense receptors) we could have more acute perceptions. As is the case of people who have 4 light cones instead of the traditional 3.
Yes. I think that's accurate, and I don't have a reason to think it should be otherwise, once we shed our naïve realism.
Dreams are interesting. Of course, when we are awake we tend to easily point out what was out of order or made no sense when comparing dreams to waking life. Skeptical games aside, we don't do the inverse much, that is, when dreaming, comparing "real life" to dream life, as it were.
(Some of was inspired from listening to the transhumanism aims of David Pearce.)
When this trans-humanism arrives…
Through natural evolution or via human-assisted evolution to higher being:
The naturalist, with the senses deepened, would be able to absorb with awestruck reverence scenes of overpowering sublimity far beyond the simple prettiness on offer now.
A musician would be able to hear and play music more exhilarating and heartfelt than anyone had ever dreamed of.
The celestial music of the spheres heard by the mystics would become as a child’s toy flute in comparison to this grand and ultimate symphony.
The sensualist would discover that what had passed for deep and passionate sex had been merely a pleasant prelude. Erotic pleasure of an intensity that flesh had never known would become enjoyable without guilt, even by thought alone.
A creator or patron of the visual arts would be able to behold representative vision in a holographic reality of indescribable glory and completeness.
Scientists would be able to apply a googolplex of neurons to their thought experiments, or by using AI, rivaling Einstein’s fortunate “ah-ha” moments, all of the time, to reveal much of what was unknown between heaven and Earth.
Arguments by people insisting on their own selfish ways would melt into a new sense of increased reasoning, just as bad and aversive emotions forced upon us involuntarily would be greatly lessened by new and safer medical miracles.
Wars would become much reduced, and humanity at large could finally progress beyond its everyday suffering.
People would actually remember their car keys and glasses that had often and usually piled up at the vanishing point of the ‘lost and found’, which is at the end of the converging railroad tracks.
Of course, throughout the ages there had always been those rare and mystical moments as described above, for some enlightened and peaceful souls or those in love, but they were but fleeting glimpses of a rare light that lit their minds for a while as a flickering candle, when all one’s thoughts perfectly conjuncted, but then, as usual, soon dispersed, scattering into the oblivion of forgotten dreams.
That true, if transhumanism turns out to be correct, that is, that we can "super-evolve".
But I don't think transhumanism is quite reliable. But, I hope I'm wrong, it would be interesting to fine tune oneself to such degrees. Perhaps.
:up: Interesting!
Yes, very much so:
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-found-a-woman-whose-eyes-have-a-whole-new-type-of-colour-receptor
Mmm. That's where I think this thought experiment can be misleading. This paranormal stuff, ghosts and the like, are all quite ancient registers of our evolutionary history. We used to believe in animism, fire has life, the Gods get mad and the dead roam the life of the living, wanting revenge or looking to quell a pain before going to the after life.
The evidence for almost all of this is non-existent. Ghosts are hallucinations, fire is not alive and the Gods don't control thunder or love. Another thing is to talk about something like intuition, in which very little is known - it's very hard to study. But plainly some people have good intuitions other do not.
The case of the photoreceptors proves that one mutation can reveal an aspect of reality most of us just cannot experience. We can, if feeling suggestible, feel ghostly presences and even make sense out of the idea that thunder is due to some human-like God wanting to harm us. We have access to these things already, but the reality attributed to them does not withstand scrutiny, so far.
The kind of thing I have in mind, hinted at photoreceptors are real phenomena which we cannot access even if we wanted to. We can't see more colours than the ones we see, save very few exceptions. Likewise, we cannot smell nearly as well as most other mammals. In this vein, an intelligent alien (if they exist - we don't know, prospects are iffy) could well organize reality in different ways.
They could smell like dogs, see much more of the visual spectrum and intuit how non-mental stuff leads to mental stuff, the way we intuit how apples fall. The difference here is one of lack of capacities not venturing into areas which lead back to the dark ages, burning witches based on testimony.
So I get your drift, but I'd be cautious.
Right!
However, don't you think that just like having infrared receptors in your eyes can help us see in the dark, acquiring a novel receptor could open up the world of ghosts, poltergeists, demons, and angels to us? Just saying.
Well, that's the thing. Some suggestible people already (claim) to see ghosts, demons, angels, without any extra cognitive faculties. In fact, I suspect all of us did if you go far enough back in our history.
So I think we would expect other aspects of reality much more ample than ghosts. Think, like of prodigies who can count thousands of numbers of pi by associated numbers with colours. Or being able to read a book to pages at a time and capturing all the content.
Such cases exist.
Why are you dismissing the paranormal world, calling people who report encounters with it as "...suggestible people..."? My take on it is that, as I said, since all perceptions have, as their final destination, the brain, there may not be any need for additional/enhanced sense organs; the brain alone would suffice in detecting all things/phenomenon in the blind spot of our sensory apparatus.
Take radios and infrared cameras - they're products of the brain, no?
Well, if you want to go that route, you'd probably want to say that these are natural phenomena as in the end, all processes are. Yes, the brain is the end point of it all, but that doesn't mean we should give much importance to phenomena which have been repeatedly shown not to be what people claim: things belonging to a different reality outside of nature. I don't think that's coherent.
At best you can say ghosts are like hallucinations. Which is fine. But I don't think these things "expand" our mental or sensible faculties, in fact, they fit into the ones we have.
Why stop at ghosts? We then need to grant literal existence to not only the Abrahamic God, but to Satan, the Flying Spaghetti monster and everything else. I think it muddles our ontology.
It would be more helpful then to develop an ontology of fictional entities and include all the characters of all the novels in the world, which are as real as ghosts. You can do that if you wish, but it would be an infinite task, just a list of all possible mental entities.
But these things don't add to the faculties we already have.
How do you know ghosts and the like are fictional? What if you added a sense organ to the existing five and with that detected the presence of what people have been calling ghosts? What then?
As for muddling ontology, remember what can be detected with the senses has ontological import and if I can feel the presence of ghost-like entities, then these entities have ontolological significance, no?
We're now talking past each other. I said (some) people already see "ghosts". You can find them in these entertainment channels were some guys get a camera and go to so-called haunted places and end up seeing at best some static or a flash of light.
So people don't need extra faculties to "see" them.
Ontological significance would be significance pertaining to the nature of the world. Hallucinations fit the same bill. But these aren't ontological per se, they are epistemic. Hallucinations don't have ontological weight. There are no hallucinations in the world.
Things change if you put them in a fictitious "epistemic-ontology", pertaining to the way our minds, in some circumstances, project these things, with little by way of causal connection between world and mind. In an epistemic-ontology analyzing fictions, we can say that we add entities to the world which do not exist.
We could say the same thing about trees, but we have good reason to believe trees have casual powers, not only for us, but likely to other creatures, like birds, who use them to build nests or whatever else they do.
So the ghosts thing doesn't add anything new. In fact, they are as old as human culture, when we had primitive beliefs. Sophisticated compared to anything else, but pails in comparison to what we understand now.
If they played a role, we’d accurately model them. Example: Electromagnetic waves. That doesn’t mean we “detect” them, rather, we see their effects and infer what they may be doing. These guesses will be as simple as possible in order to fit the observation, meaning we won’t know if we “really” got the right model of reality, but we will have something that works. Until new observations show it isn’t the right model either.
And if it doesn’t play a role, who cares about it?
Maybe we can't. But I'd speculate that things-in-themselves make sense in an ontology, though this can be debated.
That's a fair attitude, makes sense.