Cheerskep: you might be right about the wording we use. I propose:
1.- A sensorial experience is not a consciousnes experience BUT it requires a state of pre-awareness. There is no self-observation on our sensorial experience. 2.- I suggest perception starts in the sensorium with the bottum-up path, I locate interpretation of perception on the top-down pathway. We sense the world, lets say we get natural signs of it; perception and interpretation help us derive knowledge from the sensing of the world. 3.- Structural isomorphism. "When we see on the television screen films that have been taken through an infra-red camera, we see the warm and hot portions of the view as shades of green; the green is structurally isomorphic to the heat but does not ressemble it - does your TV screen get hot? We manage reasonably well to act in the world with our internally colored, structurally isomorphic evidence." 4.- Qualitative (and numerical identity) ressemblance. Am using resemblance as identity. There is no external smell to match neural smell. We have no sound, no smell, no color, no pictures in the brain.Our eyes pick up light rays which are uncolored. 5.- Sensing. Agnosics sense but do not perceive. 6.- Since I consider sensing as being non epistemic I cannot accept the traditional view on the term "aesthetic experience" unless we "extend" the concept of "aesthetic" to perceiving. I know Sense-Datum theorists have a problem with that (see Roy Wood Sellars, for exemple). 7.- Then there is this thing about consciousness. I'm not sure with the "...arising into consciousness". In that particular case I rather say that consciousness is the "arising" (a process). My views on sensing and perceiving help me substantiate my views on the non-conceptual and the indirect realism theory. I know I'm taking many short cuts here, and I apologize for that but I am short on time. Luc PS. By the way I also have a problem with the term "experience" when used in "sensorial experience". But, that's another story! www.lucdelannoy.com ----- Original Message ---- From: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 10:27:41 AM Subject: Re: Unnoticed asthetic response I think Luc and I have basic philosophical differences, but not nearly as many as first reading suggested to me. My guess is that we have some fundamentally similar views, but our ways of articulating are so different that the similarities are not immediately easy to discern. It seems a lesson in how the mere difference in verbal labeling of notions can produce what seems a serious disagreement about fundamental things when in fact there's no basic dispute at all. For example, Luc writes: "It as been said that aesthetic involves the senses (sensorial receptors); fine. But if you believe, as I do, that sensing is not a conscious mental state. . ." Here's my notion of "sensing". My eyes, ears, nose etc are receptors where the first events occur that will result in what I've called raw sense data. Visually, these "data" comprise colors and shapes; aurally what is "coming through" will result in various "sounds"; aromas and stenches that I will become aware of depend on earlier events in my nose. Initially, what happens is that non-mental objects impinge on nerve endings in the receptors, and nerves deliver certain impulses to various parts of the brain. It is not until the "olfactory bulb" -- a physical part of the brain -- does its work that we "become aware of" the smell. It's comparable to switching on a light. The "impinging" is the flicking of the switch. Electricity courses through the wire until it hits the bulb. Then -- light! So "sensing" is for me a multi-part event -- including the moment of our first being "aware" of the colors, sounds, smells. For me it's not simply that initial impinging and racing nerve impulses. But I think that the initial activity may be all that Luc has in mind with "sensing". That would account for his asserting "sensing is not a conscious mental state," because indeed I'm not "aware of" that initial "pre-bulb", pre-brain nerve activity. I'm ready to assume that what he has in mind with 'conscious' is very close to what I have in mind with 'aware'. We'd both agree, I think, there is no "notion" until after the brain starts working. Luc further writes: "If you believe, as I do, that sensing is non-epistemic, that sensing is not a conscious mental state, that there is no qualitative resemblance, just structural isomorphism, then you have to ask yourself the question I put forward." Maybe I've got Luc wrong in believing he thinks of "sensing" as all the pre-awareness activity because I'm not sure how the pre-brain activity can have "structural isomorphism" if there's not yet any "notion". Certainly nerve impulses have their own "shape", but there isn't yet anything for them to be "iso" -- similar -- to. When notion arises, with colors, shapes and sounds, then we can talk of their being isomorphic with, say, the shape of the object "out there". But maybe Luc does see the "shape" of the coursing electricity before the bulb lights up as having a shape that is in some way isomorphic with, say, the color or intensity of the ensuing light. (Meantime, I can't grasp how a smell could have "structural isomorphism" at all.) Again, though, I don't see any of this as an important disagreement between my ideas and Luc's. All pass over Luc's "there is no qualitative resemblance" not because I think he's wrong, but because I don't know what he has in mind. Perhaps he means that the nerve-ending agitation and immediately subsequent impulses on their way to the brain have no "redness", "skunk-smell", etc. So, putting aside possible inconsistencies, at the outset Luc and I may "misunderstand" each other because we have different notions in mind with the same word -- 'sensing'. In infer the difference in
