I'm going to address free-will & morality questions in a separate
thread.
On Sat, 10 Mar 2001, Dan Minette wrote:
>
> There is a difference between awareness of phenomenon and the reflective
> self-awareness of the "I" aware of the phenomenon. There are, indeed,
> internal phenomena, such as the sense of pain, which we cannot share. But,
> there is also a reflective self awareness every time we are aware of
> phenomenon.
I'm not sure that's entirely clear or true. In many respects I think
I am most aware of phenomena when I am least aware of my alleged
"self." In particular, I'm not convinced by the "every time" aspect
of your statement above. What about when we're so engrossed in
something that we "forget ourselves?" And what makes self-awareness
"reflective?" That implies that when I look at something, embedded
in that perception is a reflection of something that could be called
my "self"--an aspect of experience I can't say I've ever experienced
before--and aside from being a habit of speech I'm not sure that
the term reflection applies in any useful sense to the experience of
selfhood.
When I take stock of my internal states, I'm aware of my thoughts,
physical sensations, and feelings. Physical sensations are just that,
physical (stomach grumbling, joints aching, etc.). Thoughts are partly
guided by me but not wholly--I can't stop them coming up, for instance.
Feelings are trickier, but they seem to involve dwelling on an issue in
thought and judging it in some way that also provides a kind of physical
sensation: clenched jaw & tight stomach, or a relaxed mild euphoria, for
instance. But in all these things I'm focused on something that happens
in me or from me, yet I never look directly at "me"--the place from which
my point of view originates. My internal awareness is not mirrorlike, not
a self-reflection at all.
I don't see my "self," in other words. I see things happening in me, none
of which is actually "me," and I construct a "me" for practical and social
purposes from these events...yet these events never do provide a
description of which I'd be content to say, "This is me, no more or less."
Of course, I'm aware of my awareness of events and sensations. Is my
awareness-of-awareness my "self?" Maybe, but if we divorce the awareness
from all the sensation, thoughts, and feelings I perceive in myself, I'm
left with a vision but no eye, so to speak. So before we say that I have
a reflective awareness of self, before we make that assumption, we have to
ask, what is that self apart from internal phenomena? Do we see that self
(have reflective self-awareness) or do we merely infer it from phenomena,
making a leap of faith whenever we state that the self is indeed a thing
that exists. Can the self be described apart from phenomena? Does it
need to be?
> Well, given that viewpoint, anything experienced internally will either be
> reduced to something that is experienced externally or thrown out as
> illusion. Indeed, even the idea of ideas would have to be "rethought."
> What we think is what we are forced to think, so the concepts underlying
> rationality will have to be reformulated.
Hasn't there been some research in psychology or neurology that suggests
this isn't far from the truth? The thinking that decides or analyzes
actions tend to follow the actions, not precede them, at least in some
contexts? (I think somebody brought this up on Brin-L once, but I've
forgotten the context.)
What are the concepts underlying rationality, anyway?
> >
> Well, it would only say that evolution is our best model of what happened
> based on observations. How our minds really formed is probably more complex
> than evolution, but since we only have our senses to make models from, we
> should do the best that we can with what we have, acknowledging our
> limitations.
More complex than evolution? As in physical + cultural, or as in physical
+ transcendent?
> > Contrariwise: if the rules of time and space and cause-n-effect are just
> > grounds for human perception, why don't we (I'm assuming we don't) get
> > glimpses of things at the macro level that violate our perceptual powers?
>
> Because our minds were formed while interacting with the nomenon in a manner
> that produced the macroworld of phenomenon.
Is there any inevitability to this interaction? Rather, are there an
unlimited possible forms of interaction that lead to minds, meaning an
unlimited number of types of minds and phenomenal worlds, or are there
rules for interaction that limit the sorts of minds that appear?
Does the word "interaction" have *any* meaning at all for a protomind that
doesn't yet produce phenomena?
>
> > I really just trying to say that just because an electron doesn't behave
> > like a billiards ball doesn't mean that billiards balls don't really
> > behave like billiards balls or that they fundamentally aren't billiards
> > balls.
> >
> So, fundamentally, they are not made up of protons and electrons. What
> about the fact that quantum chaos is apparent in billiard balls within 1
> sec?
No, no, no. Fundamentally, they are both billiards balls and objects
subject to the quantum chaos of their constituent particles at the same
time. I'm asking why this either/or distinction is necessary (see
comments [*] on reality below).
>
> > While this certainly implies there's something about space/time/
> > matter/energy we don't understand, I'm not sure it implies the existence
> > of a thing-in-itself, and I'm not sure it implies that we'll *never*
> > understand.
> >
>
> Well, since this is philosophy, there are no proofs. But, I'm surprised
> that no one else thinks "fudge factor" when they think of renormalization.
Actually, I agree. So does Gribbin and, according to Gribbin, any
physicist or cosmologist who looks at the issue seriously. As I
understand it, though, people are still working on that good old grand
unified theory and coming up with possible solutions that would eliminate
the problem of renornmalization. None of these solutions (Superstring?
Supergravity? I'm incompetent to describe them.) have been proven, but
people seem to think it's a problem worth working on. So I'm still
wondering what about renormalization says "time for metaphysics" rather
than "we're still working on understanding physics in totum."
>
> So, billiard balls are real, but electrons aren't? We are poking underneath
> the structure of reality?
[*] Maybe we are. Earlier I tried to avoid language that suggests one
thing is "more real" than another, but if one wants to avoid idealism,
then there is a sense that investigating the structure of the universe is,
indeed, poking into and under the structure of reality. So perhaps in a
sense, electrons are less real than atoms, atoms less real than DNA, and
so on. It sounds bogus, but this bogusness may just be a consequence of
the limits of words like "real" which evolved when all known objects
appeared to obey the same physical laws.
So, yes, we're poking underneath reality, and electrons are less real than
bricks; but they're less real than bricks in the same way that a steering
wheel is less a car than a Honda Civic.
> > I don't mean that it's inadequate once and for all time, just that
> > macroscopic language is unfit to describe QM.
>
> But, we do have a language that describes QM: the QM theories themselves.
> Everything else is a summary.
Right. And those summaries by necessity happen in language that is more
easily adapted to metaphysics than to quantum events. So we can look at
electrons and think, "Gee, maybe the universe is less real than we
thought," but that conclusion is only demonstrating the limits of
conventional language to describe existence, not the limits of the
universe to exist at all.
> >
> > Still, if we don't know what is real, we also don't know that what we see
> > isn't real.
> >
> No, we don't know that. What I do know is that realistic philosophers have
> clung to interpretations of QM that assume a hidden reality.
What's the difference between the hidden reality of the realist, which
appears to defy or contradict the science of phenomena, and the hidden
reality of the transcendentalist, which simply concludes that science
isn't about what's real anyway (i.e. that what we observe isn't real)?
Each side makes a leap of faith, one that there's something real which
we'll never know, the other that science will eventually reveal what we
don't currently understand. If science ultimately proves a realist's
current theory wrong, he'll at least be able to point at science's ability
to continue to lay bare the world.
> > So here's a conjecture: there are no things in themselves, but there are
> > multiple (2 or more) perspectives on reality. Perhaps from another
> > perspective the problems of QM don't exist, nor do space and time or
> > anything remotely resembling them. Whatever beings might live in one of
> > these realities would be experiencing exactly the same meta-universe as
> > we but would live in an utterly different cosmology. But they might still
> > be able to have the same realism vs. idealism debate as we, not realizing
> > that their noumenon is our phenomenon, and vice versa.
> >
>
> That's part way to what I think. What I think is closer to the idea that
> they have a different set of phenomenon, with different distortions and
> limitations. We all have the same nomenon. If you want to fit God in this,
> God is the only being without a limited mind, and is thus able to both
> understand reality as it is and understand what our phenomenon (and all
> other beings phenomena) looks like.
But if a being without a limited mind can exist, that points me to one of
two conclusions: either the noumenon places no limitations upon the kinds
of minds that can evolve, hence no limits upon phenomena, and hence is
logically divorced from all phenomenal worlds such that it can't matter to
any of them; or God created the noumenon and/or it precedes from him, in
which case a noumenon isn't necessary since God might just as well deal
with phenomena directly, and one might as well prefer Berkely instead of
Kant.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
Don't be frightened. Adrenaline will just make your blood taste funny.
