At 11:59 +1100 21/01/2003, Colin Hales wrote:
This is a query placed as a result of failing to succeed to find answers when googling my way around the place for a very long time (2 years). I am about to conclude that a) no such discourse exists or b) that it is disguised in a form of physics/math that my searching has not uncovered. I know it is off-topic but I thought I'd run it by you folk as the most eclectic agglomerators of knowledge in the multiverse. Off-list replies welcome - keep the noise down and all that. Q. What branch of science has ascertained the role and status of the image in a first person perspective of a mirror? .ie. 'be' the mirror. The answer 'there ain't one as far as I know' is as acceptable as anything. I just need to know what's out there. If there's nothing there then I take it I'm in that breezy lonely spot past the front lines of epistemology and trundle on assuming (a) above.
As far as I understand the question it seems to me that the answer is "intensional recursion theory". My own approach to epistemology has been based on it, especially through the work of John Case. Fortunately or unfortunately, the modal logics of self-reference (G, G*) can be used as a sort of shortcut so that I am no more relying directly on the, although very beautiful, work by John Case. A good starting point is http://www.cis.udel.edu/~case/self-ref.html Note that it is not really "first person perspective of a mirror", at least as I define "first person" because "my" first person is just invisible for all third persons and so cannot be seen in a mirror. First persons share this property with vampires! One day I will put my paper "amoeba, planaria, and dreaming machine" on my web page, because it shows the relationship between Case's use of the mirror in abstract biology and the loebian machine psychology. Hoping that helps. Bruno
