Nick writes, incidentally to Frank's "comments about [his] argumentative style":
> As for the inner life thing, I > don't think I am dishonest when I say that I don't believe in an inner life. > I admit that I have something like that as an experience, but think it must > be an illusion. The following is a brief version (not that any longer version exists, yet or perhaps ever) of my take on "illusions"--specifically "perceptual illusions" in the passage (quoted from Jaan's and my introduction to my book on mathematical modeling in the social sciences; it's me writing here, except for all but the first sentence of the first paragraph, which is Jaan) but applicable more generally. ===begin Mathematics has been described as "the study of pattern" (Whitehead, 1941, pp. 674, 680) and (not necessarily more ambitiously) as "the science of patterns" (Devlin, 1997; Resnik, 1997; Steen, 1988). It is usual and natural for humans to perceive patterns, even patterns that are not `really there´; our perceptual systems create "perceptual illusions" of wholes from configurations of points, corners (Kanizsa, 1969) or sounds (Benussi, 1913). Furthermore, the human mind can contemplate objects that do not exist-a "round triangle" is an example that has fascinated thinkers since the 1880s when Alexius Meinong attempted to understand the nature of such objects in his Gegenstandstheorie (Meinong, 1907, passim; 1915, p. 14). In this connection, the traditional use of the word "illusion" is tendentious; it can be disputed along the following lines (see also Carini, 2007). Start with the axiom that a `whole´ that is perceived is ipso facto `correctly´ perceived. Then, for the person who perceives a whole, what is-or may be-`illusory´ is not the whole: it is the felt need or imposed demand to identify the perceptually present and correctly perceived whole as something else, namely, a certain unperceived whole that is perceptually and physically absent from the present situation of the perceiver (and might even be physically absent from the entire universe, past, present, and future-if, say, it is a "round triangle"). Contrariwise, for a(nother, or the same) person (perhaps a psychologist) who is observing the situation, what is illusory is the conviction that the `whole´ known to the perceiver is in some manner or degree less (or more) `real´ than the `unwhole´ known to the observer, which the perceiver *somehow should and would* be perceiving-were not the universe (or the observer) somehow setting successful snares. On this view, the ascription of `illusion´ is a category error, a failure of the ascriber´s (formal or informal) ontology and epistemology to adequately fit the phenomena of construction by the human mind (starting with the human perceptual system). ==end== In the present case, I would say that the "something like" an "inner life" that you "have as an experience" is not illusory: rather, you are committing a category error when you ascribe to this *actual experience* (a certain bundle of behaviors at various levels of organization) a fictitious quality of "inner"ness and/or "life"like ness. Lee [I am trying to send this to the list, but that's only intermittently successful for me; so if you only get it once, and think it would be of wider interest, please reply to the list-- otherwise only to me (or not at all, of course)] ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
