[Marsha] I remember a while back you ardently defending tit's. I think maybe you have softened your view. Are tit's independent, autonomous entities, or not? Example? Are tit's patterns? Or something different?
[Krimel] I just finished a book on child development call "The Scientist in the Crib." It looks at some of the remarkable discoveries that have been made over the past 25 years with regards to how children's brains and thoughts and sense of morality develop as they grow up. The authors claim that the three great problems of childhood are the problem of the external world, the problem of other minds and the problem of language. Sound familiar? What they show is that infants exit the womb remarkably well suited to solving these problems. We are not blank slates. For example the visual system in newborns is not at all like that of older children. In fact newborns could be classified as legally blind and for years this was the dominant understanding. However, if we look a little more closely we see that newborns are extraordinarily near sighted. For them the world actually comes into pretty good focus at about 9 inches. That is the world that their visual system processes is the face of whoever is holding them. Imagine a newborn entering the world with 20/20 vision. The task of dealing with all of that information would be overwhelming. Nature has spared newborns of this and instead focuses their attention on the most important part of their new worlds, Mama. It is no mystery from an evolutionary stand point that we are born prepared to deal with the world we must survive in. What is surprising is how well prepared we are to adapt to the world we find ourselves in. The issue I am driving at here is that it is true that we know only the world of our sense impressions and our stored recollections of past experience. It is not possible for us to have direct experience of anything outside of our nervous systems. Experience IS activation of the nervous system. The question really is: Can we trust our senses to provide accurate information? Can we trust ourselves to accurately interpret this information? Again the evolutionary response is yes because if our senses where not functionally accurate we would not survive. Our senses are finely tuned to give us information about the world that is relevant to our survival. In short our senses have evolved to help us apprehend TiTs. It is certainly possible to doubt whether TiTs actually exist. From a purely skeptical position is it is not possible to discount all of the scenarios that would have us deceived by clever demons or have our disembodied brains floating in vats or that cast us as immortal deities living in self imposed exile out of boredom. Idealism, extreme phenomenology, some forms of mysticism and numerous religious notions are ongoing incarnations of this kind of thinking. I suppose I could advance all manner of reasons why I am so willing to accept the fact the TiTs do in fact exist. I think our sensations are rooted in something outside of ourselves. But as I have said many times in the past it all boils down to faith. Whatever rational spin I might put on the matter, in the end my belief in the existence of an external world is rooted in a sense of rightness and not in rationality at all. [Marsha] p.s. If you haven't read Nagarjuna, I will have to think of you as a monk, and not a wizard. Although a useful monk. Ron: I think what Krimmel (sic) needs to distinguish, and I'm not sure that Kant does, is differentiate between noumena and things in themselves. Roughly, a noumenon may be distinguished from the following concepts, although there is debate of the synonymity between them: [Krimel] I am way too lazy to read either of these guys in the original. I will make do with the Sparknotes or Wiki versions. I appreciate the originality of such thinkers but in end I think their views are flawed by ignorance just as our current views will seem similarly flawed to future generations. While they are both interesting for historical reasons, history is not my primary interest. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
