In a previous post I spoke of Kant's apriori as "formatting". I think this term bears closer examination.
In Lila Pirsig best expression of the concept if not the term itself is here: ""Certainly the novel cannot exist in the computer without a parallel pattern of voltages to support it. But that does not mean that the novel is an expression or property of those voltages. It doesn't have to exist in any electronic circuits at all. It can also reside in magnetic domains on a disk or a drum or a tape, but again it is not composed of magnetic domains nor is it possessed by them. It can reside in a notebook but it is not composed of or possessed by the ink and paper. It can reside in the brain of a programmer, but even here it is neither composed of this brain nor possessed by it. The same program can be made to run on an infinite variety of computers. A program can change itself into a different program while it is running. It can turn on another computer, transfer itself into this second computer and shut off the first computer that it came from, destroying every last trace of its origins - a process with similarities to biological reproduction." What he describes here is various ways that a novel can be formatted. Formating is a kind of encoding. If you know the code you can extract the information. With out the code you could as Pirsig says, ". spend all of eternity probing the electrical patterns of that computer with an oscilloscope and never find that novel." I take Pirsig's explanation of Kant to mean that our experience is structured or formated in such a way as to be decodable by us. We have evolved senses that format experience in a meaningful way. Meaning is reduction in uncertainty. We have evolved in such a way as to benefit from reduction in uncertainty. A pattern is meaningful because it reduces uncertainty about some collection of sense data. Meaning is derived for sensing both difference and similarity in the relations of sense data. In Prospect Theory Kahneman and Treversky maintain that human beings are able to sense and estimate probability in much the same way as we estimate distance or size or, I would add, the passage of time. We can see odds changing all the time. At every instant we are in an environment are shifting probabilities. We construct the world by taking some of these probabilities to be near certainty. The more certain we hold them to be the less they concern us. In a room we understand that there is some probability that the walls and roof might cave in but we are certain enough that it won't that we pay no mind to the possibility. We similarly ignore the floor. Walls and ceilings and floors are rendered static because there is little probability that they will change. What we attend to most. What we direct awareness to is shifting probabilities. We are almost physiologically incapable of not orienting towards change. It is actually called an orienting response. We immediately and unconsciously shift our consciousness toward the least static or most dynamic stimuli in the environment. We are able to do this because we have been equipped by nature to encode and decode information in the format our senses present it to us. Krimel 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/
