"Perception is the process of making meaning out of sensory data. It is the instant integration of present sensation with past experience. It is the making of wholes out of parts"
just had to high light that ________________________________ From: Krimel <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, May 23, 2009 12:44:44 PM Subject: Re: [MD] Is it serious? > [Marsha] > I have always had trouble following your unique metaphysical language. [Ham] That doesn't surprise me. Describing a concept that isn't common to experience requires uncommon terms. However, this needn't be an obstacle if the terms are defined, (and I do provide a glossary). [Krimel] Since Marsha has gone to the beach I would like to step in for a second. I am sure she won't mind... At least until Tuesday... Ham, she is being far to charitable, the purpose of technical terminology in philosophy is to highlight particular meanings of terms. Hamish is not that. It is either your inability to communicate in your mother tongue or your need to make your ideas sound more profound than they actually are. [Ham] Was the world flat when they perceived it to be flat? Actually, they didn't perceive flatness, they deduced it. I don't perceive that Marsha is a "thinking self" like me, I assume it. I do perceive the world as an "other" to my thinking self. That is a self-evident fact to me, and I presume for you, also. You may call it an "illusion", but it as an illusion of the existence you and I share. "Static patterns of value responding to Dynamic Quality" is incomprehensible language to me. [Krimel] This is a point Willblake2 misapprehends as well. All perception is "illusion". It is an automatic structuring of sensation. It makes sense of our senses. It happens so fast that dmb wants to bypass sensation as the primary empirical reality. James seems to allow the function of perception into his radical empiricism but he never suggests that perception is anything other than the summation of sensation. Perception is the process of making meaning out of sensory data. It is the instant integration of present sensation with past experience. It is the making of wholes out of parts. Here are some simple examples. The raw sensation of vision involves conversion of light energy into nervous impulses by nerve cells on the retina. There is a hole in the retina called the blind spot where no such transduction takes place. The process of perception smoothes over the incompleteness in our visual field. Also the arrangement of the kinds and number of nerve cells on our retinas makes focused, sharp visual acuity possible in only a very tiny spot near the center of our vision. Most of the visual field is a blur as a result. Yet because we glance here and there unconsciously we create the illusion of a focused world. Vision takes place on the two dimensional surfaces of our retinas but because we have two retinas offset from each other we create the illusion of three dimensions. Calling the world flat or round is a slightly higher order of this more fundamental process. What you are talking about is not perception or inference. It is "common sense." That is the way that people in a community interpret their sense in a common way. Prior to Copernicus it was "common sense" to see the world as flat. Everyone had the shared perceptual illusion of a stationary earth with the various heavenly bodies circling it. What makes the "Copernican Revolution" so significant for Kant and later Kuhn is that it caused a radical shift in the "common sense". It was nothing less than a worldwide and historic change in the way people interpreted and structured their sense data. It was a collective Gestalt shift from one system of illusion to another. [Ham] I would say anything that is necessary for my survival is more than a "convenience." It must be pretty "real", even if my life is an illusion. If I thought food was a mere convenience rather than a necessity, that misconception would indeed cause me much suffering. [Krimel] So are you saying that your "free will" is constrained by your biology or even by what you think is "real"? My, my... [Ham] Calling your self an "spov for Reality" is playing games with language. [Krimel] OMG, I spilt my coffee cracking up over that one. You invent your own private prayer language and want to accuse someone else of playing language games? You should get your own show on Comedy Central. [Ham] There is beauty in poetry, music, art, and nature. But you're saying there's beauty in not knowing the truth. Inasmuch as my quest is for Truth, I don't find ignorance beautiful. [Krimel] A fine example of blue pill thinking, if ever I heard one. I fear though, that the quest for Truth is folly; mainly because if we found it we do not have the tools to actually know it. This realization is what underlies the scientific method. We cannot "prove" anything in general terms. We can add weight to a general rule through repeated observations that support its truth value but we can never remove the possibility that what we understand as Truth is in fact error. This is a radical inversion of Greek philosophical methodology which began with general rules, axioms or ideal forms and rejected the messy world of experience as shadow. [Ham] It's a poetic thought, Marsha. But, aside from the fact that it makes you feel good, what evidence do you have that thinking and talking this way is "better" than logic, deduction, or metaphysical intuition? People who make "feeling good" their life goal generally wind up uninformed, overspent, and dependent. (They make good left-wing liberals, though.) [Krimel] This is simply breathtaking. You really have got stones to use this argument. I have applied this to your "philosophy" many times and every time you ignore it or run away. I thought you missed the point completely. I guess this is a sign of progress that you understand it well enough to try to use it on someone else. But it certainly is just a baby step. Here is the most recent example from my unanswered post of 5/17: "Uncreated Essence is a myth you have constructed to cover over many of the gaping holes in your philosophy. It is a fiction that apparently serves to keep you happily blind to the huge holes in your conceptual continuity. Mostly you seem to be constructing a way of drawing a smiley face on emptiness and nihilism. But that's just the way this "negate" sees it." But let me just say that I agree completely with you when you say: "People who make "feeling good" their life goal generally wind up uninformed, overspent, and dependent." You add: "(They make good left-wing liberals, though.)" apparently missing the fact that being "uninformed, overspent, and dependent" is not a monopoly of one side of the political spectrum. But I suppose we should be happy with baby steps; that and the rich source of humor we find in all of your posts. 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/ 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/
