Platt to All: Several days ago I opined that reality is different for different creatures.
Andre: For a while now I have been hinting at other ways of interpreting (as a result of the way we see) reality. I mentioned Reanney. Here's something more: 'Imagine you are looking out the window at an iris in the garden, admiring its deep blue colour. I come into the room beside you and give you a photo which shows the iris as seen through the eye of a bee. Straight away you are puzzled. Not only is the flower no longer blue, it is streaked with strange markings on the petals, a grid of inward-pointing lines that makes you think, irrisistibly, of a runway. It is a different flower, you protest. But it is not, it is the same flower seen through a different eye. The bee's eye, unlike yours, can see ultraviolet light. So the bee's eye sees what its genes have trained it to see- a grid og markings, a landing track, to guide it to the source of the flower's nectar. This pattern is invisible to you because your eye is not made to access this higher- energy end of Nature's rainbow of colours. So which image of the flower is correct- yours or the bee's? Here is the point of the parable, they both are! No one image is 'correct'; each is tailored to the needs of the creature which sees it. What of a different eye again? Yes, it would see yet another kind of flower. And here is the mind-expanding truth of it: the process has no limit. The 'reality' of the flower is an endless bundle of possibilities, a many-faceted treasure. What appears at the invisible interface between seer and sight is only a single option drawn from a lottery that is mathematically inexhaustible' (p45-6) Just to extent this a little further: I like Reanney's 'tailored to the needs of the creature which sees it' which links in, not only biologically but also socially (with Pirsig's analogues upon analogues) through which we see [and therewith interpret] the world. IMHO the subject/object interpretation is a legacy from biological PoV's. Remember that Aristotle was not an armchair thinker. He did write the 'Historica Animalium', a result of loads of fieldwork inherited from his boyhood rides with his father who was a doctor. This became the foundation of modern day biology with all its ordering of life, its classifications etc etc. Animals need to be able to distinguish.. to extinguish in order to survive. Man is no different. We have been built so through inorganic and organic means. It has resulted in us as we are at present including the social and intellectually associated developments. Just read Lila's chapter 17 where Phaedrus walks through New York to his hotel toward his appointment with the . Does this sound and read like social patterns have won over biological patterns? Absolutely not. He is walking through a jungle, a one-to-one confrontation no one wants (blink), isolated units struggling to survive...literally. The law of the jungle. Love them distinguishing possibilities of my brain into subs and obs. Handy for pure survival. The modern scientific understanding of (and dealing with) reality/our environment was born [with long roots]. But we know that 'reality' consists of more than 'our environment'. Much more. We have evolved social PoV's ...and Intellectual PoV's. And its wasn't only because of the value of S/O thinking. We are capable of more. And now, I think I will leave 'intellect' LIE for awhile. Andre and the ignored Reanney 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/
