On Nov 16, 2011, at 6:42 PM, david buchanan wrote:
>
>
> Matt said to Dan:
> You've been taking "Don's dog dish" as an made-up, fictional account--is that
> right? And _that's_ why "what dish" makes sense? ...It had suddenly
> occurred to me, because of the lilt of some of your comments to me and to
> Dave, that you were basing the usage of "imaginary" on the fact that I "made
> up" the example, as in: I have no friends by these names, so it is an
> imaginary example. ... I still don't know whether you think it is important
> or not that some cases are anecdotal and some made up whole cloth; some are
> reportings of experience, some are thought-experiments. That's what I was
> trying to suss out last time.
>
> dmb says:
> Right. The tree in the forest is a classic thought experiment and nobody ever
> asks which forest or what kind of tree, let alone a specific and particular
> tree that Don's dog pees upon. I mean, I took "Don's dog dish" to be a
> concrete and particular experience (although trivial) but I take the tree
> that no one's around to hear as a hypothetical fiction, as an abstract tree
> of no particular type and one described in terms of being part of nobody's
> experience when it falls. Concrete and abstract are very important categories
> when discussing empirical reasons. I'd even say that no real conversation is
> going to occur until that is ironed out.
Marsha:
Can you consider this when discussing empirical reasons:
"Philosophers and scientists have long recognized the illusory nature of
perceptual appearance. When we observe the world around us, we see images, such
as shapes and colors, that lack physical attributes. The visual image of the
color red, for instance, doesn't have any mass or atomic structure. It isn't
located in the external world, for it arises partly in dependence upon our
visual sense faculty, including the eye, the optic nerve, the visual cortex.
There are clearly brain functions that contribute to the generation of red
images, but no evidence that those neural correlates of perception are actually
_identical_ to those images. So there is no compelling reason to believe that
the images are located inside our heads. Since visual images, or qualia, are
not located either outside or inside our heads, they don't seem to have any
spatial location at all. The same is true of all other kinds of sensory
qualia, including sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations
."
(Wallace, B. Alan, 'Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and
Consciousness',p.50)
Seems to me both "concrete" and "abstract" are patterns abstracted from the
pure experience.
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