[From Bill Powers (2007.01.14.0330 MST)]
Hilton head is nice and warm. Not like Denver.
Bjorn Simonsen (2007.01.14,11:00 EUST)-
Bjorn, I think you are placing theory above observation. What is most
real to us is the world we perceive. Everything else is judged by
comparison with what we can observe. If a theory says we should see a
certain meter reading, and we do not, and there is no mistake, then the
theory is wrong. To say that perception is wrong because the theory must
be right is to believe more in imagination than in direct experience.
That’s a basic mistake – of course lots of people make it, like
physicists, but it’s still a mistake. If we don’t believe our own
experiences (aside from believing what we think and say about them) then
experimental science becomes impossible. If we don’t accept that the
meter reading is what it appears to be, there is no way to test any
theory.
This still doesn’t require us to believe that the world is exactly the
way we experience it, or even approximately like it. But theory says that
our experiences are derived from the real world by physical means, our
perceptual input functions, and so are perfectly real although they
are (at present) an unknown but perhaps not unknowable function of what
is out there. If we dismiss perceptions as having nothing to do with
reality, saying “Oh, that’s only a perception,” we are
also dismissing meter readings and all other scientific data, which of
course negates the very theory that says our experiences are simply
arbitrary perceptions. The one thing forbidden to rational thought is
self-contradiction.
It’s no small task to untangle the properties of human perception from
the properties we assume belong to the real world. Physicists who think
they are observing Reality Itself are still very confused about the
nature of perception and the role it plays in presenting us with an
observable world. Schroedinger’s Cat will be seen some day as a clumsy
joke, or simply an analogy too full of holes to believe (exactly when is
a cat “dead”? What if the observer imagines or
believes that the cat is dead when it is only asleep or
unconscious? What exactly constitutes an observation?).
The only solid ground on which we can stand is direct experience. The
theoretical proposition that it is experience of neural signals in our
brains does not make it any less real.The television producer watching
screens in a control room has every reason to believe that the pictures
come from a camera somewhere that is converting some part of reality,
even on the other side of the world or on another planet, into the kind
of images we can see on a television set, and which look to us quite like
what we would see if we were standing where the camera is. We have every
reason to believe that at the lowest level, the world outside us is
imaged by a lens that forms a picture on the retina, which is then
relayed into the brain. We could still be missing something, but that
inference appears to be pretty stable for now. As we look at higher and
higher levels of experience derived from arrays of intensities, for
example colors or shapes or movements or relationships, we have more
uncertainty about any connection to corresponding organizations outside
us. but that doesn’t say we must remain ignorant about that connection
forever.
Also, of course, we must remain alert to the difference between what we
actually experience as a result of external inputs and what we experience
intentionally, in imagination, as we manufacture perceptual signals
inside the brain. It’s not self-evident what comes from inside and what
comes from outside. We’re constantly testing to see if an appearance is
“real”, meaning testing whether it’s determined by something on
the other side of our sensors, or is being supplied by our own brains
filling in what is not actually being experienced in real time. Is that a
UFO or is it a blemish in the windowpane? Open the window and look again.
Is the crossbar of the T really shorter than the stem? Turn the T on its
side. Testing isn’t hard.
Through all of this, every experience and every test of experience is
observed directly, and rationality cannot reject the reality of the
experience. We can doubt anything we say or deduce about any experience,
but we can’t doubt that the experience is occurring. If we reject the
reality of experience, then we automatically reject the reality of the
rejection, because that is an experience, too. It is impossible to doubt
real experience in general because that doubt is an experience which
instantly refutes itself.
Best,
Bill P.