[Martin Taylor 2005.03.29.17.26]
[From Bruce Gregory (2005.0329.1605)]
Rick Marken (2005.03.29.1240)
If you actually perceived God (which would be like perceiving someone as the
mailman or the dentist, I suppose; it's a category level perception in the
current PCT hierarchy), then you cannot be wrong about that. But you could
be wrong about the explanation of that perception, which is that the cause
of this perception was God. The cause of the perception might actually have
been the devil or that fellow behind the curtain in Wizard of Oz. The same
thing could happen with the mailman or the dentist. What you perceive as the
mailman could be a burglar casing out the neighborhood; what you perceive as
the dentist could be a Nazi on the lam. But even if it turns out that what
you perceived wasn't really God, the mailman or the dentist, it was God, the
mailman and the dentist _when you perceived them_.
Science is really for people who don't take their realities for granted.
Abraham was the prototypical non scientist (and thus, not a particularly
admirable fellow, from my perspective). A scientist would have done some
serious checking experiments, detective work) before believing that it was
God who wanted him to sacrifice his first born. Of course, I wouldn't have
sacrificed any of my kids, even if it were the mailman who asked.
I may be wrong, but these two paragraphs seem contradictory to me. I would prefer to say that I though I perceived God, that what I tasted seemed like chocolate at the time, that I thought I heard a noise, or that I thought I saw Nicole Kidman at the local supermarket. In other words, I believe we can be mistaken about what we perceive. I suspect you think so too!
Bruce, I can understand where you are coming from, but I'm with Rick on this. I think -- figure that one out -- that you are misinterpreting what Rick is saying.
What you perceive is what you perceive. It's not what is in the real world that provides the data that your nervous system/brain processes to create the perception.
When you say: "... what I tasted seemed like chocolate at the time..." you are describing a perception that includes two things (at least). One thing is the percetion you had at the time (or rather, a memory of it), and the other is a perception based on all sorts of other data about the context of the earlier (chocolate taste) perception."
A lot of the time, when we perceive something, we also have another perception that includes some kind of analysis of the context of the perception. Could that really have been Nicole Kidman? What was the initial perception? Was it _of_ Nicole Kidman? Or was it of a woman to whom you applied a label (by whatever indeterminate process labels are attached). If the latter, even then you had two distinct perceptions -- the woman and the label, with possibly a third, the assurance with which you applied the label. Later, you may have a perception that is inconsistent with having recently seen Nicole Kidman, and from that generate a new perception "I thought I saw Nicole Kidman but it must have been someone else".
None of those perceptions occur in the outer environment. They are perceptions that we hypothesise to have some relation to a real world "out there". But they are in your head. What's "out there" is as mysterious when it may or may not be chocolate or Nicole Kidman as it is when we deal with quantum entanglement and (worse) quantum erasure. All of it -- really all -- is modelling. The only reality you have is your perceptions.
When we treat mesoscale objects at human-scale event rates, we are often able to control those perceptions reasonably well, which gives us reasonable assurance that our internal representations of the real world can't be too far wrong, whether they are embodied in the strengths of synaptic connection or as some kind of databank. However, when we go to far different scales of time and space, whether interstellar space and megayears or interatomic space and attoseconds, we have no direct perceptual control, and no direct assurance that our models of the real world bear any realtion to what's "out there".
There's no reason for concepts that apply to the mesoscale to apply at very different scales. Why should we worry whether an entity is a particle or a wave, or whether it is localized? I think that to worry about that kind of question is an illegitimate attempt to extend the perceptual control behaviours we have grown up with into domains no biological system has ever controlled. Just because we can catch a baseball (particle) but not a seawave doesn't mean they have to be distinct concepts at all scales, does it?
The only testable contact we have with external reality is our ability to control through our behaviour the perceptions we think are of outside. It doesn't matter whether those perceptions are as direct as the taste of chocolate or as indirect as through the mathematical manipulations that enable us to say that certain sparkles in a tub of heavy water are caused by the disintegration and reintegration of atomic nuclei in a star that exploded 187,000 (or whatever) years ago in the Small Magellanic Cloud, and were expected to occur when the flash of that explosion was seen in 1987. All is perception, and the unconscious data manipulations performed by our synapses are just as fallible and provide just as hypothetical a version of the "real world" as do the abstruse mathematics of quantum cosmology.
Well, that's a lot longer than I had intended. And maybe its length obscures the message, that when you "think you perceived something" you are perceiving both a perception and some other data, which together create the new "I think I see" perception.
Martin