[Martin Taylor 2005.04.04.20.10]
[From Bruce Gregory (2005.0404.1644)]
[Martin Taylor 2005.04.04.16.21]
You can't be mistaken THAT you experience. You can be mistaked about a predicted relationship between one experience and another. In particular you can be mistaken about your experience and the likelihood that someone else might report the same experience (their report being something else you experience).
O.K. I can't be mistaken that I experience, but I can be mistaken about anything that I experience. Now I have no idea why Bill said, and everyone agreed that, "The bedrock of all science is direct experience, and theories must be subordinated to it." If I can be mistaken about everything I experience, how can that experience be the bedrock of science so that theories must be subordinate to it? Not much of a bedrock if you ask me.
That you CAN be mistaken doesn't mean you are LIKELY to be mistaken.
In all of this recent flurry that I've experienced (I can't really call it a thread), everyone seems to have missed a salient point -- control.
Passive observation of data supplied by nature can provide correlations among experiences. Much of our peripheral sensory processing seems to be constructed so as to take advantage of consistent correlations, such as that the rate and energy of photons coming from one direction tends to be very like the rate and energy of photons coming from a nearby direction, and if those parameters aren't alike, a similarly different pair is likely to be found near the first pair.
Because these and similar correlations are so often true, and have so often been true over evolutionary time, our (i.e. most lens-retina animal eyes) have adapted by a process like "reorganization" to convert the raw input to cones and rods into statistically lossy, but useful transforms, like oriented edge detectors and spot detectors.
Those consistent correlations probably represent something really real about the "real" world -- but it's just a theory produced over time by evolution. From an intellectually analytic point of view, it's a theory that is on much more secure ground than, say, Newton's third law. Out there, our nervous system theorizes, there must be "things" with definite boundaries and different ways of reflecting light--at least to the resolution available to our sensors. Our nervous system has developed no theories about whether "things" have definite boundaries at much smaller scales.
But, passive observation, in Science or in everyday life, doesn't give as secure information about what's observed as does active probing and observation. When you observe passively, you get what the "real" world throws at you. It may easily be an illusion that would look different at another time or from another place. That's been the astronomer's problem for millennia. But if you can move to a new viewpoint, you can't be fooled by an illusion of place. If you can wait long enough, you can't be fooled by an illusion of time.
Even changes of space and time, however, are somewhat passive ways of changing (or not changing) what you experience from the "real" world. It's a bit better than just accepting what nature throws at you, but not much.
If you now, of you own (apparent) volition [not wanting to get into a "free-will" discussion] act on the world, and it affects your perception in some way, do it again and it has much the same effect, do something different and it has a different effect, and all of this is pretty consistent, you have a MUCH better basis for a theory of the structure of the real world. And that, too, we reorganize, either over evolutionary time or in a lifetime.
All our ancestors grew up in a similar gravity field (swimmers excepted?), and to move in the world of this gravity field, we evolved physical structures, action mechanisms linked to sensory mechanisms, and perceptual functions that have consistent effects in keeping us from flowing all over the floor like a puddle. Those mechanisms constitute powerful theories about the nature of the real world. That we call it "gravity" is a related intellectual theory. Aristotle didn't call it gravity, or even have a theory mappable onto the concept of gravity, but he still had the skeletal, muscular, and perceptual theory that the force would be consistently toward the ground, and not change magnitude noticeably from moment to moment. As did his dog (assuming he had one).
Perceptual control REQUIRES us to probe the world and make it change our perceptions. Only if something about the world is consistent can we do that. We may or may not create intellectual theories to "explain" our theories, and other theories to explain those (which succession is how Science progresses), but we do build all sorts of well-trusted (and probably well founded) theories of the world about us. The world "really" does have objects -- not just because we perceive them, but because we can act arbitrarily on the world _as if_ it contained objects and our actions change our peceptions as they would if the world _really_ did contain objects.
So although you CAN be mistaken about your intellectual theories of what you experience, you can't be mistaken about experiencing either the theories or the entities that enter into those theories.
When you see a person standing beside you, it _could_ be a hologram, but it almost certainly isn't, and it almost certainly is a person in the "real" world. But that "almost" is absolutely critical to the argument.
In my view, although one can learn a lot from passive observation and correlation, in life as in Science, you can constrain the possible "realities" a lot better by active probing. In other words, not only does Perceptual Control bring life to the world, it brings the real world to life.
Martin
