In July, 2018, Bruce Abbott wrote a post to CSGnet titled
The Brain’s Model
Rick Marken’s reply can be seen at that same location.
I don’t know why these turned up in my CSGnet mailbox today, but I replied to them this morning as follows:
Yes, within PCT the “so what” question comes up empty.
However, outside PCT there’s a “so what” question about PCT itself. And one of the differences that PCT can make is an understanding of how perceptions that are chimerical for me and thee can have an obdurate reality for someone else that is as compelling as a closed door is for my colliding body and limbs. And understanding of how a significant number of people see George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Bernie Sanders as co-conspirators subverting even the ‘deep state’ to the purposes of the Illuminati. They’re all Jews, after all. The perceptions that people’s brains gin up for fears that they experience are compelling realities to them. As the saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies, to which I add that paranoia is as efficient at creating enemies as the e coli algorithm is at reorganizing the locomotion of a microbe or the connectivity of neurons.
A good hypnotic subject, amenable to certain suggestions, might illustrate Bruce Abbott’s point about walking through a closed door, and have a bruise or two to show for it–while as we could plainly see they were hallucinating a door that was not actually there.
So I think we should turn Bruce Abbott’s exercise on its head. Instead of talking about how the constructivist epistemology of PCT can lead us into uncertainty about the reality of our perceptions, we can perhaps more helpfully talk about how imagined perceptions can have the compelling reference-setting power of things that we comfortably take to be real.
/Bruce N
Not realizing this was email from 2.5 years ago that mysteriously was among the current email in my inbox this morning, I suggested that it be copied to Discourse. Martin concurred, suggested associating it with this present “Real and Perceived Realities” topic, and I agreed to do it.
[Process note for future reference: Since this was all quoted on CSGNet, I obtained this URL by clicking the hyperlink button above the Discourse topic-editing window and entering Bruce’s datestamp 2018.06.21.1010 EDT as a search string. Rick’s datestamp produces the same URL.]