[From Bill Powers (950203.1420 MST)]
Martin Taylor (950301.13:55)--
When you are inferring a rotten apple from the perception of a red
round thing with a brown spot, you are specifically imagining
something that you are NOT CURRENTLY PERCEIVING. You ARE perceiving
the red round thing; you ARE NOT perceiving the appleness. To
perceive the appleness you would have to cut the round thing open
and see that it is pale inside, or not, and perhaps taste it to
find the perception you call "apple" or "rotten." There is a
possibility that when you cut the red round thing open you will
find none of those signs of appleness; the red round thing may
simply be a plastic shell with a brown spot.
Right, that's what I'm getting at. Even when we make such an innocuous
identification as that of saying "It's an apple," we can be mistaken
because we're referring in part to imagined perceptions.
Of course this depends in part on what we mean. If by "That's an apple"
I mean only that the shape and color are those I classify as "apple,"
there is no problem. We need not be asserting anything unobservable;
that is something that each of us alone must determine.
In other words, I read you as saying that no perception above the
intensity level is a "perception."
Not at all. If I say "I see something spinning," the spinning IS the
appearance, and it is entirely perceivable. Even if I'm being fooled by
stroboscopic motion, I am simply reporting the presence of a perceptual
signal, which I don't have to imagine. This is, in fact, how we know
there is a level of perceptions pertaining to motion or change --
transitions. If I see two objects at an apparent separation from each
other, I can report the relationship of "near" or "beside" without
imagining anything -- even if one object is "actually" 20 light years
farther from me than the other. If, on the other hand, I see a double
star and report that the two stars are in orbit around each other, I am
not perceiving that orbital motion, but imagining it. The difference
between perception and inference is not the difference between "real"
and "unreal." It is strictly a question of whether there is a perception
there to notice, or whether we are supplying it ourselves in
imagination.
Perceptions are _appearances_. To be fully aware of the difference
between perceiving and inferring, one has to spend a lot of time looking
to see whether there is actually any apparent thing, property,
experience, what have you being perceived right now. When we have become
very familiar with a phenomenon, we often start to blur the distinction.
An old hand at operant conditioning speaks and thinks as if
"reinforcement" is something we can actually see occurring. An
electronics expert looks at a trace on an oscilloscope and imagines that
he can see a voltage changing over the space of a microsecond. When we
see an athlete trying for a world record with the shot-put we think we
can actually see and feel the enormous effort the person is putting
behind the heave. Yet all of these perceptions are imagined, not real-
time. If we were not imagining, we would perceive none of these things.
This distinction is particularly important in theorizing about
observable phenomena. If we fail to be alert to this difference, we will
not be able to report observations accurately. Some of what we report
will be supplied by our own imaginations, as when we report that an
organism received 10 reinforcements per minute. That is quite different
from reporting that the organism received 10 pellets of food per minute.
In a tracking experiment, we see a person moving a handle to make a
cursor follow a target. Hidden in this observation is a certain degree
of imagination. For example, when we refer to the "target" we tend to
imagine that the subject wishes the cursor to be at the target position.
The Test is designed, in part, to relieve us of such illusions created
by our own imaginations. If you apply the Test properly, you may well
find that the participant's behavior is maintaining the mark we call the
cursor 10 cm to the right of the position of the mark we call the
target, or the participant might be keeping the cursor at the same
distance as the target and in the opposite direction from an imaginary
place on the screen. We think we are observing a target, but all we are
actually seeing is a moving mark on the screen. This becomes immediately
apparent when something happens to reveal what we are imagining.
I infer from the rest of your posting that by "inference" you
imply perceptions at the program level only.
I'll go along with that if you want. Doesn't matter to me how we
use the words, provided that we can use them in a mutually
understood manner.
I don't really need to be humored. I think there is a serious point here
that goes beyond word usage. There are many levels of inference, some
involving reason, but they all rest on inserting imagined perceptions
among the real-time ones, the ones that are not dependent on imagination
alone. Many of our problems with conventional psychology arise because
psychologists have become so used to certain terms that they think they
are observing phenomena when they are mostly imagining them. The demos
are supposed to create a conflict with the imagined perceptions, so they
can be separated from the real-time ones. But of course that doesn't
happen automatically; the person involved must be willing for it to
happen.
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Best to all,
Bill P.