[From Bill Powers (970930.0800 MDT)]
i.kurtzer (970929)
just an experiential quibble.
Bill Powers (970928.0557 MDT)]
We can deal with "a tomato" as a perceptual
category without giving it a name other than "a tomato." No two tomatoes
are identical, but because we can deal with their different sizes, shapes,
degrees of ripeness, and locations of stems, we can _act as if_ they are
the same at a certain level of perception.
It seems that the qualifier _as if_ does not help clarify the case but
rather confounds issues of ersatz and hierarchy. Moments are regarded
similarly with regard to the level at which that moment is realizable.
Further, no moments' experiential status transends that level. That is one
basic premise to a heirarchy of perceptions; percepts are of certain
discrete kinds, meaningful only to a particular level AS THAT percept.
Hence, the tomatoes are NOT "as if" they are same: they are the same. The
ripeness, location, of stems, etc. are not tomatoes.
It's necessary to distinguish between a tomato as a particular shape and
collection of sensations, and "tomatoes" as a category. At the
configuration and sensation levels, there is only _this object_, different
in detail from all other objects. At the category level, there are all the
different tomatoes one might encounter, and any one of them is an adequate
example of "tomatoes" no matter how different at the lower levels.
This is much easier to see if we consider collections of configurations
that differ from each other much more than tomatoes do. I used the example
of "pots". Some pots are squat with wide or narrow mouths; some have two or
more necks each with an opening; some are two feet in diameter and some are
two inches in diameter; some are heavy and some are light; some are red and
some are brown with or without decorations; some have handles and some have
none -- yet they are all "pots." We see this at a blow of the eye: somehow
all these different things are examples of the same thing.
Before we can attach a label to this sameness, we must perceive it. It is
the perceiving of it that I call a category perception. Naming this
perception is a separate operation; we have a choice of names, or can make
one up: these are "quandels." Or we can just say "those," as in "I'll take
a dozen of those," pointing in the general direction of the things. We have
special words we can use when we don't have a word: "things," for example.
We can also say "Please give me one of those." By that we imply that any
one of them is equivalent to any other; they are all "the same thing" as
far as owning one is concerned. We act, in other words, _as if_ any example
were the same as any other example.
This difference between the category level and lower levels can be seen
clearly in the way men and women (in my experience) shop for things like
produce. A man and a woman may intend to buy a pound of "strawberries." The
man will go to the bin, pick up strawberries and put them into a sack until
one pound of strawberries is in the sack: mission accomplished. A woman
will pick up each strawberry, turn it over, examine it for greenness, size,
and blemishes, smell it, and either return it to the bin or put it in the
sack. The woman takes a lot longer to buy strawberries, but the
strawberries she brings home are much nicer than those the man brings home.
That is because she is looking at the strawberries not only as examples of
a category, but as individual items, different from each other in many
ways, and is comparing each strawberry against criteria other than just
their membership in a particular category.
Please forgive my stereotypes and pay attention to the point.
The point is that when we deal with experience at the lower levels, we are
attending to details and differences, treating each perception as a unique
experience. When we deal at the category level, we say "In the dark, all
cats are gray." We ignore the differences and deal only with sameness. A
strawberry is a strawberry, at the category level -- not _this particular
strawberry_.
This has nothing to do with what the strawberry "really is."
Best,
Bill P.