[From Rick Marken (930514.1300)]
Oded Maler (930514.1900 ET) --
I'm having a little trouble figuring out what we are disagreeing
about. All I am saying is that everything we experience is
perception. No one has direct access to what is beyond their
senses. Models (which are also perceptions) are guesses about
what is 'out there' (past our senses) -- and some are pretty good
guesses given how well their behavior (a perception) corresponds
to our experience of the world (another perception). But we will
never know "for sure" what is really out there. All we know is that
something is out there -- and aspects of it's nature are captured
very well by some of our models.
Are you saying that some of our perceptions are better
representations of what is "out there" than others? Is this
what we are arguing about? For example, you say:
Do you think seriously the a
position of a line on a screen and a political situation are "equally
objective"?
My answer is "Yes". I was thinking of "objective" as meaning
"corresponding accurately to what is really 'out there'". In that
sense, these perceptions are equally objective -- meaning that
both are not objective AT ALL. They are both perceptions and the
degree to which either corresponds to what is actually out there is
equally unknown.
You may have thought I meant "objective" in the sense of "inter-
personal agreement". In this sense, lines and political situations
may not be equally "objective" -- but maybe not. Interpersonal
agreement just means that people agree on a description of what
they see. People may indeed be more likely to agree to call a line
a line (assuming they are all having the same perception) than to
call a beating a beating. But that's not what I meant. When you have
a perception of a line or a beating you have it -- it's a real thing.
Whether someone agrees or not that I am perceiving a computer
screen at the moment has little influence on that perception; it's
there for me, it's real (though I certainly would get a bit concerned
if someone came up and said "why are you looking at that bowl of
cherries? but the perception would remain. It's still a computer
screen to me). I can also look in the other office and have a perception
of a political situation -- two people are discussing the best way to
get funding for a particular project. I'm perceiveing what I perceive.
You might not perceive the same thing when you look at the same
scene -- but it would still be a perception for you. The perception --
whether you call it (and experience it as) a political discussion or a
friendly chat -- is undeniably there.
in the nice example that you
just gave, you see that the interpretation of the raw perception depends upon
the interpreter, the historical context, and a lot of subjective factors
that are absent in the "line on the screen" situation.
Maybe, maybe not. But in both cases there is a perception. Actually, even the
line on the screen perception can differ depending on "interpreter, historical
context, a lot of subjective factors"; the interpreter is the person
perceiving;
if s/he has no line detecting neurons there is no line (as there is apparently
no flies for a frog when the flies are not moving); the historical context is
everything the person knows about lines, computers and what the line means.
I've been in places where lines on screens could have meant the begining
of a nuclear holocaust. Pretty real,eh?; subjective factors just means the
aspects of the interpreter that result in the particular perception the
person is having; subjective factors made some of the lines in Tom's
cooperation experiment more important to some subjects than to others.
Relevance is a sufficiently vague term so that your rhethoric is not
completely false. But note what a quantum leap you have made from a
Hubel & Wiesel stuff about lines (whose position on the screen is
almost objective due to the concensus about it across most all human
subjects) than to a more speculative stuff about faceness (which is
higher and much less concensusial across individuals and cultures)
and than this unjustified generalization in all dimensions, letting
you perceive a global geo-political situation, something which
is many orders of magnitude larger, composed of many individual
and their collective percepotion.
Well, this is where I really need help in understanding what your point is.
My "quantum leap" was simply to say that line position, faceness and
geopolitical situations are perceptions. That just seems subjectively
obvious -- if you don't perecive them then how can you even talk
about them? The Hubel-Weisel discussion was just to show that there
is evidence of neural systems that COULD compute such perceptions.
It seems to me that you are trying to say that "global geopolitical
situations" cannot be perceptions. Is this what you are trying to
say? If so, how do you know they are not perceptions? Have you never
experienced a "global geopolitical situation"?
If all you are saying is that a person cannot perceive everything that is
actually involved in a perception like the one implied by words like "the
situation in Bosnia" (such as the feelings of every person involved, the
wants and desires of everyone involved, the terrain, household situation,
what everyone's having for dinner,etc etc)-- then I agree. But you also
cannot perceive everything involved in simpler perceptions like "line on the
screen" (you don't perceive the phosphers, the pixels, the photons, etc). All
I am saying is that, if you can talk about it, it's a perception. Whatever it
is
you think is important or relevant or historically interesting about anything
is a perception. Perceptions are not right or wrong -- though you can
perceive
things as right or wrong (relative to a reference) ; perception simply is what
you experience. What else is there?
So, what are we arguing about???
Best
Rick