So you keep saying, but you've not given any account of why a dress cannot be both a red dress and a blue dress. — Isaac
Because that's a contradiction. You might as well ask why something can't be both a rabbit and a duck. — Michael
the colour one sees is determined by how one’s brain responds to signals from one’s eyes. The same external stimulation but different colour experience. Therefore colours isn’t a property of that external stimulation. — Michael
We need an explanation for this extraordinary consistency — Isaac
An even simpler example: fire causes most of us to feel pain. Pain isn’t a “hidden state” of some external thing; it’s a quality of our experIence. Colour is of the same kind.
People seem so bewitched by the complexity of visual experiences that they think sight works differently to other senses. If a dog could talk it would probably make the same mistake about smell. — Michael
Patterns emerge and are reinforced or altered in actual
contexts of interaction, rather than in rules or properties that supposedly exist before or outside of actual contexts
— Joshs
So why would those patterns emerge variable? What causes the variance? — Isaac
The atoms do collude together to form a teacup. That's why we can all see them as a teacup. That's why one of the available gestalts is that of a teacup. Because the atoms do indeed form the shape of a teacup. They also form the shape of dozens of other things which we ignore, choosing, instead, to focus on the teacup option. But it's wrong to say they're not in the form of a teacup just because they're also in the form of many other options. — Isaac
A Gestalt picture does not merely bind separate objects together, but creates an entirely new complex entity which did not exist before. It creates a new world of hierarchically structured new objects—a world which could not exist without Gestalt perception.
Our biologically-designed model of reality is thus superposed on the physical stuff of the world and structures it. It is with this reality that we interact.
Sensations, beliefs, imaginings and feelings are often referred to as figments, that is, creations of the mind. A mental image is taken to be something less than real: For one thing, it has no material substance and is impossible to detect except in the mind of the perceiver. It is true that sensations are caused by electrochemical events in a brain, but when experienced by a living mind, sensations are decisively different in kind from electrons in motion. They are indeed “figments” because they exist nowhere except in awareness. As a matter of fact, they exist only as claims made by sentient beings, with no material evidence to back up those claims. Indeed, brain scans reveal electrical activity, but do not display sensations or inner experience. — Mind and the Cosmic Order
1. Some object is red1 if it causes most humans to see red2, — Michael
Why do you say that? — Metaphysician Undercover
Knowledge of how neural nets work will not inform you as to whether or not they are representational. — Metaphysician Undercover
I certainly don’t want to posit physics as ‘normatively determinative ’, and I don’t think Pinter does that, either. — Wayfarer
Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order p1
The mystery is that in an age when physics has carried us into such a fantastic and unimaginable reality, we still balk at the idea that there are mental phenomena which do not follow the rules of classical physics. Why is it so hard to accept that in a universe in which space-time bends and curves, where particles of matter weave in and out of existence, and space itself is particulate—why would it be strange to accept that the mind of living animals is something complex whose laws are not the same ones that have been familiar to us for centuries?
The “zombie universe” of objective science [which] is exactly the mind-independent universe discussed in Chapter 2: It is the residue after all sensable qualities of objects have been taken away, leaving objects with no color, appearance, feel, weight or any other discernible features.
our representational filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is. — Joshs
For Trungpa, a truly spiritual journey toward basic sanity has to begin with a sense of hopelessness — the recognition of the complete and utter hopelessness of our current situation. He assured his readers that they are required to undertake a major process of disillusionment in order to relinquish their belief in the existence of an external panacea that can eliminate their suffering and pain. We have to learn to live with our pain instead of hoping for something that will cause all of our hesitations, confusions, insanity, and pain to disappear. This theme is elaborated in [the book] Illusion’s Game:
Creating this kind of hope is one of the most prominent features of spiritual materialism… There are so many promises involved. So much hope is planted in your heart. This is playing on your weakness. It creates further confusion with regard to pain. You forget about the pain altogether and get involved in looking for something other than pain. And this itself is pain… That is what we will go through unless we understand that the basic requirement for treading the spiritual path is hopelessness (Illusion’s Game, pP. 61-62.) — Traleg Kyagbon Rinpoche
they scatter light at a wavelength of 650nm — Michael
when someone has tetrachromacy or brain damage or the like then they respond differently to the same stimulus and so the quality of the emergent visual experiences are different, i.e they see different colours. — Michael
your theory requires this “hidden state” invention — Michael
It’s overly complicated, there’s no evidence for it, and I would even say it’s incomprehensible. — Michael
Something can’t be both all red and all blue. — Michael
An even simpler example: fire causes most of us to feel pain. Pain isn’t some external “hidden state”; it’s a quality of our experience. Colour is of the same kind. — Michael
People seem so bewitched by the complexity of visual experiences that they think sight works differently to other senses. — Michael
Variance cause variance. — Joshs
Laws and patterned regularities are idealizations of continuous qualitative change. — Joshs
Of these potentially infinite variety of accounts... — Joshs
are you giving priority to a certain empirical account from physics? Is this a ‘bedrock’ account, as Quine claimed, one which grounds all the others in an irreducibly real beginning? — Joshs
I think Wayfarer might agree that the way to bedrock is to begin by asking what all possible accounts of any aspect of the world have in common, that is , what is the condition of possibility of empirical account-building? — Joshs
linguistic conceptual accounts of the world are elaborations of practical perceptual interactions that are continuous with the role of niche building in non-linguistic animals under selective evolutionary pressure. I don’t think such models warrant taking an account from physics as normatively determinative. — Joshs
Isaac, arguments concerning colour tend to be futile. — Banno
The neural net is not making a model that you then see with your mind. It is your mind seeing. — Banno
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