Human beings learn conceptual schemas as they grow up, — Marchesk
That makes sense to me; and I agree with the point about Kant. The upshot then would seem to be that there is nothing but reality as interpreted; which would seem to be synonymous with reality as conceptual schema, or Wittgenstein's 'world as the totality of facts'. — John
he best we can do is to say things like, for example, that if we had been around at the time of the dinosaurs, and if we are right in thinking that they existed at that time, then we would have seen them. — John
Our thinking is a kind of flowering of the world, it is in in that sense in total harmony with the world, like all expressions of nature. Really, when you think about it; how could it be otherwise? — John
They illustrate the way the mind 'builds' the world and assimilates novel information into it. — Wayfarer
And that fits with the natural logic of the psychological process. To be aware of the realities of the present, we must be informed by the expectations of our past. And keeping it all "internal", it is our failures of prediction which constitute our signs of what "really just happened". We know we were surprised and so by logical implication (rather than direct knowledge) it is right to suppose that there is the noumenal out there as the apophatic source of our uncertainty. — apokrisis
But that becomes hard to see if consciousness is being understood as a spatialised thing that exists at a location, like stuck inside the head looking out through the windows of the eyes to the world beyond. — apokrisis
Which means a naive view of perception or realism doesn't work. But it's also a mistake to conclude that just because our minds work that way, the world is that way. — Marchesk
It would seem that our sight dominated hominid brains have been fooled by a metaphorical way of thinking about our relationship to the world. — Marchesk
Question: how can seeing a false reality be beneficial to an organism’s survival?
Hoffman: There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.
That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.
Understood that way, the conceptual basis of awareness becomes an obvious necessity. — apokrisis
the idea that they simply could not see the Endeavour is ridiculous. — John
By noon we were within the mouth of the inlet which appeard to be very good. Under the South head of it were four small canoes; in each of these was one man who held in his hand a long pole with which he struck fish, venturing with his little imbarkation almost into the surf. These people seemd to be totaly engag'd in what they were about: the ship passd within a quarter of a mile of them and yet they scarce lifted their eyes from their employment; I was almost inclind to think that attentive to their business and deafned by the noise of the surf they neither saw nor heard her go past them. At 1 we came to an anchor abreast of a small village consisting of about 6 or 8 houses. Soon after this an old woman followd by three children came out of the wood; she carried several peices of stick and the children also had their little burthens; when she came to the houses 3 more younger children came out of one of them to meet her. She often lookd at the ship but expressd neither surprize nor concern. Soon after this she lighted a fire and the four Canoes came in from fishing; the people landed, hauld up their boats and began to dress their dinner to all appearance totaly unmovd at us, tho we were within a little more than 1⁄2 a mile of them Of all these people we had seen so distinctly through our glasses we had not been able to observe the least signs of Cloathing: myself to the best of my judgement plainly discernd that the woman did not copy our mother Eve even in the fig leaf.
After dinner the boats were mann'd and we set out from the ship intending to land at the place where we saw these people, hoping that as they regarded the ships coming in to the bay so little they would as little regard our landing. We were in this however mistaken, for as soon as we aproachd the rocks two of the men came down upon them, each armd with a lance of about 10 feet long and a short stick which he seemd to handle as if it was a machine to throw the lance. They calld to us very loud in a harsh sounding Language of which neither us or Tupia understood a word, shaking their lances and menacing...
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