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  #41  
Unread 01-03-2021, 01:06 AM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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"We see reality as it is" and "we do not see reality as it is" are equally meaningless claims, unless you are a metaphysical idealist along the lines of Bishop Berkeley. I have yet to encounter a non-idealist way of making sense of the idea that isn't just confused.

Rainbow comes close to making sense of the idea, but that's because he's actually just making the same point I'm making in a confused way. If error is conceptually impossible, correctness is too. Perception is an interaction between one bit of reality (the perceiver) and another (the perceived), and that interaction just is, as one more bit of reality. (Kevin correctly makes this point, albeit draped in the very language of "correctness" that the point renders meaningless.) There's no room for normativity there, and thus no sense in which perceptions "match" or "fail to match" reality as it is.

Where normativity comes in has to do with our ability to extract from our perceptions information useful for acting. This we can do well for some types of information and under some conditions and less well for other types of information and under other conditions. You can extract a sense of our perceptions "matching" reality from that, but a crude one that must always be firmly kept in its place, or else you just flounder around in confusion.

For example, the straight stick that "appears bent" in water. Isn't that a failure to match reality? Well, no—it is a very reasonable way for a stick to appear when different parts of it are in distinct media that interact with light differently. There's no failure of perception to match reality, but there is a rather severe difficulty in extracting a particular bit of information (about the straightness of the stick) from our perception.

We might easily imagine an organism whose perceptual system could "correct" for such refraction, and to which the stick would "appear straight"—but inevitably at the cost of making other information harder for that organism to extract. This organism's perception would neither be more nor less "correct" than ours, because "correct" here is just a meaningless notion. Or, a bit more gently, it's an extremely crude way of gesturing at the point about which information can be extracted (and how readily) from which perceptions, and if we wish to think seriously about the matter we should dispense with it.

Last edited by Aaron Novick; 01-03-2021 at 01:10 AM.
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  #42  
Unread 01-03-2021, 08:39 AM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
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.
Scholars aside, is not the discussion of what is and is not reality just a ruse initiated by the imagination at the behest of reality?

Am I dreaming?
.
.
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  #43  
Unread 01-03-2021, 10:13 AM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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I - insofar as I am I, and not an illusion in your minds - apologize “I” guess, for my obvious impatience. Maybe it’s because “I” grew up scalp deep in a scientific environment that early on made me aware of the apparent emptiness of what lies between electrons and nuclei and between atoms and molecules, and of the apparent continuousness of radio waves. (George Gamow, One, Two, Three, Infinity..., etc, etc.) Most people aren’t so unlucky. I think I should sit down to read a poem instead of agreeing (actually) with most of Hoffman probably says. And so I will. Good wishes to all.

Last edited by Allen Tice; 01-03-2021 at 06:38 PM.
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  #44  
Unread 01-26-2021, 07:55 PM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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I'd like to add to this thread that one of the most amazing things about how the human brain arranges the varied environmental stimuli around us to make our lives interesting is the way that we perceive three dimensional vision, in particular up close where it is most important for navigation and work.

I'm amazed how the brain manages to make beautiful subjective experience of the resonant vibrations of the tiny hairs and the truly crude, to my eyes, hammer and anvil smithy works found in our ears (bang bang), yes, that's hard to understand, especially, I guess, for a lover of musical pulchritude like a Sigurd Jorsalfar Homecoming March, such as I.

More than that, binocular 3-D depth perception boggles my goggles. Space! All those things in nearby space that we effortlessly accept as being there in our conscious world, hey, have you seen that in front of you, that glass of water, that folded book page, that person, that other person, that control knob, that that that?

Last edited by Allen Tice; 02-02-2021 at 12:04 PM.
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  #45  
Unread 02-19-2021, 04:41 PM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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Default It’s Elster Time (gravity, was ist das?)

Time for Martin Elster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5PfjsPdBzg

Last edited by Allen Tice; 02-21-2021 at 08:41 AM.
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  #46  
Unread 02-20-2021, 12:02 PM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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I hope no one, least of all Martin! took my recent post as a negative response to Martin’s posts and thread. There are videos much more boring with the same message as the one I linked. That gravity is such a weak “force” seems much clearer when it is seen to be largely a gradient in time caused by concentrations of energy or mass. Something very profound is touched on here. Best to all.

Last edited by Allen Tice; 02-21-2021 at 12:24 PM.
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  #47  
Unread 02-20-2021, 02:09 PM
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Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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Hello,

I've been following this thread with real interest. It's exciting, thinking about these sorts of things, and the different perspectives are interesting to read.

For what it is worth (and I am neither knowledgeable nor scholarly) I think Henri Lefebvre (Marxist philosopher) brought in a set of useful ideas when he argued in the early 1970's that space is socially constructed and produced.

So, the various arguments and perspectives we come up with to explore consciousness and the like are maybe driven by our existing social spaces (as well as our cultural contexts, individual and collective).

If we're very sciencey in our perspective we'll produce explanations and examples that are science/'fact' driven, producing that kind of knowledge/that kind of space. If we're not quite so sciencey then we'll produce a different type of space.

Where it got interesting with Lefebvre (for me) is in his trialectics of space, where space is physically created by what we do (spatial practice), also highly conceptualised structures (representations of space) - for me, these are the spaces of Hoffman - science being - arguably - the dominant production mechanism for possibly recognised truths in our society at the moment.

Lefebvre's final part of the trialectic was 'representational spaces', which I read (in a really simplistic way) as the spaces of poetry and the arts. He didn't see the spaces as discrete - they were all inter-related. It's just a way of conceptualizing space & how it's made.

So, Hoffman is using network theory to explore how we perceive reality? And in doing so he is producing a representation of space which speaks to current social spaces as being more and more mediated by digital networks? Not a truth or untruth, just another representation of space?

Maybe.

Sarah-Jane
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  #48  
Unread 02-20-2021, 02:33 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
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Hi, Allen. "Time is more fundamental than gravity." I already knew that gravity is not a force, but the curvature and warping of space-time. He says that gravity is actually due to the gradient of different times at different locations in the universe. Gravity comes from time dilation. So gravity is time curving into space.

There are other theories, too, of course. One that physicists are exploring is gravity as a result of quantum entanglement. The more entangled a region of space-time is, the greater the gravity.

Another way of looking at time is via a light clock. It's a simple imaginary device with two facing mirrors. A photon bounces back and forth between the two mirrors and as the clock moves through space, the photon slows down because it has to move a greater distance from the top mirror to the bottom mirror. So the fast the light clock moves, the slower the photon moves, thus the time slows down. A clock in a fast object ticks slower than a clock in a slow object (from the point of view of a distant observer). But a person in the spacecraft (if that's what's moving), will not notice anything different, though when he or she comes back to Earth from their trip, they will be younger than their twin, let's say (which is the twin paradox).

PS - I posted this after Jane's post, which I haven't read yet but will shortly.
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  #49  
Unread 02-20-2021, 02:42 PM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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Regrettably, I can’t imagine space as something socially constructed by our predecessors in the reptilian or amphibian dominant periods. Likewise, the dance of superficially perceived “opposites” in dialectics is the product of the type of simplistic dialogue common in college bullshit sessions, that is, “what-about-ism,” where the post hoc synthesis that develops is what happens in fact, but not necessarily as the result of a predictable interaction of foreseeable antitheses. Dialectic is Not science, nor can it regularly predict anything. Anything. Trialectic is to me bafflegab. These are the reasons that Marxian analysis can appear to be a pretty fair reading of the past (though it assumes far too much and ignores the spectacular variety of things that could equally well be called “antitheses”, but has a demonstrably poor record of predicting things. It is not scientific, nor is it likely to be.

Space is what it is. Time is also, and may be well even more basic.
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  #50  
Unread 02-20-2021, 02:59 PM
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Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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These are the reasons that Marxian analysis can appear to be a pretty fair reading of the past (though it assumes far too much and ignores the spectacular variety of things that could equally well be called “antitheses”, but has a demonstrably poor record of predicting things. It is not scientific, nor is it likely to be.

I agree that dialectics are not particularly helpful as a way of understanding complexity. They read old-fashioned to me, although, as I said, I'm not an expert.

Arguably, they also create and produce false dichotomies which aren't helpful to anything. Personally, I'd go with D&G's rhizome rather than dialectics as a potentially useful way of looking at the world.

But in terms of this debate, this specific debate, Lefebvre sprang to mind, which is why I posted, as I thought it might be interesting. And his idea of a trialectic, in terms of the problematics of dialectics, is possibly interesting too?

Sarah-Jane
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