Posted by
lrudolph on
Jan 10, 2014; 10:20pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/St-Johns-Coffee-Shop-Closed-Today-tp7584714p7584720.html
Nick writes, incidentally to Frank's "comments about [his] argumentative style":
> As for the inner life thing, I
> don't think I am dishonest when I say that I don't believe in an inner life.
> I admit that I have something like that as an experience, but think it must
> be an illusion.
The following is a brief version (not that any longer version exists, yet or perhaps ever) of
my take on "illusions"--specifically "perceptual illusions" in the passage (quoted from Jaan's
and my introduction to my book on mathematical modeling in the social sciences; it's me
writing here, except for all but the first sentence of the first paragraph, which is Jaan) but
applicable more generally.
===begin
Mathematics has been described as "the study of pattern" (Whitehead, 1941, pp. 674, 680) and
(not necessarily more ambitiously) as "the science of patterns" (Devlin, 1997; Resnik, 1997;
Steen, 1988). It is usual and natural for humans to perceive patterns, even patterns that are
not `really there´; our perceptual systems create "perceptual illusions" of wholes from
configurations of points, corners (Kanizsa, 1969) or sounds (Benussi, 1913). Furthermore, the
human mind can contemplate objects that do not exist-a "round triangle" is an example that has
fascinated thinkers since the 1880s when Alexius Meinong attempted to understand the nature of
such objects in his Gegenstandstheorie (Meinong, 1907, passim; 1915, p. 14).
In this connection, the traditional use of the word "illusion" is tendentious; it can be
disputed along the following lines (see also Carini, 2007). Start with the axiom that a
`whole´ that is perceived is ipso facto `correctly´ perceived. Then, for the person who
perceives a whole, what is-or may be-`illusory´ is not the whole: it is the felt need or
imposed demand to identify the perceptually present and correctly perceived whole as something
else, namely, a certain unperceived whole that is perceptually and physically absent from
the present situation of the perceiver (and might even be physically absent from the entire
universe, past, present, and future-if, say, it is a "round triangle"). Contrariwise, for
a(nother, or the same) person (perhaps a psychologist) who is observing the situation,
what is illusory is the conviction that the `whole´ known to the perceiver is in some manner
or degree less (or more) `real´ than the `unwhole´ known to the observer, which the perceiver
*somehow should and would* be perceiving-were not the universe (or the observer) somehow
setting successful snares. On this view, the ascription of `illusion´ is a category error, a
failure of the ascriber´s (formal or informal) ontology and epistemology to adequately fit the
phenomena of construction by the human mind (starting with the human perceptual system).
==end==
In the present case, I would say that the "something like" an "inner life" that you "have as
an experience" is not illusory: rather, you are committing a category error when you ascribe
to this *actual experience* (a certain bundle of behaviors at various levels of organization)
a fictitious quality of "inner"ness and/or "life"like ness.
Lee
[I am trying to send this to the list, but that's only intermittently successful for me; so if
you only get it once, and think it would be of wider interest, please reply to the list--
otherwise only to me (or not at all, of course)]
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com