Re: Perception
Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2019 12:38 pm
When you are in a completely Dark room you will be Blind. You will not be seeing the world of that room as it really is. You need Electromagnetic Energy in the room in order to See the room. You don't in fact ever See the room you only See Electromagnetic Energy reflections. But the situation is even worse because the instant the Electromagnetic Energy reflections hit your Retina they are converted into Neural Activity that ultimately fires Neurons in the Visual Areas in the back of your head. You don't actually See anything until the later stages of Neural Processing. So if you Directly See anything you are Seeing Neural Activity. The Neural Activity performs functions such as Contrast Enhancement that will overlay certain shading effects that are not in the Scene of the Room but will be found in your Perception of the Room. The thing you See that you think is the world as it really is, always is a processed version of the World with artifacts of that Processing always present in any Scene you might be looking at. It is clear from Brain Physiology that you never Directly See the World as it really is. You merely Detect the World with the Visual mechanism you were born with.RCSaunders wrote: ↑Mon Jul 15, 2019 7:27 pmSince I first heard that nonsense spouted by Plato I have found every attempt to repudiate direct consciousness of the physical world spurious. They are all versions of the same thing, like the protests of the women caught by her husband naked in bed with another man, "are you going to believe your eyes, or the explanation of your loving wife?"SteveKlinko wrote: ↑Mon Jul 15, 2019 5:13 pm The reason you think you are Directly Seeing the external World is that the Conscious Visual Scene that you Experience that is embedded in the front of your face is the only way you have ever Seen the World. You only See the Surrogate Conscious Visual Experience not the Real World. Your Surrogate Conscious Visual Experience is Correlated with the external World and works pretty good for letting you move around in the World without bumping into things. It's not a Fraud or a Delusion it is just one of the ways we Detect the external World. The Surrogate Conscious Visual Experience is not explainable by anything known to Science at this time. There is an Explanatory Gap. There is also a huge Explanatory Gap with your Direct Realist view that we Directly See things as they are. How can that possibly be true given all that we know about the Brain?
I do not believe you or anyone else who tries to convince me that what I see is a some kind of, "stand-in" for existence as it actually is, but not existence itself. There is only an "explanatory gap," if you are trying to explain consciousness as something produced by the brain and not the direct perception of what the neurological system makes available to consciousness.
Your question, "How can that possibly be true given all that we know about the Brain?" is based on the assumption that the brain somehow produces consciousness. I have no idea who, "we," is, but neuroscientists do not know as much about the brain as you apparently think they do. They know a lot more than they did just a few years ago, but how the brain really functions is still not understood. Memory really is a function of the physical brain. Much of memory can be described, but how it actually works cannot be explained at all. There is nothing known about the brain that casts any doubt on the validity of conscious perception.
If what you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste is not existence as it is, but only something produced in the brain, you cannot possibly know, "Your Surrogate Conscious Visual Experience is Correlated with the external World and works pretty good for letting you move around in the World without bumping into things. It's not a Fraud or a Delusion ..." because all you have is your ersatz representation of what actually is to go by. You may be bumping into things all the time and what actually is may be nothing like your brain-created existence, but since your made-up experience is all you have to go by, a fraud and delusion may be exactly what it is. You would have no way to know.
Thank you very much for your sincere explanation, but I think I'll continue to go by what I consciously experience, rather than your, or anyone else's, word.
