". . . as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."
I wonder if that's true, though no less an authority than Shakespeare claimed it (or rather had his Theseus claim it). Would Oberon, also there in
Midsummer Night's Dream, claim it? I don't think so. MP wrote that "imagination is present in the first human perception," which means that perception relies on, depends on, experience that precedes it in the prereflective being-there/being-with of consciousness.
When I listen to rain sounds like those in the linked video below, as I've been doing recently, I feel the sensors in my nasal passages opening up and find that I have the sensation of smelling the rain, the air filled with rain, the ground absorbing the rain, the way other sounds come through the rain. Must be that my past experiences of rain remain embedded in the memories collected in my prereflective consciousness. How many of our past experiences remain so embedded, so instantly recollected, as quickly as 'the speed of thought' we experience in thinking. A thread of felt experience seems to flow beneath our streams of consciousness and also within them.
@smcder You say maybe there is no explanation to WIAM. That's fine... I 99% agree.
What I would really like though is a succinct statement or way of describing the question that is WIAM in a way [that] shows it to be
different to other very similar and related philosophical questions.
To my way of thinking, articulating the question succinctly would be the most potent comeback to people who think that there is nothing that science/objectivity cannot tackle in principle, or who think that there is nothing special about the situation... of the particular self.
I think you're essentially right about that,
@Pharoah. But it is difficult to articulate that question in ontological terms. I think we have to rely on the essential 'mine-ness' [self-referentiality] of experience that we share with other animals. As someone expressed it [perhaps Heidegger himself], the concept of
ek-stase -- the indubitable sense of one's being situated in an environing world -- means that "standing- out is standing-in."
From the Dorato paper I linked a day or two ago: "Rovelli need not deny with the instrumentalists the existence of isolated quantum system: qua carriers of dispositions, such systems can be regarded as real as the table on which I am typing. “Going dispositionalist” as the second slogan recommends ensures both the reality of the isolated systems and the lack of definiteness of state-dependent properties. In a word, and summarizing the second slogan, I will regard isolated quantum systems as endowed with an intrinsic propensity (a probabilistic disposition) to reveal certain definite values of physical magnitudes by interacting with any kind of physical system. Whether propensities are a reasonable interpretation of the formal notion of probability is better left to another paper."
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1309/1309.0132.pdf