Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8

[smcder]

Cat Philosophy

Dog Philosophy

 

[smcder]

Are Cats Smarter Than Dogs?

While pet owners may have loads of anecdotal data to show that cats are smarter than dogs or vice versa, there's little scientific evidence to back up those claims.

Brain:body mass

• Dogs 1.2%
• Cats 0.9%

Neurons in the cerebral cortex:

• Dogs: 160 million
• Cats: 300 million

Methodological isses:

• there's a significant lack of studies on feline cognition, which may have to do with the difficulty in working with cats

Other findings:

In the end, the research showed that cats can be trained to discriminate quantities, but they don't inherently have the ability like some other animals do.

Another study found (after much difficulty) that cats could follow pointing gestures like dogs, suggesting that they too have rudimentary theory of mind.

and most to the point
The research also showed cats and dogs can solve simple puzzles to get food, but when the puzzle is unsolvable, dogs will look to humans for help, whereas cats will keep trying.

This doesn't ultimately prove dogs are cleverer, just that their significantly longer interaction with humans (they were domesticated at least 20,000 years earlier than cats) grants them better social skills with humans.

So another interpretation may be that it's not that dogs are smart enough to know when a problem is unsolvable, but rather that they give up quicker or may turn to a human for help ... I know that's my dogs' go to process for problem-solving ...

 

[Pharoah]

Cat Philosophy

Dog Philosophy

hahahah! exactly.

 

[Randall]

Referring back to the original cat/dog post and the distinction between consciousness and the nature of being. You are on the money Usual suspect ... two separate issues. Explaining one does not explore the other, and exploring one does not explain the other. They are unrelated.

What might you say to someone who feels that the nature of being and consciousness are one in the same in order for them to differentiate between the two?

Concerning the point made here, if the food was attainable both to the cat and the dog neither would pretend the food was unattainable: Those of us who are not skeptics assume that the problems worth pursuing are those that have not been answered. More to the point, we find little fun in the chase where the mouse is already dead

Both dogs and cats have fun chasing their tails too. Such is the unsolvable nature of these questions. It's not simply a matter of skeptical doubt.

 

[Constance]

Wallace Stevens' Voice Was "Life-Saving"

When I first heard Wallace Stevens’ voice it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series. In a listening room in the Harvard Library, the quiet authority of his voice entered my mind like a life-saving transfusion: “Sister and mother and diviner love. . . .” In my younger days, I had been insusceptible to the idea that there were thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird; Stevens’ sophistications were beyond me then. Hearing him read many poems aloud naturalized me in his world.

“Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” was the first of Stevens’ sequences that I struggled with. I was, as a graduate student, enrolled in a seminar on Pope’s poetry, but my whole mind was on Stevens. I asked my teacher, Reuben Brower, whether I could write my final paper on didactic poetry, taking as my examples “An Essay on Criticism” and “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.” He indulgently allowed this bizarre intrusion of Stevens into the eighteenth century, and I am still grateful to him; the paper became the core of my eventual book on Stevens’ longer poems.

Part III of “Notes”—“It Must Give Pleasure”—was recorded by the Y during Stevens’ reading there on November 6, 1954. Now, listening to him enter upon this strange and difficult poem, I am surprised that he expected it to be understood by his audience—or perhaps he didn’t. When one of his colleagues (according to the oral biography) complained to Stevens that he didn’t understand his poetry, Stevens answered (as I recall): “That doesn’t matter; what matters is whether I understand it.” And he was of course right: over time, poems clarify themselves, and sophomores read “The Waste Land.”

....

...PennSound: C.K. Wallace Stevens

Thank you so much, Steve, for finding and posting this link to a wide range of Stevens's own readings of his poetry

I read the list of recordings and discovered near the end of it a lecture by one of the most insightful literary critics responding to Stevens's poetry, A. Walton Litz, who has produced two excellent books on this poetry. This lecture provides a guide to understanding Stevens's poetry based on Litz's own lengthy and comprehensive study of it and resulting insights into it. You have always been interested in the Stevens poems I have posted here at various places in the two years of development of this thread, so you might want to listen to this lecture. Here is the link to it:


{Just click on the arrow to start Litz's lecture.}

 

[Constance]

Samuel Todes Blog: Table of Contents

I remember when we spent a little time here, perhaps a year ago (?), looking at Todes's book, and if I recall correctly you not only found this book but also found a pdf of it online. Hoping very much that this is the case after reading Todes's table of contents published in the blog you cite. If not, I'll obtain the published book or borrow it from the library.

While exploring the material linked at the blog's list of further resources, I came across this paper by Dreyfus. Here is how it begins:

APA Pacific Division Presidential Address 2005
"Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise"
Hubert L. Dreyfus

Back in 1950, while a physics major at Harvard, I wandered into C.I. Lewis’s epistemology course. There, Lewis was confidently expounding the need for an indubitable Given to ground knowledge, and he was explaining where that ground was to be found. I was so impressed that I immediately switched majors from ungrounded physics to grounded philosophy.

For a decade after that, I hung around Harvard writing my dissertation on ostensible objects -- the last vestige of the indubitable Given. During that time no one at Harvard seemed to have noticed that Wilfrid Sellars had denounced the Myth of the Given, and that he and his colleagues were hard at work, not on a rock solid foundation for knowledge, but on articulating the conceptual structure of our grasp of reality. Sellars’ decision to abandon the old Cartesian problem of indubitable grounding has clearly paid off. While Lewis is now read, if at all, as a dead end, Sellars’ research program is flourishing. John McDowell, for example, has replaced Lewis’ phenomenalist account of perceptual objects with an influential account of perception as giving us direct access to reality.

But, although almost everyone now agrees that knowledge doesn’t require an unshakeable foundation, many questions remain. Can we accept McDowell’s Sellarsian claim that perception is conceptual “all the way out,”2 thereby denying the more basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with prelinguistic infants and higher animals? More generally, can philosophers successfully describe the conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge while ignoring the embodied coping going on on the ground floor; in effect declaring that human experience is upper stories all the way down?

This evening, I’d like to convince you that we shouldn’t leave the conceptual component of our lives hanging in midair and suggest how philosophers who want to understand knowledge and action can profit from a phenomenological analysis of the nonconceptual embodied coping skills we share with animals and infants.

I. The Failure of Cognitivism

One promising proposal for understanding human intelligence, while bypassing the body and, indeed, experience altogether, seems to have run its course. In mid-twentieth century, 2 philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists joined in proposing a new discipline called Cognitive Science that promised to work out how the logical manipulation of formal, symbolic representations enabled minds and suitably programmed computers to behave intelligently. Marvin Minsky, head of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, declared in a 1968 press release for Stanley Kubrick’s movie, 2001, that “in 30 years we should have machines whose intelligence is comparable to man’s.”3 Hilary Putnam and I were both teaching at MIT during that optimistic functionalist era, and I remember Hilary’s asking me earnestly over coffee when I would admit to being a Turing machine.

In the early seventies, however, Minsky’s AI lab ran into an unexpected problem. Computers couldn’t comprehend the simple stories understood by four-year-olds. 4 Minsky suggested that giving the computer the requisite common sense knowledge would merely require representing a few million facts. But it seemed to me that the real problem wasn’t storing and organizing millions of facts; it was knowing which facts were relevant.

One version of this relevance problem is called the frame problem. If the computer has a representation of the current state of the world and something changes, how does the computer determine which of the represented facts stay the same, and which representations have to be updated? Minsky suggested that to avoid the frame problem AI programmers could use descriptions of typical situations like going to a birthday party to list and organize the relevant facts. Influenced by a computer science student who had taken my phenomenology course, he suggested a structure of essential features and default assignments, which, like Husserl, he called a “frame.”

But a system of frames isn’t in a situation, so how, I wondered, could the computer determine which of the millions of facts in its database were relevant for recognizing the relevant frame? It seemed to me obvious that any AI program using frames to solve the story understanding problem by organizing millions of facts was going to be caught in a regress, and that therefore the project was hopeless. And, indeed, Minsky has recently acknowledged in Wired Magazine that AI has been brain dead since the early 70s when it encountered the problem of common sense knowledge. 5

Jerry Fodor nails the point with characteristic clarity: “The problem,” he writes, is to get the structure of an entire belief system to bear on individual occasions of belief fixation. We have, to put it bluntly, no computational formalisms that show 3 us how to do this, and we have no idea how such formalisms might be developed. … If someone --a Dreyfus, for example-- were to ask us why we should even suppose that the digital computer is a plausible mechanism for the simulation of global cognitive processes, the answering silence would be deafening.6

II. The Phenomenological Alternative

How, then, do we manage to organize the vast array of facts that supposedly make up commonsense knowledge so that we can retrieve just those facts that are relevant in the current situation? The answer is: “We can’t manage it any more than a computer can, but fortunately we don’t have to.” Only if we stand back from our engaged situation in the world and represent things from a detached theoretical perspective do we confront the frame problem. That is, if you strip away relevance and start with context-free facts, you can’t get relevance back. Happily, however, we are, as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it, always already in a world that is organized in terms of our bodies and interests and thus permeated by relevance.

As I said in What Computers Can’t Do: “[T]he meaningful objects ... among which we live are not a model of the world stored in our mind or brain; they are the world itself.”7 So, for us embodied agents, keeping track of changes in relevance is not the intractable problem it was for Symbolic AI. Recently, Rodney Brooks, Minsky’s successor as director of MIT’s AI Lab, has adopted the slogan “the best model of the world is the world itself” and he gives me credit for “being right [back in l972] that the way in which people operate in the world is intimately coupled to the existence of their body.”8 He now says, looking back at the frame problem: "And why could my simulated robot handle it? Because it was using the world as its own model. It never referred to an internal description of the world that would quickly get out of date if anything in the real world moved."9

But Brooks’ robots respond only to fixed features of the environment. That is, his robots don’t feed back into their world what they have learned by acting in it. Such ant-like “animats,” as he calls them, lack what Merleau-Ponty calls an intentional arc – the way our successful coping continually enriches the way things in the world show up. Our experience of finding our way around in a city, for example, is sedimented in how that city looks to us so that we see new opportunities for action. Brooks’ animats, it turns out, finesse rather than solve the frame problem. 4

It seems that our everyday coping can’t be understood in terms of symbolic representations, as Minsky’s intellectualist approach assumed, nor in terms of responses caused by fixed features of the environment, as in the empiricist approach of Brooks. We need to consider the possibility that embodied beings like us take as input energy from the physical universe and process it in such a way as to open them to a world organized in terms of their needs, interests, and bodily capacities without their minds needing to impose a meaning on a meaningless Given, as Minsky’s frames require, nor their brains converting the stimulus input into reflex responses, as in Brooks’ animats.

Fortunately, there are models of how the embodied brain could provide a causal basis for the intentional arc without doing any symbolic information processing and without instantiating a causal chain from input to response. For example, Walter Freeman, a founding figure in neuroscience and the first to take seriously the idea of the brain as a nonlinear dynamical system, has worked out an account of how the brain of an active animal can, in effect, categorize inputs significant to the organism by forming an attractor landscape. 10 . . . . ."

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/Dreyfus APA Address 10.22.05 .pdf

 

[Constance]

Ooops, just realized as I finished reading the posts today that you had already linked this Dreyfus paper. But I'll leave up my c&p of the opening pages to interest others in reading the whole paper.

 

[Constance]

What might you say to someone who feels that the nature of being and consciousness are one in the same in order for them to differentiate between the two?

What persuades you to think that "the nature of being and consciousness are one in the same" at a point in human history when we are able to measure aspects of physical processes in the universe?

 

[Constance]

We can indeed read the whole of Todes's book online at this link:

Todes - Body and world - Unknown - 2001.pdf

This is a pdf of the entire text by Todes with introductions by both Dreyfus and Piotr Hoffman.

It's a Christmas present from Google.


ETA: Comments are enabled in the DocHub mode of the pdf.

 

[Randall]

What persuades you to think that "the nature of being and consciousness are one in the same" at a point in human history when we are able to measure aspects of physical processes in the universe?

And if they answered with something to the effect: "Consciousness and matter are not fundamentally distinct but rather are two complementary aspects of one reality."

 

[Constance]

By way of sharing potentially significant off-topic information, here is an enhanced crop from a recent raw image photographed by the rover Curiosity on Mars that appears to show a living insect on a rock face:

http://s447.photobucket.com/user/co...INE GRAINEYS ENHANCEMENT_zpsubbholiu.jpg.html

The Mars research is fascinating because it enables us to see and recognize aspects of a world very similar to our own both historically [as some of its cultural past is visible in archaeological, sculptural, and mechanical ruins remaining on the surface] and additionally in signs of present life still existing on Mars.

The raw JPL image from which the enhanced crop was made is accessible at this page:

Curiosity Sol 1301 Image

 

[Constance]

And if they answered with something to the effect: "Consciousness and matter are not fundamentally distinct but rather are two complementary aspects of one reality."

But that's not what you previously wrote, which was that "the nature of being and consciousness are one in the same". Now you've changed the terms of your formulation to consciousness and matter as constituting "two complementary aspects of one "reality". How do you understand the relationship of our species' various descriptions and concepts of 'reality' to the philosophical question of the nature of being/Being?

 

[Randall]

But that's not what you previously wrote, which was that "the nature of being and consciousness are one in the same". Now you've changed the terms of your formulation to consciousness and matter as constituting "two complementary aspects of one "reality". How do you understand the relationship of our species' various descriptions and concepts of 'reality' to the philosophical question of the nature of being/Being?

So you would approach them with a series of questions that lead them to discover the answers for themselves. Interesting. Personally, I tend to seek better explanations through an analysis of competing ideas, which is an entirely different approach. But I can see how your approach could better facilitate change in those who have more fixed beliefs. Perhaps this will help us communicate better in the future.

 

[smcder]

Thank you so much, Steve, for finding and posting this link to a wide range of Stevens's own readings of his poetry

I read the list of recordings and discovered near the end of it a lecture by one of the most insightful literary critics responding to Stevens's poetry, A. Walton Litz, who has produced two excellent books on this poetry. This lecture provides a guide to understanding Stevens's poetry based on Litz's own lengthy and comprehensive study of it and resulting insights into it. You have always been interested in the Stevens poems I have posted here at various places in the two years of development of this thread, so you might want to listen to this lecture. Here is the link to it:


{Just click on the arrow to start Litz's lecture.}

Listening now ...

 

[smcder]

By way of sharing potentially significant off-topic information, here is an enhanced crop from a recent raw image photographed by the rover Curiosity on Mars that appears to show a living insect on a rock face:

http://s447.photobucket.com/user/constance523/media/NEAR MARTINE GRAINEYS ENHANCEMENT_zpsubbholiu.jpg.html

The Mars research is fascinating because it enables us to see and recognize aspects of a world very similar to our own both historically [as some of its cultural past is visible in archaeological, sculptural, and mechanical ruins remaining on the surface] and additionally in signs of present life still existing on Mars.

The raw JPL image from which the enhanced crop was made is accessible at this page:

Curiosity Sol 1301 Image

I dont see it ... I'm on my phone though, Will try laptop later.

What part of the photo is it in?

 

[Soupie]

Naive Realism and the Hard Problem of Consciousness; Or the Story of Captain Homunculus

One day Captain Homunculus was navigating his submarine about the ocean's depths. As always, he used his radar to navigate. All the marine master knew of the world came to him via his radar system.

His radar system was top notch. It sent out a steady array of pings which the system used to present a picture of the world to Captain Homunculus on his radar screen. For instance if there were a whale in front of the vessel, a long, beautiful, skinny red blob would appear on the screen. If there were an iceberg he would see the blobby red shape of an inverted cone. If there were a mountain thrusting up from the ocean floor, he would see a blobby, red, majestic pyramid.

One curious day, our nautical hero saw something on the radar screen that surprised him. What had at first appeared to be a tiny circle soon grew into a large circle. The captain thought that a torpedo of some kind was traveling toward him. He quickly responded by turning the sub in an effort to avoid the watery weapon. However, when the submarine was perpendicular to the approaching object, its shape changed. It changed from a large circle shape into a large cigar shape. After some additional maneuvering and experimenting, our homunculian hero realized that what he was seeing (on his radar screen) was himself.

He quickly surmised that there must be a "mirror" in the ocean that was causing his radar system to see itself. Captain Homunculus had never seen himself before. He moved the submarine up and down and side-to-side, and in that way was able to get a look at the entirety of the sub. And not to his surprise his submarine seemed to share nearly the exact same size and shape as other submarines he had encountered. On the front of the cylindrical, underwater boat, he could even see a little, square, maroon blob. That must be the radar system. Fascinating. He had always wondered what it looked like, and now he knew.

But in this insightful moment of self discovery, a thought occurred to him. When he reflected on the inside of the sub, it was rich with detail; but when he looked outside the submarine at his reflection in the mirror, he saw only the (admittedly handsome,) crimson red cigar. Inside, rich; outside, only red. Moreover, he thought, his fellow submarines must also have equally rich innards.

This puzzled him for several minutes. His radar system was top notch. It had been developed by the best engineers over dozens of years. And he had sailed around the ocean from North to South and from East to West. He had seen every sight in the known world. His radar system had never failed him.

And then the answer struck him, and he felt rather silly. He simply needed to position his radar so he could see the inside of a submarine. Not the outside.

In the months following this thought-provoking experience, he pondered how he might get a glimpse of the inside of a submarine. And he spoke with other submarines, and they confirmed that they did indeed have innards that were rich like his, but also confirmed that the world seemed indeed to consist of an altogether different, blobby, red substance. They supported his endeavor to look at the inside of a submarine.

And then one day, it happened. Our nautical navigator and several friends were traveling in the crusty northern seas. They were marveling at the beautiful variety of marine life swimming amongst the dangerous iceberg fields through which they were moving. A myriad of gorgeous maroon objects of various shapes and sizes moving in a plethora of directions at varying speeds. It was a magical moment. Until tragedy struck.

One of the Captain's friends, absorbed in the beauty of the moment no doubt, drifted too close to one of the icebergs and its razor sharp, crimson edges. The buoyant red mountain sliced the poor submarine clean in half.

Homunculus could only watch in horror.

He and the other submarines were able to retrieve both halves of the sub. It was a long, solemn trip back home to where they were able to give their beloved friend a proper burial.

...​

At the time, the friends were too grief stricken to speak of it, but all of them had seen it just the same. And it had only added to the horror and confusion of the moment. When at last they had had the opportunity to see the inside of a submarine, indeed their poor friend, the inside was every bit as red and blobby as any other object they had ever seen in their lives. Granted, there was a certain complexity to the inside of their friend, but the richness of their innards was nowhere to be seen amongst the blobby crimson complexity.

Or perhaps absent altogether, as some began to wonder. Others, especially an eccentric Australian vessel, suggested that explaining how one could get the rich variety of their innards from the shapely, crimson processes that appeared on their radar screens was a uniquely hard problem.

However, some scoffed at this proclamation as being mere rhetoric. These individuals insisted that they simply needed to look harder, develop better, more precise radar systems and then surely they would be able to see on their radar screens the innards of others in exactly the same way that they saw everything else.

The humble Homunculus was surprised—and bewildered—to learn that some poor fools had even caught the notion that everything—including whales, icebergs, and radar systems themselves—were made of the same stuff as his, and their, innards. But how icebergs, whales, and radar systems could be made of non-blobby red stuff--stuff that didn't appear on radar screens--was so hard to fathom as to make the question laughably absurd.

These pathetic pirates even claimed that while submarine radar was top notch, the beautiful, detailed, crimson images on the radar screen were perceptions of the world, and not to be confused with the world in-itself.

An easy rebuttal, our hero thought, was that most submarines, most of the time, were in complete agreement regarding what they saw in the world. How could this be possible if what their radar was showing them was not the world as it really was?

No, his rich, inner world was real, not an illusion. And he was equally certain that the beautiful, crimson outer world was real too, and not an illusion.

Maybe the world did consist of two substances. Or maybe he did simply need better radar. He certainly agreed with the Aussie fellow that explaining how his rich, inner world was produced by the blobby, crimson processes he observed in the world was certainly a hard problem.

 

[smcder]

Naive Realism and the Hard Problem of Consciousness; Or the Story of Captain Homunculus

One day Captain Homunculus was navigating his submarine about the ocean's depths. As always, he used his radar to navigate. All the marine master knew of the world came to him via his radar system.

His radar system was top notch. It sent out a steady array of pings which the system used to present a picture of the world to Captain Homunculus on his radar screen. For instance if there were a whale in front of the vessel, a long, beautiful, skinny red blob would appear on the screen. If there were an iceberg he would see the blobby red shape of an inverted cone. If there were a mountain thrusting up from the ocean floor, he would see a blobby, red, majestic pyramid.

One curious day, our nautical hero saw something on the radar screen that surprised him. What had at first appeared to be a tiny circle soon grew into a large circle. The captain thought that a torpedo of some kind was traveling toward him. He quickly responded by turning the sub in an effort to avoid the watery weapon. However, when the submarine was perpendicular to the approaching object, its shape changed. It changed from a large circle shape into a large cigar shape. After some additional maneuvering and experimenting, our homunculian hero realized that what he was seeing (on his radar screen) was himself.

He quickly surmised that there must be a "mirror" in the ocean that was causing his radar system to see itself. Captain Homunculus had never seen himself before. He moved the submarine up and down and side-to-side, and in that way was able to get a look at the entirety of the sub. And not to his surprise his submarine seemed to share nearly the exact same size and shape as other submarines he had encountered. On the front of the cylindrical, underwater boat, he could even see a little, square, maroon blob. That must be the radar system. Fascinating. He had always wondered what it looked like, and now he knew.

But in this insightful moment of self discovery, a thought occurred to him. When he reflected on the inside of the sub, it was rich with detail; but when he looked outside the submarine at his reflection in the mirror, he saw only the (admittedly handsome,) crimson red cigar. Inside, rich; outside, only red. Moreover, he thought, his fellow submarines must also have equally rich innards.

This puzzled him for several minutes. His radar system was top notch. It had been developed by the best engineers over dozens of years. And he had sailed around the ocean from North to South and from East to West. He had seen every sight in the known world. His radar system had never failed him.

And then the answer struck him, and he felt rather silly. He simply needed to position his radar so he could see the inside of a submarine. Not the outside.

In the months following this thought-provoking experience, he pondered how he might get a glimpse of the inside of a submarine. And he spoke with other submarines, and they confirmed that they did indeed have innards that were rich like his, but also confirmed that the world seemed indeed to consist of an altogether different, blobby, red substance. They supported his endeavor to look at the inside of a submarine.

And then one day, it happened. Our nautical navigator and several friends were traveling in the crusty northern seas. They were marveling at the beautiful variety of marine life swimming amongst the dangerous iceberg fields through which they were moving. A myriad of gorgeous maroon objects of various shapes and sizes moving in a plethora of directions at varying speeds. It was a magical moment. Until tragedy struck.

One of the Captain's friends, absorbed in the beauty of the moment no doubt, drifted too close to one of the icebergs and its razor sharp, crimson edges. The buoyant red mountain sliced the poor submarine clean in half.

Homunculus could only watch in horror.

He and the other submarines were able to retrieve both halves of the sub. It was a long, solemn trip back home to where they were able to give their beloved friend a proper burial.

...​

At the time, the friends were too grief stricken to speak of it, but all of them had seen it just the same. And it had only added to the horror and confusion of the moment. When at last they had had the opportunity to see the inside of a submarine, indeed their poor friend, the inside was every bit as red and blobby as any other object they had ever seen in their lives. Granted, there was a certain complexity to the inside of their friend, but the richness of their innards was nowhere to be seen amongst the blobby crimson complexity.

Or perhaps absent altogether, as some began to wonder. Others, especially an eccentric Australian vessel, suggested that explaining how one could get the rich variety of their innards from the shapely, crimson processes that appeared on their radar screens was a uniquely hard problem.

However, some scoffed at this proclamation as being mere rhetoric. These individuals insisted that they simply needed to look harder, develop better, more precise radar systems and then surely they would be able to see on their radar screens the innards of others in exactly the same way that they saw everything else.

The humble Homunculus was surprised—and bewildered—to learn that some poor fools had even caught the notion that everything—including whales, icebergs, and radar systems themselves—were made of the same stuff as his, and their, innards. But how icebergs, whales, and radar systems could be made of non-blobby red stuff--stuff that didn't appear on radar screens--was so hard to fathom as to make the question laughably absurd.

These pathetic pirates even claimed that while submarine radar was top notch, the beautiful, detailed, crimson images on the radar screen were perceptions of the world, and not to be confused with the world in-itself.

An easy rebuttal, our hero thought, was that most submarines, most of the time, were in complete agreement regarding what they saw in the world. How could this be possible if what their radar was showing them was not the world as it really was?

No, his rich, inner world was real, not an illusion. And he was equally certain that the beautiful, crimson outer world was real too, and not an illusion.

Maybe the world did consist of two substances. Or maybe he did simply need better radar. He certainly agreed with the Aussie fellow that explaining how his rich, inner world was produced by the blobby, crimson processes he observed in the world was certainly a hard problem.

Excellent work!

 

[smcder]

Reminds me just a little bit of "Flatland".

 

[Constance]

I dont see it ... I'm on my phone though, Will try laptop later.

What part of the photo is it in?

This additional crop (below) from JPL's higher resolution version of the image might help. The critter (if critter it is) is poised near the center of the roughly triangular rock face filling most of the cropped image. It appears to be clinging to the rough edge of an additional rock sitting atop the larger rock face that is shaped something like a wolf's head in profile. It looks fleshy and spotted (like several large snakes visible in an earlier Mars panorama I've seen -- one intact and another one nearby cut up in pieces). If this critter is an arthropod of some sort as we know them on earth, it seems both like and unlike those evolved here in several respects. It has a smooth fleshy body in its upper (thorax?) area and a segmented body toward the back. Several black leg-like appendages appear along its visible left side.

Photo by constance523


Because of the flatness and dullness of most raw JPL panoramas of Mars rover images released to the public [largely the result of the orange filter applied over most of them, and made worse in images obtained in lower light conditions depending on the weather and time of day], it is necessary to increase the light and contrast in the photos and adjust the tone and hue of colors registered in the photos in order to see objects with greater definition and depth. The reason why I first saw this 'critter' as such is that while I was enhancing light, contrast, and color information available in the raw image of Curiosity MSL 1301, Right Mastcam, I suddenly saw this 'critter' emerge on a rock face simultaneous with a subconscious startle reaction, just as I would experience in the first moment before directly perceiving a similar critter in my kitchen. I first realized the activity of my own subconscious mind when we had dogs who sometimes dragged their leashes into the living room. On repeated occasions, coming home from work and looking through the mail I'd brought in from the post box, my subconscious perception of shapes in the field of my peripheral vision would sense one of these leashes as a possible snake and I would experience that startle reaction, drawing my focal vision instantly to a place on the floor where I saw in fact a leather dog leash.

The same thing happened when I first perceived the appearance of this possible critter in the JPL SOL 1301 image. Are the signs presented in the image sufficient to claim that I/we are looking at a Martian arthropod similar enough to the arthropods studied on earth? I'm looking for an entomologist willing to look at this image and speculate about its possible nature.

Here is a link to the full resolution version of the JPL SOL 1301 image with no light or color enhancements made:

Raw Images - Mars Science Laboratory

{scroll down and click on the link from there to the full resolution image}

 

[Constance]

So you would approach them with a series of questions that lead them to discover the answers for themselves. Interesting. Personally, I tend to seek better explanations through an analysis of competing ideas, which is an entirely different approach. But I can see how your approach could better facilitate change in those who have more fixed beliefs. Perhaps this will help us communicate better in the future.

You seem to be sidestepping the critical issues concerning the ambiguity, the imprecision, of terms and concepts I raised in response to your last post. Re your underscored statement above -- "I tend to seek better explanations through an analysis of competing ideas, which is an entirely different approach," -- my question is on what basis we can 'analyze competing ideas' without analyzing the empirical, experiential, basis out of which they are developed.

Unlike materialist/physicalist/objectivist science of our time, phenomenology analyzes experiential {lived} reality from first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives, not merely to "facilitate change in those who have more fixed beliefs," but to open our species' minds to the perspectival and thus partial nature of the variously afforded capacities of our -- and other species' -- perceptions of what-is and the ways in which these various perspectives overlap to disclose a commonly shared 'world' -- a local world -- in which we are both embedded and enactive in our ongoing senses of and activity within it.

In general we humans have taken this local world to constitute the 'reality' within which we, individually and collectively, have existed and developed our various ways of life (cultures) within it. But our own experiences of being-in-this-world have long led our species to pose ontological questions concerning the nature of being -- and of Being -- beyond the horizons of that which is visible, sensible, and knowable by us at this point in our own evolution.

Are we rationally justified in contemplating our existential being-in-situation [temporally and spatially] as we experience it as an expression of the nature of being on planetary worlds beyond our own, and further as an expression of the nature of the Being of All-that-Is? What else can we rely on in our thinking? Hardened concepts [ideas] of what-is as developed at earlier stages in our species' existence, dismissed one by one over our history? Or the dominant computational meme characterizing our own Western culture? We need both philosophy and science, and other disciplines of human thinking and expression, to make progress in our understanding of 'what-is' in the local world we exist in, beginning with increased understanding of that which we experience.


Text for the day, a metaphor posed by Merleau-Ponty: "The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish."