Sunday, November 18, 2007
Addressing Ben Tucker's "Futility and (keep reading) Relative Perceptual Accuracy":
Although I agree for the most part with your statements about the lack of practical application for a discussion of an "objective reality" I somewhat disagree with your separation between internal and external perceptions such a sight. For instance, you mentioned the "position and velocity" as being external perceptions while "color" was labeled as being internal. My question for you is: do you make a distinction when an "internal" perception influences an "external" decision? For example: if you are sitting at a stop light and your relative internal perception conveys to your senses that the light is green. And based on your associations with a green light, you push down on the accelerator and drive out into the crowded intersection....only to realize that the light really isn't green (at least no one else perceived it internally as being green!) so your flawed internal perception led to a costly external reaction...(a car accident). How would you explain your idea that "concerning internal perceptions, relative accuracy is the only thing that matters" to the owner of the Lexus you just hit?
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3 comments:
You're breaking the rule of constancy. It doesn't matter if what looks green to me looks green to someone else, what matters is that the colors that I perceive are constant in relation to each other. The point is that I could see red as green and green as red as long as (a) they always look that way and (b) I still named them the same way [when I see grass I call the color green, even if the shade itself would appear to you as red].
It's necessary to recognize a distinction between the experience [which is associated with a name and a stimulus: I call this experience green and my response is to accelerate] and the sensation [which is the color I perceive when looking at something that language has taught me to label green, and is perceived entirely internally in that it is unable to be separated from experience that causes it].
By recognizing this difference, one can see that it's your experience rather than the sensation that matters.
By recognizing that one must rely upon a former "experience rather than a sensation" you are producing a contradiction, because you have to have had a series of sensations concerning a situation the first time you are ever put in that situation in order to create a memory or what you seem to call an "experience" so technically isn't an experience just a series of sensations that you remember and base future decisions off of?
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