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From: sjb@piobe.austin.ibm.com (Scott J Brickner)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Direct awareness
Message-ID: <8570@awdprime.UUCP>
Date: 18 Jun 91 19:53:49 GMT
References: <1991Jun17.144356.21450@aifh.ed.ac.uk> <25348@samsung.samsung.com> <8455@awdprime.UUCP> <1991Jun16.083632.1383@tygra.Michigan.COM>
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In article <1991Jun17.144356.21450@aifh.ed.ac.uk>, bhw@aifh.ed.ac.uk
(Barbara H. Webb (Phd 89)) writes:
> What is 'knowing' or 'being aware of' if it is not the process of
> sensing or percieving something? If you _have_ the sensation of seeing
> your keyboard, then you are aware of your keyboard (directly) rather
> than aware of your sensation. What you describe solves the problem of 
> _how_ awareness occurs, not by finding the processes underlying it, but by
> moving the entire problem back one step - the senses project the outside
> world onto a video screen inside our heads and the little man inside our
> head 'knows directly' what he sees there, and infers that it reflects
> some real scene going on outside the head. This is not much help to a
> science of cognition, because we don't how the little man manages his
> 'direct awareness' any more than we knew how we were aware of the world in
> the first place.
> [...]
> Barbara Webb
> bhw@aifh.ed.edu.uk

But Barbara, what happens in your system for border-line cases?  Say
optical illusion... we've all seen the one where a diagram something like this:

    >--<    <-->

is drawn, and we are asked, which line is longer?  While a ruler shows
that they are really identical, the eye disagrees... by your system, the
mind knows what the eye sees directly... therefore right up until you
put down the ruler, one line IS longer than the other.  But using the
method of "moving the entire problem back one step", the "little man"
doesn't think that the length of the line changes (or perhaps it's the
length of the ruler that changes?) when he puts down the ruler to
measure... he just thinks that the information provided by the senses
(on the "video screen inside our heads") was somehow faulty.  I think
that this fits better with the way we really DO think... don't you?

Scott