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From: jim@ISM780B.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Subjective reality
Message-ID: <27500130@ISM780B.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Sep-85 07:20:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ISM780B.27500130
Posted: Tue Sep 24 07:20:00 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Sep-85 08:41:28 EDT
References: <524@spar.UUCP>
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Nf-ID: #R:spar:-52400:ISM780B:27500130:000:2469
Nf-From: ISM780B!jim    Sep 24 07:20:00 1985


>>     Who else can tell you what you are sensing besides yourself?
>
>What makes you so sure that in all cases, without a means of verification,
>you are accurately sensing yourself?  Another important reason why a method
>of verification is necessary to gain knowledge.

Rich, all knowledge is obtained through sensation.  How do you verify that
your observation of the verification equipment is accurate?  How do you
determine that your sensation of your test tubes and monitors is valid,
more valid than the internal sensation you are measuring?

>>     Whether or not you chose to attribute reality to such entities, the
>>     fact is, they are viewed in most philosophical and psychological schemes
>>     as possessing reality, in some cases greater than that of rocks.
>
>Fine.  I find such "schemes" to be completely bogus if what they are saying
>is that these "entities" represent anything other than internal thoughts
>within the brain which may have no correlation to reality.

I really think you are missing the point here.  The very fact that you use the
word "thought" illustrates the confusion.  There is no such physical entity
as a thought; there are only chemical reactions, neural connections,
holographic patterns.  You can correlate these patterns with what someone
describes as a thought, but the thought itself, just as the sensation you call
"blue", only exists within subjective experience.  You seem to be limiting
reality in two ways; one, more trivial, is the implication that reality is out
there, but what happens internally isn't real.  I don't think you really meant
to say that, although I think it is indicative of a limited world view.
The other way is that you do not consider thoughts and sensations to be real,
but I consider that to be quite arbitrary; they are consistent and persistent.
Perhaps we merely have a definition problem; just what do you mean by *real*?

All knowledge is obtained through sense perceptions; taste, smell, touch,
sight, hearing, pain, hunger, heat, coldness, gravitational orientation.
Just what these sensations feel like is something that we know only by
experiencing them; no objective description can tell us what they feel like.
And from these feelings we form a model of the world in which we are embedded,
but to argue that the model is real takes quite a leap of faith, and to argue
that the sensations are not real seems to me rather perverse.

Is knowledge real?

-- Jim Balter (ima!jim)


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