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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Perception and Thought
Message-ID: <1695@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 27-Sep-85 00:41:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1695
Posted: Fri Sep 27 00:41:12 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 1-Oct-85 10:14:23 EDT
References: <1767@pyuxd.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 69

In article <1767@pyuxd.UUCP> rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen) writes:

>  Not only
>did I indicate that you with astigmatism and glasses have a fixed range of
>perceptive possibilities, but you ignored the part about why this facet
>of perception is trivial by comparison.  (i.e., my questions about the
>the way the color blue objectively looks---that you have no guarantees,
>that your mechanisms of perception will be accurately reproduced in another
>body)  It appears that is not worth arguing with you if you intend to leave
>out all the sections you simply don't want to address while not even reading
>the sections you do include.  (I found these comments inserted at some
>later spot in your article after further reading:  you still failed to
>address the points raised.)

Rich, do you wear glasses?  If you don't, then you have no basis for claims
about their effects upon perception.  I do, and thus I am prepared to make
experiments in perception on that basis.  Now, suppose one does something to
the eyes of a person so that what used to produce the perception "blue" now
produces some other brain-state instead.  Now the first question is, how can
it be told that it is different?  Well, because the person remembers the old
perception, and recognizes it as different from the new.  If perception is
so bound up in the brain that he cannot remember the old (which certainly
cannot be the case if the change is made outside the brain proper) then he
perceives no change at all.  If one hooks up a TV camera and uses it to
directly stimulate the visual cortex, the subject will receive sensations
that may be totally unlike what the eyes would produce in the same
situation.  What is important, though, is that these are new experiences.
The same person persists, but is now experiencing the world differently.

>>>>>Ever read/see "Johnny Got His Gun"?  I've only seen the film, but a quick
>>>>>summary of it is that a WWI soldier has his entire face "scooped" out
>>>>>by an explosion of some sort.  He cannot hear, see, smell, taste, speak,
>>>>>because all the means of doing so no longer exist in his body.

>>>>You are ratifying my point, unless you want to argue that the old person
>>>>died, and was replaced by a new defective model.

>>>Your point was that you were claiming that sensations may not have any
>>>bearing on personhood.  In the example above, the young soldier has lost
>>>ALL personhood, and exists only as a disembodied (practically) brain.
>>>How this "ratifies" your point is beyond me.

>> Because that is NOT what I said.  My point is that modifications to the
>> sensory inputs are not special.  They do not instantly change the person;
>> their effect occurs temporally in the same fashion that all other
>> EXPERIENCE changes people.  A person is changed by blindness, but
>> maintains his identity.  He is the same person as before, only now he
>> is blind.

>OK, fine.  Tell that to the soldier.  (If you find a way of doing so.)

I know this myself, because my own senses are so defective.
>>>If absence of evidence is not a reason not to hold a belief about
>>>something's existence, then you logically must believe in the existence
>>>of every imaginable thing.

>> That's because you erroneously think that the only two possibilities on any
>> topic are either total belief of total disbelief.

>I see, things can partially exist and partially not exist.  "Fuzzy
>existence"?

One can know that something exists, or know that it doesn't exist, or know
neither.  In this case, you know neither.


This is growing tiring.

Charley Wingate


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