Aug 20, 2012 -- 6:33PM, Faustus5 wrote:

Aug 20, 2012 -- 9:37AM, newchurchguy wrote:

Staying with the most basic of science methods - observing changes and transformations - one cannot transfer directly the smell of roses to the brain, via the olfactory pathway.  No organic molecules are channeled from one to the other.  Experience of the smell of roses, as detection of organic molecules, is indirect.

What you write is quite correct, of course, but the first sentence is awkward, since there is nothing called "the smell of roses" that exists outside of representations in the brain which register and process the detection of chemical properties by the olfactory systems. And the characteristics of a smell are going to be different based on how the brain has evolved to categorize the presence of those chemicals. Thus, to a vulture, I doubt very much that the smell of rotting flesh is anything but mouth watering. So to speak.

I am pretty sure from the rest of your post that this or something like it is what you meant, I'm just being nit picky.

F5,  I accept this critique.  In the first sentence the "smell" of roses is defined, as not transferable from the environment.  It is clearer to say it is - not "out there" to be transfered - only organic molecules are there, as odor producing substances.  Just like wetness is not out there - only H2O (or other liquids).

Wetness and smells are mutual information from the environment merged or appended to the database of information residing with an agent.  Tononi would say they are integrated.  Still none of this would be measurable if the information is not as real as the energy and matter.

A better example - in terms of being meaningful in people's lives - is found in this link.

newswise.com/articles/an-artificial-reti...

The lead researcher, Dr. Sheila Nirenberg, a computational neuroscientist at Weill Cornell, envisions a day when the blind can choose to wear a visor, similar to the one used on the television show Star Trek.

Dr. Nirenberg reasoned that any pattern of light falling on to the retina had to be converted into a general code — a set of equations — that turns light patterns into patterns of electrical pulses. “People have been trying to find the code that does this for simple stimuli, but we knew it had to be generalizable, so that it could work for anything — faces, landscapes, anything that a person sees,” Dr. Nirenberg says.....

The reason this system works is two-fold,” Dr. Nirenberg says. “The encoder — the set of equations — is able to mimic retinal transformations for a broad range of stimuli, including natural scenes, and thus produce normal patterns of electrical pulses, and the stimulator (the light sensitive protein) is able to send those pulses on up to the brain.”

Aug 20, 2012 -- 9:37AM, newchurchguy wrote:

Aug 19, 2012 -- 12:54PM, stardustpilgrim wrote:

Aug 19, 2012 -- 2:39AM, Truman47 wrote:

Aug 18, 2012 -- 8:56PM, amcolph wrote:

the 'reality' we experience is constructed in our heads from sensory inputs.  We do not experience what is really out there--the source of the sensory inputs--directly.

 

Hmmm??? 

While most of "reality" we experience is constructed in our heads from sensory inputs, much of our experience is also from outside of sensory inputs (e.g. chemical influences having nothing to do with sensory inputs).

And I don't agree with the last part ad I would rather say. . .

We do not experience all of what is really out there.  We do experience some portion of it.

amcolph is quite correct. An excellent book on this is Making Up Our Mind, How the Brain Creates Our Mental World by Chris Frith. But this idea goes way back, to Kant, even to Descartes. Nobody has really gotten over or gotten past Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

SDP,

If I have time, Kant addressed this in far greater scope than the materialist/nominalist approach stated by you and Amcolph.  I could cite his deep thinking on the issue and we could have a great conversation about it.

The problem concept - going back and forth on this - is the modern defintion of "reality".  Science measures in defined units.  The largest developed category of units of measurement regards physical properties.

On the other hand; there is another category (or two) of measurements that do not refer to mass and force.  These are units of measure for thermodynamics, communication, ordered systems and logic.  I suggest strongly that these are real.  The science tool, needed to render this analysis as post Kantian, is the math formula from C. Shannon for mutual information.

Staying with the most basic of science methods - observing changes and transformations - one cannot transfer directly the smell of roses to the brain, via the olfactory pathway.  No organic molecules are channeled from one to the other.  Experience of the smell of roses, as detection of organic molecules, is indirect.

However, to say that we do not experience any reality in this exchange; is created by the ad absurdum of the causal closure of material reality paradigm.

In fact, modern science acknowledges, measures and can simulate scientifically the transfer of mutual information.  What is measured in the communication channel, which is the olfactory system, is information transfer.  Damage to the communication channel can reduce the tranmission signals, while not effecting the source of smell (a physical rose) that a healthy bystander will corroborate is emiting odor.

So, while we do not directly experience the "reality" of a rose - we do directly experience its REAL information.  The amount of the information is modeled: as the mutual information communicated through the channel and received by the experiencer.

The good Bishop Berkeley makes so much sense in his arguments for idealism - because he focused on this aspect of reality.  By accepting the units of measure of information science - this paradox of Berkeley and Hume is dispached.  Forces are felt and observed according to physics, material objects are observed via material science principles and mutual information is gained according to the principles of information science.  It is the step of acknowledging informational realism that makes this so simple and clear.

In evolution - as much as; go faster, be stronger, reproduce more abundently - is also the command "make thy information larger".  (Werner Loewenstein.)

And to the point - living things cannot have adapted using division and subtraction, unconsciously  - if they are not real in our environments.
 

ncg, I do not doubt that there is a transfer of information from the exterior world to our consciousness. This is fairly evident on every drive you make, when I see a green light, I go, when traffic on the adjacent street sees a red light, they stop. Information is correctly transferred.

Did Swedenborg experience a finer order of reality, talk to people whose physical body had ceased to function and visit whole communities of such people? I believe he did. How was he able to do so, as the majority of people can't? There are worlds upon worlds upon worlds out there. Does not being able to perceive them mean they do not exist? No.

All I'm saying is that contact with reality is always mediated, never direct.

Perception of the higher worlds is mediated in a similar manner, indirectly. The physical body alone doesn't have a mechanism for receiving vibrations of a finer nature, the higher vibrations of higher worlds. However, one's consciousness can be developed to receive information from higher orders of reality. One can thus structure, in one's own consciousness, what the information is conveying, from those higher worlds.

......................

When scientific instruments are involved in gathering information, they are but an extra barrier of separation, rather obviously.

IOW, your post failed to convince me I'm wrong.

sdp