h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The colour out of space, and the amorphous form of the Great Cthulu. The shade of music, and the words bespoke by a Dali painting. The shape of an LSD trip, and the taste of purple. These things I can picture in my mind with absolute clarity, and as the image arose in my mind, unique to my experiences, they are completely new in all respects. So my question to you is, how are these mental images not new? (how ya like them apples?)

I don't know the answer to this myself, so don't ask me. This is the result of 28 straight hours of Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, so there is no offence intended.

Nice try, Sneaky. But you've just substituted meaningless phrases for meaningless words. Well, don't look at me in that tone of voice; it smells a funny colour!

toxx

True, I did, but that was in responce to the arguement of the uselessness of language to convey a new experience. Toxxin, somehow I knew you'd pop in and deflate my faulty logic. (applesauce!) The first meaningless example I gave was actually an H.P. Lovecraft story I read a long time ago. Kinda exemplified the impossibility of mere words to describe that which is unknowable.

It occurs to me in my over-caffinated state that 'unreality' might just be an impossible test due to the limits of language. If a 'thing' fails the tests for what is real, then it would by defalt be 'unreal' (but not the game 'Unreal'). The first test would have to be that of perception. If you can touch it, see it, smell it, yadda, yadda, then it might just be real. What conditions would make that test false? Under what conditions would those false results still be real? Where is the logic supporting the idea? You get the drift.

Must...Play...KOTR...Must...Have...Coffee!

People have convincing hallucinations and dreams as Descarted kindly pointed out long ago.

Sorry, Descartes.

Sneaky. This discussion sends tendrils out into many aspects of philosophy: Wittgenstein's private language argument, the paradox of radical translation, antirealism etc. Do we really mean 'unknowable' as opposed to 'inconceivable' or merely 'unknown'?

toxx

I meant unknowable. That which is not real in any possible sense, interperitation, or definition, is unknowable. Inconcievable and unknown are limiting to individuals and temporal perception. There are many things that were inconceivable to me ten years ago that seem rather common now. Same for unknown, but unknowable is that slippery beast that encompases all that I can never know. Such ideas as 'Is there really a God?', or better yet, 'Is there life after death?' These things are also unknowable.

Ok, you took the bait. An hallucination, a really convincing one, fails the test for real, though it passes the test for perception. Under what conditions would these hallucinations still be real? Under what conditions do they fail? Why? I'm looking for, if not concrete or definate, specific answers to these questions. It's all well and good to argue one idea set, and when that no longer seems to fit, to switch to another. What I'm doing is trying to further the ideas of tests for that which is 'real'. Seeing as I've been proven to not have these answers, I ask you (any who decides to answer, and Toxxin). So, logically, are there answers to my questions, or are we all just whistling in the dark?

Sneaky. I don't see that hallucinations count as perceptions. Surely perception has to relate to what is really going on out there. You wouldn't call a dream 'perception' would you?

toxx

Yes, I do. They seem to fill all the requirements for perceptions while they are happening. Same with powerful hallucinations. The whole idea is to disprove them from being real. When things like these are discarded from the testing process due to preconceived notions of what is real, then the tests lose all significance. Why are they not real? Why would they still be real? The answers to these questions may lead us to a better understanding of what it is that we have been labeling 'real' this whole time.

Sneaky. The question of what is to count as perception and that of what is real seem to me to have little connection. Would you care to elucidate how you suppose that they relate to each other? Your astonishingly broad concept of perception would appear to make any connection less rather than more likely; although I wouldn't want to beg the question either way.

toxx

Strange, in post 728 you tell me, 'Surely perception has to relate to what is really going on out there.'

In your very next post, 730, you tell me, 'The question of what is to count as perception and that of what is real seem to me to have little connection.'

I'm lost. You seem to contradict yourself in a rather short amount of time. Are you two people?

My idea of perception is simply interperitations of the five senses. Now, some will say that dreams and hallucinations don't fit that criteria, but my dreams and induced hallucinations were powerfull enough to completely simulate the five senses, or perception. This definition of perception doesn't seem to be broad at all, but the basic concept the word implies.

Sneaky. You make a very fair point and I seem to have made mine rather badly. Let me try again.

Perception, as opposed to illusion, is commonly supposed to be veridical. I'm not at all sure about that though in terms of your broad concept of perception.

On the other hand, what is there isn't necessarily percieved. So it isn't a simple one-to-one mapping. What is real might never have been observed and might in some sense be imperceptible; either to, say, the unaided eye or at all!

Is that a bit clearer?

toxx

Much clearer, thanks. I thought I was loosing it for a minute. Sleep dep, caffine overload, and a brain that won't stop with the video game, I just got a little lost.

Ok, so how would we go about differentiating perception between the veridical and illusion? Also, how would we go about including that which cannot be percieved (like certain light frequencies or subatomic particles)? Again, when would these not hold true?

All I was trying to say, through my incroaching dementia, is that perception would be the first of the tests for 'real', but not definitive.

I also meant to add that I'm not trying to find proof, but logic, if that makes any sense.

It makes eminent sense, Sneaky. Conceptual analysis as befits a philosopher. As I remarked a few messages ago, mere tests won't do in order to elucidate a concept. I suspect that when attempting this, perception is the first thing to forget about.

Unfortunately, amid all the excitement and booze in my case, I seem to have lost track of what the original question was. Are we still on defining reality, in which case knowing what is real will not help us all that much. What we need to figure out is what there is about anything of the 'real' kind that is different from the 'unreal' kind, without merely deciding which is which by some test. That just isn't enough.

toxx

I don't think Miscellaneous's question following his/her assertion in 702 has been finished with: "Nothing can be imagined that has not already been perceived"

On the face of it this can't be good. Imagination dead, imagine!

If true, what we call imagination is properly called regurgitated perception. It is Locke's "blank slate" claim, which he used to oppose the doctrine of innate ideas.

But it stretches credulity. Have quarks been perceived? They have been imagined. Has the second focus of our elliptical orbit round the sun been perceived? Has the twelfth root of two been perceived?

Perceive is a very flexible word. In what sense have electrons been perceived? Their paths have been mapped. So has Minas Tirith; but electrons are experimentally verifiable. Is that the same as perceptible? Stretches the word a bit, I'd say.

Locke's point (and Misc's, and Descartes') is that the elements of any fantasy are rooted in the familiar. That's what made Toxx's reply unanswerable: to describe something genuinely unique you need a new term which cannot have understandable meaning. This is inevitable, surely?

And yet I feel that there are plenty of "things" that have reality but are supplied to our consciousness by imagination rather than perception.

To respend to some earlier replies, hallucinations and non-tangible-by-others visions of the sort, are the brain acting as if it has seen, or heard, or smelled, or tasted, or touched, when in fact it hasn't, and it is decieving itself, or is being decieved by some outside influence, such as a hallucinagenic substance.

First up, a warm welcome to our newcomers



I think we have to have some concepts in advance to imagine or perceive anything, altough these may be implicit, rather than explicit. And they may only be "top of the heirarchy" concepts like object, or coloured. I can see a chair as an object, even if I'm unfamiliar with the concept of "furniture". The lack of words only prevents description, though it may to some extent prevent us describing things to ourselves, which is why (or one reason why) we invent new words. And once we have a word for something the concept often becomes, at least gradually, clearer (or seems to).




The problem is that under Sneaky's rather broad definition there is no test of perception; everything counts. Under toxx's the locus of the problem is merely shifted.

But imagined by analogy with the familiar. "Real" quarks may not be a bit like the imagined ones.

Complex concepts, built up by extension, analogy, metaphor and refinement of categories, can take us a long way from the ur-concepts that found the lineage, but the ancestor still leaves its mark on the descendants.

Noggin

<"Real" quarks may not be a bit like the imagined ones.>

This is beyond the hair-splitting.

If you look at the "Powers of Ten" demonstration at http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/
you end up with a visual representation of quarks . . . most imaginative, they look like Smarties (M&Ms). It is not intended to be taken as a realistic picture. There cannot be a realistic picture of a quark because . . . it can't possibly look like anything. It can't be seen. Even if we contain billions of them, we will never perceive one.

What do you mean by "imagining a quark"? I take it to mean "deducing a mathematical model of the behaviour of a sub-particle". Visualisation is not really appropriate. If you choose to imagine them as golf balls on speed, that's up to you.

R'Man. On this one, I take a view very similar to yours. Our concept of a quark is built up of it's properties and behaviour described in mathematical terms (not that I have the maths to follow the equations). That, really, is all there is to them. To expect that there might be some surprises if we could 'really' perceive them is a category mistake.

It is for such reasons that I regretted in on of my introductory pieces that we don't have the equivalent of a mathematical language to describe entities in other domains. Perhaps this is, indeed, the endeavour of philosophy itself. Over historical time, areas have been developed to the point where the domain can be transferred from philosophy to science for most purposes. Science is no longer 'natural philosophy'.

toxx

They have not been percieved. There is some theorum by some dead guy (I can't remember the names right now) that basically says that because of the nature of electrons they cannot be perceived in their natural state, you can see where they are going, or where they are now, not both. A duality of something or other (I'm really bad with names). Logical inference is acceptable as proving existance, as long as it is actually logical. As I said before, perception is only the first way to deduce the existance of anything, and it is not definitive. Where perception fails, there needs be some other method of identifying what is veridical. What other ways are there?



How, and is that not still perception? Why? Yes, my definition of the 'p' word is fairly broad, but does that make it incorrect and if so, how?



Yes! Only, what concepts shall be 'given'? Color, mass, volume? These are all under the idea of perception. How can we say that something has any of these without first perceiving them, or being informed by another's perception? The sky is blue. Well, that isn't neccissarily so, but just look up on a clear day, and that's what you percieve. The sky is clear, it is the light that hits our eyes that is in the blue wavelengths. Does that change the idea that the sky is blue?



?Que?

I don't mean to be difficult, or to spell badly, or to forget titles and names, but I just can't help it.