Re: toy town

<snip>

>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_definition
>>
>> this was interesting
>
> It contains points of view that get argued about intensely - but you > see
> some of the problems around the idea of `real', now, yes?
>
> Rowland.

philosophy aside,
how about hallucinations?

Define the word.

One definition would be `sensory experience that does not accord with
that of the majority' (or something like that, that quick off the cuff
version has holes).

No need to invoke the idea of `reality' at all.

i have an example of an hallucination. it happened when i was 5 or so.
me and my brother had been put to bed for the night in our shared room, and
i saw people walking about in the room.
they were walking through the walls.
they looked absolutely real.

i would say that was an hallucination, because
upon reflection on the memory, it is not possible by common-sense physics
- people do not walk through walls -
so then, when i think of this memory,
i regard it as an hallucination, meaning
it is a memory of something that never happened.

for something to be "not real", as in this case,
there must be criteria, learned or innate, for
judging whether something is real or not, so that
*those criteria* are the definition of "reality."

there have to be real things, for the word to mean anything.

But no word has inherent meaning.

Look for an electron and what do you see? Not a point mass, but a
probability function. Is it `really' there? How can you tell? Only -
at best - by extrapolating from indirect measurements.

The same applies to all other parts of so-called reality - it's
impossible to pin any of it down.

A lovely example is colour - what we experience by way of light
perception is different to that of other species. Many species have
only two colour perception. Some have four (UV added to our three).

Receptors working in multiple bands produce what you can only call a
false perception of a `real' difference between red and blue, as if they
`were' two radically different things - but in `reality', it's just a
different frequency of light. There's no step when you go from red to
orange to yellow to green to blue to violet (indigo's a bit of a cheat)
- it's a continuous function, but our dodgy eyes give us steps.

Or so it looks to me in my current state of ignorance... This is all
based on models that I've heard about and bet could be trusted.

But what do I know? I could be a total lunatic just *thinking* that all
these books and telly programmes and so on have been telling me things
about the retina and spectrography and... - while in fact, it's actually
desperate attempts by my therapists to crack through the shell of
insanity to liberate the brain from itself.

But I rather doubt that.

Still, I've never managed to find anyone who could refute solipsism.

Rowland.

<snip>

the only argument i can find against solipsism, is that
it closes the mind against social verification and validation, so that
it is more likely to become deluded.

-- gR

.

Relevant Pages

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