Debate 0 Discussion: Appearance vs. Reality: Philosophy Forums

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Debate 0 Discussion: Appearance vs. Reality

Debate 0 Discussion: Appearance vs. Reality

Aniket
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0 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 11/18/02 - 05:49 AM:	#1
Why did the debate fail? Guess, everybody's tired of winning or losing. We need a break...... Or there were not enough cool prizes I suppose.

TecnoTut
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0 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 11/18/02 - 11:46 AM:	#2
Paul: Appearances are descriptive of the world, but keeping the multiplicity of possible descriptions in mind we should not make the mistake of saying an appearance can itself ever be a reality. An appearance can contain a relative description of reality without being a reality itself. Not necessarily. All of your arguments that "appearances are not reality" are based on the assumption that all of our perceptions are perceptions of some object, and then arguing that our perception of the object never is how the object really is completely. Well, first, not all of our perceptions are perceptions of some object--this is what i tried saying in the 'what is mind?' thread. For example, when I perceive pain, I am not perceiving any object at all. All I am perceiving is pain. Second, pain necessarily is pain--pain cannot be something else like, e.g. pleasure. These two arguments are what Kripke's work amounted to--that there is no appearance/reality distinction with respect to the mental property 'pain'. Pain necessarily is pain and it is not a perception of some object.
I won't utter falsehoods, but I've no objection to uttering meaningless statements - A.J. Ayer, when saying grace. The apparent negation of a pseudo [meaningless] statement must also be a pseudo-statement - from Carnap's Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology Those who deny [Aristotle's] first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped. - Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

steve
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0 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 11/21/02 - 04:37 PM:	#3
Appearances as descriptions. i get the feeling that questions like this set up a biased agenda. Its not always a pernicious agenda, but it is often loaded with persuasion. Imagine a being that had more than rationality at its service for responding to the world and was not only free to choose reason but was aware of the implications of doing so. As when we choose to listen to a bird or look at it or even eat it. So with thinking about it. Each response has its own implications for the person (and the bird!). The statement "Appearances as descriptions" has different consequences depending upon how we respond. It sets up an agenda. If one simply looks at something then one sees it. However if one employs thought with the premise of this debate then a kind of interesting dillema is set up which could result in all kinds of arguements. eg i don't see the bird i see the light. No. I don't see the light i see whatever the back of the eye sends out into the brain. But maybe that gets translated into something else. But whatever it is i see it must be in my head. Therefore everything i percieve is in the mind, including thought. Geez....... my head is a big place! another angle might be - i don't see all of the bird i just see a part of it and i need light and stuff to do that. When these things are tuned properly i do actually see reality as expressed by that medium. like Amor and love in different languages. So appearances are sometimes different ways of describing reality and reality includes descriptions. There are others of course, but the point i am making is the different angles thought can take is like the different angles that hearing and seeing can take. So why should thought be able to grasp the whole? This is even more complex when we mix and combine the senses. I would include thought and emotion as senses. They help us survive by relating to the world. Language too, which is of course intrinsic and biased to this particular medium of the forum. Rationality is closely related to language. It cuts and divides and then joins with a link. It gets in a muddle with continuity and tends to atomize everything. It prefers or to and. This is very useful and beautiful of course but it is biased. We need our memories and other senses to 'fill out' what we rationally percieve. I can feel this characteristic at the heart of the statement. "Appearances as descriptions". It has the vibe of attempting supremacy as if the other senses are naive. This vibe is not rational, but i believe it is true. I also get the feeling that rationalists often feel excluded by popular 'emotional sensual' culture and there is an aloof response. Rationality reduces everything to a text. A description. No now. I believe these decriptions, when properly tuned, reveal aspects of reality. But to reduce all appearances to descriptions is just the bias of logical thinking. You can see it very clearly in this particular case from the very way that the premise is worded, which is not surprising since it is addressing existence itself. For example - the sound in your head as you read this is not the point. You should ignore it because if you start to listen to the sound characteristics of the reading voice in your head you will miss the 'sense' of the arguement. The Buddhists of course advocate this to illustrate the point i am making. Their ideas of course are not against concentrated thought and the realities that can be grasped that way. In fact they show another way of realising "All is mind" without any thought at all! A different perspective on the same appearance. This mythical being that i imagine would be aware of this all the time as it moved from biasing on one sense to another. A description is an abstraction. To abstract relationships is to think. So of course thought has a strong tendency to set appearances up as different from reality. It mirrors what thought itself does. ie seperate and link. It is its own contribution and bias showing through. Applied twice and thought abstracts from appearances and stands above them. I don't go that far. The sound of the little voice in my head is equal in kind to the abstractions that i can derive, the emotions i feel and so on. And abstractions are appearances just like all the other sensual responses. In mixed up convoluted equality speak............. they can be real descriptions. Within the valid bias of the premise, i don't know how else to say it. I am confined to written language and its perspective by discussing it and it is this language, this sense, that enables us to lose ourselves in questions and thought, just like vision enables us to lose ourselves in beauty. In the 'internal' world, in that particular abstract scheme of things, we have say the sound of music to describe emotions. (Or is it evoke?) We agree that emotions don't fly around outside our bodies, so logically there must be an internal world for them. The same for thought. We can include sound if we want and all appearances. But I propose that the division of the world into the internal/external makes only as much sense as does a lack of the distinction. We could adopt the perspective that everything is 'stuff'. The same for appearances and reality and descriptions. And besides, where are we restricted in setting up the dividing line? Inside the body, inside the head, inside the information matrix,... Why shouldn't the sense of language and logic have more than one valid perspective on the world just like the other senses? Like when we see a pheasant and remember chasing one as a kid. So looked at from a different angle of the internal we could rephrase the original premise into a new perspective by considering a new dichotomy to stir things up :- Appearances as evocations. Each question stirs up new perspectives. None are complete. Not all reveal reality. But its the richness of our languages that enables the richness in our thoughts and this is why philosophy never abandoned common languages for the more formal ones. It draws on both to create complex viewpoints from where it places its dividing lines. Eddington adds the word 'meant' into the equation. Why not? As philosophers we are free to choose our words. His views are revealing as is Kant. But not totally convincing if you ask me, because i doubt that one exists.

Paul
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1 of 2 people found this post helpful Posted 11/22/02 - 12:41 AM:	#4
Originally posted by TecnoTut All of your arguments that "appearances are not reality" are based on the assumption that all of our perceptions are perceptions of some object, and then arguing that our perception of the object never is how the object really is completely. Well, first, not all of our perceptions are perceptions of some object--this is what i tried saying in the 'what is mind?' thread. For example, when I perceive pain, I am not perceiving any object at all. Clearly you're talking about an entirely different sort of perception than I am -- and it would be best to use a different word. I was speaking exclusively of sense perception, that which is related to the sensory organs. Maybe I should have put "sense" in front of every instance where I said "perception", but it hadn't occurred to me that some people would term thoughts and emotions "perception"... myself, I've never used the term perception to cover that because I find it too dissimilar. There is no sensory organ that intuits the brain into the mind, that is not a perception in the same sense. What is it you believe does the perception of qualia? You do have experience of thoughts relating to each other, so you can say that thoughts/emotions are connected, but the connection seems much more direct than any sort of perception. A thought does not sit around and look at another thought... rather, the nature of thought itself is an intricate network of connections and each thing we parse up as "one thought" is actually a connected set. This is not perception, it's interaction. You have no experience of anything "above" your own thoughts intuiting your thoughts (that would be a Vedic move, but after considering it for a while it seems fairly fruitless to me to invent a consciousness which can never possibly be known), so there's nothing sensing pain... pain is simply part of the experience of self. Pain is an aspect of experience, not a perception. All sensory perception is causally connected to objects. Obviously, the only contact we can have with the external world is through our sensory organs... so in talking about external reality I speak of perception as sensory perception, the only type of perception where there's a clear causal connection to the external world. (Emotions have a much less direct connection.) I don't see how Kripke makes any difference here, except in illustrating that pain (the qualia of pain, that is) isn't a sense perception. Pain is an actuality, not a description... the reason there's no appearance/reality distinction for pain is that pain is an actuality of the mind. (Though of course a pain can also be interpreted as a description of an experience -- a type of pain represents contact with some object, if it's physical pain -- but this is interpreted pain rather than qualia pain.) I would not call pain a perception -- who do you think is perceiving the pain, some sort of odd disembodied ghost? No, pain is an experience of an actuality, self-experienced within the conscious network. Pain is not a description (rather an actuality of the self/mind) because it's not a perception, at least not in the sense I use the word perception.

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1 of 2 people found this post helpful Posted 11/22/02 - 01:55 AM:	#5
Originally posted by steve Appearances as descriptions. i get the feeling that questions like this set up a biased agenda. Well, I know I write with a bias. In this case what I've tried to do is reformulate a basically idealist perspective, using language that makes it sound more like something a realist might swallow... it's an attempt to narrow the gap between the realist and idealist. Kant attempted this with his empirical realism, but it didn't work very well since he could never speak of exactly how things in themselves related to the empirical world... not that I can either, but I think using the analogy of descriptions is a way to show a much close connection, or at least to phrase the connection in terms of something people are more familiar with (that being language). Eddington also spends a lot of time emphasizing the disconnect, and I think not enough emphasizing the connection... I think I can show a closer connection between the appearances and the reality. Instead of saying "The world ain't out there, you're imagining it", I try to make it sound better by saying "Your world is a relative description of the actual world." People can accept that the sounds they utter are not the same sort of thing as the meaning behind them, and yet also accept that the relational patterns make a clear connection between words and meaning, so I've tried to turn that analogy into my central point. Therefore everything i percieve is in the mind, including thought. Geez....... my head is a big place! Actually, your mind has no spatial dimensions at all (do you introspect and find one thought to be an inch away from another?), although it can be described in those terms. Space is relative, and the relational scheme of the mind is very complex... but compared to the totality of all the relational schemes in the universe, it's incredibly small. Your mind is not at all complex compared to the universe, since it's only an oddly behaving slice of the universe which has peculiar interaction patterns with tiny areas around it. another angle might be - i don't see all of the bird i just see a part of it and i need light and stuff to do that. When these things are tuned properly i do actually see reality as expressed by that medium. like Amor and love in different languages. So appearances are sometimes different ways of describing reality and reality includes descriptions. Reality includes descriptions? Whether I can agree with that depends on how you mean it, and I'm not sure exactly how you mean it... your example makes me think I disagree. When I introspect on the emotion of love, I have never to this date been able to find all the foreign translations of the word inside of it. I have yet to find any reality which contained its descriptions. It would be quite interesting if I could find the infinite relative descriptions within the actuality of the thing... I'd learn all languages at once, and be able to image what a bat senses when it encounters an object. Similarly, my mind does not contain the neuron states which a doctor might find in examining my brain... my mind only has, so to speak, the disposition to be able to provide part of the relation which when related through machines and into the mind of a doctor finally becomes described as neuron states. Also, you seem to be using them interchangeably but I think it's a good idea to distinguish reality from actuality. An argument can be made for descriptions being real (even in an external sense), but since descriptions are representational they're not actual (that is, not in a meaningful sense -- only the sound waves or whatever are actual, not the description, the description requires the sound waves being related through into a mind). I would include thought and emotion as senses. They help us survive by relating to the world. Language too, which is of course intrinsic and biased to this particular medium of the forum. Thought and emotion are actualities. What, may I ask, is the external thing you think is sensing them? Thought is not a medium between two things the way the eyes are a sort of medium between the world and the mind... thought is that which interacts with itself, looping back into itself in a complex network we call consciousness. If thought were a sense organ, simply transmitting to something else without self-interaction, then it could not be conscious. There's a very clear distinction here -- you cannot see without thought, but you can think without seeing. Thought is not a sensory organ, it's a very different sort of thing. Thought is the actuality within which the results of the sensory organ perceptions are contained -- as well as lots of other stuff such as various emotions that have no direct external cause. Thought has a wide variety of functions... I've focused on its ability to contain descriptions from the senses simply because this is the mind's faculty of getting at the external world. Rationality reduces everything to a text. A description. No now. I believe these decriptions, when properly tuned, reveal aspects of reality. But to reduce all appearances to descriptions is just the bias of logical thinking. You can see it very clearly in this particular case from the very way that the premise is worded, which is not surprising since it is addressing existence itself. Appearances are also actualities, but only if you like to be a solipsist. You're free to have everything be considered as absolutely totally real without any mistakes at all, but if you think that way you'll never get outside yourself. Appearances need to be thought of in some sort of way that reduces the amount of weight given to them, in order to make sense of any sort of connection between the self and a real external world. The Buddhists of course advocate this to illustrate the point i am making. Their ideas of course are not against concentrated thought and the realities that can be grasped that way. In fact they show another way of realising "All is mind" without any thought at all! A different perspective on the same appearance. Some Buddhist perspectives I mostly agree with. I think, however, that they're too eager to deny the self. Perhaps it's only an emotive point, but I like to think of the mind as actually existing as a self. A description is an abstraction. To abstract relationships is to think. So of course thought has a strong tendency to set appearances up as different from reality. Exactly, thought In mixed up convoluted equality speak............. they can be real descriptions. Descriptions can be considered real, yes. This is why I try in most of my posts (lately at least) to distinguish between real and actual. Something can be real, I'd have to say, if it's what it's like for that thing to be known to you. After all, it would be senseless to ask for anything more real... it'd be senseless to call the thing when unknowable more real than the thing as known. So reality is simply relational. Unlike the Buddhists though, I think of there being actualities there being related... reality may be no more than relations, but actuality is the things which are being related -- the self being the actuality into which the world we call real is related. But I propose that the division of the world into the internal/external makes only as much sense as does a lack of the distinction. We could adopt the perspective that everything is 'stuff'. The same for appearances and reality and descriptions. And besides, where are we restricted in setting up the dividing line? Inside the body, inside the head, inside the information matrix,... Why shouldn't the sense of language and logic have more than one valid perspective on the world just like the other senses? Doesn't every reality have an infinity of possible descriptions? For a simple example, try math. Take the number 5. 5 can be described as 2+3, 4+1, 6-1, 7-2, et cetera on into infinity. There are an infinite number of descriptions of 5, depending on what number you want to describe 5 relative to. So looked at from a different angle of the internal we could rephrase the original premise into a new perspective by considering a new dichotomy to stir things up :- Appearances as evocations. Is this appearances within a particular individual, or across all living things? Within an individual, I can see appearances as evocations which make use of the description. The desciption provided by the sensory process is imprecise and has to be fitted into the rest of the mind -- even something as simple as how I feel about what I'm looking at changes the specific nature of the actuality of the experience of the situation. I'm trying to split this off into two processes -- quite artificially I admit, simply because it makes things seem clearer to me -- and say that the sensory data is a relative description of the external world, and that this relative description is in turn an evocation of the actuality of the experience. His views are revealing as is Kant. But not totally convincing if you ask me, because i doubt that one exists. If there were a single way to describe things, we'd have to put all philosophers out on the street, and shut down this forum. In some ways it's unfortunate that even in describing the idea that there are many ways to describe things there are an infinite number of ways to put it and many easy ways to be misunderstood, but on the other hand life wouldn't be much fun if there were just one version of everything to be found and filed away.

steve
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Posted 11/22/02 - 06:24 AM:	#6
Well the first thing i must point out Paul is that i often get misinterpreted as exclusively advocating that which i derive, quote or create. This is understandable because most of the time that is what most people do. My personal stance is a highly relativistic and pluralistic one. Many perspectives are valid from my general point of view so when i posit them i do so in the context that it is just one of many possible valid perspectives. Even ones that i don't agree with. As you said If there were a single way to describe things, we'd have to put all philosophers out on the street, and shut down this forum. In some ways it's unfortunate that even in describing the idea that there are many ways to describe things there are an infinite number of ways to put it and many easy ways to be misunderstood, but on the other hand life wouldn't be much fun if there were just one version of everything to be found and filed away. Yes well said. i agree, but it is both unfortunate and fortunate as you simultaneaously expressed yourself depending of course where you stand at the time. The frustration of contradiction as compared to the celebration of diversity for example. Rationalists often experience the former of course because the law of non contradiction is so endemic within rational discourse and often absent outside it. That is exacerbated because philosphers refuse to abandon the richness of descriptions within common languages which is what distinguishes it from science and maths etc. The general point i am making of course is that from one of my perspectives (ie keeping an eye on rationality itself without abandoning it altogether) rationality can look at say a bird and get different perspectives just like any other sense. The brain tastes different to the feet, the eye is a different colour to beak and so on. So it is for different rational perspectives of the bird. It evolved from the dinosaurs, it is a robin, it weighs about 100 grams and so on. When we consider "Appearances as descriptions" we are looking at the whole world from a rational perspective, or so it would tempt us to do. Which is fine. But lets notice that the phrase itself is incredibly loaded. It sets up a particular agenda. In the string "the language of philosophy" we discussed various things and one of the concepts that seemed to be common to all languages was the self. ie they all have a word for it. Once you have a concept for something then rationality (and other means of percieving) can consider the lack of self. Where we 'draw' this boundary between self and non self, or whether we draw it at all is open to some very interesting perspectives. You speak of actualities and realities and they are part of where you draw that line, and so the concept of qualia are interesting to you. I can see their validity in your scheme of things. But consider the following :- All is the mind. Now you can derive this logically or you can see it. Either way your mind is quite literally huge! But from your present rational point of view compared to the totality of all the relational schemes in the universe, it's incredibly small. Well to me its like the difference between using a microscope and a telescope. Small and huge are relative to how you look at something. As a child one could easily see the stars as very small indeed. The logical objection to this of course is that "Well they can't be bloody both for god's sake!" But thats my point. The instrument of logic has the law of non contradiction as intrinsically built into it as a telescope has a mirror. Thought is not a medium between two things the way the eyes are a sort of medium between the world and the mind... I just disagree here. Thought is most definitlely part of a medium to me. We are doing it on these pages. There's a very clear distinction here -- you cannot see without thought, but you can think without seeing. well you can hear something without seeing it, you can think about it without seeing it, and you can most definitely see it without thinking about it. eg the banning of subliminal frames in tv advertising, quite apart from ordinary daydreaming etc. But generally speaking i don't consider the senses as seperate. They feedback, crossover, fill out, run parallel and so on. Memory for axample is a sense that can merge many other sensual experiences. I know where you are coming from but i agree with Kant and the Buddhists that thought is a sense. As for the latter denying the self, well not all interpretaions of Buddhism are like that. Many great Zen teachers point out that the self exists all right and then suddenly it doesn't. The drawing of the line at zero however is nothing to do with rationality for them. Quite the opposite. They explore the extreme of thought turned off. Doesn't every reality have an infinity of possible descriptions? yes. thats my point. Where descriptions are different perspectives just like seeing for example. Like when we say "I see what you mean". I love rationality. Too much i reckon. Sometimes i lose all other perspectives.

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Posted 02/07/05 - 09:43 AM:	#7
Not much to say at all. Whether or not anyone perceives an object as real, it still exists The substance that makes up the object is still floating in the universe. Objects are reality, but intangible things like thoughts, and the idea of a person are not necessarily reality. The building blocks that make up the person's body and brain are real, but their personality and other traits cannot be described as reality; referring back to an earlier post, the mind often deceives itself and therefore is not always reality.

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