Perhaps the experiencer is like a sense organ. What is seen refers back perspectivally to the eye, or more precisely to the retina, but the seeing does not 'happen' there (does it even happen?). The retina is a relay station where one carrier of information hands over to another one. What exactly does it hand on? Quite a bit of selective filtering goes on there, but what goes in is just as far from the seeing as what comes out. And presumably it is this way all through the physical system in which sight, the event (of) seeing, is thought to take place; the seeing is nowhere, it doesn't belong to a compatible level of reality, so it could just as well be thought of as 'happening' everywhere. Some sort of filtering and transfer takes place at every step, there is nothing special about the retina at all. But you can have a theory of vision, a theoria of theoria, based on the order of reality that belongs to vision, of things in space, of geometries and discrete intensities, and even if you can accomplish a lot on the basis of this theory (optometry, opthalmology), it tells you exactly nothing about what seeing is. In the same way any explanation of experiencing based on the kind of reality that conforms to that of the experiencer, even its bindings and qualia and the like - artifacts of such a theory - tells you nothing whatsoever about experiencing. It only stubbornly biases you towards asking the wrong question, towards expending your efforts on a hopelessly circular theorising. Is this, as they say, a bug or a feature? Or both at once?
Saturday, 22 December 2018
Perhaps the experiencer is like a sense organ. What is seen refers back perspectivally to the eye, or more precisely to the retina, but the seeing does not 'happen' there (does it even happen?). The retina is a relay station where one carrier of information hands over to another one. What exactly does it hand on? Quite a bit of selective filtering goes on there, but what goes in is just as far from the seeing as what comes out. And presumably it is this way all through the physical system in which sight, the event (of) seeing, is thought to take place; the seeing is nowhere, it doesn't belong to a compatible level of reality, so it could just as well be thought of as 'happening' everywhere. Some sort of filtering and transfer takes place at every step, there is nothing special about the retina at all. But you can have a theory of vision, a theoria of theoria, based on the order of reality that belongs to vision, of things in space, of geometries and discrete intensities, and even if you can accomplish a lot on the basis of this theory (optometry, opthalmology), it tells you exactly nothing about what seeing is. In the same way any explanation of experiencing based on the kind of reality that conforms to that of the experiencer, even its bindings and qualia and the like - artifacts of such a theory - tells you nothing whatsoever about experiencing. It only stubbornly biases you towards asking the wrong question, towards expending your efforts on a hopelessly circular theorising. Is this, as they say, a bug or a feature? Or both at once?
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