X-Message-Number: 16960
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 08:51:34 -0700
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: Our Knowledge of the World

Dave Pizer writes

> Actually, this summer I am taking several biological psychology courses to 
brush up on how the mind works (neurons, lobes, nets, all that good stuff) 
in preparation for philosophy of mind next fall. These classes no longer 
argue much about if the mind is separate from the brain in the way that 
traditional dualists thought the mind was the soul and immortal, etc. But 
now they argue that because our perception is just based on electrical 
signals processed in the brain, that what we mistake for the richness of 
nature is just binary signals in certain areas of the brain, and that we 
can *never* really know the world as it actually is.
<

I always have a bone to pick with that view.  We *can* know the relationship
between two physical objects, even if they are millions of miles away.  In
fact, we can know vast, vast numbers of things about distant objects and
events.  We can, and do, also know about the richness of nature.

I submit that anyone who seriously and literally says "we can know the
world as it *actually* is", and who means by that that the visual or
other sensual appearance of the world can be known "directly" without
being filtered by the sensory apparatus, must be a small child.  Who
does not realize that information from "out there" gets coded up and
sent to the brain?  Since everyone already knows that, sentences such
as "what we mistake for the richness of nature is really [something
else]" are very liable to misinterpretation, and only gives moral
support for the idiots who claim that nothing exists but our perceptions,
and other such solipcistic crap.


Sorry, perhaps, to have overreacted, or to persist in waging old
wars perhaps already won.

Lee

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