On Tuesday, March 11, 2014 12:10:31 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote: > > > Hi Bruno, > > Sure, "consciousness here-and-now" is undoubtable. But the p refers to the > contents of consciousness, which is not undoubtable in many cases. "I am in > pain" cannot be doubted when one is feeling it, but other felt sensations > can be doubted, e.g. see > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2956899/ > > Such illusions of experience can even be helpful, as in Ramachandran's > Mirror Box therapy for phantom limb sufferers, see > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3468806/ > > Illusions of experience are evidence that what we experience is of our > brains' constructions, >
Illusions are only evidence that experience has multiple layers of reference and expectation, and the brain conditions affect those layers. That doesn't mean that the brain is constructing anything though (except for neurotransmitters). If what we experience is a construction, then that means the entire universe could be a construction, including the expectation of a universe which is either 'illusory' or not. > like a waking dream, guided in healthy brains by the patterns of > information streaming from our sense organs. Brains that are defective in > this manner result in schizophrenia and presumably other dissociative > pathologies. > > For me it all casts doubt on whether Bp & p is an accurate formalization > for experience, but I might be missing something. Can you make sense of Bp > & p for a schizophrenic who hears voices? How about your own salvia > experiences? > As far as I can tell, Bp & p is a fragile notion that has been generalized from from formalities within communication and has very little to do with experience. It is a radically normative and narrow consideration of only one aspect of consciousness. Craig > T > > On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be<javascript:> > > wrote: > >> >> On 10 Mar 2014, at 16:28, Terren Suydam wrote: >> >> >> Question for you Bruno:. >> >> You say (with help from Theaetetus) that 1p experience is given by Bp & >> p. Yet, our experience is often deluded, as in optical illusions, or in >> various kinds of emotional & psychological denial. Can we ever really say >> that our knowledge, even 1p experience, refers to anything True? >> >> >> In public? No. >> >> In private? Yes. >> >> I would say. >> >> Then in the frame of theories about such 1p things, like consciousness, >> we can decide to agree on some "property" of the notion. Then, >> "consciousness-here-and-now" might be a candidate for a possible true >> reference, if you agree consciousness-here-and-now is undoubtable or >> incorrigible. >> >> Then we can approximate many sort of truth, by the very plausible, the >> probable, the relatively expectable, etc. >> >> If someone complains, is the pain real or fake? Eventually it is a >> question for a judge. >> >> The truth is what no machine can really grasp the whole truth, but all >> machines can know very well some aspect of it, I think, but very few in >> justifiable modes. >> >> >> Bruno >> >> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
