Could somebody kindly tell me/explain to me what "RITSIAR" means? I
cannot find any explanation of this in the threads which mention it.
Sorry to be dumb,
Kim
On 27/07/2009, at 12:52 AM, David Nyman wrote:
>
> Thanks to everyone who responded to my initial sally on dreams and
> machines. Naturally I have arrogated the right to plagiarise your
> helpful comments in what follows, which is an aphoristic synthesis of
> my understanding of the main points that have emerged thus far. I
> hope this will be helpful for future discussion.
>
> THE APHORISMS
>
> We do not see the mind, we see *through* the mind.
>
> What we see through the mind - its contents - is mind-stuff: dreams.
>
> Hence dream content - i.e. whatever is capable of being present to us
> - can't be our ontology - this would be circular (the eye can't see
> itself).
>
> So the brain (i.e. what the eye can see) can't be the mind; but the
> intuition remains that mind and brain might be correlated by some
> inclusive conception that would constitute our ontology: Kant's great
> insight stands.
>
> It is similarly obvious that 'identity' theories and the like are
> non-sense: it would indeed be hard to think of two descriptions less
> 'identical' than brain-descriptions and mind-descriptions: hence
> again, any such identification could only be via some singular
> correlative synthesis.
>
> Hence any claim that the mind is literally identical with, or
> 'inside', the brain can be shown to be false by the simple - if messy
> - expedient of a scalpel; or else can be unmasked as implicitly
> dualistic: i.e. the claim is really that 'inside' and 'outside' are
> not merely different descriptions, but different ontologies.
>
> By extension of our individual introspecting, a plurality of minds,
> and the 'external world' that includes brains, can be conceived as
> correlated in some way - to be elucidated - in a universal synthesis
> or context: that context being our mutual ontology.
>
> Such a universal context, or in common terms 'what exists', cannot be
> fully known (i.e. can't be exhausted by description) although - or
> rather because - it constitutes what we are, and by extension what
> *everything* is.
>
> Nonetheless we may seek a logic of dreaming so far as it goes, and
> this will indeed be as far as anything goes in the way of knowledge
> claims.
>
> Mathematics may be deployed as a dream-logic: but mathematical
> physics, restricted to 'physical heuristics', prototypically gets
> stuck at the level of describing the content and behaviour of dreams,
> not their genesis.
>
> To go further and deeper we need an explicit mathematical
> specification of dreamers and their dreams, and of generative
> mechanisms by which dreamers and their dream contents can be
> constructed.
>
> Such a schema will by its nature form an analysis of how we come to
> believe that we and our world are real, and in what terms: i.e. how we
> come to know a world in a present and personal manner.
>
> Consequently such a schema must subsume within its universe of
> discourse: being, knowing, perceiving, acting and intending - as the
> foundations of what it means to be real: i.e. it must be capable of
> invoking the Cheshire Cat *to the life*, not merely leave its grin
> hanging in the void.
>
> Moving beyond bare analysis and description, any move to universalise
> and 'realise' the axioms of such a schema is to make a claim on
> ontological finality. It has not been completely clear (to me)
> whether COMP necessarily makes such a stipulation on realisation, in
> the sense of a claim that its axioms *literally are* what is present
> and personal (i.e. RITSIAR).
>
> However I'm coming to suspect that it does not in fact make such a
> claim, although it allows any one of us to take this as a personal
> leap of faith, specifically through the acid test of saying yes to the
> doctor.
>
> COMP may turn out to be false in its specific predictions - i.e.
> empirical tests
> could rule out the possibility of our being finite machines; or
> perhaps we can never be sure one way or the other.
>
> Nonetheless, the inescapable implication is that any alternative
> schema must from the outset explicitly and fearlessly address the same
> problem space or else run foul of the same intractable 0-1-3 person
> ontological and epistemological issues.
>
> This has profound implications for virtually all current cosmological
> TOEs: i.e. a view from nowhere turns out to be nobody's view. As has
> been observed in other writings, our understanding remains profoundly
> obscured and distorted unless we restore the personal to the view from
> nowhere. Only then can we conceive why indeed there is somewhere
> rather than nowhere.
>
> >
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Received on Mon Jul 27 2009 - 11:25:16 PDT