Re: Reality vs. Perception of Reality

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 19:08:55 +0200

Le 29-juil.-05, à 18:40, daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden a écrit :

> May I offer the following quote as a potential catalyst for Bruno and
> Colin:
>
> If thought is laryngeal motion, how should any one think more truly
> than the wind blows? All movements of bodies are equally necessary,
> but they cannot be discriminated as true and false. It seems as
> nonsensical to call a movement true as a flavour purple or a sound
> avaricious. But what is obvious when thought is said to be a certain
> bodily movement seems equally to follow from its being the effect of
> one. Thought called knowledge and thought called error are both
> necessary results of states of brain. These states are necessary
> results of other bodily states. All the bodily states are equally
> real, and so are the different thoughts; but by what right can I hold
> that my thought is knowledge of what is real in bodies? For to hold so
> is but another thought, an effect of real bodily movements like the
> rest. . . These arguments, however, of mine, if the principles of
> scientific [naturalism]... are to stand unchallenged, are themselves
> no more than happenings in a mind, results of bodily movements; that
> you or I think them sound, or think them unsound, is but another such
> happening; that we think them no more than another such happening is
> itself but yet another such. And it may be said of any ground on which
> we may attempt to stand as true, Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis
> aevum ["It flows and will flow swirling on forever" (Horace, Epistles,
> I, 2, 43)]. (H. W. B. Joseph, Some Problems in Ethics (Oxford
> University Press, 1931), pp. 14-15)


I am not sure I follow that (very well written) statements. It is a
little bit wrong like the argument of those who use determinism against
free will. By looking at yourself at some low level it *looks* there is
no sense, but this just shows that from your personal point of view you
are not "living" at that level. You take the risk at dismissing all
theories by pointing that they are all produce by .... and then you are
using a theory for describing some level.
The fact that Schroedinger was obeying to its one wave equation cannot
be used to invalidate it!

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Sat Jul 30 2005 - 13:10:32 PDT

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