Reality vs. Perception of Reality

From: <chales1.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 11:02:25 +1000

Hi again,

I finally found the switch to prepend > onto my email!
To try and passivate Brent's angst a little........

The model that I need to unfurl is huge. It's the biggest structure I have ever devised. It has taken me years to create and test against all manner of brain data (pathological and normal) and the real guts of the mathematical modelling to characterise things is only just starting. Also there are a couple of layers (3/4 of 10ish) that have IP issues to protect.

However...All along, whilst I was doing my development I was dogged by the WHY ME? doubt. Why do I see this and nobody else seems to? What is wrong with me? It was only after I began my PhD and began to talk to 'wet neuroscience' that I started to understand the cultural issue and look toward scientific method as the culprit.

You can't patent scientific method! So that's where I am determined to go public and flush the ancient ghost from our past. I have said enough on the 'underlying nature' to get anyone thinking long enough and hard enough to go where I have been. It's structured noise. and ask yoursel: Ask yourself "what is it like to be a Feynman diagram?" Figure it out yourselves... it'll come out in the literature appropriately in due course. Keep an eye on Journal of Consciousness Studies and Australasian Journal of Philosophy for the beginning of issues in this thread. It'll be months.

I don't know if I'm right. I would love it to be comprehensively and scientifically refuted. My goals would be as well serviced.

Back onto the cultural matter.....

I am going to stick my finger again into the raw wound of pathological science using some further snippets from my papers. The pathologies are the phsychological conditions of denial and delusion. And they only apply to this one tiny area of scientific method applied to phenomenality. The condition does not matter in any other area of science! Indeed that is one of its defining characteristics: a necessary symptom of the problem in order that the problem persist.

Exposing the pathology:

Sometime in the 1700s...1800s ish....
1) Open up a brain.
2) Look for phenomenality.
3) Fail to find it, find only cellular correlates (or nothing, if you are Descartes!).
4) CONCLUSION: Phenomenality doesn't exist. I can't do science.
5) Train everyone for a century that any attempt to do science on phenomenality is a career ending action.
6) Continue to do extraordinarily successful ontological science. Win after win after win for centuries. HUBRIS builds in the method.
7) At some point in this era the amount of time taken to absorb and develop even tiny bits of subdisciplines of science becomes longer then a career and then a lifetime.
8) To deal with this problem...I need more time! What can I get rid of that won't damage my science?....I Know! PHLOSOPHY! Scintists and philsophers were once almost invariably the same person. Sometime in the early 20th century this effectively died out. I like to think of it's demise as occurring with the death of Ernst Mach.
9) Then continue on doing science...what do you have?

a) You have the prevailing dogma imprisoned within 'scientific method'. Science is assumed to self manage (well it works!, doesnt it?). Method itself goes unchallenged and is now unchallengable because there are no philosophers involved.

b) But NO you say! What about philosophy of science? .... To this I answer.... just get a collection of scientists lectured to by a philsopher of science and watch (as I have). The phislopher is NOT there to sort things out. The phislopher is there to raised questions! Their end result is a good argument: Not management of a discipline. They no longer have the 'scientist' aspect of themselves to demand clarity and explore problem areas with a view to maintaining a hold on science's _authority_. Method and 'authority' become one. Unchallenged.

....So what's the ghostly fossil from the 1800s?....

4) CONCLUSION: Phenomenality doesn't exist. I can't do science.

How do I maintain this fallacy?
a) Ascribe (delude youself) that scientific generalisations a la F = MA are literally implemented by the natural world.
b) Fail to be isolate a theorem of science (a theorem about the worlds characterisation by theorems, which is of exactly the same validity as F = MA, a property of the natural world).
c) The fail to be scientific in relation to science. Science culturally allows itself to be unscientific in the one tiny area. This means it's acting like a new age space cadet.
d) Deny that phenonenality exists.
e) Contue to use phenomenality 24/7 to derive scientific generalisations to the point of handing out nobel prizes.

It's d) and e) that get up my nose. This has got to stop! This whole package is a real mess. We have to wake up and take a good hard look at what we are doing.

Remember: I am not proposing that any existing science be thrown out: it must stay...it is a crucial part of the whole picture of the natural world. But only 50%! The other half is what we have to see. They key to the whole thing is to be as naturally scientific about phenomenality as we are about F = MA. Imagine a future where we we all wondering 'geeze, what was all the fuss about'... that future is at hand.

Gotta run... to be continued.....

Meanwhile: Consider a new epistemology. A 2 sided model. One side is all the stuff we already have. A collection of theorems tn = {...}. That is, in effect our model of the appearance of the natural world. Here we have the A-POSTERIORI, SYNTHETIC, INDUCTIVE world of appearances.

Then consider thet there is a whole other set of theorems t'n = {....} that is in effect our model of the underlying natural world. Thise are the ones that are A-PRIORI, DEDUCTIVE and ANALYTIC that we never directly perceive, but generate the appearances of the other set!.

Phenomenal consciousness is the key and ONLY evidence for both. Both sides are only a representation of the natural world... all we can do when we are inside it, made of it. A cognitive approach to science... When you do this you start to get answers.

cheers

colin hales
Received on Wed Aug 03 2005 - 21:06:33 PDT