An interesting read there, covering many areas. Eg. re the brain things, neuro-sciences. Re the things like how we interpret colours and music (major/minor keys) it may be related to cultural studies (anthropology).

In pop culture, these issues have been big for a while - eg. the film The Matrix.

In terms of perception, and the effect of drugs on the brain or psychiatric disorders you mention, it only becomes a problem if it is harmful to the individual, or (potentially?) harmful of others. Eg. the film A Beautiful Mind covered this, how this brilliant mathematician was having these delusions and couldn't tell reality from his own delusions.

I think reality, our experiences of it can be different, but nobody would say the paranoid delusions of John Nash in that film were within the boundaries of what we'd call 'normal.' It was abnormal, therefore an illness.

Other related example is that Monet, when he was painting his famous waterlillies series of paintings, his eyesight over those decades was deteriorating. So what you get in these series of paintings is his change of perception, eg. they increasingly become blurry (that's what he saw, & my understanding is that he refused to use eye-glasses).

So it is true that physical & mental perception (incl. sensory) does effect how we percieve, experience, relate to our world.

But I don't know the links between these. You're talking of many areas here, it's between disciplines of sciences and cultural studies.

Sorry to not say any specific opinion but I'm hesitant to do that in the current climate of this forum.

 

There are no facts, only interpretations. - Nietzsche

 

Now, is that statement a fact or an interpretation?

 

I theorize that there are basic, lower level parts of our brain that give consciously unbiased information about the world to the higher levels. This is still subjective information, but processed by more stable and time tested neural circuits that share things in common with mammals lacking the human capacities of reason. But accordingly our conscious mind has the power to interfere with these things and cloud our basic perceptions.

Edit, I don't know to what degree we can reprogram some of these basic functions at an early age against their natural tendencies, or to what degree this generally happens. But if you are worried about going insane on this basic level, your brain is probably much too rigid for that at this stage.

 

...
Edit, I don't know to what degree we can reprogram some of these basic functions at an early age against their natural tendencies, or to what degree this generally happens. ....

Don't understand most of what you said, but what this sentence makes me think of that in Nordic countries, there is more depression, partly to lack of sun in a very long winter (6 months, I think). They try to treat this depression through therapy involving artificial light to simulate the person being in summer (eg. body reacts positively to heat, the muscles relax, etc.).

Don't know how I got here exactly but I'm thinking, major key = light/heat in summer. Minor key = dark/cold in winter. So these affect our emotions, these can be linked. Similar to deep voice vs. high voice. But it's simplistic, I think I'd leave any conclusions to experts - eg. neuro scineces, anthropology, & your post even made me think of things involving study of animal/human evolution (don't want to open this can of worms, just saying).

 

tl;dr?....

 

I know you Sid and know you are not like that, its just that I was surprised that my post seemed kind of byzantine to you or something. But whatever. Lets get back to the thread questions.

 

Overwhelmingly the scientists that I have worked with and whose works I have read believe there is an objective world that is knowable. The general idea is that while we can be fooled by sensory perception we have ways of testing the consistency of our ideas. If we learn to test different aspects of reality and find that all our measurements and theories are consistent with each other, we have higher and higher confidence that what we are measuring is objectively real and not a construct of our mind.

As an example consider our perceiving red light. We see different colors and find out that others do as well. Further when I differentiate two separate colors (say red and green), others do as well, and we both differentiate those two colors consistently. Then we get smart and start using scientific instruments to learn more about colors.

1) We realize that light can be refracted (bent) and that green light bends more than red light. Red and green not only look different to us but behave differently when refracted.

2) Through Maxwell's equations, we learn that all light travels at the same speed and that the wavelength times the frequency = the speed of light. We realize that red and green light have different wavelengths, and therefore, must behave differently when refracted.

3) We discover quantum mechanics and learn that the frequency of light is proportional to the energy of the photon that carries light. Red light has a lower frequency than green, and therefore, has lower energy photons. Our experiments show an exact agreement with the theoretical difference in energy. Red and green light behaves exactly as we expect from our knowledge of optics (wavelengths), quantum mechanics (frequency), and the relationship of wavelengths and frequency as specified by Maxwell's equations.

4) We learn that our eyes sense photons because our eyes have special cells called cones that absorb photons of specific energies and produce electrical signals. The cone cells work exactly as we'd expect for sensing the energy in red and green photons.

5) We learn about evolution and how senses evolved. Organic molecules that are produced from our genes can sense light in wavelengths from roughly infrared through UV. Most animals including us sense optimally in what is called the visible spectrum (red through violet light). Our sun produces electromagnetic radiation in a very wide band of wavelengths much larger than the visible spectrum, but the maximum luminosity (the majority of photons) occurs in the visible spectrum. That just happens to match our optical sense.

All of these completely separate areas of knowledge are remarkably consistent (i.e. they fit together perfectly). Could we have made all of them up and have them so consistent? Scientists think not, and therefore, believe that an objective world exists that is apparently knowable.

 

im starting to think now that there is nothing objectively quantifiable about reality.

Think about this:

a few men live on an island:
the first man claims there are only two on the island.
the second man claims there are three on the island.

Which one is the delusional one? without a consensus or agreement, you cannot say. Both see their reality and believe what they know. This little riddle made me realize that which we call reality, is but a placebo effect on a population of people.

If someone sees the letter 'A' and says that is an 'A' but is then told by 30 people that they are wrong and it is not an 'A' but a 'B', even though this person is entirely correct, will change their reality to believe that 'A' is 'B' because they believe that they are abnormal. as a result of peer pressure, fear of exclusion or ridicule, culture, and the fact that he has no means to prove that 'A' is 'A'.

Can anyone of us technically prove our reality as being the authentic reality? This smells alot like Descartes...

 

If someone sees the letter 'A' and says that is an 'A' but is then told by 30 people that they are wrong and it is not an 'A' but a 'B', even though this person is entirely correct, will change their reality to believe that 'A' is 'B' because they believe that they are abnormal. as a result of peer pressure, fear of exclusion or ridicule, culture, and the fact that he has no means to prove that 'A' is 'A'.

When you say that the weirdo who sees the 'A' as an 'A' is "entirely correct", you admit the existence of an objective reality.

 

First off, we know for a fact that our brains are very malleable and they can be bent to see and perceive things that aren't actually there. There are numerous examples of these cases where people see and perceive things that aren't there, such as schizophrenic people, people on LSD or any other hallucinogenic drug, psychopaths that convince themselves that they haven't done something that they actually have (and truly believe that they haven't), people with split personality disorder. The examples of the brain being bent to perceive things in a false way are incredibly numerous. These are all extreme examples but just that fact that it is possible to mold the brain to see something that's not there begs the question; is it possible that all of our brains have been bent and molded to perceive things not how they actually are, just in a more subtle and not so sudden way than those extreme examples I have pointed out?

These are good examples, but you use them with the basic assumption that we can perceive a reality external to our brains, otherwise we would not be able to assess schizophrenic hallucinations as unreal. I think it's right that we can come to know an external reality by which our subjective experiences can be measured, but there are limitations.

Somewhere in our early stages of cranial development most of us started associating major keys with happiness and minor keys with sadness. This became stuck in most of our brains at the most impressionable stage in our lives and now it is nearly impossible to shake the perception of a major key being the "happy" sound and the minor key being the "sad" sound. However, if you took a child and somehow made sure that every negative experience they had was accompanied with major key music, and every positive experience was accompanied with minor key music I am sure that their brain would make the opposite connection and the link between major and sad and minor and happy would be just as strong in their own perception as our perception of the opposite. So which one is right? Well neither is. We know from science that major and minor chords are just sound waves vibrating at certain ratios that give the major and minor chords their unique sound. If our brains were to interpret major and minor keys completely objectively, we would merely perceive them as sound waves at various ratios in relation to each other with no connotation to any type of emotion. The happy/major sad/minor interpretation of those keys and the happy/minor sad/major interpretation are two sides of the same coin. Both are false perceptions of the brain through association in either direction. If this is true, then I can't help but wonder what other false perceptions of reality have we learned at a young age but don't know about?

Interactions of brain and environment are extremely complex, and different phenomena should be taken each in their own right, but it's always best to be skeptical of any argument that suggests something is completely environmental (on this issue, Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is a great book). With the example above, we can state with certainty that equal temperament is an arbitrary construct, and that our immersion in it from youth colours our perception of other musical scales, but there are arguments that the major/minor distinction is not completely arbitrary, as certain intervals mimic those of speech sounds in individuals feeling a certain emotion (e.g. a minor third is close to the interval heard in many people speaking with a sad tone of voice). This doesn't mean that the association is entirely innate, but it means there is potential for there to be a complex musical-linguistic interaction going on.

Another example might be a solid and still object, like a wall. We see a wall as a still and solid object. But we know now from science that the atoms that make up a wall are always in motion. The fact that we see a wall as being completely still is another false perception of our brain because (I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong) there are so many atoms that are so densely packed that their movement becomes undetectable. The reason also why we feel the wall as a hard solid object instead of a group of atoms and molecules that you can break through is only because the molecules are so tightly compact compared to our own body's molecules that it feels hard and solid to us. Contrast that with water which does not feel like a hard solid object only because the molecules are less compact and moving quicker than our body's molecules. However, neither of them are a completely solid or still thing.

This is the more general point that I was going to make when I saw your thread - because of the environments in which human brains evolved, we have limited perceptive abilities. We can only understand three spatial dimensions along with time, and within space we can only conceive of things on a scale similar to us (not micro, and not super macro), and we can only conceive of things that occur in time-spans similar to a human life (not micro-seconds and not millions of years). There are other limits too - for example, the visible spectrum of light is only a small slice of the full spectrum; we perceive a narrow band of possible frequencies of sound; and our innate statistical reasoning is also very primitive, leading us to see patterns where they don't exist and thus forming superstitions. All of this makes it very difficult to understand the world as it really is, but then that's what certain kinds of scientific reasoning are for. Double-blind trials allow us to understand phenomena as they occur without the influence of human psychology, and technologies such as microscopes and telescopes allow us to extend our natural senses. Nevertheless, through all this, we can only understand the universe in terms of models and metaphors that fit well with the natural human way of perception - we can never intuitively understand the universe as it really works.

I would be a little more careful in the conclusions I draw from this, however. With your example of the red shirt, I would say that people would perceive the colour of the shirt differently, but we can determine with scientific instruments the actual wavelength of light reflected from the shirt, and that would be an objective fact outside the realm of human perception.

 

This is the more general point that I was going to make when I saw your thread - because of the environments in which human brains evolved, we have limited perceptive abilities. We can only understand three spatial dimensions along with time, and within space we can only conceive of things on a scale similar to us (not micro, and not super macro), and we can only conceive of things that occur in time-spans similar to a human life (not micro-seconds and not millions of years).

Nevertheless, through all this, we can only understand the universe in terms of models and metaphors that fit well with the natural human way of perception - we can never intuitively understand the universe as it really works.

Our sensory perception is limited, but, as you point out, our scientific instrumentation is vastly less so. There is little fundamental difference between visible light entering our eyes then being processed electrochemically inside our brain and cosmic rays entering an underground detector then being processed by electronics then the results entering our brain (say though pictures produced by the electronics) to be processed.

I agree that we can only intuitively understand a subset of reality. But some of us can understand more than 4 dimensions of spacetime. Some of us can understand phenomena on scales vastly different from us (atomic scales or cosmological scales). We can understand these things in some sense much better than we intuitively understand parts of nature. We can build models that make much more accurate and precise predictions, and we can understand the genesis, structure, logic, and agreement with experimental data of these models.

 

@mmsbls and Polednice, hey thanks for all the info! I'm no science buff so all that was very informative. I thought the red shirt thing might have been pushing it a little but I thought I might as well include it. But I was wondering, if it were possible to see the shirt outside of our brains perception would it still look red? Or would it just look like light or something like that? It's hard to think about what perception without a brain might be like...since it's impossible and all haha but just speaking hypothetically.

 

I don't think it's possible to see the shirt outside of our brains' perception - I don't really know what you mean. My point would simply be that we can quantify the wavelength of light coming from the shirt, and know that regardless of our perception. So, in the case of someone who's colour-blind, we can take two colours they can't distinguish between, show them that the wavelengths of light coming from the two coloured objects are in fact different, and they'd go, "Oh ****!", though that wouldn't mean that they could then perceive the difference experientially.

 

Violadude, better than any of us will be able to expound I suggest you read the thoughts of some of history's greatest minds on the issue:

Schopenhauer; The world as will and representation
Kant; Critique of Pure Reason
Aristotle; Metaphysics

Keywords; Metaphysics... perhaps Epistomology

 

...people on LSD...

So can we get "outside of our brains" so to speak so we can see what the world actually is? No, I don't think so.

Looks like you haven't really experimented this for yourself, señor, for you'd know the true answer and that not only is it possible to entirely leave ourselves but to even forget one's self for a significant amount of time. No perception. Only what is and what is not. In the end you always come back. Our selfish, little ego just has to pull us back but oh is it possible.

 

I haven't done heroin, but part of the discussion here reminded me of something I've heard about it: supposedly, when you're high on it, you feel so certain of things. Now whether that's true of heroin or not, it's an interesting possibility. "Certainty" is a feeling. We may sometimes feel it at inappropriate times.

And - if there were a safe drug to give you that feeling, would you take the drug and enjoy feeling certain all the time, even when (as must be true sometimes) you're completely wrong? Or, if there were the opposite drug, that would prevent you from enjoying that feeling, even though you would actually be right more often, would you take that drug?

I think those scenarios are not entirely hypothetical....

 

I haven't done heroin, but part of the discussion here reminded me of something I've heard about it: supposedly, when you're high on it, you feel so certain of things. Now whether that's true of heroin or not, it's an interesting possibility. "Certainty" is a feeling. We may sometimes feel it at inappropriate times.

And - if there were a safe drug to give you that feeling, would you take the drug and enjoy feeling certain all the time, even when (as must be true sometimes) you're completely wrong? Or, if there were the opposite drug, that would prevent you from enjoying that feeling, even though you would actually be right more often, would you take that drug?

I think those scenarios are not entirely hypothetical....

hard to say for me... does it really matter either way? whether your right or wrong is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

 

I think that in order for the argument that instruments observe differently from humans to hold up, it's necessary to postulate that there is something non-mechanical about human consciousness. I am yet to come across a convincing argument for this - we are just very complex machines interacting with an external environment.

 

Hi, my name is Occam. I have a new razor that I would like to try out on this conversation.

Reality results when objects are perceived. Reality resides neither in the objects or in the perceiver but in the act of perception. "The world as it is out there" is just a bunch of unperceived objects with no meaning. Only when you get a perceiver perceiving do you have anything really real.

Different people perceive things differently.

It seems that most of the problems people have in conversations like this is accepting that fundamental fact (or in accepting that as a fundamental fact, I should say). We somehow want reality to be outside of us, immutable, separate, going its own way without us.* A reality of that sort calls for unanimity: all perceivers should be perceiving the same way. I almost always find myself more interested in this desire for unanimity than I am in the debate itself.

Anyway, we are social, so we like to know that what we perceive is shared by others. We want to be sure that that oak tree we're looking at is perceived as an oak tree by everyone else. And, if it is an oak tree and not a Douglas fir (which is actually a type of pine tree!), then everyone will. Everyone who knows those names for trees and such. Not much of a problem.

Trickier when it comes to Japanese noise bands. If we hate Japanese noise bands, then we want to be sure that everyone else hates them also.:lol: There, we're outta luck. Not everyone else does. So strong is the desire for unanimity here, that some people will fall back on the argument that anyone who likes Japanese noise bands is crazy (in the same way that anyone who reacts to an oak tree as if it were a huge monster out to destroy them and must be killed is crazy).

Good luck with that one!

*An interesting counter view to that is the story of Helen Keller, a perceiver with practically no perceiving apparatus. But, as Anne Sullivan was able to exploit, a perceiver is pretty full already, even without some of the apparatus (eyes and ears). It seems from that that if we want to find a real reality, it's more likely to be inside rather than outside!

 

Reality results when objects are perceived. Reality resides neither in the objects or in the perceiver but in the act of perception. "The world as it is out there" is just a bunch of unperceived objects with no meaning. Only when you get a perceiver perceiving do you have anything really real.

You seem to be talking about two separate things - reality and meaning. You state that ' "The world as it is out there" is just a bunch of unperceived objects with no meaning'. That sounds like your are saying reality exists outside us, but perceivers are needed to create meaning. Then you say that perceivers are needed for anything to be real. I don't agree that real things exist only if they have meaning (i.e. are perceived and considered by, I guess, intelligent agents). I'm not sure what you believe.

Different people perceive things differently.

It seems that most of the problems people have in conversations like this is accepting that fundamental fact (or in accepting that as a fundamental fact, I should say).

This is a trivial fact that everyone has known for a long time. Furthermore, everyone knows that the same person perceives the same thing differently. If I look at a spoon and look at the same spoon in a glass of water, the spoon will seem bent in the second case but not in the first. If I look at my wife standing in front of me and then walk behind her and look again, I see perceive things.

The interesting thing is that we can understand in many cases what others perceive. When my friend looks at my wife from behind, I can understand what he sees even if I only perceive her front. The trick is understanding and agreeing what everyone perceives. Brains are the most complex objects we know of in the universe. It's not surprising that we don't understand them yet. Someday, I think we will understand them well enough to understand what everyone perceives and to all agree on those perceptions.

We somehow want reality to be outside of us, immutable, separate, going its own way without us.* A reality of that sort calls for unanimity: all perceivers should be perceiving the same way.

No, all perceivers should understand the same way. That would be the goal of understanding reality. I'm not sure we want reality to be outside us. It's just that as we study it harder and harder, it becomes more and more difficult to believe that there is not a reality outside us. As I argued in an earlier post, reality appears remarkably consistent the more we learn about it. We can look at reality in many different ways (as with visible light in my earlier example), and all ways show a powerful consistency. I'm not smart enough to make that up so I believe that I am seeing an objective reality rather than creating a subjective reality.

 

Oh dear it looks like you just cut yourself with that razor!

 

I think it's a non-sequitur to say that perceptive differences mean that reality exists in the interaction of objects and perception (I would be intrigued to hear exactly what degree of consciousness is required for a thing to be a perceiver as well - humans? Dogs? Single-celled organisms? Mechanical instruments?). Instead, I think it makes much more sense to say that there is an external physical reality independent of human consciousness which we happen to be unable to perceive in its totality.

 

I have a hard time taking this kind of discussion seriously. My sentences begin something like, "But if the world doesn't actually exist, then..." and before I can finish, the pointlessness of the discussion smacks me in the forehead and I realize I need to listen to more music.

 

hahahaha! I know how you feel.

 

Perception and information given are powerful sets. I have presented this thought experiemnt before: blindfold a person and subject them to some extreme noise-music that the majority of "normal" people would not recognise as music, and do not yet reveal any information about what (s)he is listening to. After the listening session, if this randomly selected person is then told that (s)he was listening to music, (s)he would most probably have not realised it was music during the listening experience. Without prior information, her perception of the piece during the listening experience was based on her own perception of sound while blindfolded, which statistically in all likelihood would have thought she was listening to pure noise.

Edit: now I wonder if the most ardent supporters of noise-music could even tell the difference between pure noise and noise-music under such an experiment if they were blindfolded? Or maybe they don't at all care - whatever noise is enjoyable. I am very curious with this. Can anyone answer?

 

Perception of reality = noise music debate?!

 

Why not? Some person perceives road traffic as music, while I do not. Perfect example for discussion in music forum.

 

Subjective!

 

mmsbls knows what's up.