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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2016 - 08:00pm PT
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What it does do is provide sensory content that to the working brain is so close to physical reality that for all practical purposes, the brain can't tell the difference. So in this sense, we can mock up sensory data that is largely if not entirely indistinguishable from "true" reality which is up-loaded from our sense organs.
how can you tell the difference if you can't tell the difference?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2016 - 08:39pm PT
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as for visual metaphor, I read what you write, Paul, but it not only doesn't make sense to me, it seems that a whole article on Wiki describing the phrase "the map is not the territory," which also mentions Magritte, somehow fails to use the word "metaphor" at all...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation
perhaps one cannot succumb to what Wiki editors and contributor write... and perhaps if you're into sound bites:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
On the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy we find this rather interesting section:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/recursive-functions/
2.2 Contractions
When discussing the problem of consciousness, Royce [1900] observed that an individual must have an infinite mental image of its own mind, since the image must contain an image of the image, which must contain an image of the image of the image, and so on.
Abstracting from the problem of consciousness, Royce presented a paradoxical metaphor that caught the fancy of the writer Jorge Luis Borges, who quoted it at least three times in his work with the following words:
Imagine a portion of the territory of England has been perfectly levelled, and a cartographer traces a map of England. The work is perfect. There is no particular of the territory of England, small as it can be, that has not been recorded in the map. Everything has its own correspondence. The map, then, must contain a map of the map, that must contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.
The metaphor has been interpreted as a proof by contradiction that a perfect map is impossible, supporting the well-known aphorism of Korzybski [1941]: “the map is not the territory”.
Actually, from a mathematical point of view a perfect map that contains a copy of itself is not a contradiction, but rather a contraction, in the sense that it defines a function ƒ such that
|ƒ(x)-ƒ(y)| ≤ c |x-y|
for some c such that 0 < c < 1. Banach [1922] has proved that a contraction on a complete metric space has a unique fixed point, and the proof is a typical iteration. Indeed, by induction,
|ƒ⁽ⁿ⁺¹⁾(x)-ƒ⁽ⁿ⁾(x)| ≤ cⁿ |ƒ(x)-x|.
By the triangle inequality,
...
In the case of a perfect map, this means that there must be a point of the territory that coincides with its image on the map. Thus a perfect map is not the territory in general, but it is so in one (and only one) point.
and from this article
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/
Readers often take Heidegger's deliberately provocative claim that “[t]he picture really represents nothing” as a flat-footed assertion that Van Gogh's painting does not represent shoes.[72] But that obscures Heidegger's deeper point and, in fact, would make no more sense than if, beneath “The Treason of Images” (1929)—Magritte's realistic representation of a pipe against a blank background—Magritte had not painted the famous words, “This is not a pipe [Ceci n'est pas une pipe]” but, instead, “This is not a representation of a pipe.” For, Magritte's most obvious point is that a representation of a pipe (be it pictorial or linguistic) is not itself a pipe. The surreal effect of “The Treason of Images” comes from the way it encourages viewers to confront the usually unnoticed distance between representations and the things they represent. “This is not a pipe” calls the very obviousness of representation into question, and so points toward the mysteries concealed beneath the system of representation we usually take for granted.[73]
73. Although Magritte's painting initially appears “as simple as a page borrowed from a botanical manual,” as Foucault suggests (1983, p. 19), the mysteries of the painting are quickly multiplied by the vague pronoun reference in “This is not a pipe”: “This” could refer to the image of the pipe, the words beneath it, or the entire ensemble.
and this
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/twardowski/
If all this is intuitive, why are the object and the content of a presentation conflated? Twardowski maintains that the reason why content and object are often identified comes, among others, from a linguistic ambiguity: both the content and the object are said to be ‘presented’ in a presentation (§4). Twardowski offers an analysis of the ambiguity of the term ‘presented’ by appealing to the linguistic distinction between modifying and attributive (or determining) adjectives, and he illustrates it with an analogy between the act of presenting an object and the act of painting a landscape. When a painter paints a landscape, she also paints a painting: so we can say that the painting and the landscape are both painted. But in this situation ‘painted landscape’ can have two very different meanings. In the first meaning of ‘painted’, a painted landscape is a landscape; in the second meaning of ‘painted’ a painted landscape is not a landscape, but a painting (like in Magritte's La trahison des images (1928–9): it is a painted pipe we are looking at, not a pipe). In the first case, ‘painted’ is used in an attributive sense (the landscape is a portion of nature that happens to be painted by a painter in a painting); in the second case ‘painted’ is used in a modifying sense (that in which, looking at the painting in a museum, someone may say: this is a landscape!). The painted landscape in the modifying sense is a painting, and thus identical with the painting painted in the attributive sense. Analogously, in an act of presentation, the object can be, like the painted landscape, said to be ‘presented’ in two senses. The object presented in the modifying sense is identical with the content presented in the attributive sense: it is dependent on the act of presentation, and it is what we mean by ‘the object immanent in the act’; the object presented in the attributive sense is the object of the presentation, what happens to be presented in a presentation, and what is independent of the act of presentation.
I see a lot of discussion about representation, not so much about "metaphor"
but maybe that's just my poor background as a scientist...
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2016 - 08:43pm PT
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And really, you misrepresent so much of what I've said, I wonder what has actually been read.
an interesting sentiment, one that I also feel, but my response is not to sigh at your inadequacies but to redouble my own, apparently failed attempts to explain my ideas.
You apparently have no doubts regarding the clarity of your posts or the rightness of you positions.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 25, 2016 - 09:14pm PT
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an interesting sentiment, one that I also feel, but my response is not to sigh at your inadequacies but to redouble my own, apparently failed attempts to explain my ideas.
You apparently have no doubts regarding the clarity of your posts or the rightness of you positions.
Well, no doubt you're a better man than I am and that's no small achievment, however you are still in error when it comes to the notion of metaphor in art and map making.
Wikipedia or not, a map cannot be the actual thing it represents because in that case it wouldn't be a map and would be instead the thing it represents. Suggestion: consider Jasper Johns' Target with Four Faces or any of his map paintings, contemplate it/them and see what you come up with. Might be interesting and surprising. Leo Steinberg's "Other Criteria" is a good introduction.
You seem to be tap dancing around an idea so fundamental and simple and really so without controversy your complaint seems nonsensical.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jul 25, 2016 - 09:21pm PT
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the simulator does not provide an experience. What it does do is provide sensory content that to the working brain is so close to physical reality that for all practical purposes, the brain can't tell the difference (JL)
This is erroneous. Of course the simulator provides an experience: the experience of operating the simulator. It doesn't provide the same experience as flying an actual plane.
Sometimes the sloppy nature of the posts on this thread undermine any sort of rational argument being proposed.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 25, 2016 - 09:26pm PT
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Of course the simulator provides an experience: the experience of operating the simulator.
Yes .....
It's simple until one lets their mind take control.
One must always control the mind which likes to runaway on its own ...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 25, 2016 - 09:58pm PT
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Not sloppy, John. You're not getting the point.
External reality cannot "provide" experience. Otherwise, any machine that can register external stimuli - like Ed's space probe - would have a internal, subject life, and of course they don't.
Experience, which at bottom is the felt sense of being and presence, can still be had wearing a blindfold and earplugs and laying perfectly still. No externals needed.
Awareness and content are not the same. The stimulus in a flight trainer is content, which can be digitally duplicated AS content. No difference then the article simulated, at least not to the brain. But what the brain serves up is itself a simulation. The challenge of simulating awareness is that it is not an external object, among other "things."
Most of this stuff dovetails into Kantian material at this level.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jul 26, 2016 - 05:29am PT
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No externals needed.
True. Your neurons will keep firing.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 26, 2016 - 07:40am PT
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External reality cannot "provide" experience
Biggest piece of baloney in a long time. We turn to external experience all of the time, and it is every bit as valid as personal experience. Ever drop acid? Smoke weed? That is introducing a substance to alter your personal experience by turning to external means.
I think that I get his point, that the Nose is a unique experience every time you do it, but you can't have a Nose experience without externally taking your senses up that beautiful route.
So maybe Largo didn't do the first one day ascent of the Nose, or the FA of Astroman. Those are external realities, for instance, as are most of his stories. I love Largo's stories. They are almost all about the stonemasters, but I laugh with him all of the time.
External experience is every bit as valid as internal experience, like falling in love. JL, have you ever been in love?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 26, 2016 - 07:45am PT
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...would have a internal, subject life, and of course they don't.
of course, you haven't defined what an internal subjective life is or what it entails. You claim that to do so you'd be reducing it... which cannot be done and correctly describe what it is...
another way to think about this logic is that the very thing you claim to exist doesn't. It sounds outrageous, because it is something we all think we are familiar with, but actually it isn't such a stretch.
whether or not a machine can have this "internal, subjective life" what ever that is, has not been my main objection, it is whether or not we have what we describe as an "internal, subjective life."
If a machine were built in such a manner as to behave as if it believed it possessed such a thing, how would you persuade it that it actually didn't?
As for the "simulated" training, the whole point of the training is to provide "sensory input" so close to what we would call the "actual" experience that the lessons learned are directly applicable. The training for war fighting is not "actual" war fighting.. yet it is an invaluable, essential experience for the trainees.
But we train in all sorts of ways for particular events by not engaging in the actual thing, but by "simulating" the parts of it... whether with a computer or with a set of weights.
Kant is too long a subject to go into in detail, and in the past Largo has demurred the discussion (though bringing up Kant a lot). I am sure that Kant had some very interesting things to say in his time, and the influence of his work was large...
madbolter1 wrote something that Largo liked on the other, parallel thread,
Kant's revolution was to systematically demonstrate that ALL of that "reality" "exists" only because the "I think" (not the Cartesian version!) "synthesizes" it. Kant's point is that what mind IS must necessarily be forever beyond our grasp (sorry, scientists). By the time you are "evaluating it," the REAL "it" has already done its work and handed you its "appearances," including the "appearances" of "it" itself.
but what I find interesting here is the suggestion that Kant had "demonstrated" this. If by this madbolter1 implies that there is a logical proof for which this conclusion is the only "true" solution it would be an interesting read... as far as I know Kant did not do this.
So while Kant may have a compelling argument, what all philosophers run up against in their considerations is the completely acceptable idea that there is an objective reality and that it exists apart from our mind. Not only that, but it is also possible that we could understand the mind.
The ability to produce arguments to the contrary does not invalidate these possibilities.
To many this produces a maddened call for the evidence that an empirical approach would explain these things, to which there can be no response. This, in turn, is pointed to as a "belief" and therefore akin to some religious dogma...
While we physicists revere Newton, we do not claim that he understood everything, and he was very wrong about many things (we might say he was wrong for the right reasons). We understand Newton in the context of his times, and we understand the limits of his physical understanding.
We will use those things which are applicable in the appropriate domain, and we will marvel at his astounding insights and abilities. But we have moved on, and in ways which were unanticipated by Newton's great philosophical musings, all of which are quite plausible, but in the end, when confronted with what we know about the universe, are wrong.
Of Kant, we will no doubt someday understand why he reasoned as he did... and we will probably revere him for those things where were very important to philosophy at that time, but which will be irrelevant to the discussion at hand, that is "what is mind?"
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 26, 2016 - 07:46am PT
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And Paul,
You are the finest example of a careful writer who doesn't say anything new, or take a stand.
I would give you an A in English, but I rarely bother reading your posts.
I'm sure that you are a great guy, and that I would like you in person. I dislike very few people. I turn 55 in a few days, and that is the biggest change in my personality as I aged. I don't judge people like I used to. Hell, back in the day, we would only hang with the best climbers. The goobers had to have incredible personalities to break into the circle. I was not a good person. I would judge people for all sorts of reasons. Now, I seem to find good in almost everyone.
Now? Love and Mercy, like Brian Wilson says. Those are the best parts of us and we all have it. Use it.
This is an argument, so we do attack ideas and discount others. I don't feel that it is personal, though. Yeah, I think Largo is egotistical, but that is my personal observation, totally limited by reading his words. I bet he would be fun to have a beer with.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 26, 2016 - 07:49am PT
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I was waiting to be taught...
thanks
what's the analog idea for visual media?
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 26, 2016 - 07:50am PT
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Sycorax,
I will download that into my Kindle. I'm off to see the cardiologist in a half hour. My body can't sustain blood pressure. I have chronic hypotension. Just standing up and walking is risky these days. I've probably fainted a hundred times in the past 3 months.
Maybe Werner can heal me.
Taking away walking from me is like taking away someone's voice. My feet have carried me through some godawful adventures.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 26, 2016 - 07:57am PT
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Kant says .....
That speculative reason is unable to attain to a sure or adequate conception of reality.
Thus Largo is 100% correct.
That the gross materialists are all dreaming and are in fantasy land within their minds as their so called reality they believe is true.
Sorry .... you gross materialists are sooo 0wned by your illusionary uncontrolled minds ......
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 26, 2016 - 08:24am PT
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what's the analog idea for visual media?
A painting, a print, a sculpture and yes even a map can be read as a text and, as in literature, read both formally as well as in terms of its content.
I would give you an A in English, but I rarely bother reading your posts.
Not sure what this means but sorry to hear of your med issues... suffered a heart attack in February and nearly bought it... medical stuff is no fun.
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Jul 26, 2016 - 08:55am PT
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Get well soon BASE. We need you around here!
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jul 26, 2016 - 11:04am PT
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Not sloppy, John. You're not getting the point. External reality cannot "provide" experience (JL)
Once again we're down to arguing the meaning of a word, this time "provide". The simulator is a machine that provides the means for a human experience.
I tried to get some interest in definitions of and distinctions between "awareness" and "consciousness", words at the heart of any metaphysical explorations of mind, but got nowhere. However, the word "provide" seems to have sparked a tiny controversy, which illustrates the hopelessness of some paths of philosophical inquiry.
Here's an interesting thought: the mathematicians in the era of Kant produced results that, with a little background can be fairly easily understood by present-day scholars. However, it appears that the understanding of Kant's ideas takes "years of effort" even today. What does that tell you about Kant? Was he guilty of obfuscation? Or is it simply that arguments based upon ill-defined words and concepts will lead to endless and non-productive bebates . . . the
meat and potatoes of academic phillosophers? How many thousands of pages of dense and convoluted commentary have been written about "being"? MB1 was on target when he stated that seeking the meaning of "mind" is a hopeless quest.
From Wiki, a quote by Russell:
"Modern analytical empiricism [...] differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, in comparison with the philosophies of the system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods that it must be sought; I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble."
Faculty lounge stuff for a philosophy department. But if I were a philosopher this is a direction I would go.
Mark, I hope you get your medical problem cleared up.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 26, 2016 - 08:39pm PT
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artistic metaphor?
Fountain
art by R. Mutt, submitted by Marcel Duchamp photographed by Alfred Stieglitz
a urinal equivalenced to art...
Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 26, 2016 - 09:26pm PT
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a urinal equivalenced to art..
Ah yes the urinal. So Dada. I think you'll like Duchamp as his desire was to discredit art in the same way religion was discredited in the 19th C. And yet his motivation came directly form the insanity of world war one in which he saw and despised the culmination of a corrupt technology and science dedicated to the purpose of death. You know, mustard gas and machine guns and bombs dropped from the air, all the helpful science stuff.
Interestingly, the Pop Art of the mid 1950s and early 60s was referred to as Neo Dada. The Johns' image I suggested you contemplate earlier was in its own way inspired by Duchamp who had by that time retired from the art world to play chess. Too bad you won't check it out.
I wonder if you can figure out why even a urinal remains a metaphor in this case?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 26, 2016 - 10:30pm PT
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..all the helpful science stuff
x-rays, radio, plastics, that sort of stuff too...
I looked at the Johns stuff, you'll have to give us a lesson...
I was looking for a metaphor parallel to that in literature, thus the urinal, not really trying to promote the Dada agenda (though I'm sure you believe I couldn't possibly know anything about art...)
do you know anything about Duchamp at the chess player? probably not something you'd be very interested in.
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