skepticalbip
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- Basic Beliefs
- Everything we know is wrong (to some degree)
Wow! That is quite a bit heavier than I was thinking. But just off the top of my head (or pulled from my nether regions), I think that how faithfully our senses reflect reality would depend on which particular sense we are talking about.It is fairly certain that there is an 'outer reality'. We have evolved sense organs that inform us of various aspects of that reality. How accurately the information from our sense organs reflects the environment we can't really know. At least I can’t think of any tests (in the physics sense) that could disprove or verify any of the thoughts I have about our sensory perceptions.
More brainfarts:
Let's agree that there's an objective external reality, and that our senses inform us of various aspects of it.
'How accurately' might be different from 'how faithfully'. What I mean is, we could ask (and perhaps find half-decent answers to) the question of accuracy, but in the case of vision we might be measuring accuracy of information, energy, wavelengths or photons, or whatever, but not colour, if, as per the OP, something uniquely mental (in this case colour) has been created in the brain. And to me it seems likely that there must be a good deal of accuracy involved because natural selection would presumably have honed it. But the brain representation may not be faithful (in property terms) to what's out there if, again, something unique has been created in the brain that is not a property of the external world, as with pain, where again we might be able to measure accuracy, but it wouldn't be a measure of a pain property of the stimulus.
So what about the brain representations that are (it seems) not unique to the brain, which in other words (we are saying, for the purposes of considering the two possible OP categories) are 'also out there'? Well, clearly, what is out there is not the same in property terms as what is represented in the brain and vice versa (what is experienced is not the same in property terms as what is out there). But a mental image of a 4-legged table includes four (mental) legs, which is the same number (we assume) as the real, 3-dimensional (4-legged) table. So some mental representations are not only accurate (to some extent) but faithful to some of the actual properties of the original, it would seem. In that sense we could say that some actual properties are preserved, or at least faithfully recreated in another 'media', in the mental representation*.
So then one question might be, 'why does the brain need (or why has it evolved) to create uniquely mental phenomena for some properties but not others' or conversely 'what is it about some external properties that means they (and not others) are able to be (or have evolved to be) faithfully preserved in the representation'?
I guess one general set of possible answers might be that it is either more difficult, or less useful, or more expensive/wasteful (in resource terms), or not possible, for this to happen for some properties. Or just an accident (although my intuitive guess is that natural selection is a bit too competitively ruthless for that).
It doesn't seem to me that taste would have much at all in common with any aspect of the object we are tasting. However taste would be beneficial, in a survival sense. We crave sweets and fats which taste informs us about and which gives us calories and energy. Taste also identifies salt which we also crave and the body needs to remain healthy. Evolution is an unforgiving bitch... those who didn't crave the taste of nutrients the body needs were dropped from the gene pool.
The sense of touch would seem to give us a closer representation of reality. I would think the sensation of texture, solidness, heft, size etc. would probably be fairly faithful information about reality.
The sense of hearing (in humans, not bats or dolphins) seems to me to be more useful in sensing movement of things more so than the things themselves.
Finally sight. For humans this is our primary sense for understanding our environment. Personally, I think it is a fairly reliable sense for informing us of the shape, identity, and position of objects in our environment. At least I have yet to reach to open the door of my auto and be surprised to find it doesn't exist for my sense of touch or that it is a tiger.
This seems to be the result of watching too many Michio Kaku or Graham Greene videos. The video popularizations of string theory and/or quantum mechanics, I think, does a disservice to both science and the viewer. They present, often highly theoretical, quantum concepts as though they were "scientific fact" within the macro-universe. Worse, they don't explain well enough that they are making an analogy of what the behavior of the universe would be if the macro-world behaved like the quantum world... it doesn't.*That comes with the general caveat that there might not actually be 3-dimensional objects with four legs.
For example I have read that some models suggest that the universe is a 2-D hologram, or that it consists of information, not objects. Then there is the less uncommon model which has it that there are only forces, or energy, and I think I can get my head around that one (because my understanding of physics goes that far), that there is actually no 'table object' (other than as an arrangement of forces I mean), that 'solidity' (eg what wood or steel seem to have) is just an array of 'stronger forces' (which the array of forces which seem to be your hand can't easily pass through).
We see wood and steel as firm, solid materials because, in our macro-world, they are. At the sub-atomic level they are overwhelmingly vacuum and fields. But since we don't exist as sub-atomic critters, it is irrelevant to our daily life. It is those fields that make it solid on our scale.
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