[FRIAM] The Atlantic article on "the illusion of reality"

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Perhaps you aren't reading the other thread or that the mailing list is misbehaving again and you didn't receive my response to your reified ideas argument?  My counter argument was along the same lines as Hoffman's idea that the decoupling from the environment (through interfaces) can lead to (and even select for) *false* ideas.  So, the (again, very slight) flaw in your argument is that it's what you're calling the raw signals that are paramount ... and probably what's being selected for, not the concepts or the ability to form concepts.

Just to restate a little more clearly, what's being selected for are fingers, toes, proprioception, nociception, etc.  That's what provides meaning, not the (perhaps entirely false) thoughts we mistakenly reify and pretend to talk about.

On 09/19/2017 08:58 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> I'm disappointed. No one bothered to comment on or even notice my post on this subject.  Here it is again.
> 
> An easy way to agree with Hoffman and not get bent out of shape is to acknowledge that anything we think involves something being constructed in our heads. That construction is an idea -- or an emotion, or whatever other modes of awareness we have. That seems to me to be tautological: we can think or feel, etc. nothing but our thoughts, feelings, etc. As I said that's a tautology. After all, when we see something and say, that's a dog, we are converting whatever raw signals we encounter into an image and a concept. We aren't talking about the raw signals. It's impossible for us to be aware of the impact of, say, every photon on our retinas. (I'm assuming it is impossible. Perhaps some people can do something like it.) Also, I'm assuming there is a world that includes photons that we encounter. 
> 
> So this position doesn't deny a world "out there." At the same time it acknowledges that as living beings we have evolved means to make something more useful to us than awareness of raw signals. After all, why have eyes if all they do is give us the equivalent of a plane of pixels. That doesn't tell us anything about friend/foe, nourishment/poison, etc. If our senses weren't hooked up to internal processes that made something of them besides the raw signals, evolution wouldn't have kept and perfected them. 
> 
> So the simple answer is that Hoffman is right that we don't see "the world as it is" but that doesn't mean there isn't a world as it is.

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