🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <755@actnyc.UUCP> jsb@actnyc.UUCP (The Invisible Man) writes:

>Well, I hope I don't have to [beat you with a stick].  But map this: If I did
>you would experience something directly.

Everything I experience, I experience directly.  But that doesn't mean that a
great deal of interpretation isn't interwoven into the experience.  If you beat
me with a stick, I would have all sorts of interpretations of the experience
that would give a particular coloration to the pain, say a particular feeling
of humiliation, or -- perhaps as you might wish -- an element of satori!

>nervous system and the like but I would reply that you had it all backwards.
>Perception, as an interpretation of how we relate to the world, is just an
>after the fact mapping; an organization of our direct experience (which in
>this case paradoxically defines it as indirect).

I think we may have a terminological problem, here.  You seem to differentiate
between "perception" and "direct experience".  I think I know what is manet by
perception, and perception does, indeed, contain a strong admixture of
interpretation, as has been amply proved.  But I'm not sure what would qualify
as "direct experience"?  Some form of intuition that is direct contact with
reality, as some have claimed?  I don't get the sense that that is what you
mean.

>[To] paraphrase Buckaroo Bonzai, what ever we've got..., thats
>what we've got. Arguments that there is more than *that* are just mis-mappings.
>You can't argue with tautologies!

Nor would I try to.  I say the maps are what we've got and that they *are*
reality, so far as we are concerned.  In other words, though the map is not the
territory that it is mapping, a map is a territory, itself, and it is a
reality.  And there is no reality of which we can say for certain that it is
not a map of some other territory (or map).

>)I don't really understand this point.  We make models of the universe all the
>)time and predict hitherto unobserved phenomena from them by extrapolation.
>)That is a principal means of discovery.
>Yes, but the prediction doesn't make it true.  It just tells you where to look.

It makes it true for us, often.  The sun *will* rise tomorrow, so far as I
am concerned, even though it has not done so yet.  And I believe a certain wall
is hard because I have bumped into it and predict that if I bump into it again,
it will feel the same.  A large part of our knowledge of the universe is
beliefs with certainty in facts that have not yet occurred, or which we have
not perceived personally.  Most of these are extrapolations from our existing
world-view.  Yes, they tell me where to look, if I choose to look.  But
fortunately, it is usually not necessary to look.  Otherwise I would waste a
lot of time trying to look at things of whose existence I have not the
slightest doubt.  Fortunately, we have facts, not just phenomena.

>)But do we ever reach a
>)level so low that we have reached a territory that is not a map?  I don't
>)think so.

>Where's my stick?  

Sigh!  People always resort to violence when they cannot think of a convincing
argument or demonstration.

By the way, Jim, what's your last name?
-- 
"The map may not be the territory, but it's all we've got."

Sarge Gerbode
Institute for Research in Metapsychology
950 Guinda St.
Palo Alto, CA 94301
UUCP:  pyramid!thirdi!sarge