Saturday 11 July 2020

Real Experiences Of An Unreal World

Genesis, PART TWO, V.

This posts says nothing new but is an attempt to clarify a familiar issue.

The Sun shines on a garden. A man's eyes intercept a small part of the light reflected from trees, flowers and grass. Impulses transmitted from his eyes to his brain cause the latter organ to generate his visual perceptions of Sun, sky and garden. Because chlorophyll reflects a particular wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, he sees trees and leaves as green. Through long familiarity with a coherent external environment, he unreflectingly differentiates this green from the blue of the sky, the brown of the tree trunks and the hue of his own skin. While seeing trees etc, he also remembers and thinks about many other things. Consider the man's total experience through a finite period of time: all his bodily sensations, visual perceptions, auditory and other sensory experiences, memories, imaginings and thoughts.

Is it theoretically possible to construct an artifact that would internally duplicate that total experience? Thus, within the artifact, there would be an illusory experience that could be articulated by the proposition: "I am a man, standing in a garden, seeing trees, hearing birds, feeling the Sun, remembering last summer and thinking about my mortgage." Some philosophical texts discuss whether such an artifact is possible. Poul Anderson's novel, Genesis, invites its readers to imagine not only that this hypothetical artifact is possible but also that it will have been constructed in a remote future.

Consciousness involves a subject and objects, which are not necessarily material objects. (Thus, an abstraction can be an object of thought.) I, a subject, see a tree, an object. I am also aware of myself. Thus, the self is both a subject and an object. A man is an organic subject of consciousness whereas some process within the hypothetical artifact is an inorganic subject.

It seems to the organic subject that he sees a tree because he is in fact seeing a tree. Thus, the circumlocution, "It seems to...," becomes redundant. However, it seems to the inorganic subject that he sees a tree although he is not seeing a tree. The tree that he thinks he sees is not real. But he is a subject and is really seeing green, feeling a tree trunk etc. Thus, he has real experiences of an unreal world. He is real although his perceived environment is not.

8 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

The difficulty of how " I *, however or wherever I am defined, can have real experiences of or within an unreal world of the kind Gaia could generate still seems to argue for "her" emulations to be not truly real.

It still goes back to differences of interpretation.

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

Descartes: "I think, therefore I am."

Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

How Cartesian of you! (Smiles)

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

If a person has multiple personalities, then each of those personalities exists as a self-conscious entity at least temporarily. It would be equally wrong to cause suffering in any one of them.

Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I can see that, in the scenario we are discussing in GENESIS. In that case I have to yield up my doubts and skepticism and agree with you.

Needless to say, in the HERE AND NOW however, anyone with multiple personalities would be considered as suffering a disorder needing treatment.

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Our senses don't let us experience things "directly" -- we get data from our sensory organs, which are then organized by our brains.

As witness the fact that brain malfunctions can produce absolutely convincing illusions of things that aren't there.

I had an out-of-body experience as a youngster, when I thumped my head diving into the water -- I could see my own body below me at the bottom of the pool. Completely illusory, of course, but absolutely impossible to detect as such from the sensory input; I could only tell it was by logical deduction.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Susan Blackmore had some out of the body experiences (OBEs), seemed to travel up through several floors of a building and look down on its roof but got the number of floors and color of the roof wrong and developed the theory that an OBE is an ASC (altered state of consciousness)in which bodily sensations are disregarded and the immediate environment is vividly imagined as if seen from a point outside the body. One OBE was of a guy preaching in a pulpit, looking down on his body as if hovering just below the ceiling.

Given that to experience our environment IS to perceive it by means of sensory organs and a brain, I think that this is the nearest to "direct experience" that we can get. Apart from this, the phrase,"direct experience," has no meaning, like saying "language without words, sounds or marks on paper" or "a square without sides." If "direct experience" in this sense has no meaning, then it becomes redundant to say that we do not experience anything directly (in this sense). So I think that I am directly, or as directly as I can, seeing and feeling this computer. Of course, I might sometimes hallucinate but, when I am not hallucinating (most of the time), I am directly, or as directly as I can, perceiving the objects around me.

Like every finite and fallible statement, this one is vulnerable to falsification, e.g., if it WERE proved that we are living in a massive virtual reality.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

But then whoever had created the virtual reality would be directly experiencing their own actual external reality.