Flandry reflects on the numbers killed in the war on Scotha:
"...each of those heads had borne a cosmos within it." (p. 272)
What he means, of course, is that each of those individuals was conscious. Epistemologically speaking, I do not go along with any talk of cosmoses inside heads. When I look at the sun, what I see is the star Sol which is not only outside my head but ninety three million miles away. Anyone who looks inside my brain will see in there neither Sol nor an image of it but whatever cerebral processes somehow generate my perception of an external object. Even if there were an image in my brain, how would I see it? I can only see things that are outside me.
We perceive realities/realities appear to us: we do not perceive appearances and infer realities. Or so I think. If appearances are regarded not as perceptions but as objects of perception, then philosophers ask how we can know whether realities exist independently of appearances/perceptions.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And those Scothanians who died during the war had not only been conscious, self aware beings, but had also known at least a little bit about the cosmos. More so than we are, trapped as we still are on only one planet!
Ad astra! Seam
It's debatable whether we "see" realities. We see sensory input which has -interacted- with our brains.
Experiment has shown that most people most of the time don't really "see" actual things; what they experience is mostly stored images with some new input.
This is why an utterly unfamiliar object is often incomprehensible or "hard to see".
So what you're actually seeing is a simulacrum.
OK. Good points. The debate continues as we try to find the best way to describe interactions which are not as straightforward as they appear.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I think that has sometimes happened to me, seeing something new my mind need a few seconds to comprehend. I can easily imagine it finding it much more difficult to "see" a real non-human alien from another world.
Ad astra! Sean
Take a look at pictures of elephants and rhinos in medieval manuscripts, drawn from descriptions. They generally look like distorted cows, horses or pigs.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have seen pictures like that, taken from Medieval Mss. or codices. Esp. from a book I have called THE BESTIARY: A BOOK OF BEASTS BEING A TRANSLATION FROM A LATIN BESTIARY OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY MADE AND EDITED BY T.H. WHITE.* With 125 pictures of the kind you mentioned.
Ad astra! Sean
*T.H. White is the same man who wrote THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING.
Post a Comment