huckelberry wrote:In was not imagining that there could not be other methods of tracking experience. I would suppose bat spirits would feel at home in a different imaging system than I use. I am not sure how much different my dogs visual display methods are than mine, I suspect different. I wonder if there is an inclusion of smell information? I suspect my dogs spirit would feel at home it that sort of experience processing. My spirit might find the methods used by my dog's spirit confusing.
I've thought this same thing for quite a while now. To really understand the conversation, people have to be comfortable abstracting out certain concepts and overloading some terms. I heard Dawkins talk about this one time (on Youtube, I've never met him personally) and I think he explained it well enough.
It's something like this. A bat doesn't really see with his eyes. He "sees" with his hearing. Let's abstract out the vision process here:
1) some sensory organ detects some phenomenon from the physical world, and generates signals that it sends to the brain
2) the brain interprets the signals sent by the sensory organs in the context of past experiences with the world, and its own expectations
3) an "image" is created, in near-real time, that the "mind" (which itself is just an abstraction for the real-time mental processing done by our brain's neural networks) perceives as vision
Plug in "eyes" as the sensory organ in the case of humans, and this makes sense to people.
For bats, plug in "ears" as the sensory organ, and it's really the same process. In an abstract sense that we can talk about but not really understand, bats "see" the world in their minds, as their brains interpret the signals coming from the bat's ears. This audio "vision" is so good that bats can "see" and intercept flying mosquitos from the air, as the bat swoops around quickly. Dawkins offered up the suggestion that a bat could tell not only "see" things this way, but could also differentiate certain characteristics of the items they saw, such as fluffiness, hardness, etc. What does a fluffy feather or insect's antenna "look like" to the audio vision of a bat?
A bat has its own way of perceiving the world that makes perfect sense to it, even though it doesn't make much sense to us when we try to imagine it. But the bat might well ask "you mean you can see that the item is blue instead of red? Blue? Wtf is this blue? What is red? I'm confused. I don't get what it is you're trying to say." Color, as we see and perceive it, is a concept which may be completely unfathomable to something which perceives the world through other ways than by optical vision, the way we do. Or, if a creature does perceive optically, but their retinas are sensitive to wavelengths we can't see, like infrared, it's possible that some creature might be able to "see" how warm something is, as if temperature were a sort of "color" in its mode of perception.
And, in this same way, I've become convinced that to dogs, smell is very much an integral part of the signals that their brains interpret when producing the real-time "vision" of the world as they see it. Yes, dogs have eyes, and they certainly see things optically, like we do, but they also seem to "see" things based on smell.
It's like a given bush, or fire hydrant, or sign post, doesn't just look green, or yellow, or steel-colored to them. It looks "green and dog-urine-smell-like", or "yellow and dog-urine-smell-like", or "steel-colored and dog-urine-smell-like". We can't concieve what this might "look like" to a dog, but I'm convinced it does actually "look" like something. I've watched my dogs too much as we go for walks through the neighborhood not to believe this. They seem to "see" everything that we see, optically, and yet they see even more than that. They don't just see some gravel on the ground, they seem to see some gravel plus some smell evidence that some other dog was there before. They literally "see", I think, not only the physical world of objects that we see, but they literally see all those objects and their recent animal visitation history. I think they truly must perceive, mentally, all of this smell information as part of what the world "looks like" to them.
And this would make a lot of sense when you consider, for example, bloodhounds tracking down an escaped prisoner or whatever. To the dog, what he sees in some field is not just some long grass, some flowers, maybe a bird or two. That dog "sees" the grass, the flowers, the birds, and an entire different dimension, perceived through the nose, that they are able to place into 3-D space in their minds, complete with a "what this looks like" to their minds, and everything. They "see" the path that the escaped killer took when fleeing, because their brains took the smell information from their very sensitive noses and processed it together with what their eyes were seeing, to create a hybrid vision with that killer's path clearly marked out for them.
What does a suitcase with a bag of cocaine look like to one of those drug-sniffing dogs at the airport? Does the cocaine change the "color" of the bag, or the "shape" of the bag, or something like that, in that dog's mind? Perhaps these aren't the best words to try to create the analogy, but I'm sure that it's
something.
Huck, I also understood what you were trying to say to Tarski. You were trying to say OK, maybe there's a way that a spirit perceives something which in fact is different than the way our eyes perceive it, but the "mind", assuming the mind is not just the running software and the brain matter, interprets this spirit sense in the context of its experience with normal, optical vision, and uses the sensation of optical vision as the expression of its interpretation of the spirit sense.
I don't know that I can really argue against that. Knowing that it's possible, or even probable, that other creatures, like bats and dogs, experience "vision" differently than we do, with cues and signals from different sensory organs being interpreted to create the sensation of sight to them, one might well argue that we already do that as human beings, combining the "spirit sense" with the optical sense in the creation of what we see as vision. One could then argue that the reason our "vision" is dominated by the optical sense is that the optical signals are strong and powerful, and "overwhelm" the spirit sense, such that our minds are conditioned to focus just on the optical sense to the exclusion of the spirit sense, to the extent that things detected through this spirit sense were automatically re-interpreted by the mind in terms of the sensation of optical vision.
I don't believe that's true, but I think it's an argument which isn't inherently irrational or non-sensical from a logical point of view. The biggest weakness of it, I think, is that there's no more evidence that this is true than there is about Russel's teapot.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen