INDIRECT PERCEPTION II Indirect perception means learning about A by looking at something else. Sounds kind of silly doesn't it? But the whole physical universe works this way. Direct perception then would mean learning about A by looking at A directly. In fact scientists consider 'indirect perception' to be redundant, and 'direct perception' to be an oxymoron (contradictory thus impossible). Learning means gathering data about, so we are trying to learn about object A, by looking at something else. Looking itself is an anthropomorphization of what consciousness does while looking at its own conscious color forms, red, green etc, but accepting that misuse of the word looking in the physical universe, it means directing our attention at and gathering data about, so looking is just another form of learning. Anthropomorphization means assigning qualities or conditions to the physical universe that rightly apply only to consciousness. "My robot cares about me. Here have a red photon." Anti Anthropomorphization. means assigning qualities or conditions to consciousness that rightly only apply to the physical universe. "She is so far away from me. When my body dies, I die with it, consciousness is nothing but chemistry bubbling away at 98,6 degrees." So indirect perception means learning about A by learning about something else. And direct perception means learning directly about A through direct contact with A. The reason that direct perception is considered to be contradictory is that it is not possible to have 'direct' contact with a object that is not yourself. Even if you bump into a table, there is nothing really touching you, it's all a matter of alleged forces from the table interacting with alleged forces in your body. In the end the body may know something is pushing against it, but it has no clue what. The what *ALWAYS* remains a theory. In information theory a symbol is an object, like a 1 or a 0 in a data stream, that represents data about another object, such as an intended communication between two people. Symbols refer to referents, and referents are referred to by symbols. Referents are symbolized by symbols, and symbols symbolize referents. Find what fits the above pattern and you will know what a referent and a symbol are. Symbols and referents are two different objects, the symbol being used to convey data about the referent in lieu of having access to the referent directly. Thus we try to learn about the referent by looking at the symbol. Not only do all symbols contain data about referents, ANY object that contains data about a referent can be called a symbol for that referent. Any object that is causally affected by an earlier other object, has data imprinted on it about the nature of the earlier causing object, and thus the later effected object is called a symbol for the earlier causing referent. Thus with any two objects that bear a cause and effect relationship to each other, the causing object is the referent, and the effected object is the symbol, and the symbol would be expected to contain data imprinted on it about the referent, by the interaction with the referent. In the absence of cause between the two objects there will be an absence of a data imprint on the symbol, and in the presence of a data imprint on the symbol, there had to be cause impinging on it from the referent. Further in the absence of a data imprint on the symbol (the symbol didn't change state), there could not have been a causal impact on the symbol by the referent. So cause implies data imprint, and data imprint implies cause. And no cause implies no data imprint, and no data imprint implies no cause. So indirect perception takes advantage of this cause-effect relationship between two different objects, which creates data imprinting by the earlier object on the later object, so we can gather data about the earlier object by gathering data about the later object instead. Take for example a group of scientists looking at a computer monitor showing the collision between Levi-Shoemaker 9 with Jupiter. The images were coming from a camera pointed at Jupiter, either the Hubble telescope, or near by satellites going around Jupiter. Clearly the scientists in their lab do not have direct contact with Jupiter, and thus are using indirect perception to learn about the event. But does anything have direct contact with the original event one might ask? Perhaps the video camera in the satellite going around Jupiter might be considered to have direct contact, or at least more direct contact. Unfortunately, although there may be such a thing as less and less indirect contact, there is no such thing as more and more direct contact, either you have direct contact or you don't. DIRECT CONTACT IS NOT A GRADIENT SCALE OF INDIRECT CONTACT. With indirect contact you are always learning about A by looking at something ELSE. That something else may be one event removed from A, or trillions of events removed from A. There is a gradient scale going from little indirection to lots of indirection. In fact one can state a theorem about this 'casual distance' between two different events, namely that the greater the causal distance, that is the more intervening events there are, the 'greater' the indirect contact is, the more degraded the data imprint becomes until it approaches becoming useless and no usable;e data imprint at all. But direct contact means learning about A by looking AT A, so there can't be any degrees of looking at A, you are either looking at A or your aren't. There are LOTS of ways to look at something OTHER than A, thus indirect contact is a gradient scale depending on how causally distant those other things are from A, but there is only ONE way to look at A directly, and thus direct contact permits no gradient scale. Direct contact and indirect contact ARE TWO TOTALLY DIFFERENT BALL GAMES WITH TWO TOTALLY DIFFERENT RESULTS. Indirect contact produces models and theories, direct contact produces perfect certainties. No matter how close B is to A, as long as one is looking at B and not A, one is not in direct contact with A AT ALL. One can't even claim that very close indirect contact is virtually indistinguishable from direct contact, or God forbid, as good as direct contact. No model or theory even approaches perfect certainty, for one can never be certain of a theory! Although evidence (symbol) can disprove a theory, evidence can only support a theory, meaning leave it un disproved. No matter how pure the fool's gold, it will never be real gold. Scientists like to talk about 'solid proof' for their theories, they are the great usurpers. All they have proof of is their conscious experience of the matter at the time. Does the fact that one sees a pretty girl mean there IS a pretty girl? Conscious experiences come in 4 flavors. 1.) Imagination, 2.) Dreaming 3.) Hallucination 4.) Connected to sensory input. It just isn't possible to tell with perfect certainty which is which, because all one can see is one's experience at the time. In the end everyone is alone with their experience, and anything else they might put on it is alter-is, added significance, trust, desire, expectations, convenience and hope. The existence of peers is not peer reviewed, and until you prove the existence of your first peer, they can't be used to corroborate your theories. Of course with publication deadlines we can just ASSUME that peers exist and no one will notice. Now yes, one may be able to prove that other's exist, BUT NOT BY LOOKING AT ONE'S OUTWARD EXPERIENCE OF THEM, for that is learning about them, the referent, by looking at the symbol, your conscious experience of them. Looking outwardly, using your conscious experiences to tell you about what is in the physical universe is ALWAYS INDIRECT PERCEPTION. So yes, the video camera is closer to Jupiter in the causal pathway between the event and the scientists observing it, but the video camera in no way has direct contact with the event at all. The video camera is receiving photons bounced off the incoming asteroids and Jupiter's surface, at no time is the video camera in direct contact with the rock or the planet. In fact the exact rock that bounced the photons DOESN'T EVEN EXIST ANY MORE by the time the photons reach the video camera, as that rock is multiple nano seconds in the past, it's GONE by the time the photons hit the camera on the satellite. There may be another rock there at the moment the photons hit the camera, but its a new rock a few nano seconds in time later, even if it looks like the old rock. Worse the existence of that new rock is a complete theory without evidence until photons bounce off of IT and hit the camera even later in time, which event merely supports the theory the rock was there when the alleged photons allegedly bounced off of it. A rock now is a theory without evidence until the photons which bounce off of it hit our eye at which point the rock then becomes a theory with evidence. To a machine that can only learn by indirect perception, a distant now is always a theory without evidence, until the evidence checks in HERE some time later, at which point what WAS now, which BECAME then, becomes a theory with evidence. There is no certainty because there is no direct NOW contact with the rock. Thus the video camera has no direct contact with any part of the event as it is happening NOW, it only has alleged contact via the alleged photons that come to it multiple nanoseconds later. Looking at photons bouncing off a rock is not looking at the rock. In fact this matches exactly the definition of indirect perception, namely learning about the rock by looking at something else, photons. The only way one could have direct contact with the rock is if it were 'self luminous', meaning referent and symbol are one and the same event, not separated from each other by either space or time. Consciousness is self luminous, thus capable of certainty of itself, The physical universe, and everything in it, is not. But look, even when the photons hit the video camera, does the video camera see the photons directly? No, the photons cause changes in state in the camera's circuitry, and THOSE STATE'S are the learning the camera has of the photons. AT no time does the camera SEE THE PHOTONS. By the time the changes in state have happened in the camera, the photons are long gone. Thus we can only have direct contact with ourselves. Everything else is a theory. So the photons are a symbol for the events taking place on Jupiter, as the nature of the photons has *ALLEGEDLY* been imprinted by earlier distant events on Jupiter. Then those symbols are converted into radio waves which are sent to Earth which themselves become another symbol. Finally a picture is drawn on a TV set surround by scientists which becomes yet another symbol. But relative to the video camera out at Jupiter, the photons themselves become the referent, and the changes in state in the receiving screen in the camera becomes the symbol FOR THE PHOTONS. If every referent gives rise to a symbol, which then becomes a referent itself and gives rise to another symbol, at what point does anything get 'seen'? What we have is a series of referents followed by symbols. Does the symbol SEE the referent, or does the symbol merely BE in a state indicating the theoretical existence of the referent? Is being in a state indicating the possible existence of something else, the same thing as SEEING that something else directly? A chain of referents followed by symbols later in space and time is merely a sequence of dominos falling. Does domino 10 'see', in any sense of the word, domino 9 that hit it a moment ago? Is mere being an effect, 'seeing'. Even if we concede that domino 10 knows that it was hit, does it know it was hit by domino 9? Being an effect and changing state is all anything in the physical universe can do. And once it has changed state, it has no clue that it HAS changed state, no perfect certainty whatsoever. Further any object's ideas about WHAT caused it to change state are a model and theory at best, delusion at worse. If B follows A, one can never tell if A caused B, or if C caused both A and B in such a way to make it look like A caused B. That's the third party law. ONE CAN NEVER FIND CAUSE OR PROOF OF CAUSE BY LOOKING AT THE START AND ENDING EFFECTS OF CAUSE. We can consider that every time a referent causes a symbol to change state, that an act of perception or observation has taken place, but clearly no symbol has direct perception of its referent anywhere in the chain, only of itself. By the time the symbol arises, the referent that powered it is gone into the past in spacetime, so the symbol is always alone with itself in it's theoretical knowledge of the referent. Thus the symbol can never SEE the referent NOW directly, it can only see its own state allegedly caused by the referent. Consciousness however can see itself in the NOW, it is self luminous. Conscious experiences, as referent, are self symbolizing. Further if you are seeing the red in the NOW, there is no space or TIME between the arising of the red and the seeing of the red, as the arising of the red IS the seeing of the red. Thus there is no space or time between the referent and the symbol because the symbol IS the referent. Self luminous means seeable but not because of emanation of something else, like photons. Self luminous is self seeable, end of sequence. That's a big deal folks. Self luminousness is bigger than the fact that the Earth isn't flat. It is bigger than the fact that the Earth isn't the center of the universe. It is bigger than the fact that the Earth is not the only planet to have life on it. It is bigger than the fact that this universe is not the only universe there is. It is bigger than the fact that consciousness didn't arise from matter, energy, space or time, but that these things arose from consciousness. Self symbolizingness is so big, that to date, no one knows about it. Self luminousness and self awareness of self luminousness is so beyond beyond what we understand as physical mechanics, that we don't even have the words to describe how we don't have the words to describe it. That's because self luminousness is not a space time phenomenon, it is a spaceless, timeless, instantaneous, eternal phenomenon. Pity the poor guy who doesn't believe in such things, but is one. Homer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Homer Wilson Smith The Paths of Lovers Art Matrix - Lightlink (607) 277-0959 KC2ITF Cross Internet Access, Ithaca NY homer@lightlink.com In the Line of Duty http://www.lightlink.com Tue Jan 27 18:08:47 EST 2009