Arthur C. Clarke 7/9 ART MATRIX - LIGHTLINK
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homer@lightlink.com E-mail
jes@lightlink.com E-mail
08/17/07 11:45pm
Dear Esteemed Sir,
ANTHROPOMORPHIZATION
Anthropomorphization is the assignment of qualities that rightly
belong to consciousness to things other than consciousness.
Whenever symbols are used to refer to referents, various qualities
of the symbol are used to refer to similar qualities in the referent,
especially if the qualities in both symbol and referent bear a high
degree of geometric congruency (resemblance) to each other.
Geometric congruency, or geometricity for short, means the symbol
is square and the referent is square.
That is highly convenient but allows us to easily forget that the
symbol is not the referent.
Another less obvious geometricity is existence, the symbol exists
and the referent exists.
In fact our very concept that the referent exists is BECAUSE the
symbol exists.
Since the only source of information the being has about the
referent is via the symbol, one can assert that everything one knows
indirectly about the referent comes from direct perception of the
symbol.
Thus we consider that the physical universe exists because our
conscious experience of it exists.
Because our conscious experience exists we assume that what it is
being used to represent exists also.
Thus in dreams or hallucinations we are fooled into thinking the
referent exists just because the symbol exists.
In such cases we are not lucid.
Lucidity is recognition that the symbol exists but the referent
doesn't.
One is lucid when one knows one is dreaming, imagining or
hallucinating for example.
We consider the physical universe has space because our
consciousness of it looks like it has space.
We consider the physical universe has time because our conscious
experience of it seems to have time.
We assign force to the physical universe because of our conscious
experience of force and impact.
Most people's convictions are based on the conscious experience of
impact.
The impact seems more real than the consciousness experiencing it,
thus more credence is given to the alleged referent allegedly causing
the impact than to the experienced symbol of the impact.
Nonetheless the sense of actuality ascribed to the referent comes
directly and only from the actuality of the symbol.
To claim the referent is actual, but the symbol is inactual, is one
definition of insanity.
The guy thinks he is seeing the physical universe referent
directly.
Worse because he sees the conscious experience (symbol) as red, he
thinks the referent is red!
We also assign mass and energy to the physical universe because of
our conscious experience of mass and energy.
In each and every case we have taken a quality of the symbol and
assigned it to the referent.
The worst extreme of this is to assign the directly
perceived LIFE AND LIVINGNESS in our own consciousness, and
we assign it to conglomerations of force and mass in motion
such as biological life, and we call it life and living.
Biological life may have something akin to life and livingness, but
just remember biological life is made of congolmerations of dead thins,
matter, energy, space, time and force.
The whole idea of cause in the physical universe is an
anthropomorphization of our experience of cause within ourselves.
If we had never had the direct perception of personal causal agency
within ourselves, we would never have had the idea to assign it to the
physical universe too.
Notice that direct perception of causation is impossible in the
physical universe because of it's inherent dimensionality and separation
between parts.
One can see two events, and maybe even the dependable follwingness
between them, but one can never see the causation between them, ie the
NECESSARY dependable followingness between them.
Remember necessity and causation mean the same thing
when it comes to two events following each other in time.
"Mere causation is not sufficient to witness causation." - Jane's
Law
Thus assigning causation derived from direct perception of
consciousness, to the physical universe where it can never be observed
or proven at all, is a very wild step of anthropomorphization.
Assigning cause between events in the physical universe is an
extreme example of collapsing symbol and referent.
The DEPENDABILITY of our knowledge is useful to our survival, but
in the end its more important for us to know that the apple falls, and
not whether it falls due to lines of force or curvature of space.
Such models of cause are useful to science because they lead to
predictions, and science would not progress at all with out them, but if
the world is a dream, then the entire physical universe is a virtual
reality WITH NO ACTUAL CAUSE BETWEEN ALLEGED OBJECTS IN IT AT ALL.
Why does the ball bounce off the wall in a sleep dream?
There is no causation at all between conscious pictures in a sleep
dream, a third party is projecting both ball and wall to give the
illusion of cause between them.
Actual cause (the third party) projects virtual cause (dream time
realities).
If the world is a dream even in the waking state, then all physical
causality is the same as it is in a dream, virtually real, but actually
non existent.
Anthropomorphization can be useful as an analogy but is a
philosophical weakness if carried too far.
For example it would be an error to assign love and pain to the
physical universe just because we experience love and pain in our
consciousness.
Do we imagine that two electrons repel each other because they
suffer in each other's presence?
Do we imagine that electrons and protons are attracted to each
other because they feel pleasure in each other's presence?
Is nuclear force sexual lust?
Do we imagine that physical universe forces such as gravity and
electromagnetism are in fact conscious sentient wills seeking to
maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain?
Are we torturing something by bringing the north poles of two
magnetics together?
Using your right hand pick, up your left hand and move it.
Did your left hand move because of force or pain?
It moved because of force.
Now use your right hand and threaten to stick a hot needle in your
left hand and watch you move it.
Were you moved to move your hand by force or pain?
Notice both force and pain are causative, they cause us to move,
and many biological pathways involve both force and pain, but force is
not pain, and pain can not be built out of force and mass alone.
Pain is not MERELY a process in arrangements of force and mass.
"Love and pain can not of force and mass be made," because both are
conscious experiences and thus not part of the alleged multi dimensional
world.
It is also an extreme error to assign 'redness' to anything in the
physical universe at all, because redness is solely a quality of a
conscious experience.
It's external referent is frequency, and frequency and redness are
two utterly different qualities in two utterly different kinds of
objects that have no absolute or necessary relationship to each other.
In other words the assignment of redness to 5000 Angstroms of
electromagnetic radiation is an arbitrary hook together with no
underlying fundamental necessity that it should have been that way.
In fact in dreams one can hook redness onto any frequency of light
at all because THERE IS NO FREQUENCY OF LIGHT in dreams.
In a dream all there is, is conscious self luminousness.
In dreams one might just as well hook redness to 'X rays coming
from the stars' according to one's fancy of the moment.
Now one can argue that assigning conscious colors to SOME frequency
of light in the physical universe was necessary for the game of physical
evolution to take place, and right this might be.
It can also be argued that only a subset or small part of the
entire spectrum of eletromagnetic radiation was necessary and optimum
for that survival to happen, that which we call visible light.
And again this is probably correct.
However it probably can not be argued that it was better to assign
redness to 5000 Angstroms, green to 4000 Angstroms and violet to 3000
Angstroms rather than some other way around.
Further it can not be argued that any two beings can verify that
they both see the same color as the other, given the same frequency of
light, because each can only see their own consciousness and thus can
never verify that the other is seeing the same color as them.
We show two people the same frequency of light and say to them this
is to be called red, so now everyone calls it red, but who is to say
that some don't see it as green or violet or some other color we never
heard of.
There would be no way to prove it one way or the other, as no
conscious unit can even prove that any other conscious unit even exist,
let alone what colors it sees.
Modern science demands that scientific observations be
peer reviewed, but how can you have peers review you work
until you have proven that your peers exist in the first place.
In the absence of proven peers, you can't peer review your
assertions that your peers exist.
Who corroborates the corroborators?
That's called the Peer Review Paradox.
It goes right over most PhD's heads.
I can hear some dullard saying "Oh come on Homer that's silly!
Of course other people exist! I don't need other people to prove
that other people exist!"
Tell that to A Beautiful Mind. (Google it.)
Do the people in your dreams exist? How do you know?
You stick a knife in them and they scream in pain.
What exactly does what prove?
Also consider the Hallucination paradox.
Say you are in a group of hallucinating people, some of
which are your hallucinations and other's aren't, but they
may be hallucinating too.
And none of them have a guaranteed propensity to tell you the truth
as they see it even if you ask them.
If one of your people says he is not a hallucination, how
do you know if he is lying?
If he says he IS your hallucination, again how do you know if he is
lying?
Is it possible to determine with perfect certainty which of your
perceived people are your hallucinations and which are actual?
Proving with perfect certainty that other conscious units exist is
one of the deepest problems any conscious unit has.
Many children go crazy because they can't prove THEY exist to their
own mothers.
Someone gave them the expectation that they should be able to do
so.
Proving that two different conscious units exist to each other may
be possible in the inner subtrates of Eternity, where twoness may turn
out to be an illusion as space and time are.
But such proof of existence between two different objects will
NEVER be forthcoming using the outward world of indirect perception of
alleged physical objects.
"I see your body, therefore you exist!"
Thus in the end science is done alone.
Your certainties are yours and yours alone.
That would be a real twilight zone episode if you were
indeed mortal and made of meat, born to live once and die once,
never to know for sure if anyone else ever existed or gave a damn.
But your own certainty of your own existence necessarily implies
your own eternality, so being the only one in existence eternally
sure lightens things up a bit :)
As long as you are stuck seeing only your own consciousness, you
will never be able to tell what the consciousness of another looks like
with perfect certainty.
A perfect certainty can only tell about itself with perfect
certainty, it can never tell about ANOTHER'S perfect certainty even if
it is a perfect certainty TO THE OTHER.
We like to believe various things, like we are all the same, but
belief is not perfect certainty born of direct perception.
The only thing that matters for survival purposes is that every
time the being is impinged upon by a sample of 5000 Angstrom light, he
sees the same color.
WHAT color he sees is not relevant.
Since different people have different levels of color blindness,
and animals have a wide range of sight from black and white in dogs to
color in cats and birds and bugs, spanning many more different
frequencies than the human being can sense, at no time can anyone be
sure that what anyone sees while looking at 5000 Angstroms of light is
the same as all other things that can also see that frequency.
The conscious color-to-frequency-hook-together or mapping is
arbitrary.
Thus redness is not frequency!
Thus consciousness which has redness but no frequency, is not
photons which have frequency but no redness.
Thus conscious experiences are their own thing, their own object,
with qualities utterly of their own, some of which may be used by the
conscious being as symbols to map onto, refer to, referents in the
alleged physical universe.
Only the dullard continues to collapse symbol and referent and
continue to claim that there is no symbol and that he sees the referent
directly.
These are the 'consciousness is nothing and the brain is something'
crowd, of which I so tire.
In case you hadn't noticed.
You couldn't have the concept that the referent was something
unless the conscious experience of it were something also!
Because it is the somethingness of the conscious symbol that gives
rise to the idea that the referent is a somethingness also.
And that's because one believes that only a somthingness (referent)
could give rise to a somethingness (symbol).
A hallucination however refutes that.
It just isn't true that the existence of the symbol necessarily
implies the existence of the referent.
The physical universe may simply be a hallucination in the mind of
God in carnation as the High Us.
Your faithful servant,
Homer Wilson Smith
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
Sat Aug 18 00:02:42 EDT 2007