[ExI] Sensory Reality

[JOSHUA JOB]

>> What
>> I'm saying is just that we create our own reality within our
>> heads, from the sensory feeds we get.  I'm not
>> advocating solipsism.  Those sensory feeds obvously
>> come from the real world, but as you say, we have no way of
>> directly apprehending it, we have to build a representation
>> that is consistent with our sensory inputs.
>
> It seems you have embarked on the project of re-creating the  
> metaphysical idealism of Immanuel Kant. He had a name for the thing  
> that we have "no way of directly apprehending". He called it the  
> "thing-in-itself".
>
> In general he called that external unknowable reality of things-in- 
> themselves "the noumena" as distinct from world given to us by sense  
> perception, which he called "the phenomena".
>
> Kant revolutionized philosophy with that idea and others related to  
> it. Too bad he's not here to pat you on the back. :)
>
> -gts
What importance does it have that you cannot magically "experience"  
"things-in-themselves"? Outside of sort-of solving that symbol  
grounding problem, it doesn't effect anything at all. We create a  
model of the world based on our sense-perceptions of reality. That  
model is based, necessarily on those sense-perceptions. We revise our  
model continually based on all of our sense-perceptions, and over time  
it gets better and better, closer and closer to reality as it is "in- 
itself." We use this model to plan and act in the world in order to  
live. We are not divorced from reality because we are not gods. We  
simply have to work in order to understand it. We may be wrong, but if  
so, we correct our model. I do not see any meaningful consequences in  
acknowledging the fact that we aren't omniscient gods. Reason is still  
valid, and science is the way to understanding the natural world. It  
isn't limiting to acknowledge we are not infallible. In fact, that  
very admission is what is necessary for us to begin understanding the  
world.

Oh, and Ben, your experiment, where you experience the world directly  
as sense inputs, is something that is easy to at least see: look at  
babies. Babies have no mental representations of the world, and are  
just beginning to try to form one. And I think everyone knows how much  
help babies need to survive.