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Brent Allsop <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:brent.allsop@gmail.com"><brent.allsop@gmail.com></a> wrote:<br>
<br>
>If you surgically remove your eyes, and are put into a room with
no light, then stimulate the optic nerve, identical to the way it
would be when looking at a strawberry. You would have identical
knowledge of the strawberry. What is that knowledge, and what is it
that has the redness quality you experience? This can’t be
‘perception’ as that requires eyes. It is simply conscious
knowledge, the result of perception.<br>
<br>
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You are making a meaningless distinction. I would see a strawberry
(there's no need to say "have knowledge of", that's just an
unnecessarily complicated way of saying the same thing).<br>
<br>
My eyes would be whatever provides the pattern of signals to my
brain, instead of my original biological eyes. Even if that was a
stored pattern in a computer, the pattern would be my eyes. Rather
limited eyes, but by definition, whatever provides sensory signals
to my visual cortex (or optic nerves, or any point along that
pathway) is my eyes.<br>
<br>
"What is that knowledge", I can only interpret as "what do you
see?", so the answer is "A strawberry". "What is it that has the
redness quality?" = "What is red?". Um, The strawberry!<br>
<br>
And if you're going to say "but the strawberry doesn't exist!", all
I can say is yes, it does, in two different ways. A 'real'
strawberry must have been used to create the stored pattern (or
perhaps a composite of several strawberries), and a representation
of a strawberry exists in my brain, exactly the same as when I used
to see strawberries with my biological eyes. <br>
<br>
In the virtual reality that my brain creates all the time, it's this
representation that's the important thing. In a sense, this is more
'real' than the physical object that presumably exists, or has
existed, in the outside world. We can, after all, perceive and act
upon things that have no existence in the outside world. Beauty, for
example, or jealousy. Or the ghost I saw in the middle of my bedroom
the other night (which turned out to be the silhouette of my cats
head about two inches from my face).<br>
<br>
What constitutes the representation of a strawberry in my brain?
Exactly the same pattern of neural activity as before, when I looked
at a strawberry with my biological eyes.<br>
<br>
Perception does not require eyes, or any other <i>specific</i>
sensory organ (I'm sure you're not claiming that I don't perceive
music because my eyes are not involved, or that there's no such
thing as the perception of cool wet grass because it involves
several different sensory channels). Perception requires a <b>brain</b>.
The sensory organs just provide input to the sensory processes.<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Ben Zaiboc</pre>
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