Ok... So we know that we are insane and we know that we can not prove that we exist by our perceptions because that is all a "matrix" like remote sensing scam... Right? If any of this is not clear to you, try going back a few posts (Don't you hate be'n dumb, I do not exist)
I mentioned that I could think of at least 4 simple arguments that I do not exist. The Matrix thing was one. A mosquito senses me totally differently than I sense me... Who is right? Neither of us experiences the reality of what we perceive but only an affect of that reality. So, now I want to move to the next argument... my microscopic self.
I really do not need to go very far to find out that I am more than what I thought I was. Some say that right now I host thousands of varieties of parasites eating my flesh. (check out http://www.essortment.com/all/humanbodyparas_rayv.htm ) Everything from internal worms, external worms, mites, bacteria, fungi... the list seems to never end! Not all of them are harmful, and I even take a dose of live intestinal "bugs" regularly. So, is that what I see in the mirror? No wonder I am not happy in the morning... Most of these guys can be seen with a microscope. But how about going a bit smaller...
What about the chemical nature of me? In the great series of books by Dr. Paul Brand and Phillip Yancy I learned a lot about my body. ("Where is God when it hurts" about leprosy, "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made," "In His Image") Dr. Brand said that every molecule in my body is different every 3 years. What??? How about bone? Yep, the blasts tunnel through, the clasts fill the holes back up with brand new stuff, and I have a new me. Incredible! That made me change my thoughts about burial. I used to think that I should keep all of my parts together, ya know? But... what parts are me? All of the parts are swapped out all the time! (The Druids put their friends bodies up on a high platform where the scavengers could eat the flesh. When only bones remained, they buried everything but the skull which they kept around so that they could remember their friend... "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him." (Shakespeare, Hamlet))
Now, speaking of death. Think a minute. My body is 65% water... so that is not going to stick around for long. Bye bye me... There are the Big 4 (including the the water) Oxygen (65.0%) Carbon (18.5%) Hydrogen (9.5%) Nitrogen (3.2%). Wow... that sounds like plastic to me. ( http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-05/927309210.An.r.html). So, lets see... basically, 96% of my body will float away as CO2, H2O, Amonia, N2 and other smells. The rest is just "trace minerals" like Calcium (1.5%) Phosphorus (1.0%) Potassium (0.4%) Sulfur (0.3%) Sodium (0.2%) Chlorine (0.2%) Magnesium (0.1%) Iodine (0.1%) and Iron (0.1%), plus a few others.
Did you ever think of your self as a pile of ashes help together by water, carbon, and Nitrogen? God just breathed on a bit of dust ya know... I remember Bill Cosby had a shtick about a dead guy. Cosby hated it when people at funerals always said "Doesn't he look like himself?" He hoped he would not! He thought they should have a recording going that was made by the person before their death. "Hello, this is Bill. Don't I look like myself?"
Anyway, surely you can see that I am not what I believe myself to be. I am not a collection of chemicals... they change all the time. I am not even just myself... I have millions of friends eating me alive - ugh. So, what am I? Am I a program encoded in my DNA? If my hip bone is constantly changing, why does it keep looking like my hip bone? So, am I my hip bone, or am I the code that constructs the hip bone? I certainly do not think of myself as a program, but now I can not think of myself as having a hip bone either.
Yikes... Now, not only can I not sense myself, I actually know that I am a collection of constantly changing stuff! I am certainly do not exist as the me I see in the mirror - right? Maybe I should move on the the other 2 arguments - the Cosmos and the Condensate. We shall see if I exist there.
Maybe I am stepping ahead of you, but what about the atomic level. We are made up of atoms and if you blew an atom up to be the size of the solar system the nucleus would be smaller than the sun and the electrons would be smaller than pluto. That's a whole lot of nothing. Do we really exist, we are basically not even there.
ReplyDeletethese are good points, but they don't prove that you don't exist... they simply show that perhaps proving how you exist is much more difficult than that you exist at all. We know that we exist by simply questioning our existence... but after that everything is game... for instance I know I exist... but do you, does anything else?
ReplyDeleteAs Kant showed, nothing internal to us is given in it's raw form, it's always filtered through our sense perceptions. As such we cannot know the true thing which we perceive...even ourselves. But he also showed that by sheer mathematical reason we can know somethings as he called it a priori.
Interesting discussion. I'm looking forward to the next installment in the series :-)
Exactly my point! I am not saying that I do not exist literally, but that my perception of myself is not right, so what I perceive does not exist. Read it again and see if I muddied that point.
ReplyDeleteRené Descartes said "I think, therefore I am". So I guess I can't be a figment of my own imagination! : )?
exactly you can't be a figment of your own imagination because that would be too circular of a statement.
ReplyDeletebut that my perception of myself is not right, so what I perceive does not exist.
This where I'm having trouble... even though your perception of yourself is different than reality, let's say it's an abstraction of your true self and thus an approximation, it doesn't mean that what you perceive doesn't exist... or that your perception is a non-existent thing... it just may exist differently (more richly or poorly) than you percieve. (I think we're saying the same thing...hope I'm not jumping the gun on your thoughts)
Perception is the problem here I think. If we had perfect perception we could see ourselves and everything as it really was... but as it is we see as though in a cloudy mirror.. like Paul said.
This is a tricky subject, because nothing we can talk about (except mathematics) comes without perception, and nothing you can understand from my communication comes without perception. SO really we have to agree that we can perceive enough of reality as it is in order to communicate....
Once again... exactly my point! "Perception is the problem here..." That is exactly what I am saying. There is a true existence, but my perception of that existence is in question. I made that point in the original post with several examples, like the mosquito. In the Microscope post, we clearly do not see the worms that live in our eye lashes... right??? My perception of myself is wrong... not real. I have not quite arrived at the time to write Cosmology or Condensate yet... I have been thinking about this stuff for many years and I am in no rush to try to write it down. I really enjoy the comment chain!
ReplyDelete:-) well... most of us can't see the worms in the eyelashes :-)
ReplyDeleteI too am enjoying the discussion... good stuff... we really gotta get that beer sometime...
I would like to either write, or see someone begin a disuscussion on the problem of perception as regards the question "do you see what I see... and does it matter if not?"
For instance, is the blue of the sky i see the same blue as you see? If we can't establish they are the same then what about when it comes to moral perception? Is the good I see equivalent to your good as well? Would there have to be a mathematically or logically provable universal good that's good for everyone in order for it to be true that we both have the same set of "good" things, or "blue" things or large and small things?
I have thought about color a lot too! Color is so interesting... for example, the color constancy algorithm that runs in our heads. Our various color sensors do not respond to light as I used to think. Each one has a fairly broad response to light, but each one is slightly different. So, the red sensors also see blue and green too, not just red. By combining the responses in the light processing center of our brain, it can figure out what the thing would look like in sunlight, and "makes it so"! That is why you do not see with your eyes the blue florescent and red incandescent tones that are on pictures. There are some cool color constancy optical illusions that happen when you trick the algorithms. I saw a NOVA (or like that) back in the 80s and I have never been able to find it to watch it again.
ReplyDeleteBut, to your point, I agree... we can measure the responses of our eyes to various colors, and we can see that we are all "tricked" the same way by the illusion, but it is still a stretch to say that our perception is the same... after all, I do not even know for sure if you exist! Remember?
Another thought about the "moral perception". I think that points to the issue I am exploring with my "I do not exist" series. I do not mean that there is no real me, but rather that I can not be sure that my perception of me is the real me. So, I think it is like that for moral perception of "universal good" or maybe absolute truth. If there is some real me that I perceive one way and a mosquito perceives another way, then that does not change the real me. If I perceive an absolute truth one way and you perceive it another, then that does not change the truth.
ReplyDeleteThis has some relation to case law also. I read recently that case law is a relatively recent development (a couple of hundred years if I remember right). So now judgments are based on how earlier rulings interpreted the law. The article said that in the past, the judgment tended to go back to the principles of the law rather than prior related cases.
On the other hand, I think the Jewish legal system shows that the problem has been around for a long time! It seems to me that there was more arguing about what teacher a person followed than about the actual scripture that the teacher based his teachings on. I guess things never change...
I really paid no attention to his topic recently. It has been an area of interest to me since I was a child. Recently I have spent more time thinking about it partly because I realize how few people realize that their perception of reality is so far from what the simplest facts of science reveal us to be. As I think about how angles can move among us unseen, how Christ wlaked on water, floated up into heaven and passed through walls, it is comforting to realize that what we percieve does not actually exist as we perceive it. I hope to have time soon to bring the series to an end with the final installment... I do not exist, condensate.
ReplyDelete