Dreams

[Ocean11 0]

Then he croaked.

[damian 0]

Yep, he died at the end of the movie. I was going to throw that on the end, but I decided against it for no good reason.

[snowboard_freak 0]

 Quote:

Originally posted by deebee:
[QB
In fact, you cant even see the mountain, you just think you can. Your eyes detect changes in light, these are transposed into pulses of energy and are transmitted to your brain which recognises this arrangement of energy as a mountain. Your brain then lets you know that you are seeing a mountain and also goes to the effort of recontrcting an exact likness of teh mountain. But are you actually seeing the mountain? No.
[/QB]

Whoa, now your starting to spin me out!! Especially in the state of mind that i am at the moment.

[damian 0]

SB-freak,

you can't even feel the chair you are sitting on, but your brain is telling you that you can and you only find it comfortable because your belief system allows you to as a result of your positive experiences that you have had with chairs in the past. I love my dog, but I bet a person who was attacked by one when they were 3 years old doesn't. How you gain an experience (via which sense/s) doesnt matter, all that matters is how that experience shqaped your present beliefs and how intense the experience was in terms of the utilised sense/s relative to the what the intensity would have been had the experience been gained using your other available senses.

[Markie 0]

I'm sorry, deebee, I have to disagree with you here. You say I can't really feel the chair I'm sitting on, it's only my brain telling me I can feel it.

Really now, who do you think I'm going to believe, my brain telling me I CAN feel the chair or you telling me NOT to believe my brain and that I actually can't feel it?

 

Oh, no! I just realized what you're doing. You're purposely saying something obviously wrong and then sitting back and laughing while some idiot argues with you about it!

I fell for it!

[damian 0]

Markie, I dont know (or care) if it true or not, it was something I read once. I really didnt understand it at the time.

 

However I do believe that your experience of feeling the chair is a function of your beliefs about chairs.

[Ocean11 0]

What deebee says here is true but somewhat academic. Of course there is a slight lag between the light hitting our retinas and our brain decoding the message. And sometimes the lag is longer than we might like, quite noticeably so (I just didn't see the bus coming!) but that is what's generally known as 'seeing', and the word can even be used to cover the lag involved, as in the example with the bus.

 

Waking up with a jolt one night, I remember being convinced I was looking at a small girl standing in the next room. Naturally I was quite shocked as we don't keep small girls in our house. Then from the top down, exactly like she was dissolving, she resolved herself into a chair with some clothes draped over it and a pile of books. Jeezus Christ, I thought to myself, that was some pretty defective seeing.

 

This just demonstrates the difference between the aspects of interface and computation.

 

Of course, thinking without the lags necessarily imposed by spoken language may well be more immediate and 'real' than what we un-handicapped people are pleased to call real.