I'll say (repeat?) a few words about why I think the establishment seems hostile to your work. My own sense is that your primary goal is not so much to understand the truth about how things work (which should be the primary goal of any scientist, in my opinion), but instead your main goal is to be perceived as a "radical and visionary theorist". It seems to me that, whenever your views start to seem too in line with the scientific establishment (which I apparently embody to you), you go out of your way to reword things in a way that the scientific establishment will disagree with.
You say that the world that we experience is entirely a construct of our brain. The world of experience is inside our head, not outside of it. This view (which you label as your view) is exactly what I believe and have said to you dozens of times !!! This is exactly what the majority of neuroscientists believe! This is not a radical new theory that separates you from the neuroscience establishment and invalidates all of neuroscience research!
I have found a curious dichotomy in the response of colleagues in discussions on this issue. For when I say that everything you perceive is inside your head, they are apt to reply "why of course, but that is so obvious it need hardly be stated." When on the other hand I turn that statement around and say that their physical skull is located out beyond the farthest things they can perceive around them, to this they object "Impossible! You must be mad!" And yet the two statements are logically identical! How can it be that the one is blindingly obvious while the other seems patently absurd?
You suggest that the latter formulation is somehow deceptive, like I am going out of my way to reword things in a way that the scientific establishment will disagree with. But it is not the wording with which they disagree, it is the idea behind the wording that they (and you) find objectionable. But the most curious thing about this whole issue is that it seems invisible to some people like yourself.
You insist that you agree with the representationalist thesis, and yet you object most vehemently to certain wording. In Point 3 you object to my statement that "what we are observing in conscious experience is the functional architecture of our own brain." You prefer the wording that "what we observe in conscious perceptual experience is the world as it is processed by the functional architecture of our own brain; it is not necessarily the functional architecture itself." Can't you see? That there is a naive realist thesis!
If it is true, as you insist, that you too subscribe to the representationalist view, then why would you object to the above language, that what we are seeing in experience is the representation? Isn't that the very definition of representationalism?
There are different levels of naive realism, and you are obviously not one of the more naive of naive realists. Your naive realism is much more sophisticated, to the point of being almost a representationalist view. That is why you insist that you already agree that your experience is inside your head. But there is one last fragment of residual naive realism hidden in your philosophy of perception, of which you seem to be totally unaware, and it is that last fragment that makes you object to the statement that what we are observing in conscious experience is the functional architecture of our own brain.
Our debates typically go round and round in futile circles.
Everything we perceive is inside our head? Of course!
Everybody knows that!
Your skull is beyond the dome of the sky?
Nonsense! Absurd!
The world of experience appears as a volumetric
spatial structure? Trivially obvious!
There are actual volumetric
pictures in the brain? Nonsense, totally absurd!
Our brain
encodes all of the information content of our experience? Of course,
who would argue with that?!
Our brain encodes volumetric spatial
pictures? Nonsense!
Our experience is the result of electrical
activation in the brain? Of course!
What we see in our experience
is that electrical activation? Nonsense, absurd!
We cannot see
the external world directly? Of course, everybody knows that!
The
electrical activity in your brain is shaped like the world? Nonsense!
Can we at least agree on one thing? Can we at least agree that we DO in fact disagree? I find it most confusing when you claim that I am fabricating differences between our viewpoints in order to boost my image as a "radical and visionary theorist", while at the same time objecting vehemently to what seems to me to be a series of self-evident facts.
Well, whether you can see it or not, one thing is for sure, that this is NOT a NON-issue or a simple pseudo-problem, as you suggest. That would have been smoked out long ago in the excruciating four-year-long BBS review process. (Believe me, they tried!) And if it were a NON-issue, it would not be getting so many otherwise reasonable people so ticked off. The fact that merely discussing this issue as a theoretical possibility makes so many people so angry or defensive, (see the commentaries!) suggests that I might be on to something interesting.
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© 2003 Steven Lehar, Manchester, MA USA. All rights reserved.