No. Perception is a mental state. Reception is the actual excitation and processing of external stimuli by the senses, before it turns into perception by our brains. Mental perception is the brain's "best guess" of what the senses are receiving.
MR nailed it here. Senses mean detection of external phenomena. If it's internal, then by definition, you're not receiving any information about the outside world.
I agree. Logic is not a sensory receptor of any kind. It is an extra-sensory process, a function (an abstract potential, program) and it is the abstract processing language of the universe. The ability to perform logically ordered chronologies of information processing in an implacable manner. All things in the universe including the universe are a result of the logical mechanics of it's universal values and functions. Self Assembling Patterns. Revealed to us via our sensory receptions and cognitive perceptions.
Are you saying that when you see an elephant, you really believe there is a real elephant?! Science told us this doesn't work that way. All we are aware of are our "percepts". So, when you believe there is an elephant because you believe you're looking at one, all you are aware of is a percept. Sure, the percept seems an awful lot like a real elephant except you have no idea what would be a real elephant. All you are aware of is a percept that may or may not be a percept of something, and in any case something you don't know what. So objects, as we are aware of them, and at least as far as we understand what's really going on, are things in our mind. Still, I guess we can't stop ourselves from believing percept to be percepts of real things. In fact, we take them for the real thing. Me too. OK, that was a derail. That's all probably true but it doesn't matter much. Still, take logical objects to be just as much objects as your elephant. It's just a different kind of objects, but we're familiar with that, as we have to accommodate not only visual objects but also smell objects, but also thing like pains and tiredness and what not, all very different from each other but all with the same characteristic that they are brought to us by our senses. Logic doesn't differ more than any two senses differ from each other. Think of pains and visual object. The object of our sense of logic is obviously logic and more specifically logical relations, or at least a class of logical relation. So there. Isn't that good enough? We don't have a sense of mathematics. Only logic. We use our logical sense to invent mathematical ideas. We have logical intuitions without having to learn logic. We do not have mathematical intuitions unless we learn maths. Platonism is a metaphysical idea. We can choose for ourselves whether to believe in it. Logic, we don't have a choice, really like we don't have to choice whether we see an elephant or not. Well, you can also choose to believe that. Sure, you can believe that. You already believe there are elephants. It's just one little step more. Well, that's all we need. Logic is a capacity not only of our brain, but of any neurobiological tissue. Ours just evolved the longest, and so perhaps it's best. Our sense of logic is just the part we are aware of, through our intuitions. Works a bit like memory when you get to remember something, but also like some other impressions, which are essentially secondary percepts, i.e. something like interpretations of our primary percepts in terms of more abstract objects, like threats, possibilities etc. Scientists for being too slow and ideological. Nothing extrasensory. It works like nociception, memory, and much like any intuition we may have. Me, I'm quite sure p and q implies p and there's nothing extrasensory about it. It's not so different from remembering something, except you don't have to learn it. All you have to learn are the words to express it, not very different from the words we use to speak, except meaning is learnt throughout our lives. EB
??? My thesis is not that logic is any kind of sensory receptor. Well, given this shows you can't read the OP properly, what the point of you reading anything I say. Go on, keep misrepresenting what I say. That must do you a lot of good, somehow. EB
You've already committed the Fallacy of Special Pleading to allow logic as a some sort of "sense". It's hardly a stretch to allow mathematics as well. You draw an arbitrary cut-off.
This is what you say in your OP: "why science has not yet recognised, as far as I know, our sense of logic as a sense of perception" This certainly sounds like a sensory receptor. Otherwise, how is it you're perceiving? Sticking one's fingers in one's ears is not a valid refutation. It is an admission of the indefensible. That will help readers of the thread, if not you.
Are you saying that science is auything other than a precept? I mean to say .... if an elephant is a precept then the science that claims it to be is also. A mere mental construct that has consensus agreement just as the observation of an elephant has.
Sure, why not? How could it be otherwise? I thought this was no news. Whoa. Still leaving in the 19th century, are you? OK, not that it makes any kind of difference. Hmm, or may be it does. EB
Are you saying that you don't?! Of course I do. Not any science that I'm aware of. My undergraduate background was in the biological sciences and certainly everyone believed that plants and animals really exist, that the past really happened, that biochemistry really occurs, and so on. The idealistic sort of philosophers have indeed argued in the way you suggest and I'm sure some scientists here and there have been influenced by them. But I'm most emphatically not a philosophical idealist. I'm very much a realist, as are the vast majority of scientists that I've met. Astronomers believe that stars exist, biologists believe that biological organisms exist, geologists believe that rocks and landforms exist. Physical science is realist by its nature, since otherwise there wouldn't be any "physical". No,no,no. I don't buy into the fantasy that "we" are little spiritual souls, homunculi watching the "physical" world on some "inner" TV monitor (that displays qualia I guess). For one thing it's solipsistic, since it reduces not only the tables and the chairs, but other people, to my own personal "percepts". (Whatever a 'percept' is supposed to be.) When I argue with you, I don't imagine that I'm just arguing with voices in my own head (if I had a head). Intellectual disputes can't be resolved by upping one's meds. (If there were any meds, there isn't any neurochemistry either.) So it's anti-physical science, since it seemingly denies astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology and all the rest, reducing them not just to psychology, but to one individual's psychology (mine). Objectivity disappears and everything is subjective. The problem then is giving any meaning to 'reality' and distinguishing it from madness. It transforms me from a biological being in an environmental context into something transcendental, into whatever it is that's aware of my "percepts", but isn't itself included among the percepts. The 'unknown knower'. And it doesn't really seem to address the problem of perception. It doesn't explain what a "percept" is, what a 'mind'/'spirit'/'self'/'soul' is, or how the latter 'perceives' the former on the supposed inner TV monitor of phenomenal awareness. It's like trying to account for the origin of reality by appealing to God, as the cosmological theistic arguments do. That just replaces one mystery with an even larger mystery. I don't think that it's helpful to make the same kind of moves with perception. Or at least that's your metaphysical belief. I don't share it. I think that there are better (and more realistic) ways of conceiving reality. It's probably helpful to the rest of us to understand what your metaphysical presuppositions are. I suppose that if one adopts your idealistic presuppositions, then that move might be easy to make. I don't find it particularly convincing though. You seem to be trying to make room for logic as another sense by redefining sense away from what the vast majority of of us think senses to be.
There's a problem with this sentence. It introduces the notion "as far as we understand what's really going on". What can this possibly mean if awareness of "objects" is in our mind? Does it refer to what's "really going on", in our mind? Where is that? Perhaps the sentence underlines the difficulty of abstracting our awareness of the supposed "objects". Are they in our mind, or "out there"? Where then, is "out there"?
Sure, I know you do. That's what I said. It's called "naive realism". We are all subject to it. So, you're not really reading. Or you are forgetting as you read. No. Science doesn't say anything about the ontology of the world. Or if it says anything then you can expect it will be shown wrong sooner or later, like Newton. Science talk of elementary particles. So, you have to decide whether things that exist are elementary particles or elephants. You can't have both, or that would be a kind of Dualism. And while we know our qualia, we don't actually know our elephants and our elementary particles. Science is best understood as saying nothing about the ontology of the world and instead to be about predicting what we will observe in the future, or more accurately, what we will subjectively experience. You're doing the wrong reading. I'm not idealist. I'm a rationalist, meaning empiricism and logic. I am accordingly agnostic about the ontology of the world beyond my conscious mind. ??? Who talked about souls?! Ah, yes, it's you. No, it's not solipsistic. I believe like you in the reality of the world outside my mind, including other people. I'm just not so naive that I would take my percepts to be the real things. There's nothing anti-science ni what I say. There's as much science in my conception as in yours. Objectivity doesn't disappear but it is correctly interpreted as a belief, while subjectivity is knowledge. However, what we do, although necessarily based on what we know, it in fact in line with what we believe. If there is a lion, I may know the qualia of the lion percept, but what I will do will be motivated by my belief that there is a dangerous lion rather than qualia. As I said, little difference. Again, nothing transcendental. I have no idea where you find all those terms. We don't absolutely need to know the reality as it is. All we need is that there should be a process that results in our existence. Our representation of this process doesn't need to realist. All it needs is that it should help us adapt our actions and behaviour to the world. Yes, well, Copernic did exactly the same thing so I'm perfectly happy not to play the role of the Pope. You do as you please. EB
I'm not suggesting there is nothing beyond my own mind, merely that what we naively take to be objects of the real world, like an elephant, are in facts objects of our mind. That doesn't preclude that there should be something else beyond our minds that would be the original thing, but something none of us, not even science, knows as such. We see elephants. Science see elementary particles. What there is, who knows? And I can assure you I lead a perfectly normal like. I go out to buy food, go for a walk, meet friends. Nothing different. Nothing like the end of the world. EB
I'm inclined to think of both of those as different parts of the perception process. Our eyes supply us information about the world around us. Then our brains and cognitive processes try to identify what we are seeing through an elaborate pattern-recognition process. Yes, that's certainly part of it. The end product of perception is often a judgement, something like: "I just saw an elephant!" Certainly when I judge that I saw an elephant, it's a fallible judgement that might conceivably be incorrect. Maybe what I saw wasn't an elephant at all and I misidentified it. In which case I would have to go back to the drawing board, reapply the pattern-recognition task and try once again to identify whatever it is. Or else try to describe whatever it is in more raw-data form: size, shape, color, speed. That involves judgement too, and the description might in turn be mistaken. Perhaps we can say that whenever we try to attach words and concepts to perception, we are introducing the possibility of error. But, none of this suggests that what I see isn't something really out there in the world, let alone that it's naive to think it was. None of it suggests that what I really saw was a mysterious mental object in my own mind called a "percept" that must be whatever it seems to be and can't be misidentified. That's just bad philosophy in my opinion.
Yes, I struggled with that myself. I was trying to separate the act of receiving external information with the translation into electro chemical signals, which in turn are converted by the brains to produce a sensory experience or an actual internal holographic image.
I didn't say there wasn't something out there. Seeing is essentially our brain using incident light to create a percept, percept which is entirely inside your brain, unlike things supposed to be out there. The only thing you can be conscious of is the percept itself. Science. Since you are conscious of an elephant upon seing an elephant, it can only be that the elephant is nothing but the percept inside your mind. So the elephant you see is nothing but the way your brain represents to you the something which is out there. Nothing Platonic or transcendental about that. Just science and common sense. And a few elephants. EB
