Amazing!

One of the interpretations of the Heisenberg uncertainty principal is that the act of observing affects the thing being observed. In classical physics one can think in terms of a micrometer altering the dimensions of the thing being measured because it touches and therefore slightly deforms the object being measured. In the case of quantum physics knowing something accurately collapses the probability distribution of the thing you discover. This occurs regardless of how one comes by the information. This has some profound implications including conjugate pair entanglement. It would appear that reality is vastly more complex than even our most sophisticated models would indicate.

I have read that our consciousness can influence an experiments results .I have no experience or proof of this .But if that is true then does our consciousness create or shape reality?

Hi allosaurus,
The Mayans from 2000bc had a base twenty system they used three symbols for
Numbers a capsule shaped she'll was 0 a dot counted 1 each and a horizontal line equaled 5.
Therefore three dots with three lines under dots equaled 18 , two dots one line under dots 7.

We observe behavior and from that we can conjecture what is responsible for that behavior. In normal experience water behaves like a true fluid but when we look closely enough we see that water is made up of tiny particles called molecules. If we break these molecules up into their constituent elements we no longer have water. If we are designing a pump viewing water as a smooth fluid is not only acceptable it is preferable. However, if we are designing an electrolysis vessel we must employ a different model. Neither of these models tell us what water is but they do tell us how water behaves under different circumstances. We can gain some understanding of reality by observing behavior and then by constructing a testable model of what the underlying mechanism might be that is responsible for that behavior. If the test of the model produces the expected results then we can say that the model is strengthened. That does not mean that we have gained understanding of the underlying mechanism but that we have obtained a more complete understanding of its behavior. In that way the model bears a useful relationship to reality. But it is not reality, it is only a model.

The only entity you are aware of when you are pricked out of the blue is yourself.

You said that twice.

"what is it?" might be asking for an explanation of something the e-prime folks try to avoid --- existence--- by removing any form of 'to be' from English. Perhaps the best that can be done is to recognize that which exists and discover the identities and interactions. 'what is it?' for an existent would be as hard to discover as is the 'what is it?' for consciousness. Might be best to just stick with 'what it is' as with discovering the identities of that which exists in terms of attributes and laws of action.

He was trying to apply his knowledge by classifying the orangutan in terms of his existing concepts of living beings, not yet realizing that there are more than the three. He seems to have been guessing that it was more similar in some way to a bird than cats or people (maybe by being in a tree). Yet he wasn't sure, showing that he saw something was wrong, implicitly recognizing that something essential was missing but not yet quite aware of the need for further subdivision of his preliminary concept of animal or living thing.

Chapter 3 in IOE describes how abstractions from abstractions are formed through subdivision and chapter 5 describes how definitions change as new knowledge of more facts requires changing definitions in order isolate essential characteristics within a wider field of knowledge.

Ayn Rand did not write in terms of perceiving actions (or feelings) apart from entities, or "deconstructing" them into entities. You perceive an entity in terms of some of its characteristics and actions.

She didn't say that you have to conceptualize entities in order to perceive them or to accept the perception as real. You have to perceive individual entities before you can isolate their similarities and differences in a field of other entities in order to classify and conceptualize them. Perceptual awareness is the base of all knowledge and is required before forming concepts.

Perception, not sensation, is the conscious starting point of your conceptual awareness grasping the world: It is an automatic integration of sensations you are not aware of in isolation; you are not aware in the form of isolated, unintegrated sensations, each unretained beyond the immediate moment.

Immediately before the sentence you quoted as a seeming contradiction of perception as the self evident base, "The knowledge of sensations as component of percepts it not direct, it is acquired by man much later; it is a scientific, conceptual discovery", she wrote:

"Although, chronologically, man's consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual—epistemologically, the base of all of man's knowledge is the perceptual stage."

"Sensations, as such, are not retained in man's memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation... Discriminated awareness begins on the level of percepts."

"A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of 'direct perception' or 'direct awareness,' we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident."

There is no contradiction. Starting with perceptions you build up a hierarchy of concepts through a process of further abstraction (see for example chapter 3, "Abstractions from Abstractions"), building concepts on top of concepts in accordance with essential facts in order to understand ever increasing distinctions as you increase the scope and depth of your knowledge in the form of conceptual awareness. Perception is the conscious base of the whole hierarchy of concepts. That is the structure of conceptual knowledge, not a "perceptual chain".

To observe that "percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident" does not contradict the necessity of later discovering as, scientific conceptual knowledge "sensations as components of percepts":

Once you have sufficient conceptual knowledge and have begun to think scientifically you can discover the physical and biological components and causes of the perceptions themselves and conceptualize the underlying nature of perception as composed of stimuli of the sense organs in the form of sensations that are integrated into perception.

The perception of something as elementary as a pin prick is not, without further observation, enough to perceive the pin as the entity. Restricted to touch alone, you would have to at least feel the rest of the object or you could not distinguish it from needles, staples, etc. If it were your first experience of that kind you wouldn't know what the object is. You only perceive one aspect of the object from the prick alone and that isn't enough to identify a pin in contrast to other similar entities. But it is more than a pre-conceptual sensation because the sequence of a sustained prick across time is automatically integrated into a perception of the unknown entity in terms of one characteristic.

All of what we know in science is based upon our ability to perceive the universe. Happily, our perceptions are not limited to those in the human sensory toolbox - as our scientific tools improve, we change our concept of the physical reality around us.

Jan

I could not follow your link, but I looked up Stevinus and found him interesting. Base-10 math is a lot older than Stevinus, though. The Egyptians used it (if you do not mind occasionally using pictures of toads for numbers) http://discoveringegypt.com/egyptian-.... What we think of as base 10 place-value system was used by Hindu mathematicians in about the 4th C AD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E.... The Bablyonians counted base-12 and many other lands retained some of their traditions, as we do with the degrees in a circle and hours of the day - both of which are base 12. That does not mean that we do not use a decimal system for other calculations, though.

Jan

The decimal appears to have roots in our digits. I think that is based in nature, so I would say it is natural.

David Kelley's book Evidences of the Senses discusses this in detail.

I think his answer would be that you perceive a prick. Then you deconstruct the prick to discover it is a pin instead of say a thorn or shard of glass.

It is important to realize that scientists "understand" reality in terms of models and that most of these models are behavioral rather than existential. By this I mean that these models describe how things behave not what things are. Newton described the behavior of gravity with extraordinary accuracy and clarity but he admitted that he did not know the true nature of the underlying mechanism. Newtonian dynamics works well enough to enable the navigation of spacecraft from one planet to another so we can conclude that it bears a useful relationship to reality.
Einstein pointed out that Newton's model is incomplete. He showed that under extreme conditions of velocity or matter density Newtonian dynamics becomes increasingly inaccurate. Einstein's formulation of general relativity was an attempt to resolve the inadequacies of Newton. He did this by showing that gravitation can be thought of as a distortion in space and time that is caused by the presence of mass. This model satisfactorily resolved the issue of the anomalous behavior of the orbit of Mercury and was further verified by observations of gravitational bending of light rays during an eclipse. However, Einstein him self realized that his theories were also incomplete and this was the motivation of his quest for a unified field theory. We now realize that special and general relativity have boundaries where, like Newton, they begin to break down. These boundaries are the very small and the very large. Relativity theories, being examples of classical physics models, are difficult to reconcile with quantum mechanics. This is because when things get very small or very large the classical theories fail to predict behavior. Thus the search for a "Theory Of Everything" or TOE, that unifies classical and quantum physics. The problem is that while both theories predict behavior with exceptional accuracy they appear to be in conflict with one another. The key word here is "behavior". These theories describes how reality behaves they shed little light on what reality is! In this sense, there is a barrier between physics and philosophy. It may be that the question "what is it?" is meaningless and the only valid question is "what does it do?"

Without Arabic numerals, I've wondered what the Mayans used for numbers.
And then there's that decimal point!

The Mayans were pretty good at measurements and numbers. They had a year at 365.2422 days
and the nuclear clock scientists say has the year at 365.2420 plus or minus .0005!

Without putting too fine a point on it, Rand says: "It is not an accident that man's earliest attempts at measurement ... consisted of relating things to himself -- as for instance taking the length of his foot as a standard of length, or adopting the decimal system, which is supposed to have its origin in man's ten fingers as units of counting."

Rand equivocates with "... which is supposed to have its origin..." She may have known that that decimal system is not "natural."

I understand the easy intuition, but the fact is that the decimal system was proposed about 1600 CE by Simon Stevin (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_S...., I know from the works of Denise Schmandt-Besserat that the Sumerians did not have more than 5=1 1 1 1 1 for thousands of years after the invention of the first clay tokens for counting.

Moreover, the Romans counted by 12s as is evidenced by the ratios of the sestertius to the "denarius" -- admittedly "ten" but only as a debasement from 12.

Care to comment?

Thanks for posting this, k. While I certainly agree in the main with the general tenor and thrust of ITOE, I have many questions about specifics. Perhaps you can offer some insight.

Rand says, "Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident." But she seems to contradict that when she continues: "The knowledge of sensations as component of percepts it not direct, it is acquired by man much later; it is a scientific, conceptual discovery."

I understand the second part. I understand the first part. I do not perceive an empirical link between the two.

Nothing is more directly perceptible than a pin-prick. You do not need to conceptualize "pins" in order to accept the perception as real.

It is true that much later along the perceptual chain, it can be done to understand that percepts are the abstraction of sensations. But that is a very deep and conceptual identification itself.

Can you clarify?

lol. yea. we don't do that here...LOL

I got a glimpse of this entity to unit process when we took our toddler to the zoo. He had been to the zoo before, but he was starting to put things into categories. He saw an orangutan. He said with confusion in his voice, "Cat?" With even more confusion in his voice he asked "Bird!???" All animals in his mind could be classified as people, cats, or birds. It was funny and a little glimpse into this cognitive process.

Alright, real AR stuff; Cool.
Txs for posting.