I feel convinced that our ‘experience of reality’ is really the experience of a simulation of reality. (You write, “We live in our model and have absolutely, positively no direct knowledge of anything else – none ever.”). This seems to be how I experience reality, but you provide a compelling reason for why:
This makes perfect sense about external experience, but it’s interesting to try to apply it to internal experience. It might be true that what we think we’re thinking or feeling is actually simulations of the actual (physical) thoughts and feelings, but it seems like it should ground out at some point—the experience is a simulation of something else, but it’s also a thing in itself.
Is there a short-hand way to distinguish the experience of direct, immediate perception and the experience that is awareness of what you’ve perceived? I don’t suppose the former involves any simulating, and that is where things ground out.
the experience is a simulation of something else, but it’s also a thing in itself.
Could you expand on this? I’m not sure what you mean from a couple possibilities.
We perceive our simulation in some way, possibly reusing the same machinery we use to perceive the external world. ‘Consciousness’ being recursive, and all..
You think you’re seeing the color red. It’s how your brain passes you wavelengths in your environment, or it’s a memory about such an experience, or it’s a generalization about red.
You feel happy. This is how your brain (I’m not sure how or if the complex nervous system in your gut is involved) passes you an emotional state.
The thing I’m trying to get at is, are these experiences of redness or happiness simulations of something else, or is a person experiencing them as primary a thing as the red object.
This idea may not be ideally clear at my end. What are the possibilities you’re seeing?
You will have to clarify what you mean by ‘a person experiencing them’. This sounds like a little homunculus and I assume that you don’t mean that. It leads to an infinite series of watchers watching watchers.
This makes perfect sense about external experience, but it’s interesting to try to apply it to internal experience. It might be true that what we think we’re thinking or feeling is actually simulations of the actual (physical) thoughts and feelings, but it seems like it should ground out at some point—the experience is a simulation of something else, but it’s also a thing in itself.
Is there a short-hand way to distinguish the experience of direct, immediate perception and the experience that is awareness of what you’ve perceived? I don’t suppose the former involves any simulating, and that is where things ground out.
Could you expand on this? I’m not sure what you mean from a couple possibilities.
We perceive our simulation in some way, possibly reusing the same machinery we use to perceive the external world. ‘Consciousness’ being recursive, and all..
You think you’re seeing the color red. It’s how your brain passes you wavelengths in your environment, or it’s a memory about such an experience, or it’s a generalization about red.
You feel happy. This is how your brain (I’m not sure how or if the complex nervous system in your gut is involved) passes you an emotional state.
The thing I’m trying to get at is, are these experiences of redness or happiness simulations of something else, or is a person experiencing them as primary a thing as the red object.
This idea may not be ideally clear at my end. What are the possibilities you’re seeing?
You will have to clarify what you mean by ‘a person experiencing them’. This sounds like a little homunculus and I assume that you don’t mean that. It leads to an infinite series of watchers watching watchers.