Perception of Non-existent objects
When one is dreaming in sleep, one sees various objects in his mind. Yet the objects visible in the dreams don't exist in real world. One may see people one never met or go to places in one's dreams which don't exist in real world.
One flies in an aircraft in the night sky in one's dream during sleep, which don't exist in real world, yet one sees it in his mind vividly.
So where do the images come from? Does this phenomena implies that human perceptions could occur without actual existence of objects? Do human perceive things all differently?
Can humans perceive objects which don't exist?
One flies in an aircraft in the night sky in one's dream during sleep, which don't exist in real world, yet one sees it in his mind vividly.
So where do the images come from? Does this phenomena implies that human perceptions could occur without actual existence of objects? Do human perceive things all differently?
Can humans perceive objects which don't exist?
Comments (112)
And by blind, I mean completely blind, not merely legally blind.
Of course, its a memory, not a 'live stream'. So it can be experienced in a hazy or unrealistic matter. And we have the gift to take experiences in our memory and shift them around into 'potentials'. So I can imagine a horse with a horn on its head. This is the source of creativity and problem solving. To fix a problem you don't know the answer to, you often need to piece things together in ways that you haven't observed before.
Maybe you do, but there is no vivid in my dreams. I strive for information, and find it lacking in dreams, although I often don't notice. For instance, I cannot read anything, because it is an attempt to acquire information that isn't there, and making up fiction is unacceptable.
Maybe others dream differently and more vividly, and have far less trouble accepting made-up stories as fact.
The mind seems to create a sort of subconscious model of the world from either sensory or memory sources, but both present that model to the conscious parts, active both when awake and in dreams. Think of it as a sort of shared section running different input subroutines.
You seem to say largely the same thing as I just attempted.
I even got an injury from a dream of fighting an orca, something to add to my list of injuries from animals that sound hostile but were not actually.
Interesting posts and points from you all. I think what Corvus had in mind is very important, and I agree with him that while dreaming, we often see people and places that are not known to us. But why does this happen? NoAxioms states that we can't attempt to acquire information that is not there (in the dreams). Honestly, I think that the way we could approach the complex world of dreams (and nightmares!) is using a bit of imagination rather than explaining or arguing whether the gold spoon exists in the non-existent world or not. My basic point: I believe the two worlds (dreamlike and real) exist.
The people and objects located in them are accessories, and they pass through, but without altering the order. We have to keep in mind an important feature, and it is the fact that I exist in both worlds. Therefore, if I am conscious of myself in dreams and reality, they are existent worlds to me. Dreams are just more complex and blurred, but plausible. It is not possible to see a clock melting like in Dali's painting. But who am I to deny the possibility of this in my dreams? If clocks melt in my dreams, this is at least real in one part of my two worlds.
Interesting point. But if the images in dreams are from the memories, why some folks see images that they have never come across in their lives, or meet people they cannot recognise and never met, or go to the places they have never been in their whole lives before?
Aftet having had so many of these dreams, my dream-self began to realize it was a dream, and not get hopeful. It dawned on me that I can't read in my dreams. Now, whenever I see a tornado, I look for something to read. If I can't make out what it says, I'm dreaming, and don't get excited about the tornado.
Unfortunately, on several occasions, I've managed to trick myself into thinking I could read. When I woke up, disappointed again, I realized I wasn't reading anything. Just gibberish, sometimes more weird scribbles than actual letters.
I'm also very annoyed that, on several occasions, when I realized I was dreaming, it occured to me that I can do anything I want, but I really couldn't. I try to fly, but can't get going. So I wake up doubly annoyed.
Makes you wonder what Helen Keller dreams were like, especially before communication was established. Dreams of a person with only memory of touch and such for reference experience.
Quoting javi2541997
My experience is that most characters are unknown to me, but I already know that in the dream, and I already know the people that I know, meaning that I don't look at people and suddenly recognize them. I don't really remember looking at people at all because for the most part, it doesn't work. It may be different for other people, especially the people-people that are good at remembering names and faces the way I am not. My dreams are pretty abstract, and I can sometimes fly without aid in them, and other times I cannot.
Quoting javi2541997
I would agree, but I use a definition of 'exists' that allows both to exist. Others using a different definition would perhaps say that the former does not exist, nor maybe neither.
Quoting Corvus
The unrecognized things usually still make some sort of sense. They're the sort of thing that we might find ourselves experiencing, especially if you lead a life that often experiences new places. One would expect to dream of experiencing yet more new things.
Quoting Corvus
Funny, but I have little recall of explicit dreams of sounds. Sound carries so much information to me, that for it to be in my dream, it would have to convey something that it cannot, so more often than not, my dreams don't have a significant soundtrack.
Not sure how time passage is directly perceived. They've put people in sensory deprivation environments, and then ask them later how long they had been in there, and almost all answer a far larger amount of time than what really passed. This says that the sense of time passage is mostly due to external senses.
Quoting Patterner
I've had two real ones come right at me (same place, same path, 16 years apart) but I never saw them, being bunkered. I have died a few times doing violent things, but I don't recall a tornado being one of them. I had almost hourly nightmares when I was about 6, and those where repetitive, predictable, and utterly horrible. I occasionally do reruns of old remembered dreams, but you could keep the nightmare
ones, each of which I had named.
Quoting Patterner
This doesn't always work for me. If I'm deep in, I'm too stupid to run tests to see if I'm dreaming (pinch me). If I think of the test, I already know the answer. Flying is pretty easy if you know you're dreaming, but not so easy if you don't know.
The weirdest ones are experiences that put memories in your head that are not marked 'dream'. Maybe days later you suddenly realize that it was just a dream and say your car wasn't actually totaled.
Quoting noAxiomsI always know how, remembering how I've managed in past dreams. Just freestyle swimming through the air. But I can't make it work when I know I'm dreaming and should be able to. Just as well, I suppose. Only very rarely have my flying dreams been satisfactory. I'm always running into power lines, no matter how high I go. I could be a mile up, and still hitting them. :rofl:
Quoting noAxiomsThat's fascinating. I don't remember that happening. I think there's a scifi/fantasy story with some aliens that communicate by implanting memories into your mind. You remember a conversation that didn't actually happen, but you now have the information they wanted to give you.
Our empathic ability. It's the ability to mentally construct, visualize, and actually feel things that we are not directly exposed to. So if you know what it feels like to see things, then you probably have the ability to evoke the same or similar feeling when you don't see anything. The same areas in the brain are activated when you see something and when you imagine seeing it.
Because the human mind has the capability for creativity. Creativity often comes about by taking bits and pieces that belong to one thing, and then applying them to another. Think of a unicorn for example. Its a horse with a horn on its head. Now make a duocorn. That's a horse with two horns on its head. Keep going. That's why you can dream of things you've never seen before.
Well, in your example, we could agree that we saw the unicorn before because it is a combination of two previous existent elements in our world. A horse and unicorn. I think it would be interesting to dream something you didn't see before and our creativity cannot process.
One explanation for this is that the whole image in a dream is not an exact image from memory. That image could be amalgamation of several images. For example, you subconsciously take different parts of a face from several people that you know and blend it all up, resulting with a new face that you've never seen before.
Can different images be amalgamated into totally different another image? Who do you get if you amalgamate images of Elon Musk with Bill Gates, Taylor Swift and Madonna? Why would you do that?
To scare children on Halloween!?
https://openart.ai/discovery/sd-1006000370197221428
But this is not true with respect to consensus reality. Also the physical world, which everybody would agree "exists" because it is self-evident, has a relative (illusory/dreamlike) appearance to whatever organism is conscious of it.
We're always inevitably going to hit our heads against the old wall of the "world-in-itself", as if it could/should exist without the perspective of the local observer. As a networking species of consensus making, we will always fall back on the common sense notions for knowing the difference between what is meant by an illusion and the thing that the illusion references in a third-party verifiable world.
Quoting RussellA
You might be scaring the "adults" too.
Definitely not. You have your memory to back up your dreams have factual coherence from the past.
Time and space are regarded as external entities by scientists. But your point seems to indicate they can be internal (mental) entities private to you. Could it be related to Kant?
Often and recently what occurs in my dreams are supernormal stimului which refer directly to the normal everyday world, and just emerge out of interior worries.
In the real world I am a custodian of a meditation center and a Japanese inspired garden.
In the dream world:
I am the sole custodian of a miniature city (think of the Vatican) with endless water terraces. The subterranean pumping network is endless and so are the levers and buttons. It is altogether too much for a single person to take care of (I get lost). As a lone individual I cannot contain or control the pilgrims who come to the city and treat it as if it were a tourist attraction, who transgress every rule that they were blind to from eagerness to see. The crowd is too big and chaotic to learn how to approach the place.
At other times:
The miniature city/state is completely empty and I go in search of company I cannot find, getting lost.
Yes, it is a Kantian point of view. I know that scientists claim that time and space are external entities, but as I said previously, I tried to explain that my argument was not under that frame but another perspective. The basic premise is that we try to determine a basic sense or notion, and for this reason we tend to discard dreams for several reasons. Nonetheless, we usually dream with past experiences, people, and places, and I wouldn't name these dreams as 'illusions' because I literally experienced this in the past. Otherwise, I had to admit that what I lived in the past is somehow not plausible.
Your dreams are interesting, and they have a common set: you custody a place. So, we can say that your dream has a bit of coherence at least. For some complex reasons that are very difficult to explain because dreams are puzzled, you also custody a city. Sometimes is full of elements (water, terraces, subterranean networks, etc.), and others is empty. This has meaning, I am sure. Because yourself is not changing in the dream but the place or scenario. According to your dreams, wouldn't you accept that there could be two realities? Yourself as a custodian of a meditation centre and then as a custodian of those dreamlike cities, which could lack common sense, but I wouldn't label them illusional.
Can't you see Madonna in the eyes and a nose strikingly similar to that of Taylor Swift?
Yes, we are both perceiving an object that doesn't exist.
It has full coherence in the context of my personal experience. It is just an exaggeration of my worries in the mundane realm.
Quoting javi2541997
One reality, two reality, three reality... I'll defer to whatever the consensus is on this as ultimately I don't think it makes much of a difference.
No, I cannot see M or TS in there at all, but then I have never looked at their facial features of the eyes and nose closely before. I tend to look at and identify them with the whole face, hair style and what they wear rather than eyes or nose. You created the image, hence the image exists.
Could sounds in dreams might interrupt the dream, and make the dreamer wake up from sleep, therefore you subconsciously switch the volume off during dreaming?
In my dream one night, I was flying a light airplane over the night sea. In real life, I don't know how to fly airplane, and never plan to learn to fly either. That dream was something that I would never experience or wish in my life time in real life.
So likely when in your dream flying a light airplane of the night sea, I assume that it's likely you flew it straight and level. It's likely that didn't stall the airplane and put it into a tailspin or perform high-G turns or inverted flight.
Having flown sailplanes, done even aerobatics with them and few times been at the controls of motor airplanes, it's the motions that you experience that cannot be duplicated by the smart simulators of today, even if Microsoft Flight Simulator mimics reality very well otherwise. These motions are very mild in passenger aircraft, that nearly everyone has flown in: the acceleration at take off and the tiny effect of turbulence. Yet few have experienced how being in a tailspin feels like or how G-forces are experienced in the air. A roller coaster ride gives some feel of this, but as a roller coaster ride is done on rails, it misses just how smooth aircraft feel as they're not attached to rails.
How that then comes in your dreams is interesting, as usually we see, hear, touch and can even smell something in our dreams, but the inner ear's vestibular system isn't giving us much feedback, especially not something that we haven't experienced. Yet if you have a lot of experience of something, you likely can feel experiencing it in your dream too.
How would we perceive them?
I had a dream where I was trying to escape from captivity and I heard an alarm when I escaped but when I woke up the alarm was actually my alarm clock. So it seems that our minds are not completely shut off from the world and we interpret external stimuli as part of the dream.
The unique experiences we have in a dream is an amalgam of prior experiences. This is how we come up with unique ideas when awake - by logically incorporating various experiences together to come up with a new idea that is applicable to real-world situations. Think of dreams as this same process but without the logical direction that would be applied when we are awake. In the dream world we don't have the external world applying boundaries to our experience. It's more like a runaway process.
Quoting Corvus
What does it mean for our perception to not exist in a material level? Our perceptions and dreams can have a causal impact on the world, no different than when a errant baseball smashes a window. Our ideas and dreams are as real and exist on the same level as the baseball and window. The issue seems to be in thinking of ourselves and our perceptions as distinct, or separate from the world, when we are not.
Exactly. More evidence that the brain (not the eyes) is where objects, real or imaginary, are "seen".
Images in dreams are interesting in the sense that, the dreamer sees images that don't exist in the external world. Where do the dream images come from? You say, well from your memories, experience, and amalgamation of what you have seen before. But there are also images that you have never seen, experienced or the places that you have never been in your life previously in your life.
Where then those images come from?
Of course all the mental images you see and dream exist in your brain. Then while sleep, your brain is supposed to shut down too.
Let say, you are seeing a wall in front of you. You see the rows of bricks piled to make up the wall. But you also notice, the wall is level with the fence next to it. The walls and fence exist in the external wall in material level (materially, you can go and touch and inspect the walls and fences). But the levelness you perceive don't exist in the world. It exists in your mind or the perceiver's mind.
Likewise, absence of sound, emptiness of space don't exist in material level, but they are perceived by the perceiver in the mind.
Now, the levelness of the walls, absence of sounds (silence), emptiness of space don't exist. Are they then pure product of mind, which are caused by the external objects? Or are they something that exist in the world without being noticed until the perceiver notices them? Because everything we perceive must come from external world.
If it did shut down completely you wouldn't be able to wake up to loud (and possibly dangerous) noises in the world.
The places in your dream are amalgams of places you have been in the world. By using an amalgam of places you have been you can create unique places.
There is also the issue of how sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations. When you are asleep, you are being deprived of sensory input, but not completely or else you would not be able to wake in when in danger. The lack of visual input can cause you to hallucinate, or dream in the case of being asleep. You can hallucinate places you have never been, but they all are amalgams of places you have been. Even if you never experienced the idea of extra-terrestrial aliens, you might still arrive at the idea via incorporating several different ideas about life and its existence on other planets.
Quoting Corvus
But this goes back to what I said about thinking that humans are separate from the world. We are not. If the ideas in our mind can cause things to happen in the world then it seems to me that the mind is on the same level as the world. You are simply trying to make a special case for minds, but all that does is cause problems in trying to explain how the mind and world can interact causally when we know that they can - from experience.
Quoting Corvus
Ideas exist. They have a causal impact on our behavior in the world. The idea of Santa Claus causes some people to behave in certain ways in the world. To say that Santa Claus exists in the world instead of in your mind is to simply make a category mistake, not that Santa Claus doesn't exist. It does exist - as an idea, and it exists on the same level as the world because the idea can cause things to happen in the world. That is not to say that the world is made of ideas. Ideas are a complex arrangement of information and it is information that is fundamental, not ideas.
Seeing something means there was an object in the physical world, which came into your retina in the form of lights, and activated your neurons and converted into images, which was transferred into your brain. But in the case of seeing an object in your dreams, you have no external object, which causes all the seeing process.
So what are you actually seeing, when you are seeing a tiger trying to attack you in your dream?
The same type of thing you experience when you make predictions, goals, solve problems, etc. Imagining is part of the process that we use to make predictions and solve problems. One might argue that the more imaginative you are, the more intelligent you are, as you are able to come up with novel ideas to solve problems. When we are awake, most us are able to distinguish between what the world is informing us via our senses and what we imagine. Some with mental disorders like schizophrenia are unable to make this distinction.
When you are asleep you do not have the external world to compare, so you are similar to a schizophrenic when you are dreaming. Dreaming is simply the same process as day-dreaming, or making predictions when you are awake, but without external stimuli to ground you.
Can different images be amalgamated into totally different another image?
- That's basically what amalgamate means. Combining image 1 with image 2 results in an image that is neither image 1 or 2. So, the answer is obviously, yes.
Who do you get if you amalgamate images of Elon Musk with Bill Gates, Taylor Swift and Madonna?
- Someone who isn't Elon Musk with Bill Gates, Taylor Swift or Madonna
Why would you do that?
- To come up with a new image.
Seeing a tiger attacking you in your dream is "seeing something" i.e. seeing an image and motion. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with making predictions, solving problems etc.
Combining image 1 and 2? doesn't make sense to me. How do you combine images? Combine something means mixing something. To mix something you must add 1 substance to the other substance, which is only possible with liquid or powder stuff. If you put down image 1 to image 2, then image 2 will be invisible blocked by the image1. What is going on here?
Quoting night912
You were talking about the images, but suddenly now you are talking a person called someone?
Quoting night912
I don't. Do you? Why do you want to come up with a new image?
You just proved that you're wrong. You combined letters above, resulting in sentences. :up:
[QUOTE]
If you put down image 1 to image 2, then image 2 will be invisible blocked by the image1. What is going on here?[/quote]
How does image 1 and 2 make image 2 invisible ? What is going on here? :chin:
You were talking about images of people, but suddenly now you are talking about a person called someone? :chin:
I do. Why don't you want to come up with a new image? :chin:
That is why I explained in the same post that you cherry-picked that predictions are a type of imagining, and dreams are a type of imagining where you do not have the external world to ground your experience.
What it is like for you to make a prediction and to imagine things when you are awake?
I didn't combine anything at all. I just chose words to make up sentences. Anyway, it is not the same thing as seeing the images in your dreams.
Seeing images in your dreams and making predictions are totally different things happening in your mind. They are not the same activities. Seeing something is visual. Predicting something is imagining. There are two types of prediction. One by your hunch, and the other by inductive reasoning. Both activities involve your intention, will and inference.
Seeing visual images in your dreams is random events happening without any of above. Plus it is visual operation with no imagination, guessing or reasoning.
Imagine imagining something when you don't have the world imposing itself on your senses and mind. The imagining would seem real, like your dream does. The dream would take the place of the world precisely because the world is absent when you are asleep.
You're not seeing anything when you dream. Seeing is the process of using your eyes to take in light. The existence of light is a necessary component of seeing. Can you see anything when the lights are out? You are simply misusing terms.
I saw a tiger in my dream. I do vividly remember the image of the tiger, so that I can even draw it on a piece of paper how it looked. It is a visual experience, which is similar to the visual perception you have in your daily life.
It has nothing to do with making predictions or imagining something for the reasons I have put down on my previous post. Please read it again, if you haven't.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Hegel and Kant have written about the images we see in our dreams as "inner impressions" which are different type of impressions coming from the external world.
I have not used any vague terms or fancy words in my posts, but just said seeing images in dreams are different type of images we see when we are awake in daily life.
You seem to be misusing the word "misuse" without knowing what the word "misuse" actually means.
Human consciousness, by the latest research, revolves around our brain being a prediction machine; "predictive coding theory".
Our perception of reality is basically a controlled hallucination, with our sensory inputs grounding our hallucination so that we can navigate reality. Without that grounding, we hallucinate by the textbook sense of the word. Psychedelic drugs activate such unbound hallucinations by obscuring the flow of sensory information and increasing the brain's predictive measures and in so dislocates us from reality.
This also happens when we dream. The brain predicts without grounding, and because of it we are essentially forming a feedback loop in which we predict based on nothing but memory, that is then fed into itself as the grounding information and because of this unbounded nature, it "swells" into the abstract and surreal nature of our experience.
Like...
Quoting Harry Hindu
Is supporting this theory. Real world sensory information starts to ground the dream as we return back to normal processing.
We are, as Harry says, not dislocated from existence when we dream. We are connected through our memories as the source for our dreams, but unbound to reality in a loss of sensory grounding. Previous research theorized that dreams "manage our memories" and help us categorize and organize our functions. Since if we deprave people of sleep, they become disoriented with reality. With the recent research, it also points to our predictive ability becoming skewed and broken, since we hallucinate when depraved of sleep. Dreams may therefor be our way of "consolidating memory and categorization" while calibrating our predictive function and stream of memory information.
In essence, while sleep resets and balance chemicals in our body, it further cuts off sensory grounding in order to calibrate this link and process. The sensor data that is stored as raw data of short term memory is a very energy costly process that is a strain on our brain, like a muscle. And just like we need to let our muscles heal when pushed to the limits, we need to let the brain organize our short term memory into long term experience for the sake of purging the short term memory so that the next day we can use the previous day experience as coded data used with our prediction function and in turn store new short term memory in order to further reshape the long term coding.
It further supports why children are better at learning and have changing sleep patterns while they grow up; and why the older we get, the more stable our navigation of reality become. Less erratic, and more wise. As long as learning and experiences keep continue in our adult life.
It also supports why the continued use of our brain in old age, help keeping dementia and declining cognitive function away, since just like training our muscles in old age becomes harder, if we don't do it, we quickly deteriorate.
And it supports research into learning, how tests are clear that when we do something intensely before sleep, then the next day we have become slightly better at it.
And this is why sleep and dreaming is so important. Especially if you are feeding a lot of new experiences and information to the brain. The more you learn, experience and do things differently during a day, the more the brain needs to go through enough sleep to settle that information into predictive coding.
We use this to automate our functions and behavior. The more we do something, the more we automate it as the prediction becomes better. The reason we don't think about how we ride bikes is because the predictions are automated, we don't need to.
Getting better at something, therefor is a process of automation. Which can also have the negative effect of automating bad information into the process.
Which is a good explanation for our cognitive biases becoming more rigid the more we focus on just information that aligns with what we already know. And why broadening our knowledge is key to becoming truly wise.
A detailed and good post on the topic. Thank you. However, the OP was more interested in discussing and find out the nature of the visual images we see in our dreams, rather than how dreams work, and why we dream.
Clearly what we see in our dreams are images of the objects in the external world. But some of the images are the ones that we never came across in daily lives, or have anything to do with our experience and memories. The white tiger I have seen my dream for example, was a clear vivid image of a tiger, but I have never seen it in my entire life in real world.
So where does it come from? How is it different from the images we see in daily life from the real objects? Are they same type of images? Then how it does not have its real existence of the object?
It was more the epistemological angle the OP was trying to orient the discussions.
It's in there in the post. All hallucinations in our dreams are the result of ungrounded hallucinations based on the past memories in our short term and long term memory.
Quoting Corvus
This make little sense as hallucinations are failures of prediction. If your brain tries to predict a tiger and you know that white tigers exist, the ungrounded prediction function may produce such a hallucination. It's at the core of what happens when predictions aren't verified by a flow of sensory data.
It also makes little sense by just mentioning art. Artists do this all the time. Imagination is a form of controlled manipulation of our predictions. Are you saying that you cannot possible imagine a pink elephant, even though you have never seen one?
It's just a merge of previously known concepts that you mash up internally. You know pink and you know elephants and now you can expand that hallucinatory imagination to highly detailed rendition of the pink skin on that elephant.
The difference is that dreaming and psychedelic drugs enable a much more intense experience of it since it since it dislocates you from the constant flow of sensory flow data as well as the lack of ability to take action in sync with our prediction function makes the flow of that experience very abstract and nonsensical.
It's why if people close their eyes they seem to have a better ability to imagine something. They essentially subdue the visual sensory flow of data and frees up that grounding mechanism, making it easier to imagine something.
Quoting Corvus
When you look at a cup of coffee, your eyes and your sense of smell constantly feeds your brain with sensory data. Your brain is processing this in relation to memory of cups, coffee, the table which it stands and so on. It uses the sensory data to verify that our internal prediction is correct so as to move our experience forward in time. If we cut of that verification data, nothing prevents our predictions to run out of control, reshaping the color of that cup as we've seen other cups with other colors, or imagine new forms of a cup since nothing grounds our categorization of what "a cup" means to us.
So the question of "where does it come from" and how it differs from real objects becomes somewhat of a nonsense question. Your experience of real life is an hallucination that is verified by the real object. That process forms memory categories that becomes the foundation of how we think about reality and the world around us.
But it's still just an hallucination stored in memory and hallucinations can take any form if nothing grounds it.
And artists create things out of their imagination all the time and these are all coming from their internal manipulation of memorized concepts. Tapping into a similar form of ungrounded hallucination.
I'm not sure where you're going with the OP question, what you are aiming for, but there's not much more to it than what I described. Our experience is an hallucination bound by a flow of sensory data. Cutting that flow makes us hallucinate freely and our memorized concepts start to merge into new forms, shapes and concepts. The combinations of concepts stored in our memory has an almost infinite amount of combinations. A white tiger included.
I think the consistency of normal experience and our ability to compare to perceptive fabrications (e.g., hallucinations, dreams, etc.) are evidence that something normally is exciting your senses; but what that thing is in-itself is impossible to know. It very well could be a mere idea (like ontological idealists say) or a concrete object (like materialists will say) or an object (like physicalists will say) or something unimaginable.
Yet again, isn't Hallucination totally different way of seeing non existent objects? You see images of the objects which are existent or non-existent in the external world, but the cause of the seeing is the abnormal state of your brain due to the chemically induced condition? I am not too sure on the details of technicality of hallucination on why and how it occurs. But that is my idea on it. Anyway, it is not the OPs interest here.
Asking and discussing on seeing non-existence images in dreams and also daily life could tell us more on our perception how it works, which could allow us to explore on the way mind works.
If you think it has no more scope of discussion than talking about hallucination and making predictions, then maybe you are not interested in the topic of the workings of mind and perception.
Yes, this is it. The thing in-itself which is impossible to know or something unimaginable is what we hope to find out.
You did not see a tiger. You dreamed a tiger. This is how you are misusing terms.
A prediction is an imagined future. You may predict you will see a tiger when you go to the zoo. The tiger you predicted is similar to, but not exactly like the tiger you now see when at the zoo and you can draw a picture of the tiger you imagined and the one you saw at the zoo so I don't see how your explanation shows that dreamed tigers are not like day-dreamed or predicted tigers when awake. Because you are awake, you have no problem distinguishing between imagining and the tiger at the zoo. When you are asleep you don't have the world imposing itself on your senses to be able to make that distinction.
Why do you think it is easier to visualize an imagining by closing your eyes as opposed to having them open? Because you don't have the world imposing itself on your eyes. You end up shutting off some of the input that allows you to focus on the details of the imagining.
Quoting Corvus
If Hegel and Kant used the term, "see" when talking about dreams they are misusing terms too. You seem to be making a plea to authority here, when it is just as likely that Hegel and Kant could be wrong, especially when they did not have access to the scientific knowledge we have now.
The hallucination is the only state. Your perception that is the experience through your senses aren't a 1 to 1 process. You aren't registering photons with your eyes and that is producing an image internally. The experience of seeing is your brain constructing a predicted image that is hallucinated into existence based on the interplay between the sensory information grounding the expectations rooted in memory information.
In essence, when you see a cup of coffee, it forms a constant stream of information that holds in place and time that shape and form while your memory has categorized what a cup of coffee from past experiences and the interplay between them forms a hallucinatory state of predictions about the next step in time we experience.
This way, we see a cup of coffee not as an unknown stream of information, but an unknown stream of information that is evaluated against memory categories of similar objects and producing a constant prediction process of what to expect of this experience.
Without the sensory information grounding experience, this interplay is cut off and our prediction hallucinations start to flow without grounding and forming the abstract and surreal experience that is our dreams or psychedelic trips.
Quoting Corvus
But you are also saying:
Quoting Corvus
You can't ignore the actual scientific research about perception and consciousness which points directly towards explanations on how dreams work, and then say that we can understand how the mind works by discussing in the way you want.
You're asking a question about how we perceive abstractions in dreams, but you don't like the answer so you want to steer it in another direction that ignores the science.
Quoting Corvus
It's one and the same process. It just seems like you ignore what's being said here because it doesn't align with what you believe about the subject.
The images in our dreams are simply based on our past experiences, our memory and our mind forming a predictive hallucination without grounding them through sensory data. You aren't seeing anything, you are perceiving a free flowing predictive process using memory as a bucket of raw data.
Not sure what more's needed to be said to explain it? Even if the science of consciousness haven't a final objective answer on all of it, there's no point ignoring existing research and scientific theories that is as close to an explanation that is currently possible. Anything else is just arbitrary unfounded speculation and belief.
Here's some medieval paintings of animals the artist never saw. They dreamt up the visuals based on descriptions. The more "data" we have before we imagine or dream something, the more accurate those prediction hallucinations become. It's evolutionary logical for a predictive function to work this way. The more experience, the better we are at predicting accurately. You can imagine a white tiger looking just like a white tiger if you've seen tigers before. Our mind can easily switch out a color and basic attributes, but if you actually never saw a tiger you would have a major dissonance if this is what you imagined and then saw a real tiger.
Or an elephant:
Or some lions and bears:
Or this poor leopard:
In essence, those were imagined and dreamt up through descriptions of these animals or they got a glimpse in the heat of the moment on some crusade somewhere, and the emotions affected their experience. But they're all trying to form a prediction of what an animal looks like using previous visual experiences and trying to fuse them with other's descriptions. Without any prior visual information, a description will only use what's available in memory.
It's the same process as with AI models forming images. If they don't have enough data on tigers in lots of situations, they will not be able to predict an image into an accurate depiction of what a tiger looks like. The more memory data of tigers, the more accurate it makes them. Our mind works in the same way. It's the reason why we began experimenting with neural nets in computer science in the first place, because it has correlation with how neurons work and how the brain works. It's only now we're starting to form theories of why this is.
In some cases artists have very little to draw from.
Poor guy:
And this is why religion forms so easily. A lack of information and explanations lead to extremely abstract ideas that try to predict why something is happening around the individual. And why the comfort of someone spreading an explanation lessen the strain on the mind to construct accurate predictions.
It may even be the reason why we form social groups. That in order to efficiently speed up the process of prediction in cognition, a group of people spread ideas among the group rather than each individual having to learn on their own.
When I was in sleep, I was seeing a tiger. When I was awake, I recalled the dream of a tiger. They are both images, not words or sounds.
I didn't say Hegel's idea was absolute truth. I found Hegel's term "inner impressions" for seeing images in dreams interesting. In Hume impressions come from the external world objects. When the impressions come into your mind, it becomes ideas. There is no such a thing as "inner impressions".
Do you mean that we never see a real cup of coffee, but images of constant steam of information from your memory, which is a hallucinatory state of predictions?
I recall debating on this topic before. The direct realists would say, you are seeing a cup of coffee in front of you, and indirect realist would say, you are seeing a sense data of a cup of coffee which seems sounding similar to your suggestion.
You say it is a scientific facts, but is it tested, and proven fact? Or would it be just another hypotheses how seeing works?
Both speak of two sides of the same coin, neither is correct in just their single concept. And the third part is the prediction function which they don't even include.
We need to see the system as a whole of different parts. We do have a real sensory, raw data flowing from our registration of photons and molecules, this is as real as a still camera registering signals ont he CMOS sensor into raw data.
Then we have a visual cortex and parts of the brain directly processing visual sensory data .
However, that is not enough on its own. In order for our brain to make sense of this sensory data it needs to correlate it with something it already knows, so it correlates it with memories of cups of coffee, every map of neurons possible for that concept in order to verify that it is a cup of coffee. The map of neurons firing out of the sensory data is essentially being correlated with the map of neurons firing out of memory.
If it marches up, it transforms into an internal image that is basically an hallucination of all our stored memories of cups of coffee being hold into place by the raw sensory data creating a bias towards the specifics of that real time current stream of sensory data.
In essence, if the cup is blue and it steams in the rays of window sun, this data produces a bias towards similar concepts in our mind forming an interplay between memory and raw sensory data that generates this internal image.
And over time our mind uses this interplay to predict the next moments in time by constantly using our memory of cups of coffee as a foundation for that prediction and rooting a bias of that prediction with the sensory data and possible scenarios of the future for that cup of coffee, forming an illusion of motion ideas of navigation going forward.
This process seems simplistic, but if you expand and include every single object, every single memory, everything that makes up the internally formed memory and possible predictions about everything around us, it starts to form a basic structure of how humans navigate with their consciousness.
On top of that, the very act of this interaction with this blue cup is in itself adding new memory data for future events. Meaning that every single second we are gathering extreme amounts of memory into our short term memory.
This is then sifted through and organized during sleep, with similarities in situations being shaped as stronger biases for better prediction functions in similar situations. Meaning, if you work as a barista and handle cups of coffee all day long for many years, your mind is essentially an expert on anything related to the concept of navigating "cups of coffee" around you as you have formed so much memory about cups that almost any scenario can be predicted by your brain.
It's why we can experience things like "flow", or automatic behaviors like juggling. Because the training has supercharged our predictions about those specific objects around us, giving us the ability to function beyond having to think about them in the moment.
And when we sleep, our mind is essentially cutting off the sensory data and starts to "play around" with predictions based on primarily the new memory data we gathered during the day. A form of testing ground to compare the new data to old data with a free form trial and error of prediction actions onto these memories. Which finds support in how dreams behave; usually forming around recent events, but at the same time lifting out old memories or people from long past because our mind is trying to categorize a new memory to what it things is a close match in the neural mapping between the old and new memory.
Quoting Corvus
It's based on the most recent research on how our consciousness works. It's not a single fact, it's consistent of a number of facts with a number of observations and hypotheses. There are a lot of tests done on our cognition, both neurologically, behaviorally and sociologically that form specific areas of proven concepts that are then put into a holistic hypothesis and new research.
When I say it's the latest research in science it's what's the most up to date. And it is the least speculative of all speculations surrounding our consciousness and how our perception, experience and how dreams work.
I'm just drawing up an extremely simple description of all this with predictive coding at the center, but it's a concept that gathers many fields into one holistic form. If you want to check out the underlying idea more here's some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
And there's more to go from there, check the hyperlinks etc. And there are many research papers on the subject if you search for it and then follow citation hyperlinks for further papers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01516-2
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10339-016-0765-6
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12979
To mention just a few.
But there's a large body of research, empirical tests as well as theoretical concepts out there about this.
Predictions usually happen when the result of some events, movements of objects or processes are unknown to the predictor. But in visual perception of a cup of coffee, result of the perception is irrelevant with the unknown-ness or uncertainty. This tells us prediction is not relevant in most daily visual perceptions. It looks more so, in seeing the objects in dreams.
The OP is also about "non-existing objects" and existing objects. How do we perceive non-existing objects, and what are the nature of non-existing objects? Do non-existing objects exist? If they do, how can they be non-existing? If they don't, how could we see them? Are seeing a reliable evidence for existence of objects? If not, what are the evidence of something to exist?
How are they different from existing objects?
The example with the coffee cup is an extremely simplified version of what the prediction function is in order to explain the process.
The prediction function is a constant flow, it has nothing to do with the known or unknown state of something. Studies on infants show how the mental models of their surroundings are incomplete, but quickly forms into rudimentary predictive navigation as they grow into young children. Every human start out in this extremely basic state in which our brain is gathering enough neural paths to conduct basic spatial and social navigation through predicting future states in time. But as we grow older, it forms an exponentially growing complexity not only to navigate spatially and behaviorally, but conceptually. We begin to form a sort of rudimentary control over the prediction process in the form of imagination, helping us to test scenarios for navigation through unknown territory. However, this imagination is built on previous knowledge and correlations between previously mental models of scenarios and objects.
The prediction function is not a detached function of our brain like the visual cortex, it is the fundamental function of the entire brain. It fundamentally is our brain.
I recommend that you read more about it because I don't think you grasped the concept fully yet. It's not a part of our cognition... it is our cognition.
Quoting Corvus
I don't see how this isn't answered? How we perceive non-existing objects has already been answered. It's a hallucinatory flow of predictions detached from sensory inputs and composed by a collage of previous experiences and concepts of objects that we have stored in memory. The nature of them is that they are hallucinations detached from sensory information or minorly influenced by it while imagining or hallucinating in an awaken state. Internally they differentiate to existing objects in that they are pure memory information formed into prediction calculations by the brain that detaches from sensory grounding, transforming memory representations of real objects into a malleable conceptualized mental model that can be reshaped internally. During dreaming, this process happens without our ability to control it, since the flow of this collage of memories flowing together is influenced by the brain's process of fusing long term memory with the new short term memories.
You are essentially asking for a summery of the entire field of perception and cognition and I'm trying to make a short simplified description, but you have to engage with the material fully to understand the answers to your questions.
I'm not sure what else you're asking for, because with this field of science in mind, the answers are somewhat clear or at least rationally explained enough by the current understanding of our consciousness and how we function.
Predictions are overtly conscious and intentional on the events, movements of objects or functional processes which are uncertain in their results. It sounds illogical and unsound to suggest that our brain keeps making predictions on everything it sees, just because it is their nature to do so.
Quoting Christoffer
Prior to your seeing something from your memory, you must be conscious of the content of your memory, or know what you are remembering about. You cannot see something from your memory, if you cannot remember what they were.
Seeing hallucinatory images from one's past memories is what is happening in one's dreams doesn't quite assuredly explain the nonexistent objects appearing in dreams, if the dreamer has never seen, encountered or experienced the object in his / her life ever.
You say, that your explanations are from the scientific research on the topic, but it seems to have basic logical flaws in the arguments. Blindly reading up the popular scientific explanations on the topics, and accepting them without basic logical reflections on their validity appears to be unwise and unhelpful for finding out more logical explanations and coming to better understanding on the subject.
I think you are severely misunderstanding how this works. I suggest that you engage with the scientific material surrounding predictive coding theory.
The best way to describe it is through a comparison to how the AI models operate today. People saying they just collage together other images do not know how these neural network models work. They essentially "dream" up images based on their training data. Constructing something never seen out of the decoding of massive amounts of data through a prediction process. Predicting based on a construct concept of what such an image should be looking like. Effectively hallucinating forward an image by predicting every single part that makes up the image.
This AI has never seen a white tiger. Yet here it is in front of predicting what badly drawn tigers should look like.
Increasing this complexity to function real time in which a constant feedback of sensory data grounds this process and does it over time forms the perception of seeing the world. If the AI model is grounded by the prompt that's written, the sensory data grounds each moment in time for the hallucinated constructed concept of the world around us.
What you are describing is the mental deliberate predictive action of us as individuals, not the fundamental process of how we function. Those are two very different forms of predictions. What you are describing is more akin to what I described as how we are able to tap into this process when using our imagination, but at its core it is also the foundation of all perception and thinking.
Quoting Corvus
Here you are also looking at the concept of "hallucination" in the textbook description of it, not as what it means as a mental process. Our entire experience is a hallucination that our brain is constructing, it is perception itself. The hallucination of dreams and psychedelics is only the version of that hallucination that isn't grounded by our real time sensory data grounding it through correlation.
And you are never seeing anything original, ever. Everything in our dreams is a construct, a collage and combination of concepts and previous memories flowing together through a predictive process that is lacking grounding.
Saying that you are seeing something truly original is just believing in the illusion that you do. There are no original things within us, there are only remixes.
The problem with your argument is that it relies on a false premise of our mind being able to construct something that has never been. But everything we perceive as deliberate imagination or dreams is always just a remix of our memories.
If I imagine a shortnecked giraff, my brain is using its predictive generative ability to generate an internal image that is based on my memories of a giraff and my memory of spatial relations in 3D space. It then predicts this scenario within me and I see something that doesn't exist in the real world. But it's all drawing from memory. And it's drawing from memories of other animals or objects that aren't long, that have a different form, a dog doesn't have a long neck; fusing together a prediction of what a giraff with a short neck like other animals having short necks.
And it extends to other memories as well. Not everything is constructed of visual memory. We have memory of tastes, sounds, we have memory of previous constructs as well. When we imagine something, we add that to our memory as well.
Everything is a constant stream of updating parameters that is the foundation of our brain's hallucinated perception of life as a whole.
Quoting Corvus
What are you actually saying here? Are you saying it's a logical flaw that I create an argument that has roots in actual research? Even providing links to that research?
That reasoning is an ironic fallacy. You basically call the correct argumentative process of forming premises out of actual facts and research "blind", while at the same time provide arguments that even admits to be blind to how things work:
Quoting Corvus
The validity of what I say is rooted in the research, facts and empirical tests that has been done on consciousness and how our mind works. It's the research itself that forms the validation.
Where else do we find validation for the premises of an argument in this? I fail to understand the logic of what you say here. It mostly seems like you attack the scientific research because it comes into conflict with how you think and engage with the subject. But, sorry to say, you have to.
Because if you ask these questions and the research provides you with the latest answers out of the research that's been going on for over a hundred years on the subject, then what do you have to support the skepticism against those findings?
You have a lot of research you can read up on, I'm pointing towards the body of evidence, so what's your counter argument against all that? I'm not blindly accepting these research findings. I understand their implications and that's what I'm drawing on to make my argument.
I've answered your questions many times over now, but it seems like you simply don't like the answers and it seems like you rely on the answers being something else and want to force forward answers that does not conflict with the implications of your initial questions.
If that's the case, it's impossible to engage with the question without you rejecting everything that doesn't support a satisfying conclusion you already seem to have.
Basically, we do not form original, novel images in our mind, deliberately or unconsciously. It's all a remix under the illusion of us being free in thought. We are not free, we are pushed by causes that forms these remixes and nothing is truly original. Your question is therefor faulty in what it asks for as it relies on an assumption that isn't true. You are looking for an answer to a faulty question and the only thing anyone can do is to answer the real question; how these imagined concepts form within us, which I have answered to the best of my ability out of the entire scientific field that researches this very question.
That is a peculiar way to use the concept of prediction. From my idea, prediction is always for the unknown future. You don't predict how a cup of coffee will look like, when you are seeing a cup of coffee. The cup of coffee is sending you a vivid and forceful image to your eyes. You are perceiving it with certainty and realistic assurance for its existence. Why do you have to predict it? It is just a logical flaw and nonsense.
OK you say, you are using the concept of prediction differently to describe how you structure the images in your perception, and it is Scientific research. But why would you do that? Why do you have to change the meaning of the concept prediction in order to describe the perceptual process in that context?
Quoting Christoffer
Again, it is a simple basic logic of remembering something. If you are seeing a cup of coffee from your memory, then logically you cannot fail to recall the factual past content of your memory when you are seeing it. If you are seeing an image from your memory, it wouldn't be just the object of the image, you would also see the background, material detail of the cup, the type of the coffee and where it was lying on etc etc.
You don't have to hallucinate the image to see it, and insist it was from your past memory, because the images you see in your memory are conscious and intentional and factual. If you are hallucinating images in your perception, that cannot be from your memory. If you read "The doors of perception" by A. Huxley, you will find more about Hallucination. Again your writings have the basic logical flaw in the argument insisting it is hallucination from your memory, which is not acceptable.
Quoting Christoffer
As I said, the OP is not about how we form and see images from some scientific research. It is about how we see non existing images sometimes, and what is the nature of non existing objects. I have asked a few questions on the nature of non existing objects and perceiving non existing objects in my previous posts, but you have not answered any of them, but just kept going on about the prediction and hallucination.
You must be aware of the fact that scientific research explanations and theories are not all eternal and infallible truths. When new research and experiments prove otherwise, the present scientific theories and principles are destined to collapse. That is the way scientific explanations work, and you have to be always open minded on the scientific explanations and answers on the abstract topics.
Philosophy is not about accepting and adopting the scientific explanations into their inquiries without analysis, logical and critical reflections.
You are literally calling predictive coding theory logically flawed and nonsense while I've already shared you some research papers and links to the actual science behind it. You're just getting lost in word definitions and use a simplified idea of what perception is. The neurological process that handles our consciousness is what makes perception happen. This process is a form of prediction algorithm in its function. Generating an internal concept of outside reality in which our sense information stabilizes it into accurate correlation with the outside world.
You are just saying that "we perceive the cup of coffee", that it's sending a "vivid and forceful image to our eyes". And how do you think our brain process that information? What happens with the photons that our receptors register? What happens to the nerve signals from our eyes? How does the visual cortex see anything?
Before you call actual scientific theories nonsense I think you need to engage with the material some more. You're looking at perception in the most simplified way, without taking into account how the brain process perception. And it's this process that predictive coding theory is about.
Without fully understanding what I'm actually talking about here it breaks apart further reasoning.
Repeating the most basic information again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
Quoting Corvus
There's no changing the meaning of "prediction", you are misunderstanding how the term is used in this context and theory.
Quoting Corvus
You aren't seeing anything. The internal image you "see" is a generated construct, a remix of different memories.
It's the reason why witnesses in court cases are considered very unreliable. Because the memory they recall is filled with errors, changing colors of jackets, changing clothes entirely, sometimes even environmental differences to the real place. It's why the legal process sometimes take witnesses back to the scene of the crime, trying to ground their memory in current sensory information.
The reason memories change like this is because they're not a solid stored information, they're a mental generative construct of reality. The more vivid the sensory inputs at the time we form memories, the more accurate those memories become. The cup of coffee you got on a wonderful vacation, staring out into the sunset as your loved one smiles next to you, with the smell of newly baked sweets at the café you were at can significantly ground your memory to that location, making it easier to recall. But if I ask you to remember a cup of coffee from a Thursday three weeks ago, it might be impossible for you to remember it and even if you remember it, you cannot be sure how other similar days of drinking coffee is affecting that internal image.
You are therefore never "seeing" anything in memory, everything is a construct, a hallucination. With deliberate recall we are hallucinating with the grounding of stored sensory memories, which are never as accurate as current real time sensory information in the present. But even in the present we are experiencing this construct of reality. The whole concept of optical illusions is based around how our mind is using predictive coding to form our perception.
Therefore you cannot see both at the same time:
Quoting Corvus
No, I've answered them. You are ignoring how perception actually works and keeps trying to get answers that aren't there. Like if the scientific research into the concept of perception isn't giving you the right answers. You are literally ignoring actual research here because you simply don't understand what it means.
You're stuck in wanting your questions to lead somewhere else, but the science of perception is right there pointing our that the problem is in your question, the premise of seeing non-existing images is not correct. We never see anything in our brain. Why are you stuck in this loop of thinking? Your question relies on a false premise.
Quoting Corvus
But predictive coding theory has empirical evidence and experiments behind it. I don't know why you aren't actually engaging with the material provided? This is just a cognitive bias in which you try to argue against the concept of science itself because it threatens your line of thinking.
Being "open minded" does not equal ignoring the science that oppose the ideas you have, it is about the opposite of that. Being open minded is to understand that new information expose flaws in your thinking and ideas, and when you need to gather more information about a subject before continuing. I've provided tons of information here, including links for further reading and you just put on the blinders and regurgitating the initial question over and over, demanding answers that aren't there.
Quoting Corvus
Where did you get that idea? You think philosophy does not rely on facts?
Sorry, but what you're doing now is grasping at straws trying to justify your originally flawed question. You're trying to redefine how science, facts and philosophy functions because what's being said here doesn't align with your question and the answers that you want.
I recommend you to sit down and read up on the science of perception and cognition. Take time in studying and be open to abandon ideas that does not work.
Otherwise you are not doing philosophy at all, you're just trying to fight for a fundamental belief you already have. Accept the cognitive dissonance you experience and let it guide you to study further.
Otherwise you're going to get stuck and never evolve intellectually.
Not all science is nonsense. But saying that images in our seeing are formed by prediction sounds illogical and nonsense. You see a cup of coffee in front of you. You are seeing it vividly and solidly. But you also predict how it will look? Why? Prediction is a conscious act of telling the future of events which are uncertain or unknown.
Also you saw an image in your dream which you claim from your past memory, but you don't recall what the image was about, and the image you saw in your dream is the result of your hallucination sounds not making sense. If you saw an image in your dream for the first time in your life, then how could it be from your past memory? If something is from your memory, then why do you have to hallucinate about it?
Moreover, insisting that those points are from the scientific research, therefore we must accept them no matter how absurd they are, sounds blind and nonthinking.
Does it mean that we could mentally construct, visualize and actually feel the image and existence of God, souls, spirits too? What about time and space? How do we perceive them?
What exists for us to experience of God, souls, spirits etc. are our own and other people's descriptions, pictures, sculptures, plays performed by actors, movies with special effects, churches or art museums designed specifically with an ambience that tends to evoke sacred or otherworldly experiences.
Time and space may not be objects of perception, but we can use our knowledge of descriptions and theories of them in order to evoke relevant experiences of duration, extension etc.
If time is not an object of perception, how do they know today is a Saturday night? If space is not an object of perception, how do they know where the Eiffel tower is located?
But how do we experience the real God, souls and spirits? Not other people's descriptions, pictures, sculptures, plays performed by actors, movies with special effects.
They experience days and nights following previous days and nights, not the time in which they follow each other.
Quoting Corvus
They see the Eiffel tower, its extension and relations to other buildings, not the space that its extension and relations occupy.
Quoting Corvus
If they are real, then we can experience them systematically, also by those of us who don't expect them to be real. But since we don't, there's little reason to assume that they're real.
I'm sorry, I'll correct what I said.
You CHOSE words and COMBINED them together to make sentences.
Happy?
If they say, we are going to meet in the cafe in 1 hour, how do they know when to meet, if they don't perceive time?
Quoting jkop
Every part and corner of the space is mapped with the co-ordinates, so drones can pin-point the objects in them, and airplanes can reach the location. If space is not perceivable, how can it happen?
Quoting jkop
When you say "they are real", what do you mean by that? What do you mean by "we can experience systematically"?
Yes, I did. But I chose the words consciously reflecting the contents of my thoughts. In dreams, I have no consciousness of real world, hence things appear without my choice, and I have no control of the dreams.
Quoting night912
Philosophical discussions are not about being happy. It is about trying to come to the agreed conclusion via good arguments.
Some things, e.g. molecules, exist independent of us. So, for example if we humans go extinct, and in a couple of million years some new life form emerges and investigates our planet, they can rediscover molecules.
Other things have modes of existing that depend on our beliefs, habits, or sense organs. For example, money, doesn't exist in nature unless we believe that certain pieces of paper, metal coins, or numbers used in certain contexts is money. The reality of money depends on our systematic use of coins, paper bills, number etc. which in turn depend on our belief that these things represent money and not only metal, paper, or numbers.
The reality of colours is disputed, but I think their reality depends on our eyes and interaction with the wavelength components of light. The wavelengths in the visible spectrum fix our colour experiences so that we see colours systematically. It means that we can identify, discriminate, discover resemblances and talk about colours consistently and meaningfully.
Imaginary, nonexistent, or nonactual things such as ghosts are not real in the sense that molecules are real, nor in the sense that colours are real. Ghosts are fiction. But similar to how we construct money, we can construct pictures and descriptions that exemplify a fiction, and some fictions are as recognizable as money. However, our use of fictions is different from our use of money. We don't get paid in ghost stories, and there's little sense in constructing models of fictions like we construct models of financial transactions. Nevertheless we get exposed to fictions, experience them, and sometimes we confuse their mode of existing with other modes. Hence some believe, incorrectly, that ghosts are real in the same sense that colours, money, or molecules are real.
When you say ghosts are not real, does it mean that there are the real ghosts? If there is no real ghosts, then how do you know ghosts are not real? To know "not real", you must know "real". Would you agree?
No, I said that ghosts are fiction. For example, Casper the friendly ghost is real in the sense that some pictures or descriptions have the recognizable properties that refer to the fiction. That's a different way of being real than the ways in which molecules, money, or colours are real.
Quoting Corvus
By knowing the sense in which ghosts are real, and that when we use a different sense, e.g. the sense in which molecules are real, we get the negation, because ghosts and molecules are not real in the same sense.
Quoting Corvus
No, it is sufficient to know in what sense a particular thing is real, and avoid confusing it with other senses.
You just say somethings are real, while others are not. But you need to give reasons for what makes something real. For instance, you say money is real, but ghosts are fiction. But who is to say the ghosts in fiction don't exist or is not real?
In ancient times before the civilisation, the cavemen didn't have money. They went out and hunted for their food, and there was no shops or money. At the time, was money real? What are the properties / qualities which makes something real? What is the real real? If something is real to me, then is it real to you too?
It's a fact that there are different types of real objects in the world. Molecules is an example of natural objects, money is an example of socially constructed objects, and Casper is an example of fictional objects. They're real in different ways.
Quoting Corvus
I didn't say that. All ghosts are real in the sense fictions are real: i.e. pictures and descriptions possess real and recognizable properties that exemplify the fictions. But in the sense natural objects are real, ghosts are not. Your question uses one sense of being real for Casper and another sense for the other ghosts, which is a fallacy of ambiguity.
Quoting Corvus
The reasons are open to read on this page.
Quoting Corvus
You can read about the history of money elsewhere, but you might want to consider the fact that many social animals have a division of labor, exchange gifts and services. The maggot that a bird gives its mate is a gift in its social sense, but a maggot in its natural sense of being real.
What makes something real typically depends on its use / how it is being used. Your question "What is the real real?" assumes two realities. I think one is enough, and that things can have different ways of existing in it.
So, what is an example of something that is real to you but not to me? In what sense are you then using the word 'real'?
I'd say my visual experience is real to me when I have it while it's not real to you, obviously, when you don't have it. But like now when we both see this dark coloured text, then we both have the same visual experience, i.e. the object that we see is the same.
We agree that there are different type of "being real", and each objects are real in different ways.
All the questions were asked to you because you said, Quoting jkop
ergo you claim that God is not real to you because you don't expect God to be real.
But this sounds empty and groundless because you claim that God is not real because you don't expect God to be real. You didn't explain why you expect God to be not real. You just claim that you don't expect God to be real.
When you say X is not real, you must explain in what ground and reasons X is not real, because there are different "real"s in this world. OK, you said you don't expect God to be real, but why your expectation God is not real is unknown, hence it cannot be accepted as a meaningful claim.
This sounds absurd. Because, I don't see jkop, but I only see what jkop wrote in text on the computer screen. Just because I don't see jkop, if I claim that jkop is not real, but the text is real because I see the text in front of me, then I must be silly.
I claim that jkop is real even if I don't see him, because I infer that jkop is sitting somewhere in this world, reading, thinking and typing and sending the texts to the forum.
That's not my claim.
Quoting Corvus
That's another misrepresentation. Let's take a look at what we said:
Quoting jkop
The negation "don't expect" means that we don't have the expectation. Yet you say that I "expect God to be not real". You omit the negation and thus misrepresent my claim.
Quoting Corvus
RIght, when we're looking at this webpage, we see our texts (not our bodies).
Now returning to the topic of this thread. Since we have this empathic ability to use our knowledge of what it's like to experience objects, we can watch pictures or read literary descriptions of some non-existing (or remotely existing) object, and have immersive experiences of it regardless of its location or ontological status.
If you don't expect God to be real, then is it not same meaning as you expect God to be not real?
Are they different meaning?
They are same meaning. Just the sentence is in different form. They are both negating.
~A = ~A
It is not saying, A=~A or A ->~A, which is a contradiction. If it was that, then yes of course you should commit it the flames under the basis of not accepting a contradiction in any philosophical argument. There is no point going any further trying to find out whether an argument was valid, invalid, true or false from a contradictory premise or statement.
Does it mean that the perceived images are created by us, our creativity rather than the images excite our sensibility and perception?
Are we ever be able to come to understanding and agreement on what the world truly is? Is the physical world, all there exists? Can there be non-physical worlds which we don't / cannot perceive?
It seems to suggest that mind can work with no external excitement or regulation. When the external objects, time and space are unavailable to the mind, it goes back working with the past memories, intuition and imagination perceiving the random images. Some are meaningful and intelligible to the dreamer, some are not.
Hume and Kant were correct in saying that the principle of causality, space and time exist in mind rather than in the external world.
What is your definition of "perceive" "perception"? Could inference, introspection, retrospection, imagination, predictions for the future, and remembering past be type of perception? These mental activities don't rely on the sensory organs, but they still come to knowledge, belief and experience.
The bottom line is that, the book has disappeared from the spot it was on. I cannot see it anymore.
So, the book is now a non-existent object to me. But I am still seeing the non-existent book on the spot it was on the desk. It is not my imagination of the book. Imagination is mental images made up of false existence. But what I was seeing was the book which is now non-existing book on the spot in the space where it had been. It is the non-existence of the book which I was noticing. Not the book itself.
In reality I am not seeing anything on the spot where the book was on the desk. There is only empty space on the desk. But I am still seeing the non-existent book, which should be on the spot in the space. Am I seeing nothing? How can you see nothing? Nothing is invisible visually. Nothing doesn't have mass, weight, colour or shape physically or metaphysically or even logically. Or am I still seeing the book which is now a non-existence book? If it was a non-existence book I was seeing on the spot in the space where it had been existing for past few days, then how could be a book be also non-existence book?
I'm quite unconvinced we can make any kind of claim like this, and is principally why I can't get on too much with Kant (along with his boiling-down to God for his fundamental conclusions, in terms of regression). I don't think we can make this claim, because sans experience of an object without human perception, we have nothing to go on. It may be (as I think I lean) that human minds are literally empty at inception. We learn concepts through having them foisted on the mind. There's no reason to thinkt he mind is incapable of assenting to a concept like space, given it could not function without it, in the world (this, obviously, assumes space as a facet of reality outside of minds - which I think is uncontroversial, myself).
This all said, I don't think it bears on the direct/indirect debate other than to say a Direct realist would be committed to the view I put here above. Otherwise, the perception is necessarily indirect, having been mingled with the pre (or sub)-conscious mind's a priori concepts before presentation to the conscious mind
Good point. This article on Causality of Hume and Kant has a through explanation on the concept.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/
The OP's point was to explore the claim from Hume and Kant, our perception need external objects or excitement from the objects on our minds to operate. The OP is trying to argue that this claim is not necessarily true. Because there are cases that human perception operates even without external objects existing or external excitement on the mind (like Kant's claim). We perceive non-existence objects at times without any objects existing in front of us.
The OP's purpose of argument is to prove a possibility of another mechanism of mind which operates behind the scene being able to perceive the non-existence objects, which can offer explanation of the workings of causality, space and time and other metaphysical entities.
I was trying to understand points in the passage here, but I couldn't. I am not sure if it is linguistic structure or the philosophical point which are complex and abstract.
What do you mean by "sans experience of an object without human perception, we have nothing going on"?
Human perception is always operational even in sleep according to the posters' and my own experiences. The only time human perception stops is when mind falls into unconsciousness, and when the body dies.
I am not sure if mind keeps working after death of the body, but no one alive had been dead, hence no one can certify on the mystery of mind after death.
Aren't some perceptions direct, and some indirect? It depends on the situations and also the objects of perception. Not all perceptions are direct, and not all are indirect. They are confused in thinking there are only one type of perception.
There are perceptions that we perceive the objects as they are (such as the objects which are accessible and possible to interact with, in which case perceptions of this kind could be described as direct), and there are objects that we perceive as our brain interprets from the sense data (which are not directly accessible and impossible to interact with), then perceptions on these objects are indirect.
Depending on the nature of the objects, we perceive and experience them in different way, not just direct realist way, or not just indirect realist way only.
I understand/understood hte claim, and based on my own parochial understanding of Kant, my replies flowed. My responses (you'll perhaps see after this) are direct responses to that position). I think the premise is wrong and so the argument unneeded.
Quoting Corvus
If we could, somehow, access an object in some way other than via the means of human perception (this appears metaphysically impossible - implicit in my wording), then we could compare the workings of both. But, we don't have that, so we can't make any 'a priori' claims. Though, it seems i meant "nothing to go on" apologies for that mis-step.
Quoting Corvus
Sleep is defined as a state of unconsciousness, making these claims a bit dubious to me. We lose consciousness every day, multiple times for most of us. If perception continues in this situation, we need to delineate between unconsciousness, and non-consciousness, which is what I think you mean to address, based on "unconsciousness" not doing the work you're wanting.
I think the final line of that post of yours is apt for the current convo too. No one knows what its like to be unable to perceive. That would be a perception. We are, therefore, unable to make claims about a prioris or hte nature of non-consciousness. I think...
Quoting Corvus
I'm not quite sure how this para is responding to the quote it seems to respond to, so my reply might seem inapt:
No. All perceptions are indirect, on my reading, and when pressed, I think "direct realists" have to assent to the facts which lead me there. We just don't want to say the same things about it. But the image of a cup in your mind is patently, inarguable, not hte cup on the table - the same way a photograph is not, literally, the thing it represents. The rest can be argued ad infinitum, though, and I think that's where the confusion comes from. The DRists that think there's no argument literally hand-wave and ignore the discussion while asserting something so obviously wrong it's hard to engage.
Quoting Corvus
These are all objects, hence the above. I think you're talking about perceiving our interactions with objects, which appears direct. True, and its possible we are 'directly' touching the cup. But our perception is not of that interaction. It is a representation of it. Again, this may amount to a direct realist theory, but it doesn't seem like DRists are adequately grappling with these facts. I think you're describing imagination, which would not be direct as its a recall mechanism. It's indirect, as to the relevant 'data', the same way our mental image of the cup on the table is. In this sense, we donot have direct perceptual access to the cup. I don't think there is any empirical reason to doubt this conceptualisation - but how we deal with it is up for grabs, in some sense.
Again, before anyone gets their knickers in a twist: This doesn't mean Direct Realism is doa. It means its not what Searle etc.. childishly think they can simply assert without any decent argument. I have certainly stepped back from the fairly staunch position i took in response to Banno for this reason. I can't be doing the same thing he is, and claiming some kind of humility. I just think, as has been put forward elsewhere, the distinction is one of kind and not one of 'evidence'. I do not see the process of vision to perception as direct. He probably does. But, i put to him that the page on Perception and another (possibly Indirect Realism) on the SEP conflict with each other, when he wanted to use the former's conclusion (which isn't supported by it's article) as some kind of support for his position. It was more hand-waving.
Quoting Corvus
I don't think we have any grounds to say we have different modes of perception. Our mind works the way it works. We don't have two systems of data processing. We ahve one, and multiple sources of data. Though, I find it hard to say memory counts as anythign more than weak sense data from prior experience.
You need to explain why the premise is wrong. You cannot just say something is wrong without giving out the reason why. If there is no argument on your claim, then it is not a philosophical claim.
But why would you do that? I don't think anyone was saying to access an object in some way other than via the means of human perception. You need to explain further on this.
Sleep is not a state of total unconsciousness. Your body is fully functional in the biological level while asleep. And even mentally you are not totally unconscious. If you are totally unconscious, then you wouldn't know when to get up, or hear the loud scream or shouting telling you get up time to go to work.
In sleep, you are still perceiving the part of your bodily states, so you feel comfort or discomfort, and you are perceiving your dreams in the dream world, even if you might not be able to remember what your dream was about.
You are grossly misunderstanding what I said. I never said that perception is interaction. What I said was that we can interact with some objects we perceive. We can also access the perceived objects directly i.e. I can open and close the book in front of me, I can read it. If it is an apple, you can see it, but also peel it, and eat it. This is the real perception. You read the real book, peel the real apple, and eat the real apple directly. You are not seeing and reading the book in front of you indirectly, but directly because it is touchable, visible and readable i.e. accessible and interactable.
But if you are seeing a new book in Amazon, you are only seeing the image of the book with some info about it. You are seeing the book indirectly. You are still seeing the book, but it is not the real book.
If you see apples in your neighbor's garden apple tree distance away, then you see the apples, but not quite sure what type of apples they are. They could be cooking apple, or could be red delicious. You don't know if they have bugs eaten the apple from the distance. You only have prehension of the apple. Then you would add some of your imagination on your perception of the apples, and perceive them. This could be called indirect realist's account of perception.
But I feel this division of DR or IDR arguments in perception is pointless and fruitless. Because as I said already there are different types of perception depending on the situation, the types of objects perceived, and human mind can be fed with the perceptual info in different ways via different sensory organs.
You read time from your watch or clocks, but you also perceive time via your stomach when you feel hungry in the mid afternoon, you know it is lunch time etc. Anyhow, I could go on with a plethora of examples, but I hope you get the point.
I think we do. There are a plethora of different types of objects in the world for our perception. And our perception works in different ways for different objects in different situations. Sometimes we have to use microscopes, telescopes, radars, computers in order to perceive objects. Sometimes we just need a pair of bare eyes and ears to perceive. Sometimes we concentrate on the objects while perceiving, and other times we have flashing passing ideas and images for some new ideas, while walking or even in sleeping. It is a very rich and complicated system.
I reject that this is what has happened. I've made some quite detailed posts about why the premise is wrong (on my view). If you reject those arguments, sure. But this charge is unwarranted as best I can tell.
Quoting Corvus
No, I don't. It's not an argument. It was a quip about the possibility of assessing whether certain claims can be settled, and the resulting position that they can't. This isn't something that needs debating. It's simply me pointing out that perceiving things in any other way is not possible. Unless you're suggesting it is....?
Quoting Corvus
It is defined as a state of unconsciousness. I have specifically delineated why this is unsatisfactory and given the term "non-conscious" to make sure we're clear on which type of "unconsciousness" we're referring to.
Quoting Corvus
THis is hard to argue for. Plenty of times when we sleep its as if we blink. There are no intervening perceptions (unless you're saying that all un/subconscious activity is a perception?) To me perception relates to conscious perception, which, yes, is possible in sleep obviously, but need not be present. That said, I don't stand strongly behind this. It's more a technique for sorting out muddle concepts in this area.
Quoting Corvus
"total" unconsciousness would be death, or what I've termed "non" consciousness, on these formulations. Maybe we're just talking past each other..
Quoting Corvus
I didn't intimate you did, and I'm having to do some serious work to figure out what assumptions got you there. Forgive if response seems inapt for that reason - its really confusing.
Quoting Corvus
Yes, I very specifically accepted this.
Quoting Corvus
That is an interaction. Sorry bud. The touch, the sense of 'reading' etc... are sensory representations of those interactions (which could be direct). Perhaps you're not adequately applying what i'm saying to your view...
Quoting Corvus
This is, seems maybe a naive way to describe this situation. The entire debate is about the fact that this probably isn't true, but some like to claim so. The book never touches your brain or mind. There is literally no direct access, in the usual sense of hte word direct, from your mind to the objects your mind presents to your consciousness. So, is 'direct' being used in a different way? Probably, and it's one that lends itself to those contradictory SEP articles running together and probbaly not contradicting each other, other than in terms.
Quoting Corvus
It couldn't, and it's not what any indirect realist I have ever read or interacted with would say, so again, I think you are plain wrong about what's being argued for here. The IRist is claiming that all sensory experience is secondary to the objects which have reflected the light which excited our visual system to provide data to our brain which decodes and creates an image. This (essentially inarguable) process puts a massive spanner in your account (though, that being to do with the positions, not really hte conclusions, for reasons outlined above).
Quoting Corvus
I have gone over how this is patently not hte case, ignoring the IR/DR problem. I cannot see how you haven't simply ignored all of that here?
Quoting Corvus
I think this is entirely not supporting your point. Which I do get.
Again, your replies are just your personal claims saying my points are wrong, or you think it is not supporting my points. I am not seeing any philosophical arguments why my points are wrong and why not supported.
You need to give out your counter arguments on my points with some reasoning and evidence with your claims. If not, I cannot accept your claims as legitimate philosophical arguments.
This isn't my problem. If you utter something in defense of a position, and it does nothing for hte position, I have naught to do but point that out, if it is how I see it.
Maybe that is unsatisfying, but if your initial point was unsatisfying to me, we are at the same impasse. It is not for one of us to take a higher ground.
I wasn't saying anything is problem. I was just suggesting if you say some point is wrong in philosophical discussion, you need to supply good arguments with reasoning and evidence supporting your disapproval. I didn't see much of that from your replies apart from just you think the point is wrong. Hence I cannot further continue my arguments against your disapproval.
Not a problem for me. My points in the thread are inspired by a textbook called "Phenomenology and Logic" by R. S. Tragesser.
I really don't, though. You have an argument which, on my view, does not support your point. You're asking me to 'prove a negative' as it were. That wont be doable, even if you want it to be.
Your arguments did not go toward supporting your point. You need to do the work to connect htem, if you wish to.
What are they? Exactly where do you mean? The OP and many of my posts are exploratory on the topic i.e. trying to learn about the topic and concepts, not really claiming one particular point. But now you say my arguments don't support my point. What was my point, and which of my argument did not support the point? and Why?
Quoting Corvus
I said this, particular argument, does not support your point. You claimed somehow the onus was on me to show that. It isn't. But neverhteless..
You then extended the charge to your entire post (which is silly, because I responded to other parts of it discreetly). I pointed out that I don't have to explain myself in pointing out your passage does not support your point. I see you to be now probably understand this could be the case, and want to know what you've missed. That's fair. But the onus isn't on me. I hope the below helps..
You do not 'perceive time' by being hungry. You then claimed you could go on to a plethora of examples (if they're similar, please don't). But then did not give any at all... So, patently nothing here supports your contention that there are 'different types' of perception, or that 'time' is perceived by the stomach. It isn't. At all. In any way. Even on your point (which I said, I got) this makes no sense whatsoever. You need to perceive sensory data from your stomach. You perceive hunger pangs. You infer it must be lunch time (based on several other, very important, connected perceptions). That is not a perception, or a form of perception. You are leapfrogging and pretending the gap isn't there, best I can tell.
Further in support of why the above (your passage) might make sense, you're maintaining that because we have 'different types' of perception, that some are direct and some indirect. Unfortunately, this is really hard to respond to because it is, on it's face, ridiculous, and on inspection risible. Given that hte only example you have provided is obviously wrong, I don't think there's any space to push this back on me. There is a huge amount of work to be done, and I'm not seeing any of it. The distinction, theoretically, between IRists and DRists is clear, and not something that can be read-across by just assigning labels to things that don't come under those descriptions.
Well, you are forgiven for going into Ad Hominem before even beginning your counter argument. I don't feel it is necessary in any decent philosophical discussions. Discussions can be undertaken without throwing yourself into the muddy dirt of getting into Ad Hominem, but some folks just can't help doing it as some sort of naughty juvenile habit.
I will go over your points, and will get back to them when I have some free time.
Here again, you fail to explain why the examples don't support my point, but just keep repeating yourself that it doesn't support, and the onus isn't on you. I only asked to explain, because you claimed that those examples don't support my point. I wouldn't have asked you to explain, if you hadn't made the claim. It was just the way of the interaction. I was not demanding impossible tasks from you.
Quoting AmadeusD
Here, your arguments are just repeated negations instead of arguing why the examples don't support my point. I am still not seeing your argument, why those examples are not the type of perception.
Quoting AmadeusD
I was not pushing the points to you, but just telling you my opinion on the IR DRists arguments, because from my point of view, there are different type of perceptual situations, objects, modes and the way perception works for us. It is pointless to stipulate that perception works only for one way i.e. either IR or DR, because it is not the case when one reflects on the workings and the various different types of objects in the world we perceive.
So, no you are still not even one step closer to offering me a worthwhile counter argument against my point. As before you just repeated the groundless negations on my point with the ad hominem. I thought there might be some interesting counter arguments from your end this time, but it didn't take me even a minute to find out it is not the case.
Quoting Corvus
You should probably read an entire post before responding. This looks, sorry to say, utterly preposterous now, given the below failures.
Quoting Corvus
Onerous tasks. Again, please stick with what's being said.
Quoting Corvus
I cannot understand how that has happened. Let me attempt to make this even clearer for you:
Quoting AmadeusD
This is an assertion to the contrary of your supporting point. That is an argument in response to a bare assertion that was obviously wrong. I then explain directly that the rest of the point can't even begin to support your point because you didn't provide anything (this, I hope, is not controversial. You literaaly refrained from giving anything further). Clear so far? So let's do even more grunt work.. As tied to the first bold, is the second and third bold. These are arguments. If you don't like them, that's fine and you're open to responding to them, but all three of these points directly go against your assertion. Given that you did not provide anything whatsoever to support the assertion beyond a bare claim that somehow hunger pangs are a perception of time (which I have directly addressed.. please do not ignore it). That assertion has no merit, and I've still addressed it directly. I am unsure what is being missed here, but it isn't on my part. I've provided a sound explanation for why what you've asserted isn't the case. Albeit, the three bolds are only coherent in their surrounding context - they represent nubs.
Quoting Corvus
It is, and your assertion otherwise is not credible. YOU need to do the work to give it credibility. That isn't my job in responding to you.
Quoting Corvus
It seems you're just ignoring most of what's being said. I am sorry if I have been genuinely unclear, but having used my own words without any addition to clarify in the above passages, I am extremely reticent to think that is the case.
It sounds like a court or legal document rather than philosophical argument. I am not sure why anyone needs to read ad hominem filled with the groundless accusatory blames.
Quoting AmadeusD
If you just write on the topic in the discussions faithfully based on reasoning, then you would have more chance of understanding the points.
Quoting AmadeusD
From the Phenomenological point, your whole body is the sensory organ. Even the Psychologist William James supports the point, but especially Samuel Todes and Hubert L. Dreyfus suggest the point as well in the book "Body and World".
Obviously you seem have read none of phenomenology, and just have the narrow view on perception believing that perception only works via seeing something.
I have given out a simple example with folks being able to tell rough time via feeling hunger pain when it is lunch time to suggest that your whole body is the sensory organ for your perception, and perception works with the whole of your body e.g. the skin feels hot and cold of the external temperature, as well as pains, itches.
Your stomach sends the neurological signal to your brain for its emptiness when it is time for the next meal, and brain can tell it is lunch or dinner time.
It is not just time which can be perceived via the bodily organs, but also space as well. If you put your hand into a hole, you can feel, and perceive the space in the hole. You don't need to see the emptiness of the space to feel, notice or perceive its existence. These were just simple examples of bodily perception which takes place via the bodily parts rather than just eyes and ears, which you seem to restrict yourself in understanding the way perception works.
Quoting AmadeusD
It was such simple and clear examples with no much depth on its claim, hence if you extended your imagination and reasoning a little more, I would have thought you would understand and resonate what it meant.
Quoting AmadeusD
If you could be conscious of your writing style avoiding to sound like court or legal document, or a frustrated grumpy old folk telling off someone insisting the points are wrong or not supported without providing any reasons or ground, but just concentrate on giving out the philosophical arguments which clarify your points and grounds for your claims, then it would help coming to the conclusions and mutual agreements on the points.
Quoting Corvus
I am a legal professional. You will not be policing my 'style'. I am not going to engage further, because the underlined is utterly ridiculous. The bold, further, is both hypocritical, and an obviously bad-faith reading to detract from the fact I have actually made entirely substantial poitns that you have plainly missed. I even ran them back for you, in great detail, with direct links to your own words. Your ignorance abounds, in that regard. That is simply not my problem. It is yours, squarely. Take care.
It was just a metaphor or a literary expression. I hope you didn't misunderstand the expression was a statement against you.
Well, I was just suggesting you to bring more philosophical arguments rather than sounding like a court injunction with ad hominem. But obviously you seem to have taken the suggestion too personally. Not a problem. All the best.