Sun, May 27, 2007 at 5:45 AM
Hi Ranga,

Going over the thread, I find a couple of points that we mainly disagree on. Let me summarize them below.

Absolute Reality

I believe that there are forms or events causing our perception. I call them part of an absolute reality. I then suggest a model for the absolute reality and come up with a perceived reality consistent with what we do perceive.

In your view, working in the absolute reality or modeling it is clearly idiotic. The AR, by definition, is beyond perception. In the absence of a conscious observer, there is no reality. IOW, if we suddenly become aware of the AR through some divine intervention (such as Krishna showing VishwaRoopam to Arjuna), what we will have is still a perception of it, or merely another perceived reality. AR is still beyond of our grasp. (Okay, you didn’t say this; this is my interpretation of what you said.) So you suggest that I leave AR alone and present my ideas as perceptual effects.

My beef with that suggestion is that I believe space is part of the PR. Space itself *is* the perceptual effect. While trying to prove this point, we encountered the second point in the disagreement.

Space

In my view, space is a representation as in the following table:

Ears : Sound

Nose : Smell

Touch : Temperature, pain, pressure

Eyes : Space and time (through our ability to sense motion)

The only reason for our tactile sense to corroborate the space perception is that our sight sense is “superior” to all other senses. Now, if I were to present my physics ideas as perceptual effects, I would be implying that space is real, but we suffer from some distortions while sensing it using light. My notion is that space is as unreal as sound and smell (in a sense that it is only a cognitive model).

I’m not quite sure what your point is in disagreeing with me here. You are probably not suggesting that space is more real that sound and stuff. But you still disagree with my idea of separating it from AR and presenting my theory the way I did — as a CM model for AR and working out the PR through the speed of light. Your main disagreement seems to be that any suggestion that AR can be modeled is inherently misleading and quite unpalatable.

Blindness and language

You pointed out that the blind seem to have a space representation. In my view, it is the language that normalized the representations and brought in the Keller example. I said that in the absence of language, there is no reality — a notion you find so idiotic to be almost hilarious. I think this disagreement is probably not material for our main discussion. I still hold on to my view about the role language in our sense of reality, but put it in the back burner for now so that we can continue our discussion without distractions.

That is the summary.

– cheers,
– Manoj

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