"Is the simulation of sense all we need for the real to become, in its
treatment as entirely rational, the simulation..."
Starting from Derek Hales question and considering all the contributions
I've read, the Pier Luigi's links that could guide into a history of senses
simulation in history, Jennifer Nikolov(a)'s connections around mind and
telepathy, and so on, I want to share two – a tale around senses and the
problem of the origin of ideas and a some fragments from a book around
quantum entanglement and extrasensory experiences
In the preface of a edition from 1930s Teatrise on the Sensation, we read
that "the eighteenth century was the age of the Encyclopedists. In this
days, philosophic speculation was concentrated on the problem of the nature
of the dependence of the knowledge on the functioning of the various special
sense organs and it was rather than a metaphysical, a psychological problem
– the greatest interest had been aroused in Diderot's study of the
psychology of the deaf and dumb. In the 'Treatise on the Sensations'
Condillac followed almost the same method of Diderot, supposing an human
being that was devoid of all sensations until the senses are stimulated. The
interesting artifice the philosopher used was to "awake the senses
successively and study the apport of each sense separately and the
modifications consequent on the relations between them.
Condillac followed Locke in the principle that "[…] there is nothing in the
intellect which had not been previously in the senses; that the sources of
knowledge are twofold, sensation and reflexion; that by means of sensation
we apprehend external phenomena and by means of reflexion internal
phenomena." (CONDILLAC, 1930, translator's introduction, p.xxii) Criticizing
Locke for not carrying the natural method of analyses far enough, he
believed that the faculties of soul are not innate qualities having their
origin in the sensation itself. To Condillac, it is not enough to reduce all
knowledge to sentience but learn how sentient knowledge is produced.
The statue
"In order to analyze the progress of our ideas, and the genesis of our
faculties, and trace them back to their primary cause, Condillac made use of
an arbitrary fiction, a fantasy in keeping with tastes and methods of the
time. He imagined a marble statue with the complete organic structure of the
human body, but insentient, and he analyzed the knowledge such an imaginary
being would have if the senses were awakened one a time. He began by
allowing it smell, then taste, then hearing, then sight, and finally touch.
He considered each sense in itself and also in relation to the others. The
conclusions he came to were: that a sensation is itself is a modification of
consciousness and teaches us nothing of what is outside; that sensation of
smell, taste, hearing and sight by themselves or together would give no
ideas of external objects." (CONDILLAC, 1930, translator's introduction,
p.xxii-xxiii)
Ideas of external things
He believes that "in touch are united both sensations and ideas; sensations
in realation to the soul which they modify; ideas in connection with the
external world. It is because we make a habit of ascribing sensations of
touch to external things that we are led to ascribe our other sensations to
external things. In this way sensations are referred to what is outside
ourselves and become our ideas of external things. In this way sensations
become our ideas of external things. Attention is a vivid sensation,
throwing other sensations into shade. It can be directed to a past sensation
which is recalled, as well as to a present sensation. (CONDILLAC, 1930,
translator's introduction, p. xxiii)
In:
http://instantsofmetamorphosis.blogspot.com/search/label/references%20v.02
An here a Borgean fantasy mentioning the Condillacalegory and Lotze
hypothetical
animal I really like:
Two Metaphysical
Animals<http://instantsofmetamorphosis.blogspot.com/2010/04/two-metaphysical-animals.html>
*Two Metaphysical Animals**
(BORGES, 1967, The Book of Imaginary Beings)
The problem of the origin of ideas contributes two curious creatures to the
fauna of mankind's imagination. One was invented sometime in the
mid-eighteenth century; the other, a hundred years later.
The first creature is Condillac's 'sentient statue.' Descartes professed the
doctrine of innate ideas; in order to refute him, Étienne Bonnot Condillac
imagined a marble statue shaped like a man's body and animated by a soul
that has never perceived, never thought. Condillac begins by endowing the
statue with a single sense – smell, perhaps the least complex of the five
senses. The fragrance of jasmine is the beginning of the statue's biography;
for one instant, there shall be nothing in all the universe but that odor.
More precisely, that odor shall be the universe, which a second later will
be the fragrance of a rose, and then a carnation. Let there be a single odor
in the consciousness of the statue, and we have attention; let a fragrance
last beyond the moment when the stimulus has passed, and we have memory; let
one impression in the present and one from the past occupy the statue's
attention, and we have comparison; let the statues perceive analogies and
differences, and we have judgment; let comparison and judgment occur again,
and we have reflection; let a pleasant memory be more vivid than an
unpleased one, and we have imagination. When the faculties of the
understanding have been engendered, the faculties of the Will must follow –
love and hate (attraction and aversion), hope and fear. The awareness of
having passed thorough many states will give the statue as abstract notion
of number; the awareness of being the odor of carnation yet of having been
the odor of jasmine will endow it with the idea of Self.
Condillac would then grant his hypothetical man hearing, taste, sight, and,
lastly, touch. This last sense reveals to the creature the fact that space
exists and that within space, he himself is within a body; sounds,
fragrances, and colors will have seemed to him, before that moment, simple
variations or modifications of his consciousness.
The allegory we have just retold is titled Traité des sensations, and it was
published en 1754; for this account of it, we have used the second volume of
Bréhier's Histoire de la philosophie.
The other creature engendered by the problem of the knowledge is Lotze's '
hypothetical animal.' More solitary than the statue that smells roses and at
least becomes a man, the animal has but one sensitive spot on its skin, on
the end of an antenna and therefore movable. The structure of this animal
prevents it, as one can see, from receiving simultaneous perceptions, but
Lotze believed that the ability to retract or project its sensitive antenna
was enough to allow the all-but-isolated animal to discover the outside
world (without the aid of Kantian categories) and to perceive the difference
between a stationary object and a mobile one. Vaihinger admired this
fiction; it is contained in the work titled Medizinische Psychologie,
published in 1852.
*Telephaty and Quantum … beyond the 5 senses:*
In his book "Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in Quantum Reality.
New York: Paraview, 2006", Dean Radin mentioned Bergson talking about
telepathy:
"If telepathy is a real fact, it is very possible that it is operating at
every moment and everywhere, but with too little intensity to be noticed, or
else it is operating in the presence of obstacles which neutralize the
effect at the same moment that it manifests itself. We produce electricity
at every moment, the atmosphere is continuously electrified, we move among
magnetic currents, yet million of human beings lived for thousands of years
having suspected the existence of electricity. It may be the same with
telepathy." In: Henry Bergson (1914) Presidential Address. Proceedings of
the Society for Psychical Research, 27, 157-175; Huxley, A. (1954) The Doors
of Perception. London: Chatto & Windus.
*In the same book, Dean Radin propose the following question: "Whether
[…] deeply
entagled states are meaningfully related to human experience, and if so,are
they also related to psi?" Bring the point to discussion, Radin believes
that the answer is 'yes' and consider that:*
* *
*"One reason is that some scientist now believe that bioentanglement – quantum
connections within and among living systems – will be usefull to explain
the holistic properties of life itself. Numerous scientists, including Nobel
laureate physicists Brian Johann Summhammer, from the Vienna University of
Technology, proposed because entanglement is everywhere in nature, it's
conceivable that evolution has takesn advantage of it." *
In:
http://www.amazon.com/Entangled-Minds-Extrasensory-Experiences-Quantum/dp/1416516778
**
* *
* *
The vision proposed by Harald Atmanspacher and others, in the works about
"Weak Quantum Theory:Complementarity and Entanglement in Physics and Beyond"
brings a perspective where The concepts of complementarity and entanglement
are considered with
respect to their significance in and beyond physics. A formally generalized,
weak version of quantum theory, more general than ordinary quantum theory
of physical systems. From a conceptual point of view, Bohr used the concept
of complementarity to indicate a relationship between apparently opposing,
contradictory notions which
can be characterized in terms of a relationship of polarity. Freud (1992)
was the first to observe that in the context of a therapeutic relationship
strange interpersonal experiences can happen which he called transference
and countertransference. In order to apply the concepts of weak quantum
theory to such situations, Harald Atmanspacher and his group consider the
entire group of involved people as the system as a whole. The subsystems are
the individual members of the group with particular emphasis on their mental
(psychological) variables. The local preparation of "conscious awareness"
can then be considered as complementary to a global preparation of material
which is principally not available, because it is unconscious or irrelevant.
In close analogy to the quantum situation, where measurement separates ontic
(holistic) and epistemic (local) levels of description, the appearance of
conscious contents as manifestations of unconscious material must be
considered as a transformation between fundamentally different mental
modalities. The unconscious mode is left (and maybe even changed) whenever a
conscious content emerges out of it.
In: http://www.igpp.de/english/tda/pdf/wqt.pdf
Clarissa //
2011/1/21 rbuiani <rbuiani@gmail.com>
> ...at the risk of being naive: the more subjective and arbitrary a type of
> sense is and the more unsimulable it is too. this is not so much because of
> the actual difficulty to simulate a particular sense, but because that
> particular sense has not being payed too much attention to (smell being one)
> or has been deemed as secondary: thus, it hasn't been subjected to any set
> of rules (think of perspective) that dictate the way in which a sense has to
> be reproduced artificially.
>
> I have been thinking about this for a while (coming out of a period of
> research on conventions and assumptions regarding the act of seeing, so I am
> very interested in knowing about treatments of the act of smelling or
> tasting) and would love to hear what everybody else thinks about this issue.
>
> thanks
> roberta buiani
> On Jan 20, 2011, at 6:19 PM, Pier Luigi Capucci wrote:
>
> > Some other links about the discussion on the sense of smell
> >
> > Symbolic Olfactory Display (Thesis)
> > http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jofish/thesis/
> >
> > What's that smell? New York museum calls it art
> >
> http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/2010-12-31-museum-art-design-art-of-scent_N.htm
> >
> > Sissel Tolaas
> > http://andreaskeller.squarespace.com/odor-art/
> >
> > MoMA exhibit includes smell artist James Auger
> > http://airsensenews.com/2008/04/01/203/
> >
> > Following Her Nose. An Odor Artist's Vision of a Smelly Future
> > http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,692351,00.html
> >
> > Il marketing olfattivo (in Italian)
> >
> http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/aSGuest20613-202823-ttnuovimedia-olfattivo-marketing-education-ppt-powerpoint/
> >
> >
> > --
> > Pier Luigi Capucci
> > e-mail: plc@noemalab.org
> > web: http://www.noemalab.org/plc/plc.html
> > skype: plcapucci
> >
> >
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