Sylvia wrote:
>All of your analyses of perception are still of phenomenological reality. No
>matter what the stimuli or the perceptual equipment, we can't get outside of
>ourselves to see if anything beyond our experience either matches our
>perceptions is the cause of them. The belief in the external world is
>universal, but if we go after it to prove it either through direct experience
>or any kind of experimentation, we are still stuck with phenomena. However,
>we need the explanatory hypothesis, since without it we are left with
>unanswerable questions about our everyday experience.
And this is the basis for our question, "What's it like for you?"
I agree with this, but I think it's still too simple. I do not think that
we can know anything absolutely, but I do think we can know some things
provisionally (well enough), and that we can have a reasonable assurance
that, within a margin of error, we are pretty close. I also think we
construct working definitions of various "facts" in order to make our
practical way in the world. Within this kind of system, then, we can
compare our experience with that of others and reach a consensus about some
things. When we say there is a sun out there that gives us light and heat,
I think we can all agree upon that, even though we would have different
specifics about its mass, etc., etc. So, one of the hermeneutics involved
might be something like consensus; when we compare notes with others and
pool the data, we can approximate what constitutes the objective world.
I'm wondering what other aspects of a hermeneutic people might utilize to
evaluate and make sense of their experience.
One thing that seems important to me is that we carry in our bodies the
experience of being in the objecive world. If we bump into a tree riding
the bycicle, we have the bruises and scratches as a record of that meeting.
That is information people can utilize. It's like having a fossil record
which is actually ourselves. It's like having layers of silt and rock that
can be analyzed. We have layers of experience that form a kind of ground
of experience, and they not only contribute to the present experience of
self, but attest in some way to the objective situation that left its
imprint upon us.
Why is all this important? At one level there seems to be a "So what?"
looming. I think it is very imporant to realize there is otherness. We
cannot have a co-created field, for instance, unless there is a real other
joining in the process. We can have fantasy and projection, but if our
fantasies do not accord with what actually is, we can run into trouble as
we imagine we hear our friends and lovers saying things they are not
actually saying. Furthermore, these need to be more than mere word games;
we need to be able to attest, even if it be nothing more than a knowledge
by faith, that something is real. We believe it. We may come to see it in
another way, or have a corrective experience that reshapes our
understanding, but we need to be able to fall back on the position of
reality as more than one's own construct.
And when I do that, I do not see fragmented reality, but one, undivided
field, which is spoken of by sensient members of that field who speak of it
in terms of their own experience, which is for them the boundary, the
substantive layer of the field.
Phil
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