Back to the beginning: the cave

[robvalue]

Let's take a simple example for starters: I look at a rock. We'll assume for now that I actually am looking at a rock, and not dreaming, hallucinating or having information implanted in my head.

How do my eyes detect the rock? They pick up light that is reflected off it. So right away, even if I could experience this light directly, I'm experiencing a shadow, and not the rock itself.

But then, my eyes have to detect this light and convert it into something. They turn it into electrical impulses. They have encoded the light, and by doing so, have turned it into a specific format. These impulses are a shadow of the shadow.

Then finally, the brain receives these signals and constructs a model of the rock. It's made of colours, which don't really exist at all. They are a representation. The brain experiences itself, and its own internal models. It never experiences anything else.

Different animals might encode the light differently, and produce different types of models in their brain for the same "rock". A machine set up to detect light might end up outputting the frequency of the light.

Informally, we say we experience the rock. But since this is a "back to the beginning" philosophical type thread, I was pointing out that this isn't actually the case. What we do is to work backwards from our shadows, to see what would logically produce it.

I thought about theism, and the cave thing doesn't quite work. Theists are seeing the same shadows, but their interpretation of what they represent differs. Perhaps as a metaphor within a metaphor they are trapped in a cave of sorts, but it doesn't quite fit. It's more like they are expanding the cave in their minds in ways that aren't actually real. The way I see theists chained up is in their programmed responses, and their faulty logic, which keeps them from unbiased analysis.