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Technology Stocks : Don't You Cry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elpolvo who wrote (199)	3/3/2003 4:23:34 PM
From: HG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 239

i knew that. <g> . . . . . . I didn't flesh it out to that minute a detail, but we're on the same wavelength. We are incomplete, a fraction of the creation, as in, we cannot imagine what it is to be a stone. We cannot participate. The pleasure or pain of knowing what it is to be a stone, is denied to us. Partly by nature, but also because of our unwillingness to see beyond the limitations of our physicality. We choose to say 'our knowledge is supreme' or 'we know more than anyone else,' or 'science doesn't say this and that' - an attitude that really inhibits creative free thinking and growth. you have only a sense of what that sense should be, only its seed, imagination. And I am not sure we can even imagine what it is to be a stone (or anything or anyone else for that matter. I guess the use of the word stone is a metaphor)? Or even if there is something that being a stone means. And we can 'see' well enough now - thru microscope etc, but for feeling, analysing, understanding we rely on our good old ancient brain, which may have gotten too outdated. Maybe a microscope for 'feeling,' 'understanding' and/or 'imagination' is needed as well...? I wrote a few pages in my diary yesterday about the issue of not knowing anything about anything and being vain enough not to know that we don't know anything either.....fascinating subject this, my ignorance and stupidity....<g> Wanna ride the batmobile with me? I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats.....perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case,5 and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion. Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications. silcom.com