From: Patrick van den Berg (cirandar@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Dec 16 2002 - 13:43:59 GMT
Hi people,
On acausality:
Pirsig somewhere says (I believe in Zen...) that the perception of the
tree is not one of contact with the tree, because light takes time to be
reflected from the tree, and in addition it takes around 100 ms to
create a conscious awareness after a stimulus arrives at the retina.
The point by Pirsig was that the percept of the tree was secondary
somehow, because of the causal links or obstacles between us and the
tree. IMHO Pirsig was thus looking for something 'acausal' then, a
direct, pure experience of something.
Well, all I can say about that is: just look someone in the eyes. When
you make contact, do we need Einstein (-no signal can travel faster than
the speed of light) and time-reaction experiments to tell us that this
direct contact is an illusion? I think our folkpsychological intuitions,
that we CAN make direct, instantaneous (and thus acausal) contact with
someone are right.
BTW, some people see parallels between direct correlations between
spatially seperated events in the quantum world and our consciousnesses.
IMHO something like that is closer to our folkpsychological intuitions
than the story above with the tree.
Just felt like sharing this line of thought. GReetings, Patrick.
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