From: Mari (mld2001@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 00:06:28 GMT
Now if i can find the page where i found this article i can credit the
person who wrote it.
According to the naive realist view, the world we see around us is identfied
as the objective external world, even though the limitations of our senses
and the properties of light allow us to experience only a small subset of
the properties of that world. In other words, the naive realist view holds
that the world we see is the world itself. This is the natural intuitive
understanding of vision that we accept from the earliest days of childhood.
The problem with this view however becomes clear on consideration of the
role of the eye as the sense organ of vision. For the flow of visual
information occurs exclusively in one direction, from the world through the
eye to the brain. If the brain is the organ of consciousness, then it cannot
in principle experience the world directly, but only indirectly, in response
to the two-dimensional images sent to it from the eyes. This fact is in
conflict with our subjective experience of objects and surfaces outside of
ourselves, because our conscious experience appears to escape the confines
of our physical being, to extend into the external world beyond our sensory
receptors. The causal chain of vision therefore refutes the naive realist
view of vision, as explained by KÖHLER (1929). It is due to this naive
realist view therefore that consciousness is often considered to be somehow
mysterious, forever beyond our capacity to comprehend, for there is no known
physical mechanism that can possibly account for the external nature of
visual experience.
The solution to this paradox was discovered centuries ago by Immanuel KANT
(1781) by the principle of epistemological dualism. KANT reasoned that we
cannot actually experience the world itself as it is, but only an internal
perceptual replica of the world. There are, in other words, two worlds of
reality, the nouminal and the phenomenal world. The nouminal world is the
objective external world, which is the source of the light that stimulates
the retina. This is the world studied by science, and is populated by
invisible entities such as atoms, electrons, and invisible forms of
radiation. The phenomenal world is the internal perceptual world of
conscious experience, which is a copy of the external world of objective
reality constructed in our brain on the basis of the image received from the
retina. The only way we can perceive the nouminal world is by its effects on
the phenomenal world. Therefore the world we experience as external to our
bodies is not actually the world itself, but only an internal virtual
reality replica of that world generated by perceptual processes within our
head.
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