All sensory processes have different quality and extent of spatial representation in humans — cognitive representation of space is not restricted to sight alone. All these senses also contribute in building the cognitive representation of time too. These faculties differ among various organisms greatly, and even among humans to quite an extent. Congenitally blind people have a representation of space around them through touch and sound in the absence of sight. (I have attached a study on dreams of the congenitally blind — useful for discussing the point you made about dreams). 有趣的是, congenitally blind people sometimes use the language of vision to describe space around them even though they have never seen before. The important point is that although vision is perhaps the most important faculty for humans, it is not the only one and has no inherent specialty about it. Different people may find different senses special for different reasons. A physicist like you finds light special because of the special relation it holds with mass and energy. I understand this “special-ness” from your point of view well enough — there is I think no great difficulty in relating to this conceptual flavor. My personal favorite is also sight, with its important presence in physics. Francis Crick chose to study vision as the critical organ to explain consciousness, not because it had any inherent superiority, but because it provided the right platform with all its perceptual idiosyncrasies. This is what I meant by a good strategy for research. 另一方面, if I were a chemist I would also argue for the special-ness of chemical reactions in sensing smell or taste. I may even say atomic or subatomic interactions are the core of anything happening in the universe.
Two points about the above: 1) You misunderstood my question 2) you used an example that is quite an overkill to describe “phenomenal reality” which is already well taken. It is well understood that perceptions of things around us differ between senses and different species, simply because the instruments and mechanisms of measurement are different. Two scales of different lengths give different measurements of the same distance. Some perceptions could produce at the end similar results while others produce indeed different results. 所以, the space I represent and the space a bat represents may indeed be different, although we may bump into each sometime. 然而, I don’t know what bat’s space is as I’m not a bat and the bat is not me and we cannot compare.
My question was: assuming that perceptual realities between organisms differ, which perceptual reality are you talking about here? You cannot obviously generalize, as you are not even privy to others’ perceptual realities. You can only at best speak of your own PR, and stretch a little bit to assume you are not very different from me and others, so what you decide for yourself may also apply to me. My question was about this: what is the perceptual reality that you are trying to explain with light as being the most important entity? Are you explaining it for yourself (á), for all human race (B), or for all beings in the universe (Ç)? This is important to be clarified upfront.
Now now, we have to go at this carefully. 第一, I’m no longer sure what you hold AR for although you also say it is not accessible. I thought it was the Absolute Reality akin to Brahman or Noumenon that we will never know of. The more important point is even if we guessed it right we will never be able to test it. If it is so, one can assume it as obeying whatever one wants, even as a pot of boiling water. 你要知道, I understand the elegance of taking AR as CM so that you arrive at PR as SR. This is an attractive proposition that has not missed me. But it is a proposition that shoots itself in the foot, albeit boldly!
As I have said, I can understand the temptation of this proposition. It is too attractive to pass; even Schopenhauer fell for it (read Brian Magee’s Confessions of a Philosopher). I understood your tilt already from your paper. 但, how can you test that the light barrier exists only in the PR? You will have to show that the light barrier does not exist in the AR. Or do I miss something? I hope that in arriving at a complicated solution we have not forgotten the simple premises we started with — that AR is not reachable and testable.
It is an interesting metaphysical concept as metaphysical concepts go (same as Noumenon/Phenomenon) that can never be tested. I see clearly the point that if AR obeys CM, then we would get SR in PR etc. It gives me the feeling of a very tasty morsel suddenly falling from my mouth into a deep hole. The difficulty, 对我来说, is not in understanding the concept, especially as I have been into this Noumenon thing for I don’t know how long, but in agreeing with it because of its slippery nature — the inability to test it from because of its very premise.
好, that is the crux of the matter — that PR to AR mapping could be very many. However much you warn people against it, they would go away with a feeling quite to the contrary, worse still they would also know that you are putting forth something you cannot test.
同样, we don’t have to be one or none. We need not ditch or embrace causality before even understanding it. If there is no causality, so be it, ending up with solipsism or nihilism for what one cares.
Although, this study is not about sound (notice that here also sight is more interesting than hearing!), it relates to the question with no less importance. Dreams are indeed neurological phenomenon experienced without outside sensory input. This is very well understood now (also attached see a more recent review on neuroimaging in dreams). 然而, dreams of visual imagery are completely intact in only those who have only seen before. If you had no prior experience of a percept you may not even dream about it, because the neural connections cannot form without the percept, and hence cannot be repeat without it.
Although, you made this point tongue-in-cheek (quite inline with your routine behavior:-), you opened up yourself to the profound question ? is there anything to be observed without the observer?, or vice versa. This is a question that occupied much of the lifetime of Advaita and Dvaita philosophers, and requires persistent reflection. One may assert that there is Brahman beyond Maya, and another might say there is not. You take the pick – but you have to reflect on this more, 我认为.
肯定, I think we all perceive and understand as is our wont and our experiences and such blah blah. But a certain exercise made me a little unsettled sometime ago. The thought experiment was to imagine how Brahman could be in the absence of a conscious being. 当然, you will never know, but the process of reflection will give you some insight into this Brahman-Maya quandary. Try it for yourself. I will be interested to know what you imagined and what you felt.