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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 14, 2019 - 05:22pm PT
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When you hear a word, it matches one of your stored patterns...
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Look carefully at the words you just used: you, and hear.
My point in a lot of these discussion is that in sticking strictly with physical descriptions, you have essentially not only missed the implications of the words just used, but you are describing a machine and only a machine. A machine does not "hear" anything. It mechanically processes data. It has no "you" that is aware of anything at all.
While we can obsess about physical functioning and often we do, it is consciousness that makes sounds and ideas and all and everything possible. It's not that we don't all know this on some level, but unless we take account of it, a sound wave and the experience of hearing are held as the same thing, that is, the topo and the experience are selfsame. And nobody believes that for a second.
Strange how that gets passed over. When it does, it's not that qual are not "there," rather even as your consciousness processes them continually, your eyes are elsewhere.
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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Jan 14, 2019 - 05:41pm PT
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Consciousness is not a brain. A mind is not a brain. That can be easily proved mathematically. Various people have been puzzled by the fact that not even the molecules making up the brain tissue could hold all that the mind can remember or do. And then there is creativity, drive, and so forth.
If you say it's all in the brain then you slam the door on perception. There is where Wundt and the rest went off route.
There is an energy, or rather a source of energy. It can be measured.
Consciousness is not just the introspective human.
A giant sequoia tree can be conscious yet has no "brain" that we know of.
(actually any plant has consciousness, that has been proven too)
One sign of consciousness in nature is self-determined motion.
The mosquito evading you in your tent.
The storm that is born, lives and dies.
The Earth moving through space, mother of a billion lives.
A Star, moving through space, emanating the love you feel as it caresses your skin on a warm day.
A Galaxy, mother of abillions and billions of lives. A harbor for all life.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jan 15, 2019 - 07:52am PT
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DP: there is the problem that different people observe the same thing the same way.
Only in the most generalized way. Specifically, I don’t think that can be shown.
I tried to pin down specifics about new product descriptions in an embryonic industry in my Ph.D. dissertation between buyers and sellers of the same brands and models. I got the attributes from the supply side and the demand side in interviews and surveys, and I factored those down to about 35 different attributes for the industry. (The industry was “market-data systems,” think Bloomberg boxes that sit on traders’ desks.) There was generally NO meaningful correlation among buyers and suppliers in the data set I collected. I argued that should have been expected in an embryonic (formative) industry.
In job interviews, I got the following at research universities: “You must have done something wrong; of course people know what they’re doing and they must be agreeing with each other.” “Look at the data” said I.
Over the years, I came to see that any consensus occurs only at the most generalized and superficial level; when one gets down to individual specifics, so-called consensus disappears.
Scientific research studies finesse this problem through parsimonious modeling: the complete number of attributes of anything are boiled down to a “manageable” number—that is, reductionism. Some of us would argue that no thing can be fully and accurately described. Hegel once wrote: "To describe a red ball fully, one would have to stipulate every association with everything else in the universe." (Know anything about R-square statistics in research studies? It's the total explained variance in a study. They tend to be quite low in almost every study.)
“Trucks” is a category comprised of specific individual trucks. Are all trucks the same to you? Would that be so for an expert mechanic?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 15, 2019 - 08:46am PT
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If MH2 finds that process "garbled," perhaps he needs to seek out another modality
It would be nice to see lucid honest accuracy. What I saw in your post was you tossing a hodge-podge of your clay pigeons in the air and shooting aimless confusion at them.
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WBraun
climber
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Jan 15, 2019 - 09:05am PT
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You have to tell people what they are seeing and then work to get them to agree that is in fact what they are seeing.
Just a simple example of how it doesn't really ever work that way.
One winter a Ghost appeared in the house we were caretaking.
The house is only less than 200 yards from the Yosemite Cemetary.
The Ghost was a woman in all white and very clear.
No one saw it except me and the dog there.
Ghost means the living entity in the material world lost its gross physical body and now is only in it's subtle material body.
That person can't move on due to heavy attachment to that material body.
So it remains as ghost and lacks a gross physical body now to be able to enjoy.
That person remains in limbo.
The dog saw it also and wouldn't go into that room for a couple of months.
In a court of law a scientist will just say you're insane and you wer seeing sh!t that ain't there and using the dog as a collaborator that can't be confirmed by talking to him.
There are people on this planet that can see the spiritual stratum very clearly that a gross materialist
like rantloon ((AC), HFCS, etc etc etc) will never see any of this because their consciousness is not on that level.
Thus they'll keep jumping like monkeys claiming that their brainwashed biased restrictive so-called science can't verify any of this.
Thus they discard it and maintain their brainwashed illusionary authority of their so-called modern science. .....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 15, 2019 - 10:13am PT
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If MH2 finds that process "garbled," perhaps he needs to seek out another modality
It would be nice to see lucid honest accuracy. What I saw in your post was you tossing a hodge-podge of your clay pigeons in the air and shooting aimless confusion at them.
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This, to me, is a troll. If you take issue with specific things said, then point that out, specifically, and offer counterarguments. Otherwise, it's just all guff and jive.
Again, the conversation advances on specifics, and if you take issue with what someone says, specifically mention a passage, and offer an alternative, and specific, take on it.
Another interesting thing is that Don Paul says he got vexed over the issue of qualia, or more specifically, Husserl's distinction between "natural" and "phenomenological" modes of understanding. With the "natural" article, sense-perception of the material realm constitutes the known reality, and understanding is premised on the accuracy of the perception and the objective knowability of what lies "out there."
This perspective leaves little room for perception itself, yet ironically, the physical breakdowns Don Paul has been serving up rater perfectly describe a physicalists take on qualia "production" in the brain, sans any consciousness to experience same.
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capseeboy
Social climber
portland, oregon
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Jan 15, 2019 - 10:46am PT
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Actually, there is no example of any force or object existing independently from everything else. There is no stand alone anything whatsoever.
Either a person believes this or they don't. From a very early age I believed this; it may have been due to LSD, I don't know. Never the less, my interpretation of science seems to keep reinforcing this belief. Others may say it does just the opposite. Whatever helps me to stay cool.
Over the years, I came to see that any consensus occurs only at the most generalized and superficial level; when one gets down to individual specifics, so-called consensus disappears.
This is really funny stuff to me. It reminds me of nine witnesses having nine different versions of the same accident. Yes, there was an accident, but the devil in the details.
The consciousness has always been there but hasn't surfaced, in mind, until relatively recently; when the thumping and pumping was superseded by a few minds.
My brains interpretation of reality is based on a need to know basis, IOW, how to keep myself alive. Although other realities may exist, It, my brain, doesn't need to know of all the other realities to keep myself alive; although, I may find it to be very interesting stuff.
However, the continued existence of our species may need to acknowledge other realities. The other realities, being based on interpretations of data, point to our planetary existence coming to an end.
May be mind is doubt.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 15, 2019 - 11:14am PT
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Actually, there is no example of any force or object existing independently from everything else. There is no stand alone anything whatsoever.
Either a person believes this or they don't. From a very early age I believed this; it may have been due to LSD, I don't know.
The acid didn't do it, IMO.
I said "example" on purpose.
Take the standard take that space and time are "real."
How would we ever know if some thing or force exists independent of everything else. Where would it exist? If we see it, it is not independent of us. If nobody observes it, we can postulate it existing alone, but what about the space in which it exists and operates.
There's the old notion that the moon exists whether we observe it or not. This is really the key point with most physicalists: that mind is a linear/causal phenomenon or function preceded by material evolution ergo there was a time when mind was NOT around. This was preceded by a big bang with no "before," though one might ask: What went bang? Oh yes, potentialities existed beforehand, some believe, though "reality" did not. And there's also the common saw that this "misinterprets the data," though by definition "before" the big bang there was no data. Or maybe the data ("information" in modern parlance) "existed" in a timeless non-zone.
You can see why so many moderns are starting to junk linear time and space as fundamental. We always end up backed into a corner.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 15, 2019 - 01:35pm PT
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Some might find this instructional per what some of us are saying on this thread.
Map–territory Relation
The map–territory relation describes the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory" and that "the word is not the thing", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse models of reality with reality itself. The relationship has also been expressed in other terms, such as Alan Watts's "The menu is not the meal."
"A map is not the territory
The expression first appeared in print in "A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics", a paper that Alfred Korzybski gave at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, Louisiana on December 28, 1931. The paper was reprinted in Science and Sanity, 1933, pp. 747–61. In this book, Korzybski acknowledges his debt to mathematician Eric Temple Bell, whose epigram "the map is not the thing mapped"[2] was published in Numerology.
A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves" in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled The Treachery of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe").
In The Medium Is the Message, Marshall McLuhan expanded this argument to electronic media. Media representations, especially on screens, are abstractions, or virtual "extensions" of what our sensory channels, bodies, thinking and feeling do for us in real life.
This concept occurs in the discussion of exoteric and esoteric religions. Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and language constructs, such as mathematics. Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.
Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), made the point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile". A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
Jorge Luis Borges's one-paragraph short story "On Exactitude in Science" (1946) also describes a map that has the same scale as its territory, here an entire empire where cartography has become exactingly precise.
Laura Riding, in her poem The Map of Places (1927), deals with this relation: "The map of places passes. The reality of paper tears."
The University of Cambridge economist Joan Robinson (1962) emphasized the disutility of 1:1 maps and other overly detailed models: "A model which took account of all the variation of reality would be of no more use than a map at the scale of one to one."
Korzybski's argument about the map and the territory also influenced the Belgian surrealist writer of comics Jan Bucquoy for a storyline in his comic Labyrinthe: a map can never guarantee that one will find the way out, because the accumulation of events can change the way one looks at reality.
Historian of religions J. Z. Smith wrote a book entitled Map Is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions
Author Robert M. Pirsig uses the idea both theoretically and literally in his book Lila when the main character/author becomes temporarily lost due to an over reliance on a map, rather than the territory that the map describes.
In 2010, French author Michel Houellebecq published his novel, La carte et le territoire, translated into English as The Map and the Territory. The title was a reference to Alfred Korzybski's aphorism. The novel was awarded the French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.
Robert Anton Wilson, in his book Prometheus Rising, also makes this point about the map not being reality. He explicitly attempts to explain this important principle to the reader.
The mathematician James A. Lindsay made the idea that the map is not reality a primary theme of his 2013 book Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly. In it, he argues that all of our scientific theories, mathematics, and even the idea of God are conceptual maps often confused "for the terrain" they attempt to explain. In a foreword to the book, physicist Victor J. Stenger expresses agreement with this point of view.
In 2017, Ugly Duckling Presse published a book of poetry by Marília Garcia called The Territory Is Not the Map, translated from the Portuguese (O país não é o mapa) by Hilary Kaplan.
Yuval Noah Harari's 2018 book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, has a description of people following directions from their navigation software and driving into the ocean.
Relationship
Gregory Bateson, in "Form, Substance and Difference", from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), argued the essential impossibility of knowing what any actual territory is. Any understanding of any territory is based on one or more sensory channels reporting adequately but imperfectly:
We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.
Elsewhere in that same volume, Bateson argued that the usefulness of a map (a representation of reality) is not necessarily a matter of its literal truthfulness, but its having a structure analogous, for the purpose at hand, to the territory. Bateson argued this case at some length in the essay The Theology of Alcoholics Anonymous.
To paraphrase Bateson's argument, a culture that believes that common colds are transmitted by evil spirits, that those spirits fly out of you when you sneeze, can pass from one person to another when they are inhaled or when both handle the same objects, etc., could have just as effective a "map" for public health as one that substituted microbes for spirits.
Another basic quandary is the problem of accuracy. Jorge Luis Borges' "On Exactitude in Science" describes the tragic uselessness of the perfectly accurate, one-to-one map:
In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
A more extreme literary example, the fictional diary of Tristram Shandy is so detailed that it takes the author one year to set down the events of a single day – because the map (diary) is more detailed than the territory (life), yet must fit into the territory (diary written in the course of his life), it can never be finished. Such tasks are referred to as supertasks.
With this quotation of Josiah Royce, Borges describes a further conundrum of when the map is contained within the territory, you are led into infinite regress:
The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: 'Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.' Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Partial Enchantments of the Quixote (1964)
Neil Gaiman retells the parable in reference to storytelling in Fragile Things (it was originally to appear in American Gods):
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.
The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues in Simulacra and Simulation (1994, p. 1):
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory.
The philosopher David Schmidtz draws on this distinction in his book Elements of Justice, apparently deriving it from Wittgenstein's private language argument.
The fundamental trade-off between accuracy and usability of a map, particularly in the context of modelling, is known as Bonini's paradox, and has been stated in various forms, poetically by Paul Valéry: "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable."
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jan 15, 2019 - 02:07pm PT
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Interesting, John. Was this post from Korzybski's essay?
The following I found to be particularly intriguing:
" In it, he argues that all of our scientific theories, mathematics, and even the idea of God are conceptual maps often confused "for the terrain" they attempt to explain."
I wonder what the "terrain" of mathematics is? And how it might relate to the notion of a "mathematical universe" as conceived (perceived?) by Tegmark? How might a non-mathematician answer these questions? And would their opinions have equal or greater "validity" than those of a mathematician? I'm staying mum momentarily.
;>)
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 15, 2019 - 04:54pm PT
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Back to definitions. I think that HFCS's, agency, is a good one to include in the big three; intelligence, consciousness, and mind.
I've had further ahem, thoughts on these words. I think that the best way to look at them is through the lens of evolution, which is fundamentally hierarchical. In my previous post, I said that intelligence is pure code. Hogwash (former self)! Here's a better hypothesis; intelligence predates both consciousness and mind in an evolutionary sense. I mean, the thing about evolution is that the algorithms that help organisms survive and navigate the world and propagate are saved and can be re-used or re-purposed. In this sense, intelligence can be viewed as being used by consciousness and mind, as I stated previously.
To me, there needs to be a word for how a bat or whale or a chimpanzee or a human experiences the world in their brains. Clearly they are all making informed decisions in their brains based on a (nearly) continuous stream of environmental information. I would call this consciousness. They also all exhibit agency, although I would say that agency probably applies to organisms that don't have consciousness (I could easily be wrong).
Human mind -- the only kind of mind that we know, occurred evolutionarily later than consciousness, at least along our lineage. I think that Michael Gazzaniga nailed it on where it is in the brain and more or less how it works.
This leads me to this; it's clear that we will be able to build intelligence into robots and the internet. AlphaOne is probably the tip of the iceberg. It also seems that this intelligence will not require consciousness or mind. What's not clear to me is whether we could ever build consciousness from scratch. You could grow and modify it from an existing life form though I'll bet. Start off with life to get consciousness, I say.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 15, 2019 - 05:05pm PT
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Hi John. I can't speak for math, but for mind itself (aka, 1st person experience), the basic idea is that said mind is not normally "known" or encountered as a static object, capacity, function, or phenomenon, but a dynamic process. This aspect is encapsulated this way (from the quotes):
Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and language constructs, such as mathematics. Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience.
For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.
Nagel pushed it further and said that mind, in this regards, can only be known - epistemically speaking - THROUGH experience. That is, we can only know about climbing The Thimble by climbing The Thimble, and that descriptors, no matter how accurate, are not detailing the climbing itself, so to speak, but the information or data thereon refers to something altogether different than the climbing.
Another aspect above and beyond about mind that is NOT "normally known or encountered" is when we intentionally (though figuratively) attempt to freeze or pause the dynamic flow of experience and simply observe it through contemplation or whatever method we so choose.
Sensory and cognitive flow does not stop, but with practice it will greatly subside and settle and the focus shifts from WHAT we are aware of to awareness itself. What emerges is a direct experience of awareness itself. Though the wording here is inexact (only a map), when flows becomes the background and observing becomes the figure or foreground, the deeper nature of observing emerges as presence/being/existing/knowing sans object.
Some call this pure consciousness or pure mind or original mind though our encounter of same is never complete. Because this is not content, data or information ITSELF, and was arrived at by detaching from thinking and evaluating, the belief that "we only think that's what it is" couldn't be more off base.
As I've maintained many times, the biggest bedevilment in studying or trying to wrangle consciousness might be our tendency to conflate and/or contrast the esoteric with the exoteric, a point elaborated in all the quotes cited about mind-territory, pretty much summed up with:
"All of our scientific theories, mathematics, and even the idea of God are conceptual maps often confused "for the terrain" they attempt to explain."
Some traditions, and indeed more than a few leading scientists take this whole shebang yet another step and say the terrain itself IS mind, but that is another topic.
I'll add that the one thing I have slowly learned from all of this and from my practice is humility. The moment I think I have a bead on the real deal, something shifts and I find myself in terrain I could never in a million years have imagined, causing me to revise my entire take on the subject.
For those not standing pat on their own concepts going in, like Eyonkee, you see him saying things like: AlphaOne is probably the tip of the iceberg. It also seems that this intelligence will not require consciousness or mind.
In my opinion this is a crucial insight and only comes from seriously looking at what is involved. Because I have a practice, I have no choice but to constantly revise my take on it all because emerging insights destroy my previous take, no matter how staunchly I might have defended them.
At this point the way forward has narrowed so tight "I" can't fit through, but some part of me is still climbing to the holds like all get out.
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WBraun
climber
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Jan 15, 2019 - 05:29pm PT
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Consciousness can never be manufactured from scratch as it is already there in its complete whole manifestation always to begin with.
One can only dovetail closer to that whole or get farther away from that whole with ones developed intelligence.
The more one's intelligence is fixated on the material platform the more one's consciousness falls down into the lower intelligence of animal .....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 15, 2019 - 05:30pm PT
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If you take issue with specific things said
You said nothing specific.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 15, 2019 - 06:58pm PT
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the map is not the territory...
Train Your Brain Like a Memory Champion
'It’s why visual mnemonics, like MoL, are so effective; we’re piggybacking on a cognitive system that was fine-tuned over millions of years to work best with visual and spatial representation. “Visualization is typically beneficial due to its translation of the abstract form of the object (or concept) into a spatial medium,” Dr. Reggente said.'
what if the map is the territory?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jan 15, 2019 - 07:24pm PT
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Holy shite, there's whipping a dead horse and then there's whipping one, dragging it behind a truck for several miles, forcing it to walk over hot coals only to draw and quarter it...
Largo wrote: If you take issue with specific things said, then point that out, specifically...
There is a universal / fundamental consciousness - yes or no?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 15, 2019 - 08:59pm PT
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Holy shite, there's whipping a dead horse and then there's whipping one, dragging it behind a truck for several miles, forcing it to walk over hot coals only to draw and quarter it...
----
Proper investigation moves forward through extrapolation of seminal ideas. That, I believe, was the point of whoever put together those examples that "the map ain't the territory."
Judging by your reacion to the extrapolation, no examples were needed since, I'm figuring, you believed that the point was so obvious that it need only be mentioned for all thinking men to nod and say, By gum, that's dead ass obvious.
If so, then why is Ed floundering around attempting, as Aristotle said so long ago, to cling to a premise "at any cost." Does anyone honestly believe that he thinks the topo really IS the experience? Or is he simply digging in his heels?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jan 15, 2019 - 11:01pm PT
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At this point let's just consider the "map ain't the territory" well-flogged regardless of which side of that you come down on (and maybe just answer the question...).
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 15, 2019 - 11:28pm PT
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you didn't answer healyje's question...
but my point is that the use of maps man not be merely an intellectual metaphor.
Maps, whether they be highly abstract symbols on a paper, or elegantly woven objects, are a part of how our brain recalls important places. Obviously the ability to remember where water, food, danger are is important to our survival, and especially in pre-historic times.
The appropriation of our abilities to internally map has been used for thousands of years as a means of remembering many other things. In our modern world we often "road map" problems to be solved.
Great amounts of time are spent mapping in all its modern, complex and symbolic way. A recent Nobel Prize went to the discoverers of place and grid cells, mapping is a part of our brain.
As you know I take things quite literally and if you are talking about the separation of "mind" and "brain" as "territory" and "map," well, a lot of our experience is wrapped up in those cognitive maps, the territory is the map there, if you will.
But instead of offering your usual load of disparaging comments, perhaps you could work out the implication of your own idea.
I am sure you have written about experiences greatly exaggerating all the aspects about them to provide your readers a sense of what you felt, but far from the actual experience itself. "There be dragons." I recall reading something you wrote regarding your realizations about story telling.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 16, 2019 - 08:38am PT
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Going back and reading the map of this debate:
From Largo on Sep 8, 2011
This is my last word on the subject.
Time for new explorations.
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1593650&tn=289
or from recently
a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.
A nice example. Eating an apple engages senses of touch, taste, smell, and vision in ways that language does not. However, both eating an apple and hearing about the taste of an apple influence you physically and those impressions can affect your experience of apples. If you read a book while eating an apple, memory of the book may become associated with memory of the taste of an apple. If you read the book later you may recall the taste of apple, or if you eat an apple it may remind you of the book.
I am not clear on what it would mean to fully understand the experience of eating an apple but I agree that until you have experienced eating an apple you can’t be said to have had the experience of eating one. For what that’s worth.
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