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Article 7587 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Simulated Brain
Message-ID: <burt.721455705@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca>
Date: 11 Nov 92 04:21:45 GMT
References: <BxBBnw.CEK@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Nov7.213838.15600@constell
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>In article <burt.721365558@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.
ca (Burt Voorhees) writes:
>>>In article <BxBBnw.CEK@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> lcarr@silver.ucs.indiana.edu
(l
>>incoln carr) writes:
>all.  The whole point that I was trying to make about the cat is that
>the set of phenomena that we perceive to be a cat may or may not
>correspond to a single noumenon, what I think your calling an
>"identity."  There is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence
>between the items on the menu and the items of food, to use your
>metaphor.  In fact, we don't have any way of finding out a whole hell
>of a lot about the food and we're better off talking about the menu.

Yea, usually we're happy to get any kind of correspondence
at all.  And, while we're talking we are talking
about the menu, but I'd like to explore the comment that
we don't have any way of "finding out a whole hell of
a lot about the food..."  I'm not sure that I agree with
that but it takes us onto pretty slippery ground.

It seems to me that we can talk around things, using
language as a pointer as it were, and allowing
the build up of a tacit knowledge of the food...,
but then we get into the questions of how our
states of consciousness influence our understanding,
and the definition of states which allow (if possible)
unbiased understanding.  I'll vote for suspension of
judgement as the desirable state in this regard...
bv


