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Article 7612 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.721536936@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca>
Date: 12 Nov 92 02:55:36 GMT
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>In the above interpretation of the metaphor, I was using only noumena
>and phenomena, or what you're calling objects and percepts.  Perhaps
>the original poster of the metaphor had your third category, words, in
>mind, but I don't really see why such a third category would be
>necessary.  It would seem that words would be phenomena.  By
>"phenomena" I mean absolutely all perceptions, including "internal"
>perception, or apperception.

I'm not so sure about that.  I think the words are necessary
as a third catagory, unless we want to claim that there is
an inate natural language.  The perceptions are all internal,
even though we attribute most of them to external sources.
But we use words to lable the perceptions, and manipulate
them linguistically.
There is something very Kantian about all of this:

nomena-->sensation-->apprehansion-->perception-->empirical thought
         sense data   sensations     objects       naming and
                     in space/time  (sensed things)    thinking about (words)

Our usual problem is to work backward from the words to some sense of
the nomena, if we want to go that far, it doesn't usually seem to be
a matter of survival if we develop an intuition of nomena or not as
long as we can on occasion deal with sensations located with respect
to us in space and time (e.g., getting out of the way of that thing
which, after the fact, I'll recognize as a truck.)
bv


