Images and Reality.
Thoughts
Delusion 1
There are objects called thoughts, and not processes called thinking, (see W
and S)
Since these are classed as objects, we imagine that they have an important
quality or attribute of objects, that of spatial position or location, (but
of course they don’t)
As well as the psychological process of thinking we have the processes of
feeling, remembering, (memory), imagining, (imagination), perceiving,
(perception) etc
Taken together we get the fictitious entity, the mind
When a person perceives an object there are two things here.
a) One is the perception,
b) One is the actual object.
b) is presumably the cause of a)
We might imagine a), the perception, as localized in the same place as b),
the actual object, but of course the perceiving process occurs in the brain
The perception and the actual object are easily confused or
merged.
Then we can think that
1) people can see the object and see our perception also
For other processes e.g. hearing, other people can hear the sounds we hear
and so can hear our auditory perceptions, our auditory images.
2) Names, words and other symbols
Primitively these merge with the idea of the object itself,
The young child thinks of the name of the object as adhering to the object,
as a real external thing.
And we have Freud's primary process, a primitive unconscious mental process
of the very young child, in which an image of a desired thing partially
gratifies the need. The child has to learn that this gratification is only
partial and fleeting, also seen in dreams of normal people, in psychotics
and in crackpot pseudo-sciences
To know the name of a thing is to have power over it, so to know the true
name(s) of God is to have great power indeed. The Bibical crap of naming
things, in Genesis?
Basis in calling a person's name and having them respond?
So we have spells, and magic, and conjurations and incantations
For the ancient Egyptians, to keep the name of a person alive, and a
realistic image of him, and maybe his preserved body too, is to keep him
alive also in some way.
For the ancient Germanic peoples, to keep the name of a hero alive, to often
recount his deeds of valour, to sing songs about him around the fireside of
the great hall, keeps him alive.
We have witches sticking pins in dolls, or burning them
So the psychotic thinks his thoughts might be read by others
And we have obsessive-compulsive neuroses, neuroses in name, which
because of the crazy thinking involved in fact borders on a psychosis
And Rhine wastes his professional life pissing about with experiments on
telepathy, telekinesis etc, if you think a thing hard enough it might happen,
also ‘The Secret”, that crackpot video
But I think strange things do happen such as the occurrence in Prague
involving Stuart and the playing cards, my “A hundred and eighty!”, etc.
So how do I explain these? Maybe Jung was on the right track, or ----
And the woman on a Thai TV advert selling something or other, “Hi, I’m Rita
Hassan”, not “My name is Rita Hassan”
The idea that ------
And we have the obsessive-compulsive neuroses, a neurosis in name but a
disorder which borders on a psychosis, because of the crazy thinking
What kind of thinking?
One has an urge to harm someone. This may be unconscious, or at least
the person tries to keep it out of his 'mind'. One way to do this is
to try to convince oneself that one does not have these thoughts, that
ones love is pure and unalloyed. Ones desire to hurt sees ways for
this to happen which have a vanishingly small probability of occurrence.
The desires to prove concern makes one oversolicitous.
Rituals express the desire to ward off evil by magical means.
All these points can perhaps be expressed in a single principle
The word, phrase, statement, symbol or image or picture, (S),
of a desired thing, situation, event or process, (R), is
the thing referred to
So instead of the Ogden triangle to express the case:-
We might have the Ogden-Locking line!:-
Since S, the images/thoughts/things, (S) are real and 'out there'
they can be perceived by everyone, not just the person, (P),
really having the thoughts.
Even more primitively we might have the Ogden-Locking cluster:-
to describe the case where there is no distinction between
Person, (P), statement, (S), and referrent, (R)
In the beginning is PSR, I/me, is everything. Later the 'I' pseudopodia
withdraw to produce a me and a not me
See the idea of the Oceanic Feeling, (Freud?)
No distinction between the 'me' and the 'not me'. An experience of the
very young child, and of schizophrenia, see my poem.
The evolved 'me' concept will include things that I can control, my body,
first the head and eyes, then the trunk, then arms --> hands --> fingers,
legs ---> feet, and also produce various types of sensory feedback,
proprioceptive, kinaesthetic etc.
The 'not me' will be things I can't control directly, but can see, and touch
and control indirectly
Still later there will be things that are mine or not mine
We might see PSR as the primitive basis of the philosophy of solipscism, just
as xxxxx might be the primitive basis for telekinesis.
See Bishop Berkely and his
Esse est percipi
If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one to see and hear this
event is there a sound? Or even a tree falling?
Berkely's answer that even if there is no human to perceive the event
God is always there, (omnipresence), and can perceive it and so the
event occurs, in the mind of God
We might add this:-
Leave God out, as being a non-existent entity. There will be no sound
because this needs a being of some type to perceive
But we might say that there will be alternate compressions and rarefactions
of the air around the tree, 'waves'.
This argument is based on a view of science due to Eddington??, Poincare??
My memory of the precise argument is sketchy and you would do well to check
out the references at the bottom of this page, but they go something like
this:-
Science might be based on sensory perceptions, but of a very limited type
We rule out smells, and tastes, colours and sounds
We allow measurements based on the method of measuring the length of an
object, e.g. with a ruler
You limit the human observer's sensory input to that from a single eye.
(I suppose this is to rule out the influence of individual differences in
binocular vision and depth perception).
and have him only report whether two marks coincide or not
One effect, amongst others, is to reduce individual observer differences,
and produce the greatest degree of inter-observer agreement. If the basis
were to match colors there night be much less agreement, (people with RG
blindness etc.)
So this basis is a spatial perception of a relation, the relation of
'in the same place", between two elementary visual stimuli/perceptions,
two black dots or lines
We would not want to base our science on matching colours, because
of the above, although we could imagine a world where colour agreement
was better than matching the spatial position of two dots or lines,
then their science would be quite different
The colourless, dull, schematic symbolic world of the sciences, is then
given the status of reality, R, but is actually just a symbolic logical
structure based on a single sense, vision, and a single quality of that
sense, length, or spatial position
This is then said to be the cause of everything else, of physical
events, and when it acts on a person, of psychological phenomena
such as colours etc, although it is intuitively difficult to see
or feel how this can be
So colour, as light, is 'really' an electromagnetic longitudinal wave
form of a certain wavelength, sound is another kind of wave, alternate
compressions and rarefactions of air, etc
The 'real' person is also reduced to various measurements of the
attributes of objects, length, mass etc
So physics becomes the primary science, aand other sciences are
believed to be ultimately reduceable/explicable in terms of physics
Physics dealing with physical objects having physical attributes,
length, width, occupying space, having spatial position, changing this,
producing motion, having mass etc
Science 'truth'
Its not that a theory is true or false, rather that one or other is
better at explaing things, at predicting things and is as simple as possible,
e.g. see William of Occam, Occam's razor.
So we could still hold to the theory of phlogiston in chemistry, but
it would be a strange theory, ill-fitting with physics, where all bodies
have a positive mass and weight
We could still hold to the geocentric view of the universe but
the orbits of the planets become very complicated and therefore I suppose
difficult to explain, and requiring a complex theory to explain them
Even more bizarrely we could imaging, instead of the movement in space of
an object, constant destruction of an object in one place, and then the
creation of an identical object, a clone, in a place slightly different.
This would make science very difficult??
Another principle of primitive thinking found in unconscious processes
of normal people, in dreams, in the waking life and thought of the
psychotic might be given by:-
if A and B have one corresponding attribute-value equal, they have
all corresponding* attribute values equal, they are identical
A attr5 = Battr5, therefore A = B
* Explore what this means
a) Aristotelian logic
b) Paleologic
Perhaps there is not a simple dichotomy between a) and b)
but a continuum:-
And again we will have mixed or hybrid types as in our t.r.a. and p.c.s.
hybrid, i.e. t.r.a./p.c.s. etc
Perhaps we can derive the image = thing proposition from:-
if one attribute value of a thing/image x, is = to
the corresponding attribute value of a thing/image y,
then x=y. (Paleologic)
If 30% of corresponding attribute values are the same, x=y, (more realistic)
If 60% of corresponding attribute values are the same, x=y, (still more realistic)
If 80% of corresponding attribute values are the same, x=y, (still more realistic)
If 100% of corresponding attribute values are the same, x=y, (most realistic)
If all corresponding attribute values are the same, including spatial
position, the things are identical, and we might have t.r.a., using real
objects as images or symbols of themselves
We have the same thing or person
'Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time'
If all corresponding attribute values are the same, apart from the
attribute of spatial position, we have identical twins, or perfect copies,
or clones
??Ancient Egyptians attempt this in their portrait art for the image to be
effective as a home for the spirit of the deceased??
Elsewhere we said that even an sld kid can point to a photo of a hamburger
to a express a desire for the hamburger, rather than for the photo itself
Note that he might have much more difficulty if pointing to a schematic
black and white graphic symbol of the hamburger
Maybe he is not doing anything very startling
Perhaps for him he is not pointing to the picture to express a desire for
the thing represented but pointing to what he takes to be the hamburger
itself???
Easy to test this, if he points to the photo of the hamburger, give him this:
will he eat the photo?
For more on this kind of thing have a look at
mad or primitive thinking
covering the eyes
And have a look at:-
Bishop Berkeley
Arthur Eddington
Henri Poincare
Occam's Razor