[MD] A dog's reality

[Andre Broersen]

Platt to All:
Several days ago I opined that reality is different for different creatures.

Andre:
For a while now I have been hinting at other ways of interpreting (as a
result of the way we see) reality. I mentioned Reanney. Here's something
more:
'Imagine you are looking out the window at an iris in the garden, admiring
its deep blue colour. I come into the room beside you and give you a photo
which shows the iris as seen through the eye of a bee. Straight away you are
puzzled. Not only is the flower no longer blue, it is streaked with strange
markings on the petals, a grid of inward-pointing lines that makes you
think, irrisistibly, of a runway.
It is a different flower, you protest. But it is not, it is the same flower
seen through a different eye. The bee's eye, unlike yours, can see
ultraviolet light. So the bee's eye sees what its genes have trained it to
see- a grid og markings, a landing track, to guide it to the source of the
flower's nectar. This pattern is invisible to you because your eye is not
made to access this higher- energy end of Nature's rainbow of colours.
So which image of the flower is correct- yours or the bee's? Here is the
point of the parable, they both are! No one image is 'correct'; each is
tailored to the needs of the creature which sees it. What of a different eye
again? Yes, it would see yet another kind of flower. And here is the
mind-expanding truth of it: the process has no limit. The 'reality' of the
flower is an endless bundle of possibilities, a many-faceted treasure. What
appears at the invisible interface between seer and sight is only a single
option drawn from a lottery that is mathematically inexhaustible' (p45-6)

Just to extent this a little further: I like Reanney's 'tailored to the
needs of the creature which sees it' which links in, not only biologically
but also socially (with Pirsig's analogues upon analogues) through which we
see [and therewith interpret]  the world. IMHO the subject/object
interpretation is a legacy from biological PoV's.

Remember that Aristotle was not an armchair thinker. He did write the
'Historica Animalium', a result of loads of fieldwork inherited from his
boyhood rides with his father who was a doctor. This became the foundation
of modern day biology with all its ordering of life, its classifications
etc etc.
Animals need to be able to distinguish.. to extinguish in order to survive.
Man is no different. We have been built so through inorganic and organic
means. It has resulted in us as we are at present including the social and
intellectually associated developments.

Just read Lila's chapter 17 where Phaedrus walks through New York to his
hotel toward his appointment with the . Does this sound and read like social
patterns have won over biological patterns? Absolutely not. He is walking
through a jungle, a one-to-one confrontation no one wants (blink), isolated
units struggling to survive...literally. The law of the jungle. Love them
distinguishing possibilities of my brain into subs and obs. Handy for pure
survival. The modern scientific understanding of (and dealing with)
reality/our environment was born [with long roots]. But we know that
'reality' consists of more than 'our environment'. Much more.

We have evolved social PoV's ...and Intellectual PoV's. And its wasn't only
because of the value of S/O thinking. We are capable of more.

And now, I think I will leave 'intellect' LIE for awhile.

Andre and the ignored Reanney