[MD] "Could have acted differently" v. "the extent to which we perceive DQ"

[david buchanan]

Horse said to Arlo:
... I would say that "real" cannot be anything other than DQ + SQ - this is the MoQ definition of Reality after all. SQ without DQ can never be anything but illusion - the map is a representation, nothing more. ... I'm not saying that everything except DQ is illusion. .. it is a combination of DQ  and SQ that constitutes what is real. Both the experience and the expression of that experience are necessary - one without the other precludes reality.

A piece of the Wiki article on Northrop might be helpful here.

..."The problem is not what is really real. Unlike (certain interpretations of) Plato and Plotinus, there is in Northrop no propensity to degrade or downgrade the world-as-it-is-sensed in favor of the world-as-known by concepts-by-postulation. To experience the visual image of blue is as epistemically valuable and irreducible as knowing blue postulationally. The two sources of all our knowledge give information that is both complementary and supplementary. Without concepts-by-intuition we could never know the world in its particularity. Without concepts-by-postulation we could never know the world in its universality and necessity.We now have enough information to give a name to Northrop's epistemology. He calls it "logical realism in epistemic correlation with radical empiricism." In other words, reason (in the form of concepts-by-postulation) epistemically correlated with the senses (in the form of concepts-by-intuition).The consequences of this theory cannot be overestimated. It has ramifications for psychology, epistemology, religion, culture and philosophy. Not only will the world now come to be seen as something that can be known both by theory as well as by sense perception, but the knower can also be known by both methods. Humans are not only what the latest science has postulated them to be, but also what they sense themselves to be."


Yea, humans are not just what science says they are (sq) but also what they sense themselves to be (DQ). Seeing blue and understanding what "blue" means are both necessary and it would be very misleading to say that one or the other is an illusion. The concept "blue" functions in relation to blue as it's felt and known in experience and it does so unproblematically for everyone almost all the time, except for philosophers of course. :-)