[MD] an apple

[Michael R. Brown]

Everything has static and dynamic elements. Everything.

And it goes all the way down. : )


MRB

-----Original Message----- 
From: MarshaV
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 3:08 AM
To: MoQ
Subject: [MD] an apple



Greetings,

I am interested in the relationship between consciousness and static 
quality.  I offer this not because I have settled on it as some sort of 
truth, but because it is interesting to consider.  It is, of course, not 
presented in the language of Quality, but I find it something worth thinking 
about, none the less.



"Let us take, as an example, our apprehension of a small and simple object 
in nature such as an apple.  We may see it, and identify its location in 
space relative to ourselves and any number of other objects, up to the rest 
of the known physical universe.  We may also locate in time the moment of 
our seeing it relative to any number of other event, up to the whole 
history: 'My eye fell on the apple just as the clock struck one on the 
afternoon of the 16th February, AD 1982.'  Using our sense of sight more 
concentratedly we can look closely at its color and texture.  We can note 
its exact shape, measure its exact dimensions, weigh it.  Bringing into play 
our sense of touch we can feel the weight in our hands, and the apple's 
degree of hardness, the degree of its coldness against our skin, the balance 
of its mass as we aim it as if for a throw.  Using other senses still we can 
smell it, taste it, and listen to the different sounds it gives off when 
struck or touched by differe
nt sorts of objects.  We can break it open and repeat all these operations 
on its innards, noting also new entities, such as pips, and other kinds of 
attribute such as consistency and moisture.  We can make our description of 
the apple as full and detailed as we like, to the extent of giving 
exhaustive accounts of its biophysical structure and its biological 
constitution.  But every single one of the operations I have listed is 
dependent on our having the particular perceiving apparatus we have, and 
yields its information in forms which cannot exist separately from that 
apparatus, namely in terms of visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory and 
aural data, and the concepts derived ultimately from these, and the 
operations with those concepts that constitute thought.  These simply are no 
other ways in which we can experience contact with the apple, or form any 
conception of it.  If we try a thought-experiement and attempt to 'think 
away' from the apple all these sense-dependent a
nd mind-dependent attributes which we associate with it, in order to arrive 
at what it 'really' is _in itself_ independently of our experiences of it, 
what we actually arrive at is indistinguishable from nothing at all.  It 
might seem 'out there' beyond our sense-dependent experiences there must lie 
some entity which causes these experiences in us and which we differentiate 
in English by he word 'apple' from other entities which gives us other 
experiences; but what it is like independent of all actual and possible 
experiences is something of which we can form not the ghostliest conception. 
Our position with respect to that is the same as the congenitally blind 
man's with respect to vision.  Inescapably, the whole world as we experience 
it is mediated through our sensory and mental apparatus.  Consequently this 
world of our experience is not at all a world of things as they are in 
themselves but a world of sense-dependent and mind-dependent phenomena.  To 
things as they are
in themselves we have simply no access.

  "Up to this point Kant's argument may seem like a richer , more powerful 
and sophisticated version of Berkeley's.  Certainly, he had more in common 
with Berkeley than he prepared to admit,even to himself.  (Schopehauer 
regarded the second edition of _The Critique of Pure Reason_ as a mutilation 
of the first, perpetrated by Kant with the mistaken aim of emphasizing his 
difference from Berkeley.)   However, from this point in the argument Kant 
moves on to consider the role which of our minds , as distinct from our 
senses, have to play in perception, and here his arguments become altogether 
more original and profound.  As a small, straightforward instance of act of 
immediate perception than which it would be hard to pick anything simpler or 
more direct, let us take again the case of of simply looking at an apple. 
For me to have the experience I describe as 'seeing an apple' the following 
three conditions, at the very least, have to be satisfied:  I must (1) be in 
receipt of s
ome visual datum; (2) be in possession of the concept denoted by the word 
'apple'; (3) be able to categorize the visual datum as falling (or not 
falling) under the concept.  Unless I can do at least these three things I 
cannot see an _apple_.  But only the first is sensory, and only the first is 
solely a matter of immediate activity; the other two are mental, and depend 
on my bringing prior dispositions to bear on the sensory situation.  It 
turns out, then, that even the simplest act of direct perception is by no 
means solely a matter of immediate experience but more mental than sensory, 
and involves a great contribution from my brain as as from the object seen. 
By this token there can be no such thing as _immediate experience_.  We 
readily assume that, for me to see an apple, there has to be an apple. 
 But --- equally necessary --- there have also to be those mental 
pre-conditions which make my having the experience [which I can identify as 
seeing an apple] possible.  Some
  of Kant's profoundest pages are devoted to an investigation of what these 
pre-conditions are.  On reading them one feels he is opening up a whole 
floor beneath what had always been taken for the basement level in our 
analysis of experience:  Locke had been led by his investigation of 
experience to consider pre-conditions, but Kant's investigation of those 
preconditions leads to consider _their_ preconditions.

"Kant goes on to point out ..."



    (Magee, Bryan, 'The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, Hardcover', 1997, pp. 
65-66)


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