[MD] Schroedinger's paradox

[T-REXX Techs, Inc.]

No, it's not about the cat this time.  In a the last chapter of a pithy
little treatise called "Mind and Matter" Erwin Schroedinger addresses a
perplexing topic called "The Mystery of the Sensual Qualities".  Here's how
he poses it:

"[It is a] strange fact that all our knowledge about the world around us.
rests entirely on immediate sense perception, while on the other hand this
knowledge fails to reveal the relations of the sense perceptions to the
outside world, so that in the picture or model we form of the outside world,
guided by our scientific discoveries, all sensual qualities are absent."
Thus, for example, for people with normal color vision, light with a
wavelength around 570 nm produces a perception of the color we call yellow.
But a superposition of light sources of other frequencies will produce an
identical perception.  Thus, the perception of yellow is correlated with a
physically described circumstance but not explained by it.  Schroedinger
gives several convincing examples.

             The MOQ has been effective in resolving a number of classical
paradoxes, dichotomies, and dualities.  But I can't see how to apply it
effectively to this one.  Any ideas?

 

John L. McConnell

Office:  407-859-2637

Cell:     321-438-6301

Home:  407-857-2004

Email:   <mailto:trexxtechs at bellsouth.net> trexxtechs at bellsouth.net