[MD] Schroedinger's paradox

[david buchanan]

John McConnell said:

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?


dmb says:
The problem is predicated on the assumptions of subject-object metaphysics and the correspondence theory of truth that goes so neatly with those assumptions. The MOQ rejects those assumptions and it rejects the correspondence theory of truth. In fact, anyone who subscribes to pragmatism, which is a theory of truth, is by definition rejecting the correspondence theory of truth and the metaphysical assumptions that go with it. For the pragmatist, even our sensory perceptions are theory laden, are already attached to ideas and interpretations so that reality is never simply given to the senses and there is no such thing as "objective" reality, no such thing as a Kantian thing-in-itself. Instead, subjects and objects are concepts, not ontological categories.

Does that help? I hope so.