Editing Annotation:Text:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/T42k8wc6p5

|LastModificationDate=2020-06-16T12:27:00.894Z

|AnnotationMetadata=^"permissions":^"read":ӶӺ,"update":ӶӺ,"delete":ӶӺ,"admin":ӶӺ°,"user":^"id":6,"name":"Sarah Oberbichler"°,"id":"T42k8wc6p5","ranges":Ӷ^"start":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ42Ӻ","startOffset":0,"end":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ47Ӻ","endOffset":214°Ӻ,"quote":"How does it come about that we all seem to be bound by remarkably rigid constraints in the construction of our worlds and why, if our construction of a world requires no more than a certain internal consistency of subjective invariances, do we all end up with worlds that seem so very much the same?\nThe constraints of our construction are sometimes explained by referring to the individual’s cognitive development and in particular to the fact that the construction of objects,’ of the categories of space and time, and of the concepts of motion, change, and causality takes place at a very early stage in the individual organism’s cognitive career. These constructs become immediately involved in every one of the organism’s cognitive activities, most subsequent constructs are in some way based on them, and it therefore becomes almost impossible to “undo” them at a later stage. With most of us these basic concepts lead to a highly successful construction, if success is measured by the stability rather than the logical coherence of the world we achieve.\n\nFrom our very childhood we are subjected to an education which gives a definite direction to our way of looking at things and acting in the world, and which suppresses, or relegates to the realm of fantasy, all other possibilities. This is how our notion of reality comes into being, ... (Feyerabend 1967, p. 304)Ӷ9Ӻ\nThe argument can be simplified and presented on the most general level without any reference to actual ontogenic development. It seems inevitable that, in any structure that uses specific building blocks, the character of these building blocks will entail certain limits and constraints of construction. In Power’s hierarchical model, for instance, it should not surprise us that the construction of higher-order invariances will be to some extent constrained by the number and kinds of invariances that can be maintained on the first level.Ӷ10Ӻ\nThe question concerning the similarity of construction in a plurality of individuals raises an altogether different problem. What has to be answered is not really the question as to how we come to have “objective” or “intersubjective” knowledge (a secondary consideration), but rather the more elementary one: How do we come to have other people in our subjective construction of a world?\nIt is certainly possible to provide a plausible analysis of the construction program that a control system would have to carry out in order to install in its network invariances of permanent objects that belong to a special class with “other-people properties” (comprising for instance an invariant and therefore predictable margin of unpredictability). Such construction leads to a solipsistically generated society of fellow humans, and that is intuitively quite unsatisfactory. But then, intuitively, the denial of any knowledge of an ontological reality is also unsatisfactory. Berkeley, in his efforts to escape the solipsistic loneliness into which his unwavering and, it seems, irrefutable reasoning had landed him, opted for an imaginative but wholly irrational way out. His attempt to recover an objective reality through the introduction of God’s perceptual prowess has for us, today, the air of a gimmick.Ӷ11Ӻ\nBut the Empiricist who resorts to a real external object is doing the same thing. Consequently, it is subject to the same criticism. What, after all, is the real external object other than “that which preserves objectivity”? External structured reality is a hypothetical construct which serves this sole purpose. We have argued here that it is misleading since we cannot have access to any of its features. This is what Kant achieved by attributing space and time, as Anschauungsweisen (ways of apperception), to the process of experiencing. He irrevocably pushed ontological reality beyond the reach of human representation. No amount of transcendental effort can make our reason grasp a noumenal universe in which, by definition, none of the relations we are able to compute is applicable.\nThis is precisely the Pyrrhonist limitation we accepted in the beginning. The limits of our model represent only the limits of what we perceive. Knowledge is limited by the very methods we use to obtain knowledge.","highlights":Ӷ^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°,^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°,^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°,^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°,^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°,^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°,^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°,^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°,^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°,^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°,^"jQuery3210169141624291851422":^°°Ӻ,"text":"","category":"Argumentation2","data_creacio":1592303150006°