Tuesday, October 12, 2010

of perception and zombie cats

"The absence of perception of the counterpositive is a necessary precondition for the perception of the absence of that counterpositive"

It took me about a minute to figure out what that sentence meant... specially since dad quoted it at me in sanskrit and it took a while for me to translate it to english... he had to translate it for me at the end coz both mom n i simply got confused at the sudden flurry of incomprehensible words...

A student of dad’s asked him to teach her darshan shastra- vedantic philosophy. Dad being the practical soul initially refused but then agreed coz his student kept badgering him... now he has had to spend several hours with sentences like these and analysing ancient Indian philosophy.. he is both repelled and fascinated by the sheer vellapanti of philosophy.. coz if u look at it, the sentence above is simply common sense. You have to perceive that something is absent before you KNOW that it is..

Philosophy is such a weird thing... to construct long winded sentences with attendant explanations to say something that is so glaringly obvious that no one ever stops to THINK about it..


Was talking to a friend a couple of days ago about plato’s pholosophy.. specifically his analogy of the ‘cave’.. how perception shapes our worldview.. if you nor anyone else around has ever had to see or experience anything differnt from what everyone else doe sthen you will not have different ideas. You will accept what teh socially sanctioned view is because you don’t know any better and there are no other stimuli affecting your perception...

A few years ago, i was told about a rather facinating theory in quantum physics.. Schroedinger’s cat theorem.. atleast thats how i remember it.. don’t know if it was even the real name.. the essential sense of that theory was that if a cat is kept in a box through which neither the sight not sound of the cat can be perceived, then in a state where it is not known whether that cat is alive or dead, it exists in both states. Effectively, there’s a cat thats both alive and dead..

The absence of perception is essential for the perception of absence of a state...or alternatively, if you don’t know that the thing (that does not exist) does nnot exist, then at that moment is exists for you..

Who the heck comes up with this stuff???????????????????????????

the idea that simply perception through any sense is the reason why things exist in a certain manner for us... it is mind boggling coz its so glaringly obvious.. if one does not know better, one continues to do what one thinks is right... it applies to everything, from seeing that something you kept on the table is not tehre anymore to explaining why people act in an absurd manner... if you have not perceived it though some sense, then it doesnt exist for you...

2 comments:

KayEss_2610 said...

Here's why 'this stuff' goes beyond common sense.
Consider 'the absence of perception';
for now lets consider it to be the same as ignorance, of the concerned commodity.
Now ignorance itself is not a simple black and white thing. It goes beyond yes and no, here's how.

Ignorance has the following 5 levels.

0th Order Ignorance (0OI)—Lack of Ignorance.
I have Zeroth Order Ignorance(0OI) when I know something.

1st Order Ignorance (1OI)—Lack of Knowledge
I have First Order Ignorance (1OI) when I don’t know something,
but I know I don't know it.

2nd Order Ignorance (2OI)—Lack of Awareness
I have Second Order Ignorance (2OI) when I don’t know that I don’t know something.

3rd Order Ignorance (3OI)—Lack of Process
I have Third Order Ignorance (3OI) when I don’t know how to know that I don’t know that I don’t know something.

4th Order Ignorance (4OI)—Meta Ignorance
I have Fourth Order Ignorance (4OI) when I don’t know about the levels of ignorance.
(which by reading this does not apply to YOU (the reader) ).

-Kanak

Shruti said...

Philosophy's too much for me - I just discovered that. And I also discovered by virtue of the comment above that I was at the 2nd Order Ignorance Level.