All they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable. It depends on your point of view.
As P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.
You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.
But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.(John Donne, Sermons)
In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.
Home_____Blindsight: Graham Young Is Blind But Can See
What is consciousness? You may say that it is to be aware. But what does it mean to be consciously aware of something? I can type this paragraph while outside my window a bird chirps, shadows dapple the window ledge, and here, inside, my fingers move on the keyboard, music plays on the radio, and so many other events also happen as I focus only on these words. I stop for a moment, and there they are, all these other things. Then I return my attention to the computer screen. In a sense, I see but I don't see. I am aware but I am not aware. Things are part of conscious and, so to speak, they are not.
Graham Young of Oxford, England is a case in point. When eight years old, he suffered a head injury that damaged the visual cortex of his hind brain, and this experience rendered him unable to see on his right hand side, while he can see on his left. This blindness affects both eyes.
He has a condition called blindsight, a term coined by Professor Larry Weiskrantz of Oxford University, and it has made Young a prime candidate for neuroscience experiments, particularly because his damage is quite specific and localized, making his situation one of the purest examples of a very rare condition.
If you put an object on his right side and ask, "What is it?" he cannot say.
If you move it, and ask "What direction?" he can tell you. Up, down, left, right. He can do this even though he cannot see the object.
If a neuroscientist moves an object to his left side, he will see it. As the experimenter moves it to his right he will announce the point at which the object disappears from his view. So long as the object remains motionless, Young can only say nothing is there. When a tiny light is moved, he can announce its direction, although he cannot see it. More
Home
What is consciousness? You may say that it is to be aware. But what does it mean to be consciously aware of something? I can type this paragraph while outside my window a bird chirps, shadows dapple the window ledge, and here, inside, my fingers move on the keyboard, music plays on the radio, and so many other events also happen as I focus only on these words. I stop for a moment, and there they are, all these other things. Then I return my attention to the computer screen. In a sense, I see but I don't see. I am aware but I am not aware. Things are part of conscious and, so to speak, they are not.Graham Young of Oxford, England is a case in point. When eight years old, he suffered a head injury that damaged the visual cortex of his hind brain, and this experience rendered him unable to see on his right hand side, while he can see on his left. This blindness affects both eyes.
He has a condition called blindsight, a term coined by Professor Larry Weiskrantz of Oxford University, and it has made Young a prime candidate for neuroscience experiments, particularly because his damage is quite specific and localized, making his situation one of the purest examples of a very rare condition.
If you put an object on his right side and ask, "What is it?" he cannot say.
If you move it, and ask "What direction?" he can tell you. Up, down, left, right. He can do this even though he cannot see the object.
If a neuroscientist moves an object to his left side, he will see it. As the experimenter moves it to his right he will announce the point at which the object disappears from his view. So long as the object remains motionless, Young can only say nothing is there. When a tiny light is moved, he can announce its direction, although he cannot see it. More
Home
posted by John
at
09:34
'Ernst Mach
I can imagine Jack The Ripper also saying this. John
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home