I spent most of yesterday going over this thread and rereading
my posts in it and I find in this thread, I have covered most of
traditional philosophy…I hope to continue this…
there are two schools of thought… one says we have innate idea’s,
the other says we get all knowledge from the senses. Plato believes in
innate idea’s with his eternal forms and Hobbes and Locke and Hume believe
in empiricism which is we gain knowledge from our senses…
one idea is Tabula rasa… the mind is a blank slate without rules for processing data,
and that date is added and rules for processing are formed solely by sensory experiences…
so far so good, nothing new here…we react to events from the sensory knowledge
we have gained… this sensory knowledge can be from any source that is within
our sensory perception, seeing, hearing, taste, smell, touch… we learn from those
sensory experiences…but what if we have a feedback loop of sorts…
we have our sensory perceptions we have built up over the years and through
them we have some sense of the world… this theory is a inside out looking at
the universe…we gain knowledge from our senses and then we look at the world…
but what if we react to events outside of ourselves which creates the sensory
perception’s… for example, it is the events outside of us that creates the
sensory perception’s…for example, I walk into a table… by walking into the
table I learn that the table is hard and will hurt if I walk into it… the event of
walking into the table “teaches” me a sensory perception…sensory perception is
active, not passive… watch a young child, maybe one or two years old…
they will grab everything… that is how they “understand” outside events,
by experiencing them… the event of grabbing something, say a ball for example,
is a learning experience… they learn about round or color or textures when grabbing
a ball, grabbing a tennis ball is a different event then grabbing a baseball and is a different
event then grabbing a golf ball, the experience itself will become new sensory experiences
for the baby…from a child’s standpoint, there is no real difference between
a golf ball and a grape… they can’t tell the difference until either being told
or they experience it for themselves…the physical act of grabbing the golf ball
creates new sensory information… thus it takes two to tangle… you need both
the event AND the sensory knowledge…if there are no outside events, there
is nothing to get sensory knowledge about…there is an interaction going on
between outside events and sensory knowledge…a dance as it were…
one needs the other…as there is not innate understanding of the world,
we gain knowledge of the world through our senses and then we use that
limited sensory knowledge to gain more knowledge of the world through
interactions with events which increases our sensory knowledge which allows
us further understanding of outside events which increases our sensory knowledge
and that dance back and forth between outside events and our senses creates
our knowledge of the universe…a limitation of senses limits our understanding
of events which limits our knowledge of the universe… I can’t hear high pitch
noises like Violins and flutes and certain telephones and some women’s voices…
as I cannot experience those noises, those outside events, I have limited knowledge
about them… to increase my knowledge/understanding of those high pitch noises,
I wear a hearing aid which increases my sense of hearing… I can experience
the event of high pitch noises with my hearing aid but without it, I cannot…
I couldn’t even imagine what high pitch noises sounded like until I wore a hearing aid
because I can’t experienced it without a hearing aid… the event creates
new knowledge, new understanding of the universe… as long as I can experience
it in some fashion through my senses…quite often when checking at the store,
I will vaguely hear something but because I can’t place it because of my hearing,
I don’t know/understand what that noise could be… it might be a phone or a balloon
popping or coins going into the coinstar machine…until I am able to
create some understanding or to say it another way, a connection between
that noise and what is the cause of that noise. I cannot understand or
grasp that noise until I understand the event that created the noise…
it is not enough to sensory experience an event, one must
connect in some fashion with the event to be able to have
knowledge about it…it is about creating a relationship between
the noise and the event that allows me to understand or experience
the event… it is an active process between the event and the sensory
understanding of the event…an event occurs and I must use my senses
to be able to have knowledge about or understand that event…
and my past sensory knowledge aids me in my understanding
of current or even future events…if someone is about to pop
a balloon, I have experience that in the past and so I know what
that will sound like and I can react accordingly…my previous
sensory experiences helps me to understand current events like
a balloon popping or about to be popped…this back and forth
between events and our senses is what helps create
us as human beings because we are, in part, not much more then
the accumulation of prior or past events…those events help create
the person we are today and our senses however limited they are,
help shape who we are by the information we receive from our senses…
Kropotkin