| | I'm surprised that nobody has yet drug in Heisenburg's uncertainty principle or the collapse of the wave forms into eigenvalues... This was the subject of that incredibly stupid movie, "Everything you know is wrong," or some such title. It made me physically ill to see how thoroughly they managed to trash objectivity via pseudo-scientific crap that no reputable scientist would have spent two seconds on.
It is certainly true that every sensation is, in some sense, an interaction, and that all interactions go both ways. I.e., we do often minutely change the things that we sense thru the act of sensing. In the case of touch, this is obvious, to the degree that we might actually break or seriously modify something through a miscalculation in how hard to touch it as part of our investigation of its nature. However, it is also true as a general principle in the sense that we can only sense something via some interaction with it that partakes of its identity.
Consider a simple one-celled organism. It survives and prospers by virtue of the fact that through the luck of many trials and errors it has evolved mechanisms that switch its behavior according to simple signals, chemical or electromagnetic, that correspond to the same general states - food, danger, etc. - again and again. The ratio of energy output for the identifying signal to the energy gain from eating the food or avoiding the danger has to be rather high in order for this to work, and it could thus only work in a universe in which the same signal corresponds to the same state a very high percentage of the time.
It is that "energy leverage" which is crucial for all forms of self-replicating order in the universe, especially life, and most especially consciousness. It is only the fact that the universe is orderly, in the sense of there being a finite number of recognizeable classes of events, attributes, etc., that life and consciousness are possible.
If we had to fully interact with every entity we encountered, to the point of destruction, as would be the case if every entity was completely unique, then there would be no room for life or consciousness. And, to the point, if our interactions were such that we altered the nature of everything we encountered significantly by our very perception of it, then an equivalent problem would arise. I.e., we could never know anything. The universe and our knowledge of it would be a slippery fog that never quite congealed to the point that we could dependably interact with it.
It is the very fact that things do have stable attributes, that we do not alter them significantly in most cases by our act of sensing, perceiving and identifying them, that makes knowledge, consciousness and life possible at all.
|
|
