Real…Unreal…!!
Posted by Logu Krishnan | Posted in Personal, Ramblings | Posted on 27-07-2006
Tags: Personal, Ramblings
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“that Sentence
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
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Against the use of nature.”
…
…
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This view is confirmed by the fact that we only feel images to be “unreal” when we already
know them to be images. Images cannot be defined by the feeling of unreality, because when we falsely believe an image to be a sensation, as in the case of dreams, it feels just as real as if it were a sensation. Our feeling of unreality results from our having already realized that we are dealing with an image. As soon as an image begins to deceive us as to its status, it also deceives us as to its correlations, which are what we mean by its “reality”.
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Stout (loc. Cit., p.127) cites: “One characteristic mark of what we agree in calling sensation is its mode of production. It is caused by what we call a stimulus. A stimulus is always some condition external to the nervous system itself and operating upon it.”
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“Most of our judgments of perception involve correlations, as when we judge that a certain noise is that of a passing cart. Such judgments are all obviously liable to error, since there is no correlation of which we have a right to be certain that it is invariable.”
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Excerpt from “Sensations and Images”
“The Analysis of Mind” by Bertrand Russell
Logu Krishnan, a Technologist living at Bangalore, India.