An ideal ultimate truth? (Origins)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Wednesday, May 12, 2010, 22:00 (5094 days ago) @ dhw

dhw asks: "Well, how do you think the deaf Beethoven "heard" his 9th Symphony, or Schubert his Great C Major, which was only discovered and performed after his death? How does a writer "see" and "hear" his characters? How do we feel emotions, summon up language, work out ideas, recall the past?"-I would say that a composer has a simulation of a music room in his head, and a writer has a simulated stage or simulated world peopled by his characters. This is all in our memory and available for us to draw out and manipulate. But this is all within a material structured brain. When we imagine or dream we are drawing impressions out of our memories and replaying them, with variation, on the screen of our retinas or on the vibrating hairs of our inner ears.-If somehow we can exist bodiless in a "spirit realm" but still have mental activity then this is rather like the "brain in a vat" idea.-Further to the above thoughts, and returning to the discussion of "identity", I would say that we also have a simulation of ourselves in there. This is what we call "I". It is just like any other fictional character we may make up, or our memories or simulations of people we have known. We augment and revise it from time to time depending on our experiences, or our ideas of what we want to be. Probably we have several different ideas of ourself, sometimes conflicting.

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GPJ