An ideal ultimate truth? (Origins)

by dhw, Friday, May 14, 2010, 08:41 (5305 days ago) @ George Jelliss

GEORGE: 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.-I find this a little hard to follow. It's clear, of course, that no-one can create anything without first learning and then remembering, and we draw on and manipulate our experiences when we produce a work of art. But what is this "replay" on the retina or the vibrating hairs? Writers do not literally "see" or "hear" characters move or speak, and composers do not literally "hear" the melodies, harmonies and instruments, and no original work of art can be drawn from memory! What you rightly call a simulation does not involve the senses directly. The plain truth is, we do not know how people imagine these sounds, stages and worlds, because we do not know how the imagination works. You are, of course, entitled to believe that somehow there must be a physical explanation, and you may well be right, but please don't kid yourself that you know what it is.
 
GEORGE: 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.-For the most part I agree. We can only know ourselves and others through experience, and with each new experience we may find out something new. There is an almost infinite potential of identities, because there is an almost infinite potential of experiences, but although some aspects are certainly within our control, unquestionably there are others which are not. I don't think each of us has an infinite potential of, say, intelligence, artistic creativity, practical sense, sporting ability. I do not believe that I could ever have been an Einstein, a Beethoven, a woodwork teacher, a Bradman. As regards what I AM, there are aspects of myself that I most definitely have not made up. I'm not going to draw a character sketch of myself here, but I have certain qualities and defects which assert themselves even when I wish they wouldn't, and I'm sure you and everyone else will have had the same experience. So although I agree that there is simulation, that we do change, that we do have different ideas of ourselves and others, and these may even be conflicting, there is generally a core that we ourselves and others who know us well can identify as essential features of the "I". Admittedly even these may change, e.g. through disease or accident or circumstance, and I would be intrigued to know from someone who really does believe in an afterlife just what identity actually survives in such cases. But like most of life as we know it, I would say identity is part fact, part fiction, part mystery.
---