> "Ed" wrote:

>> I just watched a program on difficulties that young children have with
>> separating symbol and what a symbol represents.  Experiments showed
>> that they do have such difficulty, they recognize, say, a baby bottle
>> very clearly but are uncertain how to treat a color photograph of a
>> baby bottle. They attempt to treat it exactly as they would treat a
>> "real" bottle, trying to pick it up for example.  Only after training
>> and maturation do they acquire the ability to treat the picture in the
>> way adults treat symbols; pointing to the picture instead of trying to
>> pick it up, for example.

>

>> One could view the brain as "making" symbols of sensed objects, those
>> symbols are part of the "world view" that the brain maintains all of
>> our awake time. A birdsong, as perceived, is not the actual birdsong,
>> which is a disturbance in the air, but some brain symbol for the
>> birdsong.  A memory of a birdsong is also a symbol which refers to the
>> perception of the birdsong, which was a symbol that referred to the
>> actual birdsong.

>

>> The brain does the same thing for "internal" objects, stomach aches,
>> for example.  It seems to do the same thing for brain activities to
>> the extent that those impinge on our awareness.  Many brain activities
>> go on "in the dark" and we are not ever conscious of them; like
>> sorting through all the memories to find just the one that is relevant
>> to the exigencies of the moment.  We remember the name of someone we
>> encounter but we are not aware of the process that presents that name
>> instead of some other, irrelevant, memory.

>

>> We are conscious of what we focus on; usually to the exclusion of
>> other sense data.  If we listen to the birdsong, we are not generally
>> conscious of the feel of the wind on our face.  If we focus on solving
>> a math problem we are generally not conscious of the feel of our
>> clothes on our skin. If we focus on our consciousness we are aware of
>> something that we are not generally aware of as we focus on other
>> things.  All of these things we can choose to focus on are brain
>> symbols, not the things in themselves.

>
> Sounds like an interesting program, but I don't yet see how it might
> undermine my argument.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -