Tuesday, October 26, 2004
How We Experience Things
It's been awhile (unfortunately) since I've posted. First off, I have to say, Ray Kurzweil's book, which we are reading in class now - The Age of Spiritual Machines - kicks some serious butt. It's a great read with some interesting propositions (even if a lot of them are a bit extreme or hard to understand). Kurzweil explains some interesting phenomena in an easy to understand way...
One such example of his ability to explain deals with a subject I've often been intrigued by and yet could not for the life of me explain my thoughts on it. I quote Kurzweil here for your benefit:
"Human perception of color is more complicated than mere detection of electromagnetic frequencies, and we still do not fully understand it. Yet even if we had a fully satisfactory theory of our mental process, it would not convey the subjective experience of redness or yellowness. I find language inadequate for expressing my experience of redness...So how do I know that you experience the same thing when you talk about redness? Perhaps you experience red the way I experience blue, and vice versa. How can we test our assumptions that we experience these qualities the same way?"
So perhaps the color of this blog text, which you and I both call 'black' actually looks different to both of us...perhaps to you, the reader, it looks like the color I call blue, but you've been taught from an early age to call it black. On the other hand, while it is what I've always been told to call black, the color itself looks different to you. Make any sense? It's complicated stuff, but it's really interesting if you're able to wrap your mind around it!
Part of the reason why it affects me so much is my severe hearing impairment. I have been fascinated by the idea of what it may be like to hear fully and normally, just like everyone out there who does not require a hearing aid (like me) as an assistive listening device. I wonder sometimes if my perception of sounds are different than your perception of sounds. I have also always wondered what it would be like to hear 'normally' for a day...would it be so radically different that it takes me time to get adjusted to the addition of new frequencies of sound that I've never been able to hear before? Hmm...
Think about it, it's crazy!
One such example of his ability to explain deals with a subject I've often been intrigued by and yet could not for the life of me explain my thoughts on it. I quote Kurzweil here for your benefit:
"Human perception of color is more complicated than mere detection of electromagnetic frequencies, and we still do not fully understand it. Yet even if we had a fully satisfactory theory of our mental process, it would not convey the subjective experience of redness or yellowness. I find language inadequate for expressing my experience of redness...So how do I know that you experience the same thing when you talk about redness? Perhaps you experience red the way I experience blue, and vice versa. How can we test our assumptions that we experience these qualities the same way?"
So perhaps the color of this blog text, which you and I both call 'black' actually looks different to both of us...perhaps to you, the reader, it looks like the color I call blue, but you've been taught from an early age to call it black. On the other hand, while it is what I've always been told to call black, the color itself looks different to you. Make any sense? It's complicated stuff, but it's really interesting if you're able to wrap your mind around it!
Part of the reason why it affects me so much is my severe hearing impairment. I have been fascinated by the idea of what it may be like to hear fully and normally, just like everyone out there who does not require a hearing aid (like me) as an assistive listening device. I wonder sometimes if my perception of sounds are different than your perception of sounds. I have also always wondered what it would be like to hear 'normally' for a day...would it be so radically different that it takes me time to get adjusted to the addition of new frequencies of sound that I've never been able to hear before? Hmm...
Think about it, it's crazy!
# posted by David Duncan @ 11:33 AM 
