it's one of those brain breaking things to try to imagine a perspective completely different to the human perspective when we have no point of reference to be able to do that. Yup. The brain needs input from reality in order for the mind to get its secondary consciousness (thoughts, imagining, analyzing, reasoning, etc.) going. This is why we theoretically assume that if a developed brain (I don't know if you could say the same for an undeveloped brain) was placed in a vat, completely isolated and dark, it would start to hallucinate because of the lack of input. The mind forms thoughts and imagines because of the input it receives from reality and our senses. Because the reality dealing with this form of consciousness is basically taken from the human world, as you have said, it is impossible to break off from a human perspective because the brain has no input from a completely non-human (but fully intelligible on that level) point of reference in reality.
This also makes me think of innovation and what its place is in the mind. It's not so much that the innovator pulled something new out of nowhere, but that he took the varying points of references from reality and turned them into something different, which made it new. It's making something new out of something that was already there. T.S. Eliot had the right idea of it before neuroscience/neuropsychology/etc. came long to confirm it:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
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Date: 2009-11-28 07:57 am (UTC)Yup. The brain needs input from reality in order for the mind to get its secondary consciousness (thoughts, imagining, analyzing, reasoning, etc.) going. This is why we theoretically assume that if a developed brain (I don't know if you could say the same for an undeveloped brain) was placed in a vat, completely isolated and dark, it would start to hallucinate because of the lack of input. The mind forms thoughts and imagines because of the input it receives from reality and our senses. Because the reality dealing with this form of consciousness is basically taken from the human world, as you have said, it is impossible to break off from a human perspective because the brain has no input from a completely non-human (but fully intelligible on that level) point of reference in reality.
This also makes me think of innovation and what its place is in the mind. It's not so much that the innovator pulled something new out of nowhere, but that he took the varying points of references from reality and turned them into something different, which made it new. It's making something new out of something that was already there. T.S. Eliot had the right idea of it before neuroscience/neuropsychology/etc. came long to confirm it: