Re: virus: Hegel's Virus

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Wed, 30 Apr 1997 12:29:00 -0700 (PDT)


> [Richard, in reply to DHR]
> You are backing yourself into an EXTREMELY narrow definition of "sense."
> You seem to think there is a sensory layer, the same in everyone, which
> infallibly receives raw data about the world. It's only the next layer,
> you seem to be saying, that starts sorting and distorting. Even if that
> were a useful model, we have no access to that first layer except
> through the sort-and-distort layer, which is affected by your meme-set.

Actually, I think both of you miss the mark a bit. Current neurological
research shows pretty clearly that the first stage of processing of
sensations into perceptions is hard-wired, and not subject to memetic
influence. Things like depth-cue interpretation, edge enhancement, face
recognition, and other processing steps evolved to make our perceptions
faster and more useful, but it is unlikely that we can influence them.
Of course, conscious processes can still choose how to interpret the
perceptions, but those perceptions are handed to us in a far from "raw"
state, and there's little we can do about that.