260717: Animal Eyes & Animal Opinions
We say (as Palmers says) that a historian is prone to "presentism"; that is, his understanding of history is distorted by his modern perspective. But what historian could leave behind his culture?
And what does it mean, to say his view is "distorted," as if there were some clear or neutral, undistorted view, which existed, which was possible, which was conceivable, that we or some future person might hold? Not only is our view of history "distorted" by our acculturation, but it is also distorted by past historians' cultural perspectives, and there is no escape from the hall of mirrors.
Palmer would not contest these claims, but she is stuck using common concepts, and our common concepts are incoherent. They are out of step with our understanding. Our theory is post-structural and relativist, but our language remains archaic.
Perception is necessarily, that is, definitionally, an interaction of top-down assumption (that is, the deductive extension of pattern, assimilating) and bottom-up reception (the inductive accommodation of novelty into pattern).
Computer science again provides a metaphor. (Artificial intelligence is, after all, applied philosophy of language & mind.) All perception, and all representation, is lossily compressive. We cannot encode, let alone perceive, reality in anything approaching totality. Specifically, we encode the world egoically and pragmatically, according to our biology, our history, our culture and our goals.
Everything we see and hear and smell comes precompressed; concepts are synoptic compressions built from so many sights and sounds; narratives, from so many concepts; and history, as a metanarrative? Is the battle between so many stakeholding storytellers, relying on the (culturally structured, egocentrically interested) senses of others.
Yes, compressive perspectives differ, and there are only compressive perspectives, speculating on the material realities, which exist whole and endless in themselves, incompressible. This is not to say that there are not procedures of measurement and action that are more or less reliable; and words which assist in these procedures. This blog "believes in science."
It is, rather, to state a tautology, the tautology of compression. There cannot be a sense of the world without a sensing organ. There cannot be a computation of the Universe, that is outside the Universe and somehow identical to the Universe. There are only organs' sensations, and computations from within, on such meagre instruments probing and pulsing in the flux.
So that there have been some men in favor of smallpox. If God wished to strike a sinner down, said these good 18th C Christians, then we ought not deprive him the opportunity by such artifice as vaccination. We cannot argue with these people, for their argument rests on the unseen and incontestable theology of value and purpose. But we can take heart that, surveying the far reaches of time and space, the many worldviews and the many compressions, smallpox is deeply, deeply unpopular.
It is fortunate for us that our moral circle is not so far expanded as to give the smallpox a say in the matter.