Objections to ‘Proof’ of Sense Data

bove, I said that some find sense data the only thing necessary. They suggest that we have more proof of the appearance of blue then we do of a blue baseball cap.

This is perhaps seductive enough, but, I have a problem with what it claims.

Sense data cannot be proven, in any sense of proof known to me. Since all I can know is what comes through my senses, I cannot see what happens in your mind as the sights and sounds register in your brain.

I hear you say “the light is too bright,” or “the carpet is a sensuous shade of blue”. And, I can see your face as you react to light and color. But, since I can not see your impressions, they belong to the unproven part of the world. I could consider only my sense data proven.

But to prove something is to lay it out on view. But you can’t inspect what goes on inside my head, either. It remains just my notion that I have seen blue or heard a string section.

Also, I have never once seen light bombarding my eye-lens or electrons zipping through my nerves. I’ve only seen the software, patterns of light and shade and color. I’ve never seen nor heard the hammer beating upon the anvil in my ear. I also lack any impressions of the electronic pulses that travel up my auditory nerves. I’ve only heard a tree fall and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

It seems, then, that I only have proof of the color patterns before my eyes, or the sound qualities in my ears. Here, we begin to lose the idea of data in the term sense data.

If we accept the idea of “proven senses”, the color pattern I see is simply the color pattern I see. There is no reason to suggest that it indicates anything, because nothing else “proven” I have no indication that it suggests anything else. Only in the process of interpretation does it become suggestive of anything else beside the simple shapes it is taken at face value.

I think I need to expand what I concluded in the last paragraph, and relate it to the central proposition: We only have proof of sense data. Let’s think back to when we knew about our world. Data enters through the sensory organs and gets interpreted by our brain. The brain perceives its clues from these impressions. The extreme Phenomenalist stance says that only the sense data of a rough, off-white sphere is proven, and not the baseball we interpret. The stitches are really red and graded darker lines rather than actual stitching that we make out.

What is proven is the patterns we perceive and not the pattern that we interpret. Therefore, where we might interpret a real ball that we can roll across the table, it does not really mean this. The sphere is just a sphere and the lines are just lines. No more interpretation is possible. This is why I say that there is no data, because all sensations are just what they are and are indicative of nothing. It is the interpretation process which imputes a transfer of information, yet this interpretation process depends on what is not proven.

I have to accept one of two things at this point, either “provability” is nothing, or it only makes sense to stay away from interpretations which are not proven.

Here I ask, “Proven how?” “Proven to whom?”No matter how convincing are my impressions of other people, I must not interpret other people to exist. Therefore, I cannot prove it to anybody.

What is proof? Where is its sensory profile? It is more of a perception—or an interpretation—that one has met the requirements of proof. Since any perception that I may call an impression of proof does not necessarily require that there is proof, I’m left with nothing. Therefore I’m left with only sensory impressions of imaginary objects.

This leads to meaninglessness. There is nothing I can do from this near-solipsistic viewpoint. The patterns formed by the impressions are pretty and amusing, but devoid of meaning and so all conclusions are useless. Sense only has meaning as a conduit from the outside world; it means nothing by itself. There is only one purpose and one interest in sensory impressions and this is to deliver data about the outside world.

This convinces some that there must be an outside world. If you think that I have concluded that here, I have not. I said that the concept of senses implies an outside world. I said that the idea of sense data can only be justified in a certain context. At least, the only context that I can recognize. (See An Etymological “Sense” on this SideBar. )

No, instead of offering you a firm, fixed outside world, I set before you moral goals of purpose, utility, and reason. And say that these things motivate us to conclude that the rejection of the exterior world buys us nothing. However, this is not a problem—or even goal— in a philosophy that rejects the external world. (What can we buy that we do not already possess?)

This is if we can know nothing about the world...

However, I would point out that we know about as much about the world as we do anything else because our concepts are dependent upon sense data in many ways. It is true, that in this model, the idea of knowing that the classicist had is destroyed. I’m completely comfortable with this fact however.

(For objections, see “Observing the Pragmatist”)

The Analog

nce we’ve established that belief in the external world is the only possible meaning of sense data, we face the problem of overadjustment that realists make. This could be paraphrased thusly: “Therefore, if we must perceive the exterior world then the reality is what is perceived.”

Oddly enough, in this section I’m going to use principles and findings of science to prove that this is not so—at least not in any consistent form.

We do not see the world as it exists atomically. We see an Analog of it. We do not see particles of matter; we do not count electrons to tell one elemental substance from another. We do not see all colors emitted from an object. Photons do not really have ‘color’ in one way of thinking. Color is an analog of wave frequency. It is our optical nerves that classify the wavelength coming into our eye into color. Matter does not have hard-fast edges, what we see as the desk before me is an aggregate of the average density.

Quantum physicists argue that there is not one reality even, that perceptions are dependent upon an eigenshtadt. Which is one possible arrangement of quantum particles, amid various others. Some physicists argue that time is a fourth dimension, perpendicular to the other three dimensions that we see. Surely we can’t walk up and down time like we can walk north and south, but we do experience time in an analog of its true shape.

The proponents of this argument use an analogy in two dimensions. Imagine the trace of a three-dimensional object as it passes through a plane. Take an apple for instance, passing through a plane perpendicular to its core: The bumps on the bottom of the apple might be of different height, so that some will touch the plane before others. We can imagine spots showing up in a ring as more bumps contact the plane. If two of the bumps touch the plane at the same time, the impression on the plane is that of two distinct objects. These objects merge into one as you begin to pass the rest of the apple through the plane. Also the area taken up by the apple expands as the plane passes through its meatiest portion. And, as we get to the very top of the apple we may see the valley at the top of the apple hollow out the shape. And finally when the stem is reached, the apple is just a fraction of its former area.

Placing these various impressions of an apple together, we get a sense of a three dimensional object in two dimensions (plus time, of course). We have an analog of an apple. In two dimensions, it is impossible, except through imagination to see the three-dimensional apple.

So, if we reason that an apple really has four physical dimensions-as well as any other piece of matter that we may be concerned about-then we still only see an analog of its four-dimensional shape. Thus, were these speculations true, we do not see the apple, just its three-dimensional shape that intersects with our time. In short, we cannot see the apple, itself.

We also know that in a three-dimensional world, we do not see three dimensions, except by cross-referencing two two-dimensional pictures of the world taken with our separate eyes. That’s why damage to one of the eyes creates a loss of depth perception. We also take hints from the angles that edges take within the two-dimensional views. These angles give us perspective, and we match up the two separate perspectives in each of the pictures to get a sense of the three-dimensional picture. These processes take an analog of the three dimensional world. In fact, our eyes are equipped with cones to sharpen edges so that this three-dimensional view is more convincing. We don’t even see all the light that enters our eyes. The placement of cones in our retinas nullifies some of the light that enters our eyes. Our corneas polarize some of it, and thus minimize light that does not help us get the picture that we need to get.

But even after all this, we haven’t given a lot of thought about how the brain pieces it together. Does the brain have a two dimensional grid to lay the picture upon? Is this two-dimensional grid like some mental TV that the brain views with internal eyes? No. It stores it in an analog of a two-dimensional picture. A computer stores a two-dimensional figure in a one-dimensional space. Therefore, the four-dimensional time-space, perceived as three dimensions, through a pair of two-dimensional snapshots can be stored in one dimension, through a process of analogy.

Sight is one example of a sense that we use to perceive our world. It is one of our main senses. Up until the spectrum was understood as differing frequencies, color was thought to exist as an innate property. The idea of unseen colors wouldn’t have made any sense to a rational man. But before man knew about light waves, this was the best analogy that could have been made to light frequencies outside of the visible range.

And what are waves of light? What do those waves represent? 20^th-century science gives conflicting opinions. Wave properties of light are an observed phenomenon. We know them to have wave-like qualities because of experimentation. They apparently have no medium, as does water and air. They apparently are not an aggregate pattern, as one photon is said to have the same wave frequency as a mass of photons. Whatever the underlying mechanism is, it gives the perception of light as waves, which gives us the concept of waves as color. Therefore there is some analog from the mechanism to the phenomenon of color. There is a mapping from the unknown mechanism with unknown properties to the perception of visible-spectrum color.

Therefore, even if we buy the most bedrock reality of science we have to see that a majority of the impressions that humans have of reality are inexact, they are metaphors of the more basic structures and behaviors. This is what I call The Analog.

Finding the “World”

e are at a crossroads here. Do we accept the authority of the senses? Do we accept the authority of scientific discovery? Do we accept both?

“Is there any conflict?” some might ask. There is if we maintain the Enlightenment doctrine that observation gives us a coherent view of reality. To me, it’s like stereoscopic vision. Both pictures are right, but they are not the same picture. Just because we can’t see the vase hiding behind the chair with our right eye doesn’t mean that our left eye cannot see it. Both pictures must be taken together. There are wrong ways to put the picture together, so that objects seem to occupy two different places, hang in the air, and share space with other objects. But properly focused give you a good picture of the whole view.

But this is nothing more that what I proposed as The Analog. “How so?” you might say. Am I not implying that if we put the two pictures of reality together-or even if there are a third and fourth view-that we obtain a vision as good as sight? If we put them together correctly, yes. But still, to judge how well eyesight models reality, I refer you to my passages above. I can extend the analogy to say that if we find a way to unite human perception and scientific data into a stereoscopic viewpoint, and say that is the complete picture, turn around and look behind you. Even with your stereo vision you did not see what was behind your back. Again, the view is flawed.