the Descartes thread

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Johansson" <and_yo@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 12:40 PM
Subject: Re: KuJomu - the writing


> I shan't claim I'm into philosophy, but the question that strikes me at
some
> point during this kind of discussion is this: Why does something's
> unreasonableness prove its non-existence? What forces reality to obey
logic,
> to be coherent?
>
>                                                  Andreas
          As to the first question, I'm not sure. There's Occam's razor, I
guess, but it's really just a convention. It seems to me that any system
that isn't contradicted can "work" to explain something, theoretically, but
people tend to take the shortest route where all the points along an
argument are either verifiable or presupposed.

         As to the second, I think it has to do with the fact that things
sort of have to 'make sense' to us in order for us to sense them. What we
think of as reality is conditioned by the fundamental principles of
perception, and it's very rare that we're ever confronted by anything that
is truly "incoherent". Maybe if someone blind from birth were given the
sense of sight, he might for a brief time see what things look like prior to
visual concept-formation. Similarly, sometimes if you meet with someone
you're familiar with and stare at their face upside-down, there will be a
period where you'll no longer recognize "face" or "Person X", and you'll
just see a collection of features, and it can be pretty eerie.

         I'm not sure if either of these really answer what you're asking,
though.