Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 7:28 am
RCSaunders wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 12:19 am
You really cannot think of a single thing that you cannot see, hear, feel, smell, or taste?
If you really can't, I'll be glad to give you examples.
I can think of many things I can't see, hear, feel, smell or taste.
Since that is what I mean by perception, those many things are things you cannot perceive.
Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 7:28 am
I can't think of a single thing I can't perceive,
Your inability to think of something is not evidence of anything except a deficiency on your part, but I suspect you are using the word, "perception," to identify something other than seeing, hearing, feeling (including interoception) smelling and tasting.
Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 7:28 am
... since my mind is a measurement apparatus and everything that is knowable can be measured.
Shades of Ayn Rand.
If your mind was only capable of measuring things, you could not know very much. Before you can measure something you must identify it, and before you can identify it you must at least suspect that it exists, but if you cannot see, hear, smell, taste, of smell it, you could not possibly know it exists to measure.
Even at the physical level most things cannot be measured. I call the superstitious notion that everything can be reduced to measurement the Pythagorean fallacy. When the Pythagoreans discovered everything could not be measured, because many physical things have incommensurable magnitudes, (e.g. the sides and hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle, the diameter and circumference of a circle) many of them committed suicide.
Even when things have commensurable measurable attributes, almost nothing can be measured by any specific unit of measure perfectly. The best measurements are still approximations. If you really think the mind is mathematical in nature, perhaps you should say, "the mind is an approximation apparatus."
When strange attractors and the whole field of fractal math were discovered, it was also discovered than many physical phenomena cannot be described in measurable terms, and even though fractal events are determined physically, they cannot be mathematically predicted.
Almost nothing we know is measurable.
Either/or attributes liquid, solid, gas, plasma, dead, living, pregnant, lie. Something is either dead or alive, there are no degrees or measurement. One is either pregnant or they are not.
Things humans use, such as food, poison, clothing, medicine, tools, machines, books, computers. Sure food can be weighed, the lethality of poison estimated, but whether something is food or poison is not determined by any measurement, but by what it is used for.
mind attributes and functions, such as reason, concept, percept, memory, imagination. None of these can be described mathematically or measured.
philosophy and its branches, such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, logic. There is no commensurable unit of measure for epistemology.
language, its parts and structures such as verbs, nouns, pronouns, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, declension, conjugation, subject, predicate, participle, gerund, infinitive, spelling, and alphabet, cannot be defined or known mathematically.
adjectives, such as mysterious, lost, found, important, funny, true, and false are all immeasurable.
relationships like father, sister, cousin, uncle, grandmother, leader, employee. There are no degrees of fatherness, or brotherness.
percepts sweetness, bitterness, greenness, heaviness, coldness, smoothness, loudness, acridness, pain. Especially pain. The fact that pain cannot be measured is why doctors must depend on a patient's testimony to asses pain on the imaginary scale of one to ten.
I know you'll not be interested in this, but others may be interested in understanding the absurdity of claiming the mind is, in some sense, "mathematical." Since mathematics, and the methods of measurement were invented by man, man's invention would have to have existed before the means for inventing it (the mind) existed.