Author Topic: Is it possible for non-human organisms to be "gorts" ?  (Read 139 times)

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Is it possible for non-human organisms to be "gorts" ?
« on: April 04, 2019, 11:25:31 am »
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The following is an exercise in play, and to be taken tongue-in-cheek.
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To the question, "Is it possible for non-human organisms to be gorts?" I would respond, "Yes."

By definition, a gort is "someone (or some quality?)  who/that believes perception equals reality."

What would it mean for a quality to "believe" ? The quality itself is the process of transforming sensation into the lifeworld of lived experience.  If that which is perceiving takes its lifeworld-as-experience to be "reality" itself, then I conclude this mechanism qualifies as a gort - a dupe of Nature.

On the other hand, if by chance the processes suspect their perceptions are a mere approximation restricted by the vague nature of what it means to perceive, then they have developed a consciousness of the very process by which perception is filtering one small part of THE-UNKNOWN and transforming that one small part into a world, into your world.

If quality = "how an organism responds to its environment," then
sensory apparatus, as a function of noumena, experiences phenomena, so it is a kind of functional-thing, more akin to the nature of verbs than nouns.    That is, sensations are the ingredients of our experience of our lifeworld.  The sensations are the processing nouemana.


phenomenon p = Organism-as-Perceiving-Device.read(noumenon n)

If this systematic abstraction is "true to reality," then there is no way for other reading mechanisms, such as our very selves, to inspect the contents of what other reading mechanisms are reading.  To speak plainly, it is not possible for me to imagine the lifeworld of a snake without any sense of the kinds of sensations and feelings the snake experiences from the vibrations of its environs.   I can imagine sleeping until a mouse alerted my inner-system to awaken body, hunt, and consume prey; but there is no way for me to imagine the way such a life-world FEELS "to be."

There is no way for what we generally refer to as creatures, organisms, life-forms, as individuated and therefore unique specimens, to gain immediate access into the "subjective experience" of other sentient life-forms.  There is the reading of expressions and behavior, but nothing hard-wired and direct, no actual or "true" empathy.

So, in order to even to be able to qualify as a "gort," the Thing (creature/organsim/being/entity) would have to be a PERCEIVING-mechanism, a device which reads data/information from environs [noumena ---> thing-in-itself].   Since this is the case, such a mechanism cannot be considered outside of the context of reading noumena.  If lived-experience-in-the-life-world [reading data] is a function, the domain of the input is noumena, and the range of the output is all possible and even impossible phenomenal worlds.

phenomenon read(noumenon) ;

In computer programming terms, the function read(noumena) returns an object of type phenomena, where an instance of phenomena is individualized phenomenon. It could be called y, where noumenon would be x, and read() could then be, say f().

With this abstraction in mind, let us consider Korzybski's term, from Science and Sanity, "organism-as-a-whole-in-environments."

As a term, it is actually "functional."   The organism cannot be considered a separate thing as such.   Hence, what we mean by "entity" or "being" or "creature" or even "life-form" cannot be considered a separate thing as such.  That is, we can't possibly imagine such an organism outside of the context of it being in some environs.   For me, personally, the mathematical flavor of this abstraction helps me overcome some of the limitations of the subject/object imposed by language.  That is, a knowing subject perceives an objectified "world."  The split is imposed by alphabetic language.

Removing the subjective being, and replacing this concept with the basic mechanistic device we call "reading experience/perception as data/input," we have:

phenomenal lifeworld = read(noumena)

If, in essence, we are, as Senor Raul of Paraguay, has many times suggested, we are merely devices capable of following the internal instructions written into the wetware of our nervous systems by eons of years of experiential programming via sexual natural selection, then we are not so much "subjects" as specimens. 

I would say that, even non-biological life-forms would qualify as having great potential for gortness, since what is read is perception, not reality, not noumena, not the Thing-in-itself.

In fact, it will only be the individual mechanisms, perhaps flawed, which develop the capacity to doubt the legitimacy of their own sensory perceptions, which they receive from their own limited sensory apparatus, who would be capable of NOT being a gort.  That is, I am afraid that the answer to our initial question is a resounding YES, since natural world phenomena depend on organisms reading environments.   As we mentioned earlier, we can't even imagine an organism existing outside of an environment.  It is our languages which impose this restriction upon our imaginations.

Is the implication of all this that the world itself depends on gorts following the instructions dictated to them by their perceptions of reality.

Higher up the current food chain, we clearly see that some of our mammal cousins can behave in a gort-like manner, such as the poor deluded and conceited horse who wins a race and struts around afterward ... and is then encouraged to bust a fat nut in as many females as possible before he is turned into dog food.

The whole gist of my intention in posing this question is to point out that life is for suckers.

I'm not sure where I could go with this conclusion.  It seems to imply that all sentient life is a dupe of Nature, Fate, the gods, what have you.

Just as it was hard to pin down "quality" as a noun since we used it more like a verb, we can't really describe a gortbuster as a noun, but more as a kind of experience that may or may not have a lasting influence on the memory of the device "reading noumena."

So what then exactly would be the nature of these experiences which expose the brute fact that perception does not equal reality, that the phenomenal world is not the Thing-in-itself, that perception does not equal reality?

???

Could it be instantaneous, such as whenever we even consider for one moment that "we" are the product of a world-as-representation-producing nervous system?
« Last Edit: April 04, 2019, 10:27:03 pm by Miserable Mike »
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