Tractatus Analogico-Mythologicus
Reality is whatever it is… only our models of it can be considered continuous or discrete (or true, or false, or useful).
I say this like it’s obvious, but it’s a potentially controversial opinion. 🙂
People have a strong tendency to confuse the map with the territory. So a very successful theory becomes synonymous with reality itself.
But things get murky when we investigate all the details of the theory. If we are being extra cautious about what we consider “real”, then we can always wait for experimental confirmation before believing in the existence of some thing or process proposed by a theory.
There are two ways to define thinking: each leads to a different answer to the question of whether thinking is conscious or not.
We can test our preference for definition 1 or definition 2 by considering an example.
Sherlock Holmes was a good chemist. When he found himself stuck while attempting to solve a mystery, he would sometimes distract himself by doing a chemistry experiment. At the end of such an experiment, he often found that a solution simply popped into his head.
No measurable physical quantity is ever infinite. In other words, only theoretical concepts can be definitively labeled as infinite. But that is perhaps an epistemological claim that is unnecessary here. So let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of how visual ‘resolution’ is actually measured. As we shall see, the number of light sensitive cells in the retina does not tell us what the ‘resolution’ of the visual system as a whole is. In some circumstances our visual ‘resolution’ exceeds that of the eye considered in isolation.
Visual acuity [1] is the sharpness with which we can distinguish patterns of light on the retina of the eye. This depends on the exact location of the light falling on the retina.
