Different people have different eyes, nervous systems and brains, so the causal path from the primary object to the part of reality in their brain to which they are latching on can be different.
When you first mentioned “latching” my initial reaction was as negative and incredulous as Ben Jones’s was. Now I recognize that this idea is Kripke’s—he explains intensionality as a chain of causal links between territory and map. I see why Kripke went that way, but the whole enterprise turns my stomach. Where is Descartes when we need him? Intensionality carries no mystery in a model where map is distinct from territory, with no attempt being made to embed map in territory. It only becomes problematic when naive reductionism demands that our models must capture the act of modeling. And then we proceed to tie ourselves completely in knots when we imagine that this bit of self-reference contains the secret of consciousness.
Can’t we just pretend that our minds reside outside the physical universe when discussing epistemology? It makes things much simpler. Then we can discuss the reductionist science of cognition by allowing some minds back into the universe to serve as objects of study. :)
When you first mentioned “latching” my initial reaction was as negative and incredulous as Ben Jones’s was. Now I recognize that this idea is Kripke’s—he explains intensionality as a chain of causal links between territory and map. I see why Kripke went that way, but the whole enterprise turns my stomach. Where is Descartes when we need him? Intensionality carries no mystery in a model where map is distinct from territory, with no attempt being made to embed map in territory. It only becomes problematic when naive reductionism demands that our models must capture the act of modeling. And then we proceed to tie ourselves completely in knots when we imagine that this bit of self-reference contains the secret of consciousness.
Can’t we just pretend that our minds reside outside the physical universe when discussing epistemology? It makes things much simpler. Then we can discuss the reductionist science of cognition by allowing some minds back into the universe to serve as objects of study. :)