Beauty is in the eye or the eye

Had a nice little argument with a (12 yr old) student yesterday on images being inside eyes. He very wisely understood the nature of the puzzle.

A scientist may argue that we see the image that falls upon our retina (viz. all those diagrams of eyes in science books). It is true that if the image is not there we don't see, and whatever that image is we do see... so you can see the source of the argument. But if we link that to our common perception that "we see what is there" then we must conclude that if the scientist is looking at me, then he sees "me", so "me" must be the image in his eye.

But if I'm looking at him also then he is the image in my eye also. (This all only works once you make the link between images in eyes and the phenomena of consciousness.) So it means that his eye is in my eye, but that my eye is in his eye as well. Reflections in reflections in refelctions... kind of how the world of meaning is.

The usual escape from this is to make "me" and "you" physical single entities which cause numerous images by reflecting light. But then you have the Noumenon problem of how do we ever see or know about a noumenon?

As argued recently all we can say is that various descriptions are just various names and predicates that apply in place of one another or not.

I accused Hofstadter of thinking in terms of "real" entities when we started talking about the brain. I still think he is making this mistake. You can tell he is U.S. educated from the 1960s; American academia stinks of this materialisms; it still saturates that M.I.T. lecture on you-tube and interesting it is the point the lecture ends up having to vigorously and quite painfully defend! I wonder how many American students start open minded and end up being indoctrinated into the materialism mould? It is quite probably this dogma which is driving the resurgence in religious thinking.