If the reader will take his own experiences, he will see what I mean.
Let him begin with a perceptual experience, the 'presentation,' so
called, of a physical object, his actual field of vision, the room he
sits in, with the book he is reading as its centre; and let him for the
present treat this complex object in the common-sense way as being
'really' what it seems to be, namely, a collection of physical things
cut out from an environing world of other physical things with which
these physical things have actual or potential relations. Now at the
same time it is just _those self-same things_ which his mind, as we say,
perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus's time
downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is
evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer
space and in a person's mind. 'Representative' theories of perception
avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the
reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but
seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically
exist.
The puzzle of how the one identical room can be in two places is at
bottom just the puzzle of how one identical point can be on two lines.
It can, if it be situated at their intersection; and similarly, if the
'pure experience' of the room were a place of intersection of two
processes, which connected it with different groups of associates
respectively, it could be counted twice over, as belonging to either
group, and spoken of loosely as existing in two places, although it
would remain all the time a numerically single thing.
Well, the experience is a member of diverse processes that can be
followed away from it along entirely different lines. The one
self-identical thing has so many relations to the rest of experience
that you can take it in disparate systems of association, and treat it
as belonging with opposite contexts.[9] In one of these contexts it is
your 'field of consciousness'; in another it is 'the room in which you
sit,' and it enters both contexts in its wholeness, giving no pretext
for being said to attach itself to consciousness by one of its parts or
aspects, and to outer reality by another. What are the two processes,
now, into which the room-experience simultaneously enters in this way?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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