(2) We might attempt to distinguish images from sensations by our
absence of belief in the "physical reality" of images. When we are aware
that what we are experiencing is an image, we do not give it the kind of
belief that we should give to a sensation: we do not think that it has
the same power of producing knowledge of the "external world." Images
are "imaginary"; in SOME sense they are "unreal." But this difference
is hard to analyse or state correctly. What we call the "unreality" of
images requires interpretation it cannot mean what would be expressed
by saying "there's no such thing." Images are just as truly part of the
actual world as sensations are. All that we really mean by calling an
image "unreal" is that it does not have the concomitants which it would
have if it were a sensation. When we call up a visual image of a chair,
we do not attempt to sit in it, because we know that, like Macbeth's
dagger, it is not "sensible to feeling as to sight"--i.e. it does not
have the correlations with tactile sensations which it would have if it
were a visual sensation and not merely a visual image. But this means
that the so-called "unreality" of images consists merely in their not
obeying the laws of physics, and thus brings us back to the causal
distinction between images and sensations.
This view is confirmed by the fact that we only feel images to be
"unreal" when we already know them to be images. Images cannot be
defined by the FEELING of unreality, because when we falsely believe an
image to be a sensation, as in the case of dreams, it FEELS just as real
as if it were a sensation. Our feeling of unreality results from our
having already realized that we are dealing with an image, and cannot
therefore be the definition of what we mean by an image. As soon as an
image begins to deceive us as to its status, it also deceives us as to
its correlations, which are what we mean by its "reality."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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