Hi Yanniru,
"So why call it a pipeline. It has nothing to do with my biological pipeline. It's just a mathematical representation with assumed symmetries in sets of data."
I don't think the word 'pipeline' appears in Dick's paper. In his paper, he referred to it as his "model". I think 'pipeline' was an analogy he started using recently in an attempt to get some ideas across. By now, that decision has probably caused more confusion than it has cleared up.
Now, I think his model, or 'pipeline', does have something to do with your biological pipeline. It relates to it in the same way that any mathematical representation relates to some physical phenomenon - for example, the way in which an equation describing the balistic flight of an artillery shell relates to the actual flight of a real shell.
Your biological pipeline presents your consciousness with information that somehow originated in the real world. From all this information, and in particular from the accumulation of similar information from thousands of other people, the laws of physics as we know them have been inferred. I'm talking here about the progress and results of Science.
What Dick has developed is a mathematical method of converting any arbitrary set of numbers into a "picture", or a "display", or a "presentation" which also happens to conform to the familiar laws of physics.
"NO WAY. Not he, not you , nobody has shown that the biological pipeline has anything to do with his representation of data. That is a tremendous assumption. Completely ad hoc as Dick has admitted to me on this forum. "
WAY. He has shown that his model conforms to the laws of physics, and the biological pipeline (Science) has shown that the model of reality it produces also conforms to the laws of physics. It's not an assumption, but a derivation.
"Just saying something is true does not make it true."
I agree. And, I think you would agree that just saying something is false does not make it false.
Warm regards,
Paul |