Milinda’s Questions

On the 1,928th anniversary of the destruction of Pompeii, let’s see what’s erupting around the Internet.

Here’s a review that my friend Darien Large wrote several years ago of Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind. There’s a lot of other interesting stuff in the Daliverse; browse around a while.

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I recently discovered that Peter Medawar’s classic 1961 takedown of Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man is available online.

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Eric Schwitzgebel’s most recent post at Splintered Mind provides an introduction to a whole series of interesting papers and posts he’s written on the validity of introspection as a means of psychological and philosophical investigation. They are:

• “Introspective Training Apprehensively Defended: Reflections on Titchener’s Lab Manual” (pdf), from the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2004.
• Do Things Look Flat? from Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 2006.
• “Do You Mostly See Double?” (September 2006.)
• “The Unreliability of Naive Introspection” (March 2007).
• And finally, today’s post: “From Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics.”

The only one of the numerous complex questions raised that I can address in this brief post is “Do You Mostly See Double?” The answer in my case is unequivocally “Yes.” Schwitzgebel introduces the issue like this:

Raise a finger to about four inches in front of your nose. Focus on some object in the distance, then — without changing your focus — shift your attention back to your finger. Does it seem doubled? Most people claim to be able to experience this, at least after a few tries.

If you then focus carefully on your finger (bringing it out maybe to six or eight inches, depending on how close in you’re able to bring your focus), do the objects in the far distance seem unfocused, blurry? Even doubled? Reports of doubling in this case are less common, but I think I can get some doubling in myself in this condition.

I always get very distinct double images in both cases. It’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything and hit a target. Take darts, for example: If I see one dart, I see two targets. If I see one target, it looks like I have two hands, each holding a dart.

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This Overview of Buddhist Philosophy looks like a valuable resource. It’s put online by the White Lotus Center for Shin Buddhism, but from my browsing it appears to be fairly nonpartisan (although, naturally, opting for inclusiveness in terms of what counts as Buddhism.)