Ep. 7 Page 1

Abt_Nihil on Aug. 17, 2008

The awareness that I am working on episode 7 of this series, with 6 completed episodes in the archives, feels very, very surreal itself.

Anyway, this episode is going to be much less wordy than the previous one, even though this first page doesn't look like it. I just wanted to remind everyone what this is all about, and combined some aspects of awareness/consciousness… this also ties into Jack's backstory, which will unfold over the course of the next few episodes, which actually began with the info on the previous episode's last page that the two persons Jack met were “reflections”…

Concerning the philosophical background of this page (yes, there is one :P), it pretty much draws on the distinction between knowledge that is completely internal and externally-determined knowledge, the former being something like “being aware of the quality of sensory experience” (in this case, feeling the difference in temperature), the latter being something like “knowing that something is such-and-such” (in this case, knowing that Jack's father is (not) there). What's the difference? Well, the latter is objective, meaning you can believe something wrongly. Whether you can be wrong about feeling something is much more controversial.

REPLIES:

Midge: Well, the problem is you'd have to describe the feeling's quality in words like “hot” or “red”. And you could maintain that the content of these words is in turn determined by an external semantic relation. Which means, you can be wrong about “feeling hot” or “seeing red”, if someone convincingly argues you were wrong about what these words mean.

trevor -P) And concerning heating up chocolate - I never thought about it that way… I'll make sure to touch a lot of icecream from now on, simply to be justified to “get my warmth back” :-D