When you vividly remember an event from a decade ago it most likely did not happen like you remember. They've done longitudinal studies on people's memories of things like JFK assassination and 9/11. People swear they remember it clear as day but it never really matches up to what they were actually doing...
Memories are bunk, is my point. Only media can really record history.
I don't trust media because Berenstein bears is the proper spelling [0]. I died when I was 6 years old after an asthma attack and shifted into another timeline where I survived. It shares most of the same details but likes to throw a few typos in to check if I'm paying attention. I'm not sure the purpose of these tests, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation#Mandela_effect
/s
While confabulation is a severe problem with human memory, I don't trust media because history is written by the winners.
these two statements are both true (as far as we can verify in this limited human existence, anyway):
1. there is a world beyond an individual's consciousness.
2. an individual can only ever experience the world through their own consciousness, and therefore their own senses and memories.
Bloom's statement contradicts neither of those things. He is simply acknowledging that from an individual's own subjective point of view, their own consciousness is really the only thing they can work with in a direct sense. That isn't a denial or negation of exterior reality. For practical purposes though, if we wish to examine consciousness we are pretty much stuck in examining our own consciousness, since that's the only one we have direct access to.
Alternatively, someone can eat LSD without sensing it. But, that LSD is still going to have a profound effect.
Of course the human mind (which is NOT identical with the brain, not a good idea to conflate those terms) is influenced by the outside world. Sense organs (and the sensations in consciousness that arise due to them) are the means through which external reality causes changes in consciousness.
Why is it wrong to call that "senses"? How is that abusing the term? It's the literal meaning of the word.
First off, what does that even mean? Surely your own eyes directly stimulate your optic nerves which directly stimulate your visual cortex. Is there a different kind of stimulation you had in mind?
I'm not sure what you mean by "a stroke can do things without influencing memory or triggering anything you can detect". Do you mean that people sometimes become unconscious during a stroke? Maybe. So what? The effects of a stroke are most certainly detectable afterwards though. I'm really just not sure what you're trying to get at.
These are not in the two category's proposed earlier, thus memory and observation fail fully describe what's going on.
Bloom's discussion was a highlighting of the ways in which cultural transmission of events imbues the sensory perception and recollection of memory in every person in society with a certain kind of filter which he describes by analogy as if it was some sort of group mind.
my point of elaboration was meant to emphasize that when we examine the contents of consciousness, we necessarily are limited to examining our own consciousness qualitatively. Reporting on the consciousness of others is only ever capable of producing yet another stimulus in our own input stream that we would interpet the same way we interpret any other exogenous stimulus. Despite that, this does not imply solipsism. Only an admission of the limitations we are faced with in this examination.
> we necessarily are limited to examining our own consciousness qualitatively
Err no. It's just as much a physical things as a rock or your toenails.
PS: The modern CPU your using to read this is to complex for any one person to understand. It has billions of connections all doing important things some of which don't work. But, it was designed so each connection is intended to do something understandable. Further, it's way to fast to understand what's going on at a second by second basis, but every individual interaction is predictable. So, that CPU is to complex to understand, but that does not mean your limited to looking at it qualitatively.
Both are physical things. An abacus does not undergo long term change when you move the beads. But, the arangment of beads can have meaning. Brains and CPU both treat the intermediate state as something meaningful and act on it.
"To see things in a new light is a cognitive challenge; to adjust the language to the new insight is nothing more than a bothersome technicality." - Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking
> Yet you know sure as you were born that there's a broader world outside ... [you know a bunch of other things about reality] ... At this instant, reading by yourself, where do these realities reside? Inside your mind. Memory in a very real sense is reality.
Bloom is absolutely right that memory is central to all this. But it's a category error to say that just because your knowledge of reality is through memory, that memory is the only realitiy.
Ok, it's logically possible there is no external reality, and all that exists is just my (Ratnapala's) memory. But even then the distinction remains. Then, the lying medium (memory) is real, but the content of those memories is not a reality.