If you say listen to this cheesy music, a person might not want to listen to it because they respect you, and it might even change their perception because we are all influenced by people's opinions, but I don't think that would change their intrinsic feelings about what they are hearing. I also agree that someone can learn to appreciate a certain genre of music if they understand the difficulty. In our society there is also a greater value placed on certain types of music over others, so people will try to listen to that music not so much because they enjoy it, but because it makes them feel more cultured.
The point here is that before verbal and social conditioning, there is also a
direct and natural response to sense stimuli. 3 year olds will overwhelmingly prefer listening to folklore melodies instead of Schoenberg (20th century composer who invented the 12-tone technique in an attempt to escape the traditional concept of tonality). The reason why it is so is
not that they are verbally conditioned to prefer consonance to dissonance, it's that humans
naturally detect and prefer simple consonances. The simple consonances of music can all be explained mathematically by simple ratios such as 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (perfect fifth), 4:3 (perfect fourth) and so on.
Saying a girl is ugly or beautiful changes nothing about the way the atoms of her body are assembled together, but it does change how people see her features. It is this conditioning which is causing the problem, and this is all due to words that are projected onto a screen. When the words are removed, we get a true glimpse of reality.
When words are removed, we perceive reality in a more direct way. That doesn't mean photons don't impinge on your retina.
I was trying to explain that even though Lessans used the word 'image', it is not a strawman because this word can be interchanged with photons. The point is that the photons are not impinging on the optic nerve and going to the brain to be decoded.
Of course the photons don't travel to your brain. What goes to your brain is a biological electro-chemical impulse. But the photons do enter your eyes.
The same applies to sound. There are no air pressure waves reaching your brain. But they do reach your ear.
You're right. Too much light can burn, but that has no bearing on whether the eyes are a sense organ. When you take your hand out of a fire, you are feeling this from your sense of touch. Where does this cause a conflict?
Too much light can burn for the obvious reason that
too many photons will destroy your retina. When I take my hand out of fire, I am feeling the pain from my sense of touch. When I close my eyes when exposed to an overwhelmingly bright light,
I am feeling this from my sense of sight. How is this so hard to understand?
Of course we can see before we can speak. But as soon as these words are introduced, children begin to be conditioned to hearing only certain words used with certain features and not with others. As they begin growing up it doesn't take long before they are attracted to those individuals that are considered beautiful not only because of this attraction, but because there is more value placed on those individuals.
Yes there is
some truth to that. But again, you don't need to say sight is not a sense to get that point across.
I think he did need to explain what is actually happening with words, which necessitated that he prove that the eyes are not a sense organ, but proving that the eyes are not a sense organ had no other significance. He writes:
"The knowledge revealed thus far although also hidden behind the door marked ‘Man Does Not Have Five Senses’ is not what I referred to as being of significance. Frankly, it makes no difference to me that the eyes are not a sense organ, that our scientists got confused because of it, and that a dog cannot identify his master from a picture. What does mean a great deal to me — when the purpose of my discovery is to remove all evil from the world (which word is symbolic of any kind of hurt that exists in human relation) — is to demonstrate how certain words have absolutely no foundation in reality, yet they have caused more suffering and unhappiness than can be readily imagined."
A dog won't identify a picture of his master because it doesn't move and especially, it doesn't smell his master. That doesn't mean photons don't enter the dog's eyes.
It effectively makes no difference that eyes are a sense organ or not when you want to show that words can be hurtful. But the fact that you insist on saying that they aren't is just a very strong demonstration of your disturbing inability to see that Lessans was clearly wrong on some issues. If you can't even acknowledge that he's wrong about something so obvious (sight is a sense), you really are no better than the fanatic religious folks who believe the world was created 6000 years ago because the Bible says so.
