(November 10, 2010 at 4:13 am)tavarish Wrote: How do you determine what is real and what is not?
Reality is a tricky question, I can't merely say that what is real is the world of my five senses. Sight for example results from light being flipped upside down, passing through a semi-opaque substance, being deflected off of ganglion cells, and hitting whatever light receptors aren't obscured by the connection of the optic nerve to the back of the eyeball. The actual raw data we get from our eyes is upside down, blurry, full of little holes, and it has a big empty spot. The reason we don't see like that is because the data is processed by the lateral geniculate nucleus, superior colliculus, and other parts of the brain until the image is compiled into what we see. So if we think that for example, the wall we're looking at has three little holes in it, we might be wrong, because there's actually a little blind spot in our vision that our brain fills in with information from the surrounding area. So if it's in the right spot, there can be a little hole in the wall that is completely invisible to you because your brain is filling in the missing pieces so it actually looks like the wall is perfectly fine there. Of course this does not mean that the hole is false, ultimately it's there, and other people may or may not be able to see it, but you can't. The same holds true with the other senses, we can hallucinate just about anything, and even when our senses are correct we still don't understand how the world is in it's raw form because we experience everything through our consciousness. So evaluating what is real ultimately supersedes what I can experience with my senses. I do believe that in reality we are relating to something real through our senses, but our senses are very small doorways to a very large reality.
You could argue that the collective experience of life as shared among the humanity community sheds some light on reality. The outside perspective of others correcting our personal blindness. As we exist in community the fact that we successfully relate concepts to each other reinforces the idea that those concepts are universal. So in our larger community we try to lay the foundations of an absolute understanding of the universe and existence. But once again we are limited by being human. We cannot, for example, see in the infrared spectrum, the best we can do is make a device to translate that spectrum into one we can see. We can never know what it is like to see that spectrum, or to be able to "see" sound like some animals. It's not only a sensory limitation, but a cultural one. Cultures see things differently, and however homogenizing we think the media can be, we always have different cultural groups that define truth and reality a different way. The vast majority of people will simply assume that their world view is superior without really examining the many facets of the others. This is just cultural arrogance. Psychologically speaking, things like culture have the effect of shrinking the world rather than expanding it. Reality is so vast, and there are so many things we will never understand, that we have to compress existence into a manageable format. So we don't really think about humanity at large, we focus on our group of associations. We don't see all the possibilities in our lives, we focus on our routines and hobbies and the places we usually go. We all have our own setting, and we tend to change it very slowly. We create identities within cultural groups in order to belong to a certain set of ideas, which we tend to conform to closely. We set our cultural groups in opposition to other cultural groups whose ideas are too dissimilar because living with the tension that they may have some valid points is to mind-expanding. We shut our minds to the fact that we have everything to learn about our existence.
What will always be most fundamentally real to any person is their own subjective experience of the life they live, the needs they have, the desires they feel, the questions they have. I think Modern thought tries to say that there is a higher logic beyond this illusion, but it will always be our illusion. One would be wise to remember that the work that gave rise to the Modernist revolution contained the oft quoted phrase, "I think therefore I am." We can't shake this feeling of consciousness, we can't help but feel like us. We experience everything as who we are, and as long as we think about anything we think with ourselves as the thinker. So when it comes down to it the reality that is most "real" to anyone is the one they experience. No one cares about metaphysics when they are losing someone they care about.
So each picture of reality is incomplete, upside-down, and blurry. I have no reason to think any one of them is perfect, but I do know that I have access to several ways of gathering information about what is real, my sensory experience and my own logic (the data I gather about the world personally), the world at large, the story of man as told by history, science, philosophy, the ideas of my community (all the data we take in from our culture/fellow humans), and last, but not by any means least, the more ineffable experience of what it is to be myself, to be this human being that I am, to be in this skin feeling these things I feel. So in my own view, for anything to be considered real it has to do the best job of hanging together within all these different means of seeing reality. To be true it has to the best job of explaining itself within all these contexts. It has to tell the most convincing story. It has to make the most sense out of this mess we live in. So everything that may be real has to be tested in this holistic crucible to be true, but even the crucible is limited. The universe is big, I feel like I'm in a movie and the camera just keeps panning out, and out, and out, out into the atmosphere, into space, the universe. There is so much more to being human than what we can account for with formulas and thought experiments. If you think you have the all the answers, give it enough time and life will humble you. So I can only know what is real to the best of human ability which is actually what most people think of when they think of certainty. I would contend that the human mind cannot hold the nature of existence. I would say that reality is realer than I am, and I can live like that because of what I have seen of the truth.
Wow, that was a big question, but definitely a good one! Thanks for your input!
