Can we see reality as it is?

[bennyboy]

@bennyboy, you are correct up until you mentioned self delusion. You cannot be deluded about your experience although you can misinterprt its significance. Even still you can deduce logical absolutes.

Right. Experiences are just what they are. It's the attributions we make about them that may be delusional. The problem is that wherever our experiences come from, using them to establish the nature of their source amounts to buying in to a logical fallacy: "All my experiences tell me that there's a physical universe and nothing more than that. . . so that must be the case."

Now, that doesn't mean that conclusion is wrong, or even that there's any better conclusion on which to base one's world view. I would submit, as an agnostic, that opting not to arrive at a conclusion at all is better: let truths live in their own context, and don't bother trying to globalize them to all other contexts.

The jealous attempt to take ideas which work in some contexts, and impose them on all of human experience, is a mistake: it ignores that not all can be known to us, and that all our reality is therefore necessarily contextual.

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People talk about reality, but they should talk about reality AS. Experiences are real-- as experiences. Red is really red. The taste of hot chocolate on a winter day is really just that. We are experiencing those things as they really are, because they are experiences. Do those experiences represent some underlying, objective reality? Not really.

I've never really bought into arguments that our experiences don't really reflect material reality. I believe that they probably do, but our perception involves an interpretation of that reality through our mental structures. I wouldn't go as far as Kant and say that we have no access to "the thing in itself" and that the idea of objective reality outside the lens of our perception is in the realm of metaphysics, but I don't think that we can ever intuitively grasp what the world is like without our perceptions applied to it.

Even in pure science, it's clear that by the time we experience the universe, we've torn it down, filtered it through our own world views, and made a symbolic reassembly. So I don't see a tree for what it "really is." I see a collection of symbols: greenness, length, a collection of angles, etc., and know this collection to be referred to as "tree."

That's why a dream tree can be as convincing as a "real" one. It's also why we should always be suspicious of things we take as real just because they seem to be. We are too fallible to reliably make that determination.