(December 30, 2013 at 10:56 pm)bennyboy Wrote: 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."
There are definitely some problems, but I do think that we know the Universe outside of the way that we perceive it to some extent with the natural sciences. That knowledge is necessarily counter-intuitive and confusing, since it involves exploring things that we can't perceive and principles that can't be reduced easily to say "what" they are. There's no real comprehension, in the way that you might comprehend physical laws closer to human experience, but we can still know the underlying principles and use them to make accurate predictions of what will happen next.
Quote: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.
I've very seldom had dreams that were even completely convincing at the moment, but I understand that most people do, so I'll go with that. I find some difficulty in assuming that everything is a dream, because for everything to be a dream, everything would have to be composed of a being's thought process (or of some thought process that was the basic nature of reality). It seems illogical that the basic nature of reality would be something that could be other than it is. You can get away with the potential for something to be different when you talk about the physical world (because a lack of precision regarding how things "are" appears to be a logical necessity for the Universe on a very small scale, and that can lead to extremely large-scale phenomena like the Universe if everything works out the right way), but there's nothing that would justify the complexity of a dream being basic.
