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.

[TudorGothicSerpent]

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.

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.

[houseofcantor]

Excuse my english.

OK.

Other than that, huh? Are you asking a scientific/philosophical/or moral question? I see a conflict as I am a naive philosopher who relies on science, i.e. to answer the question of "good and evil," I would refer to evolutionary concerns...

[TudorGothicSerpent]

Other than that, huh? Are you asking a scientific/philosophical/or moral question? I see a conflict as I am a naive philosopher who relies on science, i.e. to answer the question of "good and evil," I would refer to evolutionary concerns...

It seems like a philosophical question to me. It's about whether or not we can perceive reality as it actually is without the interpretation of human faculties, which is a perennial question that authors like Immanuel Kant have been trying to tackle since the 18th century. There's definitely some crossover with science, though. I think that science has pretty much resolved it, at least as far as we can resolve questions in philosophy.

[houseofcantor]

Other than that, huh? Are you asking a scientific/philosophical/or moral question? I see a conflict as I am a naive philosopher who relies on science, i.e. to answer the question of "good and evil," I would refer to evolutionary concerns...

It seems like a philosophical question to me. It's about whether or not we can perceive reality as it actually is without the interpretation of human faculties, which is a perennial question that authors like Immanuel Kant have been trying to tackle since the 18th century. There's definitely some crossover with science, though. I think that science has pretty much resolved it, at least as far as we can resolve questions in philosophy.

Yabut. I suck at formal philosophy. I cannot keep my science out of it, and as I understand it; well, it cannot be understood. I'm officially "agnostic" about reality.

"Humanity" is not a 'logical' position, it is an emotional one. What 'we are' is a 'sack of mostly water' trying to make sense of our environment and our place in it. And it is just that: I see 'us' as part of, and not seperate from, environment; yet the 'feel' I get from formal philosophy is that somehow we are 'above it all.'

I'm not 'above it,' I'm 'in it,' I'm all tao like that; and like Godel mentioned, no system is both complete and self-consistent, and I think that the 'incompleteness' here is in not being 'above it all.' Which is a perspective I fell we are currently unable to grasp.

[Mudhammam]

I'm not sure what you are trying to say, if you remove someones thoughts and emotions he becomes empty shell like robot you loose consciousness and basically that is what I believe is you. You wouldn't have view of life you would have picture of surrounding which would mean nothing, good and bad would also mean nothing, plus what is true reality it's an abstract thing, how do you know that you aren't just nuts, how do you know that you haven't dreamed all your life, you just do because it's your reality.

It's like saying prove me that you are real, you can't.
Is reality real? Nonsense questions.

I have a lamp in my room.. I look at it, it's a lamp, i take a picture it's a lamp, i touch it if feels like a lamp and by now i believe it really is a bloody lamp.

But lamps are the stuff of atoms. Atoms are the stuff of electrons and protons. Electrons are the stuff of quarks. What the fuck is a quark?

[houseofcantor]

I'm not sure what you are trying to say, if you remove someones thoughts and emotions he becomes empty shell like robot you loose consciousness and basically that is what I believe is you. You wouldn't have view of life you would have picture of surrounding which would mean nothing, good and bad would also mean nothing, plus what is true reality it's an abstract thing, how do you know that you aren't just nuts, how do you know that you haven't dreamed all your life, you just do because it's your reality.

It's like saying prove me that you are real, you can't.
Is reality real? Nonsense questions.

I have a lamp in my room.. I look at it, it's a lamp, i take a picture it's a lamp, i touch it if feels like a lamp and by now i believe it really is a bloody lamp.

But lamps are the stuff of atoms. Atoms are the stuff of electrons and protons. Electrons are the stuff of quarks. What the fuck is a quark?

What!? The electron is a lepton. Bosons are made up of quarks. Oh my Gwynnies...

[Mudhammam]

What!? The electron is a lepton. Bosons are made up of quarks. Oh my Gwynnies...

I'm currently going through "Quantum Physics for Poets" and I feel like Paul Dirac captured my current mindset well when he said: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."

Oftentimes when reading this book I have felt like a zombie staring at words on a paper, with no comprehension for the terms, their meaning, and the math involved. I feel like I have the IQ of a snail. hock:

So please forgive me?

[bennyboy]

I feel like Paul Dirac captured my current mindset well when he said: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."

I think both aim to capture the essence of some aspect of reality, in the face of the obvious truth that totally encapsulating reality is impossible.

Science aims to find a shorthand to describe the infinitely complex physical reactions around us. But it is in fact a shorthand-- when we some up the characteristics of say a gram of zinc, this is shorthand for a near-infinite number of particles and interactions. What is represented simply is also incalculably complex-- and the simplicity is more a function of our lack of interest in properties that we can't measure or interact with than a representation of reality.

[MindForgedManacle]

No, I don't think we do. I find myself to be, at best, an indirect realist. That is to say, I think what is the case that our conscious experience of reality is a mental reconstruction of sense data by our brains.



However, I'm not convinced this is really an answerable question. Answering affirmatively (that we directly see reality as it is) draws in some, I think, dubious assumptions. Even within our mentally reconstructed perception of reality, we have massive evidence as to the fact that our brains streamline what it receives via sense data and doesn't deliver the complete picture, so to say, but rather perceptions is more biologically manageable chunks. This is where things like motion blindness and such would come in I guess.