Is reality only as real as the details our senses give us?
It seems like the world is less real every year. My sense of touch is less pronounced, eyes are weaker and less vivid and photo receptors die over time, and hearing gets worse. Are our senses the only things that make the world real to us?
Comments (15)
Granted, we would not get far with intellect alone. But without intellect, the senses would be quite useless if understanding the world is what you're looking for.
If you can elaborate a bit more on your OP then there'd be more to say on this.
I would guess the most important thing is memory.
Our senses inform us about reality but reality doesn't give a shit about what our senses tell us.
Your subjective existence may be seeming "less and less real", because the Universe itself, and all other subjective perceptions of it - like mine, for example - capture a different kind of "reality"; for me it seems to be still and stable.
Depends what you mean by 'the world'. Surely it's what we do with that sense data - our thoughts - that creates our reality. You use the term 'make the world real to us' - is this different in your view to the idea of experiencing the real world?
The thread title question, “Is reality only as real as the details our senses give us?”, is having your cake, but the second question contained in the opening comment, is eating it too.
These are mutually exclusive, having two separate and distinctly opposing answers. Makes me wonder what it is you’re looking for.
Your senses present you with what is called apparent reality, as opposed to ultimate reality which is only partly accessible to us. Your whole body however is a sensor, and it is your biologies reactions to the stimulus of the physical world that gives you apparent reality. The dimming of the senses by degree, as in ageing, is a loss of consciousness by degree. Consciousness is reaction, perception, awareness, all diminishing with a dulling of the senses. Your apparent world is a biological readout, the quality of that readout certainly would depend upon the quality or health of your biology.
Quoting T Clark
Memories are sense based.
Quoting TiredThinker
No. Even abstractions are … well, abstracted from sensory input not from some mysterious ether.
All in all I think Kant put it well enough. The capacity to think is empty without sensory input. What we deem as ‘real’ or ‘the world’ is due to sensory perception but that sensory perception alone isn’t much in and of itself. An eye is pretty much the same as a camera, but we don’t ‘see’ with our eyes as the main gubbins is in the occipital lobe.
What is your evidence of an 'ultimate reality'?
Well, the physicists tell us that ultimate reality is a place of no things. When one gives it a bit of thought, one must realize that all the energy frequencies that are out there are not available to our senses. We are getting a limited experience of ultimate reality, and that experience, is what we tend to call apparent reality, a biological readout of what is available to our senses.
Pit viper snakes, for example, can detect infrared. Their evolutionary path brought them the Infrared senses. Ours' brought us the five senses we have now. Or six for a rare few. May be a few thousand years down the line, we'll develop other senses to see/feel things we can't right now.
As Morpheus famously said: if real is what you can see, smell, taste and touch, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
Yes, it is not knowledge that is handy in ones day to day experience, still it is nice to understand where meanings come from. What we see as the physical world, is our biological readout, biological interpretation, not necessarily what is really there. If one's biology in not in good health, it is good to know that this can affect one's perception of the world, one's biological readout.