Reality
Dennis Balson 2018-10-12
The mind cannot experience reality (what is) because it takes time for the cognitive mind to function, therefore the mind only experiences 'what was'. And as J. Krishnamurti claimed:- "what was is the death of what is".
Comments (44)
You mean the mind cannot experience the present.
There is a lag between sensation and the experience of it, which puts all things sensed into the past, but we must allow that the things which come to pass are coming from the future. We can conclude that things coming from the future have a type of existence which makes it impossible for them to be sensed. Whether the cognitive mind functions in the past, future, present, or a combination of these, is another question.
All activities follow a preset pattern. It's what we refer to as the 'characteristic' or 'nature' of something. Because of this, I don't believe in chaos or randomness. Anyway, that's beside the point, imagine two boxers fighting in a ring. They see where each other's heads are and they try to figure out how best to project their punches so as to hit the other. They do this with the knowledge that the other guy will attempt to change the position of their head to avoid getting hit. However, the mind takes as many factors as it can into consideration and predicts the best move. That prediction of the future is one of the more common and advanced activities of the mind. We may perceive the past but we use our knowledge of the 'nature/character' of things to conceive of the possible future circumstance thus upsetting the minimal delay caused by the process of perception. Also, considering the many reference points we use to define a circumstance, it is more probable we perceive reality (in the sense of a particular relationship) than not.
The present consists of an instant which is changed for another instant immediately the present instant ceases to exist.
Really, everything only appears to be happening.
Part of this was certainly based on the experience of persistence and the dynamic continuity of physical reality. But, I think, another part if it, clearly seen in Aristotelian philosophy going back to the Categories, is a far more expansive view of being that you seem to be taking. Action has always been seen by Aristotelians as inhering in the being that acts. Thus, the Aristotelian tradition sees beings not only as the core object thought of by materialists, but also as that object's radiance of action.
Aristotle was perceptive enough to see that in sensation as well as in cognitive perception, subject and object are linked by an indivisible identity. The object being sensed by me is identically me sensing the object. The object being known by me is identically me knowing the object. As he discusses at length in De Anima, both sensation and perceptual cognition involve the joint actualization of two potentials in a single act (or event). The act of sensing simultaneously actualizes both the object's sensibility and the subject's power to sense. The act of perceptual cognition simultaneously actualizes both the object's intelligibility and the subject's capacity to be informed.
We can see this in the neuroscience of perception. My neural representation of a being is identically the the being's modification of my neural state. For example, the light scattered by an object (its sensible species) modifies the state of rods and cone and cones in my retina. That modified state is identically mine visual image and the object's modification of my retinal state. This dual citizenship continues in effect as the neural signal propagates to the various centers of visual processing in my brain. The information is both mine and the object's continuing action within me. It is literally an existential penetration of me by the being I am perceiving.
So, the projection of being I'm aware of is identically the being's concurrent dynamical projection with in (its existential penetration of) me. Of course, the present information, existing concurrent within me, has a past origin, but that is hardly surprising to any student of nature. Whatever is now bears the imprint of a history going back to the big bang.
But don't we experience it as it occurs within us?
Of course, we can discuss what kind of activity "knowing" names, but that is an empirical question, and one that we cannot engage in unless we know relevant evidence.
A few years ago I decided that in my next dream I would use logic to decide if I was in fact dreaming and awaken, sure enough I soon had a strange dream in which I was steering a narrowboat along a canal at an impossible dream, I rembered my previous decision to use logic to analyze things. But the problem was I had no knowledge of the laws of physics in the real world, if I did I would realise my dream world was separate, instead I looked around me and everything was in perfect detail, the weeds bending in the boats wash, totally convincing so I decided it was real, and carried on dreaming!
I saw a documentary on ww2 dogfights. A fighter pilot has to make a guesstimate (is that the right word?) about where the enemy plane in front of him will be and fire with adjustments made. In modern planes there are onboard computers to assist the pilot.
The point is that as the speed of events increase our mental reaction time becomes more and more significant.
In short the OP is right. We can only experience the past. This should be no surprise because I've heard it many times on the forum that when we look at the stars we're seeing history and not the present. Even the sunrise is 8 minutes old.
The philosophical implications of this I don't get.
We do know. I know what dreams are. They span but a short time. What is an illusion except something that is not real, but what we mean by "real" is the world we know via experience. So to say reality is not real is a further abuse of language.
To think reality is an illusion is to say it is not reality -- again a contradiction in terms. Still, we know that whatever informs our experience has the power to so inform it -- because nothing can do what it cannot do.
So, what is it that we don't know? We don't know what reality can do beyond informing us as it does. So, we form hypotheses. Descartes entertained the hypothesis that it could also act as an evil spirit -- a demon. Others suggest we are a brain in a vat or a simulation. All such hypotheses are unfalsifiable, and so unscientific. Science offers falsifiable hypotheses such as general relativity and quantum field theory.
So, I admit that we do not know the deep structure of material reality, but we have a methodology that prefers falsifiable to unfalsifiable hypotheses and we have made a great deal of progress by applying that methodology.
When trying to observe the quantum world nothing makes logical sense, we are faced with a conundrum, the logical observable world is built on an illogical observation, we know nothing if all our observations are based on nothing logical.
Not quite. I, for example, am a lucid dreamer. I know when I am dreaming, and if I do not like how a dream is going, I wake myself up. So, when we are talking about dreams in the context of skepticism, we are not talking about actual dreams, but something that is not a dream at all. So, what is it? It seems to me it is undefined -- hiding behind an equivocal use of "dream," but actually not a dream at all. If it is something we cannot wake from, if it constrains our existence and choices, if it forms the very fabric of the lived world, then how, precisely, does it differ from reality? If there is no discernible, experiential, difference between A and B, then what does it mean to say A is not B -- that this so-called "dream" is not reality? It seems to me that such claims are utterly meaningless.
I think the "illogic" of the quantum world is baggage brought the seers of paradox, not presented to us by reality.
As for quantum theory I think it's largely bunkum with lots of buzz words.
Quoting Dfpolis
Science, however, studies events that take place in less than our reaction times and so we need instruments. Flies are a blur in our visual fields.
No, it's not-belief - or non-belief - in the existence of God. Derail here - sorry! :yikes: - but the difference is important. Not being persuaded of the existence of X, and being persuaded of the non-existence of X are very different things. The former is agnostic; the second draws a firm conclusion.
But, back to my question:
Quoting Dfpolis
"Someone who finds his life meaningful enough to pursue; without admitting or dismissing a God, and tolerant enough to respect either ways as a possible answer.
But I prefer this one:
"A person who is sensible enough to admit that they have no fu*#i*g clue what is going on in the universe.
Contrary to both a Theist (someone who sits in Church thinking they have shit figured out) and an Atheist (someone who sits at Starbucks thinking they have shit figured out)"
But nouns aside, trying to describe what we imagine ultimate reality might or might not be we can't rely on oral or written words, they are just labels after all. But to me anyone being persuaded of anything is believing the persuader.
As to reality I'll quote Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan:
"... the objective world exists, it is not an illusion. It is real not in being ultimate but in being a form or or expression of the ultimate"
That puts it much better than I can.
Yes, that's a good one. :smile: And, just for clarity, that puts me in a Church, which I find a little uncomfortable. I could go with a druid grove, if such are available options? :wink:
We have an idea <reality> which we form as a result of our experience. That idea signifies what it is that we encounter in experience. So, to say what we experience is not real is to say that what we experience is not what we experience -- it is an oxymoron and a contradiction in terms. It uses the term "real" in a sentence without thinking what it really means. That is why I asked you to define real.
'Real' is like saying a computer game is real, but not ultimately real
Please, define "ultimately real." If you are talking about God as the ultimate reality, then I would agree..
I think to an extent that depends on a false view of time that sees it as some sort of real abstract that's infinitesimally divisible. Given that time is instead simply (the ontological process of) motion/change, and seeing it as infinitesimally divisible is only a mental abstraction, it's more plausible that we do in fact experience the present. There's not some tiny "slice" of motion/change that's "the (preferred) present," against which all other motion/change occurs.