Breaking the "Literal Reality" addiction.

[Iyace]

Pretty sure that 2012 article Steve001 posted is talking about a math proof, and thus an argument from reason rather than a conclusion based on empirical evidence.

In any case, board physicists can correct me but I don't think that the wave function being extant, as opposed to an artifact of math, says anything one way or another about the role of the conscious observer.

Part of my reasoning is that the January 2013 New Scientist article "Quantum Shadows" discussed three experiments that corroborated the idea that the observer influences reality. (Summary of article here + here)

I think we may be talking about different things. I was referring to the quote of him saying that physicalism lies at the heart of science.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

I think we may be talking about different things. I was referring to the quote of him saying that physicalism lies at the heart of science.

Ah, I figured he was basing that assertion on his interpretation of the aforementioned article.

But yeah, Bernardo covers this in his Materialism as Fairy Tale article.

One just has to look at Josephson's ideas relating to Neutral Monism, Zeilinger's belief that information & reality are interconnected like space & time are, or Isham's interest in Idealism to see three physicists who'd strongly disagree that physicalism is the heart of science.

 

[gabriel]

The mistake is to use terms like addiction to describe the response to our surroundings. Reality doesn't operate like an addiction, a bad option among better choices, it's more like a backdrop which we can focus in or out of, and each layer is real at the time we hone in on it. A novel works as a theme, characters, paragraphs, sentences, words, pages, a book of paper, a product, a historical artefact. It might have multiple narrators within the diegesis and outside of it, but nobody says novels are a lie. Reality proliferates and blooms like a growing story, always using the physical world as a stage. To deconstruct the setting, the proscenium of living, tells you nothing about the play or its stories. That's why reductionism is an inappropriate tool for analysing reality. Things will not be reduced, and if you try they'll always throw up further reductions and new stories.

 

[Kai]

I appreciate this thread's existence. I think this whole way of looking at the Phenomenal/Numinous is an interesting one and Kai's presentation synthesizes a few ideas that I wonder about.

A lot of this isn't new, but then many of our conversations here bear the scent of the Ouroboros.

;-)

The Ouroboros is not a bad metaphor for an ecology that cannot escape itself and which is deeply incestuous in its self-relation.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

The Ouroboros is not a bad metaphor for an ecology that cannot escape itself and which is deeply incestuous in its self-relation.

I think it's sort of inevitable when everything is in a holding pattern of "maybe".

I suspect any game changers signaling paradigm shift will only occur at the personal level, and so the macro stalemate continues.

 

[Iyace]

Ah, I figured he was basing that assertion on his interpretation of the aforementioned article.

But yeah, Bernardo covers this in his Materialism as Fairy Tale article.

One just has to look at Josephson's ideas relating to Neutral Monism, Zeilinger's belief that information & reality are interconnected like space & time are, or Isham's interest in Idealism to see three physicists who'd strongly disagree that physicalism is the heart of science.

I think science views physicalism as a useful assumption in operating. I think research is beginning to suggest that we're going to need to start looking at those ontological assumptions we make.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

But I don’t think that this is just mere talk. My suspicion is that these more ‘liquid” functions of our world and experience are actually the reality function, so to speak, disclosing itself more akin to *what it actually is* and the reason we haven’t been able to make sense of it, is that we have tried to map our primitives concept of atoms and molecules onto them, when it is more likely, I think, that those primitives are themselves impoverished versions of the same more liquid reality function. When even the nature of atoms and molecules becomes a story that we have to “buy into” this is as good a sign as any that stock is overdue for resale at the literal reality store.

But what are you going to do now? If you focus on this idea of liquid reality and try to come up with hypotheses to explain it and experiments to test those hypotheses, haven't you just picked another "literally real" model of the world?

On the other hand, you could back off and just go with the liquid flow. But then there is no reason to believe that you have discovered anything "real" at all. And note that there is obviously some sort of "external world," or otherwise things would not remain consistent when I am not looking at them.

'Tis a conundrum.

Like crack or cocaine, the literal reality assumption may serve its users well, but with all addiction comes a price, and that price is usually a blindness to other possibility beyond the world of that addiction.

I would accuse you of poisoning the well here, except that I think the crack reference applies equally well to people who reject "literal reality" and adopt a warm and fuzzy view of the world. That's not to say that they must be wrong, of course.

~~ Paul

 

[Kai]

But what are you going to do now? If you focus on this idea of liquid reality and try to come up with hypotheses to explain it and experiments to test those hypotheses, haven't you just picked another "literally real" model of the world?

On the other hand, you could back off and just go with the liquid flow. But then there is no reason to believe that you have discovered anything "real" at all. And note that there is obviously some sort of "external world," or otherwise things would not remain consistent when I am not looking at them.

'Tis a conundrum.


I would accuse you of poisoning the well here, except that I think the crack reference applies equally well to people who reject "literal reality" and adopt a warm and fuzzy view of the world. That's not to say that they must be wrong, of course.

~~ Paul

The fact that they are consistent doesn't qualify them as independent Paul. I can just as much make the case that invariant experience is what is really consistent. What do we do next? Perhaps begin thinking in different ways, so that logjammed problems begin to move?

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

The Great Escape: Digital technology allows us to lose ourselves in ever more immersive fantasy worlds. But what are we fleeing from?

Philosophers have argued for millennia about the nature of reality, an argument that can be broadly classified within two schools of thought: materialism and idealism. Materialist philosophies contend that reality is composed of matter and energy, and that all observable phenomena, including mind and consciousness, arise from material interactions. For many of us, materialism is the only theory of reality that can or should be given any credence: it underlies all of the scientific and rationalist perspectives prevalent in the world today. What is reality made of, if not atoms, or their constituent particles?
http://aeon.co/magazine/oceanic-feeling/does-fantasy-offer-escapism-or-escape/
Idealists, meanwhile, take their cues elsewhere. ‘The world is made of stories, not of atoms,’ said the American poet Muriel Rukeyser in 1968. Her words are a powerful expression of a world-view that materialism cannot accommodate. Idealism argues that reality is constructed by the mind. Consciousness does not arise from material interactions, it is universal; and from consciousness arise all of the material phenomena in the universe, including atoms. The world is not made of atoms. It is made of the stories we tell about atoms.

In material philosophy, the act of escaping into our imagination is at best a temporary retreat from reality into fantasy. But in the idealist view, the same act of imagination can reshape our reality.

On our TV screens and in the shopping centres was the abundant material wealth of consumer capitalism: but it wasn’t for us. Just a few streets away were the suburban homes of middle-class workers. Those weren’t for us either. And the gated communities of the truly wealthy, their country clubs and luxury hotels, were as good as invisible. The hints of them that we did manage to see made it abundantly clear that these weren’t for us either. The materialist society of 1980s Britain had a hierarchy, and we were the bottom-rung.

From the perspective of the underclass, material reality is bleak. You’re a survivor of blind evolution, stranded on a muddy rock under the harsh glare of a nuclear sun. Beyond that is an infinite universe of inert matter, dust and devastating radiation that is neither for nor against you, but simply unaware of your existence. There is no God. There is no heaven, or eternal reward. There is only another shift in the factory, or the call centre, or McDonald’s — if you're lucky. At its determinist extreme, materialist philosophy enforces a strikingly rigid and oppressive social hierarchy.

 

[Haruhi]

Did you mean a world independent of experience?

Yes.

 

[fls]

Interesting way to put it, Kai. I agree that it is hopeless to think that our stories or narratives can be understood in terms of a literal reality. Science broke away from this idea long ago to focus on teasing out an understanding of a literal reality, mostly by ignoring the stories (although the two intersect in subjects like literary criticism - e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Literary-Anim...NP6_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398429419&sr=1-4). But as you point out, most of what it means to live is about the narrative, with little to do with what we are finding out about a literal reality which increasingly has little connection to our stories. The main contribution of a literal reality is to serve as a steady supply of chaotic information, both externally and internally, from which we organize stories about the experience of a life lived.

Linda

 

[Haruhi]

I do not know what meaning you give to the word "literal" but when people claim to have seen something, whether normal or paranormal, they say that they have seen literally, not metaphorically.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

The Imaginal Within The Cosmos: Natural Jesus (1): The Imaginal Realm

...in the Gospels Jesus expressly says that his Kingdom is *not* of this world. This is suggestive of a "source" Kingdom to which Jesus associated. To quote:
°Perhaps he will kill himself: is that what he means when he says, "Where I am going you cannot come."? So Jesus continued, "You belong to this world below, I to the world above. Your home is in this world, mine is not." [John 8: 22-23]

°Said Pilate. "Your own nation and their chief priests have brought you before me. What have you done?" Jesus replied, "My kingdom does not belong to this world. If it did, my followers would be fighting to save me from arrest by the Jews. My kingly authority comes from elsewhere." [John 18: 35-37]

°Full authority in heaven and on earth has been committed to me. [Matthew 28: 18]

°So after talking with them the Lord Jesus was taken up into heaven, and he took his seat at the right hand of God... [Mark 16: 19]

Now wherever might this Kingdom be? Ancient Christians called it "Heaven." And there have ever since been arguments as to whether Heaven exists. Well, coming out of odd corners--such as from the psychological and physical sciences--there's some slowly accruing thinking about this Kingdom. These scientists don't call it such, and they surely don't call it Heaven--rather they refer to this special "source" place as the *Imaginal Realm.*

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

The fact that they are consistent doesn't qualify them as independent Paul. I can just as much make the case that invariant experience is what is really consistent.

The consistent "external world" is independent of my consciousness, because it remains consistent even when I am not paying attention. And as soon as something is not consciousness, "the one thing we can be absolutely sure about," then how do we know what it is?

~~ Paul

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

The consistent "external world" is independent of my consciousness, because it remains consistent even when I am not paying attention. And as soon as something is not consciousness, "the one thing we can be absolutely sure about," then how do we know what it is?

~~ Paul

How do you know it remains consistent though?

Think about those First Person Shooters that only render what you're seeing, or perhaps things in your immediate vicinity.

Even the confidence that solipsism is false requires a leap of faith.

 

[Arouet]

Even the confidence that solipsism is false requires a leap of faith.

The only thing we can really do with solipsism is look for any evidence of it. It is completely unfalsifiable so we can never be certain it is not true.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

The only thing we can really do with solipsism is look for any evidence of it. It is completely unfalsifiable so we can never be certain it is not true.

Right, which is why I don't think Kai's assertion that our only definitive knowledge is individual subjective experience is very controversial.

Even if we reject Berkeley's Idealism, I think he successfully argues this much in the First Dialogue between Hylas & Philonius.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

"Every culture is based upon a mythological substrate that provides a particular basis for understanding and interpreting reality. The ancient Greeks gave us Zeus, Athena, Hermes, and a pantheon of quarrelsome Olympians who interject themselves into the human world as a kind of aristocratic blood sport. The Hindus embody their cosmic principles in colorful multi-armed divinities such as Brahma, Vishnu, Shakti, Kali, and Shiva—creators, protectors, destroyers, and serene contemplators. The Mesoamerican cultures personified their metaphysic in a dizzying array of figures who enfold and interpenetrate one another: Omeototl, Quetzalcoatl, Itzpapalotli, Mixcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, to name but a few. Christians worship the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, embodying the feminine principle in Mary as well as the long-neglected Sophia, goddess of wisdom known to the Gnostics.

Is it far-fetched to suggest that the deities of our secular age include the superstrings, selfish genes, Black Holes, and Big Bangs described by our scientists, that define the limits of the materialist worldview?"
-Pinchbeck, The Return of Quetzacoatl

(Worth a read, but before anyone gets too excited about this book, I'd check out the IMO balanced Daily Grail review.)

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

"You lied to her."

"No. I told her a Story."

"Shit! You sound just like your dad."

"Actually I was thinking of something...my mother said. That most times, the truth is like a close-up conjuring trick. You can look straight at something and think you're seeing the truth of it. But really, you're seeing what someone else wants you to see. So FUCK the truth. We don't know where it is, and we probably won't know it when we see it. She just chose the story she needs right now.

The story that keeps her standing. That's probably all any of us get to do."
-the Unwritten # 17: The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

Away. Away. Go play like children in the fields of eternity your games of war, of good and evil, order, chaos, right and wrong. And dark and light? The dark, we say, is only matter, light coiled round inside itself, a snake eating its own tail; but it is still light. And light? Light is a fire in the night, a flame to warm the flesh and flicker form into existence.

But hush now. Sure and we are young. You know this more than us with your entrancing, dancing lives of little things that are so much more true than all the hells and paradises we, the dead, dream in the Vellum, in the quiet places deep inside your head. And so we turn to you.

– Such is the storm the Dukes gather against us, you say. Sure and all their dread’s let loose, it is, not just in words but in their deeds as they tread ever nearer. And you seem so sure. We do not know. You may be mad as our old master said. But we are dead.

– Oh, but the holy mother that’s the earth itself, you say, sure and the sky revolving overhead, sure, and the light of the sun that shines over us all, they see me, sure, as they see all injustice, foolishness and cruelty, aye, and sure, I say, ye can be sure of this, ye can be sure. And even in your cage of wire and flesh we envy you. You say:

– I will endure.

Duncan, Hal (2011-08-11). Vellum (The Book of All Hours) (pp. 472-473). Macmillan Publishers UK. Kindle Edition.