i wonder about stuff like this quite often like one time i was coming home from northampton and its 1am and pitch black with no lights at all on the roads, i look up and see the way the sky is all blurred and the stars and it makes you wonder when you see such beautiful things. Everything is amazing if you think about it but we simply accept it for what it is because its everyday stuff, the way the brain works in humans, how weve developed as a race, the universe and the laws that define it and how they perfectly work against each other to create a stable reality...its amazing really but does pose questions that are far beyond my own understanding to answer.
Personally I don't find the universe and laws stuff intresting, most of it had to be that way for us to exist. Its the way we interact with it all that I find very intresting, for instance, I was reading a book by Bertrand Russel a few weeks back, and he stated that humans don't really see objects, we rather interpret "sense data" and output it onto our little mind screen. So what we see isn't neccesarily whats there, its just the interpretation of whats there. Nice little things like that, that you can chew over for a few hours or days in your head, are great.
ROFL, but seriously i try to not think about it to much i confuse my self... then i confuse others...
specofdust - I love the study of philosophy too. Were you refering to Russell's 'The Problems of Philosophy' when you talked about his phenomenalist beliefs regarding sense data? I loved that book. One time when I really wondered about the nature of reality was - ok, I know this is a cliché - after watching The Matrix. Later, I looked at Descartes's Meditations and the whole question of the possible deception caused by 'the demon'. Great stuff.
im definitely going to be googling for some philosophy might just buy a book if i begin to get dragged in im sure some wacky backy and gazing into space would'nt go a miss though
Actually, I'd say stay away from the green dude when you're wanting to think deeply. It may make many things seem like they're deep, but it impairs thinking so much, that proper decent magnificant deep thought is damn near impossible. Just take a nice walk into the countryside, or further into the countryside if you live in it anyway, find some grass, plonk yourself down on it, and gaze upward
I don't really think about this kind of thing too much... none of it makes sense and noone really knows any answers to why we exist etc so why waste time on it. What I do find hard to comprehend though is things like motion blindness... I just can't imagine being able to see things yet not detect movement, imagine looking down a street with a car going down it - rather than see the car moving down it all you see is a car x distance away, then a car y distance away and so on. Must be so wierd! http://www.hhmi.org/senses/b210.html tells briefly of a woman with this disorder!
The way I see it is this: Reality is your own perception If you can truly 100% beleive in something it will happen/come true. We only use about 10% of our brain power and if we were to use 100% then we may be able to predict or control what happens to use. I could go on and on but I would fill far to many pages. Regards GiGo
I wrote 4 really long paragraphs discussing my views before I realized how long and boring it would seem. In short, I think about such things often as well. It becomes quite difficult as science and religion conflict alot sometimes. The point of life is to live as happy a life as possible and if one cannot directly benefit mankind, then they should just live as decent folk since they may indirectly have great impact on mankind. Life is not meant to be wasted frivolously, but to be enjoyed passionately.
Not true. Hundreds of delusional psychotics who thought they could fly have plunged to their deaths. Reality is "out there", and does very much impose real limits. However much of what happens "in here" (in our minds) can be influenced to a great extent by our perceptions. Popular misconception. We use 100% of our brain power (in fact 50% is dedicated to keeping the other 50% in check). Thing is, we may only be aware of a small chunk of what's going on --the rest runs on "automatic", so to speak, doing things for us without our conscious involvement. Now we could gain awareness and hence, some control of part of those processes; other parts however stoically carry on regardless of how much we try to influence them. We can control much of our experience of pain, for instance, but we cannot stay awake for a whole week, no matter how much we convince ourselves that we aren't sleepy... because some things are just physical reality.
Ah c'mon now, you listened to hicks, you know as well as the next intelligent man that those people weren't just delusional psychotics..they were delusional psychotic dumbasses. "You don't see ducks taking of from the top of buildings" I disagree with the point though, while there may be a consensus on what is reality for the majority of people, I don't think you could ever definately say "this is reality".
When you get hit by a speeding bus you are really killed. That is not just a matter of perception. Although our preception of the world is indeed subjective, and we cannot really know its "true" (and I use this term advisedly) nature, you have to sort of wonder whether qualia such as, say, the colour "red" actually exist as such anyway. Space, entropy, matter and the laws of physics do however. Trees do fall in the forest even when we are not there to hear them make a sound.
We can never know this for certain as whenever we imagine a tree falling without anyone watching, we do so through the eyes of an imaginary observer. It is impossible to prove that when a tree falls in the forest (unpercieved) it does so in a way that we would expect.
That's where you're going wrong. A tree falling in a forest is always subject to the same laws of physics, whether we are there to perceive it or not. The entire universe happily manages to chug along according to the same old laws of physics, doing the same thing everywhere with or without out us being there to perceive that it does. A tree falling in a forest is physical reality; our perception of it (i.e. the sound that it makes) is a qualia that is entirely a product of our own mind. However even if we are not around to hear it, a falling tree will generate a pattern of shockwaves in the air (again, physical reality) that we would have perceived as sound if we were there to do so. There is a fundamental distinction between reality and qualia. Qualia are not reality; qualia are our perception of reality. They do not exist outside of our mind. When we are not there to perceive it, red is not "red"; it is light at a wavelength of about 650 nm. Conversely, physical reality does not exist inside our mind; it is completely independent from it. Red light continues to be 650 nm even when it is perceived by a colour blind person as "grey", and continues to act on the physical world as light of a 650 nm wavelenght does.
That is a dangerously big implicit jump to make. All our scientific theories (or laws, as you describe them) are based upon empirical knowledge gained through our fallible sense data. Clearly Nexxo, you are a strong realist but your view is not philosophically indisputable, as any solipsist or other anti-realist philosopher would point out.
Is this so? I've never been hit by a bus and killed, so I wouldn't know. I know that when I see someone hit and killed by a bus thats my perception of events, but since I've never been them, I can't really be sure if they were even a real person, they may just be the same as any other object in this universe. Trusting the senses is a dangerous game, as your dead delusional psychotics would no doubt inform you. But that goes both ways, just because we percieve the common reality, doesn't mean that we are percieving what is true. I must say, I'm glad themajor made his post up above, while I have opinions, I probably wouldn't have even remembered the term Solipsist, even though I'm a fair example of one.
Ah, yes... The Raven Paradox. We can get stuck in Hume's Problem of Induction: All hypotheses, no matter how well “proved,” are generalizations based on prior observed events. Since past events are but a small subset of event-space, and observed past events an even smaller subset, why should we expect anything but observed, past events to confirm to the hypothesis? However, let's start with what we are certain of. Descartes said: "I think, therefore I am" (and he knew he was thinking, because he was doubting that he even existed. Doubt is a form of thinking. QED). So I know that I think, and since I have to exist in order to do so, I know that I exist. In fact, as long as I am thinking, I can be pretty certain that I am existing. Now the rest of the Universe. I doubt my senses. Can I be truly certain that they reflect physical reality? Well, no. But I can reasonably assume that there is a decent fit between physical reality and my preception of it, because so far it is doing the trick of allowing me to function and survive in it (same for roughly 6 billion other people --I am not going into the sollipsistic argument about whether they are automata or Minds Like Me for now, just that their senses are apparently accurate enough to allow them to generally function and exist in physical reality). My continued existence proves that my perception of physical reality is close enough. Same for other people. Trusting the senses may be a dangerous game, specofdust, but ignoring them generally proves far more dangerous. Think about it. Same with the laws of physics. Based on our observations/perceptions which are a flawed approximation of reality rather than an exact fit, but like the perceptions that they are based on, they work well enough to let us build and fly planes and the like (unless 300 passengers and some aircrew are sharing a consensual hallucination, which seems rather unlikely). Moreover, so far they have allow us to build and fly planes consistently, and they allow us to very reliably explain, predict and manipulate a quite mindbogglingly massive range of other things in our physical environment. Such as falling trees. So basically, to give Hume his due, although I cannot be absolutely, totally sure that an unobserved tree somewhere in a forest will fall in exactly the same way as all trees people have observed falling thus far have done (instead of, say, gently floating away or spinning around its axis and singing "The Hills are Alive..."), I can be pretty confident that in the greatest of likelihood, it will. So far, the whole observable universe has been playing ball. Why would one tree be different? By the way, I'm also a pragmatist.
Great post! You write very succinctly and clearly have a great knowledge on the subject. Did your psychology degree include a relevant philosophy component per chance? Anyway, although your view is essentially what I agree with, the great thing about philosophy - at least in my opinion - is that it's still open to debate.
