The Case Against Reality

[magpie]

The Case Against Reality - The Atlantic

Discuss?

 

[Polaris]

I disagree with the article's premise that there is a reality independent of our "simulation" of reality. We can obviously have incorrect perceptions, but that doesn't mean there is some sort of impossible-to-envision realm that our thoughts and sensations are only flawed approximations to. It just means that we're capable of being wrong. We correct that not by glimpsing a transcendent realm but by gathering new information. This new information is inherently sensory in nature; it exists within our "simulation," not outside of it.

 

[Empyrean]

Ah, the old philosophical arguments of direct realism versus indirect realism versus idealism versus none-of-the-above.

Direct realists posit that we directly perceive objects and states of affairs in reality. (I suggest John Searle for a defense of direct realism)

Indirect realists posit that we indirectly perceive objects and states of affairs via sensory impressions, or sense data. The immediate objects that we perceive are themselves mind-dependent, or subjectively-derived. (I suggest Kant or Russell, perhaps, for a defense of indirect realism)

Idealists, perhaps of the Berkeleyan or Hegelian variety, posit that there are only these sensory impressions, or "objects of thoughts." That reality is constituted by subjective thought-content.

And of course, you have none-of-the-above philosophers/scientists/what-have-yous. This is the camp I fall into, myself. I think reality is far more complex and nuanced that any of these "conceptual categories" that we have derived from our experiences and reasoning, to try to superimpose upon reality in a coherent and consistent way.

 

[magpie]

What's amazing is that we all use our different experiences of a single concept as a frame of reference. So what makes anyone's point of view understandable to anyone else? Arguably then language creates reality because it's a representation of something we all experience, but we all experience it in our own way, so we're always understanding other people through the lens that is self. We understand others by understanding ourselves.

I don't know if that can be transcended.

 

[Eilonwy]

Our minds are limited. We see experience the world through a human brain. We don't see experience the world as a dog sees experiences it, or a fly, etc. We don't see the macro or the micro well, through we have figured out that those exist (The Middle World). It's been postulated that time is an illusion. So, I think the concept that reality is not what we humans perceive it to be, because we are incapable of perceiving all of reality, is sound.

 

[Empyrean]

I'm in the camp of so-called wisdom. I've stopped trying to formulate and articulate some structurally consistent, coherent and rigorous concept of how "reality is." Language imposes another layer onto the problem, adding more complexity and depth. But this is easy for me to accept, having dominant Ni.

Life is beautiful, amongst many other things. I think Wittgenstein was right in saying that language itself is a form of life.

I'm not sure that time is an illusion per se but rather something more mysterious. An illusion somehow smuggles in the notion of "not-real." Yet time is very real, is it not? It is as real as my experience of a red ball, pain, or sexual attraction. An illusion or a hallucination is also an event in the world like any other event; an event in my head.

The presocratic philosopher Parmenides of Elea, and his students such as Zeno, came up with various puzzles and paradoxes showing how things such as motion, time, and the like are illusory, not real, or flawed in our conception. That they are incoherent concepts, and we should abandon them and simply meditate on the "One" of reality.

But Heraclitus of Ephesus, who was just as profound a thinker, would argue that the mere fact of calling time an "illusion" is already referencing to something, even if that something is illusory (what does this mean, really? Heraclitus might ask--to call a perceptual experience an illusion and thus "not real?").

Is the world one of duality, plurality, or unity? Is it merely the "One," or is it of infinite variety? Or perhaps, of a mathematical structure (Pythagoras). Heisenberg was a sharp man, because he recognized these fundamental questions the ancient Greeks had regarding being, becoming, strife, opposition, tension, unity, and plurality were similar in nature to the questions asked in theoretical physics. I believe he talks about it, briefly, in his book, Physics and Philosophy: A Revolution in Modern Science.

Karl Popper and others also tackles this ancient problem in the book A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (such as how quantum states seem to falsify the Parmenidean view of reality... it runs and runs and runs in a circle, doesn't it!?).

I don't think the answer is black and white, but I'm very comfortable in both silence and paradox. It doesn't bother me that quantum superpositions are observer-dependent, seemingly, or that reality may be completely alien than not just our best models, but beyond our capability to even model.

Just food for thought.

PS - A very good lecture on the thoughts of Parmenides (and Plato) may be found here: Plato's Parmenides - YouTube

However, there's a caveat. Michale Sugrue is not doing justice to Heraclitus. Understandbly, because Plato himself didn't really understand Heraclitus, I think, and misrepresents him. If you listen to the section about how the Heraclitean view leads one to radical relativism... yet a charitable reading of Heraclitus might suggest that this is not the case. I think Heraclitus was the philosopher of war, strife, fire and deconstruction, but also truth, unity, and dynamic tension, but he never suggested that "anything goes," or that "truth is absolutely relative." An oft misunderstood and misquoted man, for he never said "you can't step into the same river twice" but something like that, that was twisted for people's individual agendas (namely, Plato and Aristotle).

 

[Thisica]

Some of the discontent I have with the article is bad word-play and some of it is the inability to distinguish between the finger pointing at the Moon and the Moon itself (as per Zen). Put in a different way, the map is not the territory. We can perceive the world in many ways, depending on what we care about - an artist and a politician would not see the same forest, as their perspectives of the forest differ. Yet the forest exists, beyond their perspectives. The illusion of knowledge is quite strong in the article...

 

[Siúil a Rúin]

I think there is an objective reality that exists independently of us, but that our perceptions are distortions of it. There are many ways we can demonstrate those distortion when studying optical illusions and other tricks of perception. It is why magic works. We have a selective consciousness that perceives details in the environment connected to our instincts and sense of survival, so we do not see reality in a holistic way for what it is. It is a troubling truth I find. It is like we are in a pitch-black room bouncing a ball against a wall. The ball comes back to us because it interacted with something outside of us, but we cannot fully comprehend what that thing is outside of ourselves without perceptual distortion.