If there are grammatical errors i apologize, im tight for time so will edit for grammar later tonight
the real reality
What’s real, what’s not? What’s true, what’s false? What’s fact, what’s fiction?
What is the Real philosophy?
What is the Real Reality?
Concerning morality and metaphysics, what is Real and True?
What is Reality?
These questions are where many people begin their philosophical endeavors. The aches of unanswered questions can drive people to anger, madness, and even suicide; with such an extreme effect, i believe it is very important for any existentialist or analytical philosopher alike to address these questions.
The first plunge into wonder that many of us take is simply thinking about the unknown; what does the universe contain that we fail to see? what is the truth behind the hidden doors?
Many of us reason that “God” is the only possible answer. We reason that everything we see and know is guided by a higher, incomprehensible purpose. With this explanations we are able to silence many of our unanswered questions.
The far reaches of space, which we will never explore no longer contain anything wondrous, for if we were created by “God” we are likely the most wondrous things in existence. If we were created by god we need not worry about what happens to the dead. We become a servant and extension of God, and through this service we shake loose our understandings of mortality.
When God exists, there is no unknown; there is no worry. Everything can be explained by God, and everything is kept and directed by God.
God is a metaphor for the unknown; the ultimate unknown.
God is what we all want to be the answer to the aching unanswered questions which often drive us into thought in the first place.
From our perspective, most of us admit that we are finite in every respect. We live comparatively short lives, our brain power is limited. The resources we have access to are seemingly limited. The information we have access to is definitely limited.
It is this comparison that we make between ourselves and the infinite and our ideas of God which can drive us into depression in the first place. Popular nihilism would have us believe we are “utterly insignificant”, and that “nothing we do matters”. A few nihilists i know like to point out their miserable state of mind quite often, ad nauseum. I ask them if life does not matter, why they bother complaining or continuing to live at all…
It is in truth another coping mechanism. When a nihilist says nothing matters, he is lying. His very action of telling you that nothing matters indicates that something made him choose to say that. If he is weighing options, then something necessarily matters.
A nihilist will complain about their own life in order to ease the discomfort of their conclusion that the answers to these aching questions do not exist. Yet, through their depression, they all know that they still exist. Even if there is no great tower of meaning to climb they still have to admit, even though they never do, that they exist, even if of infinitely small significance.
Many nihilists tend toward hedonism. They become selfish in their pursuit of relief from the loom of their own conclusions, and cope with pleasurable distractions supplemented with complaints.
It’s interesting how the focus of ones own mind, notin any focused on your physical position in life, but just the focus on abstract concepts like “the meaning of life” can cause us to be happy, sad, angry, fearful, or even suicidal.
Suicide is not a happy topic, but it’s a reality. I have heard suicide described as “an admittance that life is too much”, in essence giving up on life, but i disagree.
Life is the only thing we have, beyond that we know nothing. Fear alone is enough to have stay alive, but we also have pleasure to give us incentive.
Suicide is when the fear of the pain and loss of death is no longer greater than the pain and fear we experience in life; our Reality
Would I condone suicide? No. I would try to stop anyone i could from committing suicide, out of hope that their life could improve. Would I condone Euthanasia? perhaps.
Euthanasia is basically suicide when there is no more hope, in an ideal sense of the term. The right to take your own life is difficult to pin. If we don’t have the right or freedom to choose to live or not then what rights do we have? To be forced to endure a completely miserable existence is arguably worse than risking no existence at all.
I don’t really associate nihilism with suicide. When someone commits suicide, it’s usually the result of a loss, not a lack of gain.
Generally I oppose suicide and largely euthanasia because there is always a chance that the would be victims can become happy.
Which brings me to my coping mechanism; Attitude. With the great unknowns we get more than just cognitive dissonance, we get hope and possibility. We currently do not fully understand how the brain works, so who’s to say that we won’t be able to create happiness with a simple injection. I know that sounds a bit extreme, but against suicide such optimism doesn’t seem such a bad idea.
After all, we try to create happiness through medication and drugs, of which i myself am guilty, and this is done in common practice. If you’ve ever taken an anti-depressant you are guilty of the same optimism as I.
Cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant feeling when you realize there is an inconsistency between your attitudes, or your attitudes and your actions. In the case of the big questions, the cognitive dissonance which arises comes predominantly from realizing that life might be bad, and yet we are living life.
Life might be meaningless, and yet we live it.
Life might not be worth it, and yet we live it.
Life might be a pain; a cost. A debt before a death.
And most of this cognitive dissonance is easily transformed into a satisfactory feeling with a simple change of attitude.
Life might be meaningless, but it might have great and profound meaning.
Life might not be worth it, or it could pay off infinite fold.
Life might be a pain and a debt, but what we pay for with pain and debt could be heavily outweighed by the value of life.
A debt before a death becomes a stroll along a river before death, and that doesn’t sound so bad. If you focus on the negative possibilities, the negative unknowns, you are only going to ruin the enjoyment of Reality. When I say reality, I refer to what you are experiencing at this very moment. The here and now.
Each of us have our own realities. Some people see better than others, some hear better. Some have better senses of smell, or none at all, or any combination of any number of senses with varying degrees of precision. What I’m saying is that we all have different experiences due to the different ways our bodies are built, giving us a different interpretation of “the world around us”. Our differing focuses, coping mechanisms, and conclusions can only be explained by differing interpretations resulting from different degrees of perception and differing experience.
We are given only limited and inconsistent perceptions of the world, of reality, and i hope this thread will address that problem.
What is “the world around us”? What is “The Real Reality”?
Presumably we are all experiencing the same universe. Our own existence aside, we presume that our bodies provide the reactionary mechanisms which create our individual subjective realities; our own interpretations. what we see are photons bouncing off the rods and cones in our eyes which create a sort of imperfect facsilime, or negative, of what light there is. This effect creates the image we see in our heads. Our hearing is more peculiar. Little hairs in our dear drum react to changes in air pressure which create what we hear, in our heads. Our sense of touch is less localized. When something happens to our nerves, they send a signal to our brains, which produce the sensation of feeling, which by the way is an incredible thing.
Smell and taste are even stranger. We have evolved to have certain reactions to certain things, they are so abstract and absurd that if they didn’t enhance pleasure we would probably find cause to get angry at our senses.
I’m sure no one needs me to explain this, but it is important to understand our world; the world we know, as nothing better than a reflection of the real world. Our perception is blurry, missing an unknown amount of facets, differs from person to person, and is as of yet inexplicable.
When we make “factual” statements about the world, we can easily do so if we combine both of our perceptions and come to an agreement.
Let’s say that we place a baseball on the stump of a tree. We can agree that it’s a fact that there is a baseball on the stump of a tree. It does not matter that there is more to the stump and more to the baseball, the fact that our perceptions are contextually in agreement, and our ability to communicate that agreement provides with the necessary grounds we need to establish a working “fact”.
There is of course the chance that both and all of our perceptions are wrong, but in this case the actual state of the real world does not matter if we can only experience it in a complex limited, emotionally convoluted way. Our reality is all we will ever have. We are free to make statements about the universe, the which gives us perception and experiences, and no harm will arise because it will be impossible for someone with greater perception to show us otherwise.
If Einstein said, there is no baseball, there is no rock, they are beams of light infinitely close together and infinitely far apart, would you care?
“The Real Reality” is the way things are without our warped filters. We can combine our perceptions in an effort to un-warp our perceptions, and this is the foundation for approaching things “objectively”.
And so we are left, wondering what exists in the real world… Are there Dragons? Is there a God?
No matter what you choose to hope for, is it not our own reality which inevitably matters most?
In hoping that god exists we hope to explain away the cognitive dissonance of a godless reality versus our way of life. A nihilist degrades the idea of life, making the idea of death seem equally insignificant. Suicide is the extreme behavioral change; a true commitment, though most likely chosen premature. Changing the attitude with chemicals or deep thought is a way to ease the focus and loom of an unknown world. You become free from the worry and fear of the unknown, experience pleasure more profoundly and pain less excruciatingly; in my experience the conclusion becomes to make the best of things. ( I might be just selling my own views here folks keep that in mind).
Which coping mechanism is the best? Who can say but ourselves…
We each experience things differently so naturally different options will work better.
Someone who is prone to fear might be best off finding faith in a God. Someone who is prone to discomfort might be best off complaining a lot to ease tension. Someone who is having bad luck, or no luck at all might be better off changing their attitude, and focusing on what they do have, rather on what they don’t. In extreme situations, for example if i ever became a brain dead vegetable, i would want to have the plug pulled, but that’s just my choice and my reasons are my own. I also see “the humanity” in euthanizing animals and sometimes even people.
If your alternative was a slow painful death, a quick and easy one might just outweigh the loss of time.
Humanity is an interesting topic… Is there an objective humanity? Are moral facts objectively accurate?
What is a moral fact?
Is it that certain actions are right and certain actions are wrong?
is it right or wrong to cut down a tree?
kill an animal?
kill a human who you consider to be an animal?
kill a human who you just dislike?
kill a human to survive?
What if god is out there in the objective universe, beyond our perception, silently judging our actions according to his conclusions on these matters.
How are we to come to the same conclusions as a God we cannot perceive in a universe where most of us are heavily confused?
The implications of a devotion to God in matters of morality are interesting.
I claim to not know if God exists or not, but i claim to know that other people cannot know, or at least prove that they know god exists, or to know what his conclusions are.
We are completely left to our own devices in matters of importance. We each decide what we think is right and wrong, even if we are influenced to do so. It is our upbringing, surroundings and experiences which give us our perception and knowledge, so naturally any claims about the nature of god comes from the same type of warped inconsistent limited world which we all live in.
What if there is no intelligence beyond us? What if the universe is cold and indifferent? Does nothing matter as a nihilist would tell you?
The nihilists conclusions of insignificance are again made from warped perception, just like our own. If we do not share this perception then how could, or why should we share in a nihilists conclusions?
Is life not worth living? can we ever answer that question amidst the confusion?
When all is said and done are you better or worse off? who can say?
Changing your attitude to make life more pleasurable is a greedy pragmatic thing to do. Maybe we’re fooling ourselves, maybe we’re offending God, but who can say?
What is the real reality?
Who gives a fuck?