I agree
it seems that a fundamental reality is truely , at last , begining to be understood by us Humans and its about time
Hello Ierrellus:
I actually have only read Bloom’s “Lucifer’s Principle” but I did like it very much. How did you find this book?
— Where Bloom errs, IMHO, is in his confusing belief with reality. Belief can be described as social agreements that one finds personally comforting.
O- Is not just comfort but utility and control. Phobias are discomforting but are retained because of a certain value they hold in manipulating risk- utility/control.
— Reality may not offer social or personal comfort.
O- “Reality”, as it were, is always mediated by belief in one thing or another, so “reality” is always of a mixed character.
— It may offer cataclysm. We use social agreement to verify all of our ideas about reality.
O- Again, we can only “use” a belief to verify another belief. Suppose you hear a dog talk in the park. That is what you believe you heard, but you admit that you might be wrong based on the previous experiences you have had, however you also cannot dismiss the report of a sense outright. If you ask a friend if he or she also heard the dog talk, you ask of him this from the belief that he is like you and that he has the same ability as you. This is only another belief because there is no necessity that his or her subjective experience of what the dog sounded like will echo yours. He or she says:“I did not hear anything” goes against your experience but now you have to choose whether to believe or have faith in his/her sensory experience or rely or have faith, in your own even if it is not in agreement with his/hers. In either case, whether you go alone in asserting the truth or in a group (with the hope of objectivity), you are left with a faith, a belief about what is real.
Real, I would say, is a level of certainty, which is a very subjective thing but which we cannot do without. I can doubt that a dog can talk, that is, I doubt the reality of this actually happening, because I have a greater sense of certainty, and thus it seems to me more real, that dogs cannot do this. I have an unconscious calculator, call it “reason”, that compares and judges between wyhat the senses inform it with and a lifetime of non-talkative dogs trumps an instance of one talking dog (Hume). This is not logical…it is just what passes as “good sense”.
— What the agreement verifies, on the most basic level of knowing, is shared experiences among organisms.
O- But what is actually shared? The same exact thing or something that is distinct but which is made more alike by the expedience of language? We share words, not experiences. Experiences are codified in these words but not without controversy leading to many cases in which we think we are talking about the same thing (a direct correspondence between word and experience), but in which case in fact we are using the same word but speaking of compleately different things (a manufactured correspondence).
north,
Thanks! I’ve tried to locate “The Lucifer Principle”,but our local library doesn’t seem to have a copy or be able to get a copy within its system. It had a copy of “Global Brain”.
Omar,
Your arguments are good, but are probably due to my abbreviations of certain concepts. Experience is our prime reality. What we experience is shared by other organisms. Among humans (And probably among bacteria. They actually communicate with each other!), agreement on reality amounts to a communicated sharing of physical data in an agreement that what one experiences another also experiences. This has nothing to do with my take vs. your take as in the talking dog situation. What is real will survive in bodies and minds. What is not will be sloughed off by change.
One way to think about conventional understanding is that we are living in darkness and not able to see the greater reality, although it is still there. This conventional understanding comes to us through our five senses. Without knowing any better we take this view of the world as the way it is. It is metaphorical darkness.
All metaphors aside, neither science nor philosophy may be able to help us see the deeper reality. But perhaps if we arm ourselves with the wisdom of Kabbalah, we can more fully understand our own limitations and begin to test the bouderies of conventional reality and how we can transcend them.
Aploogies. This should have been addressed to Omar.
How does the Kabbala help?
Ierrellus: How does the Kabbala help?
[quote]
No matter how much you and I progress technlogically, we wil never be free of the boundaries of the five senses. However, some individuals have acquired an additional sense that enables them to perceive a wider reality. They still exist within our world, but they have extended the boundaries of their perception to include the entire picture of creation. Such people are called Kabbalists.
You can have Kabbalah classes online: kab.tv/
Thanks, but no thanks. The only sixth sense humans can do is a sense of motion/change. Put all of the senses in concert and you might get some better perception than each could provide individually. (Blake/Huxley–“doors of Perception”.) I cannot look to the mystery as defining the experiential reality. It exists in our prodding potential, not in some ultra or other reality that somehow imposes on this one.
reality, consisting you thinking you are. being nott understanding you would nott understand. there of reatlity nott exsist becouse. but in all reality think of a gallaxy on that spanz, there you think it could have any number of spranz. it means any number of life to create more reality than exsisting. you could explore the spranz that hold but you might nott, there you find yourself in of there lost. it happens butt doob proseed. there god creates forr butt you know reality nott. you might want to do ob excuse the mess, being nott what you were after butt go on love life. the reality of life not consisting butt posess. you being butt nott being what you call error of life of reality. reality ends up being understanding tord life if nott then you are liveing in a dream you have yet to butt you will understand inocents, life be about everything not just those things you look tord for answers butt are answers. question? space ,matter. or does life base reality of the inniquent thought of everything reality for us. energy being just one of 144 nuttnbolt creating reality. 12 of those fusion.
trane,
Sorry, friend. I can’t understand your post. Welcome to ILP.
Reality is often confused with appearances and vice versa.
How is one to know anything?
We have to turn our beliefs on their heads. For example, the only concepts of future we have are projections. Since we respond to external stimuli, what we know is always in the past. We know where we’ve been. Rational experience lags behind, and depends on, physical experience. Information is first chemical, then mental. Both are physical. So what is reality? IMHO it is an olio of genomic and environmental interactions. It is epigenetic. How can we know it? We do it!!!
actually we have more than 5 senses, even more than 6, so if your kaballah gives you only six it means they will have take a couple of our senses away even!!
to go back to the topic at hand. This is yet another topic philosophers really shouldn’t be messing around in. However, I will say this, the simple categorization of reality as friend or foe, i.e. give meaning to sensory input does not necessarily mean the object outside is as its meaning tells us it is. Just because our reaction to it saves our lives most of the time, doesn’t make it true, it makes it correct, and that which is correct is not yet that what is true. Now we come to a second however, there is absolutely no use in debating whether or not the reality we perceive and interact with is one that actually exists, I say we because solipsism is an impossible position, we are one sided in it and it makes no empirical difference whether you answer yes or no to this question.
A very narrow perspective indeed…
You are certainly able to ‘navigate’ your dream world (at night) with no actual ‘physical processes’ (in the dream). It all ‘seems’ real, and we go about our (dream) life as ‘real’ (unless ‘lucid’. The real trick is to become ‘lucid’ in this ‘wakeful’ dream!).
So it is in your ‘waking dream’.
“As sunlight obscures the stars by day, so does wakefulness blind us to the fact that we are still ‘dreaming’.”
This is not narrow if you believe biology has anything to do with knowing. Read Piaget. He’ll get you up to date. What I seem to be getting here are objections based on favored reifications, not on the very needed complementation of science and philosophy. Without such complementation, metaphysics dies! Please don’t bore me with Putnam’s idea about science and philosophy having nothing to do with each other. It is atavistic, to say the least.
I ‘believe’ nothing. ‘Nothing’, no concept too distant or far-out for ‘belief’. ’
‘Knowledge’, unless considered transitory and constantly updatable is nothing more than egoic fantasy. No one ‘knows’ once-and-for-all anything. That is a ‘belief’.
If you define ‘knowing’ as a physical process of the brain…, perhaps you define ‘knowing’ as the ‘set’ of your memories at any one moment. That is one definition… Perhaps from that perspective you can make your statement (as memories are ‘stored’ in the brain (as per evidence), but from the overarching evidence that quantum theory has provided, all the oh-so-real-material-world more closely resembles ‘Mind/thought’ (philosophical realm) than anything that can be seriously considered as ‘material’ but by ‘appearances’ alone.
Personally, like any good scientist, I don’t ‘know’ anything, I ‘think’, and (re)evaluate, when needed, with the arising of new and relevent data…
I think for myself, if I use the ‘opinions’ of others, I’ll attribute. I don’t plagerize.
Nameless,
Personally, I agree with your concept of knowing as complexified in flux. That is not what this thread is about. I loathe absolutisms as much as you seem to. The problem of what can be known begs complementary considerations from fields of biology and epistemology. If there was no organism, there would be no thought. Of course the matter cannot be once and for all settled. Yet, one can learn to see reality as evidenced in recurrence. Where Piaget comes in is in his insisting that conditions known in later stages of growth and development cannot be used to describe those in prior stages, e.g., one cannot accuse the genome of intentional behavior. It’s activity may best be described as a combination of determinism and fortuity.
We experience a moving reality while craving one that has a stop, a final end. That’s really the human condition. Philosophers such as Putnam don’t seem to understand that our sense of reality is a dynamic proposition, having physical precursors.
You describe the ‘fall’ from grace, the ‘loss of innocence’. We are born experiencing our reality as we do, Then we are ‘taught’ how it ‘really is’. A return to innocence, grace, enlightenment, salvation is to see one’s original face!
From another perspective, (our) ‘reality’ IS what we see!
Conditions? Known? Known meaning experienced?
Until I know your meaning of ‘conditions’, I cannot find meaning here…
I wouldn’t accuse anything od anyone one of ‘intentional’ behavior. No ‘motion’ (behavior) no ‘will/free-will/choice’ (intentional).
Like at the movies, only there we know that it is not ‘Real’.
I’d rather discuss what philosophers such as YOU have to say, as here you are available for conversation, with autherntic thoughts and ideas.
Peace
Anyone who says that human perceptions of reality are in any way wrong, also automatically suggests and believes that a true rightness exists, otherwise in contrast if there was no actual truth there, there would be no untrue mismatching.
Even if you cannot know it to any greater degree, you can at least be a part of it, and experience how reality moves around each day where-ever you are at. You could feel the rain and the wind and whatever else. But trying to express the fact that you have experienced the movement of the reality of life, with words, suddenly becomes the supposed truth-untruth problem, where one dummy doesn’t understand the words of the other dummy. Words aren’t like direct body experiences or natural events. Words are about what something supposedly is. You’ve got a problem there, because normally it’s not exactly anything, but instead a process which does instead of is.
So your main problem is that many of you expect trueness to be wordable and comprehensible.
Instead I say trueness is the undeniable realness of everything everywhere.
Your main problems arise when you take language as literal. For example when someone says God talked to them, they are describing how it felt, and it is always accurate aswel as a true expression of the nature of that person, if you consider each of their words as a part of the way that their own nature moves. But to take it as literal instead, would be elivating the words and ideas above and beyond the body and the little person which experienced this. This separates experiences from individuals, so that the experience is the thing in and of itself, supposedly, and then you’ve got literal transcendance bullshit that never works or makes any sense.
Due to how often you people play this game of literal expression [though all language is a symbol, and symbolic is not literal], you’ve just assed your own logical basis. The literal true words game is doomed to fail. That said, I’ll go away and people will waste more time on nonsense.
Dan, your posts are always weclome. You get to the heart of the matter. Now, if there is no such animal as absolute truth, can there be any concept of truth that is not negated by relativity? I opt for reality over “truths”. Will we reach some final end? No way. The journey is its only end.
Nameless, please accept my apology for being testy to the point of arrogance. I’m no authority on anything. My comments about Putnam come from sheer frustration. I’ve researched the issue of physical precursors to mental structure and content for over 20 years. I’ve read widely in various disciplines. Consequently, to hear that the whole project is suspect because science and philosophy have nothing to say to each other demeans not only my research, but that of hundreds of scientists and philosophers. You have every right to object to any and all of my statements in that they may be poorly presented by me; however, you need to offer more to the conversation than drive-by shootings, something more than simple denial of ideas, something that offers more than a single opinion. If I miread you, I again apologize. When I appear to pontificate, it is with the thrust of thoughts coming from people who are much more intelligent than I am.
On first whiff, I thought Piaget was full of beans. (“Thou shalt not eat beans”–Pythagoras 
) Currently reading his “Biology and Knowledge”, which was written in the late 60’s, I’m amazed by his insights, considering the fact that they came prior to the computer and hands-on gene revolutions of the 70s, yet addressing them. His insights are directly concerned with our human sense of reality . You and Dan both seem to pit belief that no absolutes exist against the human need for them.