Reality

B

b_sinning

Erect Member
Nov 22, 2004
22,790
47
41
47
Savannah, GA
Marklar
₥10
In the drug thread we got on to one of my favorite topics Reality. So let's discuss your ideas on it.


I like Philip K. Dick's "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." His works often dealt with realtity as defined by perception(a scanner darkly) and things such as what defines being alive (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?(Blade Runner was based on it)).

Our senses define our reality. So can you alter your reality by altering your senses?
 
This isnt the whole quote but it fits the thread in my eyes...

John Keats (1795-1821) There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions...

Call the world if you Please "The vale of Soul-making" .... I say "Soul making'' Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. I[n]telligences are atoms of perception --they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God --how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion -- or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation--This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years--These three Materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming theSoul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. . . . I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School--and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul! A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! . . . As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence--This appears to me faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity.
 
Very nice BeerAd.

Macines are getting smarter and one day do you think they can become so smart and self aware that you can consider them alive? If they are do they have a soul?
 
b_sinning said:
Very nice BeerAd.

Macines are getting smarter and one day do you think they can become so smart and self aware that you can consider them alive? If they are do they have a soul?
Click to expand...

No. Robots will never have a conscience. In my belief it is physically impossible to recreate human nature and all that is man in a machine.
 
what if the lines between man and machine get crossed with cybertechnology?
where is there a defining diffrence between the man and the machine? a brain in a jar with legs? a completly electronic copy of a living human's brain a ghost in the machine if you will.
 
Nice Onnotangu. Let say in the future we can copy exactly the neural network of someone and it is self aware. Is it alive? Does it have a soul. It perceives reality exactly like us and reacts to it the same as us but is it alive? Aren't organs just type of machines made to do set function?
 
Onnotangu said:
what if the lines between man and machine get crossed with cybertechnology?
where is there a defining diffrence between the man and the machine? a brain in a jar with legs? a completly electronic copy of a living human's brain a ghost in the machine if you will.
Click to expand...

I was actually about to say the same thing but got distracted. I do not believe a human brain will ever be able to be "imported" into a robot. If one day I am proven wrong then one day I will rethink my stance, but for now it is completely SciFi to me.
 
Technology is advancing very fast so I believe we could reach that point in the next 100 year or so. That is if we don't wipe ourselves out.



100 years ago the thought of me interacting withsomeone on the other side of the world real time and sending data back forth would have seemed like SciFi.
 
Last edited:
So, let me get this thread right...

We are talking about how our "senses" is our reality, correct? What we perceive is real in turn is real to us? IMO our reality means nothing, what is seen as reality to the group that means all. If I see a tree and you see a purple elephant we could both be correct. Now if 8 million other humans see a purple elephant, I am without a doubt not looking at a tree. It is nice to believe that we can escape this reality by perceiving our own but it is not our own that matters in the whole scheme of things.
 
Last edited:
BeerAd said:
So, let me get this thread right...

We are talking about how our "senses" is our reality, correct? What we perceive is real in turn is real to us? IMO our reality means nothing, what is seen as reality to the group that means all. If I see a tree and you see a purple elephant we could both be correct. Now if 8 million other humans see a purple elephant, I am without a doubt not looking at a tree. It is nice to believe that we can escape this reality by perceiving our own but it is not our own that matters in the whole scheme of things.
Click to expand...
Even according to physics, everyone's reality is different. It's mostly talking about time, but that's a big portion of reality...

Thank you for getting this back ONTOPIC... ;)
 
Philip K. Dick often wrote about how just because one person could see something and others couldn't didn't mean it wasn't really there. Something i really believe.



How do I know for sure that you perceive things the same exact way I do? What if the color I say is blue would be your red if you looked through my eyes? We are taught as kids that this color is blue and from that point on that is all we know what is blue so we both will always say it's blue.
 
Last edited:
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through' narrow chinks of his cavern."




Aldous Huxley's book Doors of Perception is a great read on this topic.



Psychedelic drugs are thought to disable filters which block or suppress signals related to mundane functions from reaching the conscious mind. In this book, Huxley explores the idea that the human mind filters reality, partly because handling the details of all of the impressions and images coming in would be unbearable, partly because it has been taught to do so. He believes that psychotropic drugs can partly remove this filter, or "open these doors of perception." Huxley was administered mescaline, and had an interviewer prompt him to comment on various stimuli around him, such as books and flowers. The conversation was recorded and the book mainly concerns Huxley's thoughts on what he says in the recordings. He observed that everyday objects lose their functionality and suddenly exist "as such." Space and dimension become irrelevant, and perceptions seem to be enlarged and at times even overwhelming.
 
fly said:
Even according to physics, everyone's reality is different. It's mostly talking about time, but that's a big portion of reality...

Thank you for getting this back ONTOPIC... ;)
Click to expand...

Sure we have different realities to the way we perceive things such as time, but does that change how the clock moves? I feel that our alternate realities is our mind playing tricks on us individually. As a whole not everyone thinks "time flew by". Just yesterday this guy at work told me today seemed like forever, I thought it flew by. In reality it moved the same for all of us.
 
BeerAd said:
Sure we have different realities to the way we perceive things such as time, but does that change how the clock moves? I feel that our alternate realities is our mind playing tricks on us individually. As a whole not everyone thinks "time flew by". Just yesterday this guy at work told me today seemed like forever, I thought it flew by. In reality it moved the same for all of us.
Click to expand...

Time NEVER moves the same for all of us. Your 24 hours and my 24 hours are different, especially if I'm heading away from you at 75% the speed of light. There is no universal reality.
 
b_sinning said:
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through' narrow chinks of his cavern."




Aldous Huxley's book Doors of Perception is a great read on this topic.



Psychedelic drugs are thought to disable filters which block or suppress signals related to mundane functions from reaching the conscious mind. In this book, Huxley explores the idea that the human mind filters reality, partly because handling the details of all of the impressions and images coming in would be unbearable, partly because it has been taught to do so. He believes that psychotropic drugs can partly remove this filter, or "open these doors of perception." Huxley was administered mescaline, and had an interviewer prompt him to comment on various stimuli around him, such as books and flowers. The conversation was recorded and the book mainly concerns Huxley's thoughts on what he says in the recordings. He observed that everyday objects lose their functionality and suddenly exist "as such." Space and dimension become irrelevant, and perceptions seem to be enlarged and at times even overwhelming.
Click to expand...

Although drugs can make it feel that way, do you really believe that its lifting the curtains of reality or is the brain in fact making shit up?
 
b_sinning said:
Philip K. Dick often wrote about how just because one person could see something and others couldn't didn't mean it wasn't really there. Something i really believe.



How do I know for sure that you perceive things the same exact way I do? What if the color I say is blue would be your red if you looked through my eyes? We are taught as kids that this color is blue and from that point on that is all we know so we both will always say it's blue.
Click to expand...

I posted about this once and everyone got upset :p

FlamingGlory said:
Empirical evidence is just a fancy method of saying "observable and repeatable" evidence of something. An observation is perception; always. You are assuming that your [or anyone elses] perception is reliable. So, you are taking your perception on faith. Which rather defeats empiricism, since it is only a consensus of the observation of something by people who are also taking their perception on faith.

I could just leave it at that and hope you sort out the point but no one here ever does so:

You are applying the observation of your perception (which cannot proved to be truth, as above) as an absolute truth against something which you simply havent perceived.
Click to expand...
 
b_sinning said:
Philip K. Dick often wrote about how just because one person could see something and others couldn't didn't mean it wasn't really there. Something i really believe.



How do I know for sure that you perceive things the same exact way I do? What if the color I say is blue would be your red if you looked through my eyes? We are taught as kids that this color is blue and from that point on that is all we know what is blue so we both will always say it's blue.
Click to expand...

If I see blue and you see red, we could both be right. If I see blue but you and the other 400 people see red, then something is distorting my personal reality.
 
fly said:
Time NEVER moves the same for all of us. Your 24 hours and my 24 hours are different, especially if I'm heading away from you at 75% the speed of light. There is no universal reality.
Click to expand...

Can you physically move away from me at 75% of the speed of light?
 
BeerAd said:
If I see blue and you see red, we could both be right. If I see blue but you and the other 400 people see red, then something is distorting my personal reality.
Click to expand...
You missed the point:

Can you say with any great confidence that everyone's concept of 'red' is the same? There is a word that describes it but you have no way of knowing exactly what another person's concept of it is since the only way you can communicate with another mind is through an imperfect medium, i.e. language.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back