questions on reality.

[Dragon321]

who is it that truly believes that this reality is extant, impermeable and absolute? sorry to leave it at that, but i wouldn't mind seeing other's responses before i shoot my mouth off.

"is reality absolute and objective? if it is not, does this undermine all religions but buddhism? does christianity and other monotheism rely on an objective reality?"

 

[Deleted member 2452]

impermeable?

as in poking holes in it? huh?
i'd prefer to say this reality is tangeable. real to the touch.
however i do believe in alternate realities, or planes of existance, other dimentions ,etc.
is that the kind of thing you mean?

steve

 

[TKpervert]

I just love answering a question with another question

What did you mean by 'this reality' ?
If you meant the ground we walk on, the air we breathe, the physical laws we are bound by, then yes reality is extant, impermeable and absolute.

Reality doesn't undermine or strengthen any religion, it simply tolerates its existence as an artifact of the human mind.

 

[BigJim]

Everything that exists is just particles vibrating at different speeds and frequencies. Other "dimensions" are places whose structure vibrates faster or slower than ours. Just as a radio wave can't be seen, neither can other dimensions.

Confused? Me too.

 

[Ticklemmmeeeeee]

I pondered whether to post my two cents from a philosphical, scientific or religious approach and opted for the ticklemmmeeeeeee logic...lol.

I think that everything can be categorized as either reality or perception. If there is something tangible that can be seen, felt, and physiologically experienced it is a fact. A cat sits in a chair, it is factually true that there is a chair there with a furry little animal sitting in it. This fact cannot be disputed.

However, the cats level of enjoyment from sitting in the chair is perception. It is too abstract and unable to be scienifically measured with our minds eye. Yet we humans continually impose our perceptions on others and argue the sacredness and validity of our ideas as factual and being so simply because we think so.

It happens every time we have a conversation. There is what the person actually said and there is our interpretation of what they "meant" though we don't seem to view things this way in our ordinary daily experiences. I think we rely upon our opinions, viewpoints, interpretations and perception much more than we rely upon fact. Therefore reality is fact and anything less is perception...Why? I dunno that's another thread 🙂

 

[Admiral Trouser]

Ooooh...i like these questions. i have to write essays on them, lol.

Reality so far as we commonly take it cannot be proven nor disproven to objectively exist, for our only direct understanding of it comes from our sensory experience, such as sight, touch, smell etc. Now, the problem with this is that until these little bits of "sense data" reach our brain, the're something quite alien to us indeed: Colour, for example, is but a lightwave of a certain frequency, and remains so even as it hits our retina and travels down our optic nerve towards the brain. Somehow, though, the second your brain receives the data, it interperates this into the something that we can identify better with: In this case, the colour red.

In case you haven't guessed it yet, what I'm trying to get at is the fact that colour does not exist in objective reality...its our brains visual code for interpreting reality. If we didn't exist, neither would Red. The frequency that causes us to see red would exist still, because *thats* independant to our own existance, but thats it.

Now the same theory can be applied to other senses...touch is an electronic pulse of sorts that travels through the nervious system, and and when it reaches the brain it become a sensation of rough or smooth, hard or soft, etc from which we can then more easely understand and react with. Its commonly called the Veil of Perception: That which we experience of the world is like an imitation of it which we can never bypass, because its so rooted into how we perceive anything full stop.

Tickleme was kinda there when she distinguished reality into two groups: So far as standard opinion goes, we tend to look at any given object in reality, and place its properties into two distinct and seperate groups: Primary and Secondary. Basicaly put, an objects primary properties are those that we can explain through maths and physics: That being its mass, weight, height etc. They exist independantly of our experience of them, and they constitute what objective reality really is. Its Secondary properties are those qualities that come into play when we are directly experiencing them, so thats things like its colour, texture, and the sound it makes, if any. Obviously, these are only exist when we are there, expereincing the object with our senses, but they count as apart of the object in a distanced sense because they cause them to happen (kinda).

I hope thats not too vague, and I hope that helps a little with your understanding 🙂

AT

 

[Admiral Trouser]

Edit: Aussie monkey, I just read your sig quote, so i'm guessing you already know what I just posted above anyway, lol. Sorry m8 🙂

AT

 

[Deleted member 2452]

admiral, let's see if i got that right?

so what you are saying is; if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to witness it... the husband is always wrong!
right?

steve

 

[Admiral Trouser]

If you were the husband in this case, then I say you're always wrong😛

But to (try) and answer the question seriously...you're pre-supposing that the tree already exists, but objectively you'd never know if it had fallen if you weren't there to see it happen.

I think. LOL.

AT 🙂

 

[Dragon321]

just a small re: to Admiral pants, before i post for real

what you are expressing is the fundamental similarity between the zen question of the tree falling and the scientific principle of schroedingers cat? sweet. at its base level we cannot even truly be sure that primary qualities exist, since their existence is affirmed through the same pathways that we experience secondary qualities through. the empirical nature of science is its strength and weakness.

 

[Haltickling]

I don't know whether you know the "cave example": Imagine a man who was born in a cave and has never been outside. The only light there comes from behind an insurmountable wall, and the only things the man sees are shadows on the ceiling. Are these shadows the reality?

No, but that's all we perceive from reality. the rest is pure brain work. We see a tree lying on the ground of a forest, and we automatically deduce that it must have fallen, because we know from our experience that trees always grow vertically. We see a broken teacup, and we deduce from the shape of the pieces that this must have been an unbroken teacup before; our experience tells us that nobody produces broken ones. And so on.

However, our perception is thoroughly limited by our human nature, even if we use technical instruments to broaden the range of our senses. We still only see the shadows on the ceiling.

Descartes used another approach: As we can't be sure of anything, we can doubt everything. But even if you doubt the real existence of the world, e.g. as a dream within a dream within a dream, you can be sure of one certifiable existence: The fact that your doubt exists...

IMO, reality is only a matter of perception. Take any bank robbery with twenty witnesses, and you'll get twenty different perceptions of how the crime really happened. Twenty different realities? Who is so super-human to decide that there's only one reality? Everyone sees the same robbery, but as the witnesses filter these perceptions through their own brains with their own experience, the results can differ vastly.

As to AussieMonkey's question about the reality of religions: No religion is based on reality. That's why you need faith. The only thing you can be quite sure of is that these religions exist.

 

[Admiral Trouser]

Nice to see that someone reads Plato, Hal 😉 Its a good example, but it never factored in a priori truths into the question of human understanding: The fact is that we can understand the basic principles of an object, and therefore reality, through maths, and maths itself is a priori in nature: That is to say, to understands its truths one does not require empirical evidence. Hence Descartes Primary/Seconday quality distincion in his Meditations, which has leapt out of the realms of philisophical theory and become scientific fact. It makes the distinction between the two and accurately describes how they interact to form human understanding. Pretty neat, IMO.

Regarding Descartes...well, I Think Therefore I Am does the trick on the Method of Doubt, so I never pay much attention to the neo-scepticists that you get every now and agian. But they have there uses, I suppose, lol...

AT

 

[Haltickling]

The fact is that we can understand the basic principles of an object, and therefore reality, through maths, and maths itself is a priori in nature: That is to say, to understands its truths one does not require empirical evidence.

Careful, dear Admiral: How do you think maths came into existence? Somebody started to count something, probably cattle. Later, the figures were used for trading, and the first mathematical rules were discovered. By perception, by counting visible things! Maths only became abstract very much later...

And who tells you that our kind of mathematics is the only one? What kind of maths are valid in other universes or in parallel realities? So our maths only describe OUR kind of reality, too.

You seem to know quite a bit more about philosophy than I do, therefore I can't argue about your view on Descartes et al. I bow to the better informed person... 😉

 

[milagros317]

And who tells you that our kind of mathematics is the only one? What kind of maths are valid in other universes or in parallel realities? So our maths only describe OUR kind of reality, too.

The way I see it, mathematics is the study of all conceivable patterns. Hence any conceivable universe can be described by some math. Whether we humans have written down that math or not is another matter.

The study of patterns that decribe this universe in which we live I would call physics.

PS: The British say "maths" and we Americans say "math", so use whichever you wish when writing in English.

 

[Admiral Trouser]

Furthermore, one can think of a four-sided object without ever having seen one. Even more primitively, one can think of a singular when they consider themselves as a singular thing: From that concept you can imagine of one singular and its duplicate, making two things, not one. And there's your basic principles of numaracy for you, ready to be applied a priori to the wider realm of mathamatics. Ig maths was inherintly a empirical in nature, conceiving of vast numbers such as googleplex (sp) would require us to actualy count that many things in order to assert its truth.

AT

 

[Haltickling]

The way I see it, mathematics is the study of all conceivable patterns. Hence any conceivable universe can be described by some math. Whether we humans have written down that math or not is another matter.

The study of patterns that decribe this universe in which we live I would call physics.

The study of ALL CONCEIVABLE patterns? I doubt it. There must be patterns that we can't conceive. Because we can't conceive everything due to our human nature, or we would be omniscient. Mathematics may be reverse in a contracting universe, like the vector of time.

Maths, as being abstract, can merely be a brain product. There's no mathematics of worms, although the same mathematical and physical laws exist. But unless you can think in mathematical categories, maths doesn't exist in your world. That's what I meant by OUR mathematics.

You're right that physics describe our universe. But physics is impossible without mathematics. Therefore, a different universe with different physical laws may also have a quite different kind of mathematics, where 2+2=5 to give a simple example. We shouldn't think that our reality is the only conceivable one, that's hybris.

 

[Admiral Trouser]

Hmm. Perhaps, Hal, but I highly doubt it. Regardless of what universe we logicaly conceive of, 1+1 will always equal 2. To say otherwise is to assert more than a different universe opperates on a different set of physics (which may well be true): You're instead asserting that in different universes, there are different forms of logic. If we accept that in other realms 2+2=5, it would also be possible for an object to be both a square and a triangle at the same time...which is a logical contradiction.

Regardless of the universe and its particular physics, the maths are always the same, and absaloute, as is logic.

So says the Vulcan, AT 😉

 

[Haltickling]

Hmm. Perhaps, Hal, but I highly doubt it. Regardless of what universe we logicaly conceive of, 1+1 will always equal 2. To say otherwise is to assert more than a different universe opperates on a different set of physics (which may well be true): You're instead asserting that in different universes, there are different forms of logic. If we accept that in other realms 2+2=5, it would also be possible for an object to be both a square and a triangle at the same time...which is a logical contradiction.

Regardless of the universe and its particular physics, the maths are always the same, and absaloute, as is logic.

So says the Vulcan, AT 😉

Oh, but a square and a triangle CAN ce the same at the same time, even in our universe: Imagine a triangle stretched into the third dimension, similar to those illumionated letters above an entrance. From the triangle's base perspective, it's a square, from the front perspective, it's a triangle. Both are the same object from different perspectives. Just as light can be particle and wave at the same time. Much of our quantum physics defies our logic.

But that's just hairsplitting. I'm sorry that my limited language abilities can't bring across my point sufficiently to express myself clearly.

Just because WE can't conceive a different set of logic and mathematics doesn't necessarily mean ours is the only possible one. While our logic and mathematics are true for our world, the different universes and logics are nothing more than speculation. Logic, as well as mathematics, are brain products, and therefore limited by our brain's capacity. Some brain in a speculative universe might find our logic just as absurd as we see the equation 2+2=5 . Yet both can be true. Logic is only absolute in our kind of world. Sorry to insist! 😛

 

[Admiral Trouser]

Hmm...good point about the triangle/square, hal, and you expressed the idea well enough m8 🙂. However...my point was that a triangle cannot be that and a square at the same time objectively: Your example, if I read it correctly, relies upon sensory experience, in this case, perspective. Simply put, its either one or the other. Nothing can be logicaly contradictory, in the sense that a table cannot be both all white and all black.
As regards to the light example, two suggestions: That either our understanding of light is uncomplete and we are making shots in the dark as to its true composition, or quantom physics itself is entirely aschew. Considering the fact that it is entirely theory-based and impossible to prove, this might well be true. But thats a subjective opinion.

As for each others disposition towards logic..well, we're going to have to agree to disagree here lol: I for one beleive that it is an absaloute in all realms, whatever they me be, where as you are seemingly open to the possibility of it being otherwise. I cant conclusively prove that you're wrong, so...fair do's 🙂

AT

 

[BigJim]

Some brain in a speculative universe might find our logic just as absurd as we see the equation 2+2=5 .

Who says it has to be a brain in a speculative universe?

 

[milagros317]

The study of ALL CONCEIVABLE patterns? I doubt it. There must be patterns that we can't conceive.

This is exactly where we disagree. I believe that the human mind can conceive of any pattern that could exist in any universe. Call this hubris if you wish.

You're right that physics describe our universe. But physics is impossible without mathematics. Therefore, a different universe with different physical laws may also have a quite different kind of mathematics, where 2+2=5 to give a simple example.

2+2=5 is true in the commutative ring Q/Z (the rational numbers modulo the integers), conceived of and studied by humans.

It is also true in Q/Z that 1=0, as well as more interesting things such as 3/4 + 4/5 = 11/20, and "for every element x in Q/Z, there exists a positive integer n such that x+x+x+ ... +x = 0, where there are n addends on the left side of the equation."

 

[Haltickling]

This is exactly where we disagree. I believe that the human mind can conceive of any pattern that could exist in any universe. Call this hubris if you wish.

Okay, we agree to disagree. I don't doubt that all your mathematical examples are right, and that we can eventually conceive a lot of patterns in our universe. But I think it's something like parallel lines crossing in infinty. However close you get, you won't be able to cross the line. (there's no smilie for that)

 

[TKpervert]

Here's a shrug smilie for you, but it's not real.

 

[lite]

Very interesting, Jim...

Everything that exists is just particles vibrating at different speeds and frequencies. Other "dimensions" are places whose structure vibrates faster or slower than ours. Just as a radio wave can't be seen, neither can other dimensions.

Confused? Me too.

kwil and I watched a show, "The Elegant Universe," which involved String Theory...and you summed up the basic premise of that theory. While I, too, was confused by some aspects of the science behind the theory, I was also intrigued...the incompatibility of quantum mechanics and general relativity, the possibility that String Theory may resolve that incompatibility...I think I need to do a lot more reading. 🙂

 

[BigJim]

Re: Very interesting, Jim...

kwil and I watched a show, "The Elegant Universe," which involved String Theory...and you summed up the basic premise of that theory. While I, too, was confused by some aspects of the science behind the theory, I was also intrigued...the incompatibility of quantum mechanics and general relativity, the possibility that String Theory may resolve that incompatibility...I think I need to do a lot more reading. 🙂

The theory of relativity has a lot of holes in it, not least of which is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Einstein came to this conclusion because experiments in his day showed a strange anomaly. If a car doing 80 MPH passes a car doing 40 MPH, then the first car is doing 40 MPH relative to the second one. However is a photon of light travelling at the speed of light (for convenience sake rounded down to 186,000 miles a second) passed a space ship doing 93,000 miles a second, the light is still travelling at 186,000 miles per second relative to the space ship. While it was a jump forward for it's day, Einstein's theory was dreadfully limiting and has already been proved wrong in that aspect.

Quantum theory and mechanics are bringing the world of the natural and supernatural together. I think that sooner or later it will be widely accepted that what people see as supernatural and paranormal will be understood to be the natural forces of creation. Right now people can very rarely see past the purely physical as it vibrates on our dimension. More are able to with each passing year though and are gradually waking up to the possibilities.

Sounds like it was an interesting program Lite. Let me know if you or the Macho Man dig anything else up. 🙂