Tom Sawyer

DD,

This is what I'm saying. There is no way to determine if our internal perceptions have any bearing to reality without testing them against external stimuli. Therefore, the external stimuli are what's important, not the internal perceptions of these stimuli.

Red isn't some philosophical concept. Our internal perceptions of what red is is entirely based upon neurological interpretations of specific wavelengths of light that hit our eyes. Blue light has a different wavelength, which is why we perceive it differently. It's the external reality of the wavelength of the light that makes things red and blue, not our perceptions of them. If a person is color-blind and they can't distinguish red from blue then according to their internal perceptions the two would be the same. However, that wouldn't mean that the lights suddenly have the same wavelengths, the person's internal perception would simply be wrong, which he could check by building an external machine that will display the wavelengths in some other format, like numerically, that he could understand. So looking internally would give a faulty interpretation of what reality is, while looking to external means would give a correct one.


The mechanics and constructs of reality are what reality Is. If you want to understand reality, you must look at those mechanics and constructs. Those mechanics and constructs are the things that are within me, you, the trees, the stars and everything else. By looking externally to figure out what those things are, we can gain an understnding of them and learn how reality is put together.

As an example, take medicine. For most of our history, when someone was sick, people pondered what was wrong with the person (looked internally) and came up with the idea that the person was possessed by demons, or similar such nonsense, and prayed for the person to get better. Eventually, people started to look externally and discovered germs and the like and were able to develop vaccines to use instead of prayer and people started to die at a vastly reduced rate. Do you have any similar examples of when looking internally produced results like this? I'm not talking about the occasional fluke when someone chanced upon what turned out to be the right answer, but a situation where the right answer was given by internal methods as opposed to external methods to discover what really Is on a consistent basis?

Our internal perceptions are all that any of us can know of reality. However, these perceptions are based entirely on external stimuli and do not supercede those stimuli in any way.

John Page

Philosophy Consultant to client:

John Page

What about compound objects, do they have their own identity? If so how does this differ from/relate to the identity of their component parts? Do you agree after consideration that identity can be shared?
Cheers, John

Darth Dane

To be is to be something, but everything that is has its own, individual identity

Yes we all have Identity, this is the same property I share with anything that Is. It has Identity.

Could it be an illusion as Buddha alludes to?

Could it be that everything that Is has one cohesive Identity?

Could it be that all these sub parts are part in forming the identity of One over-arching Individual?





DD - Love Spliff

John Page

Individual what?

Darth Dane

Presumably "God" or God's self-referring name "I Am"!




DD - Love Spliff

soulofdarwin

You might be pleased to know that Nobel Laureate particle physicist Steven Weinberg seems to agree with you. He has summed up the matter quite nicely, I think, in the following anecdote:

“For some years I have been wrangling about reductionism with a good friend, the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, who among other things gave us our best working definition of a biological species. It started when, in a 1985 article, he pounced on a line in a ‘Scientific American’ article (on other matters) that I had written in 1974. In this article I had mentioned that in physics we hope to find a few simple general laws that would explain why nature is the way it is and that at present the closest we can come to a unified view of nature is a description of elementary particles and their mutual interactions. Mayr in his article called this ‘a horrible example of the way physicists think’ and referred to me as ‘an uncompromising reductionist’. I responded in an article in ‘Nature’ that I am not an uncompromising reductionist; I am a compromising reductionist. . . .

As far as I can understand it, Mayr distinguishes three kinds of reductionism: constitutive reductionism (or ontological reductionism, or analysis), which is a method of studying objects by inquiring into their basic constituents; theory reductionism, which is the explanation of a whole theory in terms of a more inclusive theory; and explanatory reductionism, which is the view ‘that the mere knowledge of its ultimate components would be sufficient to explain a complex system’. The main reason I reject this categorization is that none of these categories has much to do with what I am talking about (though I suppose theory reductionism comes closest). Each of these three categories is defined by what scientists actually do or have done or could do; I am talking about nature itself. For instance, even though physicists cannot actually explain the properties of very complicated molecules like DNA in terms of the quantum mechanics of electrons, nuclei, and electric forces, and even though chemistry survives to deal with such problems with its own language and concepts, still there are no autonomous principles of chemistry that are simply independent truths, not resting on deeper principles of physics.� [pp. 53-54, ‘Dreams of a Final Theory’]

So, reductionism relates to order in nature (as opposed to reductionism as a prescription for progress in science - a view to which Weinberg does not subscribe).

Further, there are no autonomous laws of nature other than a relatively few fundamental laws. That is to say that nature is described by a hierarchy of explanations, each resting on a more fundamental explanation and ultimately converging on the fundamental laws of nature, for which there are no further explanations. Or, more simply put, the reality of everything is there. It remains only for us to see it. That hierarchy of explanation is the singular reality of this universe.

My conclusion on the matter (essentially your view) is presented in the opening paragraph of my thread “General Theorem of Existence� in the Moral Foundations forum:

It seems to me that philosophy, sociology and science devolve to a single arena of human inquiry, as I make no distinction between philosophy and science and I am too optimistic to believe that our planetary society will remain forever uninformed. I do not separate philosophy and science because I am of the opinion that knowledge does not exist apart from that body of knowledge which comprises universal law. Clearly, we, as thinking beings, are capable of formulating ideas that have no connection to reality, and which, therefore, have nothing to do with knowledge. Because both philosophy and science have as their object the pursuit of knowledge, and because there is only one body of knowledge in existence, these two realms of intellectual endeavor are indistinguishable in my view. When we, as individuals, speak of our philosophy, we refer to the collective ideas that constitute our perception of the universe and of our relationship to it. These ideas are either correct, in which case they are knowledge, or incorrect, in which case they are only ideas. History is replete with lessons which demonstrate that attempts to conduct one’s affairs in contravention of universal law do not end well. I believe, therefore, that it is essential to our societal well being that we examine and consider “social issues� in the context of knowledge and not merely in the context of ideas.

paul30

I think most of us would like to think there is one reality.

But reality is primarily subjective; it relies on perceptual apparatus that are themselves merely perceived and which are often faulty and may bear little or no relation to what is "out there."

Multiply this by the fact that every person's perception is incommunicable, except vaguely, and that democratically agreed-upon, even scientifically-agreed-upon reality is often mistaken,
and you get an extremely amorphous look at reality, or even whether there is one reality, or any reality, or a multiplicity of realities.

There is really no way we can demonstrate that a person who is hallucinating and seeing things wildly different from what anyone else sees isn't in fact seeing the truth, and everyone else is missing it. The most we can say is that it is improbable.

But there are many degrees of improbability, and any degree negates certainty (except to the dogmatic; and they are only just guessing, too--guessing defiantly).

I personally don't think there is one reality.

Many children, when they draw a person seeing, draw a cone of lines from the eye outward. They believe not that the eye receives light from the outside, but that the eye creates what it sees. This is pretty close to the truth.

River

This is not a Theory. This is Fact.

Normal

There is only one reality?

Sure

Is the subjective reality you are experiencing now representative of reality as a whole?

That's debatable

Does this invalidate your theory?

Yup

IOW:

1. There is one reality.
2. The reality you experience might not be representative of reality as a whole.
Therefore,
3. You cannot come to know the truth about reality.