Is it possible to perceive a world which is external to our perceptions?

hammegk said:
Your words, not mine. Should an individual have an "interesting" subjective experience, may I say 'numenous', the hallucination vs reality problem becomes personally interesting.




Nor would a like number agreeing.
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An interesting subjective experience is useless, and largely incomprehensible, unless the subject can communicate, discuss, and learn with others.
 
cyborg said:
So you made a fallicious statement for what purpose now?

zaayrdragon makes an appeal to reality by eliminating inconsistencies in our perceptions, you make an appeal to everyone arguing about it endlessly?

That kool-aid did not pass the taste test.
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Is that what I did? I gotta learn this language you guys speak.

That does it - I wanna go back to college now. Thanks, 'borg.
 
zaayrdragon said:
Geoff, we can be largely certain (though I doubt 99.999...% certain) because we are alive. We survive, thrive, and successfully manipulate the world we perceive. That world is the real world, for us.

Even if we're brains in vats, the world we perceive is our real world, because we can neither know nor manipulate, in any way, any other world.

And the world we perceive is physical, down to the atomic level, and beyond that might be something else entirely... but it still obeys rules. They're just all new rules.
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Yes, but then it becomes something different. My neutral monist position allows for "obeyance of rules" without a claim of physicalism.
 
zaayrdragon said:
What use is this? It's the only way we have to learn what reality is like, numbskull.

Let me emphasize this:

Comparing our perceptions to the perceptions of others is the only means we have to learn what reality is really like.

There is no other way.
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The there is no way at all. This tells us nothing about reality. It tells us about other people's perceptions of reality..
 
JustGeoff said:
The there is no way at all. This tells us nothing about reality. It tells us about other people's perceptions of reality..
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It's called compare and contrast. All we have is our perceptions, and our ability to share those perceptions, via language, to others. Without that, we have nothing.

So we form our understanding of reality through our perceptions, and our understanding of the perceptions of others. And, yes, we miss a lot. We don't know a lot about reality; for example, we don't know how the quantum level works, or what color rocks are on the fourth planet from VV Cephai A, or what ultraviolet patterns exist on the petals of daisies. But we can learn, especially if we accept the communicated perceptions of others.

Other than that, we know nothing about reality. NOTHING.
 
JustGeoff said:
The question is not whether or not there is a reality out there - it is whether or not our perceptions of it are anything like the thing itself....The problem is that the reality beyond observers isn't physical, not that that it doesn't exist at all. i.e. the "real world" isn't made of things like the physical objects we directly perceive.
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But this is like lamenting that the world isn't made of words, so that when we talk about tables we aren't refering to real tables just words, that our discussions can never touch real things because they are just words. Why would anyone have an expectation that the models of the world in our head had to in some way be the same thing as the things they were modeling? Why should we see the difference between reality and our representations of it as a gap that requires bridging? This gap is simply the necessary relation between them, a relation that is inherent in what they are. If they were identical they could not have any relation.

You seem to be after some kind of mystical fusion between reality and our experience of it, some way in which we become one with the world. That's every bit as non-rational and Zen-like as saying there is no mind, which seems like a simpler way to monism to me.
 
zaayrdragon said:
In other words, it's not a position at all.

OK...
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Well actually he insists that 'mind' and 'matter' form the neutral. What he seems to reject is that a material view of the universe doesn't have room for a 'mind' to be a fundamental existent. So he tells us, yeah, all that empiricism and sciency stuff is fine, lovely model of the universe you have, but no 'mind' so there's a fundamental problem there.
 
chriswl said:
You seem to be after some kind of mystical fusion between reality and our experience of it, some way in which we become one with the world. That's every bit as non-rational and Zen-like as saying there is no mind, which seems like a simpler way to monism to me.
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First break the limits of language and reasoning, then become a Zen Buddhist. You cant get that simple without being complicated ;)
 
chriswl said:
You seem to be after some kind of mystical fusion between reality and our experience of it, some way in which we become one with the world. That's every bit as non-rational and Zen-like as saying there is no mind, which seems like a simpler way to monism to me.
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If that's what you think, no-mind .... :p
 
cyborg said:
Well actually he insists that 'mind' and 'matter' form the neutral. What he seems to reject is that a material view of the universe doesn't have room for a 'mind' to be a fundamental existent. So he tells us, yeah, all that empiricism and sciency stuff is fine, lovely model of the universe you have, but no 'mind' so there's a fundamental problem there.
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Dualism, then.


Well, isn't this weird.
 
cyborg said:
Jesus Christ man don't utter that out loud!

It's NOT DUALISM! Dualism is for poo-poo heads like us. It's NEUTRAL! Don't you see man, NEUTRAL!
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Um... yeah... ok.

So it's not idealism. And it's not materialism. And it's not dualism.

It's nothing, really....
 
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