Existence and Reality

K

kajolishot

Registered Senior Member
Sartre said:

I was just thinking … that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing absolutely no reason for existing.

It got me thinking about another related question: what is reality or existence.

It could be something as simple as neurons firing in our brains; there really is no concrete evidence that anything is real. Perhaps reality is simply the last minutes of our lives while we are lying on our death beds...dreaming one final dream.

Maybe reality just IS.

Any thoughts?
 
Originally posted by kajolishot
Sartre said:

I was just thinking … that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing absolutely no reason for existing.
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I believe Sartre is wrong. There exists a plethora of reasons why you exist. The most straight-forward of which is that your parent's had sex. Then there's the fact that you haven't yet died. Then there's all the metaphysical stuff where you set your own purpose, etc. We attempt to preserve our existence because we have a survival instinct that strongly motivates us to do so. We are not separate from nature. We are an aspect of it.
Originally posted by kajolishot
It could be something as simple as neurons firing in our brains; there really is no concrete evidence that anything is real.
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Yes and no, depends on how you look at it. I mean, could you read this message from me if it weren't real? What do you consider "concrete evidence"? If I drop you into a vat of wet concrete you'll suffocate and die. Do you require more "concrete" evidence than that?
Originally posted by kajolishot
Maybe reality just IS.
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Once can conceptualize a set of infinite content segragated by a line acrossed it somewhere. One one side "that which is" and on the other "that which is not". It's quite obvious as such that "that which is", IS, as it could not be any other way.
 
Originally posted by kajolishot
Sartre said:

I was just thinking … that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing absolutely no reason for existing.

It got me thinking about another related question: what is reality or existence.

It could be something as simple as neurons firing in our brains; there really is no concrete evidence that anything is real. Perhaps reality is simply the last minutes of our lives while we are lying on our death beds...dreaming one final dream.

Maybe reality just IS.

Any thoughts?
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:eek:

The only Reality that has no reason to exist is a singularity alone in the emptiness, uncertain, without meaning without cause, a voice crying in the wilderness.


Man is the only creature that has no reason to exist, whose existence is without meaning, without cause, uncertain as to purpose.

Mere Animals do not need a reason to exist, they are born, completely fulfilled, not uncertain in their nature; existence is there purpose in life, Survival.

Man has no reason to exist because he and she are born uncreated, boundless, without dimension.


Man has no need for a reason to exist, Man is Free to exist without cause, Free to do as he Will, Man just is.
 
Re: Re: Existence and Reality

I do not necessarily agree with Sartre fully, but just posted it for background into my thought.


Yes and no, depends on how you look at it. I mean, could you read this message from me if it weren't real?

Why not? Who is to say you are not a dream avatar in my dream typing the thoughtful words?
But as you said, yes and no.

If you have ever had a lucid dream you know how difficult it is to know you are dreaming, then what's to say we are not locked in an never ending dream? (Death)

(I just realized The Matrix deals with this last question in the first film.) :cool:
 
Re: Re: Existence and Reality

Originally posted by wayne_92587
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:eek:

The only Reality that has no reason to exist is a singularity alone in the emptiness, uncertain, without meaning without cause, a voice crying in the wilderness.


Man is the only creature that has no reason to exist, whose existence is without meaning, without cause, uncertain as to purpose.

Mere Animals do not need a reason to exist, they are born, completely fulfilled, not uncertain in their nature; existence is there purpose in life, Survival.

Man has no reason to exist because he and she are born uncreated, boundless, without dimension.


Man has no need for a reason to exist, Man is Free to exist without cause, Free to do as he Will, Man just is.
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I dont disagree
But say that there were two people in the forest, isolated and left to live without cause. Would those two people exist?
To eachother yes, to anyone else no.
Only the senses in YOUR own brain deserve the name of existence. Or this statement might be more accurate if I were to say MY own brain.
 
Re: Re: Re: Existence and Reality

Originally posted by kajolishot

Why not?
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Because it would not be reasonable to think that you could. It is certainly fair to recognize the possibility, but as long as all evidence points to the conclusion that you are real, it is reasonable to tentatively assume that you are. I term the notion "faith in reason". Sure, ultimately agnosticism has no bound, but that doubting that a 10 ton rock will crush your head doesn't help it maintain its shape if gravity does its trick.
Originally posted by kajolishot

If you have ever had a lucid dream you know how difficult it is to know you are dreaming, then what's to say we are not locked in an never ending dream? (Death)
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You difficulty discerning between reality and dream states apparently has no bearing on physics. If you concentrate really hard on keeping me from pulling the trigger, do you think you could? What if 1000 out of 1000 times you could not? Would you think it reasonable at that point to make the working assumption that you couldn't do it on the 1001st time?
 
Re: Re: Re: Existence and Reality

Originally posted by man on the hill
I dont disagree
But say that there were two people in the forest, isolated and left to live without cause. Would those two people exist?
To eachother yes, to anyone else no.
Only the senses in YOUR own brain deserve the name of existence. Or this statement might be more accurate if I were to say MY own brain.
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Webster's, Reality:


5. Philos.
a. something that exists independently of ideas concerning it.
b. something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive.
6. something that is real.
7. something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent.
 
Originally posted by kajolishot

It got me thinking about another related question: what is reality or existence.
.
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Reality is synonomous with Truth, which is, of course, highly subjective. Ergo, reality is whatever you presume or observe it to be.
Every sane mind carries its own Reality, a mental model formed over long periods of painstaking learning. The Mind functions on the premise that its model is the actual Reality but will alter the model if new experience proves otherwise. Needless to say, though I will anyhow, the more intelligent mind, quicker to discern realationships, is better at realization, or the process of updating the model from data collected by the senses.
It is obvious that all current human Realities are incomplete and skewed, as the ultimate Truth, a guideline of all the physical cosmos, is probably beyond the finite Human scope.
(According to quantam mechanics, or at least my cursory grasp of it, physical beings will never be able to observe without interference, guaranteeing that we will never have untainted data and a full understanding.)

Both the Human Physique and senses are undeniably limited, and this seems to ensure that there will be forces which always retain their mystery to us. We will probably never familiarize ourselves with the ultimate Reality.
Perhaps reality is simply the last minutes of our lives while we are lying on our death beds...dreaming one final dream.
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Have you seen Waking Life before? It's an excellent film.
 
So it seems like reality is simply our collective memory of 'things'. It consists of thoughts, beliefs, preceptions, and experience.

All of which can be simulated or occur at random in our brains.

A perfect example would be the deja-vu effect. While doing some task you suddenly realize "hey i feel like i've done this before, or i dreamt of this before". Well it's some random neuron firing in your brain and you think you've done this before.

Consider Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

To the prisoners, reality is whatever their mind precieves the projected images to mean. To them the "figures" on the cave is our equivelant of what we precieve as god. Are they wrong? Not really, because in their mental frame their thoughts are fully sane as gravity is in our mental frame.
 
Originally posted by kajolishot


It got me thinking about another related question: what is reality or existence.

I've actually been thinking about this quite a bit, and of course this is only my subjective view. . . reality is a highly abstract thing. That is to say, there are no simple definitions as to what reality is. The reality that the common person refers to is not the 'absolute' reality, but an oversimplified model that seems to fit his/her personal paradigms. Absolute reality is the reality that i want to address right now. It is unknowable to us in our present consciousness. why? Because absolute reality is everyone and everything, and the summation of every individual consciousness and the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and ideas within that context. Because of this, I believe the everyday 'reality' that we are in living in is nothing short of a lie.
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invisibleone
I believe the everyday 'reality' that we are in living in is nothing short of a lie.

Interesting take. Though, I do not think 'reality' is a lie. After all, for anything to be real only requires certain mental interpertations. To the mind, reality and dreaming are one in the same. But certain chemicals are released during REM sleep to stop you from "living the dream". (I think the disorder related to that is sleep walking)

The mind has some awesome way in which it can re-create models of reality. Sadly we know nothing about how our mind works. Not even the simplistic and fundamental questions have been answered. It is just interesting to think of life as being a dream within a dream. Waking up from one dream into another. Again, there's no proof that this isn't happening.
 
Features of reality should be identified. What about:

1. Repeatability, consistency, the ability to form an induction concerning related events. Like wesmorris posed, consider the outcome of some process. How consistent is the outcome (given that the process is repeatable). The consistency could be probablistic, but should agree with the results aquired by others. Of course, this presupposes the existence of others, but, you could just as well check against the results of others in a very abstract sense.

2. Determinism and/or causality. These are almost invariably accepted as logical structure. Nothing should have an effect before it happens, and things should follow some set of rules (what I believe to be represented as the laws of physics in this reality). Of course, "before it happens" implies temporal reality, which is more specific than arbitrary reality.

3. I think that there's some third thing that I'm forgetting to mention. Oh well.

Crazy people don't have a very good grasp on reality, as we might say. Notice that this statement is consistent with the above two proposed features.
 
I think that there's some third thing that I'm forgetting to mention.
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Objectivity? Observations of the same (simple) event by different obervers should coincide to some degree?
 
I was including this as part of the consistency feature (by "others," I meant "other observers.").
 
Oh yes. I skimmed too quickly and thought you were referring only to internal consistency.
 
Truth is synonymous with Reality but so then is a Lie.

If we have been beguiled, the Truth, our Knowledge of Reality
that we Speak of, is the knowledge of Illusion, our truth a Lie.


A Material Reality is a singularity.

The Law, only the Whole of a Single Reality is Free to occupy a
given moment of Time in space.

Truth, if it speaks of the singularity of Reality, the Absolute Truth, is the Truth the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth.

If we are duplicitous, speak with a forked tongue, if we are two face, speak out of both sides of the mouth, if we are a double dealer, if we deal from the bottom of the deck, then our Truth will become differentiated, a Duality, our Truth the Knowledge of Reality that we speak of will be of an Illusion.

Our truth, a Half-Truth, our Reality an Illusion, Deception, the Knowledge of Good and Evil, a lie.

Duality, the Truth that is a Lie, a Reality that is an Illusion.
 
What really wierds me is that these features cannot be verified conclusively. The only way to probe them is to use a probe that is also part of the construct that it is probing. I could imagine that, given a sufficiently malicious entity controling the construct, there would be some provision for attempting to probe such features that would confound the utility of the probe. In other words, the construct is closed and self consistent, but that it exists in some true reality not restricted to the construct.

How would we then know for sure that there were not instances of anomolous consequence to which we refer as insanity, but that are actually just isolations of evidence of the true reality?

Or, how do we know that, just because we observe these two features now, and have since a record of science was kept by humans, how do we know that tomorrow the construct will not fall, and the true intentions of the malicious entity come to fruition?

This kind of scares me.
 
kajoli,
i agree that it could all be a dream. but then you gotta wonder, how could a dream be 'reality'?. . .
 
Well, first you have to explain/define what you mean when you say "reality." According to the two features that I have suggested in a recent post, it is reasonable to imagine defining a dream (or rather, the construct of the dream) as reality.

I could do experiments in my dream (I call these dreams nightmares. They occur all too frequently when I've been working on some paper or lab report. I will dream about working on the project, but when I wake up, I am neither rested, nor any further along).

These experiments could possibly be consistent/repeatable within the dream (without even being related to results obtained in "waking" reality, which makes them so useless).

I could notice that nothing "magical" happens, like the meter reads a value before I measure it in the experiment.

And viola! A construct that satisfies the features of a reality (as I personally require).
 
maybe we are someone else's dream.
you will never know what reality is because it is all based on the way you see things- perceptions.
 
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