No. What I said stands.
Reality Reduces to Consciousness
- Thread starter Spellbound
- Start date
Until your next "reality is _____" post, then that will be your new reality.
So without a conscious being in the universe reality would not be unified?
Why the name of Ra is this turd of a thread in the science section?
Yes. Reality is a unity of something. I posited consciousness as the unified field since all things share reality in common . See; http://www.gizmag.com/quantum-theory-reality-anu/37866/. Mind is not discrete or limited to brains alone. It may very well be universal.
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I've explained before, measurement is not consciousness. That's a Deepak Chopra level of misunderstanding.
There you go with your logical fallacies again.
Obesity comes about by eating food, but obesity can not be equated to eating food, since it is possible to eat food without being obese.
And this is merely perpetuating the myth that "observation" means observation by a conscious entity. It has been shown, I believe, that the "observer" need merely be any sufficiently complex arrangement of matter that requires a specific solution from an interaction rather than a superposition.
Hence mechanical measuring devices are sufficient to do so, and they are not conscious.
So I do hope you are not going to push this "consciousness is key" malarkey.
Bells
Staff member
So why did you post it?
It does not contradict it because it doesn't really have anything to do with your comments.
It is like talking about why the sky is blue and then linking an article about fresh water shrimp in rivers and declaring that the article does not contradict your comments about why the sky is blue.
You fail to understand. You made a theoretical comment, supposedly, and linked something completely different. If you wish to discuss quasi religious ideals about spirituality, then say so and I will move this to the appropriate sub-forum. This is an actual science sub-forum.
Have you never seen a mirage? You might perceive it as being real, but it won't be real.
What?
Why the sky appears to be blue is well understood (I'll explain if asked) but consciousness is not - it is only experienced. What is reality is not certain either.
Reality can be a mater of definitions. It may be an external state of affairs that most can agree is "real" especially if they understand that illusions (like your mirage of water, caused by refracted light from the distant sky near the horizon) are understood and not included in that "reality."
Or:
As Berkeley recognized more than 300 years ago, every thing of that above reality may be illusion; after all we have only our perceptions upon which to postulate or infer there is indeed something "out there." Berkeley, a Bishop and philosopher, believed in the Christian version of God, which he at times in his writings called the "great spirit" to contrast with his own "lessor spirit;" and that God gave him his illusions of an external reality.
I, as a physicist, especially liked Berkeley's explanation for why we physicists have been able to discover so many "physical laws." The answer he gave is simple, and like every thing else he wrote, impossible to refute.* I.e. there must be great regularity to the reality - the illusion almost all believe in - as if it were not that way, then not even God could occasionally "work miracles" as miracles are by definition violations of the physical laws.
* At least no one has been able to do so in 300+ years, even though many have tried.
I have a somewhat "crackpot" idea (in strong disagreement, with the accepted POV by cognitive scientists about our perceptions) which is not greatly different from Berkeley's POV, but I don't think my perceptions are the gift of some God. Instead I believe that the parietal cortex of my brain creates a great and detailed simulation that "runs" when I am awake or in dreaming sleep. The main difference is that when I dream, that simulation is not constrained significantly by the signals from the neural transducers my body is equipped with. Evolution has so constrained it when I am awake and capable of acting on what I perceive. (My ancient ancestor, who perceived and believed water was solid so that he could walk on it from the boat to the distant land, left very few descendants.)
Below I give a link to more details as to why I believe the standard POV of cognitive scientists is "worse than wrong" as it is just "hand waving" - I. e. their claim that "perception emerges after many stages of neural computations or input data processing" is not even consistent with many known facts, even many about the interconnections in the brain. For example, there are more neural connections to the V1 part of the visual cortex from the parietal lobes than from the eyes, via the LGN! (as is required in my model of perception but rarely mentioned by cognitive scientists. Same is true of the connections to the LGN.)
More on my RTS, view of how we perceive the external reality or illusion of it at:
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=905778&postcount=66 where I explain and justify my RTS view of perception with focus on showing genuine free will is not necessarily inconsistent with the natural laws that control the firing of every nerve in your body. Then see:
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/what-is-the-appeal-of-considering-free-will-an-illusion.104623/page-5#post-2644660 and posts 84,86 & 94 where I clarify my POV more.
BTW, Billy T2 is the old Billy T who lost the ability to log on, so made this new ID.
Reality can be a mater of definitions. It may be an external state of affairs that most can agree is "real" especially if they understand that illusions (like your mirage of water, caused by refracted light from the distant sky near the horizon) are understood and not included in that "reality."
Or:
As Berkeley recognized more than 300 years ago, every thing of that above reality may be illusion; after all we have only our perceptions upon which to postulate or infer there is indeed something "out there." Berkeley, a Bishop and philosopher, believed in the Christian version of God, which he at times in his writings called the "great spirit" to contrast with his own "lessor spirit;" and that God gave him his illusions of an external reality.
I, as a physicist, especially liked Berkeley's explanation for why we physicists have been able to discover so many "physical laws." The answer he gave is simple, and like every thing else he wrote, impossible to refute.* I.e. there must be great regularity to the reality - the illusion almost all believe in - as if it were not that way, then not even God could occasionally "work miracles" as miracles are by definition violations of the physical laws.
* At least no one has been able to do so in 300+ years, even though many have tried.
I have a somewhat "crackpot" idea (in strong disagreement, with the accepted POV by cognitive scientists about our perceptions) which is not greatly different from Berkeley's POV, but I don't think my perceptions are the gift of some God. Instead I believe that the parietal cortex of my brain creates a great and detailed simulation that "runs" when I am awake or in dreaming sleep. The main difference is that when I dream, that simulation is not constrained significantly by the signals from the neural transducers my body is equipped with. Evolution has so constrained it when I am awake and capable of acting on what I perceive. (My ancient ancestor, who perceived and believed water was solid so that he could walk on it from the boat to the distant land, left very few descendants.)
Below I give a link to more details as to why I believe the standard POV of cognitive scientists is "worse than wrong" as it is just "hand waving" - I. e. their claim that "perception emerges after many stages of neural computations or input data processing" is not even consistent with many known facts, even many about the interconnections in the brain. For example, there are more neural connections to the V1 part of the visual cortex from the parietal lobes than from the eyes, via the LGN! (as is required in my model of perception but rarely mentioned by cognitive scientists. Same is true of the connections to the LGN.)
More on my RTS, view of how we perceive the external reality or illusion of it at:
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=905778&postcount=66 where I explain and justify my RTS view of perception with focus on showing genuine free will is not necessarily inconsistent with the natural laws that control the firing of every nerve in your body. Then see:
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/what-is-the-appeal-of-considering-free-will-an-illusion.104623/page-5#post-2644660 and posts 84,86 & 94 where I clarify my POV more.
BTW, Billy T2 is the old Billy T who lost the ability to log on, so made this new ID.
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That is just the direction my thoughts went. I just ran with it.
I do not wish to discuss quasi religious ideals no. The whole point of my thread is to understand what and HOW consciousness exists and what is it.
Even if the mirage does not exist the thought that generates it does. So it comes from an inner reality not an outer one.
Of course not. They are the same reality but we perceive differences within the one.
Reality , shapes , depth of perception , movement of things is real , the birth and death is real .
The problem is do we think that this is real ? I think we should .
Consciousness is based on awarness , the evolution of awareness .
Both go hand in hand .
To be conscious , fundamentally , means that you understand the depth of movement . from stillness to a hurricane .
Therefore you know or will know through the elders how all things , animals , plants , wind , water , clouds tell you .
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Reality is what science will see, in 1 million years. Until that time, we can only see this final reality, modified by filters of the mind. As an analogy, if you look at the blue sky wearing red sunglasses, the sky will look purple. In this case, one will swear reality contains a purple sky, since all who wear the same glasses will agree. Science of the future would need to help people, take off their sunglasses, so they can see reality, as it was meant to be.
One filter of the modern liberal mind, is connected to amplification/hypersensitivity. They are conditioned in a way such that certain word/sounds can overwhelm them to where they feel overdosed. It is almost like an amplifier sensory effect, that makes certain noises/sounds overwhelming to them.
This type of filter of the mind makes it hard to see reality, since they are also conditioned to seek arbitrary low emotional inductions; low trigger levels, defined by those who induced this filter aberration. Sticks and stone can break my bones was an old fashion way to turn off this brain filter, so one can see reality better, without emotions clouding reality with smoke and mirrors. Reality exists apart from the fads of the political herd. Science is shy about teaching this because the herd will see any attempt to clarify reality, as an amplified threat.
One filter of the modern liberal mind, is connected to amplification/hypersensitivity. They are conditioned in a way such that certain word/sounds can overwhelm them to where they feel overdosed. It is almost like an amplifier sensory effect, that makes certain noises/sounds overwhelming to them.
This type of filter of the mind makes it hard to see reality, since they are also conditioned to seek arbitrary low emotional inductions; low trigger levels, defined by those who induced this filter aberration. Sticks and stone can break my bones was an old fashion way to turn off this brain filter, so one can see reality better, without emotions clouding reality with smoke and mirrors. Reality exists apart from the fads of the political herd. Science is shy about teaching this because the herd will see any attempt to clarify reality, as an amplified threat.
Consciousness makes the empirical and intellectual evidence for existence possible. The brain / body outputs sensory experiences; then the cognition of them via memory and conceptual processes; and later even deeper apprehensions of those affairs are garnered by reasoning and investigation. Such a manifested and thought about world could thus at least be considered as what deserves the title "reality", when contrasted with the utter absence of presentations and discriminated things and events, as when there is no consciousness occurring.
IOW, while a mind-independent, normally invisible or insentient realm is popularly taken to be the source or cause of its opposite above, that kind of absence which likewise precedes birth and follows death certainly wasn't the original inspiration for labels like reality, world, etc. Those ideas were abstracted from the "something" of experience, not the empty oblivion which matter is to itself when not organized as a functioning biological agent endowed with a brain.
While a handful scientists like Christof Koch might favor an end to that "nothingness" consequence of the materialist worldview via adding panpsychism to it (that is, all the features of an advanced mind have primitive precursors prior to the emergence of life), it is not the majority view. Even back in the 1800s, the influence of phenomenalism on some physicists and other scientists didn't necessary scrape against or cross paths with panpsychism (Ernst Mach, for instance, considered phenomena to be prior to both mind and matter classifications).
"In the late 19th century, an even more extreme form of phenomenalism [actually neutral monism] was formulated by Ernst Mach [...] Mach rejected the existence of [Berekely's] God and also denied that phenomena were data experienced by the mind or consciousness of subjects. Instead, Mach held sensory phenomena to be 'pure data' whose existence was to be considered anterior to any arbitrary distinction between mental and physical categories of phenomena. In this way, it was Mach who formulated the key thesis of phenomenalism, which separates it from bundle theories of objects: objects are logical constructions out of sense-data or ideas; whereas according to bundle theories, objects are made up of sets, or bundles, of actual ideas or perceptions.
That is, according to bundle theory, to say that the pear before me exists is simply to say that certain properties (greenness, hardness, etc.) are being perceived at this moment. When these characteristics are no longer perceived or experienced by anyone, then the object (pear, in this case) no longer exists. Phenomenalism as formulated by Mach, in contrast, is the view that objects are logical constructions out of perceptual properties. On this view, to say there is a table in the other room when there is no one in that room to perceive it, is to say that if there were someone in that room, then that person would perceive the table. It is not the actual perception that counts, but the conditional possibility of perceiving."
The latter bit Mach obviously acquired from the British philosopher John Stuart Mill:
"Matter, then, may be defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. If I am asked, whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter: and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this, I do not. But I affirm with confidence, that this conception of Matter includes the whole meaning attached to it by the common world, apart from philosophical, and sometimes from theological, theories. The reliance of mankind on the real existence of visible and tangible objects, means reliance on the reality and permanence of Possibilities of visual and tactile sensations, when no such sensations are actually experienced." --An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy
It is so ironic that you seem completely blind to the fact that you are following the 'conservative herd' (as you would put it) and you have a 'conservative filter'.
Thanks Glenn Beck.