Definition of Reality

There was a time when "rationality" was a "non-ordinary" state. Maybe it still is! :flowers:

well I think part of the modern mind-set is to believe that normality is reality.

But now you're going to have to define what you mean by "normality."

If we stop thinking in terms of subject/object, will that make it disappear?

A more mature distinction to make, and the one I came to in the end, was the distinction between 'conditioned' and 'unconditioned' views, understandings, and so on. What I realised out of my 60's experiences is that most of us live in a realm of consensus and convention which has no absolute foundation or basis. It is mainly pragmatic and oriented to getting along. This corresponds with the 'conditioned consciousness'. There is also an unconditioned consciousness but it is something that has to be discovered. It takes a lot of self-awareness and the will to find it. This 'unconditioned realm' corresponds to the higher states in Eastern philosophy. But you have to make the effort to ascend to it. Normally, left to our own devices, we won't.

Well, of course, whether we know something is real depends on our "subjective experiences". Knowing depends partly on mind. But whether or not something is real does not depend on anyone's "subjective experiences". In fact, whether the Moon is real or not, does not depend on whether there are any sentient beings. Since we know that there was a Moon before there were any sentient beings on Earth. We should not confuse what we have experience of with the object of our experience.

Well I do not say everything that is "real" necessarily depends on our subjective experience. I said the "real" necessarily includes at least part of our subjective experience. We should also not confuse our experience of an object with the object itself.

There is also an unconditioned consciousness but it is something that has to be discovered. It takes a lot of self-awareness and the will to find it. This 'unconditioned realm' corresponds to the higher states in Eastern philosophy. But you have to make the effort to ascend to it. Normally, left to our own devices, we won't.

That is a good question and well worth pondering.

It seems a little off thread to go on about "what is normal"

If you think about it, normality and reality ought to be closely intertwined, or even exactly coincide. The fact that they do not is one of the main drivers behind the 'search for meaning' and the sense that 'something is not right'.

The modern world holds 'naturalism' in high regard; we seek 'natural explanations' for our existence, which translates, in effect, to believing that life itself is something which is, in principle, explicable in terms of science. And this is so much part of day-to-day reality that we forget that we have assumed it; and then we loose the ability to recall that this is what we have projected or assumed. I think this actually leads to a very deep-seated anxiety; because intuitively, we sense that despite our best explanations, life itself is not really rational or explicable. The evidence for this is the fear of chaos and the nagging threat of global catastrophe - climatic, economic, or atomic. This lurks around on the fringes of our awareness while we go about our daily lives.

Part of the modern outlook is to disparage the mystical, the religious. Yet religion is often strong where our modern project is weak: in coming to terms with the Unknown. Rationalists (so-called, although they are not at all that in the traditional sense) get really worked up about this, first because the persistence of mystery is deeply unsettling to them, and secondly because the religious seem to have made an arrangement with mystery which accommodates it without explaining how it works in rational terms. They are deeply angry about it. But this anger too is basically rooted in fear and denial because all of us do feel the unknown within ourselves. According to scholar David Loy, this manifests as the sense of lack, the feeling that something is missing or we are without some important thing. And this in turn drives a good deal of our modern culture, so-called, with its consumerism, reliance on entertainment, the worship of celebrity and money, and so on.

This is what is driving a good deal of the anti-religion of modernity. It is a complex which has taken a long time to develop. And we're standing in it.

I believe in progress, science, the separation of church and state, and secular values. But even so, there is something essential that has been forgotten in the headlong rush into modernity. So to say that to deeply question and to seek out perennial spiritual truths is to turn the clock back to medieval times is to misconstrue the nature of the situation.

Incidentally, I was going to say, in relation to your earlier post, that the idea of 'conventional reality' is really what The Bible would refer to as 'The World' - namely, the realm of socially-conditioned opinion and convention. Until modern times, all kinds of philosophers were aware of this concept, but we are now so thoroughly immersed in it, we have forgotten how to make the distinction.

I am somehow happy that if the price of anesthetics and anti-biotics was giving up "something essential", that happened. If you require surgery, so will you.

What distinction do you mean? Between reality and what?

'no metaphysics' is a form of metaphysics, and a very poor one at that.

The argument is not really about abandoning science, reason and technology in the quest for "truth". Clearly science is an extraordinarily powerful tool in the quest. The notion is more one that science alone gives you only a partial, incomplete and imperfect picture of "total reality" human experience. There may have been a wisdom present in earlier times that in the dramatic adoption of science as the only method of obtaining truth and the sole basis for answering the existential questions of the human condition has been lost. I would argue science and the scientific method do not suffice to construct a quide to living well and that your science is always supplemented by some form of metaphysics in constructing a world view (a view of the world in which to live and which to live by).

Since there was reality way before there were people.

Science does not pretend to answer questions of value, so you should not suppose that it does pretend to do it. But science does give us information so that we can make sensible judgements about value.

Human experience is not total reality (whatever that is). Since there was reality way before there were people. Science does not pretend to answer questions of value, so you should not suppose that it does pretend to do it. But science does give us information so that we can make sensible judgements about value.

You say that a lot, and yet the only being who know this are people. The fact that the Universe existed for x billion years prior to the emergence of H Sapiens, is only known, as far as we can tell, to H Sapiens.