Reality

Twyvel, my reply to your last post will have to wait until Monday, but meanwhile, if non-dualism is correct, how can anyone be wrong?

Terry,

If you can't or won't see that "proof" "cause" "evidence" and "time" constitute in combination a particular paradigm, and that these very concepts are being questioned by those at the cutting edge of "scientific research" then you will remain in "the box" with your "point".

Terry, Is the cab driver's brain "improvement" equal to the musicians?

truth
Terry, I appreciate the irony in your declaration to me that "...one would have to be extremely self-centered to proclaim that nothing exists unlelss they have personally experienced it." This, of course, reveals your complete misunderstanding of my argument. I hope it wasn't all because of my failure to express myself. I was arguing that "my" experience IS my life, just as your experience is yours. I was not talking about the positivistic understanding of research into the nature of the empirical world. I was talking, I guess, phenomenologically. Of course I can and do obtain "information" ABOUT the world "out there" from other people as well as from my own experience. But keep in mind I am not talking ABOUT the content of our shared or public world; I am talking about the nature of my immediate on-going experience of life. I can be told something ABOUT what is happening in your life, but it is a far cry from experiencing my life. I used to jest that I would not mind dying if, in my oblivion I could get reports from Walter Cronkite ABOUT events on earth. I was kidding, of course. I would prefer to occasionally have a sip of tea, or a taste of one of my wife's casseroles. THAT would be for me, experience life.
When I said that mind produces brain, I was not, of course, saying that by thinking the thought, "brain", that brain comes into existence as YOU, or any positivist, would think of it, i.e., as a palpable solid thing that exists without being perceived. I was talking about the EXPERIENCE of "brain." Even the "palpability" of a physical brain, the touching of the sqwishy thing, is itself NOTHING more than an experience, for me, for you, for anyone, and any indirect indications of it, say a weighing machine registering its "weight" is also an experience, as we READ the scale and THINK of the meaning of units of weight measurement.

"if non-dualism is correct, how can anyone be wrong?"

I made this point several pages ago.... never was answered.

truth
We were just being nice.

I appreciate your concern for yourselves, but I would like to be a part of the conversation however unpopular my ideas are.

truth
I wouldn't characterize them as unpopular.

Than discussing them would be a problem, would it?

truth
Rufio, I'm just having malicious fun. Sorry. Let me answer your question, both to you and to whoever plagerized you.
His and your question "if non-dualism is correct, how can anyone be wrong", totally misses the point about nondualism. It has nothing to do with being a tool for being right or for being wrong. Your question was not even wrong. It was, as I see it, totally off the mark, as far as my understanding of nondualism is concerned. To me, nondualism does not generate questions; it is not a scientific perspective; it focuses just about entirely on the nature of experience and the epistemology of self-hood. It is a perspective, as I see it, that is "spiritual" in nature, a nutritious perspective. Your question, from that perspective, is tantamount to asking how eating well can answer my intellectual or scientific problems? Now I know that Fresco and Tywvel, and perhaps myself, have referred, philosophically, to nondualism in our comments on the limitations of dualism, and Fresco more than Tywvel and myself is sensitive to its potential for avant-garde science. But for the most part I don't think we have been using it to generate information, only to critique dualistic arguments. I, for one, only approach intellectual and (social) scientific questions dualistically. I have no idea how I might do so non-dualistically. It may be possible in theoretical physics, but for me so far it only has applicability in philosophical discourse and private meditations. I expect a lot of flack, perhaps even from my camp, on this. But if I'm wrong I will have been advanced by the corrections.

It was Terry, earlier on this page... but I doubt it was plageurism, since everyone likes to ignore what I say regardless.

Originally, it was like this:

Frank: I will stick with my first answer which essentially is: We do not know what REALITY is -- but we do know that whatever IS -- IS. And whatever IS -- is independent of our being able to KNOW what IS.

Twyvel: I would say, "Whatever IS, is neither dependent nor independent.

Rufio: Is there another option, twyvel? Either the two are unrelated, or one dependant in whole or in part.

Twyvel: rufio, I was thinking along the lines, Whatever Is, is trans-conceptual and trans-self.

Rufio: That would be completely dependant then, and vice versa. But if that's so, than how do we discover things that are at odds to our past beliefs and that we did not know about previously? You'd think that if self were inextricably part of reality that everything we thought would be in harmony with the rest of existence.

At which point the conversation stopped because no one contested that.

Regardless of whether our discoveries are "right" or "wrong" any given person should not be able to disprove original hypotheses, but this happens all the time.

truth
Dualistic Science generates good engineering but poor philosophy. The latter may cease to be so with the new paradigms on the horizon of physics and biology.

truth
Rufio, you said that "if self were inextricably part of realitly...everything we thought would be in harmony with the rest of existence." This is very ambiguous phrasing which may account for lack of response. You would never argue, I'm sure that WE or our "self" (if such a thing existed) are not part of reality. And non-dualism does not preclude our having delusions (i.e., our making false claims about reality). Dualism merely implies that anything we do, claim, believe, say, are reflections of reality. Our statements ABOUT reality, whether right or wrong within the framework of dualism, are themselves expressions OF reality within the framework of non-dualism. It's as simple as that--I think.

From what I understand from listening to twyvel, non-dualism effectively says that not only am I existing near this chair, the chair is also a part of my exitence. Now, whether that refers to a physical objective chair that is somehow part of me because everything in nature is one, or a subjective chair which is my interpretation of something real or imagined which is part of me by virtue of being an extension of my imagination, I should after having absorbed that chair into my reality not be able to disover anything about that chair - as it exists in my reality - that I don't already know. So if you discover something about the chair that you didn't know before, either a) the chair is not part of your reality, or b) the property that you discovered does not belong to the chair.

I don't deny that we are part of reality and also effected by whatever happen in reality as most objects would be, and our perceptions are reactions to reality, and the fact that we perceive at all is also a reaction to reality. But I don't see how we could actually BE reality without knowing about it (reality, not being reality).

Rufio,

JLN is correct in saying that "non-duality" does not tell us what "reality is", but whatever it "is" it is NOT duality - there are too many epistemological problems associated with duality which have already been identified by scientists as well as philosophers.

We may never know what reality "is" or whether indeed what "is-ness" involves, but delving into these questions reveals certain mindsets (paradigms) which in real life terms are self limiting. For example, the mind set of of "striving/becoming/controlling" forms the basis of what we (in the West) at present call "knowledge". Research is funded by commercial or military rivalry with little heed to long term consequences.

Now , I am not claiming to be better than than next person in these matters. I "strive" and "waste" like anyone who has had similar conditioning. But I am aware of alternative mindsets which have associated epistemologies and these mindsets attempt to solve the problems that "traditional science" seems to have created.

So for me perhaps "reality" is "the sum total of these epistemologies" or "the sum total of parallel universes with their multifarious epistemologies" or simply being aware of "all this" and "what reality is not".

Rufio

The non-dualists will occasionally (as Fresco just did) aver that they are not offering an explanation of what REALITY is -- but if you read further in any statement in which they say that -- you will see that in fact what they are doing IS to offer an explanation of what REALITY IS - even if only by limiting what it CAN be.


I certainly do not know what REALITY is.

I do not see anywhere enough unambiguous evidence upon which to make a reasonable judgment about what the TRUTH is about REALITY - not to limit or exclude any of the myriad possibilities that we can think of or which we can acknowledge as being beyond our present abilities to conceptualize.

I see no reliable evidence that anyone else on the planet is in any better a position with regard to any of that.


I think that is the best place to leave that -- with the proviso that we continue to investigate using what we have available for that investigation here in...the illusion...if that is what it turns out to be.

Science should continue to investigate; mentalists should continue to investigate.

Unfortunately, the non-dualists have crafted a belief system such that they cannot investigate without having the belief system crumble -- so they will have to sit on the sidelines and await whatever the dualists (seem) to discover.

Frank, Spoken like a true non-realist!

truth
I made a mistake above and sit here surprised that I'm not paying for it. I carelessly said that "Dualistic Science generates good engineering but poor philsophy." Actually I should have said that science supports in the popular mind the validity of naive realism. Science before quantum mechanics and its offspring is not philosophically iconoclastic, theologically it has been, i.e., the findings of Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, etc.. But engineering existed before science as we know it. Great aqueducts, churches, and machines of all sorts existed during the middle age and before.

You made an even bigger slip of the tongue with that "...engineering existed before science as we know it" comment.

"Science as we know it" is not different enough from "science as the ancient Egyptians knew it" -- to really be considered different. Mostly it is a bunch of people touting guesses about REALITY based on very, very scant, and decidedly ambiguous, evidence -- and touting them as FACT rather than conjecture.

Funny thing -- Fresco and I were discussing this very point in another thread earlier.

Frank's quote, ""Science as we know it" is not different enough from "science as the ancient Egyptians knew it" -- to really be considered different. Mostly it is a bunch of people touting guesses about REALITY based on very, very scant, and decidedly ambiguous, evidence -- and touting them as FACT rather than conjecture." Very well stated, Frank.