Reality

I'm not exactly sure what I was supposed to be trying, fresco, and I'm not quite clear on what this little exercise is supposed to demonstrate. I thought of myself as an "it" a couple of times: didn't really shift any paradigms for me, but then I may be a lost cause.


This bit of condescension was a lot funnier before you corrected your misspelling of "anthropocentric."

truth
Frank, this rests, of course, on one's definition of science. For you, it's a more general term, i.e., the quest for knowledge. For me, it's the more narrow, "method": the formal use of hypotheses, falsifiable assertions that can be subjected to testing. I agree that science has never had a monopoly on the acquisition of knowledge. Trial and error was, I agree, THE method of knowledge acquisition prior to science. The extremely long"formative phases" of all cultural evolution, according to anthropologists, reflects this process of trial-and-error, as well as serendipitous good luck. Science is more methodical--indeed, it IS method. No doubt accident, luck and good guesswork is a part of it. One can generate hypotheses by means of guesswork, virtually random observations or deductions of extant general theory, but ulitmately it must be TESTED before I would consider it as part of the scientific enterprise.

Hey Joe, you nearly got it ! The "I" which maybe a "lost cause" could be just one of several. But to see this is to see is to see "all". (Mystical wink :wink: )

BTW "Anthropocentric" is a term used by "deep ecologists" in their rejection of a " consumerist progress" paradigm. It is not so much condescending as self-critical. Whereas I do not personally subscribe to "ecology" I do see the term as underlying the fact that "our reality" is "species specific".

JLN's quote, "..... but ultimately it must be TESTED before I would consider it as part of the scientific enterprise." The problem with this concept is the fact that we don't know "what's missing" from what we consider 'scientific fact.' Testing goes on after we are gone, and what we think are indisputable today may turn out to be wrong.

truth
Cicerone, what you say is absolutely true. But I was not suggesting that science EVER arrives at some absolute truth that will never be improved upon or rejected. If science is PROGRESSIVE, as it claims to be (correctly I should add), all of its findings are tentative. I was referring to the methodology that generates tentative trues and the improves upon them.

Fresco, I absolutely love your phrase, "mystical wink." I have had the honor of trying to learn something from three bona fide zen masters, and NOW I see that they were sometimes giving me enigmatic gestures and statements that can be glossed as "mystical winks." I sure hope they weren't "blinks" at my denseness.

What problems are there with duality, fresco? I'm not claiming to say what reality is either - I am just saying that whatever it is, it would be completely known if it were non-dual.

truth
Rufio, I'm giving off a fine dualist scream because I wrote you a long response to your last statement to Fresco and hit some devilish button that erased it. Oh well, we'll all live without it. But I did want to suggest to you that you may have hit on something. When one drops the dualistic stance, when one stops perceiving and conceivng the world dualistically it IS in an importance sense "completely known", at least all the knowing that is available to one with our nervous systems. Zen masters tell us that we are ALREADY enlightened except for the fact that we cover it up with world-fragmenting distinctions. This may be the meaning behind the biblical myth of man's eating from the tree of knowledge of good and bad, true and false and all the rest of our constructed divisions. Northup compared the world of an "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" of the non-dualist to that of the dualist: a differentiated aesthetic continuum. In both cases it is an aesthetic (immediately perceived) continuum, but we divide it all up into discrete fragments, including our constructed and alienated selves. That recovers the gist of my lost theme.

Try this "reality" exercise." It's gonna drive you batty.
*******************
Left brain, right brain
>>
>> This is a little silly but true... and it's going to drive
>> you crazy!
>>
>> While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the
>> floor and make clockwise circles.
>>
>> Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the
>> air with your right hand.
>>
>> Your foot will change direction and there's nothing
>> you can do about it.

truth
o.k., was that supposed to be hard?

truth
C.I., just kidding. It wasn't hard; it was a neurological IMPOSSIBILITY. Why do you do such things to us?

I don't know, I had it there for a little bit. Jerky circles and sixes with tails, but I did do it.

Don't you hate that, jl?

But, in your post, are you saying that we lose the ability to know reality by assuming that we exist as a perceiver of it and outside of it, and therefore can't know it? Because that's kind of like saying that we do know that fairies are real until we realize that there's no evidence for them. I mean, I don't think anyone's saying that your incorrect beliefs about reality aren't subjective, and that they aren't a part of you as a perceiver, or that they're objectively perceived in any way.

Sort of like trying to explain what "reality" is.

truth
O.K., Rufio if after all this time that's the most you take from my efforts, let's just acknowledge that I'm incapable of communicating my perspective to you and just rest with that.

Rufio,

It is well known in the sciences that the observer affects the observed. This may not be always be a "practical problem" but is definitely an "epistemological problem" becomes it questions the independent existential status of either and ultimately points to the need to reconsider "existence" itself.

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


Sometimes a lot can be said in a few words,



You can't deviate from the Tao.Terry, Frank and surprisingly joefromchicago

truth
Excellent, Twyvel. Yes, one cannot deviate from the Tao, any more than one can do something that is un-natural. And in our immediate (pre-reflective) experience--which is the ground of all mentation--we cannot be dualists. We suffer the delusion that our necessarily dualistic thoughts ABOUT experience are the ground of mentation. That is, to use a gross metaphor, being grounded in sand.

I suppose that may be true, if only very slightly, fresco, but since our observational powers may or may not be accurate anyway, I don't think it would be very significant. This doesn't mean that whenever we see something we are seeing ourselves projected on reality. Nietzsche was wrong about that, if he was refering to everything.

JL, if I've misinterpreted what you said, than what DID you mean?

That is a very interesting way to say "I wonder why Frank, Terry, and Joe refuse to buy into my belief system?"

I don't know whether I should be proud or embarrassed to be singled out by twyvel in this fashion. Perhaps, in a non-dualistic sense, I should be both simultaneously.

But I guess I missed the infinite regress of which twyvel speaks for one of two possible reasons: (1) it was mentioned in one of those interminably long posts that I didn't bother to read; or (2) it was described in that peculiar language -- "twyvelese" -- of which I have only a tentative grasp. On the other hand, I can confidently assert that it was not due to my fear of the "perceived consequences," since the consequences of admitting the identity of the observer and the observed are, at most, trivial and inconsequential, much as embracing Buddhism is, by and large, trivial and inconsequential.

In any event, I'm not sure I could reconcile the possibility of so Aristotelian a notion as an infinite regress with the decidedly un-Aristotelian notion of non-dualism, so I suppose that I'll remain unenlightened in this regard.

having just waded through the last couple of day's (should i say "daze') posts, i must insist that my reality is neither 'dualist' or non dualist, but an integrated amalgom of all the sensory aspects of which i am aware (including, but not limited to, the internal, and external).
My reality is born of chaos, as sensorily catagorized, and seen always through a scrim of humour (Fresco's 'mystic wink'), without which absolutely nothing can make sense, or should i say which buffers the fact that absolutely nothing does make sense!

Reality is an infinite 'fractal' experience.