Reality

truth
Frank, in comparing the non-dualists to christians you at least said that IT SEEMS to you that that is what we are doing. You are admitting, I hope, that, from the outside, it only APPEARS to be the same. I've been both a christian and an atheist, both a dualist and non-dualist. And from the inside they do not look the same to me. So I do not know why you are SO attached to appearances.

Re: truth



Because I've discovered that where there is smoke -- there is fire.

Next time you are in a crowded theater and you smell smoke -- try sitting there and debating whether you are becoming "attached to appearances" by reacting. :wink:

By the way...Christians often mention that they were once atheists or agnostics -- and then mention that "from the inside of Christianity" they can see...blah, blah, blah.

A belief system is a very powerful thing.

truth
Frank, you're suffering from smoke on the brain.

By the way, here is a very good contrast between dualistic theistic Christians and non-dualist "mystics". A dualist says "There is only one true God (my God)"; the non-dualist, if he were to use religious terminology, would say "There is only God." I hope you appreciate the difference.

Frank wrote:



Yes and you should know Frank

Re: truth


never seemed to cause any hesitation in the past..

Hmmm; seriously though, the current discussion is dealing with primary perceptions similar to those of a new born baby who is frequently unable to grasp sensory concepts, due to lack of experience; the language of 'perception' must be learned, simply in order to 'see'.
If we try to sense reality completely without 'baggage', there are no criteria guiding our assessments; without history, we are intellectually 'blind'.

BoGoWo, Even with history, we're blind - so it seems.

i should append that i meant the personal 'history' of individual experience, not social history in general.

BoGoWo

cicerone imposter



Yes, as long as 'you' are and imagine to be that 'you', you have to a some perspective, becasue the 'you' IS a perspective.

i tried it from a 'ewe's' perspective, but everything was very, very, green!

i'm going to try it in 'third person' (will report back).

truth
BoGoWo, you understand us to be talking about "primary" perception (I would prefer "primordial" perception) SIMILAR to that of the new born baby who sees somewhat like the congenitally blind person who is suddenly given sight. In both cases the individual must learn (as you say) to see, to make cognitive sense of what he's seeing. That's correct. But there is a difference between these two forms of profoundly "naive" perception and that of a non-dualistic perceiver. The latter is, as Twyvel notes, not blind; he just sees (as a result of a kind of sophistication, not naivete) through the structures he has imposed on perception; he's aware of the artificial nature of his perceptual "baggage," as you call it. When one sees experience "pre-reflectively," as in zen or vipassana meditation, he sees sensations, ALMOST, but probably not quite, as if for the first time. This is what I enjoy about completely non-representational abstract art: I see aesthetically moving compositions of color, line, shape, texture, design, values, etc. without needing to ask "What is it?" (i.e., what does it represent?). I am enjoying a kind of pure pre-reflective aesthetic experience for itself. I don't know if that is true of the new born baby, but I've heard that many newly sighted congenitally blind individuals are horrified by the cacophany of disorganized and meaningless visual sensations. These individuals should have undergone a long course of meditation before gaining sight.

I am thinking here that "color perception" is an excellent exploratory tool in a discussion of "reality". On the one hand most of us "agree" on major color categories even though we cannot occupy each others heads, yet on the other we may disagree at "color boundaries" due to personal history, or the nature of the lighting in the overall illumination of "objects". It is also the case that if we were all "color blind" then certain categories would not exist, or if we had enhanced perceptual apparatus like other mammals we might have extra categories.

It is easy to extrapolate from "color perception and color boundaries" to "general perception and ALL boundaries of reality" (including that which constitutes "self"). There will be a certain degree of agreement due to commonality of structure (species), history (langage and culture), and purpose (nature of ambient light), but such "agreement" is as far as "reality" can go.

truth
Fresco, I have not quite tuned into the point you are making here. Does it concern color PERCEPTION (which is always private and sensual) versus color category CONCEPTION (which is public and conventional) as ingredients of a model of "reality"? My congenitally blind friend, who I use sometimes in these discussions, has color categories--he can ask me the color of my car, and when I answer blue he understands up to a point--but his color categories are empty. They reflect no perceptual experience, nor do they stimulate such experience in imagination. So, I suppose it can be said that he and I occupy, at least with regard to color (and other visual) experience different realities. How might we extrapolate from this to a more general model of "reality?
Or am I too far off the mark?

JLN, How do you describe any color to your blind friend? Blue? I wouldn't know where to start.

JLN

There is essentially no difference between "perception" and "conception" if we define them both as "interactions". Blind people use the verb "see" for common communicative purposes with sighted people. Their categories are not "empty" but "different"...but so presumably are yours and mine ! What matters is the nature and purpose of the communication i.e. what constitutes a "significant difference" in communicative co-ordination.... but again none of us completely overlap as shown by this very discussion!

sorry to get back to the point.
To me reality is a collective agreement of thought applied to the experience of the five senses of our bodies.

However, it is not realistic to assume that our experiences are the same. Rather it tend towards a likeness that makes us feel comfortable in our experiential process. We agree only because it aids us in getting a balance of sorts. It does not mean that reality is real. Only that our perception thereof is acceptably static. This way we can call ourselves sane and normal.

A mad persons reality is in fact a deviation of the collectively acceptable and comfortable experience we agree on. Ergo no person is in fact truly mad. It is only our measure of the same experience that we class mad people so.

For this I apologies.

Doomy.

truth
Good question, Cicerone. My blind friend has no sensual experience of color, but he has the IDEA of color, and I suppose he would consider it a sensation like the sound, touch, taste and temperature sensations he DOES have. But the very idea of color would seem to be out of his reach, unless we consider it an idea dressed in the same word, "color," thus giving us the gratifying illusion that we are talking about the same thing, what the psychological anthropologist Anthony Wallace called "equivalence structures." These structures serve as substitutes for actual sharing.
Doomy, I agree with you. Your orientation is essentially that of the "symbolic interactionists" of sociology, and Anthony Wallace (above). I also essentially share your notion about normality and madness, but I do have some reservations because of my experience with a psychotic (paranoid schizophrenic friend who is too often subject to extreme emotional suffering. Nevertheless, I do tend to think of psychotics, like everyone else, as creating mental realities that make them feel relatively comfortable, i.e., strategies of adjustment. Or as R.D. Laing once said, they are not lost; they are hiding. I would not bet my house on this until I know more about psychiatry. So, I do suspect that there is some difference between clinical and statistical abnormality, but I agree with you to the extent that people tend to exaggerate that difference.
Fresco, I--as, I think, would Wallace--agree with you that CONGENITALLY blind people use "see" purely for its communicative value, and that the difference between me and my blind friend is only a more extreme form of my inability to know if my spoken concepts or experienced sensations are the same as yours. But I do not KNOW that when I see "red" it is not the same experience you have (the problem of Other Minds). Hence, I cannot confidently accept absolute subjectivism or solipcism. I agree that both perception and conception are forms of interaction with the world (pardon the obvious and inevitable dualistic phrasing), but there is the difference that perception refers to usually but not always conceptually informed sensations and conception refers to sensually grounded symbolizations, i.e, when I "think" the concept, house, I can feel it as a mental sensation.

Thanks for that vote of confidence, that being my first post and all.
On an interesting note with reference to the emotional aspect and the understanding of cognitive ability, has anyone had a look at the idea(although darwinian) of the human brain being divided into 3 distinct sources or levels of interaction being Amphibian brain -> Reptilian brain-> Mammalian, then Primate and finally Human brain. I find this to be of interest in that it may explain the centres of understanding when it comes to the concepts of abstract thought vs. cognitive/automotive response. In the previous discussion with respect to "the blind understanding of colour" or the human infants non-cognitive response to stimuli, we may have a situation where we are trying to tackle reality without the necessary understanding of how the brain actually functions. This leads me to think or hypothesize that reality is part of our very existence so that we may ultimately be creatures of design and not evolutionaly different from all other species we encounter.

Had our predecessors not encountered the world as they saw it/ experienced it, we may have had a totally different set of rules governing our current understaing of reality.

Am I making any sense?

Thanks.

Doomy, welcome to A2K. Yes, your posts make sense. My guess is that evolution selects for those individuals whose brains are most adept at correctly conceptualizing "reality" from sensory data in order to find food and avoid predators. I have read a little bit about the triune brain theory: reptilian (basic functions), mammalian (limbic system/emotions), and primate (neocortex).

Much work has been done on how the brain functions. People with varying degrees of colorblindness, synesthesia in which sensory perceptions are cross-linked (letters and numbers may be perceived as having colors, for instance), and the ability of animals to see more or fewer colors than we do suggest that there are differences in how we perceive things such as color.

Twyvel, you ignored my response to you (Feb 7 post 551366) regarding the observation of awareness, consciousness, knowledge, and brains, and simply reiterated the one point on which I suggested that we agree to disagree: subject/object dichotomy and infinite regression.

Have you ever actually experienced the non-dualistic state?

If so, do you have any awareness of particular objects making up the universe or only a "feeling" of being at one with everything? In other words, can you gather any useful information (remote sensing, for instance) from your experiences?