Reality is relative, not absolute.

@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Even you should see that only a fool would ask for "chapter and verse" and then reject that answer as "an appeal to authority".

If you have a need satisfied by considering me to be a fool because of my last post, Fresco...by all means indulge yourself.

But I am not a fool...and the substance of my remark was appropriate.

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@cicerone imposter,

Sorry...you wanted other examples of normal use of "reality".
How about
1. "She thinks she can cook but in reality she is hopeless."
Re Decision Context...whether to accept a dinner invitation.

2. "Artificial flowers can be as effective as real ones as table decorations".
Re Decision Context...what to use to to decorate tables.

3. "He was not his real self when he committed the crime".
Re Decision Context....what sentence a judge should hand out.

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@fresco,

Quote:

1. "She thinks she can cook but in reality she is hopeless."
Re Decision Context...whether to accept a dinner invitation.

"she is hopeless" is your value. What's your point?

Quote:

2. "Artificial flowers can be as effective as real ones as table decorations".
Re Decision Context...what to use to to decorate tables.

So what? Who's going to complain whether the flowers are real or imitations?
What's your point? Who cares what individual values about flowers are? You?

Quote:

3. "He was not his real self when he committed the crime".
Re Decision Context....what sentence a judge should hand out.

That's only one opinion. Whether that is true or not is determined by a court of law. The decision for a sentence is made by the jury, not the judge.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Quote:
while Fresco is talking about the description of the thing

With respect Joe, I am not. Try listening to Rorty(from about 13 mins in to 17 mins)

I watched Rorty. I'm just not sure you watched Rorty. If you did, you didn't understand him, because he says exactly what I said and what you've failed to grasp - that there's a difference between "actual reality" and the description of reality.

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We all have seen Rorty here n there...Rorty is careful and his circumventing of the problem is more subtle then Fresco's position, he simply states that he has nothing to say about reality. He never dares to claim any position about its existence.

To say that a perceptual apparatus in the human brain participates in the phenomena of "experiencing" changes nothing on the status of reality independently of our knowledge being filtered. Such participation itself requires a reality.

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The all problem can be resumed to the problem of identity...X is X.
Whatever criticism we want to make concerning Reality, we have to establish a function in regards to it which operates, that works, as is described. If we want to say that reality is a construction the term "construction" must refer to an actual operation which is not an illusion, that is, it has to construct. Itself automatically is excluded from being a construction...If X (to construct) is X and does what X is described to do then X cannot be fabricated, you cannot construct construction. To "fabricate" requires itself existence, working. While I cannot establish an original point, a fundamental property from where all is derived, that is, which X comes first, I still can certainly say that whatever it is, works, it is real. Such X is X. Reality cannot be fabricated !

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Reality itself can't be fabricated, but the individual's perception of it may not reflect the common interpretation of it. Even the idea of 'common interpretation' leaves much to be desired.

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@joefromchicago,

I may be wrong here but it seems to me that "reality" is a construction that is defined in various ways. But what is constructed is not the thing itself. It is our invention something we refer to intellectually but not point to emperically. THAT--like the Tao--remains ineffable. I think of it as the empty foundation of everything, That makes me not quite an anti-foundationalist like Rorty.
I don't know why some of us are so threatened by Fresco; he's trying to make useful contributions to our understanding, not trying to defeat us. His appeals are to the arguments of certain philosophers not to the philosophers themselves (as authorities).

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@JLNobody,

I don't have any problem with fresco saying that people have different interpretations of reality. Granted, that would be an utterly banal observation, but there's nothing wrong with it. On the other hand, I do have a problem with fresco saying that people have different realities, as if he's talking about the "actual reality" (as Rorty put it) rather than the perception of reality. I don't mind banality, I just object to banality that is masqueraded as profundity.

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@joefromchicago,

You don't seem to have grasped the point that when Rorty uses the phrase "actual reality" he uses it at arms length as though it were in inverted commas in order to dismiss it later on when he sides with Heidegger et al.
Listen further when he discusses "the search for truth" as NOT "an attempt to get closer to reality", or watch the Magee-Dreyfus interview to understand Heidegger's paradigmatic shift away from phenomenology and the subject-object distinction .

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@JLNobody,

Insofar as you, I and some others here have elsewhere attempted to engage in a mutual project which attempts to discuss aspects of meditational states we have attempted to depart from Rorty's foundationalism.

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@JLNobody,

JLNobody wrote:

I may be wrong here but it seems to me that "reality" is a construction that is defined in various ways. But what is constructed is not the thing itself. It is our invention something we refer to intellectually but not point to emperically. THAT--like the Tao--remains ineffable. I think of it as the empty foundation of everything, That makes me not quite an anti-foundationalist like Rorty.
I don't know why some of us are so threatened by Fresco; he's trying to make useful contributions to our understanding, not trying to defeat us. His appeals are to the arguments of certain philosophers not to the philosophers themselves (as authorities).

Yes, you may be.

REALITY is whatever actually IS.

I realize that Fresco uses big words and complicated phraseology...which he apparently does to persuade naive people that he is an intelligent person sharing great knowledge. You apparently are buying into it. (Paul Krugman wrote, "He (someone) speaks like what stupid people think intelligent people speak."

Fresco is an intelligent person, JL...but the best guess that can be made here is that he is merely spreading the gospel of a religion he has established.

Whatever IS...IS.

And when he is speaking out against what is being said in opposition to his position...is about human inability to understand and communicate about reality...NOT ABOUT REALITY.

REALITY is whatever IS.

Quote:

...he's trying to make useful contributions to our understanding, not trying to defeat us. His appeals are to the arguments of certain philosophers not to the philosophers themselves (as authorities).

Interesting guess about his motives. I'm pretty sure I can guess why you have to make that particular guess. Your non-duality seems to depend upon it in your mind...and you have begun to treat your guesses about non-duality the way theists treat their guesses about gods.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

You don't seem to have grasped the point that when Rorty uses the phrase "actual reality" he uses it at arms length as though it were in inverted commas in order to dismiss it later on when he sides with Heidegger et al.

Rorty says that there can be no agreement on "actual reality" because no description can be privileged over another. On that point I have no objection. But I didn't hear him say that there's no such thing as "actual reality," and given that he was talking about the pragmatism of Dewey and James, I'd be surprised if he diverged from them by rejecting "actual reality," as you seem to do.

And if he agrees with Heidegger, then he must be as full of **** as Heidegger was.

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@JLNobody,

I am well aware that you were referring to "our invention" when I wrote my reply up there...I have nothing against Fresco except disliking his constant circumventing of pertinent counters...he would get far more sympathy whatever his take was if he admitted the underlying "problems" with his position and tried to his best to answer the questions like for instance you try !
I in the distant past, now Setanta and Joe, have made the remark more then once that "creators of realities" need themselves be created in order to create anything...to this Fresco does not make a single small comment. That JL is dishonest, and itself justification for people resenting Fresco patronizing attitude when he can't even address the core of the counters people throw at him.

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@joefromchicago,

15.30 to 16.00 on clip.
"...These ways of thinking about truth, belief and reality are common to...(Dewey, Heidegger etc) ....They all give up on the idea of reality as it is in itself.....all deny things have intrinsic natures as opposed to more or less useful descriptions...."

Quote:

And if he agrees with Heidegger, then he must be as full of **** as Heidegger was

.
That comment is unworthy of your otherwise well deserved intellectual reputation.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Counters from "Sam's Wife" are not worth commenting on.
As Wittgenstein pointed out so called "philosophical problems" (e.g. of traditional realists such as yourself) tend to evaporate once one has moved away from the correspondence theory of truth and accepted the non-representionalist account of language which, post Wittgenstein was developed by Rorty, Sellars and Quine. JLN's Buddhist language may be deemed by some to take a transcendent "God's eye view" but so does your own mathematical obscurantism. The use of the term "dishonesty"in these matters is completely out of place as indeed Rorty argues throughout.
I suggest what you call a"patronizing attitude" is merely a reaction to my more extensive range of references that you can muster. I make no apology for reproducing such references from my off-line philosophical activities in which they are considered by all involved to be essential. Such references are the province of those who consider themselves to be fulfilling the mission statement of A2K.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

15.30 to 16.00 on clip.
"...These ways of thinking about truth, belief and reality are common to...(Dewey, Heidegger etc) ....They all give up on the idea of reality as it is in itself.....all deny things have intrinsic natures as opposed to more or less useful descriptions...."

You take that remark out of context. Rorty is talking about the correspondence theory of truth, and how the pragmatists rejected that theory as unworkable. Dewey and James, however, never denied that there was an "actual reality" out there, just that there was no point in trying to pin down that reality when a functional description was good enough.

fresco wrote:

Quote:
And if he agrees with Heidegger, then he must be as full of **** as Heidegger was
.
That comment is unworthy of your otherwise well deserved intellectual reputation.

But Heidegger was full of ****. Like Hegel, he constructed an elaborate philosophy atop a heap of sheer nothingness. It took Schopenhauer to see through Hegel's pompous nonsense. I suppose we're still waiting for someone to come along to take the air out of Heidegger's balloon.

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@joefromchicago,

You obviously have a problem with Heidegger whose thoughts are clearly central to "the context" in which I assert Rorty is operating. The significant role that Heidegger plays in Rorty's seminal Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature would support that assertion. That reference establishes why Rorty moved on from James' ambiguity with the correspondence theory of truth, to his rejection of it, in line with Heidegger's rejection of the subject-object distinction.

I can't solve your anti-Heidegger bias, but I suggest you listen to Dreyfus his celebrated proponent for a good account of his exegesis.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaGk6S1qhz0
(All sections recommended)

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@joefromchicago,

Well, now we're beginnng to engage constructively. It's as if we all came out of a trance of ego-defensive aggressiveness. I've worked in the academic world much of my adult life and frankly all the conversations of all the Ph.D.s
I've experienced have not been more "interesting" than the latter part of this thread.
By the way, my reference to the emptiness of the "foundation " of human experience is, I suppose, an attempt to keep "reality" at arm's length because I don't know or have anything reliable to say about it. I'm simply trying to avoid the infinite regression of the description of the creation of the world's Creator. Ontological futility--all the way down. One Buddhist symbol of the foundation (the source) of all phenomena is a Great Empty Circle. I like it simply because it is satisfying in a deeply personal if not scientific or logical way. I suppose that IS "religion." But I feel comfortable with it because it is empty, non-commital. I suppose that is why I've always supported Frank's tautological claim for Reality: it is what it is is, nothing more and nothing less. Did God say somewhere "I am that I am". Or as Nietzsche would have it He was that he was?

I must go now to my morning meditation--a completely useless non-endeavor: sitting quietly for forty minutes in the Great Empty Circle.

1 Reply

@JLNobody,

JLN, I believe you've summarized it very well! Individuals believe anything they wish as their reality, and that includes believing in their god(s). Nobody else can talk them out of what people believe, simply because that's their reality.

I think what I've observed during the discussion here about reality are fireflys with some light, but with no real conclusion.

But you hit the nail on the very head of reality. I think your hammer has value.

2 Replies

Reality is relative, not absolute.

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