Your vague metaphysical idea; post here

Ray



By real I mean everything that interacts with my physical and mental experience. In other words: reality is the world of my experience, including me, because I too am an object of my own experience.

Metaphysics being everything that I cannot interact within my experience. Of course, I can have the idea of a god, or soul. But those are, to me, ideas of the experience: as Xenofanes said, we make the gods at our image. When someone says that soul is immaterial, that is a reference to our experience conditions of what is considered material.
If we think of transcendent God, like in christian or muslin religions, then I must say it is an empty word, like soul. Immaterial, absolute, eternal, are only limit extensions to our experience conditions.

But not only concepts like god or soul reveal themselves metaphysical. The idea that the laws of science exist, independent of human beings, is the same to say that there are realities beyond our experience.

Of course, those realities can exist beyond our experience - God, laws of physics - but then, they are not our reality. Just an exercise of imagination.

I don't agree with you. The Laws of science exist independent of us, but not as a concept. Laws of physics an exercise of our imagination? No Val, concepts such as physics are concepts of something real.

You are bordering on solipsism.



So reality is only your experience and nothing more? Are you not confusing the concept of a perception of reality to a concept of reality?

Ray



But, how can you know that? In a reality without an human brain why should things be exactly as our poor and limited brain configures them?




I didn't say that laws of physics are exercise of imagination. I said that the belief that those laws remain in a reality without human beings is an exercise of imagination. Like God.



No. Just being humble. The problem is that science took men from the center of the universe - and I agree with that - and then proclaimed that man can know the physical structures of the universe, not in relation with him but in absolute. That means, science put mankind again in the center of the universe, a sort of BRAIN GOD to replace the old gods of religions. And this to me is absurd. Or, in other words, metaphysics.

Of course, the only way that reality can be perceived, is by a conscious being, and because of this, we can say that even without a human being there, reality would be as it is when it is perceived. Without any observer to sense it, then any attempt to figure out how reality looks like is futile because looks is a sense and thus a cognitive part of being aware of reality.

The laws of physics would exist independently because it works. Reality might not "appear" the same to our senses from one specie to the next because it depends on the sensory capability of the observer, but the laws of physics is nevertheless there, and our senses follow these laws of physics.

If you are trying to find out how reality looks like to an unconscious thing, then it is futile since there is no such appearance of reality for an unconscious thing. We have to look at reality from our sense capability because this is the only way we know how reality looks like and there's nothing wrong with that because our senses are a direct representation of at least some portion of reality, and we can know of "invisible" things directly(neutrinos) from our rational and empirical capability.



Of course we would have to imagine what it would be like, because we are limited to a particular space, but this imagination is a basis of something real. Again, the only way we know of what reality looks like is through our best empirical and rational ability. When we are looking at reality that we sense, we are looking at something real, being sensed, we are aware that it is there.

When we are trying to look at the fundamentals of reality, we are trying to understand it in the deepest sense.