Reality - Subjective or Objective?

I believe you are the only one here, Journey. I am merely an implant placed inside your head by Grog the Gorgarian from Nebulus s6.

Obviously, in my belief system, you are here. I think you are here. But there is something more fundamental than the "are we all really here" debate.

Of course we are all here, at least to most of us, that is true. Majority rules. But if I were to ask you if politicians are evil. What would you say?

This seems to be a popular topic of discussion on Able2Know. I wonder why that is.

I am very curious as to why so many are searching for reality. Doesn't anyone accept anything at face value? You are alive. That's reality. I am alive that's reality. These looking for reality threads are confusing to me. THAT's reality.

Why so much on reality?
Well, I am a newbie.

That is my reality.

theres another topic devoted to this conversation so why take up more space?

Other Threads..
Well, sorry about that. I scanned through the threads too quickly I guess. I was looking for this subject, and didn't see it anywhere when I first posted this topic.

I will be more careful in the future.



Journey

np

As I understand it, reality, by definition, is objective. If it were not objective, it would not be "reality".

Embodied Realism

Cognitive science argues for an embodied realism as opposed to philosophy's metaphysical realism. Embodied realism provides us with a link between our ideas and the worlds we experience. "Our bodies contribute to our sense of what is real".

Spatial-relations concepts are not part of the world but are embodied and provide us with our ability to make sense of the world. "They characterize what spatial form is and define spatial inference."

We do not see neither nearness nor farness but see objects in the world as they are and attribute the characteristic of nearness or farness to them. "We use spatial-relation concepts unconsciously, and we impose them unconsciously via our perceptual and conceptual systems. We just automatically and unconsciously ?'perceive' one entity as in, on, or across from another entity. However, such perception depends on an enormous amount of automatic unconscious mental activity on our part."

We might see a butterfly ?'in' the garden. We conceptualize a three-dimensional container that is bounded by the garden and that which contains the butterfly. We locate the butterfly as a figure relative to that container. "We perform such complex, though mundane, acts of imaginative perception during every moment of our waking lives."

Spatial relations have built in "logics" by virtue of their image-schematic structure:
Given two containers, A and B, and an object, X, if A is ?'in' B and X is ?'in' A, then X is ?'in' B. Such is self-evident and requires no deduction. A container is a gestalt structure, its parts make no sense without the whole, it has an inside, outside, and a boundary.

"Container schemas, like other image schemas, are cross-modal. We can impose a conceptual container schema on a visual scene." We can impose it on something we hear, on music perhaps to separate components, on our motor movements such as breaking down our movements in a tennis stroke and deal with these parts as within the whole.

Another important schema commonly used in perception and conception is the source-path-goal schema, which has an internal spatial "logic" with built in inferences":
*If you have traversed a route to a current location, you have been at all previous locations on the route.
*If you travel from A to B and from B to C, them you have traveled from A to C.
*And so forth.

"Our most fundamental knowledge of motion is characterized by the source-path-goal schema…One of the important discoveries of cognitive science is that the conceptual systems used in the world's languages make use of a relatively small number of basic image schemas…The spatial logics of these body-based image schemas are among the sources of the forms of logic used in abstract reason."

The embodied mind hypothesis "radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction. In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movement) plays a central in conception. That is, the very mechanisms responsible for perception, movements, and object manipulation could be responsible for conceptualization and reasoning."

There is, for us, only our subjective experience. And THAT is an objective fact.

echi says: "As I understand it, reality, by definition, is objecdtive. If it were not objective, it would not be 'reality'."

If we remain within this dualistic framework (and I tried to transcend it in my last post), we might also say--and both statements seem valid--that if reality were not subjective, we would not experience it.

I agree with echi. If you say that reality is not objective, then you are talking about perception/experience itself, whether or not it does show reality.

If you are psychotic, you might see a cat flying around your head. Is the cat really there? No, but you are perceiving it. In other words, you would be seeing something that isn't really there.



No... if reality were not subjective, then it will exist whether or not we experience it.

So, does it even make sense to try to define "reality"?
(Oh, man... what a dumb question.)

What the hell are we talking about?

Non-dualistically, reality is both objective and subjective, depending on one's issue. But I would not agree with Ray that it is ONLY objective--nor with the idealists that it is ONLY subjective. How about a two-sided coin that presents the problem that we can only see one of its sides at a time.

Thanks, JL. You just melted my brain.

Okay. Is there really any objectivity? Is objectivity even possible?

Journey,

This topic has been discussed many times on a2k.
e.g.
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=17919&highlight=

The dichotomy "subjective-objective" may be too simplistic to analyse the meaning of "reality".