what if you are a delusional mental case. reality is what is there, not what is perceived. the media is always trying to get you to perceive one thing that has nothing to do with what is there, let alone if one's perception is distorted, clouded, or a head full of preconceived notions without any help from those who would deceive you. you are way off base, not in the correct ball field, not even within reality.
Very interesting when you compare this to Tibetan Dzogchen. Leave the seeing in the seeing. The hearing in the hearing. Etc. What doesn't change is the nature of mind which is one taste, pure awareness. What you are aware of changes, but the nature of mind, pure awareness, does not.
I don't but, you were the one making the claim about a reality that you appear to claim we are ignorant of. So, can you answer the question?
Reality is not subjective, there is an objective reality that exists regardless of our ignorance of it; reality is not contingent upon our knowledge of it. How we experience it is subjective. I agree that we make assumptions about reality in order to function within it.
Really? An "objective reality?" Please then, ask a person blind since birth to describe red or a person deaf since birth to hum the "William Tell Overture." Those things may be "objective" in your reality but what are they in the reality of where those objects do not exist? Does this "objective reality" change? If viewed from over there is it the same as viewed from over here? Does a fish view the reality of being submerged at 1000 feet the same as a person would view that reality? Does "Dadoalex" exist only because you are reading this message? Does he cease to exist when you move on to another message? 2500 years ago "reality" included all the gods of what we now call mythology. Did this "reality" cease to exist because people stopped believing?
Like I said, reality is not contingent upon our knowledge of it. You kind of answered your own questions with the examples you gave, you just need to think about them a little more. Your examples demonstrate that we subjectively experience that reality through our senses but, we have no idea if what we experience accords with the true nature of reality. The response I was expecting was, 'on what basis can you claim that an objective reality exists?' didn't think I'd have to reiterate that we experience it subjectively since we appear to both agree on that point.
"Reality is not subjective, there is an objective reality that exists regardless of our ignorance of it; reality is not contingent upon our knowledge of it." Then, please, identify and quantify that "objective reality" without the use of perception and understanding.
I suppose there are objective and subjective parts to reality. For example, the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and the Sun's orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy are both very objective. But what people are thinking on the Earth is very subjective. Politics is very subjective. Love is very subjective (love for a lover, not friendly love or parental love).
That is the point, I can't because all I have is my subjective perception and understanding however, I can infer that since we appear to be experiencing something and, even if we can't agree on what it is we are subjectively experiencing, then something objective exists that we can all experience, even if we are a brain in a vat. It used to be turtles all the way down, now it's ignorance all the way down.
IMHO, there are two types of realities. That which is within human perception and that which is not. a perception that is fundamental to my agnostic atheism.
Well the Empiricist tradition really comes to a close with Kant's transcendental idealism. The problem, seemingly, with the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume is their conception of the passive mind, namely their understanding of the experiential as something that is imprinted (or in Hume's case, impressed) onto the mind. Kant's Copernican Turn moves reflection inward to the issue of how the subject knows, and this concerns how the mind actively constructs reality from the raw data of experience. Hence all experience is processed experience, meaning that all knowledge is necessarily phenomenal (of phenomena). There is no unmediated knowledge/experience and for Kant this means that we can never know what reality is in and of itself (what he calls the noumenal) all we will ever know is the phenomenal. What is essentially at stake here for Kant is the salvaging of human freedom, for if the world is as Hume and company suggest there seems to be little room for causal agency (in a deterministic material world). Furthermore, Hume problematically denies two seriously important ideas: 1) the notion of causality itself, since for him all attempts to locate an impression of cause and effect fail (we have nothing but inference of relationships) and 2) he denies the concept of a continuous self that persists through change (given that he could find no experiential impression of a self on a bundle of perceptions). Kant's transcendental idealism secures both in that 1) causality is a category of conceptual judgment that we use to process/comprehend relations of experience and 2) all experience must be bundled together in a coherent manner, hence there is a "transcendental unity of apperception" which is necessary for consciousness - the self then is this unity that ties our experiences together into a coherent whole - hence the continuous self is a necessary condition for the possibility of consciousness. Of course, it's not long before Hegel problematizes Kant's formulation here as an alienated abstraction that ignores the ensconced nature of subjectivity itself (that the self and its understandings are social constructions) and this then moves the discussion to one of an intersubjective dialectical nature of self-emergence - that consciousness, self-consciousness, conceptualization, language, etc. are all dependent on sociality, so that one must understand the interplay of social forces in the construction of understanding/knowledge. As for the first philosopher, Thales has my vote. Regardless, it's good to have a discussion of philosophy in the Religion and Philosophy section. Kudos.
Reality is falling down hard and it hurts like a bitch!! Reality is whatever can obtain a Mathematical Proof. AA
