Better than calling each other ■■■■■ catshit for the next two years. I like the sound of “naive realist.” Maybe we could throw in a little cat shit now and then, for kicks.
#naive catshit realists
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There almost certainly is an objective reality.
It seems that people are more or less completely unable to experience it directly. The best people can hope for is a once-removed version - their own subjective interpretation of what appears to be objective reality.
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This is not true. You can experience it directly and live in it for a time. But the nature of the mind is that we do not stay there.
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I agree with your earlier point that there can be pretty objectively flawed perspectives that nevertheless provide positive results (believing that people and people’s actions have eternal meaning could give you a better perspective on life, even if you can provide evidence that this is false). However, the flaws are often very clear in other areas and it’s usually not too difficult to arrive at a less problematic perspective while having a closer allegiance to reality. People may not matter much in the grand scheme of things, but neither do I - if I take myself and my experience as the benchmark for caring rather than the universe over billions of years, people and their actions are very important. The fact that we aren’t that different from apes or other animals may also encourage us to care more about the rest of nature.
On the other hand, it’s good to recognise that we’re not able to objectively define reality and other people may base their thinking on premises that are ridiculous, yet they may still have something to teach us.
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Human life isn’t a logical thing. If we are just apes, we are built from a base of instinct and emotion rather than being hard mathematically correct computers. Illogical things give beauty and poetry and love to our lives. It’s an opinion that I have expressed here before that got pretty negative responses, but I can see the good Religion and Tradition do for people, and as long as they aint hurting anyone, I wish them well with it. It gets them through the day. It gives meaning. Just as much as a football team does to others.
As for Evolution vs Creationism, of course I’m not a Creationist, but I can kind of get why some people are, beyond simplifying it to “It’s in the Bible”.
The POINT is to try an see the world through eyes that you fundamentally disagree with. Try to see the world through the eyes of that woman who refused to endorse Gay Marriages. You see a bigot. She, and the people around her, saw her bravely upholding moral values. They have no doubts that they are in the right. And Morals are such an abstract thing.
Ahh well. Just waffling.
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A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a woman I know on Facebook who has the most consistently conservative views I’ve seen. I really don’t know if there’s a single thing that she’s shared on politics, religion, sexuality, guns or healthcare that I can agree with. However, I also know her to be a very caring person who is currently working with orphans in South Sudan. She’s probably in her 60s now and is currently suffering from malaria, but she’s still very upbeat about life and does whatever she can to help others. I admire her more than many others who have more “correct” perspectives on reality.
Still… being a good person who cares about others is one thing, but people like this are also politically active and in aggregate can cause a lot of damage. I think the outward focus and self sacrifice that she shows is often missing from less religious demographics, but they are often more effective in bringing about positive change in society. She’s not the enemy and I have been happy to work alongside her, but people have very different ideas about what does and doesn’t hurt people. In the end though, people don’t necessarily change a lot with their views, so I think it’s often best to look at what they actually do with their lives.
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Thank God that we don’t!
Edit: This thread is becoming increasingly disrespectful to apes. Leave the apes alone, they never did anything to you!
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Have you read My Stroke of Insight? Only tangentially related, but I think you’d find it interesting.
I agree with @popobawa4u; I don’t think the meat engine that houses our perceptive apparatus (which is, mostly, the brain) is capable of experiencing reality without being restricted by the illusion of time. I think this is inherently demonstrated by your comment, that we can’t “stay” there - we are there in objective reality, timelessly, but we can’t directly know what the place we are is really like because we are physiologically restricted to experiencing only one point, with that point moving continuously along the dimensional axis we’ve labeled “time”.
At some point perhaps it will be possible to upload my consciousness into a tree, and maybe then I’ll be able to experience reality without meat-time translation. In my present body I have not been able to expand my perceptions past the physiological barriers represented by time.
Of course Descartes already proved that while we can make inferences from evidence available to us, we can’t ever know for certain what our limitations are while we’re still in these bodies. So we’re both guessing, really. We know that all our senses can be fooled and all our reasoning can be subverted, without our being able to detect such tampering.
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Tried DMT?
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Except that one that flung poo at me at the zoo. One day. Mark my words. One day…
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No; my experience of drugs is pretty limited and pedestrian. Mostly beer and tequila. Does DMT give you the ability to experience the past and future non-linearly? Honestly even if it generates the illusion of that ability it sounds intriguing!
Offtopic: These emoticons are lame. Why isn’t there one for “I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter?”
Oh, it’s a non-linear experience alright.
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