I would say that there (obviously) exists a world apart from our perceptions — it is not our perceptions of it that conjure it into being — but that we have no way to get at it. The world as we perceive it is the only one we get to experience. At best we can compare notes (which drowns out some of the static and fuzz, and eliminates a lot of illusions caused by parallax and viewing angle) and extend the reach of our perceptions using instruments that can ‘see’ things our unaided biological equipment can’t directly sense, and/or quantify various differences. But it’s still perception.
One cannot make a distinction between “x is real” and “I personally believe x is real”. Or, rather, one can of course make such a distinction, but the making of it is arbitrary. You may believe God exists. You may believe you’re currently looking at a computer screen. You may believe yourself to be a human being. You may believe that there exist such things as computer screens and human beings. You could be wrong about any of that. You could not really proceed on the assumption that you are in fact wrong (not without suspending all confidence in what you believe, at which point you cannot proceed to do anything), so at best you acknowledge “I might be crazy; I might be a conscious ice crystal in the nether caves of Planet Q and I’ve dreamed up this entire human life and environment and history, or it’s a delusion I’ve built and embraced because I hate being a sentient ice crystal”. I think it is a good idea to do so — if nothing else, it knocks one from a smug arrogant perch of a certainty which is actually based on faith founded on earlier faith founded on yet earlier faith in one’s ability to recognize patterns and make sense of sensory input.
But having done so, one tends to proceed on the assumption that one is not crazy and is not wrong, so as to be able to proceed at all. One is as skeptical as opportunity and the human mind allow, but the only avenue available is to lay down some axioms and say “I don’t know with absolute certainty that these things are true but I’m going to assume for now that they are. So, given these truths…”
OK, I am going to have another go at this. This is very important.
You are in a room full of Lego pieces of all kinds, with other people. Each of you builds what they want. Each creates their own world. No matter how the Lego pieces are snapped together they still remain Lego pieces. But the creations made by you and the others are no longer perceived as Lego pieces but as the world you have created.
A fan once asked the umpire how he knew whether a pitched ball would be a strike or a ball. The umpire replied “the pitch ain’t nothing until I call it.” And so your world is nothing until you decide what it will be.
Good point. I suppose much of atheism is wrapped up in responding to positive beliefs that are already out there, really. Would “I don’t believe in any gods” be better?
I had to think pretty hard about this one, and I think you do have a very good point. I would say that I tend to agree, but it’s a particular problem in debates around this subject, though. If, for example, lekatt’s God exists, then I am affected by it though I do not percieve it. I can’t get at things outside of my perception, since they would be from my point of view hypotheticals if I thought of them at all. But *they * can certainly interact with me. So while we may all be swimming about in our own little pools of percieved reality, that might not stop actual reality from barging itself in and involving itself.
(snipping your middle bit, since I basically agree with it all).
I was with you up until “truths”. I’m happy to make what’s essentially a guess as to what’s reality, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call them truths. They’re just what I currently believe is most likely to be truth. Truth would imply certainty, at least to me, and i’m not comfortable using certainty in non-casual situations.
Preview; Nope, still not getting it, lekatt, sorry! Do you believe in a single objective reality, with then people’s interpretations of that leading to different views of that reality? Or that there is a single reality, but it is actually changeable and shaped by our perceptions of it?
Let me get this straight, you perceive God to exist, so therefore God exists for you.
Does this mean that while he exists for you, that he does not exist for me in the same way as I do not perceive him as you do? In fact I am more in the belief of there is no God.
Or does it mean, because you perceive him to exist, he does exist period, no need of further proof?
There’s a single reality that is both objective and doesn’t change, but also that changes and is a result of people’s perceptions? I’ve got to admit that i’m totally lost. How can you have a reality that’s both unrelated to *and * a result of perceptions at the same time?
There are two evaluations being done here. The first involves assigning a probability value to a situation. We all do this differently. The naive email user might consider the spam as potentially legitimate, the sophisticated one trashes it immediately.
The second evaluation involves what probability lets us feel comfortable acting as if we’re certain - transforming our speech from I believe X is Y to X is Y. I suspect that this is pretty similar to all of us, though my threshold seems to be higher than most peoples. For this discussion honesty doesn’t enter into it, though faking sincerity is important in some cases, like sales and acting. (Someone said, and I’ve seen several sources,. "Sincerity is the most important thing in acting. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.)
Anyhow, I can say that lekatt’s sincerity threshold is perfectly reasonable while still saying that his probability evaluation function leaves a lot to be desired. [I believe] he’s honest, sincere, and wrong.
Still nonsense. In your first example, we consider things at different levels of hierarchy. We know that our keyboard is made of atoms, but it is not particularly useful to consider atoms when typing. The creations are still made of Legos, but after being built into a robot, get used as a robot. We only consider them as Lego pieces again when one falls off and we need to replace it.
In your second example, what is a ball and strike? If you consider them defined by the rules of MLB, a camera might reveal that a called strike is actually a ball, no matter what the ump says. For purposes of the game, though, a strike is whatever the ump calls, in which case he’s correct. He’s saying (and I’ve heard the quote also) that he has final authority. Consider how the authority of the final call in a football game changed after the instant replay rule. Truth in this context is a social construct - just like a person being guilty or not guilty after the jury makes its verdict.
I don’t get this either. The snapping together of the legos is supposed to be an analogy for perception, correct? Which would mean that one person doesn’t see the creations assembled by another, even if they’re looking at the same legos. Which argues that the ‘assembly’ does not have a practical effect on the legos, just liek perception doesn’t have a practical effect on reality.
This example seems like an effort to concede the existence of ‘univeral reality’ (which you must do in order to believe that you are actually interacting with other, different people or beings), but present it as an amorphous, unformed thing, the vast majority of the details of which are created individually by the perceivers. The presence of traffic signals strongly argues that this is not how things are. If the stoplight’ did not inherently and universally present its colors the same way to all percievers, and thus if all viewers were left to assemble varying images of the stoplight as being different colors, shapes, visible or not–if that were the case we’d have traffic accidents all over the place, since the signal could not possibly coordinate people who did not all percieve it in approximately the same way.
The vast, vast majority of other things observable in life argue a similar conclusion: though people’s perceptions vary somewhat, there still is certainly a universal underlying reality that is perceived approximately the same by all people, to a high degree of detail.
Assuming I haven’t just disproven your position or something, could you clarify what you’re trying to say?
I would like to add some nuances to perception by adding emotions.
Picture a computer which we will label God. This computer is a constant in reality. We send out invitations along with a description of what this computer is and can do for the people we invite.
One person declines to come because of his belief no such thing could exist.
Another person decides to come but is not sure whether such a thing exists or not. So the rest show up and begin to examine the computer.
One is very frightened and believes the computer could harm him. Another thinks the computer far to difficult to understand and walks away. Yet another recognizes the computer as a game machine. While another understands this computer can link him to knowledge and understanding.
Each individual brings an emotional perception of computer along with him.
Each person is displaying an emotion which affects his belief about the computer. Negative emotions will deter learning and effectively using the computer for the benefit of the individual while positive emotions will enhance the learning process.
The world is not black or white. It is full of varying shades of gray and it is our emotions that help us understand these differences. We hold emotions or feelings about every belief we own. These emotions probably weren’t taught to us, we just picked them up from others, but are they correct?
I may have just confused more. It is very hard to put feelings into words.
Thanks, the reason this concept is so important is that it allows you to take control of your life. As long as you believe you are tossed about in the storms of life you have no control.
What you say is true for the logical world. We humans agree that stoplights will be red, yellow, and green, just as we agree on many other things to make our world easier to live in. This is the logical part, or practical part of our thinking. Now there is a whole other part of us humans called emotions. In the emotion part there is nothing logical at all, at least in most of us. Our feelings about stoplights vary greatly from being life savers to being something in our way. It is our feelings that determine how we will handle a stoplight or anything else in our lives.
Do you SEE thread after thread popping up on the SDMB arguing “Rocks do not exist” or “Rocks are real: a PROOF!”? No, of course not. As you said, the vast, vast majority of things observable in life indicate that there is an underlying reality that is perceived approximately the same by all people.
There are exceptions.
You find the exceptions in those aspects of reality where the perspective of the perceiving person makes the biggest difference in what is perceived: social reality, questions of human behavior, politics, and so on. And yeah, religion.
The observable fact that we have reached an accord on vast areas of existence doesn’t change the fact that we each construct our reality out of lekatt’s legos. We have little bits and pieces of empirical data (about 1/10,000th as much as we tend to think we’ve got) and how we make sense of it is a cascading sequence of models of reality which influence how we model yet more of reality and so on, in our heads. (Even the interpretation of empirical data depends unavoidably on pattern-recognition, of saying inside our own heads ‘aha, this is another one of THOSE things’)
Thanks for your very accurate post. I am very glad you brought up pattern-recognition, it is the key to higher knowledge and finally wisdom. The more patterns you can recognize the better the understanding of our world.
I don’t seem to suffer from these feelings. My life is largely in my control. I know bad things could happen at any moment, but I do what I can in meantime and try to worry about only that which I can prepare for.
Storms of Life, I think that is something I grew out of in my early twenties. Nice band name though.
