Does reality create the need for reason? Or does reason create one’s reality?
My cat has a fluffy tail.
Reality superseeds everything. Reality is what is in actuality. A mirage is not real in the sense that it’s not what we expect it to be. But it’s real in the sense that it occurs. If reason creates one’s reality, then your reason is indeed what is in actuality (i.e. it is in fact reality).
Unless you see reason as something shared among many individuals suspended in some abstract super vat, what you’re asking us is whether sollipsisim is a viable weltanschaung. And if you believe we are suspended in an abstract super vat and in conjunction do create the world we can experience directly through our reason, then what we experience is not reality and therefore we are not creating it through our reason! IOW, reality is the super vat. So we’re back to sollipsism.
Is sollipsism a viable weltanschung? My answer? No, it’s not. Descartes “cogito ergo sum” is predicated on an aversion within our cognitive space to the paradoxical. That aversion is inherent to the thought process. It’s an absolute not created by the thought process in-an-of-itself, indicating some other metaphysical realm, a reality beyond us. What that reality is, what is in actuality, who knows. But it’s nonetheless evidence that thought is a system within a system.
I’m pretty certain that the phenomenon I experience arose from a realm beyond my reason. My reason is what applies itself, what tries to structure, what tries to make sense of those phenomenon. Do I stop experiencing things when I stop reasoning? No. Do I stop experiencing things when I stop experiencing? Certainly (talk about tautology!) . But given the little control I have over these phenomena, how would it be meaningful to say that I created them? If they exude from me back into me, the only part which I realy experience is the absorbtion (the back into me part). Therefore, in such a case we must speak of a greater I (God? Reality?) and a smaller I (which would be me, ETHIC that is).
Ergo, I am not God! (phew, good to get thet of my chest…)
ETHIC
On the one hand, I agree with ethic – especially if I had to choose between newage sewage about belief systems (or “culture”) creating reality and reality being intrinsically real.
However, that’s a bit of a false choice. We don’t experience reality, we experience meaning, and meaning is an interactive state. We have meaning in relationship to things and to each other, and things have meaning in relationship to other things and to us.
Thus, moral laws, ethical codes and whatnot are neither truths of intrinsic worth nor happenstance products of whatever uncaused accidental mindset happened to have created them. Or, to kick it into the more practical zone, there may be objective moral laws for humans, insofar as their contextually dependent meaning is consistent across all of the possible human contexts, but we cannot attain a perspective from which any of us as individuals can say what such laws might be; and we, collectively as a species, are most likely to arrive at something approaching a consensus on that only in an environment in which myriad suggested codes and rules can be discussed and debated, and experiences related and described, which is again incompatible with behaving as if we already knew what they are.
Would this be the proper thread to attempt to mount an attack on a priori knowledge? I’ve been itching to do that for some time, only haven’t quite found the proper context.