Posted on 11/01/2005 6:27:26 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Non-locality (quantum entanglement) has been tested at 10 kilometers: measuring the quantum state of one of two or more entangled photons instantly determines the other regardless of spatial separation.
Superposition (Schrodingers cat) is another example of reality being an illusion. The cat is both alive and dead until a selection is made. But as Everett and others have suggested, both states (or all superimposed states) may actually exist in parallel universes (multi-world theories). You are reading the post. But another you who chose not to read the post also exists.
Another example and, IMHO, what should be the most unsettling to all metaphysical naturalists is that matter itself has never been created or directly observed. Matter consists of the ordinary (5%, Higgs field/boson required by the standard model), dark matter (25%, suggested by galaxy rotation) and dark energy (70%, dispersed through space/time causing acceleration of the universe). Physics has turned to geometry for new theories including the possibility that the particles we observe in 4 dimensions are massless and what we think is mass is actually a shadow of momentum in extra-dimensions. Further, the particles in 4 dimensions may be multiply imaged from as little as a single particle in an extra dimension.
Time is yet another issue. If we add one temporal dimension to the four dimensions then what is sensed as a line or arrow of time in four dimensions is actually a plane. Thus, physical causality and past/present/future can be moot from the aspect of a second temporal dimension.
These are some of the reasons physical reality may be a persistent illusion.
But the question you ask is much deeper and one which, IMHO, ought to be explored by everyone: what is reality?
The answer is no doubt very personal just like the question of how do you know what you know and how sure are you that you know it?
The two questions are related.
Certain knowledge to me is that which has been Spiritually revealed to me, personally. It doesnt originate from within me or by sensory experience. Such Spiritual revelation is self-authenticating. Therefore, to me, reality is Gods will, which is unknowable in its fullness and all other knowledge, including knowledge of reality itself, is relatively uncertain.
Therefore, though the musings of important Christian thinkers, philosophers such as Kant, physicists such Einstein and Vafa, you and other posters on this forum - are all quite interesting to me they are not Spiritual revelation. My own musings have the same uncertainty.
None of these mortal sources can be certain because the observer is part of that which is being observed.
Thus to me only God can reveal Truth and His will, which is reality (albeit unknowable in its fulness).
I really doubt that this is understanding is recognized every time you use the term illusion. Certainly we can't continue to call illusion the realization that our view of reality is partial. Or more generally, that our supposed unity implied in discreet knowledge (intentional it-reality) fails to adequate the character of the phenomena.
Perhaps it would be an illusion if the one perspective annuls the previous one. Kind of like an Hegelian aufhebung. But that is not the case. Newtonian physics holds--has not been demoted to illusion--even with the advent of quantum physics.
At the same time we see that between It and Thing we have reality, and to call reality illusion without making this distinction, we run into a muck. If we proceed to equate God's will with reality, we are liable to be careless in speaking of reality as illusion. It fails to take into account new knowledge.
Some care is really needed here.
With constant Hope,
Having studied number systems some or even a lot, to even do what I did in the past.. The concept of base "this or that" came hard to me.. But eventually it got through to me..
The way it did get though to me, was realizing that 2 is 2 no matter the system you're using.. even in binary 2 is 2.. even it looks like 10 its still 2.. 2+2=4 is true no matter the number system you use.. 2 apples are 2 apples.. the only way they can become three apples.. is not by changing the base number system they are calculated in but by adding another apple..
I laughed when "sophomores" came up to me in college with " You have your truth and I have mine"... thereby makeing "truth" an opinion.. degrading the concept of truth to a sphere around themselves..
Can the same gross narcissism effect "scientists" educated in "the scientific principle".. changing the BASE of an argument hoping that will confuse "the Simple".?... Of course that was a rhetorical question but it brings forth another question in my mind.. "as simple as it is"..
Are there any checks and balances to "scientists" infected with this "gross narcissism" or even "chronic narcissism" to spare the rest of us the dose of "clap trap".. that will surely come from it.?. You know, from chronic narcissism of "scientists".. I hesitate to include P-marlow in this.. He whips chronic narcissists like a rented donkey.. a very mean person.. but quite entertaining.. <<- does that make me a bad person.. Oh! well...
When a person has not received Spiritual revelations, everything you have said about the root being sensory perception would be true.
But take qualia for instance in the mind of one who is indwelled by the Spirit: his likes and dislikes are not his own but rather belong to the new creature he has become which lives by the Spirit Himself. If he struggles against the Spirits likes/dislikes, he is convicted and will usually repent. After a long walk with the Lord, he can no longer tell you whether he likes a thing because he likes it or because the Spirit likes it. He therefore becomes keenly aware of being alive in timelessness while yet in the flesh.
The decision in the 7th circuit court of appeals, that atheism is a religion, was based on Supreme Court precedents which established that the behavior of adherents (doctrines, articles of faith, etc.) determine whether it should be considered a religion. Passive atheism which doesnt believe but doesnt mind if you do would not be considered a religion. Evangelical atheism would be considered a religion.
If or when the intelligent design question comes before the Supreme Court, IMHO, the decision may turn on whether atheism has been established as the State religion and that will be based on the behavior of the combatants in this war (Dawkins, etc.)
We who live in the First Reality are open to such information - whether by our own reasoning, the counsel of other mortals, other sensory perceptions or most importantly, Spiritual revelation.
I do understand the frustration with such specificity as my adding the term "base 10" in the reply.
Around here, a lack of specificity can result in a completely unnecessary sidebar. Thats why I did it (2+2 is not 4 in base 3).
Concerning bases, long ago a discussion of auto-correlation of a digitized alpha/numeric string finally, after days, ended in a showing of the difference in auto-correlation between a binary or decimal rendering of Champernownes constant.
Sometimes it is just narcissism" at you say, but then sometimes it is the pond the correspondents swim in when they are not Freeping.
Christianity is a revealed religion. It is not deduced from science, philosophy, theology or any other study. It is made know by a personal act of God to the knower. We can not find Christianity. We can not discover it. Any salient Christian truths come to us by spiritual enlightenment - the light of God shining in our spirits - and not by any effort, including reading scripture, attending church, being good or praying.
The knowledge derived from God's revelation must, of necessity, be incontrevertable truth. It can not be disputed since disputation is a function of intellectual discipline and spiritual revelation does not come by intellectual discipline.
For the scientist this is meaningless since the tools of science are not based in spiritual revelation. Or are they? Paul Tillich claimed that we must make a leap of faith into the unknown if we are to gain knowledge. The leap is made not in a spirit of chaos but of harmony. We leap because we have faith that we will land somewhere that is stable and sensible.
The scientist does precisely this. He leaps across a chasm of ignorance in the expectation that his actions (research) will drive ignorance furthur away. This act of faith is only possible because the scientist has been informed in spirit that reality will conform to his methodology.
There is no basis in science for proving the scientific method. It stands as a given, based on apriori assumptions about the nature of reality. These assumptions can only be subsumed under the category of spiritual enlightenment.
That spiritual truth is knowable is similarly coherent with a unity of the parts of creation and the creator. Principles, rules, reason and logic all comprise the noumena, and are an expression of that which is behind the nature of things.Kant differentiates between phenomenon, the thing itself, and noumena, the thought of the thing. the thing itself is unknowable except as noumena, the thought object.
Thinking is not phenomenological. Its derivation is in a realm of existence that we refer to as spiritual. The process of thought is not questioned in the scientific method. Thinking is assumed. This is the problem of the observer. The scientist's thought process is an unexamined given, a revelation. Science must be based on revelation else it is not in the universe.
Again and again, scientific materialism and humanist atheism are forced to come full circle to a starting point that only exists by virtue of God-consciousness. To deny the existence of God or to fail to consider God in the process of learning about the universe precludes the possibility of knowledge.
It seems to me sense perception pertains only to material phenomena. But there are phenomena, or movements in consciousness, of which we are aware our thought processes completely independently of sensory experience.
I'm not sure that consciousness itself is not a sensory experience, or if it is not, that it occurs independently of sensory experience. It seems to me that where there are questions of phenomena existing beyond our ability to perceive them sensorily, that what experience we may be said to have of these phenomena is nonetheless quite intricately knotted to our sensory perceptions. In any case, I don't think we should be too hard on ourselves if we don't manage to resolve this one...
...the shadows are a fleeting image of a more substantial reality that only becomes visible to us by virtue of the Light.
First, thank you for the further explanation of Plato's cave. I haven't actually read the text itself in several years, and clearly it would be worth going back to. Now, I am interested in this phrase of yours: "a more substantial reality". I wonder whether, without admitting to a knowable "First" reality, it would nonetheless be tenable to acknowledge degrees of reality more or less "substantial." My intuition is that it would be (the question has actually been a little project of mine for some time), but I am far from having thought it all through. Your question, "If we question the reality of the Light that casts them, and find it an illusion, then how could we know anything at all?" is quite a valid one, of course - and in my opinion it has never been sufficiently dealt with. To me, it seems philosophically necessary to "question the reality of the Light," and, at the same time, it seems philosophically bankrupt to deny the possibility of knowledge. However incompatible the two may appear, I believe we must hold to both, and closely, as to reject either would be akin to giving ourselves a (philosophical) break. And I don't think we should do that. But how do we deal with the contradiction? Well, there it is... On the one hand, we are "prisoners, bound to watch"; on the other, there is much to look at.
Here is a possible way of looking at the problem: Consider a person who wants to be a painter; how is he to know whether his work is any good? How do we know a good painting when we see one? Well, already we're in murky waters. But there is a certain grammar that we may agree to, that we recognize as the skills necessary to making good paintings. Now, Picasso may not always have created realistic, figurative works, but he exercised a certain (extremely advanced) degree of control over the movements of his brush, and this was a quality he shared with all of the old masters. Similarly, in the physical world, in "reality," we come to certain agreements. If a friend tells me his mother is dead, and then the next time we meet he is with his mother, who is very much alive, then I know something is amiss. If my friend continues to insist, in spite of the obvious, that his mother is dead, then if nothing else it will be clear that my perception of reality is in conflict with what my friend tells me is his perception of reality. Which reality, in this case, is the more substantial? We would need a great deal more information to make such a judgment from the outside, of course, but I have little choice but to privilege my own perceptions. If the "substance" of a reality has to do with a certain degree of coherence among its aspects, then the reality I perceive does not need to be the reality in order for it to be the more substantial one. It only needs to be the more coherent one. This is, granted, far from being a fully developed position, but it is one I am still just beginning to explore. In any case, it seems compatible with Musil's idea and Voegelin's reading of it; as the latter wrote, "the universe of rational discourse collapses... when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared."
Putting analysis aside for a moment, it seems to me that the more substantial reality allows for contradiction. As any reader of Borges or Kafka or the Old Testament knows - or, for that matter, anyone who has been through a war or been in love or believed in anything at all; anyone who has fought with his parents or with a friend, or who has lied or stolen or come home drunk to his family in the middle of the night, who has had to apologize for his actions or express regret for his shortcomings - as any person, that is, must know: a human being manages often (and often, it seems, miraculously) to keep within him a great union of opposing forces and possibilities, the cohabitation of which our rational faculties may have a difficult time accounting for. Still, it is not our reason which perceives reality but which processes the reality we perceive; deficiencies of reason may imply deficiencies of perception, but the inverse does not hold: reason is not reality. Rather it is a means by which we keep reality coherent for ourselves. The gaps (often chasms) only indicate, for me, a cracked surface; they are not erasable, to my mind, and I don't see why they should necessarily be unwelcome.
That's all I have for the moment, but thanks for your comments and for your kind welcome...
Yes. And I agree with Alamo-Girl that there is no why to be drawn from this. Truth, here, is simply any statement which adheres to the logic of the system. That is, 2+2=4 adheres to the logic and is therefore true; 2+2=5 does not, and therefore constitutes a false statement.
Hmmm... if language is just "codes" as you specified elsewhere.. and it is.. Are numbers language.?.. of course they are.. If 4 can be calulated in binary why not thiriary.?.. is my point.. Is 4 a symbol or a part of the decimal system.?.. Thats WHY I had a hard time with numbering systems.. Wouldn't let go of the symbol.. but held on to it like a teddy bear.. And I can be persistent too..
The numbers (as I understood them) were my qualia.. my qualiaific base, to understanding cyphering.. When I finally let go of them, THEN, math became interesting to me.. Kinda like being "born again".. Where once I was happy in a ten dimensional world, so to speak, after letting go, my world became infinite.. as far as numbers go.. When one says 4 to me today I don't see 4 as a chinese character i.e. a specific pictorial scribbling.. But as a symbol.. like any "word" is.. Words represent or try to represent "stuff"..
What does all this have to do with what you said.?. I dunno exactly.. after looking at what I just said, but somewhere between my words is the meaning.. of what I mean.. Sorry excuse for poster I am.. but I am persistent.. Give me that...
A system of coherence is practically necessary. But we live in a world of pluralities. There is more than one system of coherence. And the mistake of second-reality thinking is to raise one system to a privileged position of being, as stultis noticed.
Indeed politics will always have to put up with the consequences defying the divinity-of-things-as-they-are, as Derbyshire puts it, and make fools of us. But we should be continually surprised to find that things are not what they are, that is, that any given system of coherence has limited application.
The concept of limit in intentionality is entirely different from the meaning of illusion.
But the fact of choice changes the matter entirely.
And with choice, we need a system of coherence to choose rightly. So systems are practically necessary, because we are free agents. If we are free, we are free from the system of nature. I learned from Richard Weaver that art is our conscious effort to keep from slipping into the illusion that we are not in any way free from nature, but a mere automaton of things as they are. It is interesting to note that this same idea pops up in other venues: we are puppets of some divinity.
One might ask whether non-locality, superposition, the mystery of mass and time, etc. suggest that what we observe at the classical level is an illusion an erroneous mental representation. I would say yes because we dont know the what the system is the non-A is still out there and all of these points raised by physics strongly suggests that non-A exists.
Another example is dimensionality itself. Our vision and minds are limited to four of the dimensions though we are able to reason the likelihood of additional spatial or temporal dimensions. Why this particular selection of four coordinates? What would the classical level look like if we could observe and comprehend all the dimensions?
Nevertheless, even though I assert all of this, it doesnt mean I dont trust there exists a chair in which I am sitting or that you are a real person who is actually conversing with me on this thread. But I cannot rule out that a cornelis who chose not to respond doesnt also exist or that you exist in more than three spatial and one temporal dimensions.
All of this can be quite confusing, so it seems to me that we ought to try to be like Paul who customized his conversation to the audience. When cosmology or geometric physics are raised, all of these points are germane. But it may have no bearing at all in another discussion where the classical level is presumed to be real.
I do not however believe that philosophy or theology can make the presumption that the classical level is real. Too much is at stake precisely because philosophy/theology guide us to the meaning of things and its.
In sum, I can weigh myself on the bathroom scales or calculate the escape velocity needed to send an object into space. I can do these things even though ordinary matter has never been created or directly observed. Thus if the subject is diets or Mars probes, there is no need to get into the related geometric physics or philosophy/theology.
But if we are on a science/philosophy/theology thread and I am asked what is reality? or what Einstein meant when he said reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one - then I must respond accordingly.
However, I can also say that Gods will allows for all humans a sense of being and becoming an it reality and a thing reality. I can also say that one persons sense of reality may not be the same as anothers and the difference can often be irreconcilable. But somewhere in such a response, I am most likely to raise the observer problem that only God can be objective.
For the scientist this is meaningless since the tools of science are not based in spiritual revelation. Or are they? Paul Tillich claimed that we must make a leap of faith into the unknown if we are to gain knowledge. The leap is made not in a spirit of chaos but of harmony. We leap because we have faith that we will land somewhere that is stable and sensible.
The scientist does precisely this. He leaps across a chasm of ignorance in the expectation that his actions (research) will drive ignorance furthur away. This act of faith is only possible because the scientist has been informed in spirit that reality will conform to his methodology.
Again and again, scientific materialism and humanist atheism are forced to come full circle to a starting point that only exists by virtue of God-consciousness. To deny the existence of God or to fail to consider God in the process of learning about the universe precludes the possibility of knowledge.
I realize that free will has been considered a central issue for hundreds of years, but I simply don't see it as that crucial. The important point IMHO opinion is that God gives each object/creature the freedom to be fully itself. IOW the gift of being is, in all cases, imparted by God without stint or restraint. Each being has available to it the full potential of its being; to be fully and authentically what it is. Choice is secondary. A stone doesn't have "choice" or "will", but it has the full freedom of being nevertheless. If we have free will it's not so much because God "decided" that we should or shouldn't, but rather because it is inherent to the kind of creature we are in the kind of universe we inhabit. If we were some kind of creature to which free will was not naturally implied by the character of our being, then it would be no deprivation that we would lack it.
I strongly agree with you that numbers are codes like words are codes in language. Generally speaking, it doesn't matter if one wishes to communicate in Spanish or English, binary or decimal as long as everyone is one the same encoding/decoding page.
But much can be lost in translation since some phrasing in a language is not suitable to translation. The Champernowne's constant was an example of something which has additional meaning in binary v. decimal.
You are of course correct as far as I can determine.. Made me think.. Do not be afraid.. LoL.. I cannot absorb "all this" as easily as some "you guys" seem to do, so easily.. so my problem might be the "music"..
I can enjoy Spanish(in various iterations of it), Russian or even Aborigine Australian because of the "music".. even not understanding the words, "per se".. Some can hear and even understand the words but not appreciate the music.. let alone "dance" to it.. LoL..
I like the "music" of this conversation.. (so I dance funny.!.) the music of your instruments intrigues me.. All of you.. Its like jazz changing tempo and going from major to minor chords.. maybe thats what the "human spirit" is.. The music behind the intellect.. Except the human spirit cannot only hear the "Blues" but the Reds, Yellows and Violets too.. Who then has the last word on anything.?.. Nobody evidently..
Maybe I'm a Savant.?.. Maybe not.. But the music of this thread is quite deep except when its high.. Wonder if All threads have a certain tone to them that can be appreciated.?. A certain lilting or even plaintive music.. in the background.. NO I not smoking anything, don't start with me.. LoL.. I'm just ugh.. sensitive.. d;-)...
When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.""The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words to mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
Are we on the same page with the meaning of illusion?
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