our experience

[hiyymer]

What has been striking me lately, is how profoundly our experience is NOT what's really there. The experience of colors, sounds, and smells are all created by our brain from wavelengths, moving air, and particles in it. The tree isn't green, the dog is not making a barking sound, the flower is not smelling. It's all being created inside our head. We believe that all our feelings are just bodily chemical states, but are we feeling the bodily state or what the brain does with it? My wife wants a new pocket book. Is there really a wife there with self-caused intentions, or is my brain creating the wife from some fully caused biological process? Is what's out there really organized so neatly into thing-ness? Or is it just a mass of molecules that wouldn't look like much of anything or have any meaning if our brain didn't organize it and make sense of it?

Our experience has evolved over the eons. According to science the process is natural selection. What evolves is what works. Our experience is not an illusion or imaginary, because it works. It has a functional relationship to what exists, or we wouldn't be here. But a functional representation is so profoundly NOT an accurate representation. Why would anyone ever think it should be. When you are being awestruck by the amazing display of the sunset, it is not the amazing display of the sunset out there that is striking you. It is the virtual reality show in your brain that is striking you. Our appreciation of nature and beauty and the wonder of it all has nothing to do with what really exists. We are appreciating our own experience created by our brain.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

We create our own Matrix.

[Rum]

I agree with this completely and have often thought it. There is no substance 'out there' at all. And when you think of how scatty and disorganised our thoughts and perceptions are and that each person is more or less as ephemeral, it adds up to the world being totally chaotic and without order, except that which we impose on it.

Human beings are amazing when you think about it.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I agree with this completely and have often thought it. There is no substance 'out there' at all. And when you think of how scatty and disorganised our thoughts and perceptions are and that each person is more or less as ephemeral, it adds up to the world being totally chaotic and without order, except that which we impose on it.

Human beings are amazing when you think about it.

It's a matter of scale. We're constrained to thing of things we can see as being "real" We can't imagine a billionth of an inch or a billion suns in a cluster.

[Feck]

Spend enough time in altered states and you get the idea (still waiting for this last bad trip to wear off ,it seems like it's been 20 years)

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Spend enough time in altered states and you get the idea (still waiting for this last bad trip to wear off ,it seems like it's been 20 years)

I once took a long canoe trip in a cave that seemed to be lighted by electric fire. It went on forever and my canoe didn't make any ripples, so the cave was perfectly reflected in the water, a mirror image that convey infinity quite nicely. I had to cut the trip short because I was starving and the bastards there had eaten all the Fritos so I had to in the kitchen for more.

[Feck]

Spend enough time in altered states and you get the idea (still waiting for this last bad trip to wear off ,it seems like it's been 20 years)

I once took a long canoe trip in a cave that seemed to be lighted by electric fire. It went on forever and my canoe didn't make any ripples, so the cave was perfectly reflected in the water, a mirror image that convey infinity quite nicely. I had to cut the trip short because I was starving and the bastards there had eaten all the Fritos so I had to in the kitchen for more.

[Hermit]

There is no substance 'out there' at all.

Accepting that proposition for the moment, what do you think is the practical upshot of it?

[FBM]

There is no substance 'out there' at all.

Accepting that proposition for the moment, what do you think is the practical upshot of it?

My unsolicited and probably unwelcome upshot is that the proposition should neither be accepted nor rejected. I don't know of any way to get evidence to either support or refute it. I'm not sure we can assert anything more than empirical data with complete intellectual honesty. That is, saying "such and such appears to be..." without taking the extra step to say "such and such is..."

[Hermit]

There is no substance 'out there' at all.

Accepting that proposition for the moment, what do you think is the practical upshot of it?

My unsolicited and probably unwelcome upshot is that the proposition should neither be accepted nor rejected.

You call that a practical upshot?

I had this kind of scenario in mind:

If you saw a rock in front of you - and were of the opinion that it is of real substance 'out there' - would you kick it as hard as thought it might be safe to do if you thought it is not of real substance 'out there'?

(Scenario borrowed and adapted from Samuel Johnson)

[FBM]

There is no substance 'out there' at all.

Accepting that proposition for the moment, what do you think is the practical upshot of it?

My unsolicited and probably unwelcome upshot is that the proposition should neither be accepted nor rejected.

You call that a practical upshot?

I had this kind of scenario in mind:

If you saw a rock in front of you - and were of the opinion that it is of real substance 'out there' - would you kick it as hard as thought it might be safe to do if you thought it is not of real substance 'out there'?

(Scenario borrowed and adapted from Samuel Johnson)

No, Sammy had it right in terms of practicality. However, practical considerations shouldn't be allowed to skew our ontology, should they? Otherwise, that which is more convenient is more real.

[hiyymer]

I agree with this completely and have often thought it. There is no substance 'out there' at all. And when you think of how scatty and disorganised our thoughts and perceptions are and that each person is more or less as ephemeral, it adds up to the world being totally chaotic and without order, except that which we impose on it.

Human beings are amazing when you think about it.

I'd say "we" don't impose anything. It's not your experience that's running the show. It's your brain.

[charlou]

I agree with this completely and have often thought it. There is no substance 'out there' at all. And when you think of how scatty and disorganised our thoughts and perceptions are and that each person is more or less as ephemeral, it adds up to the world being totally chaotic and without order, except that which we impose on it.

Human beings are amazing when you think about it.

I'd say "we" don't impose anything. It's not your experience that's running the show. It's your brain.

I don't think we can separate the two and still function.

[hiyymer]

I agree with this completely and have often thought it. There is no substance 'out there' at all. And when you think of how scatty and disorganised our thoughts and perceptions are and that each person is more or less as ephemeral, it adds up to the world being totally chaotic and without order, except that which we impose on it.

Human beings are amazing when you think about it.

I'd say "we" don't impose anything. It's not your experience that's running the show. It's your brain.

I don't think we can separate the two and still function.

I look at it this way. You're experience is like your brain's active view finder. If you have a damaged limbic loop you have no thoughts. What that says to me is that motivation is not conscious. It is the limbic system, after all, that has the reward/pain and action initiation circuits. It's like the view finder is a compulsive thinker that is always filling out the view and attending to what the emotive part of the brain senses needs attention. But it's not our thoughts that animate us. We know that the precursors of action are already happening in the brain before we are conscious that we are deciding to do something. It's like the brain responds and then puts the experience of the representation of self deciding in the view. "Look what I did". After all it's the brain that is creating everything that we experience, so what's really running the show. The only 'I', the only conrtol center, is the one that the brain puts there in your experience. No one has found a control center inside. It's just a bunch of subsystems talking to each other.