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What is reality?

Nimos

Well-Known Member
I posted this in another thread, relating something else, but it made me wonder, how people perceive reality.

As we know time is relative, so it depend on speed and acceleration. So if we take two identical watches and throw one of them in a spaceship and keep the other one on Earth. Now we accelerate the spaceship and let it go around Earth at the speed of light for a few days and then bring it back again, then the watch will show a different time than the one on Earth, in fact it will be behind. So time have passed more slowly for the watch in the spaceship than the watch on Earth. Now that is pretty weird, in it self.

But lets try to make it slightly more weird. Since that is true for the watches, its also true for us as humans. Even though we all perceive time equally here on Earth, we are actually living in different realities, your "now" is not my "now". the difference is simply so small than we don't perceive it as such. So now we are going to screw it up even more. So I put you in a spaceship and fire you into space at the speed of light. Now time is really going slow for you, so I age much faster than you. But my past is also changing compared to yours as I have more years of it. But it haven't happened for you yet as it haven't caught up with you. So when you finally reach your destination nothing really seems to have changed a lot for you, but I would have been long dead. And your perception of reality as you remember it, also doesn't exist anymore, but is in fact the past and not something that happened yesterday but maybe 100 of years ago, depending on how long you have been travelling for.

So lets make it even stranger. Now you arrive at you destination and encounter an alien race, which turns out to be humans from Earth, having developed faster than light space travel or wormhole technology and therefore reached the destination faster than you did, so basically you traveled into the future of humanity. So now your understanding of reality is completely screwed :D


So how do you see reality, is it individual or do we actually share it with each other?
 
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Terry Sampson

Well-Known Member
So how do you see reality, is it individual or do we actually share it with each other?

I say there is but one objective reality, in which we humans are substantially small parts. Human perception of that reality is significantly limited by the means through which we perceive that reality and what we "make of" that reality, i.e. our individual, separate, and subjective understandings, is affected by our physical perceptions and also affects our perceptions.

P.S. Einstein's Relativity Theory is nonsense.
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
I posted this in another thread, relating something else, but it made me wonder, how people perceive reality.

As we know time is relative, so it depend on speed and acceleration. So if we take two identical watches and throw one of them in a spaceship and keep the other one on Earth. Now we accelerate the spaceship and let it go around Earth at the speed of light for a few days and then bring it back again, then the watch will show a different time than the one on Earth, in fact it will be behind. So time have passed more slowly for the watch in the spaceship than the watch on Earth. Now that is pretty weird, in it self.

But lets try to make it slightly more weird. Since that is true for the watches, its also true for us as humans. Even though we all perceive time equally here on Earth, we are actually living in different realities, your "now" is not my "now". the difference is simply so small than we don't perceive it as such. So now we are going to screw it up even more. So I put you in a spaceship and fire you into space at the speed of light. Now time is really going slow for you, so I age much faster than you. But my past is also changing compared to yours as I have more years of it. But it haven't happened for you yet as it haven't caught up with you. So when you finally reach your destination nothing really seems to have changed a lot for you, but I would have been long dead. And your perception of reality as you remember it, also doesn't exist anymore, but is in fact the past and not something that happened yesterday but maybe 100 of years ago, depending on how long you have been travelling for.

So lets make it even stranger. Now you arrive at you destination and encounter an alien race, which turns out to be humans from Earth, having developed faster than light space travel or wormhole technology and therefore reached the destination faster than you did, so basically you traveled into the future of humanity. So now your understanding of reality is completely screwed :D


So how do you see reality, is it individual or do we actually share it with each other?
I think reality like life itself, is multi-layered and multifaceted.
 

Eddi

Agnostic
Premium Member
Someone once said that reality is that which exists when you no longer believe it to exist

But I forget who
 

Quintessence

Consults with Trees
Staff member
Premium Member
The details of my ontological outlook are complex and nuanced, but in simple, practical terms it boils down to this: anything that I can experience or know about is real and exists.

What this means is that in order for something to truly not exist I cannot know about it or experience it in any way. If the question can even be asked "does such and such exist" the answer is already yes because the thing has been named and it is a known thing that can be experienced by me in some way. The better question is always to ask me "in what way do you experience this thing" or "what type of existence does this thing have for you." My answers there definitely vary, given my life experiences. I do take into account collective human experiences of things as well.
 

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
I posted this in another thread, relating something else, but it made me wonder, how people perceive reality.

As we know time is relative, so it depend on speed and acceleration. So if we take two identical watches and throw one of them in a spaceship and keep the other one on Earth. Now we accelerate the spaceship and let it go around Earth at the speed of light for a few days and then bring it back again, then the watch will show a different time than the one on Earth, in fact it will be behind. So time have passed more slowly for the watch in the spaceship than the watch on Earth. Now that is pretty weird, in it self.

But lets try to make it slightly more weird. Since that is true for the watches, its also true for us as humans. Even though we all perceive time equally here on Earth, we are actually living in different realities, your "now" is not my "now". the difference is simply so small than we don't perceive it as such. So now we are going to screw it up even more. So I put you in a spaceship and fire you into space at the speed of light. Now time is really going slow for you, so I age much faster than you. But my past is also changing compared to yours as I have more years of it. But it haven't happened for you yet as it haven't caught up with you. So when you finally reach your destination nothing really seems to have changed a lot for you, but I would have been long dead. And your perception of reality as you remember it, also doesn't exist anymore, but is in fact the past and not something that happened yesterday but maybe 100 of years ago, depending on how long you have been travelling for.

So lets make it even stranger. Now you arrive at you destination and encounter an alien race, which turns out to be humans from Earth, having developed faster than light space travel or wormhole technology and therefore reached the destination faster than you did, so basically you traveled into the future of humanity. So now your understanding of reality is completely screwed :D


So how do you see reality, is it individual or do we actually share it with each other?


My understanding is that our perception of reality is an interface created for us by the unconscious mind. Like consider the data that is use to create the information on your computer screen. A bunch of binary bits that wouldn't make sense to most people, however the hardware takes the information and creates an image on the screen that we can make sense of.

We all have slightly different hardware so the image we consciously see can be slightly different from individual to individual. In some cases the hardware could be radically different or even damage so the image we individually see can be radically different.

So the reality you perceive is base on actual data input through your senses however how the image ends up being displayed on the interface that is perceive by the conscious mind can be different from individual to individual. The "better" the hardware the more accurate the image.

So reality is the data we share how we end up individually perceiving that data maybe different.

The unconscious mind is not only hardware however, it also has it's own programming. While we can't do much about the hardware, we can to some degree alter it's programming. It is what religion tries to do, it's what the concept of critical thinking tries to do. It's what brainwashing attempts to do. Alter the programs the unconscious mind runs on to alter the resultant image perceive by the conscious mind. It is, IMO, what the idea of "right thought" in Buddhism tries to do. Alter the image of reality created by the unconscious mind that we consciously perceive.
 

dianaiad

Well-Known Member
Samuel Johnson did this best:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus." (Boswell, Life)

Whether or not Boswell's account is apocryphal, Johnson nailed it. Reality is what we experience, because no matter what actually IS, all we know is what we experience.
 

PureX

Veteran Member
I posted this in another thread, relating something else, but it made me wonder, how people perceive reality.

As we know time is relative, so it depend on speed and acceleration. So if we take two identical watches and throw one of them in a spaceship and keep the other one on Earth. Now we accelerate the spaceship and let it go around Earth at the speed of light for a few days and then bring it back again, then the watch will show a different time than the one on Earth, in fact it will be behind. So time have passed more slowly for the watch in the spaceship than the watch on Earth. Now that is pretty weird, in it self.

But lets try to make it slightly more weird. Since that is true for the watches, its also true for us as humans. Even though we all perceive time equally here on Earth, we are actually living in different realities, your "now" is not my "now". the difference is simply so small than we don't perceive it as such. So now we are going to screw it up even more. So I put you in a spaceship and fire you into space at the speed of light. Now time is really going slow for you, so I age much faster than you. But my past is also changing compared to yours as I have more years of it. But it haven't happened for you yet as it haven't caught up with you. So when you finally reach your destination nothing really seems to have changed a lot for you, but I would have been long dead. And your perception of reality as you remember it, also doesn't exist anymore, but is in fact the past and not something that happened yesterday but maybe 100 of years ago, depending on how long you have been travelling for.

So lets make it even stranger. Now you arrive at you destination and encounter an alien race, which turns out to be humans from Earth, having developed faster than light space travel or wormhole technology and therefore reached the destination faster than you did, so basically you traveled into the future of humanity. So now your understanding of reality is completely screwed :D


So how do you see reality, is it individual or do we actually share it with each other?
I think it's important to keep in mind that there is a great deal that we don't know. Whatever one thinks reality is, is very likely to be very wrong.
 

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
Samuel Johnson did this best:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus." (Boswell, Life)

Whether or not Boswell's account is apocryphal, Johnson nailed it. Reality is what we experience, because no matter what actually IS, all we know is what we experience.

I disagree, for example the color pink does not exist but it is still something we can experience. It is an experience created by the unconscious mind.

In that light, a person can experience an relationship with God which may not exist in "reality". Just because you experience something does not gurantee it is part of reality.
 

PureX

Veteran Member
Yeah, ... but there's wrong and there's wronger, as when I'm wrong and you're wronger.
Well, being that what we can't know how what we don't know would change what we think we know, now, if we were to come to know it, there really isn't any way for any us us to justify boasting. Not that this ever stops any of us.
 

Nimos

Well-Known Member
I think it's important to keep in mind that there is a great deal that we don't know. Whatever one thinks reality is, is very likely to be very wrong.
If we talk about reality in terms of time, then we have three different ones. past, present and future. We can't see or experience the future, we can learn from the pasts and observe it, yet we never really experience present, except an illusion of it.

So we are basically always living in the past, so would that mean that we never really experience reality? Its a funny thought I think :)
 

dianaiad

Well-Known Member
I disagree, for example the color pink does not exist but it is still something we can experience. It is an experience created by the unconscious mind.

In that light, a person can experience an relationship with God which may not exist in "reality". Just because you experience something does not gurantee it is part of reality.

It's a part of the reality of the person experiencing it, isn't it?
 
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