CuriousLord
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Joined: 4/3/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Aswad
quote:
ORIGINAL: CuriousLord
I would encouarge you, in the question of reality vs. mental construct, to consider reality, as we know it to be.
Not to be nitpicking, but in the context of the rest of the post, "know" should perhaps be replaced with something else, such as "believe it to be", given that "We do not know reality". 
I'm glad you tried this nitpick, as it gives me a chance to explain a subtle point.
If I had said, "reality, as we believe it to be", then one might be correct in assuming that an apparently mundane ball, placed into an apparently mundane box, under apparently mundane conditions, would remain in such a box until taken out.
Instead, though, I asked readers to consider "reality, as we know it to be". Should such a ball be placed in such a box under such conditions, what do we know? We have a series of perceptions we can claim to know, modified by our memory. We do not actually know if there's the ball in the box still, nor even understand exactly what the ball nor box are.
Point being, such stimuli constitute our reality, outside of the internal stimuli. This is reality, as we know it to be, in the truest sense; it contrasts with reality, as we believe it to be, in which case we begin to adopt the constructs.
I.. chose my words carefully, often times. I often feel like such subtle points stand as paramount to verbal masturbation as I often doubt even a fair minority are recognized. Most are probably assumed as such mistakes. I'm sort of glad I could try explain one.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Aswad
quote:
But I can not stress the importance enough of the vast difference between constructed model and actual reality. Something similar to "God" may exist. This may even fall into some definitions of "God", even if loosely or with inconsistencies, but, nonetheless, God is not "God".
~nod~
Human conceptions of any god are bound to be flawed.
Not to mention that, for a number of these faiths, the beliefs were originally those of illiterate shepherders and farmers.
The notion of "consciousness", for instance, is a fairly recent one; as a term, it is a few centuries old. And it was not evidenced at all in some of the early tales of mankind, such as the Gilgamesh epic; there is no introspection, no sense of "I" that is in sync with our modern perception of it.
When even such basic ideas are absent, how can one codify beliefs in a way we can relate to?
If confronted with a spaceship, these people would be seeing a spaceship, but they would have no concept of one. So they would describe it in terms familiar to them, which would make it hard, if not outright impossible, for us to imagine what they are describing.
The same goes for anything beyond what science has encountered (i.e. anything "supernatural"); if it's something we can not accurately comprehend today, how on earth would an earlier culture fare in trying to relate to it and describe it?
Sort of ironic. The subject involved constructs, and your ideas moved in this direction.
Understanding such things, such as a spaceship, or even sense of self in the sense of "I", is to have constructs.
Edit: Missed the second quote tag.
< Message edited by CuriousLord -- 6/15/2007 12:41:32 AM >
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RE: the nature of God; does it matter? - 
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