reasoning – What Comes to Mind https://whatcomestomind.ca ... and trying to making sense of it Mon, 02 Mar 2020 07:16:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 On the Nature of Reality https://whatcomestomind.ca/2020/03/on-the-nature-of-reality/ Mon, 02 Mar 2020 07:16:46 +0000 http://whatcomestomind.leignes.com?p=2908 Continue reading ]]> Simply put, reality is experiencing the world in real-time,  the here and now and “the place” where we interact with it.  It is the state of things as they are when we encounter them, as opposed to how they may appear or can be imagined. Reality is the basis for everything that we believe to be true about the world. (Well, at least, it ought to be!)

Determination and acceptance of what is real is derived from our interaction with the world and in the first instance a product of our minds in consideration of the information delivered to it by our sensory experiences. This makes our understanding of what is real very much a function of what we have brought to the fore in terms of our sensory organs and the intellectual ability to interpret the information they have gathered for us via our sensory experiences.

It goes without saying that if we had been different creatures we would have likely experienced a different world and have interacted with it differently, although I would hold that the difference in interaction would be a matter of degree and not of kind.  As a result our conclusions about the nature of the reality might very well be the same in the sense that we can interact and share a common environment despite qualitatively substantially different experiences.

It follows that  all knowledge  is subjective, and a product of our experiential perception of it, i.e., the only reality we know is entirely of our own making  and that would include any theories we have developed around its nature or origin.

It also follows that reality isn’t limited to what we know about it; instead,  it is limited by what we don’t know about it on the assumption that there is likely so much more to it but just not available to  us us because of what we are in terms of being able to perceive and understand it …

For example, we have developed notions of space and time which work perfectly well in helping us navigate and manage our immediate environment, but these concepts begin to break down – and no longer make any sense – when we apply them to the larger whole and  their logical consequences. They become nonsensical, as we will have to assume such things as the beginning and end of time  and the possibilities of the infinitely large and infinitely small.

As a result the reality of the world we know becomes less and less intelligible the further we move away from the centre – which lies necessarily within ourselves – where the very concept of it came into being when we first opened our eyes and found ourselves immersed in it.

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