If you haven’t already seen it, you might be interested in looking at this thread:

Objective Reality: We Can't Know It

Your post addresses the cultural/societal aspects of subjective reality, and the linked thread addresses philosophical aspects.

Good post!

Hi Researcher

Do you know the Temple of Set? The theme you brought up is discussed there extensively! and in very similar terms.

I don't. What is it?

http://www.xeper.org

or the wikipedia, naturally.

The topic you mention is discussed in one of their documents, the Crystal Tablet of Set, which I do not know if you can readily find it online. The distinctions and the way of working with the Objective Universe and the Subjective Universe is one of the cores of their philosophy.

I am not a member, BTW!

I like this thread, and also the one by gibran2. Slowly but surely there will be more clarity (and agreement) on what can and cannot be known, and how to act accordingly so.

I really want to see the faces of these "objective reality" fanatics, when the laws of physics are nullyfied right before their eyes.
Very good analogy. The human body as a "computer".

I think it's like that:

Human body: hardware
mind: software
non-physical part: true self

Very interesting!

In my thinking, the reason we are so easily hornswaggled is reality is based on infinity rather than logic, which, in a long about way, coincides with your post, Researcher. What I see is we're floating in an infinite universe which we aren't equipped to comprehend, so we insist on putting walls and a floor around some small part of it and call that "reality". This works as long as we hang out in groups what all accept the same "architecture" and everyone in that group is happy with the way things are.

Unfortunately, when you're operating in an artificial system, it's easy to invent rules that aren't fair, that favor one part of the group over the other. (In the novel "Animal Farm" the pigs make a rule that "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others".) Under those circumsstances, the artificial reality starts to split between the awarenesses of the folks on top and the folks getting screwed. So, the underdogs stake a claim over their own section of the infinite Whatever, and put their own walls.

To go with the computer analogy: It's like cropping a photo. In the end, we're all starring in our own movie, complete with glamor shots cropped to make us look our best. All the messes we make are "erased" and we feel pretty good every time we check out the finished photo.

That's part of being human, though. Without the walls and floor, we'd just be hanging out suspended in space, trying to visualize what it means to have no end to anything. Infinity is hard to wrap your mind around. You can't move forward if you don't have a past to step away from. You can't move up if there's no down.

So I guess the best we can do is just go a little ways away from whatever doesn't seem right and put up our own structure, inviting others who share the same thoughts and feelings to join the effort. As this new ideal gets built, hopefully it works better and lasts longer than that which came before.

I know this is getting long, but one parting shot:

The native peoples of the Southwest have a theory about how we came to be here. The Creator made several world (maybe infinite worlds). Humans started out in one but we all got to quarreling and acting bad, so one group (the natives) asked for help from their spirit helpers and a way was prepared for them to escape. They got into the next world, but they couldn't get alone with the people they found there, either. This went on several times, unti they got here. But always Coyote, who has a lot of brains but no sense, seems to get a little seed or two of evil caught up in his fur or in his pocket or whatever, and it grows and grows until everyone wants to leave again. If what we're doing here is laying the foundation for a better way of living, I hope we find some way to clean up Coyote this time.

Light and love,
Chal

Irony? Seems rather fanatical to exhibit so much contempt in the matter.


I too have considered the human-computer analogy:
-Hardware->Physiology
-Software->Perception
-Firmware->Sentience

Bear in mind also that data is stored and accessed physically within a computer, and I don't think there's any reason that the human being is necessarily an exception to this.

I typically find dichotomies like objective vs. subjective to be poorly representative of how we experience our existence; their is good and evil, then there is us, and we are as much neither as both. For example I may consider that rather than perspective being divided between the two as either-or, perspective represents a third condition, establishing a trichotomy like the Hegelian triad.

This is a leap of faith that cannot be proven and is really just an ideological viewpoint. I'm not commenting on the good/evil dichotomy as that is all relative (as is everything, which segues into my next points).



Regardless of how "real" any of this existence may or may not be...

Subjective Reality can be experienced and is proved by (or at the very least, to) the individual who lives this filtered piece of reality. Only he who lives this reality has the proof it exists.

Consensus Reality can be experienced and is proved by the consensual interactions that take place within it. As we all function and interact within this reality, we all have the proof of this reality.

Objective Reality can be neither lived nor proved, imo. No one's experiencing it and no one can say they are functioning in it and provide evidence it is something beyond "Consensus Reality".
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The problem with "Objective Reality" is that, in order to be objective, something must stand outside of that which it is viewing. Reality can't do that with respect to itself, imo.

The point was that though we consider good evil as diametrically opposed, the fact of the matter is that there is no true good or evil, and that both stem from the individual which is neither or both; as in, the individual's conception of good and evil either extend beyond one's reality, or are both reflective of one's reality. The individual is the only thing tying them together and can never be purely either-or.



Ok, but consider that there must first be an objective reality for a subjective one to arise. The subjective (qualia) is the result the objective, but it doesn't stop there: Subjective reality does impact objective reality, but how does it do this? Through one's perspective reality, the subjective, born of the objective, may lend to the generation of a new objective reality via perspective. Thus my follow-up remark to the following statement:



In a linear model, this would be compromise, but the Hegelian model works in cycles, as you illustrate. As I have previously stated, objective reality is influenced by subjective reality through perspective reality. I would contend that the subjective does not entail interpretation but precludes it. The subjective more adequately comprises sensory or action (manifestation of impulse), which more often than not finds consensus between individuals of like physiology. It is perspective in which the subjective may be interpreted, and the interpretation determines an objective outcome. Fire (object) generates warmth (subject) feels pleasant in some cases, painful in others, and often fluxuates between the two with no clear distinction (perspective), and as such, one's behavior is altered accordingly (back to object). That one behaves in a certain way in consideration of heat means that, for example, one may physically keep their distance, and consensus between individuals and by one's own account that one is not throwing oneself into the fire indicates that the subjective and perspective realities of this person have born an objective interaction--repulsion.

Certainly we can't know the totality of objective reality, as in, from a "god's-eye-view," but this is an imagined position to begin with and presupposes the possibility of an extraneous position. To see or know things as they are is at once paradoxical but also the given state: We see things as they can be seen, given the visible electromagentic spectrum but sight doesn't go beyond that, so to see the totality of something beyond our own sight is a contradiction in terms. To know would be precisely the same, but in terms of neurology: There is nothing to know beyond the brain's capacity to know, and everything that is knowable, is knowable--no such thing as unknowable knowledge. Omniscience does not exceed the capacity of science, just comprises the totality of it, of which the frontiers expand perpetually; certainly not beyond the constraints of reality, but within it.

these threads always end up the same way..its impossible not to.