I just read that and would it be fair to say that your view of the whole is analogous in a way to imagining we’re entities in a bloodstream trying to understand our reality(the bloodstream) unaware that we’re just a part of a functioning human body? This is an illustration i heard somewhere
Or another one I heard which may be even better is that we’re like neurons in a living brain, we interact with other neurons to create thoughts(experiences?)
Hmm, I’m not sure I would use either, partly because all metaphors/images break down at some level, and partly because representations from anatomy/neuroscience are inevitably shaped by centuries of the kinds of thinking and imagery that (I think) has caused so much conceptual confusion. For instance, I don’t believe neurons interact to create thoughts/experiences. I believe this is an image that (succesfully and productively) serve some explanatory purposes, but also one that affords some ‘special’ priority to neurons over experience, a priority that fails to accont for the primacy of experience. Neurons are derived from experience, and not the other way around.
Ok i finally got around to reading your essay On The Horizon, the first thoughts/visual that came to my mind to understand your take is we’re in a shared dream or more precisely reality IS a shared dream. It also occurred to me while reading the various world views that you outline and critique that beyond my curiosity and enjoyment of contemplating these things i don’t know if it serves any useful purpose for me to form an opinion on the nature of reality, since I really don’t have the academic or intellectual chops to have any confidence in whatever opinion i might come to. I can understand how one’s view of the world and reality can affect their attitude and approach to everyday life experiences, and because of my lack of confidence in my opinion this is probably a source of tension for me personally, if I don’t have a set belief and just accept it as a mystery, I have to look elsewhere for a foundation to base my outlook on. I suppose this is the general plight of many people and one of the reasons for mine and others spiritual and scientific seeking and I take solace in not being alone in that regard. Anyway I enjoy your work and im sure im benefiting somehow even if I find some of it difficult to grasp. Anyway my journey continues and im sure it will include reading more of your stuff, including dwelling on the parts below that I think are central in order to understand your theory or view of reality(correct me if im wrong)
not only is reality in experience, but made of experience.
The most central notion that has to be let go in this is that we are a product of the world, rather than us and the world co-arising as one whole.
Experience precedes the cogito (“I think”), as experience comes much before there is an “I” that finds itself thinking, much less doubting that it is thinking. Experience, “the stage”, precedes the what of the world, both subject/I/Self and objects/other/world. There is as such a that-ness, an experiential stage on which your world takes place.
Central to this is memory and representation, that which allows us to differentiate the changes in experience. Again we may ask, changes of what? Memory and representation implies an original, and we must think now of the original experience, and not of original objects, which are derived from experience as useful abstractions.
The conception of reality as the union of our experiences is an idea that is hard to come to terms with. A significant reason why this is so hard to wrap one’s thought around is, I think, that we cannot visualize this geometrically in a «non-contradictory» way. To paraphrase Wittgenstein: «the eye cannot see itself in its field of sight.»13 Just like the eye is not visible to its own sight, the eye is still required for sight. In a similar way, our individual experiences are nowhere to be seen from a physical-theoretical point of view of only those things in our experience, but our individual experiences are still required for the physical-theoretical point of view to be possible in the first place. We are in difficulty when conceiving that reality should be somehow made up of our experience, because, on the analogy of eyesight, we inevitably ask, in what space does our view lie in? If there are multiple points of view, does not the existence of these presuppose a space that these all lie in? And this is the thing, there is no pre-existing space, the view and the space it is in comes about as one whole. Any drawing we may supply of this gives the impression that the eye or point of view is in some pre-existing space, but this merely showcases the limits of geometric representation. To appropriate a quote from Putnam: «…the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.»14
It certainly jives with the quantum measurement/observation phenomenon
For more on that, see: https://tmfow.substack.com/p/quantum-theory
I just read that and would it be fair to say that your view of the whole is analogous in a way to imagining we’re entities in a bloodstream trying to understand our reality(the bloodstream) unaware that we’re just a part of a functioning human body? This is an illustration i heard somewhere
Or another one I heard which may be even better is that we’re like neurons in a living brain, we interact with other neurons to create thoughts(experiences?)
Hmm, I’m not sure I would use either, partly because all metaphors/images break down at some level, and partly because representations from anatomy/neuroscience are inevitably shaped by centuries of the kinds of thinking and imagery that (I think) has caused so much conceptual confusion. For instance, I don’t believe neurons interact to create thoughts/experiences. I believe this is an image that (succesfully and productively) serve some explanatory purposes, but also one that affords some ‘special’ priority to neurons over experience, a priority that fails to accont for the primacy of experience. Neurons are derived from experience, and not the other way around.
Ok i finally got around to reading your essay On The Horizon, the first thoughts/visual that came to my mind to understand your take is we’re in a shared dream or more precisely reality IS a shared dream. It also occurred to me while reading the various world views that you outline and critique that beyond my curiosity and enjoyment of contemplating these things i don’t know if it serves any useful purpose for me to form an opinion on the nature of reality, since I really don’t have the academic or intellectual chops to have any confidence in whatever opinion i might come to. I can understand how one’s view of the world and reality can affect their attitude and approach to everyday life experiences, and because of my lack of confidence in my opinion this is probably a source of tension for me personally, if I don’t have a set belief and just accept it as a mystery, I have to look elsewhere for a foundation to base my outlook on. I suppose this is the general plight of many people and one of the reasons for mine and others spiritual and scientific seeking and I take solace in not being alone in that regard. Anyway I enjoy your work and im sure im benefiting somehow even if I find some of it difficult to grasp. Anyway my journey continues and im sure it will include reading more of your stuff, including dwelling on the parts below that I think are central in order to understand your theory or view of reality(correct me if im wrong)
not only is reality in experience, but made of experience.
The most central notion that has to be let go in this is that we are a product of the world, rather than us and the world co-arising as one whole.
Experience precedes the cogito (“I think”), as experience comes much before there is an “I” that finds itself thinking, much less doubting that it is thinking. Experience, “the stage”, precedes the what of the world, both subject/I/Self and objects/other/world. There is as such a that-ness, an experiential stage on which your world takes place.
Central to this is memory and representation, that which allows us to differentiate the changes in experience. Again we may ask, changes of what? Memory and representation implies an original, and we must think now of the original experience, and not of original objects, which are derived from experience as useful abstractions.
The conception of reality as the union of our experiences is an idea that is hard to come to terms with. A significant reason why this is so hard to wrap one’s thought around is, I think, that we cannot visualize this geometrically in a «non-contradictory» way. To paraphrase Wittgenstein: «the eye cannot see itself in its field of sight.»13 Just like the eye is not visible to its own sight, the eye is still required for sight. In a similar way, our individual experiences are nowhere to be seen from a physical-theoretical point of view of only those things in our experience, but our individual experiences are still required for the physical-theoretical point of view to be possible in the first place. We are in difficulty when conceiving that reality should be somehow made up of our experience, because, on the analogy of eyesight, we inevitably ask, in what space does our view lie in? If there are multiple points of view, does not the existence of these presuppose a space that these all lie in? And this is the thing, there is no pre-existing space, the view and the space it is in comes about as one whole. Any drawing we may supply of this gives the impression that the eye or point of view is in some pre-existing space, but this merely showcases the limits of geometric representation. To appropriate a quote from Putnam: «…the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.»14