Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

http://iainews.iai.tv/articles/beyond-reality-auid-518

EXCERPT: [...] “Reality is the dream of a mad philosopher.” [Ambrose] Bierce’s words seemed apposite because to me the notion of a single overarching ‘reality’ which might apply equally and objectively to all humans, now and forever, is a wild fantasy.

A standard dictionary definition of reality runs thus: “Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.”

Someone, somewhere, has carefully divided ‘things’ into two fixed categories:

(a) ‘Things’ which actually exist. These are objectively Real

(b) ‘Things’ which exist only as ideals or notions. These are not objectively Real.

‘Things’ can apparently only be one or the other – (a) or (b), real or unreal. Therefore, we might speak about someone refusing to face up to reality [...] their attempts to evade this immutable ‘reality’ have led them into the further sin of being ‘unrealistic’.

Yet, what are things – actually or otherwise? And, who, or what, has divided all these ‘things’ into such neat, polarised categories: actual/notional, real/ unreal, objective/subjective?

In order to ascertain that something is ‘objectively’ real, you would need to be an objective judge of objectivity. Effectively, you would need to be omniscient, to perceive all time, all space, so you can fix the parameters of the real and the unreal. You would need, therefore, to be non-human, because the condition of human life is transience – non-eternality, non-omniscience – so there is a further question of how this non-human and therefore objective perception of reality would relate to non-objective and therefore human experience anyway.

The notion of reality as divisible into the notional (subjective) and the actual (objective) is therefore merely a notion. The entire definition of reality quoted above exists only in category (b). Therefore, by its own logic, it is not real. Or, it is the dream of a mad philosopher.

However, scientific materialists, for example, might say that this is specious....

We need reality to be as subjective as it is objective in order for it to be real. Too often subjective connotes unreal or illusory. As if by being subjective reality has become LESS real. But subjective really means impacted by and involved with--a reality that we are part of and that lives inside us as feelings and dreams and passions and images of transcendental beauty. A rock or a tree is in this primal sense subjective to reality--it is subject to the conditions that surrounds it and participates in the changes of the world. We can experience matter because we ARE matter, We can experience energy because we ARE energy. Objectivity, in a purely dispassionate and independent sense, is only a myth of the abstracting mind, because as given the Real is personal and spontaneous and nascent at every moment of our lives.

“Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced.”
― John Keats

Denial of reality is a path straight to madness.

As far as I'm concerned, the value and interest of both philosophy and science are found in learning more about reality.

Not in trying to make reality go away.