The Glade 4.0

Do you believe that what you believe is really real?

What is "real?" How do you define "real?" If you mean what we can taste, smell, hear and feel then what's "real" is nothing more than electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Or you could be advertising for the farcically named "Truth Project."

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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That's what CNN is for, barring that a slap in the chops can seem pretty real.

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"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." Charles Mackay

I am human, therefore I am flawed. Realizing that, I have to take on faith that my perceptions are flawed, that my beliefs are flawed, and that my knowledge base is horribly incomplete. I have no real choice but to believe my perceptions for everyday reality. To do otherwise is a path to madness.

I believe in God. I believe that everything we have been told about him, including what is in the Bible and the other holy books of the world, is the interpretation by inspired and well meaning men of what they cannot truly understand.

So yes, I believe what I have just written to be true. That leaves me with a huge problem believing that what other men say to be true is in fact, true.

I have no doubt you may have problems believing to be true what I just wrote. That is okay, you should. All men and women need to find truth and God for themselves. In spite of what Jesus is reported to have said in the Bible, and that others have said in the holy books of their faiths, there is no one path to God that will work for everyone. I believe that to be true.

As the Bard of Avon once wrote - The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek.
[1596 Shakespeare Merchant of Venice i. iii. 93]

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Or maybe I was hoping people would honestly examine what they believe and ask themselves if they really believe that what they believe is really real.

Beryllin:

She did. "Reality" is a construct, as human beings are fundamentally incapable of knowing anything objective.

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Ok, that is what you believe. But do you believe that to be really real?

Are you passing along questions from a three year-old?

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What is real? Is my keyboard real because I can touch it? Is my Mountain Dew real because I can taste it? Is my Seahawks Jacket real because I can see it?

I don't need to believe in these things because they are tangible, "real". My Blackberry doesn't need me to believe in it to function, the Earth doesn't need me to believe in it to exist.

Therefore, if God *does* exist, he doesn't need us to believe in him to do so. All he requires then is our obedience and adherence to his rules for our eternal reward. Since I have no tangible proof of said existence, I therefore have no need to adhere to his rules. (most of which are kinda silly anyway.)

If God appeared before me and said I am god! and performed a miracle or something, I still wouldn't need to *believe* in him. At that point, he is clearly tangible, and exists, so belief is not necessary.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I am still unconvinced that I am not a figment of someone else's imagination. Their psychological need for someone to dump on. So I cannot answer the original question asked as I do not even know that I am real, let alone anything else.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Darksiege is wise.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I think it's a poorly phrased question and awfully general.

About God and and the universe and eternity: Yes.

About politics: I'm open to honest discussion, but what I believe about this ties largely to the first.

Other subjects, not so much.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I absolutely reject that. Gravity works. The world is not flat. The earth is many billions of years old. Mankind evolved from primates. Natural Selection exists. Concrete hurts when you fall on it. Mankind knows many things as an objective certainty. In fact, all reality is objectively certain, we simply have not answered all the questions yet. What is, is.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I believe that I observe real things, however, I am not arrogant enough to believe that I perceive them accurately or fully.

As a kid, I used to muse over whether the color my brain "sees" when I look at something green, is the same as what another sees when they look at something green (as opposed to, for instance, them observing something green that appears to them as red appears to me). It is obvious that we are both observing something when we distinguish color, and it is obvious that it is consistent within our perceptions. If my friend and I look at something and say "that's green," then when I look and see green somewhere else, I am confident that he will decide that the second object is green, as well. I used to ponder whether it might be the case that one *perception* of color is preferable to everybody, and people linking different colors with different perceptions might be responsible for people having different favorite colors...

The second part of my statement is akin to what I brought away from my reading of Flatland.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

This is equal to or even exceeds the arrogance you'd have us believe religion fosters.

Really, it's backwards, a slap in the face of science and knowledge how simplistic this perspective is, ironic given the fawning for knowledge and objectivity you espouse.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I admire your faith.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Btw...yet another Matrix reference I'm obliged to point out.

I believe there are absolute physical realities, whether we understand them or not, but then there is all the rest - our malleable subjective perceptions that is the maze of billions of complex synaptic connections that are human brains.

But that's not the question now, is it?

There is nothing we can know objectively. We end up needing to take certain things on faith, just to survive--things like our senses being trustworthy, our memory being correct, etc. We have no way to know that everything we remember wasn't manufactured, and that we are not disembodied brains in a vat somewhere being fed our realities as some kind of experiment...

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

/waves to the other brains. With his tentacle-ly brain stem.

So, if I may re-phrase this, you are saying that there is a reality, but we cannot know what that reality is?

We can experience that part of the reality that our senses and physical limitations allow. My very colorblind friend sees thousands of shades of grey. Color is a fantasy to him. His wife's eyes a lovely deep blue, he shall never truly know what that means.

Extrapolate that out to the rest of reality. The deaf cannot hear, the blind cannot see, the mute cannot talk. What parts of reality are the rest of us missing because of senses we don't understand we don't have? How much more beautiful, how much richer the experience if we knew, if we could understand those things - if they exist.

Because we don't know if they exist, for us they don't. But if they do, and they are part of reality, we just don't know and appreciate the experience and it keeps us from making the connections they might provide.

Then again, what is it to reality if we can observe it or not?

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

As far as I can tell reality is a bubble encompassing only my observations. Everything else is a perhaps waiting for me to collapse it into an "is".

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I like this post very much!

To bring it home to the commonplace, some life on Earth (not humans) see parts of the ultraviolet spectrum that we do not. A photographer has taken photographs of flowers that sort of shift part of the UV spectrum into color we would normally see. Turns out that some flowers have patterns that we simply can not see, which some insects can. This link shows a striking such example. The link for the main website for this UV (and infrared) photography is here.

To us a yellow flower might just be a yellow flower. To an insect that doesn't quite see the same spectrum it may not be. Neither of us is any more correct than the other. You don't even have to venture out into the realm of the Matrix to have some problems with an objective reality. We may say "that is a yellow flower" but it's only true for us, and besides, that yellowness is just a creation of our brain based on reflected light entering our eyes and being picked up by nerves. The objective reality is that light bouncing off a flower, but it's one step removed from how we directly experience things. Kinda a strange concept once you wrap your brain around it, even if you toss out all Matrixesque possibilities.

With science discovering new fundamental stuff every now and then, I wouldn't even feel too comfortable stating that we know much about objective reality to begin with. You can cheat and say stuff like the Earth is round, since those are fully defined terms in and of themselves, but I wonder what some scientist 2,000 years from now would say if they read my comment about reflected light. I can imagine they'd say something like "well, yes, but..." and explain with a lot more finesse about the details of what is objectively happening. Well, I'm sure a scientist now would find my science explanations infantile, but you guys get where I'm going with this I hope. :p Taking it a step farther, you can dig deep enough and find a whole lot of stuff science can only guess at right now, so I can only wonder about the stuff science has no clue even exists to question now.

The double slit experiment and time-bending gravity still confuse the heck out of me and these are not particularly new concepts. :p

I wish I could see Octarine.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Yeah. We can know nothing for certainty. All we have is what we can observe, and we make the assumption that our observations reflect reality.

I have no problems making that assumption, however. We all have to do so, just to go about our day-to-day lives. In the absense of the evidence of any other reality, we're left with what we can see, hear, smell, touch and taste.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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