Dialectic: The Nature of Reality

Dialectic : The art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions.

Hello!

I thought it might be fun to broaden our horizons by investigating and discussing the nature of reality. It may seem like some serious head-in-the-clouds stuff but when you look at some of the cultural phenomena through history on war, peace, and ethics...how we explain the world often informs how we act within it.

I'll start with a classical Greek conception of reality that has informed much of how the West (I use this term loosely) understands this thing we call existence. I'm linking two videos. The first is a TED educational video that discusses Plato's famous 'Allegory of the Cave'...and rounds it out with a reference to how many philosophers built the ideas Plato demonstrated with his allegory. The second approaches the allegory from a slightly different perspective, and dives into methods of Socratic discourse. Very cool too. These certainly aren't the ONLY conceptions of reality...but I figured since it speaks to a conception most of our cultures are derivative of...it's a start. I'll drop a few more in as we go!






How does the idea of an 'essence' or 'ideal' form of something inform religious and cultural belief systems? I bring it up because many faiths have a creation story (reality as we perceive it) as stemming from the ideal of a deity (Heaven, Elysium, etc.)

What are the implications for a culture where an ideal concept informs and in some cases supercedes the reality we see? How can we determine the 'ideal' if it will never enter our sense...and what are some of the dangers of interpretation?

Also, I wanted to offer up The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

It is a wonderful resource covering most philosophical traditions stemming from antiquity until today. It is constantly updated by students in graduate and doctorate programs, so you assume less risk than jumping into the web.

Enjoy!

I like to differentiate essence and nature, with essence being somethings less volatile attributes and nature being the more volatile ones, such that somethings nature tends to be strongly influenced by its environment while its essence is more steadfast. From that I tend to avoid absolute statements about things, and view them instead as a range of that concept of volatility.

Such that it's all just patterns of energy until it smacks into you. Avoiding getting smacked into helps but in essence (no pun intended) how something reacts or responds determines their moment of existence at that time. But the patterns as data reveal useful information when considered in terms of essence and nature, because something being more 'of essence' might appear to be closer to some absolute truth about something when considered in different circumstance or environment. And in the workings of our mind we'd seem to use simplified models built from experience to try and better confront that nature of reality, so they do indeed become essential parts of how we end up living life. But I think we can change them, and by doing so its not about confronting the nature of reality anymore, and about perhaps confronting the nature of our perception to better relate to the essence of reality. That would be my pop-philosophical approach at this point in time!

Adder, what would you say your influences were in coming to this conception? It sounds a bit more fundamentally western...with certain connotations taken from eastern thought as well. I like it

Reacher wrote: Adder, what would you say your influences were in coming to this conception? It sounds a bit more fundamentally western...with certain connotations taken from eastern thought as well. I like it

Hehe yea, I"m all mixed up that is for sure... but, hmm I'm not sure I read it anywhere in particular (but its possible), so short of saying 'everything' it perhaps was facilitated in the most recent sense by Covey's distinction between character and personality in 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People'. I do spend most of my time reading about Buddhism though... I'm interested to see where this topic could go!!

Interesting!

Considering some of your Buddhist overtones and almost Taoist undertones, let me throw a couple things your way and see if they resonate.

The following are from the 1993 Roger Ames translation of Sun Tzu's The Art of Warfare:

"Order within the classical Chinese world view is "immanental" - indwelling in things themselves - like the grain in wood, like striations in stone, like the cadence of the surf, like the veins in a leaf. The classical Chinese believed that the power of creativity resides in the world itself, and that the order and regularity this world evidences is not derived from or imposed upon it by some independent, activating force, but inheres in the world. Change and continuity are equally "real."

The world, then, is the efficient cause of itself. It is resolutely dynamic, autogenerative, self-organizing, and in a real sense, alive. This one world is constituted as a sea of ch'i - psychophysical energy that disposes itself in various concentrations, configurations, and perturbations. The intelligible pattern that can be discerned and mapped from each different perspective within the world is tao - a "pathway" that can, in varying degrees, be traced out to make one's place and one's context coherent. Tao is, at any given time, both what the world is, and how it is. In this tradition, there is no final distinction between some independent source of order, and what it orders."

"The 'two-world' order of classical Greece has given our tradition a theoretical basis for objectivity - the possibility of standing outside and taking a wholly external view of things. Objectivity allows us to decontextualize things as "objects" in our world. By contrast, in the "this-world" of classical China, instead of starting abstractly from some underlying, unifying, and originating principle, we begin from our own specific place within the world. Without objectivity, "objects" dissolve into the flux and flow, and existence becomes a continuous, uninterrupted process. Each of us is invariably experiencing the world as one perspective within the context of many."

What Ames is describing is a conception of reality where none of us 'are' anything beyond our relation to everything else. I am 'like' other humans because I am less hot than fire, more hot than ice, softer than metal, harder than water...all the way down to specifics. Which explains why flow and harmony are important in that universe. It also explains why Go is about establishing a balance of continued existence while Chess orients upon annihilation - in the context of warfare.

Fascinating stuff, and somehow familiar...

Here's a great talk on what Ames is writing about:

Very interesting about the different categories, makes me think using appropriate categories could lend some net benefit to process. In fact, it's made me realize I've been doing this as central to my Jedi path without realizing it - trying to gather concepts and themes around a central 'flow' from stabilized restful awareness to directed effective action, or in another context, from a basis of complexity out to point in time and space. The whole idea makes for an interesting perspective on learning and education, creating individual categorization of information to help memory (and refining them as knowledge increases).

Firstly, thank you for starting this thread, I've had to have quite a think about what you've said in this (and was a little nervous about posting as both you and Adder appear to considerably more knowledgeable about this topic than I am, and I'm still a bit concerned that I'm out of my depth here haha).

I'm going to take a slightly scientific approach to this if thats ok? Purely because I know more about it from that angle.

From my understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong) Platonic philosophy basically tries to understand reality in terms of the 'ideals' that capture the real 'essence' of that which is dimly reflected in the physical world? I used to be a much bigger subscriber to this philosophy than I am now (though I was not actually aware that its was called Platonic Philosophy lol), in that I believed what we were seeing in the physical world was a dim reflection of the true ideal thing, much like the men in the cave seeing the shadows. Then I discovered mathematics :laugh:

Maths comes pretty close to capturing ideals. For example the 'ideal' circle. It cannot be constructed, but its properties, like the area it covers, can be calculated to virtually any degree of accuracy. Maths can do this in a purely structural way building all objects including circles from the 'essence free' empty set.

I should clarify that 'essence free' arguments are pretty rare in maths, but even geometrical arguments are still phrased in such a way that they're easy to convert into sets. In normal discourse we take the merger of structure and essence as given. It is how we visualize the world and how we think. The problem is that the essence we attribute to external objects is from our own experience. It is not something that is part of the external objects. A soft touch, sharp slap, beautiful sunset or ugly wound, are things created in us when we have particular experiences.

We are neither perceiving the reality as it truly is, nor are we dimly perceiving some ideal platonic reality. The world is created in our conscious experience, sure there is a related external structure that our perception is causally connected to, but the perception of, for example, colour is far more a construction of our sensory and nervous system than it is an effect from light of a particular frequency (are you familiar with The Colourblind Neuroscientist though experiment?). In other words, we have to experience and perceive colour to know it, and i think we have to experience and perceive our reality in order to know what (we think) reality is.

I think I've gone a bit of topic now, and possibly confused myself in the process :laugh:

Think I'll stick to my own reality, one that I can see and touch, and not worry about whether I'm looking at shadows or rabbits :laugh:

Sorry for the long post, here's a Plato Potato:

You're spot on, man - thank you for bringing math and geometry into this because those two are exactly the kind of ideal Forms we like in the west, and I completely neglected to mention them.

What you're talking about with perceived reality is akin to Social Construction . It's the idea in sociology that there is no objective reality, only what we perceive and how social dynamics orient us to those perceptions. For example:

As a baby you perceive the things your mother does for you - feeds you, clothes you, bathes you...all things that are gratifying and feel good to you. You think mom is awesome!

At a certain point, you externalize the role of 'mom' from the person who does all that awesome stuff for you. Your understanding of 'mom' goes from this is how MY mom acts, to...this is how moms act. You understand the role as independent of any one person and have incorporated it into your construction of reality. This applies to father, brother, car...everything. "The central concept is that people and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each others' actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other."

Another example is our understanding of symbols - Imagine you get into a pretty serious argument with a guy, so much so that you think he might harm you.
He doesn't, and you both go your own ways. You wake up the next day to find a knife lodged into the wall over your bedpost. If you're like me and understand what knives do because you accidentally shanked yourself at Boy Scout camp...you know that 'knives' (as constructed like 'mom') cut things. You have been socialized into this understanding, but also understand that the knife represents implied violence. Your reality is that the guy is threatening you with harm...and you need to take it seriously. Why don't you perceive the knife as a gift? Perhaps an offering to make peace? In some cultures, that may well be the case. But you understand knives, and share a reality with your fellow arguer near enough to know that he understands knives the same way you do.

This isn't always the case, though, as symbols, ideas, and reality can be constructed VERY differently by different people and cultures. This echoes into your Non-interference thread. Perhaps it isn't safe to assume, at all times, that others share your reality.

This has VERY strong implications about understanding others' behavior. When you simply don't understand someone...maybe there is merely a significant gap in their reality. Usually when people can't make sense of one another, they generalize each other along these lines:

1. They don't have all the information. If they were less ignorant, they'd think like me. (Clinton and Trump supporters?)
Well, what if they do?
2. They're crazy. There is something wrong with their mind that prevents them from thinking like me. (North Korea and Kim Jong Un?)
Well, let's assume we discovered they're not crazy.
3. They're evil. If they have all the same information we do, and they aren't crazy, they MUST be evil - and criminal (Bin Laden?)

I think on some level, this speaks to why we often declare our enemies 'criminal' in war - they are literally in violation of ordered reality. Criminals are punished for willfully deviating from ordered reality, are sometimes rehabilitated to recognize and submit to it, and in some cases have no place in it. In war, entire societies entertain realities which are not reconcilable, so we fight about it until one reality or another exists.

This explains classical Chinese thought as well. If reality is ever-present, and ever-creating as we live it...those who go to war in Sun Tzu fashion are attempting to attune reality in a way they see as most harmonious. They have different dispositions as to what that means. They implicitly recognize that realities are in contest.