I'll have to think about these "subjective visions of the world", which I admit exist and which I don't recall ever disparaging, although I'm not entirely sure exactly what you mean by that, and I won't presume to guess either.
You say that I'm disputing objections that you haven't raised. I think perhaps we're both doing a bit of that. For my part, I'm assuming that you dispute objective reality on the basis of statements like, "Reality is contingent on the observer.", which to my mind mind can only mean that the stove isn't real until I walk into the kitchen. To be precise, it would mean that there was no sense of even talking about the kitchen or anything else outside of my being there. Perhaps, the dispute here is a semantic one. You admit that a physical world exists beyond our perceptions, but you use the word "reality" to mean simply the sum of our knowledge and idea of the world. Well, you can call a duck a goose, and a goose a duck, but I'm not sure what's accomplished bickering over idiosyncratic word usages. Either the stove is real when I'm in the room or it isn't. If you want to twist the word "real" to mean strictly my confirmation of the stove, and rob me of any word with which to express it's unobserved existence while simultaneously admitting that it has one...well, I guess you have a reason.
Perhaps it's your objection to the narrowness of the example. Well, what do you want? You didn't like the scientific examples; you don't like the immediate example. I can't establish the objective reality of everything on a case by case basis. You have to build on the principle. If the stove is real, then so are the plasma caves of Alpha Centari or whatever. You keep insisting that you're talking about "something else", something more. You keep saying basically, "Oh yes, that's true, but that's not 'all there is.'" And yet I have no idea what you're talking about, or why you deem anything that I'm saying as a threat to this "something more." After all, I didn't write this note to dispute anything you've said, but rather to clarify my own fundamentals. You keep insisting that these ideas encroach on some ineffable realm that you've yet to define. You keep coming back with "Well, there's more to human reality than that." When did I say there wasn't? Why does it always sound like you consider physical reality a threat to that reality? You say I'm "rejecting the worldviews of millions of people" How? Who? By saying that the world is real? Sorry, it is. If that invalidates someone's "worldview", that's too bad. By saying that God isn't real? But I didn't. I merely proposed a hypothesis.
You ask if I think we create our own reality. I'm not sure what you mean. Do we use our imaginations? Of course we do. I've never been to England, for instance. My idea of it is a composition of things I've heard, what I've seen in movies, extrapolations of my own memories, and things I just flat out made up. But only an extremely small child doesn't know the difference between this and actual reality. I know that the England in my head isn't the real England, and that it would be supplanted by the real thing the minute I set foot in your country and saw it with my own eyes (and yes, there would also be my experience of England, which wouldn't be the sum total of its reality, or would be my experience of part of its reality). Do I discount these "constructs"? Do I devalue the imagination? Of course not. I'm a writer; how could I? I just think it's possible to know the difference between it and reality, and I'm not going to pretend that I don't to coddle to people's "worldviews."
You accuse me of "suggesting things", but it seems to me that you've come here to pick a fight. I was posting my notes. Minding my own business. The comment at the end was meant as a joke, as was the aside in the post. Sorry it bothered you so much.
You say that I'm misconstruing your position...maybe, but you are miscontruing mine. When did I say that the "air" metaphor above meant "reality"? If you would read this post in the same open spirit that you've supposedly been trying to read my other posts, you'd see that the "air" is clearly the passions, the possibilities, the vitality of life, our love for it. It has nothing to do with anyone's concept of reality. I wonder how much you know about this "something else", if you don't see what I'm talking about here.
Besides, you're passing judgement on idea that I'm presenting as something I've already decided isn't going to work. I don't see the need to be so critical of it. This is, after all, just a note.
New post in response to your comment on the last one.
ReplyDeleteOK just read this, after writing my "taking a back seat" post. I do sympathise, and feel sorry for my role in this mess, but I think we are unable to meet and talk about the same thing, or to understand where the other one is at.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, got to go now. Will return in the morning.
Ok I'll try to say something in response. Yes, you and I could be hit by the same truck with the same result. We die.
ReplyDeleteBut when you and I listen to the same music we may not hear the same thing. You hear noise, I hear something wonderful or vice versa. Only a recording machine "hears" the same thing. But you and I do not hear what the recording machine hears - those patterns of vibration. We hear something that does or does not make sense. So I don't know if one can say that music has objective reality.
What has objective reality in the case of music is a set of frequencies etc which can be analysed or represented scientifically. But that is not music. It is sound.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the "air" that you used in your metaphor was connected to the reality of the world from the way you used it. For you described religious people as getting less "air" in proportion to their religiosity. I therefore assumed that you don't think that religious people get any joy from their religion.
ReplyDeleteWell, I would assume that we both hear the same music, but that our responses to it and our appraisal of it might different. When you say that I might call it "noise", it seems like you're kind of slipping between a play on words. "Noise" in this case would seem to be a judgement call. I would be saying that the music does nothing for me other than irritate me. If I literally perceived it as "noise", this would only be because I didn't consider it worthy of my attention enough to decipher the melody, the rhythm and so on. Those things would still be there to be perceived, if I cared to. So, even in that case, there's still a quality of judgement to it, a choice whether to be receptive to the music or not, but I think we'd both have the same piece before us. We would might respond and deal with it differently.
ReplyDeleteThe closest that I could come to confirming this is by asking you to hum the melody back to me. We cross-reference our common perceptions with each other in this manner all the time. Of course, it's always possible that you're humming a different piece of music than what I hear, in which case we're all separated from each other in our person, indecipherable Towers of Babel.
But I don't think that's really what you're saying. I think we're both talking about our subjective experiences of the music, but you're drawing the line between what's in us and what's in the music in a different place than I am.
I think the "music" exists, melody, rhythm and so on beyond human ears, but it serves no purpose beyond our ears. It's just "sound", as you say. It becomes "music" in the passions it evokes, which I absolutely agree is primarily subjective, although like the Doppler Effect it can be hard to determine how much those passions are being evoked by the mechanisms of the music and how much we are responding from within. It would take a much more in-depth study of music. However, I absolutely agree that music has no vitality, no substance as music in its capacity to evoke emotions without someone being there to listen to it.
And as far as religious people, I'm sure they get a variety of different satisfactions out of their beliefs, depending on the person. My point was that they exchange some of the passion of life for these satisfactions. Except for my "other monk" who seems to have found a loophole. Religion becomes a way of expressing his passion for life, rather than a substitute for it. (I think Jesus may even be the prototype of this "other monk" and much of what he was trying to express seems to be a love for the world. Of course, we weren't having any of this. So we nailed him to a tree.)
ReplyDeleteWhat I was always intending to say, but never managed to get that far, was to explain what I mean by constructing reality. It has a lot to do with psychoneurology, and like anything to do with the body owes its origin to evolution.
ReplyDeleteSo in ordinary life (as against rational analysis and science), our own mind and body react to objective reality, just as we react to music. To express it in a crude example, our liking and disliking affect our perception. Our perception is the only reality we know, except when we go into rational analysis, which can be just as biased. So yes, there is an objective reality (as we know when we get hit by the truck) but we can't truly say that we know what that objective reality is. The tree I see through the window has green leaves, but green is an attribute contingent upon my eyes and brain. If there were no human eyes, green would be meaningless.
My point, if fully developed, might have had a bearing on your 'other monk' idea. Putting it briefly, if my eyes create the attribute 'green' then the monk's heart creates the attribute 'joy in all things'.
It doesn't necessarily make a difference whether the monk is a regular monk with vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, or your 'other monk' who embraces the all-singing, all-dancing world and makes no vows at all. The range of experience open to mankind goes beyond enjoyment of the outer world.
As to Jesus' role in this, I refuse to speculate.
In all, I think we don't disagree on essentials, and I didn't want to end on a state of failing to understand one another.
Well, now that I would perfectly agree with. Like a flower, for example. Can we really say that a flower is beautiful aside from the reaction it evokes in us? Or, even better, our attraction to another human being. When you break it down, a woman's body is just a series of angles and curves. There's nothing there to explain it's powerful appeal to us. You have to look to our hormones and urges for the explanation. Yes, these things definitely color our perception, just as they do for zebras and lions on the Serengeti. Meanwhile, we stare and shrug. We can't even tell them apart.
ReplyDeleteThis gives a somewhat better idea of what you were driving at. I could say, "Why didn't you explain this from the beginning?", but I suspect that your ideas have been evolving and developing all along as well. So, hashing these things out wasn't always a bad thing.
So, I think I at least begin to see where you were going, and I can see how the emotional dimension of our perception could be a fascinating thing to explore. Not just how we feel about the world, but how those feelings color our perception of the world, not necessarily distorting it, but rather bringing the world to life for us.
Yeah, why didn't I explain this from the beginning? Sheer foolishness. I could have just said what I thought without beating about the bush. Then there would have been no book, just short blog posts. Anyhow there were all sorts of things to bring in as evidence, e.g. from Antonio Damasio, & William James.
ReplyDeleteHard work. But let this place stay, as a shrine to our efforts like the broken statue of Ozymandias in the desert:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I think it would make the whole thing more readable now if we changed the posts back to their original dates, and coded them by author, e.g.
ReplyDeleteA reasonable argument (B)
Birth of a paradox (V)
What say you? I have been finding the fake date scheme a pain in the ass, and I bet you were too polite to say so yourself.
Well, we could have avoided some fine arguments, at least.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that there ever was any real fundamental conflicts in our ideas. Conflicts in the details, certainly. But for the most part, I think we were like those blind guys groping at that elephant in the old fable. One of us said it was like a snake; the other said it was like a tree, but we were talking about the same basic, whole, elephant.
Well, it was fun anyway. Good luck, Vincent. See ya' later.
Well, it WAS a bit of a pain to manually change the dates, but once they were posted it didn't bother me.
ReplyDeleteYou can restore them to chronological order if you like, though. It would make more sense now, especially if, God help us, you're planning on opening this up to the public.
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary. I had invited two discreet guests, but their privileges have now been revoked. It's just the trio of you, me and nostalgia now.
ReplyDeleteWell, as long as nostalgia doesn't cause any trouble, then I guess he can stay.
ReplyDelete"Yeah, why didn't I explain this from the beginning? Sheer foolishness. I could have just said what I thought without beating about the bush. Then there would have been no book, just short blog posts"
ReplyDeleteI know I should let this go at this point, but this has been bothering me. You had to get one last sarcastic jab in, didn't you? I detect a bitter tone here, like I ruined all this because I didn't get what you were doing. Well, you know, working on a book like this is about developing and expanding on an idea, not keeping it like an ace up your sleeve and being deliberately circumspect and obscure about it because you've got pages to fill. I may have been temperamental. I may have been belligerent. But I always tried to be as straight-forward as I could possibly be about my ideas, and I tried my best to understand you. If you purposely "beat around the bush", then don't blame me for not understanding, and don't blame me for this not working out.
Alright, I'm done. You and nostalgia can have the place to yourselves.
Oh dear. It was not meant to be a sarcastic jab but a self-deprecating "you can blame me for it all" joke.
ReplyDeleteYou didn't ruin anything. I was impulsive and hoped for the best. I thought things would somehow flow magically.
I wasn't at all serious about deliberately beating about the bush. Yes, I had vague ideas up my sleeve as to where I was leading, and always thought it was the same for you. the point was to give the ultimate reader a chance to catch up. To explain oneself. To recapitulate in some way a long journey that one had made from ordinary thinking to some less ordinary thinking.
Enough. I don't blame you for anything. I see it was a mad gamble on my part. But it was sincerely undertaken at every stage, including the last one of seeing - again impulsively and intuitively - that it would not work.
I don't feel an ounce of blame against you, only regret.
And my ideas were actually too vague to be able to go straight there. If that had been the case there would have been no reason not to go there.
ReplyDeleteThere is always the risk in purely written yet casual conversation between people who have not met face to face, of misinterpreting the tone when trying to be funny. There are those who use the smiley face repertoire. But I always thought it funnier to leave that out, leave the reader guessing whether one was joking or not. I don't think it funnier now. and again I'm sorry. But I still don't like using smiley faces. :(