As Bohm argued, autonomous objects are human inventions.
Yeah but they are not just arbitrary inventions. They are necessary inventions which every type of animal or intelligent being would necessarily make, and that puts them on a higher ontological level.
This is where your Plato point breaks down. You replace the ill-defined river with another definition including an ill-defined “shape of the landscape,” which is also changing all the time just as much as the river does, with no singular and consistent “shape of the landscape,” and its very precise shape is impossible to rigorously define even at a single time instant.
Well, i get your point, but what plato does is actually to go further and not just replace the water with some curve in space, but he goes on to say that precisely because the shape is infinitely complex (and we can therefore not comprehend it anyways), we have to replace it with something simpler in our mind. something like doing the following:
replace the fuzzy nature of reality with something simpler, which then (by agreeing upon it), becomes what we call real.
funnily enough, that’s exactly the argument that you seem to be making. “reality” is perceived by us precisely because it is a social construct that is useful to us, and therefore it has to be simple.
For example, Benoist would say that, if you are talking about a river in the abstract, it does not refer to anything real. But the word “river” serves as a socially constructed norm that can be used to judge reality to be something, and thus can be employed in a social setting. If I see a river and point to it, and say, “look at that river over there,” the river is now not just an abstract symbol, but it is a symbol pointing to something in a real world context, where people can really observe its glistening surface, dip their toes in it and feel its cold water, etc.
Yes, precisely, that is why we think abstract thoughts. Because they convey information more meaningfully than the thing with you call reality. Check out how pictograms are used by IKEA furniture, chemical lab danger warnings, anime etc to convey information, because that is actually clearer / more fun / easier to digest than to use real-world depictions. Thus, by social contract, these abstractions become our reality, just like the smartphone has replaced actual inter-human contact.
funnily enough, that’s exactly the argument that you seem to be making. “reality” is perceived by us precisely because it is a social construct that is useful to us, and therefore it has to be simple.
I’m only saying the language we use to describe reality is socially constructed and “fuzzy.”
I am a direct realist, I believe you can perceive reality directly for what it really is. You just cannot capture what it really is in words. My words describing my dog will always be “fuzzy.” But if I just go look at my dog and hug my dog and don’t think words at all, nothing about that is fuzzy.
The raw perceptions are real, and each perception really is equivalent to the totality of all that there is. That may seem weird to say, because if I cannot see you right now, then does that mean you don’t exist? No, I can see you right now, just not in fine detail. Your body has mass, and that mass has a gravitational pull, and as you move, as your heart beats, it sends out gravitational waves. These are too subtle for me to notice but technically they do make an impression on me as well as slightly move everything around me, and if somehow I could notice, collect, and process all of that information, I could derive where you are purely from what is right in front of me right now.
But, in practice, I can’t do that. When we change vantage points, we don’t go from black-and-white experiencing things to not experiencing things. It’s an infinite gradation, where we go from seeing things with high fidelity to low fidelity. Things we see with high fidelity are easy to notice, process, contemplate, etc. But things we see with low fidelity are much more difficult to notice. But noticing something is not the same as not seeing it. If I watch a film and don’t pay attention at all to the background characters, so if you later ask me what was the color of the shirt of one of the background characters, and I report I did not know, that doesn’t prove I did not see it, I just didn’t pay attention to it. Even the stuff in front of me that is too subtle to pick out and notice, I am still seeing it, in the sense that, mathematically, it really does make a slight different on the impression on my virtual cortex.
In everything experience, we really do see all of reality at once. We just don’t see it all in equal levels of fidelity, and changing vantage points changes only the fidelity of what we are perceiving, to make certain things easier to notice. But every perception implicates the whole.
That is a point of view that is basically impossible for most modern philosophers to understand because they are obsessed with representionalism which falsely conflates experience (reality) with consciousness (awareness), which are entirely different things. They treat everything we experience as part of consciousness, but since reality is obviously independent of consciousness, then that makes reality itself independent of experience, and if you can’t experience it, then how can you even know it exists? This then devolves into idealism, solipsism, the hard problem, the mind-body problem, etc.
But I reject the whole framework because experience and consciousness are not the same thing. Experience is just direct reality for what it really is, in its full totality. It does not enter consciousness unless I become aware of it and start thinking about it.
Yeah but they are not just arbitrary inventions. They are necessary inventions which every type of animal or intelligent being would necessarily make, and that puts them on a higher ontological level.
Well, i get your point, but what plato does is actually to go further and not just replace the water with some curve in space, but he goes on to say that precisely because the shape is infinitely complex (and we can therefore not comprehend it anyways), we have to replace it with something simpler in our mind. something like doing the following:
replace the fuzzy nature of reality with something simpler, which then (by agreeing upon it), becomes what we call real.
funnily enough, that’s exactly the argument that you seem to be making. “reality” is perceived by us precisely because it is a social construct that is useful to us, and therefore it has to be simple.
Yes, precisely, that is why we think abstract thoughts. Because they convey information more meaningfully than the thing with you call reality. Check out how pictograms are used by IKEA furniture, chemical lab danger warnings, anime etc to convey information, because that is actually clearer / more fun / easier to digest than to use real-world depictions. Thus, by social contract, these abstractions become our reality, just like the smartphone has replaced actual inter-human contact.
I’m only saying the language we use to describe reality is socially constructed and “fuzzy.”
I am a direct realist, I believe you can perceive reality directly for what it really is. You just cannot capture what it really is in words. My words describing my dog will always be “fuzzy.” But if I just go look at my dog and hug my dog and don’t think words at all, nothing about that is fuzzy.
The raw perceptions are real, and each perception really is equivalent to the totality of all that there is. That may seem weird to say, because if I cannot see you right now, then does that mean you don’t exist? No, I can see you right now, just not in fine detail. Your body has mass, and that mass has a gravitational pull, and as you move, as your heart beats, it sends out gravitational waves. These are too subtle for me to notice but technically they do make an impression on me as well as slightly move everything around me, and if somehow I could notice, collect, and process all of that information, I could derive where you are purely from what is right in front of me right now.
But, in practice, I can’t do that. When we change vantage points, we don’t go from black-and-white experiencing things to not experiencing things. It’s an infinite gradation, where we go from seeing things with high fidelity to low fidelity. Things we see with high fidelity are easy to notice, process, contemplate, etc. But things we see with low fidelity are much more difficult to notice. But noticing something is not the same as not seeing it. If I watch a film and don’t pay attention at all to the background characters, so if you later ask me what was the color of the shirt of one of the background characters, and I report I did not know, that doesn’t prove I did not see it, I just didn’t pay attention to it. Even the stuff in front of me that is too subtle to pick out and notice, I am still seeing it, in the sense that, mathematically, it really does make a slight different on the impression on my virtual cortex.
In everything experience, we really do see all of reality at once. We just don’t see it all in equal levels of fidelity, and changing vantage points changes only the fidelity of what we are perceiving, to make certain things easier to notice. But every perception implicates the whole.
That is a point of view that is basically impossible for most modern philosophers to understand because they are obsessed with representionalism which falsely conflates experience (reality) with consciousness (awareness), which are entirely different things. They treat everything we experience as part of consciousness, but since reality is obviously independent of consciousness, then that makes reality itself independent of experience, and if you can’t experience it, then how can you even know it exists? This then devolves into idealism, solipsism, the hard problem, the mind-body problem, etc.
But I reject the whole framework because experience and consciousness are not the same thing. Experience is just direct reality for what it really is, in its full totality. It does not enter consciousness unless I become aware of it and start thinking about it.