Comment by skinney6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skinney6 | Hacker News Reader

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Here are a couple of my attempts are non-dual. You are not an object in a outside world of objects. You are consciousness. You are the infinite field of knowing that allows all experience to be known (Rupert Spira). The objects are conceptual layers added by the mind. The mind sees a certain pattern of color and has learned that it is a chair. You cannot know the chair tho. You can only know the activity of consciousness that lie below the mind and it's concepts and you are that field of consciousness. There is no duality or multiplicity. There is only the one, the consciousness. There is a man in a bunker deep below the ground. There are wires coming in from above attached to telegraph machines. He interprets the telegraph messages and draws maps. He doesn't actually know anything about the outside world where these messages are supposedly coming from. He only knows the data and the maps he draws from it. You only know the raw conscious data; color, sound, thoughts, feelings, sensations, taste. Does a physical objects actually exist outside of you? Maybe, but we can't know for sure. We only know the simulation and the stuff the simulation is made of is consciousness. We are that consciousness. Until one takes this first step in self-realization they are still stuck in the conceptual world. That world is constructed purely of thought. Arguing in this space is futile. It's just thoughts and thoughts are changing all the time and different for everyone.

How do you define truth, and objective reality? With your argument, it means we can't ever experience the true reality -- or ever know if it even exists!

What makes you think humans are wired to experience objective truth?

Evolution is a process that builds agents capable of interacting with their environment in limited ways - specifically those ways that are beneficial for their reproduction and the maintenance of the species. If simpler (ie, subjective) degrees of truth are sufficient for humans to survive, doesn't it seem extremely unlikely that we would be given the keys to full objective truth? It can be very simply proved that even your sense data, the most direct and true-seeming aspects of our experiential reality, is subjective, rather than objective (eg, blind spots in your eyes that your brain paves over, various forms of visual and auditory illusions, phenomena like tinnitus and migraines that are responsive to feedback loops involving your attention, etc). And of course, we are as humans, subjective and biased observers of our experiential reality as well. If God himself came down on a mountain in front of 100 people, you would get 100 unique reports of how that encounter happened and what it meant.

You can come at this from a sociology of knowledge perspective - what we call "objective reality" operates more like "consensus reality" - the set of subjective truths that are widely experienced by people. In most cases, we can act as if these things are equivalent, except of course, for this type of philosophic enquiry!

I agree with you & the parent comment. I just wanted to play a little with reason :)

Where does 1 + 1 = 2 (or math) live? Is it in any way related to us, our experiences, our senses, or evolution? Is it part of objective reality or just some abstract idea?

I agree though, with just our senses, we can never experiences the reality - just as simply we cannot see molecules - but we know they exist? We understand the molecular machinery of the cell, though we cannot see nor experience it.

How do we understand molecules or cells? Through microscopes with our sense of vision? We haven't avoided the subjective sense problem at all! Merely refined it. We _can_ see the molecular machinery of the cell, having the ability to augment our senses with technology, and what we see must account for human subjectivity in a myriad of ways.

Math is a more interesting case, in that regard, as it is more clearly divorced from sense data in the classic sense. Though with the nondual perspective being presented here in mind, thought and logic is often lumped in closer to being a kind of sense - I don't _think_, I _experience thoughts_. I'm not settled on the point, but that framework would allow us to say "math is a function of the way human brains sense logical resolutions among axioms".

Alright I buy your point. I don't like it, but I do buy it.

I do see that ultimately everything is painted in my mind by my senses and I rely on this painting for my interpretation of the world. If I didn't have senses since birth? I wouldn't have the painting nor any understanding of the world except for, maybe, a sense of hunger and an urge of bodily secretions.

Regardless, the world continues to exist as is.

For sure :)

Our true reality is consciousness and all it's activities. Open up to all of the experience instead of just little clusters of thoughts and feelings. It's amazing and wonderful.

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