Tags / 27 quotes from 12 sources
#reality
An Appetite For Wonder By Richard Dawkins – Review (richard Fortey)
Is science the poetry of reality?
Dawkins is on less secure ground when he claims that "science is the poetry of reality". Poets would no doubt claim that poetry is also a portrait – sometimes of a scientific sort – of reality, since it seeks to express in precise words emotions that otherwise defy…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Hoping to leave readers more confused
than a year, and thinking about some for at least fifteen, I am more confused now about digital technology and consciousness than when I started writing. Likewise, after you read this book I hope you are more confused about computers, numbers, mathematics, the Internet…
Everyday experience as hallucination
this is where LSD enters the picture. It turns out that human consciousness is likely itself a form of hallucination. As I have said, it is a very useful hallucination, but a hallucination nonetheless. LSD and psychedelics may help reveal our normal everyday experience for the…
No direct link to the external world
idea that there is no direct relationship between the external world and…
Does LSD sharpen perception?
Does LSD actually enhance the accuracy of our perceptions? Do we see, think, or hear better on LSD? The question has not been scientifically investigated. In an email exchange, the philosopher Riccardo Manzotti wrote me, “I do not believe that because of drugs one is more…
Distrusting reality after frequent trips
Robert and Kristian were using LSD so often during this time that they said they had a hard time trusting the non-LSD reality they experienced even when they were not on the drug. After only one trip, over the following days I too would sometimes wonder if the thoughts and…
Mathematical models are not reality
Edge magazine: Many mathematicians are Platonists. They think that the Universe is made of mathematical stuff, and that the job of mathematicians is merely to discover it. I strongly deny this point of view. This does not mean, however, that I am a ‘social constructivist’ … [I…
Information as resurgent Platonism
“I am aware that in this information-centered era, many scientists and philosophers are bamboozled by the idea that information lies at the bottom of reality. It is nothing more than a resurgence of Platonism supported by the social and economic power of computer science and…
Are computations real or epistemic tools?
In philosophy, cognitive science, and, more broadly speaking, in computer science, there is a divide between those who believe that computations underlie physical reality—and that human consciousness is made of information, reducible to information, or caused by it—and those…
Three kinds of information
Oxford professor of philosophy Luciano Floridi describes three flavors of the word information in modern science: “information as reality (e.g., as patterns of physical signals, which are neither true nor false), also known as ecological information; information about reality…
Reality became a problem after LSD
Hofmann says: “Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into…
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Perception as a handshake with expectations
The second reason content is so important is that our expectations and assumptions profoundly influence our perception of reality. This is because of the brain’s eager willingness to insert its opinion directly into what you are currently experiencing—and then fool you into…
Durante (Andrea De Carlo)
Gelosie che deformano la realtà
“Siete diventati come loro. Pieni di gelosie e sospetti, pronti a deformare la realtà secondo le vostre frustrazioni e paranoie.”
From Encyclopedia To Ontology: Toward Dynamic Representation Of The Discipline Of Philosophy
Statis vs dynamic ontology
One broad response to these challenges [of knowledge modeling], emphasized by the “formal ontologists,” is to attempt to produce a “once and for all” description of the underlying reality of the subject domains, and to link the types of those subject domains into a standardized…
Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana
Constitutive ontologies = second path
In following the second path the observer assumes, quite differently, that the starting point must be the constitutive biological phenomena of being unable to distinguish perception from illusion in daily living. In the absence of being able to make statements about…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
La scuola del vuoto di Nagarjuna
Il Mahayana: la scuola Sanron o dei Tre Trattati Deriva da una scuola cinese, a sua volta la continuazione della scuola indiana del vuoto (shunyavada) o della via di mezzo. In India il suo principale esponente fu Nagarjuna (II sec. d.C.), in Cina Chi-tsang (549-623). In…
Nishida Kitarō (stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy)
Pure experience
For Nishida, experience in its original form is not the exercise of individuals equipped with sensory and mental abilities who contact an exterior world; rather it precedes the differentiation into subject experiencing and object experienced, and the individual is formed out of…
Nishida's logic of place
If judgments describe things and states of affairs and thus would give us access to reality by setting themselves over-against that reality, we must step back as it were and consider a wider reality that includes judgments. In other words, we must place judgments that predicate…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Principles are like lighthouses
Principles are like lighthouses. They are natural laws that cannot be broken. As Cecil B. deMille observed of the principles contained in his monumental movie, The Ten Commandments, “It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.” While…
Proactive people aren't pushy
There are some people who interpret “proactive” to mean pushy, aggressive, or insensitive; but that isn’t the case at all. Proactive people aren’t pushy. They’re smart, they’re value driven, they read reality, and they know what’s needed.
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
We imagine the truth
Again, and even more derisively, the materialist stance would be that this is pure imagination. And again I wouldn’t contest this, so much as to reply that such so-called explanations merely beg the question. What is imagination? Surely that is the question. Why is it so…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Mere constructs versus real constructions
idea of the self as a construction is one that many want to resist, because it seems to imply that it is not real. But of course constructions can be perfectly real. It is important to distinguish between ‘mere constructs’, which exist solely as ideas, and real constructions…
Every recollection reconstructs the memory
‘Every time we recall an event, we must reconstruct the memory, and with every recollection the memory may be changed … Truth and reality, when seen through the filter of our memories, are not objective facts but subjective, interpretive realities.’
Postmodernism rejects essentialism
This is not fragmentation for fragmentation’s sake, however. Underlying it is an intellectual rejection of various kinds of essentialism or realism. Before postmodernism, so we are told, most dominant modes of thought took reality to have a single, real essence.
Much of reality is bundle-like
it’s worth remembering just how much of reality is bundle-like. Atoms are not solid objects but bundles of electrons, neutrons and protons. A plant is a complicated system, not a simple thing. Cars only exist as an assemblage of parts. The internet is a network, not an object…
The physical is what fits physicists' equations
the only way physicists can really understand the universe is in the language of mathematics. The fundamental basis of physics is not atoms, or even subatomic particles, but equations. That is why, for all its mysteriousness, dark matter does have all the reality that is needed…
The Essence Of The Essence Of Constructivism
The essence of constructivism
In one famous article dating from 1988 (German edition 1998), Maturana states that the problem of reality is “the most important problem of our time”. I fully agree with him and I think that realism needs to be expressively refuted and the choice between realism and…