Reality: Perception is deceiving

[fretbuzz]

You and I view reality much like a speculator might watch a baseball game through a knothole in the fence - and all he sees is third base. He's got his eye up there and he watches the entire game through third base, and only third base.

If someone asks him to decribe baseball, he says, "Well, there's some guy that stands around kicking the dirt for quite a while, spitting on the ground, and that sort of thing. And all at once a bunch of guys come sliding in and kick the dirt all over and then swear at eachother and almost fight, and pretty soon they all leave and the first guy stands around, kicking the dirt once again. And that's about it. "

And this is America's number one sport!? This is about the way we view reality. We perceive just a little bit of it, and we are so naive to think that's all of it. But that isn't all of it. The truth is that virtually the whole ball game called reality is being played beyond our knothole view...

-Court Holdgrafer

Our senses combined actually perceive less than one millionth of true reality. Our eyes can only receive 3800Ǻ - 7200Ǻ of the electromagnetic world and our ears can only sense 20Hz - 20,000Hz of the sonic world. These are two seperate windows opened up to allow us to sense our environment, yet they are incapable of showing us the whole picture. We can only taste 4 ranges of flavor - sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, just the same as we can't "touch" empty space. By the way, the smell of that rose is just an experience conjured up in your mind - the "rose" really doesn't smell like a "rose". That orange might look orange, but is it?

Our minds are hopelessly incapable of truly understanding our world without the use of scientific interfaces.

[ArmsMerchant]

I was with you up to the last sentence.

Our job is not so much to understand the world as to create it.

[DerDrache]

Originally Posted by fretbuzz

Our senses combined actually perceive less than one millionth of true reality. Our eyes can only receive 3800Ǻ - 7200Ǻ of the electromagnetic world and our ears can only sense 20Hz - 20,000Hz of the sonic world. These are two seperate windows opened up to allow us to sense our environment, yet they are incapable of showing us the whole picture. We can only taste 4 ranges of flavor - sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, just the same as we can't "touch" empty space. By the way, the smell of that rose is just an experience conjured up in your mind - the "rose" really doesn't smell like a "rose". That orange might look orange, but is it?

Our minds are hopelessly incapable of truly understanding our world without the use of scientific interfaces.

Indeed, we can only sense a tiny portion of what is around us.

Would you like a cookie?

[KikoSanchez]

At the same time, just because you only perceive a small portion of something, does not necessarily mean there must be something filling the space you can't perceive.

[Area51]

There is no spoon.


All matter in the universe is touching. Every event creates infinite tangent universes, coexisting in a multitude of dimensions. Your brain? No, Your brains. Every time you form a thought/decision, you create tangent brains, similar to the tangent universes, except with no extra dimensions, no extra skulls.

Wrap your brains around that.

[KikoSanchez]

Originally Posted by Area51

There is no spoon.


All matter in the universe is touching. Every event creates infinite tangent universes, coexisting in a multitude of dimensions. Your brain? No, Your brains. Every time you form a thought/decision, you create tangent brains, similar to the tangent universes, except with no extra dimensions, no extra skulls.

Wrap your brains around that.

All a hypothesis. Back to verifiable things now.

[Area51]

Originally Posted by KikoSanchez

All a hypothesis. Back to verifiable things now.

You have never dropped acid and studied quantum physics, did you?

[Optimus Prime]

Originally Posted by Area51

You have never dropped acid and studied quantum physics, did you?

Try dropping acid and studying your self:

I would like to go into thought about expectations. I believe expectations to be a detrimental aspect of life - they distract from both creativity and critical thinking by restricting the individual (a hard to define entity in itself) into roles. Expectations, even 'great' ones, are nothing but limitations. If an expectation is your motivation, what are you to do upon success? Until one can operate within the reality of freedom, each success is cast away with the creation of a new expectation, or held to as an errant as if it were the one thing worthwhile in life. Life itself has one unbreakable limitation - death. Aside from that, expectations treat imagined boundaries as real, holding back the limitless potential of the individual to overcome.

Childhood, parenting, trauma, grief, failure...none of these hold us back from being great, what then does hold us back? We torment ourselves with our expectations! A fat child expects to be treated kindly until the spirit is broken; then he accepts that others may be cruel, but unable to let expectations go, then expects only torment and accustoms himself to it, and horribly, even seeks it out! This steadfast nature of expectations creates self imposed limitations that define the path of our life.

Hold no expectations in life: the world owes you absolutely nothing, and you owe it your life...literally. In debt to the reaper, you must utilize reality to the benefit of your self, and if you are so inclined, to the benefit of others and a higher purpose. This may read as my expectation of people, but it is not. I expect nobody to listen; nobody to follow. I tell them this because it is reality. The only sure expectations are life and death; all else must be earned.

Why?

Many have an expectation of purpose: They expect a truth...something unchanging, something certain, something higher, something like a god. Religion, Science, Philosophy...fields once held simply to control, learning, and understanding now sit as dictators of our purpose. One says we must serve God (as they see it, of course); another says we must serve our biological nature (as they define it, of course); another says we must choose from a select number of purposes (as it can be understood by them, of course). Aside from these dictators, Average Joe says our purpose is anything from spirituality, to love, to breeding, to laughing, and so on. It seems as though everyone expects a purpose, and feels obligated to take a guess at what it is. The reality is, however, that when we expect a purpose to be, and then adopt an ideal as our purpose in an attempt to leave no expectation unmet, we restrict our free will in a fashion of ignorance. Have any of us truly known what lays beyond death, or before life? If not, how can purpose be assigned? How can purpose even be expected? To craft a fallacy in our mind and herald it as supreme is to live outside reality, reality being that we have no limitation but birth and death; but I must be careful to not expect you to live within reality. It's merely where I choose to be, because it enabled me to be more free than anywhere else I have lived.

Expectations of self and others, especially when raised as motivations for our self, close off entire avenues of thoughts, feelings, actions, and possibilities. With the absence of expectations...with complete uncertainty...we are free to make any decision, to think any thought, to feel any emotion, to take any action, to explore all possibilities, to discover that thought to be unreal. When we expect nothing of reality, it grows from a small world into an infinite landscape of endless possibilities.

[dal7timgar]

I just reread A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke. He has a scientist near the Moon testing an infrared scanner by pointing it at the Earth and comparing the infrared to the visible light image. Plato's allegory of the cave is also mentioned in the book.

But this also applies to social reality. How much is going on that you don't know but you could easily understand if someone just told you or you found the right book?

How much about reality are you not supposed to know?

DT

[Big Steamers]

Mathematics is something that your senses cannot detect, yet we seem to have a great fascination with the subject. Just as Thomas had doubted Jesus's resurection simply because he could not see Jesus some people will doubt the laws of the universe.