• TiredThinker
    831
    It seems like the world is less real every year. My sense of touch is less pronounced, eyes are weaker and less vivid and photo receptors die over time, and hearing gets worse. Are our senses the only things that make the world real to us?
  • Manuel
    4.1k
    Senses and intellect. It's a synthesis of the two.

    Granted, we would not get far with intellect alone. But without intellect, the senses would be quite useless if understanding the world is what you're looking for.

    If you can elaborate a bit more on your OP then there'd be more to say on this.
  • T Clark
    13.8k
    Are our senses the only things that make the world real to us?TiredThinker

    I would guess the most important thing is memory.
  • Snake
    4
    I don’t know. Seems like contending with the world at your level of ability and competence is also real.
  • TiredThinker
    831
    Can anything ever be real without sensory feedback? I see videos about people who have been blind their whole lives and it's obvious they lack more than visual knowledge about the world. It's like they can't touch the reality most people can.
  • DingoJones
    2.8k
    Can a bullet kill a guy who can neither see nor hear?
    Our senses inform us about reality but reality doesn't give a shit about what our senses tell us.
  • Gus Lamarch
    924
    It seems like the world is less real every year. My sense of touch is less pronounced, eyes are weaker and less vivid and photo receptors die over time, and hearing gets worse.TiredThinker

    Your subjective existence may be seeming "less and less real", because the Universe itself, and all other subjective perceptions of it - like mine, for example - capture a different kind of "reality"; for me it seems to be still and stable.
  • Tom Storm
    9k
    Are our senses the only things that make the world real to us?TiredThinker

    Depends what you mean by 'the world'. Surely it's what we do with that sense data - our thoughts - that creates our reality. You use the term 'make the world real to us' - is this different in your view to the idea of experiencing the real world?
  • Mww
    4.8k
    Are our senses the only things that make the world real to us?TiredThinker

    The thread title question, “Is reality only as real as the details our senses give us?”, is having your cake, but the second question contained in the opening comment, is eating it too.

    These are mutually exclusive, having two separate and distinctly opposing answers. Makes me wonder what it is you’re looking for.
  • boagie
    385


    Your senses present you with what is called apparent reality, as opposed to ultimate reality which is only partly accessible to us. Your whole body however is a sensor, and it is your biologies reactions to the stimulus of the physical world that gives you apparent reality. The dimming of the senses by degree, as in ageing, is a loss of consciousness by degree. Consciousness is reaction, perception, awareness, all diminishing with a dulling of the senses. Your apparent world is a biological readout, the quality of that readout certainly would depend upon the quality or health of your biology.
  • I like sushi
    4.8k
    Yes.

    I would guess the most important thing is memory.T Clark

    Memories are sense based.

    Can anything ever be real without sensory feedback?TiredThinker

    No. Even abstractions are … well, abstracted from sensory input not from some mysterious ether.

    All in all I think Kant put it well enough. The capacity to think is empty without sensory input. What we deem as ‘real’ or ‘the world’ is due to sensory perception but that sensory perception alone isn’t much in and of itself. An eye is pretty much the same as a camera, but we don’t ‘see’ with our eyes as the main gubbins is in the occipital lobe.
  • Tom Storm
    9k
    Your senses present you with what is called apparent reality, as opposed to ultimate reality which is only partly accessible to us.boagie

    What is your evidence of an 'ultimate reality'?
  • boagie
    385

    Well, the physicists tell us that ultimate reality is a place of no things. When one gives it a bit of thought, one must realize that all the energy frequencies that are out there are not available to our senses. We are getting a limited experience of ultimate reality, and that experience, is what we tend to call apparent reality, a biological readout of what is available to our senses.
  • Echoes
    13
    I'm sure there's more to the ultimate reality out there than what our senses can detect right now.
    Pit viper snakes, for example, can detect infrared. Their evolutionary path brought them the Infrared senses. Ours' brought us the five senses we have now. Or six for a rare few. May be a few thousand years down the line, we'll develop other senses to see/feel things we can't right now.
    As Morpheus famously said: if real is what you can see, smell, taste and touch, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
  • Tom Storm
    9k
    I hear you. I wonder if any of this matters to a life lived. Physicists also tell us that reality is a series of fields with blobs of discrete energy bouncing upon these is some way I don't pretend to understand. None of this seems to matter much except to physicists and dilettantes. I sometimes think that what matters is not ultimate reality (whatever this is at the time of writing) but the quotidian world we live in and can make use of.
  • boagie
    385

    Yes, it is not knowledge that is handy in ones day to day experience, still it is nice to understand where meanings come from. What we see as the physical world, is our biological readout, biological interpretation, not necessarily what is really there. If one's biology in not in good health, it is good to know that this can affect one's perception of the world, one's biological readout.
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