See also, The Bird of Paradise, by RD Laing. (Not seemingly available online for free). — unenlightened
I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.
Contrast this from Sartre:
The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green blight covered it halfway up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather. The sound of the water in the Masqueret Fountain trickled in my ears, made a nest there, filled them with sighs; my nostrils overflowed with a green, putrid odor. All things, gently, tenderly, were letting themselves exist like weary women giving way to laughter, saying, "It's good to laugh," in a damp voice; they were sprawling in front of each other, abjectly confessing their existence. I realized there was no mean between non-existence and this swooning abundance. If you existed, you had to exist to excess, to the point of moldiness, bloatedness, obscenity. — Nausea — Banno
So i don't see it helping with the mind-body problem or the hard problem, except perhaps to show how what we deal with is always already filtered through our neural networks, even when they are behaving unconventionally. — Banno
Does Sartre make perfect sense, too? Both are interpretations, albeit in opposing directions. What is to be avoided is the mistake of thinking that an experience brings one somehow closer to reality "in the flesh"; using mescaline or existentialism or phenomenology remains an interpretation, just different to our more common or functional interpretations.
. — Banno
So i don't see it helping with the mind-body problem or the hard problem, except perhaps to show how what we deal with is always already filtered through our neural networks, even when they are behaving unconventionally
So whether or not the contents of consciousness are "real" or "not real" is down to the functioning of the wet-ware robot in daily life. But it's still all a brain process, no? So the real life VR that serves as reference to the metaphorical VR are on different levels: Real world VR is computer generated sensory input for biological perception systems (sensory organs, nerves, brains...). The metaphorical VR is neither input nor output it's just... a flow? It's this disjunction that makes the question hard to answer. — Dawnstorm
So whether or not the contents of consciousness are "real" or "not real" is down to the functioning of the wet-ware robot in daily life. But it's still all a brain process, no? — Dawnstorm
I certainly don't think that brain provides VR as output for a disembodied consciouness. Or at least, I wouldn't know how to make sense of it. This is why I'm with Chalmers: I have no idea how to connect that "experiential flow" with the physical processes. — Dawnstorm
The only reason I know what we're talking about is that I have that sort of flow myself. So, yeah, there's this brain process, "consciousness", and it's part of the total functioning of the wet-ware robot; and there's this first-person experience on top of it.
So to the extent that we can call that VR, it doesn't make sense to differentiate between illusions and reality for the VR status; it's *all* generated. We'd be talking about types of input, rather than the process. But types of input matter, too. Does it travel along the nervous system? Is it generated somewhere else in the brain? People with more insight into the brain might be better fit to talk about this (say, Isaac). But the process itself shouldn't be all that different.
Poor old Sartre clearly had a bad trip, which usually arises from a resistance to the dissolution of self. Shame he had to make a philosophy out of it and impose it on us, though. — unenlightened
Self-deception. The flowers and the root are real - not hallucinations. The interpretation is what the body does. If anything the body is a reaction-generator....the body is a reality-generator. — Janus
Your wetware can't walk through walls. It's the reality of walls that counts, not the reality of "the contents of consciousness", whatever they might be.So whether or not the contents of consciousness are "real" or "not real" is down to the functioning of the wet-ware robot in daily life. — Dawnstorm
Crowley and Aziraphale. Stop being so bloody nice to everyone. They really don't deserve it. — Banno
Self-deception. The flowers and the root are real - not hallucinations. The interpretation is what the body does. If anything the body is a reaction-generator. — Banno
Yeah, they would. "The tree is a chestnut" and The flower is a rose" are true even when no one perceives it. — Banno
They wouldn't be real without the perceiving body; at least not in the same way. No reality to speak of without bodies, and no speaking either. — Janus
Without all of us this wouldn't be real in the same way. — Moliere
Sure, we can say all of this would be real in some way without us, but we have no idea what that could mean, since the notion real has its genesis in perception. To say all of this would be real without us is to project our perceptually embodied based notion of reality onto an imagined situation where there is no perception or embodiment: I think that qualifies well as "language on holiday". — Janus
It's nothing more than your preferred way of talking. — Janus
Without our bodies the things which exist would not be real in the same way. — Moliere
So how exactly would they be different? — Banno
They would not stand in certain relations to you, sure. Relate that to the word "real" - what will you say, that only what you perceive is real? But that's not right.
Obviously. I'm using a bi-conditional logic. What logic, if any, are you using, and why? — Banno
...and we're off on Janus' preferred goose chase again. Around and around. — Banno
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