How big is reality?

[SeattleUte]

This poll is crap. I love postmodern thought, in the hands of David Mitchell or Cormac McCarthy. But it's this kind of thing that makes me embarrassed for postmodernism and brings it close to religious nonsense (and enrages R. Dawkins). No wonder it's such a hit with progressive Mormons.

A few common sense questions. First, whose thought do you mean? The average couch potato who watched every minute of Super Bowl 46 yesterday? It seems that much thought out there is pretty impoverished. In any event, can we agree that not all thoughts are equal? Also, if you have any question about the power of thought over material facts, try convincing yourself you can fly and take a dive of the Golden Gate Bridge. See if it hurts when you hit the water.

[Jeff Lebowski]

I think reality is what we see. What we think can be far more than what we see.

No, what we think is an extension of what we see*. What we see is a tiny, tiny subset of reality.

*Suppose someone is born without the ability to hear, see, smell, taste, or feel. Would that person be capable of having thoughts?

[Viking]

No, what we think is an extension of what we see*. What we see is a tiny, tiny subset of reality.

*Suppose someone is born without the ability to hear, see, smell, taste, or feel. Would that person be capable of having thoughts?

I should have said "experience".

My brother thinks there's a good chance we're living in Sims 15,000,000,000.0

[kccougar]

Thanks to the wonderbra, usually less than what is advertised.

[wuapinmon]

You can only imagine combinations (possible or otherwise) using your physical brain and electrons firing across your synapses. All of which is uniquely defined by configurations of atoms at a snapshot in time. To state that your thoughts are more complex than configurations of atoms is a self contradiction.

Neener, neener.

Rubbish. A car that can go anywhere, can go anywhere, but I'm still king of the universe inside it.

This poll is crap. I love postmodern thought, in the hands of David Mitchell or Cormac McCarthy. But it's this kind of thing that makes me embarrassed for postmodernism and brings it close to religious nonsense (and enrages R. Dawkins). No wonder it's such a hit with progressive Mormons.

A few common sense questions. First, whose thought do you mean? The average couch potato who watched every minute of Super Bowl 46 yesterday? It seems that much thought out there is pretty impoverished. In any event, can we agree that not all thoughts are equal? Also, if you have any question about the power of thought over material facts, try convincing yourself you can fly and take a dive of the Golden Gate Bridge. See if it hurts when you hit the water.

We're talking quantitative thought here, not qualitative. Borges inspired your boys, and he agreed with me (and I with him). No wonder it's such a hit with progressive Mormons.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Rubbish. A car that can go anywhere, can go anywhere, but I'm still king of the universe inside it.

Ah... such intellectual arrogance. Your finite mind is like a pissant scooter puttering around the inside of a Cheerio.

[il Padrino Ute]

This poll is crap. I love postmodern thought, in the hands of David Mitchell or Cormac McCarthy. But it's this kind of thing that makes me embarrassed for postmodernism and brings it close to religious nonsense (and enrages R. Dawkins). No wonder it's such a hit with progressive Mormons.

A few common sense questions. First, whose thought do you mean? The average couch potato who watched every minute of Super Bowl 46 yesterday? It seems that much thought out there is pretty impoverished. In any event, can we agree that not all thoughts are equal? Also, if you have any question about the power of thought over material facts, try convincing yourself you can fly and take a dive of the Golden Gate Bridge. See if it hurts when you hit the water.

A rather arrogant comment on your part, no?

[wuapinmon]

Ah... such intellectual arrogance. Your finite mind is like a pissant scooter puttering around the inside of a Cheerio.

Alright, that one got a chuckle out of me.

[Sleeping in EQ]

So I've been reading Peter Kreeft's treatments of philosophy and metaphysics in Tolkien's works (Kreeft is a tenured professor of philosophy at Boston University). Kreeft proposes the same questions I've offered in this poll, and then goes on to discuss how they have distinct metaphysical implications.

Here's what he says about "there are more things in reality than in thought":

That was Shakespeare's philosophy, as expressed by Hamlet to Horatio, who found it hard to believe in ghosts. This is the philosophy of the poet and of the happy man, for whom nature is a fullness, a moreness, and therefore wonderful. It is the philosophy of all pre-modern cultures....If you believe [this] philosophy, as Shakespeare did, as Tolkien did, and as most pre-modern peoples did, then your fundamental attitude toward all reality is wonder and humility. You are like a small child in a large house. As Tolkien said in one of his letters, "You are inside a very great story." You expect mysteries, you expect moreness: terrors to stop your heart and joys to break it (Kreeft, 2005, 33).

Regarding the "there are fewer things in reality than in thought" position, Kreeft says:

The second possible answer is that there are fewer things in reality than in thought; that most of our thought is mere myth, error, convention, projection, fantasy, fallacy, folly, dream, etc. This is the philosophy of the unhappy man, the cynic, the pessimist: "Trust nobody and nothing." This philosophy is hardly found in pre-modern culture, except in a small minority....If you believe [in this] philosophy, that there are fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies, then you are cynical, skeptical, suspicious, bored, jaded, detached, ironic, and definitely non-heroic. You are a reductionist: you reduce mystery to puzzle, love to lust, thought to cybernetics, reasoning to rationalizing, ideals to desires, man to ape, God to myth. In other words, you are a typically modern or post-modern man....You buy into the first step of the scientific method: "Doubt everything that is not proved; treat every thought as guilty until proved innocent, false until proved true." The older philosophy [of Shakespeare, discussed above] treated thoughts as we treat people in court: innocent until proved guilty. (Compare Socrates's method with Descartes's on this score.) (Kreeft. 2005, 33, 34).

Of the third answer, he writes:

The third philosophy is rationalism, in fact, arrogant rationalism: Everything in my thought is real, and everything real is in my thought. In ancient Greece Parmenides said, "What is thought and what is real is the same," and in modern Germany Hegel said, "The real is the rational and the rational is the real;" but I think only those with a divinity complex can actually believe that. And even pantheists, who believe that the whole cosmos is only a thought or dream, believe it is not our dream but God's, and therefore still "more," or transcendent to our thought--unless there is some confusion between us (or me) and God... (Kreeft, 2005, 34).

[SeattleUte]

The first two explanations are opposite of what I would have expected.

[Sleeping in EQ]

The first two explanations are opposite of what I would have expected.

Indeed. One of the things I enjoy about Kreeft is that he breaks out of the well worn fundamentalist-modernist-postmodernist framework. He's reasserting the classical thinker as a kind of post-postmodernism.

[woot]

I don't know if this gets to the point of the question, but when I think of reality, I think of things so complex that it takes centuries of teamwork of our best and brightest to conceive of models that vaguely approximate reality sufficiently enough to allow us to gain some semblance of understanding of a few aspects of what's going on. In my very limited experience, reality is so complex, so wonderful, and so enormous, that a single human brain is capable only of reciting the ABCs in comparison -- at least consciously; the human brain itself is far too complicated to ever be understood by itself. It will take several more centuries or millennia of insight from our best and brightest to provide some relatively simple approximation of the complexity really going on.

So, I say reality is much "bigger" than thought; our thoughts will continue to expand as our awareness of reality does, but we will never catch up.

[UtahDan]

I don't know if this gets to the point of the question, but when I think of reality, I think of things so complex that it takes centuries of teamwork of our best and brightest to conceive of models that vaguely approximate reality sufficiently enough to allow us to gain some semblance of understanding of a few aspects of what's going on. In my very limited experience, reality is so complex, so wonderful, and so enormous, that a single human brain is capable only of reciting the ABCs in comparison -- at least consciously; the human brain itself is far too complicated to ever be understood by itself. It will take several more centuries or millennia of insight from our best and brightest to provide some relatively simple approximation of the complexity really going on.

So, I say reality is much "bigger" than thought; our thoughts will continue to expand as our awareness of reality does, but we will never catch up.

I could not have said it better. The paragraph above seems to assume that a belief that there are many things yet unknown must embrace the supernatural and irrational. It doesn't in my case at all.

[Indy Coug]

I don't know if this gets to the point of the question, but when I think of reality, I think of things so complex that it takes centuries of teamwork of our best and brightest to conceive of models that vaguely approximate reality sufficiently enough to allow us to gain some semblance of understanding of a few aspects of what's going on. In my very limited experience, reality is so complex, so wonderful, and so enormous, that a single human brain is capable only of reciting the ABCs in comparison -- at least consciously; the human brain itself is far too complicated to ever be understood by itself. It will take several more centuries or millennia of insight from our best and brightest to provide some relatively simple approximation of the complexity really going on.

So, I say reality is much "bigger" than thought; our thoughts will continue to expand as our awareness of reality does, but we will never catch up.

Agreed.

[Sleeping in EQ]

I could not have said it better. The paragraph above seems to assume that a belief that there are many things yet unknown must embrace the supernatural and irrational. It doesn't in my case at all.

It doesn't limit the unknown to the supernatural and irrational. It also doesn't reduce the rational to the scientific.