In every single creature we are acutely aware of their limited awareness of reality. We don't assume ants can understand calculus. While we seem to understand more it shouldn't be the assumption that we aren't limited in our perception in the same way ants are. The absolute strangest option is that our perception of reality is anywhere near complete and accurate.

Abstract: We usually conceive of the world as being made up of different components and we set ourselves the task of identifying and understanding what each of these elements of reality represents. But with postmodernism came the realisation that we may never be able to fully grasp what the world is really made of. Instead, Hilary Lawson proposes a radically-different approach and supposed that the world is an unspecified other or an “openness” that we close into our ideas and the properties we assign to it. In doing so we give ourselves a means to intervene in the world but also distance ourselves from its openness. These closures can be developed and refined but they are not an ultimate description of reality, only a way for humans to be able hold the world.

As a computer programmer, I can confirm that functional closure is a VERY effective model for interaction with real-world systems. I EXTENSIVELY use functional closure when writing business systems. I am not surprised (in fact, I am quite intrigued) to see this idea being generalized to interpret the human experience!

Correct me if I’m misunderstanding, but this is where I think my biggest problem in life comes from. I cannot put my world in different boxes because idk how to do that while remaining open to the great unknown. If I just accept and submit myself to the openness of reality, I cannot help but only feel depressed and anxious all the time. If I try to refine it more, I know what I’m doing is ignorant, but I also know this is how I get hurt when someone tries to break that shelf or I break it myself. I used to be Mormon and had such a specific understanding of the world. Once that was shattered, I became pretty agnostic and remain lost. Nothing but medication seems to help instead of trying to figure it out myself, and even then I feel like it creates a cloud around my world.

The real is what escapes the symbolic

Well be needing a different term than "Post-postmodern".

I think this comes down to semantics. Just because I come along and describe a bottle as a weapon and someone else describes it as an environmental disaster doesn’t mean that bottle is actually separate things.

There is a thing that bottle actually is. Though language may not be able to describe it wholly. And, just because we might come along and find different uses for the bottle or think up different ways to describe it, or maybe we even learn some new thing that is essential to its botttleness, this does not mean the bottle has changed in some fundamental way. The only thing that changes is the way we look at it, and describe it.

"there's too much information in the universe for us to comprehend all at once, by many orders of magnitude, so we focus on bits we find to be useful and use those bits to learn new bits."

this doesn't seem like a "theory" at all, just a statement of the painfully obvious.

I think the nature of reality is always a self constructed byproduct of conciousness itself. In other words, reality or ultimate truth is not a fixed thing that exists outside of our grasp. It is only a truth in so far as we can percieve it as such.

In a sense this makes sense because you can assume humans have conjured some version of consensus reality, which is an abstracted version of reality as it appears to us. Therefore, we can assume to some extra terestrial alien out there they may have a different version of reality that they percieve which may overlap with ours in someway or perhaps not at all.

If you could gain the perspective of every perspective, forever, simultaneously, I would assume you would become god at that point, the experience of which is ultimate reality itself.

Your ego as a concious waking human can not percieve ultimate reality because your ego will block it from happening and only allow understanding of limited everyday constructed reality.

We are cursed with incomprehensibility, and will accept anything incomprehensible as an explanation. The madman will always be labeled a “prophet” and will be defended with violence because the state of accepting incomprehensibility is more painful than just dying.

Nice video, particularly enjoyed the random dude swimming in the river in the background lol.

He spoke well on the way we psychologically close off, or narrow our worldview, in order to make assessments and decisions. He did not articulate very well what full closedness would be like if it's possible, or what dangers that would pose.

His discussion of politics is also pretty conventional. "Be open to new ideas" is a pretty basic tenet of good faith debate, but individuals are still left to go out into the world and close it off in various ways to determine what's true, what a political response should look like, and what policies to pursue. If you care about consequences, maximal openness is not necessarily superior.

As for how to find that balance between closedness and openness He doesn't tell us much other than finding the balance is important, without any practical way of knowing when you're "open enough".

Saying that we need closures doesn't remove the fact that we don't actually have them. The baseline of an essentially open-source entirety is important, apart from insisting that it destroy indications.

Please let me off this reality! Next

What Lawson gets at with "openness" being all that possible ways in which a thing can be perceived reminds me of the quantum cosmological idea that reality is inherently probabilistic, and that all the different "options" available in a wave function never truly collapse, but collapse for each reference point in potentially different ways.

But where there's a difference is the idea that we're "always infinitely distant from the true open nature of things." The thought school of quantum mechanics that I'm thinking of suggests that there is NO "God-eye-view" of reality, and thus every reference frame is equally legitimate, since no one or no thing can experience multiple reference points simultaneously.

So when Lawson says that reality is a bunch of homogenous stuff that only appears to have differentiation when we using a closing tool like language, that's not far off from what quantum theorists have to say about reference frames and observation (or interaction).

Edit: a word

I agree with the unrealist postmodern, clearly we are making best approximations of narrative realities. However I disagree with unrealisim anyway, we're just spoiled and distorted by being the dominant predator. When the wolves overcome the bunny population, do we say anything fundamental has shifted? No, the circumstances have certainly done so, but still the same game table, still the same rules. I understand the unrealist is stating we can't possibly really get "there," but can we really state that. That's why I fight so hard against human intuition, most people have no interest in teasing out what is expedience or self soothing and what is truthful and repeatable.

the whole point of "IGNORANCE is BLISS"

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Where is the evidence that we can't explain reality? Where is the evidence that there exists questions that we can never truly answer? Saying that reality cannot be explained is as strong a statement as any hypothetical explanation of reality itself.

Closure is an imminent threshold beyond which no stable means of interrogation can be mastered.

The oscillation between a developing forecast, and a shift in circumstantial decay leaves a vessel prone to even the most subtle disturbing qualities.

Hilary Lawson's "exposure theory" posits that the world is inherently unknowable, and our access to it is limited to the representations or "exposures" of it that we construct through language, culture, and other forms of mediation. While there may be some truth to this claim, it is also possible to argue against it.

First, exposure theory assumes a radical divide between the world and our knowledge of it, which may not accurately reflect the way we experience reality. In practice, our knowledge of the world is often based on a dynamic interaction between our perceptions and our concepts, rather than a strict separation between the two.

Second, exposure theory also implies that our knowledge of the world is entirely arbitrary and culturally constructed, which overlooks the possibility of objective knowledge. While our knowledge of the world is undoubtedly shaped by cultural and linguistic factors, it is also possible to arrive at shared truths about reality that are independent of these factors.

Finally, exposure theory may lead to a kind of relativism that undermines the possibility of meaningful ethical or political action. If our knowledge of the world is entirely mediated by language and culture, then it may seem that any ethical or political claims we make are simply expressions of our own subjective perspectives. However, it is possible to argue that certain ethical and political claims are objectively valid, based on shared values or principles that are not simply relative to individual perspectives.

In sum, while exposure theory raises some important points about the limitations of our knowledge of the world, it also overlooks the possibility of objective knowledge and may lead to a kind of relativism that undermines meaningful action.

Our minds create reality, thats how I look at it. When we have normal working eyes. We see RGB. We create the picture in our minds. We name objects to identify them. We create our own reality.

People who are colorblind have a different kind of reality. Yes objects stay the same but they see less or no color. So they have a slightly different reality.

Blind people can't see, or see very little shades of light. They use their ears and touch more. Their reality is more different.

I see it as the way we are able to observe our environment. The way our brain creates our reality.

We live in an "open" reality. We can devolope technology to expand the reality we can't see before. So reality is still expanding for us.

I think closure theory sounds a little like, stop asking questions, just settle with what we know. It's not that we might never know what reality is that we need to stop asking. As technology advances we can touch the reality that we thought we might never fully grasp. But than we might if we look further. Yes we need to function in this reality, so yes we need some kind of closure on certain aspects of reality. Only I would name it differently. Closure should be 'current understanding'.

Counterpoint, no brain, no reality? Maybe. If no living being can observe does reality exist anyway?

Edit: did not saw the video. Just wanted to see how you think of this opinion.

Reality is a waste of time when you reword it.

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I disagree that we cannot or do not quantify or define what is real. Philosophies like this, to me, always read as an ignorance of science or a poor excuse not to look behind the curtain that is your current shallow understanding of a subject. Best part is, when you start to get far enough along into mathematics and statistics, you realize it all sort of ties back together.