Petal_Chatoyance t1_jauc1d0 wrote
Reply to comment by dbrodes in Glorifying the "self" is detrimental to both the individual and the larger world. It neither helps you find your true nature, nor your role in the larger world. by waytogoal
"Teach it phenomenology, Doolittle! Phenomenology!" - Dark Star, 1974
Everything you perceive, or experience, comes through your sensory apparatus, your eyes, ears, sense of touch, proprioception, and so on. Your brain processes this information, and in this way, you think you live in a world, have a body, and so on.
Nothing you experience is real.
When you see something - my words, here, on the screen you are watching - you are seeing how things were about a hundredth of a second after the fact. It takes time to process sight and understand what you see. But more than that, you are not actually seeing 'reality' - your brain constructs what you see and projects it for you as a waking dream.
This is partly because your vision center is made of modules, each which does one specific task: one clump of neurons only processes horizontal lines, another vertical, one processes contours, another processes light values, and so on. But there is more: your brain is constantly filling in gaps with virtual reality - things that are not there at all.
Of course, your 'blind spot', the place in your retina where your nerves blossom out into the retina itself, no vision occurs there, so the brain just 'paints over' the region with whatever was close to it. And yes, your peripheral vision - anything just a ways to the side of the center of your sight - is all in black and white. No color at all. But, your brain makes you think you are seeing color, because it paints it in - sometimes falsely. And, of course, your macula - the tiny spot in the very center of your vision, about the diameter of a dime at arms length. That's the only part of your vision that is sharp or clear - everything else is low resolution. Yet, you think you are seeing a detailed, colorful world - all a waking dream, created by the same part of your brain that actually dreams. You live, constantly, in biological virtual reality. Most of what you see is... made up.
This is why optical illusions work, by the way. They work because they are images that break your brain's virtual reality system and show you how the visual hamburger is made.
And there is the matter of saccades. Constantly, your eyeballs are twitching - moving, scanning, flicking from one spot to another - as you read these words, as you look around your room. If you actually could see with your eyes, the world would look like the jerkiest of badly-filmed music videos, with the camera jumping around so rapidly that nothing made any sense, and everything was a smear.
Fortunately, your brain has a solution: you don't actually see anything (it's a waking dream based on input from your eyes) and the good thing about that is that your brain can just turn it off. When your eyes flick and jitter and jump from spot to spot constantly, your vision just... shuts off. You are completely blind for about a 40 minutes (!) of every day. It's just that this total blindness happens during the tiny moments when your eyes jerk about. Your brain just shuts off vision, then convinces you that it didn't do that. That lie makes you think you are seeing this page, your room, whatever, as a constant movie of your life. It ain't so. Not even close.
And all of this is true of all your other senses, too, in various ways. You - your 'self' is forever living in a virtual reality recreation of the world outside your brain, computed by your brain, based on information your nerves report. But it is not actual reality. You will, from birth to death, never see actual reality. You will only touch, taste, feel and see a model of it constructed, projected, and edited by your brain modules.
What it 'really' is, your senses cannot tell you. And lest you think this mere semantics, consider the issue of the weird divide between quantum scale reality and large scale reality - they don't agree. At all. Yet, our senses paint us a cohesive reality that is very useful for an animal surviving on earth. But mathematics and technology give us more senses, and they describe a reality a bit stranger than that, one we cannot ourselves directly see.
And so it goes.
With that stated, we get to phenomenology.
If the only way you can know the world is through your senses, and your senses lie to you and you exist only within a waking dream your brain invents to help you survive, what do you really know about literally anything? I mean actually, really, truly know?
And if you cannot know anything about actual reality, then what is left? What do you have that you can still call real... to you?
You. Your self. That is all that you have left. Just you. Somebody is experiencing this illusion, this lying set of sense impressions. Who is that somebody? It is you. You are that somebody. Your self is the only thing you can truly hold real. Because you... are the experiencer and the entity thinking about all of this.
You think, therefore you are. You are the only thing you can ever be certain is real.
Make sense?
AdvonKoulthar t1_jauxdg1 wrote
Haha, I feel like that’s a bit wordy and flowery to get the point across to someone who says they don’t understand it.
Petal_Chatoyance t1_javeznv wrote
Okay, can you do better? Show me a way to convey phenomenology in, like, a single, short, concise paragraph. I mean, other than just copy-pasting a dictionary definition or whatever - something that would really get the idea across.
Maybe you can do better than I. I would be interested to see that - I know I like writing a little too much.
[deleted] t1_javxzyi wrote
[deleted]
dbrodes t1_javgvnk wrote
Just because reality is coloured by your perceptions doesn't make your perceptions any more 'real' though.
Petal_Chatoyance t1_javhvsh wrote
What? That was incoherent. That sentence doesn't make any sense. I don't have a clue what you are trying to say.
dbrodes t1_javieex wrote
How can you say your 'self' is real when you, yourself, concede your view of the world is influenced by perception, habits and socialisation. I'm just curious why you think the self is independent from being skewed by such perceptions?
Petal_Chatoyance t1_javjfa3 wrote
I may not know anything is real, but I know I have a self, because that self is writing this.
You may not know anything is real, but you know you have a self, because that is what is reading this.
If you do not have a self, then you are not reading this right now. Without a self, you do not exist as a person. You - do not exist. You are your 'self'. Without a 'self' you are a shell, a philosophical zombie, a mindless thing that has no thoughts, no feeling, no anything.
That is how you know. Your senses could be lying to you. You could be hallucinating everything - even this response. You could be a brain in a jar - but there is still a you, asking the question of me. That self that you are, regardless of any outside information, clearly exists. You are experiencing it. It is the one thing you can say you truly experience.
dbrodes t1_javkb7g wrote
>If you do not have a self, then you are not reading this right now. Without a self, you do not exist as a person. You - do not exist. You are your 'self'. Without a 'self' you are a shell, a philosophical zombie, a mindless thing that has no thoughts, no feeling, no anything.
Why do think someone disconnected from their true self would have no thoughts or feeling?
How do you know your thoughts and feelings are authentically yours? Just because you experience something doesn't make your 'self' necessarily something tangible and independent from perception.
Petal_Chatoyance t1_jaxr1t4 wrote
'Authentically yours?' This statement literally means less than nothing.
By less, I mean that it increases confusion and ignorance more than mere nonsense would do.
If the only voice that exists in your own head, the only perception that exists in your private universe, the only awareness that you can - ever - experience is literally all that can ever happen for you, the issue of 'authentically' has no meaning.
To even suggest that your own self awareness is 'inauthentic' invokes something outside yourself that could be authentic, or which is producing a false sensation of existence, and there is zero basis for such a notion. It is ridiculous at every level.
If your own self awareness is not 'authentic', then what would be 'authentic'? You might as well be asking, about the apple on your plate, 'is this apple a - real - apple?' what does that even mean? It is defined as an 'apple'. It is all that there is. What is it? A plastic replica?
There is no 'plastic replica' of self aware experience. You either exist, or you do not, in which case this argument ends - you do not exist, and I am not communicating with anyone at all.
If you can post back, you exist, and that existence is authentic. It has to be, unless you are a NLP-based chatbot, which you cannot be, because such a bot cannot succeed in signing on to reddit to respond in the first place.
This is getting silly, by which I mean you are getting silly.
dbrodes t1_jb02nla wrote
I find your definition of self a bit reductionist tbh. I also find your tone a bit patronising but we'll move past that.
Your take is somewhat solipsistic. You agree that we are slave to our perceptions and experiences but seem to think the self transcends this.
Just because you choose to identify with your thoughts doesn't make them anymore 'you'.
Petal_Chatoyance t1_jb0s7h8 wrote
If you exist, you have a self. So long as you know you exist, your self is present. The moment you lack a self, you no longer exist and are effectively dead.
If this is not clear, obvious, solid, undeniable, and indisputable to you, then there is just no point.
I am weary of watching René Descartes spin in his grave.
Have fun.
dbrodes t1_jb0sq7o wrote
It's evident how your solipsistic view of things and your hubris feed each other.
Petal_Chatoyance t1_jb0wy1t wrote
There is no solipsism in anything I said. I have no idea why you are invoking an entirely separate branch of philosophy other than, perhaps, you simply don't understand the terms you are using.
If you wanted to talk solipsism, you should have said that. We were discussing phenomenology, last I heard.
Now, I am just confused by you. Either you haven't got a clue, or you are just trolling me. Either way, I am now done.
Try looking up both terms. Learn what they actually mean. Yes, they could overlap, but so could a lot of things with either term. Like I said - have fun.
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