On how perspective affects the nature of things

Is the mind the same as the body? What is consciousness? Can machines have it?

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Zandareagle
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On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by Zandareagle »

It's a generally agreed upon truth that how you perceive something affects what it is to you. If you see someone as good,
he will be good, if you see someone as irritating, he will be irritating. So far so good, right? In fact, it could be
argued that the entirety of anything is exactly how you perceive it - that there is no difference between perception and
reality because one is the other.

How far does this go, though? You can't "perceive" your way into godhood, for instance. If you believe you are not hungry,
but you indeed are, eventually you will die without enough food. There are aspects of reality that seem (at least to me)
to trump all perception.

Perhaps it's not a question of whether perception influences reality, but how much. If you drop your cup on the ground,
then you really have dropped it on the ground, you can't "believe it" away. Maybe perception matters more to our emotional
and spiritual realities than it does to the physical reality of things?

Just some musings and thinking aloud. It's something that's been on my mind this week or so, but I haven't gone into any
serious research or dialectics about it.

What do you all think?
jackles
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by jackles »

we could ask the question does perception move.
madera
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by madera »

madera23 wrote:
madera23 wrote:
Zandareagle wrote:It's a generally agreed upon truth that how you perceive something affects what it is to you. If you see someone as good,
he will be good, if you see someone as irritating, he will be irritating. So far so good, right? In fact, it could be
argued that the entirety of anything is exactly how you perceive it - that there is no difference between perception and
reality because one is the other.

How far does this go, though? You can't "perceive" your way into godhood, for instance. If you believe you are not hungry,
but you indeed are, eventually you will die without enough food. There are aspects of reality that seem (at least to me)
to trump all perception.

Perhaps it's not a question of whether perception influences reality, but how much. If you drop your cup on the ground,
then you really have dropped it on the ground, you can't "believe it" away. Maybe perception matters more to our emotional
and spiritual realities than it does to the physical reality of things?

Just some musings and thinking aloud. It's something that's been on my mind this week or so, but I haven't gone into any
serious research or dialectics about it.

What do you all think?
Perception does not influence reality.
perception is thought.
insight influences reality because it is personality changing.
Zandareagle
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by Zandareagle »

But doesn't thought influence reality? What you think does impact how you feel about something.
madera23
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by madera23 »

Zandareagle wrote:But doesn't thought influence reality? What you think does impact how you feel about something.
The bible tells us to take every thought. Thought is not trust worthy so how can it influence reality?
Thought can impact how you feel, some can cause frustration, worry, doubt, it can also tell you how good you are, it lies.
who wants that kind of influence?
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The Voice of Time
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by The Voice of Time »

@Zandareagle

In the natural world, it does not matter what is good or what is bad, that's a human construct, for this reason, it makes no difference in the natural world what you think is good or what you think is bad, except, when your belief has consequences on your actions.

When your belief does not explain in such a fashion as to be able to influence the course of events in the natural world, your belief will face difficulties in being able to make you live longer, better and so forth, in other words, if you do not have a view that is representative of reality, you will suffer incompetence from it to the degree your belief's misconceptions are about critical features of understanding the world.

For instance, the more "modern" versions of religion, do not really take everything about their identity seriously, or favourably explains away things that could've been interpreted more adversely. This allows the believers to be efficient participants in the modern world as what their religion is about, is not really stuff that matters that much when it all comes down to it and you measure their abilities. But that said, atheism still has greater potential at defining more dependable understandings of the world, and therefore will eventually triumph religion the more and more time passes (though religion will certainly redefine itself over and over again trying to keep up with the pace).

However, the more "backward", antiquated or eccentric versions of religions, often hold very strong impeding perspectives of the world, that disables their ability to solve certain problems and understand certain features of reality, and this usually also is why they are often the poorest or least technologically and socially developed among the population.

They often experience violent conflicts because their social backwardness does not allow them to solve dilemmas that arise in societies, typically it's the conflict between tradition and liberty. Imagine a couple of love-birds having sex the night before the girl was to be wedded as part of a deal between two families, and imagine that the kind of revenge or feeling of deception that the man who was to get the girl would feel about that. Now in modern societies, the inclination to choose who you want to be with yourself, is greater than the utility your family might have from controlling your life, and because of this, situations like this doesn't normally arise, and if they do arise, the expectation that a person is free, helps to diminish the consequences as the man who was to be wedded to the girl does not have a property-interest in the girl, but instead a continuous co-operation interest, which can more easier be dissolved as his rights are weaker in this case.

Now also imagine that this society believes the Earth is flat because that's what "divine intuition" says, and that they do not believe in the existence of outer space at all or objects of outer space like asteroids or planets only thinking them to be like paint on the ceiling of the world. Now if a large asteroid was to crash with Earth at their location, they'd not believe the scientists urging them to go away, instead the would sit there and be crushed in an instance, all of them. Their belief is their demise, and so it is with all belief that is contrary to reality: it has consequences, it takes away your ability to assert control over the world as you don't know how the world properly works.
Zandareagle
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by Zandareagle »

So we can say that thought influences reality, but only to a certain extent - like in your example of the meteor. But I don't think it's fallacious to say that thoughts CAN have some influence on reality.

And who is to say which perspective is right or wrong? Though I do agree that the further you get from physical reality, the more suspect your thoughts become. :)
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The Voice of Time
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by The Voice of Time »

Zandareagle wrote:And who is to say which perspective is right or wrong?
Nature. Nature is a productive thing, it produces "events" or alternatively preserves a state of existing. If either ceases to be the case, then we can presume there's a cause for this, and this cause is derived from whatever patterns that came with the reality of events and states of existing.

So a perspective is wrong when it goes against the case of events and states of existing. I may also add that there's a difference between "why" things happen and "what" they are, and the fact that they do happen. "Why" and "what" can be argued about, that a thing does happen can't be argued about... either it is, or it is not the case that something happened or a thing was existing. Maybe it was an illusion, doesn't matter, it still happened, you are just wrong in "what" happened and "why".
Zandareagle wrote:Though I do agree that the further you get from physical reality, the more suspect your thoughts become. :)
"Suspect" is not a good measure of quality if you're gonna be exact about it. Plenty of people have been suspect about genius science because they don't understand it, doesn't make the science wrong by a stretch.
madera
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by madera »

Zandareagle wrote:So we can say that thought influences reality, but only to a certain extent - like in your example of the meteor. But I don't think it's fallacious to say that thoughts CAN have some influence on reality.

And who is to say which perspective is right or wrong? Though I do agree that the further you get from physical reality, the more suspect your thoughts become. :)
Thoughts need to be seen, not caught up in.
A river flows, thoughts flow.
Do you jump into a flowing river or do you sit on the banks of the river and just watch it flow, or do you jump in and drown?
Zandareagle
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by Zandareagle »

I agree about not being controlled by your thoughts, and how you can watch them flow instead of "jumping" into them...but that wasn't really what I was talking about in my post. :) It was more about how thoughts can influence reality (though what you said does have a bearing on the issue)
madera23
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by madera23 »

Zandareagle wrote:I agree about not being controlled by your thoughts, and how you can watch them flow instead of "jumping" into them...but that wasn't really what I was talking about in my post. :) It was more about how thoughts can influence reality (though what you said does have a bearing on the issue)

Thoughts can influence reality only if you get tangled up in them, trying to figure them out, think about them.
Reality flows like the river.
Do you think that God thinks? No, God knows without thought.
There is a scripture in psalms, "Be still and know",
jackles
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by jackles »

yes thoughts interfere with the relativity of the general event in terms of human intereaction.i reckon fear is the cause of thought.relativity to and in the event and consciousness are one in the same thing in my reckoning.
Wyman
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by Wyman »

There are aspects of reality that seem (at least to me)
to trump all perception.
This is a question of what causes perception. From the one side, photons strike our retina. From the other, our brain interprets the outside input. In between, we get a 'perception.'

I would liken this to a gradual gradation from sense impressions (a la Hume) to abstract thoughts. In impressions, the outside cause is immediate, forceful and overwhelms what is contributed by the brain. In abstract thought, the brain is the primary cause. And there is everything in between.

This describes a dualism that is as old as Plato, at least, and has been a focus (almost obsession) of modern philosophy since Descartes; where a 'perception' is a mixture of the mental and the physical.

So, I think your intuition is one of the primary intuitions of philosophy.
Zandareagle
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by Zandareagle »

Thanks for all the responses so far! It's quite an interesting topic, wouldn't you say? :)

Perception definitely influences reality, but no matter how much we may want to perceive things a certain way, sometimes static reality can't be altered by our views alone - like a stone will still be reasonably solid however we look at it.

But is that really true? A stone is also fluid in the sense that it is made out of changeable particulate matter.

So does perception really govern everything?
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HexHammer
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Re: On how perspective affects the nature of things

Post by HexHammer »

Hallisunations, delusions, brain damage, insanity ..etc, all will manipulate the mind to precive reality in a wrong way.
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