>...are we arriving at an agreement that our inferences about
> the world do not correlate to anything called absolute or objective reality?
> The concept of absolute reality wouldn't have much meaning beyond the
> inferences you and David spoke of below, although I still get the feeling
> that your hanging onto some notion of an absolute.
>
> David McFadzean wrote:
> >
> > We can infer the existence of an objective reality from out subjective
> > reality, but we can have no direct knowledge of objective reality.
> >
>
> John Aten wrote:
>
> It is exactly this objective reality that I called "absolute" reality. I
> think that we are not seeing as much of the absolute reality as we think
> that we are. Our senses seem so natural that we think of them as
> perceieving actual objective reality, but they do not. People tend to
> think that their subjective realtiy is objective, absolute reality.
>
The "absolute" or "objective" reality is synonymous with "Truth" with a
capital "T".
Truth/objective/absolute is also known as the sublime. I have had a
little trouble following this thread- since it started out discussing
possible inhabitants of another reality. Since it is going into methods
of apprehending Truth, I feel I can now speak up. Try looking to the
Romantic poets and their theories of the Imagination for some good
material on inference of the sublime. The sublime is something that
keeps getting redefined from period to period. There is the romantic
sublime, the gothic sublime, the dark sublime and the post modern
sublime. The latter being the impetus behind the contemporary gothic- X
Files and the movie Seven.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the sublime is indeed a
meme. It is constructed and adapts to changes in the "environment", in
this case, our concept of ourselves as discreet entities. Death is the
big sublime, because it ultimately ruptures the sense of the discreet
self. The central tenet to the sublime meme is that it *cannot be
transmitted using regular language* but must be transmitted as a
feeling- usually a feeling of having your discreetness (new word that I
just made up:)) ruptured.
The romantics had a good thought going. That the universe is so bloody
big, there are things that you just can't and shouldn't bother thinking
about. It is more useful to think *around* them rather than through
them.
This lead to a whole theory of the subconcious in which it was held that
there is a whole system of human thought that is *repressed* (ala freud)
because it is not organized by a system- i.e. not formed as concrete,
usable language. The romantics believed in following the symbols in
dreams, for example, because they were the gateway into the universal
subconscious. A body of knowledge that is presumably shared by all
humans.
Before you flame me for being irrational, let me offer this. The
subconscious is a meme that allows the rationality meme to exist.
Do you follow me?