home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: sparky!uunet!olivea!decwrl!adobe!asanders
- From: asanders@adobe.com (Alan Sanders)
- Newsgroups: alt.consciousness
- Subject: Re: Next?
- Message-ID: <1993Jan21.224725.6768@adobe.com>
- Date: 21 Jan 93 22:47:25 GMT
- Sender: usenet@adobe.com (USENET NEWS)
- Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated
- Lines: 27
-
- | ...you _can't_ have any such thing as an objective viewpoint...
- | therefore any observed phenomena exists only in the mind of
- | the observer...
- -Tom
-
- This doesn't follow. Our observations (thoughts, feelings and
- sensory perceptions) are certainly subjective, but "things in
- themselves" exist (or do not exist) quite independent of the
- way in which we perceive them. Our problem is that we cannot
- distinguish the Real from the transitory, since *everything*
- is rendered as a vision in the mind.
-
- | ...although if your observations and those of other people
- | mostly agree you can make some deductions about the probable
- | nature of "Reality".
-
- This doesn't follow either. Agreement among people can be the
- result of shared illusions. Besides, we can only say that
- "something real" may lie behind commonly observed phenomena.
- The true nature of that Reality cannot be known from *any*
- subjective viewpoint. If a bunch of blind men compare notes
- on their subjective experiences of an elephant, they may
- arrive at a fairly accurate notion of what an elephant looks
- like to the human eye. But what does an elephant look like
- to a bumble bee? What does it look like to an angel?
-
- -Alan
-