Is there an absolute reality?

And? So does that mean I am not allowed to ponder it as well? This thread is just an invitation to ponder with me. If you wish not to go a pondering then perhaps you should be a wondering off.

I create possibly the most theist friendly thread an atheist has ever posted and wynn still does all that wynn possibly can to try to create conflict. I think I will take control of my reality and remove wynn from it... again. I should have never taken it off of ignore. Sorry for calling you "it", I have no idea what gender you identify with.

 

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Sheesh.


Given the confidence with which you usually speak, I assumed that you are well familiar with the numerous philosophical approaches that deal with the problem of "What is real?"

It seems I was wrong.

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Confidence is an emotional state as fleeting as life itself. One reason that I don't like basing opinions on how something makes me feel. Though I am not exempt from committing that basic human mistake.

 

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One of the tricks is that we keep trying to force square pegs into round holes. Here I'm thinking of the extreme cases of submitting to the intuitive view of reality - including pseudoscience, magic and religion.

My own view is that the idea of absolute reality is something like the medieval view of a firmament. It was probably the best guess given the primitive nature of astronomy and science in general.

I think the "Big" in "Big Bang" is all we have left of the sense of a kind of firmament. And we have a vague sense that there could be a kind of symmetry, that the bang could have been preceded by a crunch, or that there could be a cycle of bangs and crunches. I guess that's a serial multiverse. And then there's the possibility of a parallel multiverse. Then you could infer a serialized cycle of parallel multiverses. But all of this nothing more than speculation, with no way to tell which could be remotely possible.

But even if we limit our focus to our best bet, the Big Bang, when you "look back" into the cone and contemplate the orgin of spacetime itself, Ultimate Reality takes on a very unreal face. Now we have to consider what it means to "arise" from an absence of spacetime. If there ever was a time when there was no time . . . ah, the paradox . . . and even more bizarre is to try to comprehend the meaning of a lack of space.

There can be no "before" time. But it's almost conceivable that time converges to zero at the vortex of the cone. In my view this is something like imagining an infinite past, while at the same time conceiving of a static spaceless eternity that "is always with us" (whatever that means) especially since it would "be" spaceless, whatever that means. The other bizarre notion is the one that arose from watching annihilation / creation pairs in a cloud chamber (particles moving forward in time collide with particles moving backward in time), that can impute to a negative going timeline, or a retrocausal parallel universe, one which intersects ours at every instance of a particle of matter.

Ultimate Reality is a concept that's probably too big to ever fit into a human brain. The idea may be nothing more than a stepping out point, just at the point of falling asleep, or perhaps for someone meditating or tripping on psychedelics. Other than that it remains a kind of boundary on human knowledge, one that we can try our best to push against, no matter how much it springs back into place.

Another sense of reality is that it is a projection from another source, something like the way a holograph is a projection, or a map is a projection.

All of this may be a little different than what you meant by an absence of an Ultimate Reality, but I think there's probably some overlap here once we figure out what either word really means.

 

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As far as neuroscience is concerned the perception of the electrical interpretation of stimuli are the core facets of what can be describe as “reality”. However for the question of the OP is asking is of what constitutes or could possible allow for the existence of alternate or multi-realties that is yet another interpretation of the mind. Currently my brain is telling my hands to type these words; the keypad is cool to the touch (a product of the electrical via my fingers nerve endings sending signals to my mind for interpretation). However right now you could question the authenticity of what I said and create in your mind a different variant of what could be meant by “cool ” is based on my description, your mind and though process is or has already created an alternate but to you "real” sense or contemplation of what that temperature feels in your mind or what doing right now while typing.
Perception=Reality and since electrical signals can be altered or artificially created ones sense of “reality” may be false but the brain couldn’t tell the difference.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121023172113.htm
Then there is memory creation.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121023100944.htm
Then there is our interpretation of time
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121024133450.htm

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I often wonder whether our own insignificance prevents us from knowing absolute reality. Science has done much to open the doors into understanding, but even that human endeavor might be limited by our meager vantage.

Certainly the reality of each individual is personal and is defined by whatever an individual might experience at any one moment.

 

There is definitely absolute and objective reality independent of our vision and brain games, but the main question is will we ever detect it?
Because our brain enables us to only see sketches and shapes of this absolute and objective reality.

 

Objective reality? Well, there is a support structure for light, for standard model particles. I call it the luminiferous aether. Whatever else it supports is anyone's guess.