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Joe_Cavalry All Day Every Day


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 On the topic of reality (5)

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On the topic of reality

When I was a child, maybe 9 years old, my mother worked as a physical therapist for children.  There was one girl there who did not have any nerve endings so she didn't feel pain and she ended up chewing off her fingers.

The pain you feel is nothing more than your interpretation of the data being sent by your nerve endings (in the form of an electrical current) to your brain.  She did not interpret the the data being sent by her eyes and ears as pain even though those messages were being sent as electrical currents and the message was the same; your fingers are being separated from the rest of your hand.

There are Tibetan monks that set themselves on fire in protest of the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and then they just sit there, while they burn, waiting for death.  They have trained themselves to interpret the data differently and to not run around with their arms flailing in the air, screaming.

Another example is Stockholm syndrome in which hostages express empathy, sympathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.

You experience life through your senses.  When you interpret the data obtained from your senses, you create your own reality.  But your reality is not necessarily that of another person.  The prevalent interpretation made by most people is not immutable and can change over time. 

If reality is nothing more than one person's interpretation, what makes one reality more real than another?

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And that's why I'm an agnostic.

According to Wikipedia:

Agnosticism is the view that the truth values of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, as well as other religious and metaphysical claims—are unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism

As an agnostic and a purist, I claim that the answer to the question I just posed above is unknowable. :)

Supporting Evidence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism (en.wikipedia.org)
1 point

I didn't know such knowledge could come from a troll.

Trolls are created by the masses that are unable or unwilling to rise above the fray ;)

1 point

You're right about us only being able to interpret reality through our senses, but that doesn't mean that there are multiple realities, just multiple interpretations of reality. Some of these interpretations are bound to be more accurate than others. We just don't know which ones.

However, I think we can assign probabilities to the accuracies of various interpretations of reality, based on the results of experiments and such. If you do an experiment, and you make a theory based on that experiment, then you have a pretty good chance of being right. If you then make a theory based on that original theory, then you have a little less chance of being right. The further you are from actual concrete evidence, the less chance you have of being right.

I think that the existence of fairies and leprachauns, the existence of God, and the theories of the Big Bang and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle are sofar from the actual first-hand experience that the probablility of them being accurate is fairly insignificant.

That's why I'm an atheist. :)

I guess what I'm saying is that reality, like "the truth," is subjective.

Here is an example of competing realities:

http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/ The_problem_with_the_world_is_what_makes_CD_so_great

;)