Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ketzer
I think what makes that idea so interesting is that nature and how we experience it may be much more intertwined then we once thought. On the one hand we might think we can never actually experience nature as we are forever limited to experiencing the model of nature we create in our minds. Yet inherent in that mind model is the thought that there is a free, objective, and independent physical reality that actually exists out there for us sense and then model in our minds. That assumption is now at least open to question. Perhaps there is no physical reality other than the one we make in our minds. The information we use to construct our physical realities may exist prior to us reading it, but if so, there is nothing to say we would all have to read exactly the same set of information to find ourselves in a common experience. We just need enough scientific information to overlap to feel ourselves to be in a common reality, yet your reality may include such things as elves and gnomes, while mine may lack them and have unicorns instead. Comfortable in my certainty of the existence of unicorns, I may yet scoff at your goofy unproven idea of elves and gnomes.
|
I remember that Bohr's philosophy said that subjectivity was an intrinsic quality of nature. He didn't hold that there is an 'objective universe' which we 'subjectively experience', but subjectivity is an inherent property of nature. Strangely, according to Bohr's view, subjectivity is an objective, or at least an actual, quality of nature. Planck had quite interesting views about 'mind' being the fundamental fabric of nature; and this is quite bizarre speak considering their work was in empirical rigour.
In Buddhist cosmology we experience the mind's projections, but because there is anata (no-self), the issue of an agent being the subject of experience is quite a tenuous one. Of course, all arisings of experience are inherently empty, according to this cosmology, in that there is a function, yet no 'thing' which is functioning.
I would guess that the projection of our experience, in this immediate noticing of 'what its like', is quite different to any volitionally produced imaginary thing, though the fundamental quality of substanceless would apply to any experience, real or imagined. I would say, however, one can imagine unicorns till the cows come home, and never actually 'see' a unicorn in the way we do cows.