Reply #226: HMMMM.... the Anthropic Principle speaks to this assertion somehow [View All]

[Leopolds Ghost]

"Reality is indifferent to and divorced from conceptual mind-models of itself." That is a claim.

If one is an idealist, or a strong anthropic cosmologist, or various other models
(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/anthropic_principle , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/panpsychism , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/epiphenomenalism , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/doomsday_argument ) one can disagree with that claim.

Not to mention pure relativistic materialism which many neuroscientists believe in... (I do not)

"Belief in the unknown is tacit evidence of that which we don't understand of reality."

By the same token, discussions of the infinite are both inherently unknowable -- this has been mathematically proven -- and inherently include anything otherwise unknown, such as the nature of God.

This ties into universalist religious beliefs. After all, if God is one way, it automatically follows that any other description of God (or Gods) folds back semantically on the "true" nature of God (or Gods) (I say "nature" instead of "true understanding" because true semantic understanding of the nature of the universe is by definition impossible). Hence the notion that my God is the same as your God, seen through a glass darkly, etc. Alternately, cosmologists and philosophers have proven (I think this was Godel's hypothesis) that any explanation of the universe is inherently paradoxical because any system that includes everything also has to include not just what is unknowable, but what is contradictory to the order established. Hence, good can only exist in the context of evil, somethingness in the context of nothingness, space/time can only exist in the context of the observer, etc.

"The underpinning of conceptualism represent degrees of separation from reality."

I think I understand and agree... However, in analyzing our own consciousness (or the notion of a God-mind that speaks to us or thru us) the question becomes whether we imagine that we have a mind through infinitely recursive self-consciousness and that is called "self-awareness" and nothing more; or whether there is an underlying reality which we can percieve only through infinitely recursive self-awareness; or whether there is, in fact, a mind (conscious entity) that is associated with our individual brains and/or the entire universe and therefore rationalism (and self-awareness) are merely higher-order complications that attempt to reproduce what is already there, like a Windows program emulating a DOS shell or a computer screen emulating a false-color image of an electron in an effort to reproduce what is already there.

"While humans are fundamentally constrained by the "this is like that" functional limitation of how the brain works and by the arrogance and bigotry of both human and personal perspectives, reality is not thus constrained."

I believe in underlying reality, but saying that reality is relative to what exists does not imply that reality is not concrete, it implies that consciousness (universal mind, i.e. the observer) is necessary for existence. If there is nothing to observe it, space/time collapses into a singularity.