Gordon:
> >And "real" is what? In 25 words or less, please.
Dace:
> Reality is whatever is left over when we stop believing in it. What is real
> is what exists intrinsically, regardless of whether we imagine it.
My beliefs cease to exist when I stop believing in them, yet I'd say they were real -- even on the material plane.
> >But even assuming we know the real like a brick, why should
> >a search for it be impeded by religious ideas?
> There is no such as a brick. What exists intrinsically is molecules and
> electromagnetic bonds. The "brick" exists only insofar as we imagine this
> set of molecules to be a "brick." There is no "brickness" in the world.
On the contrary, molecules and electromagnetic bonds are, like bricks, human mental constructions _as_far_as_we_know_. That is, they are organizations of phenomena. In any case, even if they were really real, if you were to dissolve a brick into its component molecules and the energy of its bonds, I'm pretty sure you would find something was now missing from your world that was suspiciously like an instance of brickness. That is, the _form_ of the brick would have disappeared, even though its material and energetic "substances" remained. Where did it go? Maybe home to the Empyrean, eh?
The process could be repeated with the alleged molecules and energy, probably, breaking them down into quarks or strings, so that the molecules too would disappear. Things seem to be a piling-up of forms within forms. And as the Buddhist mantra goes, "The form is empty; empty is the form."
And yet everyone knows what a brick is, and can call to mind the shape and weight and texture of one held in the hand.
> >Hence, it does not seem reasonable to tell people who have
> >direct experience of ghosts, gods, or higher realms, that they
> >should reject these in favor of a contrary and equally unprovable
> >religious position (that there are no ghosts, gods, or higher
> >realms), which they do not experience.
Dace:
> The problem is that we don't always know how to interpret our experiences.
> Just as a brick is really just an interpretation of matter, a ghost is an
> interpretation of experience. While "brick" is a pretty solid
> interpretation, "ghost" is not. Let's take the example of "higher realms."
> Now, I am not inexperienced in these matters, and I can *totally* understand
> why people would think they had experienced another "realm" of existence
> altogether. In my view, though, the "altered state" of consciousness
> results from a memory. Consciousness has evolved. It has been refined. As
> abstract intelligence developed, we lost a great deal of the power of
> consciousness. I like to use TV as a metaphor. At first the brightness
> (consciousness) was all the way up. Over time, we lowered the brightness in
> order to establish contrast (intellect). There are certain neurological
> events which can trigger this memory. Though my interpretation may not be
> correct, the same could be said of the "higher realms" interpretation.
I'm arguing only that if higher realms (or gods, or ghosts) correspond with one's experience, one might as well believe in them, as exercise faith to deny the validity of one's experience.
Gordon