Too stupid to know we're stupid?

[dtel]

Entire lives can be lived without ever contacting reality.

That's what I am counting on, I have done well so far.

Reality is boring and hard, I like my artificial reality...................I can change it.

[BigStewMan]

what are you all talking about--i don't get it. [*-)]

[Mallette]

>Entire lives can be lived without ever contacting reality.

Yes, sir. I believe we concluded this under separate cover. It would probably be more accurate stated that "No life has ever been lived that contacted reality." Limitations, of temporality, etc, etc...

Dave

[Islander]

Well, first of all, everyone is living in the past; just a little. It takes about a tenth of a second from the time we see or hear something until it reaches our brains and is processed and interpreted, so whatever you're seeing and hearing right now actually happened a fraction of a second ago.

On most occasions, that delay is insignificant, but in certain competitive situations, whether competing for a trophy or for your life, the person who reacts in a shorter fraction of a second may have the advantage, since he's closer to reality or to the present.

Another question is temporal horizon. Most people can plan years into the future, but some, like some criminals for instance, can only see until tomorrow or next week, so to them getting arrested is unlikely and going to jail is so far in the misty future that it's not relevant, sort of like a grade school kid would think of next summer's holidays when it's only October. Drug addicts are the same or worse, so many of them are criminals, too.

Are those temporally short-sighted people fully conscious? I'd argue No, not by a long shot, but few if any of us could really be called fully conscious. Siddhartha Gautama was the Enlightened One, the Buddha, but how many of us have been enlightened since him? Not nearly enough, or humanity wouldn't be facing all the unnecessary and avoidable problems we read about every day.

[Islander]

There's also the idea that reality is what we all agree it is, so anyone who disagrees with our version of reality is insane. Most of us function fairly well while subscribing to the common view of what's real, but what if we were the minority and the strange ones thought we were all crazy?

If the strange ones (by our standards) had a whole society or culture who thought the same way, perhaps they'd be able to hold jobs and raise families and do all the normal things, while we'd be unemployable and hard to communicate with.

Absolute reality may well be indefinable, so we just try to do the best we can to deal with what we perceive and hope we find some friends who can deal with it, too.

[Islander]

Then there's the concept of the doers and the done-to.

The doers are in the situations they're in because they chose to be and realize it, so they feel they have at least some control over their lives.

The done-to feel they're where they wound up, and got there with little input of their own, so they have little feeling of control, and little sense of responsibility for their situations or the actions they think those situations call for. Some of them can justify evil acts, claiming "they had no choice", because of where they found themselves, not where they put themselves. Are they just not taking charge of themselves and their lives, do they not realize they can, are they semi-conscious or somehow mentally lacking? Some or all of those factors may be at work with them.

Since not all can or should be leaders, and leaders will by definition always be a small minority, could it be that this is the best way for humanity to be? The done-to should not be leaders, since they can't or won't take control and nothing would get done. By "control", I'm not referring to tyranny, just the idea that someone has to be the foreman, or the person who tells the oarsmen when to row, or who tells the workers what to do next.

Of course, not all doers need to be leaders. Most will go about their lives exerting control over no-one but themselves, but will be more satisfied and less resentful than done-tos who may appear to be in very similar circumstances.

[Groomlakearea51]

I'm a schizophrenic existentialist myself... The voice in my head is always calling me stupid.... Problem is the voice does not tell me that until after something went south. Stupid voice!

[H]

[Islander]

..........but few if any of us could really be called fully conscious.

What choice impedes consciousness? How do we choose to separate our selves from reality? And why?

Many factors can impede consciousness and choice is only one of them. Education, cultural expectations, personal initiative and drive, even the friends you associate with; all can have an effect.

Remember the feminists' "consciousness-raising" sessions in the Sixties and Seventies? They realized that being brought up to be a "homemaker" with no legitimate concerns other than taking care of her family resulted in women having very limited intellectual lives. Women in those circumstances had to be shown that there was so much more out there and that they were capable of having much richer personal lives.

Men can be limited in similar ways by the culture or segment of the culture that they grow up in. If you and your friends have never looked up, you'd never know the sky was there.

It could be said that consciousness is like fitness. It's something you have to work at to achieve and maintain, and it doesn't happen by accident. You have to literally "put your mind to it". Accordingly, it's not an either-or thing, but a scale of possibilities.

How smart is a cat? As smart as he needs to be. In the same way, many humans are operating at a functional level, but one that's far below their potential. Some may not know what's possible, some may not care or may find themselves too occupied by day-to-day concerns to take the time to exercise their minds.

I think very few people choose to separate themselves from reality. Is it even possible? Everyone lives in some kind of reality. A bit of channel-surfing on TV will show many different worldviews, which could be called many different perceptions of reality.

Since we can only perceive reality through our senses, unless we have a transcendent experience, reality will always be subjective. Physicists may talk about quantum foam and worldlines and multiple universes, but we can't really see those things, so they're a "true" reality that we can't experience.

We know there are more dimensions than we can currently perceive, but no matter how much you read about it or think about it, you can't really visualize a hypercube or tesseract, any more than a person in Flatland could visualize a cube.

What do you think?

[Islander]

I'm a schizophrenic existentialist myself... The voice in my head is always calling me stupid.... Problem is the voice does not tell me that until after something went south. Stupid voice!

As a police detective once said on TV, why do the voices always say, "Kill everyone in the house!"? Why don't they say, "Get a job!"?

[oldtimer]

Because if they said that, they wouldn't be voices in their heads, it would be their moms.

[jheis]

Just walk in to any WallMart.

You can actually feel the intelligence leaking out through your pores.

I've had to make a run for the exit before I became too stupid to find my way out.

James

[Islander]

Good points, but is it possible to see what is, and understand it, if you attach no idea to it? If words represent ideas, how can you describe or understand what you have no words for?

As for living in the present, are you referring to being "in the zone", as some athletes and others describe peak moment experiences? I've only experienced that feeling of total focus once, years ago, during most or all of a motorcycle race that lasted about twenty minutes. On that day, once the race started, I knew I would win, even though two fast riders passed me for the lead. Within a few laps, I regained the lead and kept it all the way to the chequered flag.

I competed for six full seasons and never experienced that feeling again, though I did win a few other times.

[Islander]

So to become conscious requires the ability to see what is, in the exact present moment, and attach no preconceived abstract idea to it.

Now that I think a little more about it, I can see a few examples of not seeing what's in front of you because of what you expect to see. If you have a beard and/or moustache and shave it off, friends may not even notice for a while, since they still see what they expect to see and their brains are over-ruling what their eyes are seeing.

Another example is looking at an object or listening to it and giving an incorrect description of it because you were told what to expect, like with Bose Wave radios and their "amazing room-filling sound". Your brain can contradict the direct evidence your senses are providing.

And that's without chemical modification of your perceptions, such as the apparent enhancements of someone's appearance when you're wearing "beer goggles" while looking at them.

[oldtimer]

Using past experience you might simply be avoiding what has been reality too many times before. Defining consciousness as a lack of perspective does little to advance knowledge, and becomes a simple exercise in awareness.

[oldtimer]

To further refine the thought, avoiding what has been a negative stimulus is not dwelling in non-reality but simply dwelling in learned stimulus repsonse activity. perception alone is not and will never be the desired goal of human endeavor. otherwise why bother with theories of how things work in an attempt to actually discover the environment in which one dwells?

[Islander]

Bigotry is a bad thing, but it's often confused with prejudice, which is not necessarily a bad thing, in its true sense. Pre-judging a person or a situation based on previous experience with something similar is using learned information, so you don't have to repeat the lesson.

Keeping an open mind is a good thing, but it needs to be tempered by what has already been learned. That's tempered, not completely over-ruled.

[Jeff Matthews]

Not so easy. Past experience conditions what our perceptions will be. You say it's bad because it shields us from the truth of the present. This is true in some cases, but in a vast many, this is untrue. Examples:

(1) Don't get near the wasps' nest. They will sting you.

(2) Don't drive a car with your eyes closed. You will run into something.

(3) Don't scream in the classroom. You will be disciplined.

All of these are simply "not true" and are just generalizations based on past perceptions which cause us to view the event with prejudice. But the prejudice is useful and valid, is it not?

What you need to explain, to make your point, is the methodology people should follow to ferret out the good prejedudice from the bad prejudice.

[sputnik]

.........What you need to explain, to make your point, is the methodology people should follow to ferret out the good prejedudice from the bad prejudice.

Refer back to Aristotle, Descartes, and Newton - empiricism and deductive reasoning, ie. the Scientific Method. Challenges our induction, or inference, or intuition, or observation with known universal truths by objective syllogism. Presuming that there can be no contradiction in reality, if we discover a contradiction, there is an error in our observation or in our understanding of reality. A beautiful means to accommodate unkown unknowns and filter bias.

[Jeff Matthews]

Right. Except the problem, as Mark describes it, is not so simple. He uses an analogy where one can infer the perceiver suffers a neurosis.

However, when it comes to the example of homeless in the streets, generalizations of "laziness," "drug or alcohol dependence," etc. are statistically valid. Sure, in passing judgment, there is room for error. A fraction of such people are probably more worthy of a better perception, but this fraction does not dispel the statistical validity. By "statistical," I do not imply that I have some statistics to back it up, so let's not ask for them.

Statistically, parachuting is safe. However, I do not desire to take the risk because of the perceived danger from my point of view. Narrow-minded? Perhaps. Do I regret not wanting to assume the risk? No.

You have people that train tigers and then, get mauled. These people tried to dispel prejudice as a myth.

[sputnik]

A major pitfall in not recognizing our stupidity is that we assign an undue level of certainty to our inferences without basis. When we make mistakes, it's often because we've failed to recognize that we could be wrong. Overconfidence and ignorance are a dangerous combination. "Here, hold my beer and watch this."