Altered Reality

I dont watch tv, i dont celebrate holidays, i dont vote, i dont go.to the movies. No radio and i take in just a little news. I feel better, more at peace, i have noticed i dont get as angry or irritated. Just work, my wife, my daughters and God.

 

Are senses are limited, but they aren't limiting. Just like a car can only drive us so far and so fast, so it's limited, but a car is what enables us to travel long distances, so it's certainly not what limits our travel.

 

deprogramming

 

No matter in what form, we are all conditioned in a way when we are raised as kids. Although this conditioning can be seen as a form of being brainwashed (in a certain way if we would insist on it), I would conclude that generally they are slightly different things. Most people would regard their upbringing and getting to learn the social constructs of how society happens to work as useful in the end. Even when they might reject them after they asked questions.

 

Not at all but humanity has experienced a social, cultural, political, and hierarchal evolution which has resulted in a lot of bullshit, to be blunt and not very eloquent. Its a good idea to tune out the bullshit sometimes and focus on what its like to exist as a human in one's most natural state, in the midst of trees and dirt and wildlife.

I agree, I love NPR haha. I just think some people are so involved in being a news junkie or a cultural entertainment junkie that they miss their own lives happening right in front of them. I know I have to detox from outside influences sometimes to stay sane and gain perspective.

 

but what happens when they do? nature catches up and they starve to death. that's not a very stable future. nor are we likely even to get all the way there, before more things start collapsing, as they already have, even from the degree to which we've deluded ourselves already. the majority in the 'western'/'northern' world, have already 'voluntarily' enslaved themselves, to the automobile, the ownership of land, and the smoke and mirrors that money is anything more then a symbol, a place holder, used to represent value, rather then in any sense, value itself.

this is a kind of land of the lotus eaters that capitalism already is. and its not like other ideologies avoid ending up in the same boat.

what appears likely to be the natural conclusion of this trend, would be famine and disease, just as ultimately brings back into balance, any species who's population exceeds balance with its environment. with humans this would seem a little more difficult. we have our medical science. we can figure out work a rounds, for most things nature can throw at us. but we can also, have, grow over confident as a result of this.

global climate change is real, and its real threat, is precisely such famine and disease, simply overwhelming, not merely by scale, but by scale of diversity, all of these supposed bulwarks against it. with a resulting implosion of human population levels, back down to something that can once again achieve and maintain some sort of more reasonable balance.

the why care, if the process is inevitably going to correct itself anyway, is that famine and disease are rather a painful and not terribly entertaining way to go.

and we do have other options. many people just haven't understood the desirability and benefit of choosing them. actually many people have. but we're still being dragged along down the garden path of doom, by those who continue refusing to, out of their mindless hatred, of anything and everything not familiar to them.

we don't lack for technological options, but rather cling to the familiarity of greed. largely on the baseless assumption that, oh well, it might not be that bad.
well of course, when its far too late, people will look back and realize how very stupid we are currently being about this.

even this notion of "contributing to society" is somewhat problematical, when we blindly refuse to consider WHAT we are contributing.
contributing to the perpetuation of the familiar may very well, is even likely to be, contributing to its demise.

 

All people want power. The majority of those in power today have no significant values beyond that. You alluded to money without value, which is fine with them so long as they can count it. The same goes for people who they can say are "under" them. It's all quantities without any thought for quality when it comes to the power most modern people seek. Mass disease and famine, ww3, etc. are real possibilities, but if those in power can unite among the ideal of quanities, then despite not having any actual concern for the welfare of others, they will want to avoid such issues.

Another way of thinking about it is that if their were mass disease, famine and/or war it wold be difficult for almost anyone to be safe from incidental effects. Even if those in power get over the idea of people under them being a quanitative value that they desire and start to think about making more room for their own family's future descendents on the planet, a far less risky way of reducing the population would be to simply provide the means for people to plug themsleves into machines, with the same IVs plugged into them that those in comas have. They will while their lives away inoccuously in fantasy worlds, never having children, and so the work of drastically decreasing the human population will be done soon enough for them, with very little struggle.

 

no it doesn't. but we do act arrogantly toward nature, as if our big brains gave us some sort of magical immunity to how the real universe actually works. and we create and reinforce this fantasy of seperation among ourselves, and are able to do so because we've surrounded ourselves by our artifacts to create this illusion that allows us to do so. forgetting that it is because of our imaginations and our creative drive to express them, that have resulted in having these artifacts and being able to use them to do this.

 

Our imagination and creative drive also resides in our "big brains", at least for the materialist.

It's not like humans have the biggest brains of any species either, so unless that was not meant to be taken literally, I'm not really sure what you mean.

Can you clarify what is meant when you say we act arrogantly towards nature and the magical immunity to how the 'real universe' actually works bit?

 

reality and perception are like a cat and a picture of a cat.
again i refer to that famous picture of "this is not a pipe"
no amount of any kind of 'authority', can make either conform to the other either.
of COURSE nothing is as we think it is. everything is as ITSELF 'thinks' it is (if you want to call what a rock or a tree does "thinking")

this is not some amazing new discovery, except maybe to most people individually, somewhere around the time they encounter puberty.

 

Our perceptions are all we have to base our experience of reality on. You cannot disentagle the two except for the fact that if we want to assume there is an objective reality, then perception can be a faulty appraisal of reality.

 

I don't follow the analogy, how is a picture of a cat any less real than a cat?

 

i can certainly "disentangle" that there is something, near infinitely many somethings, that begin, where our skin stops.

 

well its certainly really a picture
and just as certainly not a cat

i mean try feeding the picture, or not feeding the cat.

 

How do you disentagle that from perception?

 

^ alot of wiggling! lol

don't get tangled up in many of its arms....look at its eyes.....whatever it is.

 

why would i need to? our perception is not some kind of god that creates the universe.

have you tried feeding a picture of a cat yet?

 

LOL NO... I don't attempt to feed many cats I come across either. It seems you are stuck on the notion that the representation of an entity is not the entity itself. I agree with that for the most part, however our minds reconstruct representations of reality. (Blind spot test is an accessible example of this) So if that's the case, how can we ever say anything in regards to the nature of reality? Particularly anything that is disentagled from perception.