SUPERnatural

Yay for the next topic! Religion and the supernatural! This is my favorite topic!

Anyways...

I personally feel that religion is the construction of our minds. This is not to say that I do not believe in God. I do, but sometimes I wonder if it is just because I am insecure about how else anything was created. Professor Johnson said in Art and Philosophy the other day that we put gods in the places where science can't explain things. I find that this is true.

There are plenty of people who create their entire lives (their realities) around religion. Everything that they see they see with the lens of their religion. They see nothing that does not have to do with their religion, things like science are not real to them.

Calendars

Time as we know it and define it is, in my opinion, subjective. I believe that I have mentioned this before. I think that carrying calendars show this.

The example from class was the Chinese calendar in comparison with ours. Other than this, there have been other calendars in the past. We used to have New Year's on a different day than we do now. Calendars are a human invention. This I feel means that it has error, and can not be truly, perfectly representative of true time. I know this sounds kind of crazy, but it is what I believe.

Time itself is not human construction, but time the way we know it is human construction, and is very subjective.

My Perception of Time

I have been thinking lately about our perceptions of time, and I remembered something that happened when I was younger:

I do not remember the exact circumstances of the event, but I do think that I was around ten or eleven. I distinctly remember laying on the floor, staring at the clock on the VCR and watching time go by. Ibelieve I was waiting for a friend to come over or for my dad to get home from work- something like that. What I do distinctly remember thinking was: "Wow, minutes aren't as quick as I once thought that they were."

This reinforces my ide that time as we know it is subjective, but not because it was a situation where time felt slow because I was watching the clock and waiting, but because after that, I never felt that a minute was a quick little thing that didn't really matter.

Other Dimensions! Yay!

I totally feel that time is another dimension. I do not say 'fourth" only because I am not sure how many dimensions there are. i have no backing whatsoever to believe this, it is just one of those things i have always believed.

But, in class there was a rather relavant point made....

This dimension is nothing like the others, so how can it be a dimension?

I don't think that this means it isn't a dimension, I think it just means that it is a different type of dimension.

I do think that there is evidence of other dimensions...even if it does not point to time. Gravity, as DKJ pointed out, is not able to be explained by the three dimensions that we have. This has to do with string theory. I will look into the theory more, but I totally think that what I've heard makes sense.

Apples and Reality

One thing that someone said when discussing the difficult topic of whether or not there are real apples was "How did the concept of the apple get into the mind?" If the apple did not really exist independent of our conception, there would be no plausible explaination for how we have the concept of the apple. This is what Metaphysical Realists would say. I would have to say that I agree. This is why I cannot figure out what is so bad about Metaphysical realism according to von Glasersfeld. He feels that you cannot logically talk about anything outsoide of your expieriences. I agree with this but, saying that there is in fact a real apple sitting on my desk is not, at least to me, talking outside of my expieriences. I guess what my rambling is tryin to achieve is getting the message across that I feel that the reason we have the concepts of things is because things must exist outside of our reality.

The World Exists Independent of Us

Is there a world that exists free of our perception?? This is harder to answer than I thought that it would be. This is because no matter what I say, it has to do with something that someone percieves. I still stand by the fact that there has to be. But first, I must make it clear that I am automatically discounting the Cartesian idea that we can only be sure of our own existence. We must assume that others do exist independent of us.

Ok, now that we've got that all cleared up...

I look at the existence of a world independent of perception the same way that I look at religion. You have to take in everyone's point of view and sift through for the commonality. My favorite example in terms of religion is that there are three religions that feel that the area now known as Isreal is their holy land. This commonality means that that is the holy land. There are other examples too, and to me, it is these commonalities that are the closest things to truths.

Every person has a different perception of the world. There are, though, commonalities between everyone's perception, and those commonalities must be what exists independent of us. Right?

Last class, we discussed metaphysical realism. One of the things that I liked that was said was that skepticism is essentially the opposite of metaphysical realism. From there, we decided that there does have to be a reasonable limit to skepticism. I fully agree with this. A true skeptic would be skeptical of literally everything. This though, is not realistic. If someone were skeptical of literally everything, they might never leave their bedroom. But, this is an extreme. In most cases, I feel that at least some degree of skepticism is a good thing. One needs to be skeptical of what one percieves, because perceptions can be percieving.