Reality is not physical/material

[Awareness]

Rather than being defended on the basis of reason, the idea of a physical or material reality is an unexamined dogma that pervades modern culture. Not only do I think it strips us of meaning through the removal of transcedence, reducing humans to meat machines - it is the worst metaphysical position on the table.

A physical or material reality means that everything in reality, including all aspects of ourselves, can be fully accounted for or deduced in terms of the entities descibed in physics - atoms, particles, fields, etc.

Is this actually the case though?

In a physical reality, everything is ultimately quantitative; that is, everything there is to say about something is captured by a list of quantities: mass, spin, charge, ... Consciousness, the only thing you've ever known, is not quantitative. Consciousness is the world of qualities: the smell of a flower, the taste of an apple, the burn of a hot stove.

By defining reality to be physical, you introduced a category of thing called matter that has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. In fact, matter is incommensurable with consciousness because one is quantitative and the other is qualitative.

Thus, any assumption of a physical reality will be unable to explain the existence of consciousness, so it can't be true. Today, the challenge of explaining consciousness in terms of physicality is called the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" (0 progress has been made) but it is not a problem to be solved - physicality can not explain, not in principle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

 

[Internet Nomad]

I also believe reality is much more than the physical.

A simple example is the fact that we cannot see all types of light so we cannot see the full picture with our naked eyes.

Muslims believe in the Unseen World where entities like Jinn and Angels have been kept hidden from us. For our benefit. However it a 1 way mirror meaning they can see us but vice versa is not true.

The Jinn is made from Smokeless Fire which sounds like the description of Energy. As fire would need Combustion which leads to smoke.

Some say you can see a glimpse of the unseen world when you take certain psychedelic drugs like DMT or Ayahuasca which alter your brain chemistry enough to force a glimpse into the unseen.

 

[The alchemist]

Quoting myself:

I would say we know consciousness through our being, we live it and are fine-tuned in certain aspects (some more than others within a fixed parameter), to explain it probably requires measures outside the scope of what we traditionally consider 'knowledge' and the various instrumental framework to infer with. I can guess what consciousness is, yet, it's not provable by science, in fact, it could be far outside our dimensional capacity, not even through the bandwidth of abstract conceptual reach.

Materialist worldview is a reductive, albeit part of what is reality. One needs to understand that filtering out everything but the material for a naturalistic explanation of the world describes a wrong picture, despite capturing weak signals that correspond with whatever we observe.

Humans have reduced life to machine processes and workings of the mind to mere computation. They have limited knowledge seeking to distill-based inferences to give higher "certainty" for patterns and regularities in this world, a process that took complete conceptual capture, as you cannot get comprehensiveness through what seeks to filter the majority, and then call that an honest approach to reality. What we call science is the limitation. There is an inherent quality in not figuring out if there is more than the strict material. Science itself doesn't say it is the only or the best tool -- such claims are not scientific but philosophical.

 

[AMusee]

 

[Yibir_]

There are countless competing systemised methods (religion?) of approaching consciousness, it is the adamant belief of the adherents of these systems that said consciousness has been entirely mapped and it is this belief which has seeped into the public discourse. This begets self-worship, mainly the intellect, and a functional-nihilism: Why live for anything other than your unfettered desires?

Our pleasure to rule (us), or why live et al?

 

[Yibir_]

*there’s nothing wrong with desire and you can’t free yourself from it but, you can succumb to and become a slave of it. Replace your desire with akhira/God and realign your behaviours, attitudes and beliefs accordingly.

 

[Internet Nomad]

Firas Zahabi is underrated i wish he did more content where he expands on his world view.

 

[xiin-finiin]

Rather than being defended on the basis of reason, the idea of a physical or material reality is an unexamined dogma that pervades modern culture. Not only do I think it strips us of meaning through the removal of transcedence, reducing humans to meat machines - it is the worst metaphysical position on the table.

A physical or material reality means that everything in reality, including all aspects of ourselves, can be fully accounted for or deduced in terms of the entities descibed in physics - atoms, particles, fields, etc.

Is this actually the case though?

In a physical reality, everything is ultimately quantitative; that is, everything there is to say about something is captured by a list of quantities: mass, spin, charge, ... Consciousness, the only thing you've ever known, is not quantitative. Consciousness is the world of qualities: the smell of a flower, the taste of an apple, the burn of a hot stove.

By defining reality to be physical, you introduced a category of thing called matter that has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. In fact, matter is incommensurable with consciousness because one is quantitative and the other is qualitative.

Thus, any assumption of a physical reality will be unable to explain the existence of consciousness, so it can't be true. Today, the challenge of explaining consciousness in terms of physicality is called the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" (0 progress has been made) but it is not a problem to be solved - physicality can not explain, not in principle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

i feel like the reason is because humans feel very uncomfortable with the idea of transcendent beings being at work (things having non-material causes for example). So, they double down on eliminating that discomfort by reducing everything to be material. I can understand them a little tbh

 

[Yibir_]

i feel like the reason is because humans feel very uncomfortable with the idea of transcendent beings being at work (things having non-material causes for example). So, they double down on eliminating that discomfort by reducing everything to be material. I can understand them a little tbh

This. Mastery of self and the immediate surroundings is the goal of any capable of rational thought, these materialistic philosophies are just the logical progression of said inkling built upon the work of the stoic philosophers of antiquity - “God is dead, we [must kill] him!”. The discomfort lays in the fact that despite scientism, with its adage of causation, man has failed in having any meaningful control of nature and more broadly the “fates” and is instead subject to and at the mercy of their whims. The paradox of man and his quest for apotheosis is one to lament as he condemns himself to a purgatorial state of stagnation and atrophy if he ever reaches that blasphemous goal, Tolstoys writings on this are revelatory: God is for me that after which I strive—that, in striving after which consists my life, and who therefore for me is; but is necessarily such that I cannot comprehend or name Him. If I understood Him, I should have reached Him, and there would be nothing to strive after; there would be no life.
I add, Man inflicts punishment upon himself in imitation of that which he is not, nor will ever be; history is littered with these sacrilegious fools and time does them no justice. A fly in the air, a fly in the ear; a bash on the skull, a casket full.