A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.
– Naval Ravikant
We do not know what constitutes the world that we live in. Besides the advances of science, technology, and modern theories of cognition and intelligence, we have only scratched the surface of what makes us conscious and aware biological beings. We at the same time, cannot comprehend the world around us. We are only attempting to capture it, in order to use it for our aims.
This collection of essays and thoughts that will follow up on this blog, will more or less outline my own personal trip into life. It is more or less an attempt to make sense of my experience and achieve a better understanding of "what is out there." Please feel free to comment and contribute to the quest to map and navigate reality in a sensible and practical way.
We only perceive a small slice of a vast net of phenomena through our senses. With this minute amount of perceived information, we use deduction or approximation in order to construct a framework that has meaning and tells us what is going on. We use this constructed meaningful frame of reality to initiate actions that we believe will lead us to our desired outcomes.
Nowhere in our daily lives, are we certain of what is going on. The nature of what is out there, and the precise way we execute our responses to our environment so far is unknown and beyond comprehension to us. We possess skill-sets that interpret and perform on the external word, but we know very little of how we accomplish our responses. We have a thought in our head, open our mouth, and words come out to explain it. There was no planning of the succession of different sentences that convey our thinking. We just know that we can speak, and are aware of our ability to make a coherent story.
When it comes to the mysteries of consciousness and reality, most scientists and Philosophers are roughly falling into two camps:
Reductionist preach that conscience and what we call human individuality and self-awareness do not really exist. It is nothing more than a figment of our imagination. It is a construct that is flat and one-dimensional covering a simplistic stimulus-response animal.
Holist/transcendentalist on the other hand will tell us that we are a vast entity, part of a whole that reaches some space beyond time and place. This universal whole is vastly more than its part. We as part of the collective possess abilities that could manifest in various ways reaching new realms of understanding and intuition. One possible explanation that could shed light on our predicament when it comes to perception and the real world out there, is that our consciousness pickup frames of information and creates a construct. The construct is more of a pointer to a certain form or pattern. This pattern is innate to the human mind. Whatever we perceive with our mind through our sensory organs is as real as an icon on your desktop computer. It stands there and exhibits a certain form and behavior and helps us accomplish a given functions. The icon on the desktop screen, is not even close to the inner mechanism on the computer itself. We conceptually facilitate our understanding of reality by projecting meaning to what we observe, but what we observe itself has no relation to what is actually takes place in the physical world.
SOURCES:
BOOKS:
Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind Hardcover – June 4, 2019 by Annaka Harris
The Case against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes Hardcover by Donald Hoffman
I Am a Strange Loop Paperback – Illustrated by Douglas R Hofstadter (Author)
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness Paperback by Eric Jorgenson (Author), Jack Butcher (Illustrator), Tim Ferriss (Foreword)