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broken record, or I'm trying not to drive myself nuts with this
Have you ever tried to look at the world from a purely objective viewpoint? Have you ever tried to look at what's happening around you through the eyes of a totally separate, non-integrated observer?
It's not a simple exercise, because you have to shake off your whole personality to do it properly. If you don't, then whenever you consider a situation or a person or an event, you'll think about what that situation means to you, or what that person thinks of you, etc. It's pretty hard (if not impossible) to look at the world without being affected by your own personality and your own conditioning. Everyone sees the world through their own eyes, after all. Some kind of cognitive process must occur when the images that fall on your eyes get transmitted to your brain and get classified as events, memories, people, places, etc.
But imagine looking at the world without giving a single thought to what it is you were looking at. Just observing it from an objective viewpoint that wasn't coloured by your own ideas and perceptions. What do you think you would see?
Personally, I'm not convinced that you'd see anything. I have a feeling that everything in the world must have a personal frame of reference in order to exist for us. What I mean by that is that if we didn't see it for ourselves, name it, and assign a definition to it, then it might as well not exist. Whatever we're not aware of, might as well not exist. Nothing can come into existence unless we're aware of it first.
Actually, some people might disagree with that. Do you think a tree makes a sound when it falls in the forest and nobody is around? Or do you think that a sound only exists if there are ears there to hear it? I fall into the latter camp, myself, and I don't think that anything in the world exists without our having first called it into existence by naming it and becoming aware of it. That tree might still fall and create the illusion of making noise as it crashes to the ground, but if there are no ears present to hear that sound, there is no way to prove that it made one. Nobody heard a thing, so it made no noise. (Literally.)
Someone will probably quote some law of probabilities or something, and observe that under test conditions, falling trees make noise in 100 cases out of 100, which allows us to assume that falling trees will make noise 100% of the time, regardless of who is there to witness it. But I'm still not convinced. There's no way to prove that the tree even exists unless someone is there to see it for themselves. You can't definitively prove anything you can't actually observe.
Next week's question: who is doing the observing?
Alternate: Why am I asking these questions?
Second alternate: Are there actually any questions being asked?
Third one: who is asking the questions?
It usually ends up coming back to that one, doesn't it?
It's not a simple exercise, because you have to shake off your whole personality to do it properly. If you don't, then whenever you consider a situation or a person or an event, you'll think about what that situation means to you, or what that person thinks of you, etc. It's pretty hard (if not impossible) to look at the world without being affected by your own personality and your own conditioning. Everyone sees the world through their own eyes, after all. Some kind of cognitive process must occur when the images that fall on your eyes get transmitted to your brain and get classified as events, memories, people, places, etc.
But imagine looking at the world without giving a single thought to what it is you were looking at. Just observing it from an objective viewpoint that wasn't coloured by your own ideas and perceptions. What do you think you would see?
Personally, I'm not convinced that you'd see anything. I have a feeling that everything in the world must have a personal frame of reference in order to exist for us. What I mean by that is that if we didn't see it for ourselves, name it, and assign a definition to it, then it might as well not exist. Whatever we're not aware of, might as well not exist. Nothing can come into existence unless we're aware of it first.
Actually, some people might disagree with that. Do you think a tree makes a sound when it falls in the forest and nobody is around? Or do you think that a sound only exists if there are ears there to hear it? I fall into the latter camp, myself, and I don't think that anything in the world exists without our having first called it into existence by naming it and becoming aware of it. That tree might still fall and create the illusion of making noise as it crashes to the ground, but if there are no ears present to hear that sound, there is no way to prove that it made one. Nobody heard a thing, so it made no noise. (Literally.)
Someone will probably quote some law of probabilities or something, and observe that under test conditions, falling trees make noise in 100 cases out of 100, which allows us to assume that falling trees will make noise 100% of the time, regardless of who is there to witness it. But I'm still not convinced. There's no way to prove that the tree even exists unless someone is there to see it for themselves. You can't definitively prove anything you can't actually observe.
Next week's question: who is doing the observing?
Alternate: Why am I asking these questions?
Second alternate: Are there actually any questions being asked?
Third one: who is asking the questions?
It usually ends up coming back to that one, doesn't it?