What is the nature of the world around us, the external reality?
beeboroachgoingon197 аѕkеԁ:
Wһаt іѕ tһе nature οf tһе world around υѕ, tһе external reality?
External Reality – Things уου touch, see, etc.
Tһе NATURE οf those things wе саח see, touch, taste, smell аחԁ hear
1. January 2009 at 7:50 pm :
if you mean physical thing, then everyone would say yes.
3. January 2009 at 9:38 pm :
omg…i think i just burst a capillary readin ur question
5. January 2009 at 5:34 pm :
If you name it as external reality,it should or could have to be the same where ever you stand.it is not ,as even the same spot where things around you would make you feel differently,according to the situation and mood you are.
Example : i was jogging along the shore,yesterday morning.the smell of sea,the cool rushing wind,and the waves splashing the shore,the splattering sound of it,the early morning sun -made me feel i am almost talking to one all myself,and that felt they too reciprocate . today ,though cautioned ,i went to the shore, i was even unable to start jogging,as i knew there had been a terrible earthquake at Indonesia,and tsunami might attack the coastal area where i am also living.the scene of yesterday has changed for me .now the same nature seem to me as the most fearful supreme power.
external reality – no , no NO.
8. January 2009 at 10:49 pm :
That which is, is. It is in it’s nature to be what it is.
We sense it – and therein lies the rub. One reality, six billion interpretations of it.
12. January 2009 at 8:09 am :
I think the nature of the world can best be understood as patterns of relationships. This is inspired by the Buddhist notion of the interconnectedness of all things (aka the “emptiness” of all things). This point of view does not deny the reality of things that are typically perceived as being “in the objectively real world”, but it denies that these things have any ontologically isolated essence. The basic idea is that there are no substantial or truly independent “essences” of things because the essence of any given thing consists in its interconnections with every other thing. A thing is-what-it-is only in relation to other things. The problem is that when we talk about relations, we immediately want to assign some ontologically independent substances that are in relationship. The idea that there could be relationships without any substantial “things-in-themselves” that are related seems impossible to the every-day rational mind (if it were easy, we’d all be enlightened, and we would not be having this discussion).
The key thing to notice is that there really IS reality. The web of interrelationships is real, and it is patterned (as oppose to purely random). This patterned reality is the reality that we experience as being the “external” or “objective” world. You cannot change a blade of grass into a monkey just by thinking about it because the relationships between blades of grass, monkeys, and the qualitative characteristics of our perceptions and thought processes are all real – and the patterns of these interconnections can be roughly compared to the “laws of nature”. A blade of grass is-what-it-is partly because of the patterns of relationships that really exist between it and monkeys, thus limiting (in spatio-temporally local terms) the nature of our experiences with regard to grass and monkeys. (Given enough spacetime/energy and the right sorts of pattern interconnections, perhaps a blade of grass can become a monkey). The reality of these patterned relations constitutes the hard-edged, solid-feeling reality of the stone that Samuel Johnson supposedly kicked in his famous refutation of idealism.
Bottom line: The “objectively real” world cannot exists without us, not because minds “create the world” (idealism) but because the qualia of our experiences and the things in the world that we typically call “objectively real” are ontologically interdependent. The ontological essence of each thing consists in its relations to all other things, thus nothing exists unless everything it is related to exists as well.