The Trouble with Reality | Meghan O’Gieblyn
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The Trouble with Reality | Meghan O’Gieblyn
… the foundations of every philosophical question: what is the important reality - the shape of the cosmos or the tangible facts of life on earth? And what is the relationship between them? In a world that is full both of stars and of unsuspected pitfalls, which is the reality to which we should attend? What is it to understand Being? To think only
... See moreAdam Nicolson • How to Be
Debbie Foster added
The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rational
... See moreBrian Klaas • Fluke
Debbie Foster added
In Chalmers’s vision, we would, as Arendt feared, be trapped in a situation wherein we would encounter nothing but ourselves and those things some of us have made. And it would be altogether likely that we would do so while swaths of our common world increasingly became inhospitable to human life. If so, the burden will fall, as it always does, on ... See more
theconvivialsociety.substack.com • The Dream of Virtual Reality
Alex Wittenberg added
We keep trying to reclaim the Archimedean point, hoping that science will allow us to transcend the prison of our perception and see the world objectively. But the world that science reveals is so alien and bizarre that whenever we try to look beyond our human vantage point, we are confronted with our own reflection. “It is really as though we were
... See moreMeghan O'Gieblyn • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
There could no longer be a purely “objective” view of the world that took into account the whole picture. Science was always particular to a specific observer and had to acknowledge our subjective outlook as humans. We could not speak of reality without speaking of ourselves.
Meghan O'Gieblyn • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Now a thing of this world, truth falls into the hands of the individual; and without a belief in an eternal realm beyond the individual, there can be no ideals.
the critic • The death of Ideals
Keely Adler added
“For the truth is,” wrote José Ortega y Gasset, “that life on the face of it is a chaos in which one finds oneself lost. The individual suspects as much but is terrified to encounter this frightening reality face to face, and so attempts to conceal it by drawing a curtain of fantasy over it, behind which he can make believe that everything is clear
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