How Bad is Global Warming Denial?

[PufPuf93]

^^^ Perhaps we are taking the long view by accepting our own demise with equanimity.
It could be in our nature to be incapable of getting too excited about the shit which seems to be about to hit the fan from many directions.

Passive in the face of doom may be part of out genome.

[Luther Blissett]

July 2016 Was The Hottest Month Ever Recorded
…
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, some politicians ― including Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) ― continue to scoff at man’s role in climate change.

This week, Australian senator-elect Malcolm Roberts, a member of the country’s One Nation party, took climate change denial to an extreme, claiming NASA is manipulating data to create an illusion of global warming. Unsurprisingly, he has been blasted on social media.

In response to Roberts’ claim, NASA spokeswoman Karen Northon told The Huffington Post that the science is “crystal clear.”

“NASA’s global temperature analysis uses three independent data sources provided by other agencies. Quality control checks are regularly performed on that data,” Northon wrote in an email. “NASA is confident in the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures.”

Penn State’s Mann said Roberts’ comments show “we’ve truly reached the bottom of the barrel of climate change denial when we have elected representatives attacking NASA, the scientific institution that put us on the moon and engineered the modern space program.”

“We’ve reached a whole new level of conspiratorial thinking,” Mann added, “a brave new world of epistemic closure where the more authoritative the confirmation of our scientific understanding, the deeper and wider the conspiracy simply must extend.”

This record only further disproves the idea that a “global warming hiatus” proves climate change is a hoax, NOAA public affairs officer Theo Stein tweeted Wednesday morning.

But confronting the industries responsible for the rise of CO2 remains tied up in U.S. politics.
…

[DrEvil]

Malcolm Roberts is a proper nutjob:

One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts wrote bizarre 'sovereign citizen' letter to Julia Gillard

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/ ... qlesa.html

[Luther Blissett]

Now I'm going to have to really brace myself:

Donald Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Ally of Fossil Fuel Industry, to Lead E.P.A.


WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, a transition official said, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change.

Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”

Mr. Pruitt, 48, who has emerged as a hero to conservative activists, is also one of a number of Republican attorneys general who have formed an alliance with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda, a 2014 investigation by The New York Times revealed.

At the heart of Mr. Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change are a collection of E.P.A. regulations aimed at forcing power plants to significantly reduce their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution. It will not be possible for Mr. Trump to unilaterally cancel the rules, which were released under the 1970 Clean Air Act. But it would be possible for a legally experienced E.P.A. chief to substantially weaken, delay or slowly dismantle them.

As Oklahoma’s top law enforcement official, Mr. Pruitt has fought environmental regulations — particularly the climate change rules. Although Mr. Obama’s rules were not completed until 2015, Mr. Pruitt was one of a handful of attorneys general, along with Greg Abbott of Texas, who began planning as early as 2014 for a coordinated legal effort to fight them. That resulted in a 28-state lawsuit against the administration’s rules. A decision on the case is pending in a federal court, but it is widely expected to advance to the Supreme Court.

As Mr. Pruitt has sought to use legal tools to fight environmental regulations on the oil and gas companies that are a major part of his state’s economy, he has also worked with those companies. For example, the 2014 investigation by The Times found that energy lobbyists drafted letters for Mr. Pruitt to send, on state stationery, to the E.P.A., the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget and even President Obama, outlining the economic hardship of the environmental rules.

Industries that Mr. Pruitt regulates have also joined him as plaintiffs in court challenges, a departure from the usual role of the state attorney general, who traditionally sues companies to force compliance with state law.

The close ties have paid off for Mr. Pruitt politically: Harold G. Hamm, the chief executive of Continental Energy, a North Dakota oil and gas firm that also works in Oklahoma, was a co-chairman of Mr. Pruitt’s 2013 re-election campaign.

[Iamwhomiam]

OK, enough of that.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Anyway I do not 'deny' Climate Change, I just ignore it's theoritical future threat as being inconsequential compared to the current and continuing threat of radioactivity, right now.

I've been a volunteer bush fire fighter for 20 years. I'm the second highest officer in my brigade, and would be brigade captain as of this year if I hadn't had another kid just before our elections for officers. I've been what Americans call a qualified "hot shot" fire fighter - the people who get dropped into remote areas to deal with serious fires in wilderness before they threaten populated or agricultural areas. I'm part of the district training team - I help train and prepare future fire fighters. If been responsible for permitting fires during fire season for most of the last 20 years (all this work is volunteer work btw. We do it cos someone has to.) If this were a paid thing I'd pretty much be able to walk into any job relating to wild fire fighting in the world. in fact if I really wanted to i could right now. So I'm not just making shit up.

Every fire and every serious storm on the planet is worse now than it would be without global warming. Every death from the weather - be it in a bush fire, a severe storm of some sort of just from heatwaves or extreme cold - has a question mark over it as to whether it would have happened without global warming. (Some may have happened anyway but some definitely wouldn't and there is no way to compare because we have only one planet where life happens.) If anyone in public life mentions this during a disaster they are shut down mercilessly by the AGW denial noise machine.

Climate Change is not a theoretical future threat. It is already happening and has been happening for years. I go to fires that are worse than they were 20 years ago because of global warming. When we write fire permits during fire season the criteria we use to determine what limits (ie what conditions are too serious to light the fire) on permits have changed over the last 20 years. "Fire season" has changed and extended across the country over the last 2 decades.

There have been more firestorms in Australia in the last 30 - 35 years than the previous 200 and probably the previous 3000 years as best we can tell. The death toll from those fire storms is around 200 people. Over 10, 000 homes have been destroyed. Without global warming those numbers would definitely be less. This is real and happening now and it has been happening for decades. We're not experiencing the start of global warming. Some adults have spent their entire life living through it. (I may be one of them and I'm nearly 50.)

[Joe Hillshoist]

Malcolm Roberts is a proper nutjob:

One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts wrote bizarre 'sovereign citizen' letter to Julia Gillard

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/ ... qlesa.html

One nation. LOL.

[KUAN]

Malcolm Roberts would be a candidate for facial features mirroring a deficient personality imo

[Luther Blissett]

Leaked Document: Trump Wants to Identify Officials Who Worked on Obama Climate Policies
Energy Department employees are "unsettled" by a transition team questionnaire.

Donald Trump aides are attempting to identify Department of Energy staffers who played a role in promoting President Barack Obama's climate policies, according to details of a leaked transition team questionnaire published by Bloomberg Thursday night.

According to Bloomberg:

The transition team has asked the agency to list employees and contractors who attended United Nations climate meetings, along with those who helped develop the Obama administration's social cost of carbon metrics, used to estimate and justify the climate benefits of new rules. The advisers are also seeking information on agency loan programs, research activities and the basis for its statistics, according to a five-page internal document circulated by the Energy Department on Wednesday. The document lays out 65 questions from the Trump transition team, sources within the agency said.

Bloomberg goes on to say the document was confirmed by two Energy Department employees, who said agency staff were "unsettled" by the request. Someone in Trump's transition team also confirmed the authenticity of the document to Bloomberg.

Leading Trump's energy transition team is Tom Pyle, who is currently the president of the American Energy Alliance. Pyle was previously a policy analyst for former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) before becoming director of federal affairs for Koch Industries.

The president-elect isn't a fan of climate action: He has promised to end America's involvement in the Paris climate agreement and cancel financial contributions to UN climate programs, and he has claimed that global warming is a scam invented by the Chinese. (He later suggested he was joking about China's role, but regardless, he has repeatedly called climate change a "hoax.") You can read an entire timeline of Trump's various—and at times contradictory—statements on climate change here.

Trump has also assembled a team of climate change deniers, including Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, who Trump nominated to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Read a full list of the global warming deniers and opponents of climate action who are vying for positions in the Trump administration here.

[Burnt Hill]

Malcolm Roberts would be a candidate for facial features mirroring a deficient personality imo

He does look like someone with Fragile X Syndrome, a genetic chromosomal disorder.

[seemslikeadream]

Internal Memo Sparks Fears of Climate 'Witch Hunt' Under President Trump
Trump transition team reportedly asking for names of career employees at Department of Energy who worked on Obama's climate policies
byLauren McCauley, staff writer

President-elect Donald Trump's Energy Department transition team has reportedly been asking for the names of civil servants that have worked on environmental policies under President Barack Obama, sparking fears of a coming "climate purge" by the incoming Trump administration.

A "document circulated by the Energy Department," first reported by Bloomberg Thursday and later by Politico, lists 65 questions posed by the transition team. Some sought specific information on "employees and contractors who attended United Nations climate meetings, along with those who helped develop the Obama administration's social cost of carbon metrics, used to estimate and justify the climate benefits of new rules," Bloomberg reported.

"Sounds like a freaking witch hunt," a former Energy staffer said in an email to Politico.

"Why is that important for informing the transition team?" a current Department of Energy (DOE) staffer told the news outlet, adding that "some [of the questions] are harassment, some are naïve, some are legitimate."

Sierra Club Global Climate Policy director John Coequyt did not mince words in his response to the reporting.

"It looks like Trump and his administration are planning a political witch hunt which has no place in American government," Coequyt said, "purging or marginalizing anyone who has worked on the issue of climate change.

"And that's at the same time they are looking for ways to eliminate the very scientific infrastructure we need to monitor changes to our planet and its climate," he added, referring to the recent news that Trump would be eliminating all climate research at NASA. "You can't purge physics from planet earth, and seas will keep rising regardless."

These fears were circulating Friday, just as word broke that Trump had nominated drilling enthusiast and climate change denier Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) to run the Interior Department, following the appointment of fossil fuel industry ally Scott Pruitt to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Reporting further on the memo, Bloomberg notes that the document "signals which of the department's agencies could face the toughest scrutiny under the new administration."

Among those targeted are the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which Bloomberg describes as "a 7-year-old unit that has been a critical instrument for the Obama administration to advance clean-energy technologies." The transition team is reportedly seeking "a complete list of ARPA-E's projects" as well as information about the "Mission Innovation" and "Clean Energy Ministerial" efforts.

Also, the Energy Information Administration, the DOE's statistics branch, is "the subject of at least 15 questions that probe its staffing, data and analytical decisions, including whether its forecasts underestimate future U.S. oil and gas production."

Other questions probe the issue of aging nuclear plans, as the Trump team ponder, "what can DOE do to help prevent premature closure of plants?" and "How can the DOE support existing reactors to continue operating?"

The incoming president has not been discreet about his energy agenda, which largely includes slashing environmental regulations, opening up more domestic oil and gas drilling, approving more pipelines and fossil fuel infrastructure, and dismantling efforts to address climate change, such as the Paris climate agreement and Obama's Clean Power Plan.
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/1 ... dent-trump

Trump Chooses 'Proud Climate Change Denier' for Interior Secretary
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) has continually voted against 'virtually anything seen as a hindrance to big oil and gas companies making more money'
byNika Knight, staff writer

Cathy McMorris Rodgers

President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), a committed climate change denier, for Secretary of the Interior, sources confirmed to CNBC on Friday.

McMorris Rodgers is the highest-ranking Republican woman in the U.S. House of Representatives, serving as chair of the House Republican Conference, and has "taken almost half a million dollars in campaign funds from the oil and gas industry in recent years," observed Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter—and McMorris Rodgers' voting record reflects Big Oil's contributions to her political career.

Environmentalists were galvanized by the decision to nominate yet another climate denying advocate for fossil fuels to head an environmental agency, and were swift to voice their disbelief, outrage, and condemnation.

"Forget draining the swamp, Trump wants to frack, mine, and drill it."
—May Boeve, 350.org"In what has sadly become a reoccurring theme of Donald Trump's transition, his expected pick for Secretary of the Interior, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, constitutes a slap in the face of science," said Hauter. "Ms. McMorris Rodgers is a proud climate denier who has voted consistently against common-sense environmental protections, rules for fossil fuel drilling on public lands, and virtually anything seen as a hinderance to big oil and gas companies making more money."

Hauter continued:

As Secretary of the Interior, McMorris Rogers would be tasked with protecting and preserving our treasured national parks and public lands for the sake of future generations and our country's long-term environmental health. Yet based on her voting record, McMorris Rogers seemingly holds a blatant disregard for our environment and the sanctity of these fragile places. She sees these lands as nothing more than a revenue source for polluting fossil fuel drillers. It shouldn't come as a surprise that she's taken almost half a million dollars in campaing funds from the oil and gas industry in recent years.

"On wildlife, McMorris Rodgers has stood in the way of species recovery," added Drew Caputo, Earthjustice's vice president of litigation for lands, oceans, and wildlife. "She has co-sponsored legislation to remove all federal protections for the endangered gray wolf. She is also one of the most vocal opponents of restoring the lower Snake River, long highlighted by biologists as the most promising tool for recovering endangered wild salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest."

Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune quipped: "The Department of the Interior exists to protect and manage the nation's natural resources and cultural heritage. Yet President-elect Trump seems to have missed the 'protect' part of that statement when nominating Rep. McMorris Rodgers to head the agency."

And May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, charged that "Trump is handing over our public lands to the fossil fuel industry. Forget draining the swamp, Trump wants to frack, mine, and drill it. The keep it in the ground movement is ready to fight this reckless expansion of the fossil fuel industry in order to protect our communities and climate."

"The struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline has watered the seeds of a thousand other fights," Boeve added. "Resistance will only grow over the months to come."
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/1 ... -secretary

[PufPuf93]

Global warming denial is about to get way worse under Trump and his merry band of adjuncts.

[seemslikeadream]

Trump says ‘nobody really knows’ if climate change is real
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... 3bf561fda8

Donald Trump Says Exxon’s Rex Tillerson Would Be ‘World-Class Player’ as Secretary of State
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-defen ... 1481469868

[KUAN]

What is he really grunting? I've invited responses from around the world


What’s the problem? Isn’t it enough that things are as they are? No, because we are sometimes deceived. We need to tell the difference between hard ground and marsh that only looks hard. We need to know whether something is a bear or only a child with a bearskin rug over its head. We have evolved to tell the real from the false. Injure the brain and the victim may lose their sense of reality. When you have flu the familiar world can seem unreal. You might as well ask “What is the nature of ‘upright’?”

The real is the genuine, the reliable, what I can safely lean on. It is akin to truthful, valuable, even delightful. Its opposite is not illusion, but the fake, the counterfeit, that which can’t be trusted, has no cash value. Theatre, television, paintings, literature deal in illusion but can be real in the sense that they nurture and enlarge us, help to make sense of experience. When they fail in this, they feel unreal, they don’t ring true. They are false, they fail as art. Theatre and everyday life overlap – although the murderer in the play is not prosecuted. Psychotherapists know how people act out ‘scripts’ which they can rewrite to invent a new reality. It may not matter if the story of my life is real or invented, until a lawyer asks if I am really the person mentioned in my long-lost uncle’s will.

Electrons, energy, valency, spin are real in so far as the scientific structure they form part of explains what we experience. Phlogiston no longer makes sense, so it has lost its claim to reality, as a banknote which goes out of circulation becomes a piece of paper. Promises, agreements, treaties are real only so long as they can be trusted. Some plans and commitments are called unreal because we know they will come to nothing.

To take the big question: is God real? ‘Real’ I find more meaningful than the ‘existence’ question. We cannot prove the existence of the electron or alpha particles or even such matters as market forces, compassion or philosophy. But we see their effects, and assuming they are real makes sense of great swathes of our experience. God is at least as real as an idea like ‘compassion’.

Tom Chamberlain, Maplebeck, Notts

The problem ‘what is reality?’ arises from a consciousness of ourselves as living in a world which seems to be outside of, and yet is the cause of, our conscious life. Our reflections on this lead us to wonder if we can know of the world beyond our perceptions – the underlying cause of our consciousness of appearances. This world of the underlying cause we call ‘reality’.

Is reality mental – mind; or is it physical– matter and energy? If mind, is there a deeper consciousness underlying appearances that unites us all and is the source of our conscious thoughts? If matter, can we understand how the play of material objects and forces can give rise to conscious life?

If reality is mental, we might best connect with it by skillful introspection; by a pure, deep, and penetrating way of thought that would see past appearances and show reality directly to the mind. Alternatively we might passively receive, by a process of revelation, a mental image of reality. In revelation, the cosmic mind could speak directly to us, in apparitions or visions.

If ultimate reality is instead composed of matter and energy, the method recommended is more empirical; that is, more reliant on the senses. This method, which we call ‘science’, involves the formulation of statements of proposed facts (observable truths) about the physical, along with statements about relationships between the facts, in the form of physical laws. In science, these statements of laws and proposed facts are subject to criticism and testing by observation and experiment. The statements that at any time best convince, after testing and criticism, are given the status of ‘actual fact’, or if you wish, reality.

Revelation resists and endures, because science gives scant comfort to the desire for unification with cosmic reality. But science is relentless, and facts, ultimately, are irresistible.

Greg Studen, Novelty, Ohio

In discussing the nature of reality, we must distinguish between physical reality and immaterial (non-physical) reality. Physical reality is that which is constrained by physics or physical laws. Perhaps the best person to relegate this part of the discussion to would be a physicist, since a physicist is probably more qualified in discussing physical reality then an armchair philosopher such as myself.

Immaterial reality then pertains to what is not constrained by physical laws, eg concepts such as ‘character’ and the ‘mind’, Plato’s Forms, the realm of God and spirits. If physical reality is all that is ‘real’, then what is the relationship of immaterial concepts, such as ‘character’, the ‘Good’, and ‘morals’, to this physical reality? Are concepts such as these just the content of our brains and products of our reasoning and emotions? If so, then it is probable these concepts are just subjective and thus non-absolute, since the contents of our beliefs is contingent and always changing. Conversely, if there is a separate and distinct (non-subjective) immaterial reality, and the aforementioned concepts of character, the Good, and morals etc exist as aspects of this reality, then the existence of objective, absolute concepts is possible (maybe even necessary), since the nature of reality is not contingent, dependent on subjective opinion.

On the other hand, some questions now arise: if immaterial reality does exist as separate and distinct from physical reality, how would these two realities interact? Is there a distinct location for an immaterial concept (or a form, or spirit) in somewhere such as heaven, Plato’s perfect realm, or perhaps a more local area in the universe? And is there a distinct nature for logic and mathematics, or for the connections that exists between these realities. These are questions for the philosopher and physicist to ponder, and perhaps answer, together.

Joe Moore, Woodland Hills, CA.

I recently uncovered the nature of reality from a man on a flaming pie, who handed me a herbal cigarette. I now know that previously I was a body in a vat being poked by a malignant demon. I was only an ape then, but after millions of years I evolved so that I could have the brain power to lasso the demon with my electrode and thus escape. I was chased by a large white balloon, but made my getaway from the Island. Since then, I have set up my own very successful religion in the U.S. So, all in all, make sure you always trust your senses, never question organised religion, and don’t engage in any philosophy beyond Matrix 1-3.

Simon Maltman, Bangor

Definition 1. A reality consists of the interactions of a particular thing with what ‘becomes’ for that thing.

Definition 2. Reality (with a capital R) consists of all realities.

Definition 3. The nature of a reality, or of Reality, is a description or explanation of that reality, or of Reality.

A reality for a particular stone or person consists of that stone’s or person’s interactions with changing environments – ie with what becomes for them. The nature of reality for the stone is not available to any person, since stones do not speak or understand a language any person can understand. However, the nature of a stone’s reality can be imagined or inferred by people. Geologists do this, so do poets like Shakespeare (“sermons in stones”), and so could you if you try. People infer that a person’s reality is different in kind from a stone’s reality since, for example, people infer as a result of their interactions with what becomes that they can have more elaborate interactions with environments than stones can. One way people interact with what becomes is by way of their senses. Another way is by reasoning and feeling, or perhaps by way of intuitions or revelations. Stones don’t have these capabilities.

An hypothesis which can entertain people is that together all the realities – for stones, for people, for whatever – form a single Reality. One can then ask whether or not all these realities, the parts of Reality, have something in common. One answer is that they have in common interacting with what becomes. One can ask further, what is the nature of what becomes? An answer is that what becomes is realities, ie, what becomes consists of interactions with what becomes. That is, the parts of Reality, the realities, interact with each other. Thus Reality is the interaction of realities with each other.

A more difficult task would be to explain how one particular reality interacts with another reality, and with all the realities it interacts with. One can then contemplate how all the realities can or might or do or did or will interact with each other. This is how one can contemplate the nature of Reality.

Gordon Fisher, South Salem, NY

One thing that everyone agrees on – idealists, materialists, dualists – is that there is sense to our question. Another thing all these views share is that we all share the same reality. For example, for Berkeley the nature of my reality and your reality is the same – it is all constructed out of mind-dependent ideas.

We should be wary of the idea that the nature of reality is relative to what someone believes. Suppose I believe that the Earth is flat and you believe it is round. Therefore, the line goes, we have two different realities. This cannot be right, for we are talking about (referring to) the same thing. We just differ in our beliefs about it. But whatever the nature of reality is, it cannot be hostage to anyone’s view of it. It must be independent of any individual’s mind. We can only hope to understand questions about its nature once we admit this. Of course, this rules out solipsism, the view that reality – all of it – is a function of my private experiences. This view is deeply mistaken, for the beliefs and other mental states the solipsist takes to be the sole furniture of his world depend on there being a shared environment. As Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Strawson have all stressed, the development of language and of thought cannot occur in isolation. So, there must be someone else on the scene for the solipsist to have the beliefs he does, even if it is only Descartes’ evil demon. With two, at least, in reality, we see that the nature of reality cannot just be how the world seems to any (one) individual. While this is not a full answer to our question, it is a fact we cannot ignore. At the very least, we can now say something of what the nature of reality is not.

Casey Woodling, Gainesville, FL

Reality is the independent nature and existence of everything knowable, whether it is knowable by logical inference, empirical observation, or some other form of experience. Reality’s existence and nature are independent because reality does not depend on our mind’s apprehension of it to continue to exist or to maintain its character.

Consider Kant’s idea of the ‘thing in itself’: that aspect of existence always outside of our perceptions of it. In Kant’s view, we can never truly know reality in itself, what he called ‘the noumenal world’, because we are limited to our mind’s imposition of fixed ‘categories’ of knowledge upon our perceptions of it (this giving us what Kant called ‘phenomenal’ knowledge). So it would seem we are forever cut off from reality as it is in itself, that is, distinct from our minds’ apprehension of it.

Furthermore, Thomas Aquinas pointed out that our perceptions of the world around us cannot be knowledge, since perceptions can logically contradict each other. For example, I may say, “This chair is brown,” while another may say, “No, this chair is not brown, it’s white.” Since these perceptions contradict, perception cannot produce genuine knowledge, since truthful knowledge cannot contradict itself.

Therefore, genuine knowledge of reality would have to be direct knowledge of the object itself. And so reality itself, comprising the independent nature and existence of everything knowable, exists independently of our minds’ apprehension of it. At best, perceptions are not that which we know; rather, perceptions are that by which we know.

Craig Payne, Ottumwa, IA USA

While much of reality is a shared conceptualization, a great deal of it is personal to the individual, for reality is how we describe the world: it is how the world seems to us to be. Therefore the foundation of our reality is our language use.

We must resist the tendency to think of reality as a fixed state of affairs that language merely identifies or labels. Reality is the product of language. The impressions that flood our mind provide food for thinking, and the language we use provides us with the means to ‘cook up’ a reality. Peter Winch states it clearly: “Our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in the language that we use. The concepts we have settle for us the form of the experience we have of the world.” (The Idea of Social Science, Humanities Press, p15.)

What we know of the world we can only know through language, and as our language is subject to change, so too is our reality. The world will not change in the sense that physical objects may come into existence as a result of language use, but our comprehension of our impressions of the world (our experiences) often change as a result of language. When Harvey discovered that blood circulates he did not discover red and white corpuscles or plasma. But though corpuscles and plasma existed as part of the perceived world they were not realized. They held no place as conceptual elements of reality. Realization is an act of discovery governed by language use. In this sense, cultural differences in language use often create cultural differences in realities. New Guinea tribesmen who have only two basic colour words (light and dark) have a different apprehension of reality to us. They live in the same world we do and they are capable of receiving the same impressions, but their reality is different from Europeans as their language use obliges them to divide the world into different categories.

Launt Thompson, Armidale, NSW

How does reality appear to us? What are the circumstances that could cause one’s reality to be different from another’s?

Our perception of reality is a generation of sensations caused by our minds, and the sense that they make of the inputs to the brain, be they aural, visual, tactile, taste or smell. These sensations, particularly the visual, will give us a sense of our surroundings and their dimensions. It is very easy to distort this perception, and this can be done through mind-altering drugs or through the loss of one of the senses.

People who have never seen can have their own sense of reality, which may be vastly different to that of a sighted person. They may have an internal non-visual ‘visualisation’ of bodily form for example, which if drawn or created could be completely different from what is normally visually perceived.

Questions have been raised whether one person’s sense of reality may be basically different to the next person’s. However, as we are made of essentially the same genetic material and receive essentially the same sensory inputs, this seems unlikely.

How different would an insect or animal’s perception of reality be to ours? A fly for example will have a distorted (to us) representation of its visual stimuli, caused by the need for the fly to be aware of different aspects of its surroundings.

In a dream state, situations often occur which seem absurd when awake. Therefore, we seem to have a dual existence; one conscious and the other subconscious. The subconscious state can seem as real as the waking state to a person who is dreaming or having a nightmare. How often is it that you wake, and then go over your dream to realise that some of the things you were doing are impossible. Or are they?

Alternate realities can now be induced by wearing computerised headsets, which can place a person inside a virtual reality. As graphics become more sophisticated, will this visualisation always be distinguishable from ‘actual’ reality?

Simon Scates, Kalamunda, Western Australia

Reality is a simulation. In a very real way we live in a reality like that portrayed by the Matrix. I can prove it to you, right now.

Take the sensors you call your eyes. They transform light energy into an electrical, essentially digital, signal, which is sent to your brain. The same with all your other senses. All the sensory information you have about the world, according to our best scientific understanding, comes to you as electrical pulses. Your brain uses this information to produce a highly elaborate simulation. It produces a 3D coloured representation of something that’s almost certainly not coloured in itself, and may not even be 3D. It bears some relationship to reality, sure.

This may seem a bit worrying. All these science fiction ideas about being a brain in a vat are essentially true. We are just that. The vat your brain is in is your head. Worse, we are a consciousness, in a brain, in a vat. However a simulation is not necessarily less real than an unsimulated world, just a different type of reality. To paraphrase Kant, there is reality and reality, and we need to be sure which we are talking about.

Take a fighter pilot as an example. If she looks out the window at 700mph, all she may see is a mist of darkness-obscured blur whizzing past her window. If she looks down at her instruments however, she is provided with a much more useful reality simulation. A radar screen tells her where she is in the world and what is coming up far beyond her ‘real’ vision. A topographical display and night-vision goggles help her see the ground she is flying over. Our ‘normal’ simulation of reality aids us in the same way. Colour tells us information about the surfaces of objects we would otherwise not have (and how else could this information be displayed?). Three dimensionality helps us make our way in a world of solid objects. Psychologists can tell you how much this all relies on brain processes.

We live in a simulation, yes; but it is not a lesser reality, it is an enhanced reality. Problems only come about if we, as the pilot, start to think the radar screen or the night-vision goggles are the only true way to see the world, and confuse our representation of reality with reality itself.

Justin Holme, Surrey

The Y-Monster of Reality

Gazing upon a beer bottle I hold in my hand, I consider that I am not seeing the beer bottle as it exists, out there, in ‘reality’. Instead, I am looking at a picture of it as produced in my brain via my sensory perceptions. That is, my senses provide data about the object of my perception (a beer bottle), and using the sensory data my brain assembles a picture for me to see. At any rate, it is the picture in my brain that I see and not the bottle of beer I hold in my hand. But because the picture in my brain is not the object itself, one may come to doubt the very existence of the object out there, in reality. How can we ever know whether objects really exist externally, if all we have to look at are images of them in our heads? Is ours a world of ideas, or is our world really real? The answer is, Both. Reality is at once a world of ideas, and an objective world of empirical reality.

Although one may never perceive physical objects apart from our perceptions of them, we can safely conclude that the objects out there really are there, and so really are real, because there is general consensus about them. People agree, generally, as to what objects are. If I were to throw my beer bottle and hit a passer-by on the head with it, that person would tell the police I threw a beer bottle at him – as opposed to having been kicked in the head by a flying blue unicorn, for instance. If there were no such consensus about the perceived external world, then the fact of one’s experiences would be all one could be sure of, with little by way of meaningful discourse with others. Yet, there is consensus about the perceived external world. Like moviegoers in a theater, we all see the same movie.

Indeed, there is some consensus even concerning the world beyond our senses. Niels Bohr & Co explored an invisible world on the basis of theory. Yet the world they thus ‘observed’ and described is real, as corroborated by subsequent discoveries and common experiences (well, sort of, at least to some extent). So, how can the empirical world, about which there is general consensus, and the world that exists in our individual heads, be reconciled? Behold: the Y-Monster of Reality.

The nature of reality is that it has two perceptual realms, or two heads, like a ‘Y-monster’ – albeit with a slight qualification. Unlike a Y-monster with two heads perched separately on two torsos joined to one spine, the Y-monster of reality has two heads, but one is inside the other. On the one hand [head], we have our individual, subjective perceptions, individual to our own heads. On the other hand, however, there is also a giant, external ‘head’ which encompasses all empirical reality, including our individual heads. It is science-based culture.

This metaphorical ‘outer head’ encompasses the empirical world of our common consensus. It is by way of this consensus that we experience reality. Any individual’s perception is made within the context of a much larger shared perception. To use a crude analogy, moviegoers at a cinema each perceive the movie in their minds, but what they perceive is in the movie theater, and their perceptions are determined by the same objective data, as depicted on the silver screen. If, as quantum physicists say, our perceptions play a role in selecting reality by freezing a wave of quanta upon perception, then the world is also subject to our collective perception. Thus we form our world together, from one infinite moment to the next.

Raul Casso, Laredo, Texas

Bishop Berkeley’s Friday teas attract philosophers, whose most imminent reality is an empty purse. His rock cakes have to be seen to be believed.

“Time is a human construct,” reflected Cornbow. “One cannot say that Reality is, or was. One can only say that humans reflect on Reality as a defence against the mental trash unloaded upon us by the media. Those dire Reality shows especially.”

“I heard that the cosmos is shaped like a ring doughnut,” suggested Dr Shambollix, whose ultimate reality would be abundant with doughnuts. “Dark matter may be much like raspberry jam.” There followed a long debate about the meaning of ‘like’, and, fearing indigestion among his guests, the Bishop intervened: “St Paul told the Corinthians that he could see Reality only through a dim reflection. However, he also thought that Reality understood him.” Young Amy, inclined to charismatic utterance, said that like Paul she had ascended into the Third Heaven, and it was both spacious and comfortable. “Not like railway travel,” she added.

“There was a time,” sighed the Bishop, “when Bradshaw’s Railway Timetable sustained public belief in the reliability of religion.”

The last word, and the final cake, fell to Sam Socrates, the New Yorker, who saw Pragmatism in all phenomena, including the Bishop’s cakes: “When we arrive at the gates of Heaven, we are clad only in the wisdom we’ve garnered in this life. But we don’t mention it much on Capitol Hill.” A tear dropped on the Bishop’s cheek. It is easier to sense Reality within the human spirit than to say much about it. He pronounced the benediction before distributing the washing-up rota. “There are some,” he said, “who believe that God is bound up with the spiritual evolution thrust upon mankind. All is in the process of becoming Real, but is not yet. Washing Up, not Cosmic Reality, is the Categorical Imperative for our Friday afternoons. As for Spiral Dynamics, look at the icing pattern on the soft sponge...”

David Lazell, East Leake, Loughborough

From the perspective of modern physics, the chairs we use are not solid at all but are comprised mostly of space. In consequence we not only sit down rather more cautiously, but have become really quite relaxed with the notion that our day-to-day constructions of reality may be largely illusory, varying not only from person to person but from one era and culture to another, and most notably between species.

Plato’s Cave allegory would not get him onto any chat shows today; it may not even have been big news way back in 400BC. The trouble is he fudged the issue, because the reflections in the cave were distortions of real people, carrying their various burdens past the mouth of the cave.

By contrast, Heraclitus a couple of centuries earlier was making the more challenging suggestion that everything is flux – nothing permanently is. There are no beings at the cave mouth. What we think of as things – as stable objects – are really in constant transition: they are processes. Our selves are the same.

Well, this is more like it: far better box office stuff, like the Matrix, where we’re fed a stream of data. If we take on board the notion that the raw material on which our limited senses feed comprises a shifting, shapeless field of energy or data, like a sort of thin gruel in constant motion, then the question emerges: What conditions within this constant flux yield boundaries? Without boundaries, the thing-medium distinction that so taxed ecologist Roger Barker cannot exist, and our varied experiences imply such a distinction. Further, without any boundaries, any awareness must of necessity be ubiquitous and remain undifferentiated from other focuses of awareness. I, in consequence, become positively godlike.Well, I can live with that if you can.

Martin Lunghi, Scottish Borders

[Iamwhomiam]

Interesting read, Kuan. Thank you for taking the time to compile it. For me, the mention of South Salem, NY will always ring this bell, in North Salem, NY:


This fellow a recognized and honored author, a Libertarian I often disagree with, and he has a blog, one of many our local paper hosts. Yesterday he published another entry, titled, Is reality real and you might enjoy reading it, Kuan, et al.

http://blog.timesunion.com/frankrobinson/2016/12/10/is-reality-real/