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Thursday, December 29, 2016

Yes, Susan, there is a reality

Depends on what is "reality."  I kick a stone and hurt my toe (this has been done before) and say that proves the stone is real.  But it proves nothing of the sort.  The stone as I perceive it (something solid and capable of hurting me if I kick it) is an illusion.  The reality is the stone is an aggregation of atoms held together by electronic forces and it is these electronic forces that give the illusion created in our brain of solidity.

Still, electronic forces and atoms are real too, until you look more closely and see that they too are not what we at first thought.

The thing is illusions need some sort of underlying reality (even if it also turns out in the end to be an illusion) to generate the appearance -- layer after layer after layer of illusion, each in its turn generating illusions.  You can't have the illusion of rain in the desert without real atmospheric things going on to generate the appearance.

The one reality I feel quite sure about is that the reality we experience of substance and color and heat and all those things is all generated by our brains to give us an interface for dealing with the incoming sensory experiences, themselves all generated by their own set of illusions.

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