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Thread: "Reality is an activity of the most august imagination"

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    Default "Reality is an activity of the most august imagination"

    Quote is by poet Wallace Stevens.

    I was shown this quote by a friend recently, and it seems relevant to socionics. As such, I want to know what everybody thinks of it. Specifically, I want to see what meaning(s) people interpret from it (not necessarily in a socionics light, more like to paraphrase what he's saying in your own words), and I want to know what people's reactions are to it: whether you agree or connect with it, or not.

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    Sounds rather too Existential for me...
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    Well... I mean... that's a hella complicated quote, and it helps to know some Wallace Stevens, and even still I don't quite understand it...

    But basically, I reject some of Steven's more extreme statements about reality and imagination, because I feel like they tend towards solipsism. Some of the other stuff like "Let be be finale of seem" and the poem "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" ("and what I saw/or heard, or felt, came not but from myself.") I'm okay with.

    But this one sounds like there is no reality outside of the mind (which is counterbalanced by Stevens in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: "There was a muddy center before we breathed/there was a myth before the myth began/venerable and articulate and complete//from this the poem springs: the we live in a place/that is not our own and, much more, not ourselves.") And I wholeheartedly reject the notion that there is no reality outside of the mind.

    Also, that Stevens line I quoted is complicated by his claim that it was a "myth" that existed before the myth began (that is, before people started having concepts about the world, thoughts about the First Idea). But I think the bit about living in a world that is not ourselves is about as clear-cut a refutation of solipsism as you're going to get.


    Now, if someone could give me another reading of the line, I would be more inclined to agree with it, because it is a beautiful line. But I really don't understand how to rescue that line from solipsism at all.

    I do like the notion that reality is an activity. Rather than being a static thing, it is something in the process of changing. That's lovely.

    And I have found another reading, which is this: what we experience as reality (which is, for human beings, indistinguishable from actual reality) is the result of human minds constantly re-imagining what life is. That is, as Kant says, actual experience is unavailable to us. We have to organize it using the concepts that the mind imposes onto experience. Kant focuses this on more physical qualities, such as time, separation in space, causality, etc. Stevens expands it to the psychological, experiential, etc. What we experience (reality-as-it-is-experienced, phenomena) is not, strictly speaking, actual reality (reality-as-it-is, the First Idea, noumena). Rather, reality-as-it-is-experienced is the result of (and so is indistinguishable from, from an interpretive perspective) the activity of the mind, in a constant state of interpretation of actual reality, based on the heruistics provided by tradition, or more accurately, the aggregate of all human minds (the "most august imagination").

    But when you reduce it like that, you realize that this is really the exact same thing that Wordsworth was saying 100 years before Stevens:

    "Therefore am I still/A lover of the meadows and the woods,/And mountains; and of all that we behold,/From this green earth; of all the mighty world/Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,/And what perceive." That is, our minds "half-create" what we experience. When we experience nature, sure, some is perception (Stevens perhaps denies this), but in general experience consists as much in what our minds bring to the table as what is actually there in the world itself.

    Anyway, in that quote, Stevens collapses a causal chain: actual reality (the "muddy center") gives rise to the conception of reality in various human minds (principally minds of genius, i.e., Shakespeare, Napoleon, Queen Elizabeth, the Pope, Machiavelli, Freud, Jung, Jefferson, Madison etc., but also the individual, and also people who we will never hear of who created the systems according to which we think), which in turn gives rise to reality-as-it-is-experienced by the individual, whose experience is organized and defined by the methods of coping with reality inherited from the aggregate (and traditional) imagination. But Stevens collapses the distinctions (one more reason why I think he's ILI---Ti demonstrative, deep understanding of Ti distinctions, no use for them), by reducing actual reality (noumena) to reality-as-it-is-experienced (phenomena).

    So, the most interesting question to ask about this quote is, in my opinion, how is it different from Wordsworth in idea-content. But that shall have to wait for another post, as it is totally off-topic from what you wanted to discuss, I am sure.
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    Quote Originally Posted by silverchris9 View Post
    "Therefore am I still/A lover of the meadows and the woods,/And mountains; and of all that we behold,/From this green earth; of all the mighty world/Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,/And what perceive." That is, our minds "half-create" what we experience. When we experience nature, sure, some is perception (Stevens perhaps denies this), but in general experience consists as much in what our minds bring to the table as what is actually there in the world itself.
    This is essentially what I was thinking, that Stevens is trying to say "reality is determined by the individual experiencing it." Such an idea is completely mind-boggling to me, because what I consider to be reality doesn't work along that plane at all.

    For me, reality is something that exist in its true form regardless of any person's ability to understand it accurately or not. My focus is much more on trying to strip my analysis of reality of all personalization in order to get the pure, undiluted thing itself as it exists separate from myself. I can't acknowledge that what constitutes reality is determined by the individual, because all understandings of the world around me made on an individual level are not considered to be "reality" for me. Those impressions of the world that I find/make are completely detached from reality yet still encompass reality, if that makes sense.

    For example, I was talking about a quote by Yukio Mishima with a friend (I won't say which quote exactly, since that isn't the point of this example). We both had very different interpretations of what he was trying to say, because we both had different ways of approaching and understanding it. She seemed very caught up in her own personal interpretation of the quote, how it applied to her understanding of the world personally; on the other hand, I was trying to remove all personalness from my analysis of the passage. We had a ton of miscommunication in this way, because I had no means of understanding reality as a personal interpretation, and she had no means of separating herself from her personal interpretation.

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    "Reality is an activity of the most august imagination"

    The complexities and wonders that exist in "the real world" are analogous to what one would find in the world of a person with profound mental creativity.

    In essence, reality is a fantasy, if you have the right perspective.
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    -dom? Most of the imagination I have is rather internalized/personal, and so it clashes with reality and real people's ways of looking at things, in a large way. The fact that it fuels me however is significant, and that I probably need an on and off balance of personal imagination and reality.

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    I agree with it. Our reality is hugely a byproduct of our imagination.
    “Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.”

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    Quote Originally Posted by EyeSeeCold View Post
    The complexities and wonders that exist in "the real world" are analogous to what one would find in the world of a person with profound mental creativity.
    Reminds me of the movie Inception.
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    Quote Originally Posted by EyeSeeCold View Post
    The complexities and wonders that exist in "the real world" are analogous to what one would find in the world of a person with profound mental creativity.

    In essence, reality is a fantasy, if you have the right perspective.

    Or rather, reality and imagination are one and the same. A dull or uncreative mind poorly comprehends its depth, breadth, and ineffable beauty.

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    Here's my take on the quote:

    What Stevens is saying is that what constitutes reality is dependent on the individual who observes it. In some respects I can understand this to be true, because people have their own biases or cultural upbringings, everything that makes a person an individual. But where I'm finding a road block is that the individual in fact cannot determine what is reality because that is not how reality is defined. Reality is everything about the world that exists and functions independent of how the individual thinks it works. Reality doesn't care what an individual thinks it is; reality is going to function the way it does, and for a person to base their conclusions about reality on what they think about it personally does not constitute as reality. That is an interpretation, not the thing itself.

    The idea that reality is a product of the individual is very much a mindset imo. It's the mindset that reality is a subjective entity that can't be explicitly displayed, and that reality is inherently different depending on who you're talking to.

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    “Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.”

    Quote Originally Posted by Gilly
    You've done yourself a huge favor developmentally by mustering the balls to do something really fucking scary... in about the most vulnerable situation possible.

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    i disagree with it. the only purpose of the term "reality" is that of distinguishing something from the mental. if the guy said "there is no reality" he would be wrong but at least somewhat coherent.

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    i agree that reality exists separately from perception. but i really can't KNOW that, and when i try to conceptualize the idea of reality only existing in the imagination i feel really panicky and freaked out....i just really don't like the idea at all. so i choose to believe what i prefer to believe, heh.

    is it possible to actually be aware of unfiltered reality though? i guess not. or is that what Te works on doing?

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    Quote Originally Posted by labcoat View Post
    i disagree with it. the only purpose of the term "reality" is that of distinguishing something from the mental. if the guy said "there is no reality" he would be wrong but at least somewhat coherent.
    Tell me labcoat, what is this reality of which you speak? I, for one, cannot fathom what it would mean for something to exist independent of my mental conception of that thing. After all, the notion of existence is itself a mental construct. So too is the perception of a reality that is distinguishable from human cognition.

    Also, onto the term "reality" you've imposed a narrow definition that most would not support if they carefully considered that definition's implications. Who, for instance, precludes love from their conception of reality? Not a lot of people do in my experience.
    Last edited by Timmy; 03-11-2011 at 11:48 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by laghlagh View Post
    is it possible to actually be aware of unfiltered reality though? i guess not. or is that what Te works on doing?
    Not to my knowledge, no. But it seems to me that Te valuers try their hardest to rid themselves of those filters in order to best understand existence as it, well, exists. Conversely, Ti valuers would place a higher focus on those personal filters because it's all they know. I'm conjecturing that part of Ti valuing means acknowledging that all people have different personalized biases as to how the world works and that no one interpretation is really more "correct" or "incorrect" than any other. This can frustrate Te valuers who wants to be rid of those biases as much as possible, which in turn frustrates Ti valuers because they assume Te valuers are asserting that their own biases are more correct than everyone else's.

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    I, for one, cannot fathom what it would mean for something to exist independent of my mental conception of that thing.
    when you bump your head against a wall, do you stubbornly keep walking into it arguing that nothing is ever real so this wall must just be a figment of your imagination that can be simply wished away? Or do you make the induction that the wall exists as an absolute apart from what you think of it and you have no choice but to adapt to it.

    when someone prods a person with a spear, do you refrain from objecting to the action, because whatever scenario your mind comes up with is as good as any other, and the person writhing in pain could just as well be some imitation of a real conscious person in pain? Or do you induce that some scenarios are more likely real than others, and your ability to distinguish real scenarios from fictive ones could mean the difference between the anguish endured by a really existing conscious person and the relief of their anguish?

    any philosophy that denies the existence of an independent reality is irreconcilable with practical and ethical action and for that reason void of convincing power. this undermines the very purpose of ever engaging in philosophy in the first place.

    Who, for instance, precludes love from their conception of reality?
    i don't preclude love from the conception of reality. Reality is both abstract and concrete. Love is abstract, but real, in as far as it exists.

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    It seems pretty straightforward.. It takes more mind power to appreciate the phenomenon of reality than to construct a fantasy.
    Reality doesnt have any functional bias. Reality is completely unbiased. That's kind of the definition of it. If you think Te types perceive reality moreso than Ti types that only shows your functional bias in judging what reality is.

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    Quote Originally Posted by crazedratsghost View Post
    It seems pretty straightforward.. It takes more mind power to appreciate the phenomenon of reality than to construct a fantasy.
    Reality doesnt have any functional bias. Reality is completely unbiased.
    I agree with you on all these parts. From what he wrote though, it seemed to me that Stevens's definition of reality is only what the individual interprets the world to be, that reality is created by the individual.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ashton View Post
    I interpreted it the same way. That it takes powerful imagination to see reality in clarity as it is.
    That's weird, I had always thought of imagination and reality as separate entities.

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    This thread made me remember a conversation in the chatbox. A certain member was basically arguing, "If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, then there is no tree!" although he didn't word it as cleverly. I left saying, "I'm going to go stab some babies," because that is some fucking nonsense.

    At the most basic level, I agree with others that this quote deals with reality versus perception. I think there are many potential interpretations beyond this. Beyond what others have said, the phrase "the most august imagination" made me reflect on who defines commonly accepted reality within society and the power dynamics inherent with this issue. Much like whose interpretation of this quote we accept.

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    i would agree with the quote in as far as "august" means something along the lines of self-correcting, determined to reach the right answer and lacking hubris and self-deception.

    (although it would still be awkwardly worded. i wouldn't call reality an "activity" under any circumstance)

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    Quote Originally Posted by labcoat View Post
    i disagree with it. the only purpose of the term "reality" is that of distinguishing something from the mental. if the guy said "there is no reality" he would be wrong but at least somewhat coherent.
    Quote Originally Posted by labcoat View Post
    i would agree with the quote in as far as "august" means something along the lines of self-correcting, determined to reach the right answer and lacking hubris and self-deception.

    (although it would still be awkwardly worded. i wouldn't call reality an "activity" under any circumstance)
    ARGH.

    Did you read the quote at all...? You totally applied your own random definition to the word august (how does august mean self-correcting? or lacking hubris? or "all the qualities labcoat thinks a thinker should have?"). And yes, you are correct in saying that one use of the word "reality" is that which is not mental. But god, it's literature, you have to read it sensitively and subtly. Obviously, by making a clearly hyperbolic statement, he's trying to point your attention to something, namely, that what most people think of as reality (i.e., "reality as it is experienced") is a product of the "activity of the most august imagination." You can read him as saying "reality is imagination" but that's silly and solipsistic, and contradicts his statements elsewhere (I provided an example from section 4 of the first part of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, which is essentially an extremely intelligent, nearly mythic meditation on the question of perception and reality.)

    And come on, man! There's a reason he used the word activity. Awkwardly worded? It's POETRY. It's not supposed to be straightforward. The reason he uses the word "activity" is so that we understand that the "most august imagination" (which I take to be the aggregate of all imaginations, but principally the strong ones, like Shakespeare's, Freud's, Augustine's, etc.) is constantly shifting its perspective, constantly reconsidering, constantly adapting to new stimuli. The word activity is actually the closest to the meanings that you imposed on the text, and that's the word you tried to dismiss!

    Quote Originally Posted by Galen View Post
    This is essentially what I was thinking, that Stevens is trying to say "reality is determined by the individual experiencing it." Such an idea is completely mind-boggling to me, because what I consider to be reality doesn't work along that plane at all.
    Well... I agree and disagree, both with your interpretation of Stevens and your interpretation of my interpretation of Wordsworth (lol).

    Your reading of the quote is solipsistic: reality is what I imagine it to be. My argument is that Stevens is considerably more subtle than that. Granted, my thoughts are based on reading other poems by Stevens, so I can't complain about you reading the quote the way you do. But anyway, the point is, Stevens isn't a solipsist. He's a poet.

    So, he is inhabiting the tension between the idea that reality is reality is reality, regardless of the observer (you see this in a poem like "The Snow Man" and also in the first section of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"); and the idea that reality is what the observer makes of it (seen in this quote and in "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"). And this quote resolves that tension into a paradox: reality is an activity of the imagination, because we can know no reality beyond the reality that is an activity of the imagination, that is, reality-as-it-is-experienced.

    So I think you're slightly misreading Stevens, and I think that the slight misreading of Stevens is related to a similar slight misreading in your Te/Ti distinction (which I see as having a lot to do with Ne/Ni as well).

    For me, reality is something that exist in its true form regardless of any person's ability to understand it accurately or not. My focus is much more on trying to strip my analysis of reality of all personalization in order to get the pure, undiluted thing itself as it exists separate from myself. I can't acknowledge that what constitutes reality is determined by the individual, because all understandings of the world around me made on an individual level are not considered to be "reality" for me. Those impressions of the world that I find/make are completely detached from reality yet still encompass reality, if that makes sense.
    Well, Ti-valuers are often interested in reaching the "pure, undiluted thing as it exists separate from myself" (noumena). It's just that Ti-valuers, especially betas (Ni + Ti), recognize the incredible distance between subject and object, noumena and phenomena, that makes it difficult to access that. Stevens is trying to point out that most of the time, when you think you're looking at noumena, you're looking at phenomena. And we do have some control (although not complete control---the mind only half creates the world) over what phenomena we derive from noumena.

    So, I don't think all Ti-valuers are like your friend, who tried to come to a purely personal interpretation of the thing you're talking about. Or at least, if I were in that conflict, the way I would see a person taking your position is not as trying to reach the actual truth of the thing, but rather as trying to ignore the difficulty of reaching the actual truth of the thing.

    On the other hand, some Ti-valuers do go down that road. That's what Harold Bloom means when he says "the only method is the self." Impersonal subjectivity. Coming to a truth that is true for all people, not by means of objective testing, but by means of subjective... um... intuition or some shit.

    I think one of the important lessons of socionics is that it is incredibly difficult for anyone to remove personalness from their viewing of anything---we're always going to view reality through the lens of our valued IEs. We're always looking through a lens, because we don't have minds capable of thinking the First Idea.

    Quote Originally Posted by Galen View Post
    Here's my take on the quote:

    What Stevens is saying is that what constitutes reality is dependent on the individual who observes it. In some respects I can understand this to be true, because people have their own biases or cultural upbringings, everything that makes a person an individual. But where I'm finding a road block is that the individual in fact cannot determine what is reality because that is not how reality is defined. Reality is everything about the world that exists and functions independent of how the individual thinks it works. Reality doesn't care what an individual thinks it is; reality is going to function the way it does, and for a person to base their conclusions about reality on what they think about it personally does not constitute as reality. That is an interpretation, not the thing itself.

    The idea that reality is a product of the individual is very much a mindset imo. It's the mindset that reality is a subjective entity that can't be explicitly displayed, and that reality is inherently different depending on who you're talking to.
    ...but... as I said above, it's not that there is no reality behind appearances. It's that appearances are only half-reality. Like I was saying about Kant--space and time, cause and effect, they are not "real" strictly speaking. They are mental constructs that are necessary for human beings to organize reality into experience.

    So, I don't think that Ti-valuers are necessarily solipsists (i.e., "reality is inherently different depending on who you're talking to"). In fact, I think Ti generally points away from solipsism (if any function points towards solipsism, it's Ni).

    The person who I know that expresses a view closest to that is ILI. He says basically that there is no nature, or that it's unknowable anyway, and so we should just respect preferences in areas where there's no question of utility (and it's only fine to impose your preferences when it's a REALLY IMPORTANT PREFERENCE on something obvious, like whether or not it's okay to walk up to a person you've never met before who you know nothing about and who no one as paid you to kill and just kill them for the sake of killing them).

    Anyway, I think solipsism is very much NTR. I think that noticing the difficulty of seeing reality-as-it-is (and maybe focusing more on using a personal intuition to guess at reality-as-it-is in an unprovable way) is associated with both Ti and Ni. So betas would be the most focused on that difficulty and deltas would be the least focused on it. Alphas and gammas would both be interested in that difficulty, but in opposite/incompatible ways.

    Bit no one has to read:
    To put it more poetically (and Stevensianly) Concepts are necessary for the transmutation of reality into experience, which for Stevens is the transmutation of lead (or perhaps snow) into gold. (That line is going in my senior paper fo' sho'). Also, this is of a piece with Stevens' ideas on heaven, which I discussed in another thread. Heaven is noumena, unchanging, boring, and luckily unavailable. Earth is in the rip of entropy, where things change. The lesson of Hoon as that the individual can create change in the process of transmutation.


    Quote Originally Posted by Galen View Post
    Not to my knowledge, no. But it seems to me that Te valuers try their hardest to rid themselves of those filters in order to best understand existence as it, well, exists. Conversely, Ti valuers would place a higher focus on those personal filters because it's all they know. I'm conjecturing that part of Ti valuing means acknowledging that all people have different personalized biases as to how the world works and that no one interpretation is really more "correct" or "incorrect" than any other. This can frustrate Te valuers who wants to be rid of those biases as much as possible, which in turn frustrates Ti valuers because they assume Te valuers are asserting that their own biases are more correct than everyone else's.
    Oh. No. Ti-valuers do NOT think that there is no such thing as a more correct on incorrect interpretation. They just have different grounds for correctness. As many have pointed out, Te valuers tend to look for correspondence (does this fit with the facts?). Ti valuers, on the other hand, look for coherence (do the elements of this contradict one another?). Have you ever talked to Pinocchio/Bolt/whoever? He thinks there are hard-and-fast rules as to what is correct and incorrect. It's just based on coherence rather than correspondence.

    I really think this is more a beta/delta, Ni/Ne conflict than a Ti/Te conflict, especially the thing you said at the end about the source of frustration. But I think that's dead on, that deltas think that betas aren't even trying to remove their biases, whereas betas think that deltas are just assuming their own biases are correct. It's nice to know that you really aren't trying to do that.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ashton View Post
    Sure, but ultimately a crucial part of acknowledging that reality is being forever at war against your own possible biases, both known and unknown.

    I operate on the acceptance that I can never know reality in terms of How It Really Is; if I thought otherwise, I would consider myself a deceitful liar. But however futile that goal of possessing 100% knowledge of reality is, we should fling ourselves mercilessly at ever precising approximations of it, to the best extent that objective science and subjective human experience will allow.
    Argh. You silly TeNi. If you would just stop valuing Te and start valuing Fe, you would leave the earth and float towards the ceiling, and realize that you can have much more fun if you create your own reality!

    In other words, I agree 100%.

    Depends on the valuer. Some will tend to take their own dogmas quite literally as a true representation of reality as it actually is—I think ILEs and LSIs are inlined towards this. I'm not sure that SLEs and LIIs are quite the same in that regard.

    I'm frustrated both by people who don't acknowledge inherent bias ('it IS this'), and by those who resign themselves utterly to bias ('it might be this—we can't know—but let's just believe it anyway!').
    Frustration 1 is delta. Frustration 2 is beta. Don'tcha love being gamma?

    Also, Tcaud is LII and he tends to take his dogmas as reality. Same with Kant I'd say. I would agree the SLEs (having Ni in the 5th rather than the 6th slot) tend to be more inclined to the "reality is unknowable" position. I think SLEs often extend it to: "reality is unknowable, so you need to act. The proof of the action is not in the theory that led you to it, but rather, in the reaction that results from it." SEEs even moreso probably, since they don't value Ti.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ashton View Post
    I interpreted it the same way. That it takes powerful imagination to see reality in clarity as it is. Realism is definitely a more demanding exercise of imagination than fantasy, since the former necessitates one to consider things presently beyond ones ability to even begin to conceptualize—i.e., 'even the possible can be senseless.'
    Hmm... that's a valid reading I guess. But I don't think it gets into all the interesting things about the quote, especially in the word "activity." But yeah... I mean, that's definitely one meaning (or one aspect of the meaning, if you will).
    Not a rule, just a trend.

    IEI. Probably Fe subtype. Pretty sure I'm E4, sexual instinctual type, fairly confident that I'm a 3 wing now, so: IEI-Fe E4w3 sx/so. Considering 3w4 now, but pretty sure that 4 fits the best.

    Yes 'a ma'am that's pretty music...

    I am grateful for the mystery of the soul, because without it, there could be no contemplation, except of the mysteries of divinity, which are far more dangerous to get wrong.

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    Ti centric krieger's Avatar
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    Did you read the quote at all...? You totally applied your own random definition to the word august (how does august mean self-correcting? or lacking hubris?


    It is exactly my point that one needs to interpret the word in a highly unconventional way to make sense of the statement as a whole.

    And come on, man! There's a reason he used the word activity. Awkwardly worded? It's POETRY.


    A sense of awkwardness is exactly what characterizes bad poetry in contrast to the good stuff.

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    The word "august" is misplaced. I know because I had to drudge my way through latin. End.
    Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit

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    Quote Originally Posted by labcoat View Post
    when you bump your head against a wall, do you stubbornly keep walking into it arguing that nothing is ever real so this wall must just be a figment of your imagination that can be simply wished away? Or do you make the induction that the wall exists as an absolute apart from what you think of it and you have no choice but to adapt to it.

    when someone prods a person with a spear, do you refrain from objecting to the action, because whatever scenario your mind comes up with is as good as any other, and the person writhing in pain could just as well be some imitation of a real conscious person in pain? Or do you induce that some scenarios are more likely real than others, and your ability to distinguish real scenarios from fictive ones could mean the difference between the anguish endured by a really existing conscious person and the relief of their anguish?

    any philosophy that denies the existence of an independent reality is irreconcilable with practical and ethical action and for that reason void of convincing power. this undermines the very purpose of ever engaging in philosophy in the first place.

    i don't preclude love from the conception of reality. Reality is both abstract and concrete. Love is abstract, but real, in as far as it exists.

    I think we are quibbling over semantics and emphasis more-so than we are disagreeing over anything fundamental.

    I agree that most (though not all) of us would find it difficult to ignore being stabbed by a spear. This does not, however, change the fact that the experience of pain (like all perceptions and experiences) is a subjective construct of the mind. Philosophers refer to the theory of "reality" that you seem to be describing as "consensus reality." Our minds are sufficiently similar that we often interpret "reality" the same way that others do (or at least, our minds suggest to us that we and others are interpreting events in a similar way).

    However, to Silverchris' point -- and hopefully I'm interpreting him correctly -- "consensus reality" only accounts for a sliver of what most people understand to mean reality. As you said yourself, reality writ large consists of things both concrete and abstract. While a consensus interpretation of the concrete aspects (the Se/Si aspects) of a thing or event generally will exist, consensus is much less common when it comes to assigning meaning/significance (the Ne/Ni aspects) to these same things/events. For instance, all of the participants at a public execution may readily agree that they are partaking in a man's hanging, but are likely to disagree vehemently over the significance/meaning of the hanging. Whereas the executioner may understand the hanging to signify force of justice prevailing over evil, the victim may understand his hanging to signify evil in the guise of cruel and barbaric tradition overcoming justice. Meanwhile, a spectator to the hanging may conclude that the event represents a glorious sacrifice to his bloodthirsty god. Each of these individuals would likely consider the significance they attach to the hanging (the non-consensus abstract) to be as much a feature of their reality as the hanging itself (the consensus concrete). I suspect this is especially true of Se/Ni types, since Ni (a field function) leads a person to see himself as part of his abstract perceptions (as contrasted with Ne, which leads a person to see the abstract as distinct from him/herself--or so the theory goes).

    Just as there is such a thing as consensus and non-consensus reality (aspects of perception), likewise there is such a thing as consensus and non-consensus morality (aspects of judgment). Which is to say, I absolutely believe that it is possible to be a moral individual without drawing upon shared (consensus) moral principles, much less a shared understanding of reality. At this point I think we're talking classic Fe/Ti vs Te/Fi differences, with Fe/Ti types more inclined to favor consensus forms of reality. Please don't misunderstand me, I don't mean to imply that Fe/Ti types uncritically accept popular moral/theoretical frameworks on the basis of their widespread acceptance or their seeming authoritativeness (although in my experience this can be a tendency of Fe types...and bolt). I simply mean that Fe/Ti types seek to develop an ethical framework that could be explained to others via appeal to consensus reality (logic in this instance), whereas this is less true of Te/Fi types.

    Given our differences in perspective, I suppose its no surprise you're alpha and I'm gamma.

    In any event, I hope you see my point. Sorry if that was incomprehensible.
    Last edited by Timmy; 03-13-2011 at 12:24 AM.

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    Reality is not the same thing as a consensus view. To say that it is is to imply that a consensus view can not be wrong.

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    Quote Originally Posted by labcoat View Post
    Reality is not the same thing as a consensus view. To say that it is is to imply that a consensus view can not be wrong.
    Well then I frankly don't have a clue what you think reality means.

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    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/reality

    –noun, plural -ties for 3, 5–7.
    1. the state or quality of being real.
    2. resemblance to what is real.
    3. a real thing or fact.
    4. real things, facts, or events taken as a whole; state of affairs: the reality of the business world; vacationing to escape reality.
    5. Philosophy .
    a. something that exists independently of ideas concerning it.
    b. something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive.
    6. something that is real.
    7. something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent.
    —Idiom
    8. in reality, in fact or truth; actually: brave in appearance, but in reality a coward.

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    — n , pl -ties
    1. the state of things as they are or appear to be, rather than as one might wish them to be
    2. something that is real
    3. the state of being real
    4. philosophy
    a. that which exists, independent of human awareness
    b. See also conceptualism Compare appearance the totality of facts as they are independent of human awareness of them
    5. in reality actually; in fact

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    Quote Originally Posted by labcoat View Post
    — n , pl -ties
    1. the state of things as they are or appear to be, rather than as one might wish them to be
    2. something that is real
    3. the state of being real
    4. philosophy
    a. that which exists, independent of human awareness
    b. See also conceptualism Compare appearance the totality of facts as they are independent of human awareness of them
    5. in reality actually; in fact
    I'll try not to belabor the point cause we're starting to go in circles, but to my way of thinking, belief in something that exists independent of human awareness amounts either to religiosity or bad metaphysics. While I certainly wouldn't label religion as less than real (my working definition of reality is different from yours), to label any individual's religious beliefs, his "reality," as "the one and only reality" strikes me as preposterous. In short, reality defined as "that which exists independent of human awareness" has no comprehensible meaning or significance. You might as well define it as "that which cannot be defined." It's philosophical gibberish, and it makes no sense to argue for or against it's existence.

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    Lol if there was no one true reality all theories we have would be false or non applicable which is not the case. It is true that noone can conceive accurately of the whole reality but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And surely you can't say consensus creates the one true reality, that's just silly.
    ILI (FINAL ANSWER)

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    Quote Originally Posted by Crispy View Post
    Lol if there was no one true reality all theories we have would be false or non applicable which is not the case. It is true that noone can conceive accurately of the whole reality but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And surely you can't say consensus creates the one true reality, that's just silly.
    Yes, the theory of general relativity can be experimentally demonstrated as valid, but it's postulates depend upon the human perception of time, space and matter. Relativity, like all things, has no quantifiable meaning outside of human awareness.

    I don't believe consensus creates one true reality. I stated that consensus forms the basis for one commonly used definition of reality. This is a definition of "reality" that I do not find very compelling. It sounded to me as though labcoat was defining reality in this way, and I was suggesting this was not a very useful way of defining reality. I now realize that labcoat simply has not posited a workable definition of reality. Unless he tightens his thoughts or does a better job explaining them, there's no use in debating him cause I would be arguing over nothing.
    Last edited by Timmy; 03-13-2011 at 08:19 PM.

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    Well good thing we are all human and have awareness. Otherwise we might find out that NOTHING MEANS NOTHING MEANS NOTHING!
    ILI (FINAL ANSWER)

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    Quote Originally Posted by Crispy View Post
    Well good thing we are all human and have awareness. Otherwise we might find out that NOTHING MEANS NOTHING MEANS NOTHING!
    True! but then again, it may require human awareness to comprehend the meaning of NOTHING MEANS NOTHING MEANS NOTHING. Haha, just saying.

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    belief in something that exists independent of human awareness amounts either to religiosity or bad metaphysics
    This is the philosophy of a psychopath. I don't think you even really believe what you say. To say nothing exists apart from your awareness of it is to be unable to comprehend the fate of other conscious beings, which undermines the foundation of all ethical thinking.

    Holocaust? Didn't happen. Outside of my awareness. I'll just keep supporting nazism cause I don't see anything wrong with it.
    Hiroshima? Never happened. Outside of my awareness.
    That guy I just killed? I'm not aware of the fact he is a real person (~ solipsism), so it isn't murder.
    etc.

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    Quote Originally Posted by labcoat View Post
    This is the philosophy of a psychopath. I don't think you even really believe what you say. To say nothing exists apart from your awareness of it is to be unable to comprehend the fate of other conscious beings, which undermines the foundation of all ethical thinking.

    Holocaust? Didn't happen. Outside of my awareness. I'll just keep supporting nazism cause I don't see anything wrong with it.
    Hiroshima? Never happened. Outside of my awareness.
    That guy I just killed? I'm not aware of the fact he is a real person (~ solipsism), so it isn't murder.
    etc.
    I disagree. My conscious awareness informs me of right and wrong, although my sense of right and wrong could be very different from your own. If I see an old lady getting mugged, I want to help her. I feel this way not because I claim to understand the transcendent, cosmic significance of her mugging, but because MY reality, bounded by my awareness, evokes in me a sense of moral repulsion to the robbery.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Galen View Post
    Quote is by poet Wallace Stevens.

    I was shown this quote by a friend recently, and it seems relevant to socionics. As such, I want to know what everybody thinks of it. Specifically, I want to see what meaning(s) people interpret from it (not necessarily in a socionics light, more like to paraphrase what he's saying in your own words), and I want to know what people's reactions are to it: whether you agree or connect with it, or not.

    Honestly, it makes no sense to me. I don't know what he's trying to say. There's reality, and there is individual perceptions of that reality, but that does not make reality a product of the imagination. Reality is something outside of imagination, regardless of how our imaginations shape how we view reality.

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    First thought: August = transition between Summer and Fall = transition of Beta to Gamma = peak Se.
    But, for a certainty, back then,
    We loved so many, yet hated so much,
    We hurt others and were hurt ourselves...

    Yet even then, we ran like the wind,
    Whilst our laughter echoed,
    Under cerulean skies...

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    Quote Originally Posted by Galen View Post
    This is essentially what I was thinking, that Stevens is trying to say "reality is determined by the individual experiencing it." Such an idea is completely mind-boggling to me, because what I consider to be reality doesn't work along that plane at all.
    Not incompatible. Philosophically it's useful to have an absolute reality as a concept, because then you can say that everyone has some flawed connection to it through which they perceive what is.

    We're always limited by our perceptions, though. Nobody has any way of apprehending absolute reality perfectly. Even accurate perception of it is just another way of getting at what it is.

    IMO, absolute reality is a thing. We have only our perceptions of it to define what it is, however. We can intellectually implement checks, methods, procedures, protocols, w/e to try and get as accurate and unbiased perception of it, though.

    (As an aside, if you still try to argue that I'm not an introtim after reading that, I don't know what to say This was The Thing that Andy Kaufman's pranks were built around, and the man is my idol and hero.)

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    Ti centric krieger's Avatar
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    I disagree. My conscious awareness informs me of right and wrong, although my sense of right and wrong could be very different from your own. If I see an old lady getting mugged, I want to help her. I feel this way not because I claim to understand the transcendent, cosmic significance of her mugging, but because MY reality, bounded by my awareness, evokes in me a sense of moral repulsion to the robbery.
    this leaves you without the means to judge that another person's moral views might be mistaken. For example, certain interpretations of the islamic Sharia Law prescribe that women be circumcised (effectively a form of gratuitous torture). You would end up having to call their moral views as right as your own to maintain any sense of consistency in your views.

    in the end you just end up deciding that your views are moral and theirs are not. Welcome to the realist camp...

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    Quote Originally Posted by labcoat View Post
    this leaves you without the means to judge that another person's moral views might be mistaken. For example, certain interpretations of the islamic Sharia Law prescribe that women be circumcised (effectively a form of gratuitous torture). You would end up having to call their moral views as right as your own to maintain any sense of consistency in your views.

    in the end you just end up deciding that your views are moral and theirs are not. Welcome to the realist camp...
    Others' moral views are judged wrong to the extent that they clash with my own deeply felt moral sentiments (which are a part of MY reality). To whatever degree possible I try to ensure that my moral perspective is internally consistent, but you're right, ultimately I am just deciding that I am right and that those who disagree with me are wrong.

    In my honest opinion that's what everyone does, whether or not they are willing to admit it.


    On a related note, people keep insisting that it is possible to correctly comprehend bits and pieces of reality (defined universally), if not reality in its entirety. I disagree. Without reference to reality in it's entirety, one loses the proper context with which to interpret bits and pieces of information as they bubble into our consciousness. Attempting to discover the ultimate meaning of a small slice of reality is akin to watching only 3 seconds of a movie and trying to accurately interpret what was going on in that instant. It cannot be done. Accurate comprehension of reality and correct moral principal is the domain of God and none other. This is why people turn to religion -- they come to recognize their own limitations.
    Last edited by Timmy; 03-13-2011 at 06:24 AM.

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