what of the modern assaults on soft reality

I mean that’s what psychology is (not speaking of the formalism here).

you inhabit a soft reality, maintaining mental states, referenced so, and the operations of thought are filled with discretion/s, a space that way, territory, soft territory you could usefully describe it.

does it bother you that your internal reality is soft? And your relationships with the world external also are soft.

what does ideology offer you as compensations, just as religious ideology does

transition said:

what of the modern assaults on soft reality

I mean that’s what psychology is (not speaking of the formalism here).

you inhabit a soft reality, maintaining mental states, referenced so, and the operations of thought are filled with discretion/s, a space that way, territory, soft territory you could usefully describe it.

does it bother you that your internal reality is soft? And your relationships with the world external also are soft.

what does ideology offer you as compensations, just as religious ideology does

Playing devil’s advocate here.

> you inhabit a soft reality, maintaining mental states

Don’t you need to assume a hard reality, in the form of assumption of mental states, before you can postulate a soft reality ;-)

Just kidding.

My personal internal reality is built from coincidence. If my finger taps a “p” key on the keyboard, and i feel the pressure in that finger, the sight of it covering that key, the body-positioning feedback, and the sight of that “p” on the computer screen, that’s a four way coincidence. That’s enough in my book to transfer “soft reality” to “hard reality”.

On the other hand, looking at a picture on the web and recognising what it is a picture of is only a two way coincidence, poor enough to retain the reality as soft without external corroboration.

Soft reality is essential for the operation of science.

There’s a humorous quote that come to mind here. Take a “solipsist” as one who believes that nothing exists outside our own perceptions, they deny the existence of a hard reality. Or as wikipedia puts it. “A theory of philosophy that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.” The joke is this, one solipsist was heard to complain that there are not enough solipsists around.

The practical side of this is that even though one may philosophise the existence of a solipsist viewpoint, the mind rebels at that, and insists that some form of hard reality exists.

> what does ideology offer you as compensations, just as religious ideology does

One may worship Douglas Adams ;-)

The ruler of the universe is very much a soft reality person.

• “My name. It seems very odd to give a bundle of vague sensory perceptions a name.”
• “How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?”
• “You’re very sure of your facts, I couldn’t trust the thinking of a man who takes the Universe – if there is one – for granted.”

>soft reality

I remember Cusp (TheDreamOf, our resident SSSF cosmologist) once accused me of demanding that the universe conform to my attempts to understand it.

But that wasn’t true. I was just trying to make sense of things without recourse to advanced mathematics.

I do wonder how much he, and other cosmologists, are driven by an underlying feeling that the universe is an inherently mysterious place. Or driven by the rejection of such feelings.

Me, I don’t think the universe is mysterious. It is what it is, it needs no mythology. My understanding of the nature of this world is limited, but sufficient to make me suspect that a full understanding would not be life changing.

>but sufficient to make me suspect that a full understanding would not be life changing.

Well obviously an entirely full understanding would be life changing, because I’d know how to avoid death etc :)

But I meant a full broad-brush understanding, minus the important life-changing details.

Bubblecar said:

>but sufficient to make me suspect that a full understanding would not be life changing.

Well obviously an entirely full understanding would be life changing, because I’d know how to avoid death etc :)

But I meant a full broad-brush understanding, minus the important life-changing details.

Knowledge and intellect have a strong overlap, where one automatically follows the other. Therefore knowledge (understanding) would lead to the development/discovery/invention of many things of what we are ignorant today.

>insists that some form of hard reality exists.

no question hard realities exist, probably most of everything is more so, but I(and you) only inhabit a small space, are fleshy, can project things of the future, conjure likelihoods(and unknowns), so what you and I inhabit is a soft territory of choices, or discretion/s if you will.

that discretional territory is an example of possibility space.

your relationships with (self) and things external are necessarily, and mostly soft.

much of the joy of life, if you can get it, is from soft reality. Take humor and appreciation of aesthetics, for example, both involve soft reality.

you could say love deals with soft reality, with variously compensations involved.

politics and law deal with soft realities, offering constructions to tighten them up.

so, my question is, are there people that find soft reality threatening?