A. "that mankind lives in a higher unseen realm"
Got a sample of that higher unseen realm?

B. "seen as nothing but a chance assemblage of molecules.", this is a misunderstanding of evolution, chance has nothing to do with it, we are not products of chance, but of a long process of adaptation and survival.

@Davesnothere Yes indeed. The reality that we perceive is nothing but a symbolic representation of ultimate reality beyond the senses. That has been part of the body of science since the days of Faraday and Maxwell and needs no further demonstration. Pick up about any physics book and you’ll see. I recommend Reality is not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli.

Evolution is said to be driven by random mutations followed by natural selection. Yes, our particular assemblage came about because of random events. I agree about the adaptation and survival.

@WilliamFleming "The reality that we perceive is nothing but a symbolic representation of ultimate reality beyond the senses"
granted we have limited senses, but what makes you think reality has or needs some "ultimate" expression, when we will never percieve it anyway as we are not equipped to?

Reality not being what it seems does not indicate what it is, or imply "ultimate", only unknown. The reality that we cannot see or grasp even 1% of the universe is not a reason to make assumptions like "an ultimate reality"

What do you mean by that, totality?

This is a false comparrison. "Yes, our particular assemblage came about because of random events." while individual mutations were random, the process is decidely not, it is superior survival traits reproduce, inferior ones do not"
That is a process, a long tedious biological prcess, but not random like rolling dice.

@Davesnothere “Ultimate reality” is just a label indicating that which is beyond our illusory world of sensations which we model by the artificial parameters of space and time. Maybe “ultimate” is not the best word because it is ultimate only from our perspective.

IMO the most reasonable response to ultimate reality is awe, appreciation and reverence. Arguing over semantics indicates a lack of awareness.

Yes, you are right. It was a long biological process, also extremely complex and not well understood.

Why not, octopuses have a right to call themselves what they want. Not all humanist are the same, some will respect a person until that person do something wrong and they loose respect respect. I'm the new humanist, who sees religion as evil and child abuse.

@WilliamFleming Have you blended Maya into your world view?

"Maya, (Sanskrit: “magic” or “illusion&rdquo a fundamental concept in Hindu philosophy, notably in the Advaita (Nondualist) school of Vedanta. Maya originally denoted the magic power with which a god can make human beings believe in what turns out to be an illusion."

"beyond our illusory world of sensations" While all brain processes, do you discount the sensation of fire? Of hunger?

While we cannot percieve much of the cosmos, how does that imply in any way that we are experincing an illusion?

@Davesnothere How could it be anything but an illusion? Some light enters your eye. Some neurons fire. We form a mental image. What about that image has anything to do with reality. There is something that is detected, but our mental image is only symbolic of that ultimate reality beyond. As an analogy, compare with an icon on your computer screen—say it’s an icon for a computer file. The icon looks nothing like a computer file. A computer file is of a different order of existence.

Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist, has some penetrating ideas about the subject.

Those ancient Hindus who created Advaita Vedanta Philosophy were very astute, and their ideas have reverberated down through history in philosophy, religion and science.

@WilliamFleming First, thanks for the interesting discourse. I think I would lose a number just at the mention of Maya.

" What about that image has anything to do with reality. "
Everything. First of all light, which is measurable. Are you implying light is an illusion?

Do you assume your perceptions of so loose a weave that you need not avoid thrown rocks, or bullets? They are just illusions right?

Because our brains represent what data our senses percieve is not the same things as assukming reality itself is a fiction. If our senses were utterly unreliable we would not have evolved thus far.

The fact that the idea of Maya exists and has remained does not indicate the world is a fiction created by a God, nor does science tell us the world is an illusion because we did not evolve to see all of it, or interpret what we see.

@Davesnothere

“Because our brains represent what data our senses percieve is not the same things as assukming reality itself is a fiction. If our senses were utterly unreliable we would not have evolved thus far.”

I’m not saying that reality is a fiction, just that our perception of reality is only a symbolic representation. Hoffman discusses the role of evolution thoroughly and he has persuasive arguments. We did not evolve to perceive reality as it truly exists. We evolved to survive. There is no need that our perceptions be true—they only need help us survive, and in fact if reality were not translated and compressed into useable icons we would be overwhelmed and unable to respond to threats or to find food.

There’s no need to introduce God into the equation. The word is throughly ruined through misuse anyway and is damned near meaningless.

““Many, many separate arguments, all very strong individually, suggest that the very notion of spacetime is not a fundamental one. Spacetime is doomed. There is no such thing as spacetime fundamentally in the actual underlying description of the laws of physics. That’s very startling, because what physics is supposed to be about is describing things as they happen in space and time. So, if there’s no spacetime, it’s not clear what physics is about.”—NIMA ARKANI-HAMED, CORNELL MESSENGER LECTURE 2016”

— The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald Hoffman
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@Davesnothere

“As Wheeler put it, “No space. No time. Heaven did not hand down the word ‘time’. Man invented it. . . . If there are problems with the concept of time, they are of our own creation . . . as Einstein put it ‘Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.’ ”30”

— The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald Hoffman
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@Davesnothere

“Nathan Seiberg of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton said, “I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.” 3”

— The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald Hoffman
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@WilliamFleming This is where we miss each other I suspect . . ."just that our perception of reality is only a symbolic representation"
A symbolic representantion of reality as interpreted by our brains does not eqial an ILLUSION.
noun

1. a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses:
   Our senses do not percieve the quantum at ALL, to assert that since we do not see in the quantum, and in that space time seems an illusion, does not mean that we, in the Macro, do not experience space time.

In that way of thought the Macro is overlooked in favor of the Micro, imagine if we considered the microscopic world as real and our macro reality was thence an illusion because we cannot see ameoba. That we lack senses enough to see the Quantum does not imply the marco is an illusion, but poorly percieved from our macro reality.

It looks very much to me like the scientist is conflating quantum with Macro, and we have very little clues as to how they blend, like deepak's idea that the observation effect in quantum makes the moon a response t our observation of it (IE we create the moon by believing in it).

Nima Arkani-Hamed--studies PARTICLE physics==ie quantum, the world of the inpercieveable.
Nathan Seiberg--String theorist==ie quantum, the world of the inpercieveable.
And an American cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman.
Hoffman's "multimodal user interface" (MUI) theory of perception states that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world."

I have no issue with this notion, that we evolved to percieve as we percieve and that such evolution does not allow us to see ultraviolent and so on. While we may not percieve in totality, it does not mean the representation created by our brains is an Illusion, even if our perception is inadequate (which of course it is). It means that what we percieve is not the totality and we work from models our brains construct, as do all living things.

IF the macro world was an illusion we would starve as our food would be an illusion. Our representation is not complete, and often is flawed. I think illusion is a poor choice of term to talk about this effect.

@Davesnothere This illusion is not about the macro versus the micro, or our inability to see reality in total or that our representation is incomplete and flawed. The contention is that our perception is absolutely nothing like the underlying reality—it is a totally different order of existence.

We make up space and time in our minds. The concept of location, shape, motion, distance—all are illusional mental props. There are no objective “things” out there—no matter. There is no such thing as causation. Without time causation, motion, creation—all are meaningless.

There is something there but our perception of it is merely symbolic. As an analogy think of someone using an analog voltmeter. The needle moves, the voltage is detected and measured. Can you then say that you are looking at a particular volt?, That volts are little black needle shaped things that swing around?

@WilliamFleming "The contention is that our perception is absolutely nothing like the underlying reality—it is a totally different order of existence."
As is the microspocic, and the molecular, and the atomic, and the subatomic, and the cosmic, and what ever else we have not seen yet in our blindess.

Reminds me of the old Indian elephant parable. You know where three blind men are led to an elephant, one feels the side, one the foot, and one the tail, and each determines it is something other than an elephant?

"We make up space and time in our minds. The concept of location, shape, motion, distance—all are illusional mental props. There are no objective “things” out there—no matter." Nonetheless the symbolic representation of "it" is accurate enough to allow us to duck an incoming object, and not just us, with our limited perceptions, but all life based on those perceptions.

And failing to duck kind of discredits the illusion of matter, something did break your face if you failed to duck.

All our experience is but a product of the brain, that does not make all our experiences an illusion even if they are so. If it were an illusion we would drink sand while thinking it water, and die.

@Davesnothere Your face is an illusion.

I’m going to have to go with the thinking of scientists on this issue.

@WilliamFleming A face is a representation created by my brain. I do not interpret that as an illusion. Most uses of illusion strongly imply an illusionist.

@Davesnothere Sounds like you see through the illusion. In our moments of contemplation we might realize that our sensory experiences are only representations. Normally there’s not time for contemplation. In order to survive we go with the system.

Would you classify videos as illusions? They are representations of something else.

@WilliamFleming I would call them an artist's representation of the filmakers desire to communicate, with mixed results.

That Blake quote is a winner!

'We do not need make believe entities to define who we are'.

True. I think we need make believe to become better than we are. In other words, imagination. Imagination can create mental possibilities while faith can help us keep going while not everybody is on the same page. I think what I'm saying is somewhat parallel to the traditional religious ideas but more secular, more spiritual than religious.

They do though.

We are all the result of our culture, our neighbourhood, our family. You just see people playing different roles, some supportive, some not so

But they are not the real people. They are the few faces that you see of an individual. The actors in your life are all make-believe, yourself included, with different masks for different situations.

@brentan In that case I choose spiderman, I don't need a gawd to make me a better person.

@noworry28 Why choose another person, fictional or not? Why not just choose you to be the best you can be?

@brentan That was my sarcastic response. I don't need to choose someone else.

@Matias There is no need to justify something that only exists because we say it does.

Did we read the same post? Matias is saying the exact opposite of what you say he said.

Instead of delegating humans to the rank of lowly animals, I see all of life and reality as an inexplicable miracle of the utmost value, staggering in its implications, worthy of awe and reverence of the highest degree.

Early modern is usually deemed fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the beginnings of The Renaissance.

The Revolutionary Period (mid - late C18th) marks the Late Modern Period encompassing what is sometimes called The Long 19th Century.