| Author | Message | ||
     Giancarlo (Giancarlo) Username: Giancarlo Registered: 11-2008 Posted From: 85.116.228.5 |
I often discuss with my girl friend about the nature of Fantasy (as opposed to any other kind of "Reality", not as literature). Where does it come from, if not from our brain cells? That's her, and almost everybody's, contention, commingled with all unconscious motives one can devise. In short, it's as if we are inhabited by Fantasy, or is it a function from the Intelligence factor to be contained under the gaussian bell? It's my sinful thought (and a fantasy itself) we are in permanent conversation with a living multi-horizonted World we can't break from as we are the same as that World, like shapes in a painting where even the tiniest element is necessary to the work's emotional tune. Fantasy is not our brain's minion but the way we and our lived World belong to each other in ever increasing reciprocal appropriation, me living the World, the World living me, so we are One and Many at the same phenomenological time, including everything psychological, theological even. Must drink no more of that Chianti, especially at this time in the morning...sorry! But I'm resentful at my girl friend's mental blockade, unless I'm trying to dive into looking mirrors!  | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
The whole nature of quantum mechanics seems to prove that reality is intrinsically linked to consciousness and awareness. If we can alter the nature of subatomic particles merely by observing them, then we are actively engaged in creating our own reality, within the confines of our own consciousness. All that exists outside of our perception - or observation - is no less real but utterly unknowable, at that point, even though we may have observed it in the past. If conscious thought affects physical reality, but only when we are observing it, then what of the unconscious and the unobserved?... That thing glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, what of that? | ||
| Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 212.219.63.204 |
If a writer is not writing, is he actually there? | ||
| Giancarlo (Giancarlo) Username: Giancarlo Registered: 11-2008 Posted From: 85.116.228.5 |
I suppose Fantasy does not need Awareness. Even if we should be in a comatose state, Imagination as World would not switch itself out. As to the thing glimpsed out of the eye corner, it would be a case of the "uncanny". Yes, I am greatly seduced by a conception of a World made of half-perceived, or unperceived, Things which are FELT as the emotionally uncanny. Alchemists called it the "Thought of the Heart". Well, I am not going biblical about it, of course... | ||
| Giancarlo (Giancarlo) Username: Giancarlo Registered: 11-2008 Posted From: 85.116.228.5 |
I surmise the writer will be actually there because, though working through fantasy, his not writing would not be a negation of Fantasy which is not a tool by the World itself even when "uncannily" felt as Fantasy. Steaming!  | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
Even the uncanny - contact with the Other - has to make a plea to our experience in order to be communicated. I'm reminded of David Hume's assertion that even exotic angels are just women (body) and birds (wings) combined. I paraphrase, ahem. But you look at the masters of elucidating otherworldly phenomenon and see how they allude to those composite parts we, the readers, already know well. They build these visions up through metaphor, forge unlikely combinations of imagery, to create powerful moments. The trick here is, in my view, treading a fine line between over- and under-description. When it's done right - eg, The Willows, The Dunwich Horror - it's awesome. When it's done clumsily - eg, 6 billion bad Lovecraft imitators - it just falls flat on its Cthulhuian tentacled face. In the latter case, either nothing happens or, more commonly, everything does. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
For reality to hold, as it tends to do, implies a shared consciousness, an inter-relatedness of apparently individual perceptions. I agree with Jung that this also implies a collective unconscious, a miasma of fantastical archetypes that is constantly in flux, and from which we all gain unconscious perceptions, and add unconsciously to - the dark matter of the multiverse, perhaps... | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
And do you think this collective unconscious pre-exists cultural input? In other words, are we born with it - race memories, I guess I mean? | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
>>>>>>we can't break from as we are the same as that World, like shapes in a painting where even the tiniest element is necessary to the work's emotional tune. Fantasy is not our brain's minion >>>>but the way we and our lived World belong to each other in ever increasing reciprocal appropriation, me living the World, the World living me, so we are One and Many at the same phenomenological time, including everything psychological, theological even. I really couldn't agree more, Giancarlo. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
Ergo, Descartes' error. And the triumph of Cartesianism, the world's loss. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
If we accept the concept of time as an illusion, necessary to maintain the illusion of individual consciousness, then I suppose, we - as "individuals" - are more coallesced from it, than born with it. All becomes one and that one is All. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.197 |
That's illogical, Captain. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.55 |
It's life Jim but not as we know it | ||
| Giancarlo (Giancarlo) Username: Giancarlo Registered: 11-2008 Posted From: 85.116.228.5 |
So, not: " I am here" but "HERE I am", that is the I as world-implacement. I suspect a Zen monk would laugh at this thread... | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.198 |
Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." Merleau-Ponty: "I can, therefore I am." | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Entirely illogical from our perspective, I agree... but that's the universe for ya. Ask Heisenberg. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.198 |
I don't think a Zen monk would need to define his/her self against another group in that way. It wouldn't be Zen, would it?  | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.198 |
>>>Ask Heisenberg. Have you got his email addy? Or do I again have to do some of that non-linear communication which transcends temporal events such as dying? (It's very tiresome.) | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.198 |
Giancarlo, we've yet to bring in the crucial element of embodiment. If we're considering this issue from the persepctive of consciousness alone, it's a dead duck. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 129.11.77.198 |
"I quack, therefore I swim." | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.55 |
I am therefore I think. Am I putting Descartes before the horse? | ||
| Giancarlo (Giancarlo) Username: Giancarlo Registered: 11-2008 Posted From: 85.116.228.5 |
Gary, I was not implying a Zen monk's laugh would be self-defining with respect to our "reality" discussion group. I should have said, "he would laugh IN this thread", uncaring whether that's Zen or not. A laugh in the graveyard of definitions whose names are always "writ in water". And that would be another laugh-deserving definition mining my attempt at being/appearing intelligent as I fight to achieve ever increasing complexity forgetting, as you say, the matter of embodiment. But of that, later...I need that drink! Ciao | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
I blame it on the boobies. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.237.21 |
I blame it on the boogie. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.72 |
I'd call our existence determined necessity, an unalterable outcome of the multiverse. As in fact are all other necessities. The multiverse reduces everything to nothing by determining that exerything must happen. Everything out of nothing is potential; potential becomes the actual. Potential is unlimited, actualities become as real as anything, being the only thing. Oh aye. It's just our luck to be in a universe that seems to be shit most of the time. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.31.194.128 |
Careful: you'll get called a master of twaddle. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.68 |
Jack of all universes, master of twaddle. It's quantum physics, innit. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.68 |
Wavefront collapsing interferometer in my head thinks therefore it is, it thinks. | ||
| Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 82.6.94.181 |
Is simple innit blud. Fantasy is wot you is making up in your head innit. From yo bruv Tel | ||
| Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 82.6.94.181 |
Other worlds here, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, perhaps created out of the consciousnss of the observer? There is a novella that deals with that very thing..."The Places Between" I think it's called. A classic by all accounts. cheers terry | ||
| Giancarlo (Giancarlo) Username: Giancarlo Registered: 11-2008 Posted From: 85.116.228.5 |
I think Edward Lear's limericks are the best representation of the "reality" issue! | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.72 |
Hugh Everett's many worlds theory alone pretty much suggests that everything you can imagine is real. And that's before you get onto the infinite universe notion... | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.31.194.128 |
What, so Cthulhu exists? | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.74 |
If there are no physical laws preventing Cthulu existing in a universe (actually, an infinite number of them), then yes. Makes your head hurt when you realise the the implications of all of this. John Gribbins's book In Search of the Multiverse is a good starter, should anyone wanna know more about it. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.171.129.74 |
Imagine the 'time' before the multiverse. Call it a bucket of wet cement. Every single possible form that that cement can be poured into has equal value at this point, every fantastical, whimsical shape you can imagine. By necessity, ALL those forms have equal validity, and the potential becomes the actual, with every single form being made without ever 'leaving the bucket': time and matter - dark and Baryonic - as we perceive it commencing out of other matter than the cement. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
The fact that scientists have proved that the very nature of reality alters when we look at it, and is in a different state when we look away, only makes sense when we accept the fact that reality is infinite, with no beginning and no end, and no steady state governed by the laws of linearity. Whether we call it the multiverse or the infiverse or whatever, it is ultimately all-encompassing and unquantifiable, existing "everywhere" in its entirety and nowhere in isolation. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.31.194.128 |
Thanks, Mark. I'll try get that book. This stuff has always fascinated me, but I've always struggled with it. |