Compassionist wrote:As Morpheus asked in 'The Matrix', "What is real? How do you define real?"
We don't know reality directly. We appear to know our sensory-cognitive-affective model of reality as it appears to be generated by the brain. One is considered psychotic if one perceives things, not perceived by others.
Are you familiar with the concept of Maya in Hinduism? Maya means illusion and states that this perceptual world that is sensed by our senses and measured by science is an illusion i.e. not what it seems. It is impossible to disprove it. This is why I am a strong agnostic about the ultimate nature of reality although I am not agnostic about the apparent nature of reality.
Does the workings of the brain produce the mind or is the brain an illusion perceived by an immortal soul? How would I know for sure? How would you or anyone else know for sure? Do any of you really exist or are you all part of a dream or a hallucination I am experiencing?
Interesting...and the conundrum (which isn't really a conundrum) can be seen through if existence is broken down into its constituent parts...
In
Ghost in the Machine Koestler coined the term ‘holon’ – a whole part. For example, the letter ‘a’ is a whole in and of itself. It is also part of another ‘whole’, known as a word – ‘am’. It is also part of a phrase “I am…� or a sentence, a paragraph, a book and so on. If you were to destroy the letter ‘a’ it would severely compromise those other ‘wholes’ which depend on the existence of ‘a’.
We tend to see ‘existence’ as a whole when it is really a holon, made up of other holons. As physical entities, we, our physical ‘selves’, are made up of atoms and molecules. These nuts and bolts of existence ‘inhabit’ what has been called the physiosphere. From the perspective of the physiosphere we are no different from any other ‘inhabitant’ made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen etc. We are ‘one with the universe’. According to one view of modern cosmology, the physiosphere started out as simple sub-atomic particles which over a long period of time underwent a ‘complexification’ – it evolved into more complex structures.
At some point this complexification led to the emergence of ‘life’. Life brought about the emergence of the next holon – the biosphere. All living matter – or those aspects that make it ‘living’ are inhabitants of the biosphere. From the perspective of the biosphere we are no different from any other ‘inhabitant’ with a biomechanical system supporting it. Again we are ‘one with the universe’.
This biomechanical system evolved a neural network which laid the ground for the emergence of consciousness which on becoming more complex emerged as a self-awareness – a consciousness that not only knows but knows that it knows. Perhaps the very first question that arose on the emergence of this phenomenon was “Who am I?� This sphere of mental activity is the noosphere – from wiki… “For Teilhard [de Chandon], the noosphere is best described as a sort of 'collective consciousness' of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness.� Think of the connectivity of thought we have access to in comparison to our previous generations and it is easy to see the continued evolution of this sphere.
So to answer your question - all we perceive of existence 'resides' in the noosphere and is illusion in that it is a mental construct whcih is in constant flux. It indeed is
maya, like all concepts,
maya exists in the noosphere.
ANd many don't know the real from the unreal. So from my experience, philosophers are one of the most confused group of people on the face of the earth. That's because they rely on human "reasoning" which is fallible and not omniscient. 
