Multisense Realism

Quora: What exactly is our life?

How do you see the life?

Your philosophical explanation. How should one look at what he experiences, he sees, he thinks? How to live it?

What is the purpose of life we have been given and how to find it? How do you make most out of it?

In one sentence and explanation of this sentence. What is life, really?

Our life is perception and participation in experiences of particular aesthetic qualities.

Perception and participation are, in my opinion, opposing modes of a universal primitive, which I call sense.

Who and what we are is the product of countless nestings and interleavings of experiential capacities, diffractions of sense. As Homo sapiens, we are a centuryish long experience, seemingly ‘folded in on ourselves’ on several levels: Personally, socially, culturally, anthropologically, zoologically, biologically, chemically, and materially. That’s not including possible super-personal ranges of sense. More important than the complexity and the holarchy however is the simplicity and identity.

Contrary to both Western-mechanistic views which under-signify subjectivity and Eastern-spiritual views which I think over-signify subjectivity, I propose that life is always in the juxtaposition of the generic anesthetic of public bodies and the proprietary aesthetic of private experiences. My conjecture here is somewhat panpsychic or panexperiential – matter, cells, organisms, etc are all associated with some kind of interior experience which are hidden from each other by physics. Physics is actually perceptual relativity – nature defining and describing itself in an expanding array of sense modalities, and simultaneously contracting and obscuring sense through spatial attenuations such as scale incompatibility, distance, crushing and scattering.

The point of all of this as pertains to the question is that with the Western view, we have lost our native coherence as beings in our own right. Instead human presence is decomposed and de-presented into aggregates of sub-personal and impersonal behaviors; evolutionary, biological, computational. My view is that just because we find it easier to pin down forms and functions outside of our own subjective experience does not mean that the universe finds our personal day-to-day experience any less of a legitimate phenomenon than the comings and goings of quarks or galaxies. In our success at having graduated from religion and philosophy by focusing on our own insignificance and flawed sense, we have unintentionally turned our erstwhile objectivity into an anti-anthropomorphic anthropomorphism. We reject all that is personally significant in favor of an a-signifying, anesthetic, mechanism…which unfortunately has, in my opinion, begun to show some unpleasant side-effects for human life.

If you ask me, then, what we should do with this life as human beings in this place at this time, I think that it is to reclaim our authentic status as whole participants in a significant human life. We are to understand, now, that although the exterior of the universe is mechanistic and entropic, the interior is quite the opposite. The human condition is extremely tricky, and it seems that everyone seems to be missing some important piece to their own puzzle so that it is not so simple to say ‘Carpe diem’ and save the world. Everything fights back and slips through your fingers, ignores you and dissolves into regret…or else rockets into success leaving your unable to appreciate the struggles of others. It’s… weird. Isn’t it?