...

[Flolfolil]

...

Edited March 6, 2015 by Flolfolil

[Marblehead]

They don't.

 

 

Edit to add:

 

But what if? Well, I suppose they would have the same kinds of problems people have perceiving things.

Edited October 5, 2013 by Marblehead

[Friend]

What is an inanimate object for you?

[silent thunder]

current moment,

current minute,

current hour,

current day,

current week,

current month,

current year,

current decade,

current century,

current millenium,

current epoch,

current age,

 

When viewed from any but the last two, for me, inanimate objects (stones perhaps) appear to have no perception.

When viewed in context of the last two, their shape may have morphed significantly enough to have been present in a shape I would call sentient.

 

For me it comes down to levels of awareness.

When aware only of current day, week, lifetime, these objects appear to be without perception.

When aware of still being part of the current epoch or age, then the transient nature of perceived reality becomes more pliable for me and I can see them having sentience in altered form.

[fluidity]

Indeed let us explore the Platonic forms: An infinite space of geometry

Rotate a dot along a hidden axis (0>1>2)
A line appears

Rotate again (2>3>4>5>n)
Square
Cube
Hyperform (3+1D)

And this is who you ARE
This is the nature of the Visible world seen with the eyes
As for the ears,

 

Feel the breath and the heart: does breath have sensation?

[Brian]

Friend's question is pivotal...

[silent thunder]

 

 

 

 

[Marblehead]

Water, corn starch and food color placed on a piece of plastic that is on an audio speaker and you too can do magic.

[zanshin]

I always thought they did. USed to get emotional when my mom threw old broken toys away, made me sad to think of these things I used to love rotting away in the trash somewhere. I don't know how many old people are left with depression mentality to save everything; my grandmother was one of them and organized clutter with goat trails through certain rooms seemed like a treasure cave to me. I try not to save too much clutter, but still sort of an emotional process. I don't know about perception, but old well loved things have a different energy than new shiny things or old trashed things piled up carelessly. It seems like the materialistic mind set to buy things and not even really use them effects the people too, so sort of a give a take with inanimate things and perception. I don't know how.

 

How about rocks and crystals? Crystals sort of new agey, but they do seem to have energy. There was a big old rock high over the stream at my kids' preschool that seemed to understand things right used to be my thinking and meditation place, haven't talked to that old friend for a while.

[Marblehead]

You should talk with your old friend if you get the chance.

[doc benway]

There is a problem with the way we are asking the question. It presumes individual objects which 'have' perception as opposed to the appearance of objects within perception.

[Marblehead]

Hi Steve,

 

Are you trying to make this more complicated than it really is?

 

A rock is a rock no matter what name you give it. Have you never had a pet rock you talked with on occasion?

Edited October 6, 2013 by Marblehead

[doc benway]

Hi Steve,

 

Are you trying to make this more complicated than it really is?

Quite the contrary, I'm trying to simplify.

 

A rock is a rock no matter what name you give it. Have you never had a pet rock you talked with on occasion?

A rock is a rock because you give it a name.

Have you ever seen anything exist in isolation of the entire wholeness of your perception?

 

Sight is the easiest example - every time you open your eyes you see all of it, everything within the field of vision, nothing is ever seen in isolation of the entirety of its surroundings.

 

You are dividing things up gratuitously and labeling them and then assigning them specific qualities - quite a complex, arbitrary, and inaccurate mess....

[Flolfolil]

...

Edited March 6, 2015 by Flolfolil

[doc benway]

hmm, well i guess i meant anything that doesn't have the 5 human-animal sense organs

 

So what I'm getting at is looking at our perspective that awareness exists within us, is generated by us, is somehow linked to our sensory experience.

An alternative perspective is that we exist within awareness, our sensory experience exists within awareness.

 

So one illustration is to look at what happens if we remove all sensory stimulation. Imagine a theoretical sensory isolation chamber that is 100% effective and removes ALL external and even internal stimuli (eg heartbeat, sound of breathing, feeling of breathing, etc...). What would be left? How would we know we are still us, still alive, still aware?

 

Certainly we are blessed with specific sensory organs as biological organisms that a rock doesn't have, and this is what creates this illusory perspective of separation, isolation, and being the source of our awareness.

 

Clearly there is perception, the question regresses to - what is it that is doing the perceiving?

What is the source of awareness?

This is not a trivial matter to investigate and the knee jerk responses we tend to rely on don't hold water when you look closely enough.

 

And unless we each do the work for ourselves and are blessed with a peek behind the curtain, we're unlikely to accept any suggestion to our usual explanation. And even if we do accept an alternative explanation, it's hollow unless we actually have a direct experience of this.

[silent thunder]

So what I'm getting at is looking at our perspective that awareness exists within us, is generated by us, is somehow linked to our sensory experience.

An alternative perspective is that we exist within awareness, our sensory experience exists within awareness

...

 

Wrote this some 20 years ago, seems relevant.

 

surely forms arise

as natural conditions

within awareness

Edited October 6, 2013 by silent thunder

[Marblehead]

Sight is the easiest example - every time you open your eyes you see all of it, everything within the field of vision, nothing is ever seen in isolation of the entirety of its surroundings.

Not true. I have been known to walk into lamp posts that didn't exist until I walked into it while watching a beautiful woman.

 

I watched one of those science programs last night with some quantum physicists talking their stuff about particles being in two places at once, particles acting like waves and particles not existing until you observe them. You know what my thought was? Bull!

 

Sure, our awareness of the tree causes it to be real to us but it was already real without us. The entire universe existed for 13.69 billion years perfectly well without us. Our awareness means nothing to the universe. We are but straw dogs.

 

hmm, well i guess i meant anything that doesn't have the 5 human-animal sense organs

Too late now. We are already on a roll.

 

What would be left?

A corpse. Little difference between it and a rock.

[Brian]

I watched one of those science programs last night with some quantum physicists talking their stuff about particles being in two places at once, particles acting like waves and particles not existing until you observe them. You know what my thought was? Bull!

 

Experimentally demonstrated and consistent with theory. Only "bull" if you wish to ignore the last 50 years of scientific discovery...

[silent thunder]

If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.

Niels Bohr

 

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
Niels Bohr

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

Eddington: but based on Haldane's Law:

"the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose."

[Marblehead]

Experimentally demonstrated and consistent with theory. Only "bull" if you wish to ignore the last 50 years of scientific discovery...

So far they (quantum theorists) haven't offered enough "real" data for me to begin to accept what they are saying. I'm not ignoring it - I want proof and they offer none (acceptable to me).

[soaring crane]

another angle: everything is covered, permeated, by mocrobes of one sort or another (or 10,000 sorts). They're all alive, very much so, and they certainly respond to their environment, perceiving enough to survive not millenia, not epochs, but billions of years on this planet, and presumably most other planets out there. There's a lot more perceiving going on than meet the eye.

[Marblehead]

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. They keep talking about how good their pudding is but never offer me a taste of it. I remain skeptical.

another angle: everything is covered, permeated, by mocrobes of one sort or another (or 10,000 sorts). They're all alive, very much so, and they certainly respond to their environment, perceiving enough to survive not millenia, not epochs, but billions of years on this planet, and presumably most other planets out there. There's a lot more perceiving going on than meet the eye.

Yeah, I had a hard time accepting the thought that microbes communicate with each other. But they do. Single cell organism communicate with each other. And yes, there are billions of microbes and bacteria living on and inside our body. It is even suggested that we could not live without them as they perform functions that keep us alive that our body is not capable of doing on its own.

 

But we are still going to have a hard time teaching the rock to whistle "Dixie".

[soaring crane]

But we are still going to have a hard time teaching the rock to whistle "Dixie".

 

was that the challenge here?

[Marblehead]

was that the challenge here?

I've forgotten. I'm just going with the flow. Hehehe.

 

Actually, I believe the base question was "do inanimate objects have the capacity for perception?" How would the rock I am looking at view me?

 

There have been many animistic religions over time by various groupings of people who believed that inanimare objects have powers, especially over the forces of nature. Crystals were mentioned earlier in this thread.

[Flolfolil]

...

Edited March 6, 2015 by Flolfolil