{"id":22853,"date":"2017-02-19T19:43:16","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T00:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22853"},"modified":"2017-02-19T19:43:16","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T00:43:16","slug":"the-world-as-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22853","title":{"rendered":"The World as Will"},"content":{"rendered":"

The World as Will<\/a><\/h3>\n

It’s impressively easy to misunderstand the point made in last week\u2019s post here on\u00a0The Archdruid Report<\/em>. To say that the world we experience is made up of representations of reality, constructed in our minds by taking the trickle of data we get from the senses and fitting those into patterns that are there already, doesn\u2019t mean that nothing exists outside of our minds. Quite the contrary, in fact; there are two very good reasons to think that there really is something \u201cout there,\u201d a reality outside our minds that produces the trickle of data we\u2019ve discussed.<\/p>\n

The first of those reasons seems almost absurdly simple at first glance: the world doesn\u2019t always make sense to us. Consider, as one example out of godzillions, the way that light seems to behave like a particle on some occasions and like a wave on others. That\u2019s been described, inaccurately, as a paradox, but it\u2019s actually a reflection of the limitations of the human mind.<\/p>\n

What, after all, does it mean to call something a particle? Poke around the concept for a while and you\u2019ll find that at root, this concept \u201cparticle\u201d is an abstract metaphor, extracted from the common human experience of dealing with little round objects such as pebbles and marbles. What, in turn, is a wave? Another abstract metaphor, extracted from the common human experience of watching water in motion. When a physicist says that light sometimes acts like a particle and sometimes like a wave, what she\u2019s saying is that neither of these two metaphors fits more than a part of the way that light behaves, and we don\u2019t have any better metaphor available.<\/p>\n

If the world was nothing but a hallucination projected by our minds, then it would contain nothing that wasn\u2019t already present in our minds\u2014for what other source could there be?<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The World as Will It’s impressively easy to misunderstand the point made in last week\u2019s post here on\u00a0The Archdruid Report. To say that the world we experience is made up of representations of reality, constructed in our minds by taking the trickle of data we get from the senses and fitting those into patterns that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3463,1758,8718,14834,14835],"class_list":["post-22853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-archdruid-report","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-knowledge","tag-representations","tag-will"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22854,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22853\/revisions\/22854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}