From a response to an earlier thread…

What I am implying is that vast domains of our human experience are not ‘given’ entirely from without as ideas of objective reality supposes, presumes or demands. Two people in the same situation, place and time, standing side-by-side, will each have unique experiences of it due not only to their perspectives and mindsets, but also to the physics of world-lines (aka relativistic physics). It turns out that, if we take the findings of Einstein seriously, each being is not a copy of some other being, but rather a unique universe of time-space-relationships. Another reason they will not have the same experience is what Julian Jaynes and others call ‘excerption’, the almost always intrinsically unique ways in which we select features for attention, filter off others, highlight and enhance or ‘turn down the volume’ on the features selected and ignored.

The idea of an ‘objective’ concrete reality ‘outside us’ is useful in the proper scope of specific disciplines, but it is deceptive or even devastating when it escapes those contexts and seems then to ‘declare’ what exists and doesn’t. Whatever is actually going on in reality is nothing like this, or rather, resembles it only from very specific angles of concern and purposive behaviors.

As regards ‘god’, there’s a relatively simple argument that is easily ignored by those who wish to assert non-existence. They are like ‘god’ to their body, an extra-dimensional ‘sum over the constituents’ that appears as consciousness, awareness, emotion and so on. In this sense, we are ‘little local gods’, and it’s relatively obvious that this is so. Why would there not be similar beings and minds at scales beyond the local individual that subsume »all beings in all of spacetime?

But that’s a »rational argument. What I am actually trying to point at here is not this kind of idea at all. It’s something more subtle, which is that we »participate in the assembly and emergence of reality in various deep ways that science (and often even religion) are ill-equipped to notice, let alone validate. The food does not have a flavor »without a mouth that tastes it. Ideas are meaningless without minds. Even mathematics has the quality that it relies upon »human understanding to validate or repudiate theorems.

So the way we are in the world partly determines ‘what exists and doesn’t’. This is not determined by arguments — but by participation, motive and purpose, orientation, relation… »dreaming, imagination… emotion… and so on. Something resembling god almost certainly ‘exists’, even if the senses encompassed by objectivity or mere reason appear to deny such existence.