My own idea is a little less ambitious, I’m just trying to imagine the same universe seen and defined in different ways by its inhabitants. Your example of the swamp croc is a good one. Those guys have been around longer than the dinosaurs, I’m sure they’ve learned something during their stay here, they are survivors.

Their view of reality is complex and sophisticated, and their universe is just as valid as ours..

Even a single lone electron has a limited sense of consciouness, in the sense that it has two possible energy states, a positive and negative spin, and absorbing or emitting energy can alter that state.

More complex systems have more sophisticated responses. Even insects are studded with sensors, many of them totally alien to us, they are constantly gathering and evaluating data from their environment, and have a sophisticated palate of responses they have evolved to select from when responding to it.

The point Russell makes is that this ability to respond appropriately to the environment seems to be a property of all matter to a certain extent, from sentient beings to fundamental particles. This seems to be the one property the entire universe shares.

We have eyes that see at a distance, hearing which works at a shorter distance, smell even shorter, touch on the surface and taste which is internal. That’s all we need to survive as a species.

We can measure, we can find corelations, we can do far, far more with our brains and the tools we are able to create than we need to survive. In fact, our brains will lead to our extinction.

That there is much we don’t understand and can never understand is as clear for humans as it is for birds, or flowers.

Our understanding of “reality” is empirically accurate enough for our purposes. And it is real, though subjective, in the sense that it can be predictably measured within our limitations and manipulated.

I believe the bottom line is that we have a consciousness which interprets and responds to data from our surroundings with the purpose of keeping our bodies alive. Both the data and the instrument of interpretation are “real”. Disregarding the data results in death of the organism.

That some other form of consciousness may interpret the same data in a different way is obvious. Crocodiles interpret swamps differently that I do. Flowers interpret dirt in their own, unique way.

Are flowers conscious? We’d have to define “conscious” for that determination, and it’s irrelevant. What is real for them is often irrelevant to my consciousness.

A universe where anything is possible is not very interesting. A universe where everything is possible is chaotic.

As in poetry, rhyme, rhythm, and meter are self-imposed constraints that limit what the poem can say, but they also enhance and direct the value of what is said. Free verse has its place, but truth and beauty are focussed by structure and discipline. It has the additional advantage that the form is familiar and understood by the reader, its history and conventions shared by all.

Consider the Elizabethan sonnet: Three quatrains of alternating rhyme, in iambic pentameter (five feet of two syllables each, accent on the second syllable. All followed by a heroic couplet to drive the point home.

Three left jabs, and a right cross: a complex blend of profound human emotional truths, dissected with mathematical precision and icy logic. This is why Zeus gave us a brain. It’s like watching a sunrise at sea. For a brief moment, you can almost convince yourself it all makes sense.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The Universe is infinite…as is the possibilities.

I’m no different than I was before. How you perceive me is different because you know more about me.

To put it another way, I don’t think UFOs or Bigfoot or God are impossible, just highly unlikely. There is a difference: just because something is possible doesn’t mean its probable. On the other hand, the Bermuda Triangle, ghosts and Atlantis are impossible.

His primary point, one I’ve been pushing here on the Zone for a while, is that we don’t know anything at all about the universe. All we really know is what we perceive about it. In other words, we are not dealing with reality, we are dealing with our mental concept of what reality is, and that is based on limited sensory perceptions and questionable interpretive procedures. How can we possibly understand what a photon is? It’s amazing we can predict some of its behavior as well as we do. We build cameras that work. That’s not the same thing as saying we understand the nature of light.

It’s important to understand that what I just said in the previous paragraph is not a claim that there is no external reality, or that it doesn’t matter, or that we can make it into anything we want. What I and Russell are saying is that all we know about reality is what we think about it. The real universe, what physicists talk about, is not a reality we study, it is a model we have created. The fact that our model of the universe is constantly evolving, and that we can’t seem to agree on very much about it suggests we aren’t really thinking or talking about an objective reality., We are talking about a subjective conception of it. The only thing we know for sure exists is consciousness itself. “This may all be just a dream”, as every kid has at one time surmised; but the dreamer DOES exist. That cannot be denied. The existence of the dreamer is the only thing about the universe we know for sure.

Russell talks a lot about this external physical reality, and how our knowledge about it is mostly a model we’ve devised to help organize our observations of it. I go a bit further than that. I submit that the real universe we live in, the world that we worry about and obsess over, has nothing to do with electrons and waves and space-time. It has to do with emotions, careers, human conflicts, pain and pleasure. Even an engineer or scientist who feels he is dealing professionally with the real world all the time, who prides himself on his hard-boiled objectivity, promptly forgets about that world when he leaves the office. His real universe revolves about commerce and politics, family, finances, that annoying cough that only seems to be getting worse, the knock in his car’s engine, junior’s deteriorating grades, and his wife’s all-too-frequent headaches. Those skills from the office may not be very useful in this personal universe, and believing they must be can lead to fatal consequences.

We may live in the material world, but its the psychological and social manifestations of it that really occupy our time and keep us awake at night. We create that world, its different for every one of us, but it is still very real. My goals are not as ambitious as Russells’s. I’m not trying to define what consciousness or reality are. I’m just trying to make sense of my strengths and limitations.

The reason this philosophical wool-gathering is important to us here on the Zone is that this is primarily a science forum. We pride ourselves on our scientific method and our objectivity. This method of inquiry has proven to be remarkably successful in understanding the real world, in making predictions about it, in doing things like designing spacecraft or enhancing and interpreting satellite imagery. We also do intensely practical and ordinary things that interface with the world and have vital (to us) consequences. Learning how to operate an automobile safely is more important than knowing whether or not there is a god.

But those things we do so well at the office are not necessarily applicable to the subjective universe we have assembled around us, the world of psychological, social and cultural connections that make up our real lives. Newton and Einstein taught us nothing about how to raise a family or manage a career, or how to be happy, or how to protect those we love.

Long story short…you appear to be a lot more tolerant these days..or else I am understanding you more.:)