How are perceptions and reality related?

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Perception reflects reality.

First let me draw a distinction between existence and reality. When things exist, they exist relative to each other. The rules by which they interact collect together to create a continuous fabric whereby you can predict a sequence of events over time. To say something exists is to say is fits into that fabric, that it follows the rules and has effects on other things in the reality.

We perceive these effects and from perceiving the effects, we can work out the rules of the reality being existed in. When you play Minecraft, you are learning through perception the rules of Minecraft and how to thrive in the game. You exist in Minecraft primarily through your avatar. The avatar participates in a reality that is only extremely loosely connected to our own physical one.

What does Minecraft consist of? How do we conceive of these rules? In some trivial ways, the rules have physical manifestation, as the bits of code running on the various computers. But this materialist understanding fails to do anything to tell you anything you’d want to know about Minecraft.

So our perception is only loosely physical. What we see when we look at stuff is as physical as Minecraft is. True in an unimportant way, but false in the important one.

When you look at a chair, what the mind sees is really really really far removed from the actual physical reality of the chair. The chair has atoms and those atoms are held together through electromagnetic force.

What you actually see and think about when you behold a chair, concerns the chair’s essence. What is the essence of a chair? Well, you can sit on it. What does the act of sitting mean. We can come up with an empiric scientific biomechanical understanding of the act of sitting, and in fact we have. But doing that requires a ton of work.

No, the essence of sitting is that we can rest, get off our feet. Not that the amount of mass present in the chair would make a pretty sizeable explosion if you released all that binding energy.

The observing mind is forever looking to distill singular essence of things out of all the other rules and existences that the reality can offer. When you play Minecraft, your mind is looking for what’s important about the game, the ‘real’ reasons why things exist.