Yujin Nagasawa - What is Ultimate Reality?

What is the deepest nature of things? Our world is complex, filled with so much stuff. But down below, what’s most fundamental, what is ultimate reality? Is there anything nonphysical? Anything spiritual? Or only the physical world? Many feel certain of their belief, on each side of controversial question.

Yujin Nagasawa is a Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the John Hick Centre for Philosophy of Religion in the School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[Yzjoshuwave]

Really glad I watched this one. What a likable guy. And he’s certainly given me some things to think about.

[mitrabuddhi]

According to Paradoxema the Planck length may be a limit to our own ability to perceive and understand reality, but it is not necessarily a limit to the universe itself.

[studiosroom]

There’s never really an answer is there? Always questions .

[bparcej]

Our understanding of Ultimate Reality is limited by our senses and minds ( which interprets the senses)…we don’t possess the capacity to grasp that which is beyond these limitations. We are surrounded by the forever unknown…but can enjoy ‘just this’.

[craigswanson]

Actuality exists. But humans only perceive a minuscule proportion of the available information. Our senses and perceptions create the realm of human reality.

[mickeybrumfield]

Life appears to be real and a part of ultimate reality. Perhaps we should start from there with an appreciation for what quantum mechanics and relativity teach us about reality being dependent on the perspective of the observer.

[morgandebruler]

The world is but the the sum of knowledge we have on it.

[B.S...]

“Whatever is not forbidden is compulsory” » The Totalitarian Principle

[Naidu-km]

There is nothing ultimate in Life or entire existence. Such beliefs are existential. Existing from religious thoughts from the past. In our ned to balance facts n myths.

[blijebij]

Ultimate reality is the foundation we not yet see. Mostly because of our human scale conditioning en lineair thinking.

[kimsahl]

Ultimate reality is the potential nature + the realization nature.

[brendangreeves]

Nature is fundamentally relational. Relativity, in the purest and most abstract sense, manifests as what we call reality.
Concepts have their limitations, and that of creation is no exception.

[anthonycraig]

These kinds of arguments were made about temperature (heat) and pressure. Now we know their properties, they are no longer discussed. The same will happen with consciousness.

[brianlebreton]

Infinitely reducible covers the “getting smaller” direction which is where we typically look for bedrock, but doesn’t trying to look at the problem starting from a wholistic bedrock run into the problem of an infinitely large universe?

[peterpanino]

You must distinguish reality from manifestation.

[Rychosiek]

Voice of a first person in right ear and a second person in left ear is a nice effect, but it's weird and harder to understand what is being said. If you add 50% loudness of voice on the opposite ear, then it will sound great and kind of natural.

[mark.J]

Fascinating, really like this guest... what if we only perceive our reality because it is all we can handle. Imagine things occurring in life that are beyond explainable comprehension based on everything we supposedly know, yet they still occur? I love the oh so human arrogance of believing we can and have a right and are capable of pinning the tail on the donkey? Is it really so hard to accept that some things are beyond our current level of comprehension? What are our minds really capable of handling without cracking? Also, why is the banana yellow and why is the red apple red?

[Nettamorphosis]

“Reality is infinitely decomposable” *feels* right.

[NotNecessarily-ipvc]

In the natural number system, which includes zero and the positive integers, 1 is defined as the successor of 0. In other words, 1 is the next number after 0 in the natural number sequence.

Without zero, we would not have a starting point for the natural numbers, and therefore, we would not be able to define 1 as the successor of 0. So the existence of 1 is contingent upon the existence of 0, since 0 is the starting point from which we define the rest of the natural numbers.

In summary, 1 is contingent on 0 because 1 is defined as the successor of 0 in the natural number system, and without 0 as a starting point, we would not be able to define 1.

What is zero, anyway?

Our understanding of zero is profound when you consider this fact: We don’t often, or perhaps ever, encounter zero in nature.

Numbers like one, two, and three have a counterpart. We can see one light flash on. We can hear two beeps from a car horn. But zero? It requires us to recognize that the absence of something is a thing in and of itself.

“Zero is in the mind, but not in the sensory world, ” Robert Kaplan, a Harvard math professor and an author of a book on zero, says. Even in the empty reaches of space, if you can see stars, it means you’re being bathed in their electromagnetic radiation. In the darkest emptiness, there’s always something. Perhaps a true zero — meaning absolute nothingness — may have existed in the time before the Big Bang. But we can never know.

Nevertheless, zero doesn’t have to exist to be useful. In fact, we can use the concept of zero to derive all the other numbers in the universe.

Kaplan walked me through a thought exercise first described by the mathematician John von Neumann. It’s deceptively simple.

Imagine a box with nothing in it. Mathematicians call this empty box “the empty set.” It’s a physical representation of zero. What’s inside the empty box? Nothing.

Now take another empty box, and place it in the first one.

How many things are in the first box now?

There’s one object in it. Then, put another empty box inside the first two. How many objects does it contain now? Two. And that’s how “we derive all the counting numbers from zero … from nothing, ” Kaplan says. This is the basis of our number system. Zero is an abstraction and a reality at the same time. “It’s the nothing that is, ” as Kaplan said.

He then put it in more poetic terms. “Zero stands as the far horizon beckoning us on the way horizons do in paintings, ” he says. “It unifies the entire picture. If you look at zero you see nothing. But if you look through it, you see the world. It’s the horizon.”

Once we had zero, we have negative numbers. Zero helps us understand that we can use math to think about things that have no counterpart in a physical lived experience; imaginary numbers don’t exist but are crucial to understanding electrical systems. Zero also helps us understand its antithesis, infinity, in all of its extreme weirdness.

[davegrundgeiger]

I think David Deutsch asserts that there is infinite new knowledge to be gained. (And that there always will be, since that's what infinite means.) IE there is no bottom-level foundation to find. I sure hope that's true, since it would be a horrible thing for conscious beings to have nothing new to discover.