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maggie_simon's picture

Definition of Reality

I disagree with your statement that ‘the I-function has no say in reality.’  I can see two ways of interpreting “reality” here.  The first is that there is a concrete universal reality that is always present in the background but which is not necessarily accessible to everyone.  If this is the reality that you are talking about, an external reality, then perhaps yes, the I-function has no say in it (although perhaps the I-function has a say in how the conversion of that external reality to an internal reality happens: this brings me to the second kind of reality: the internal reality).  It seems that you are actually talking about an internal reality with the dilemma that this reality is based on interpretation of the body’s experience of interactions with the external world.  I would therefore argue that the I-function does have a say in how the world is interpreted.  I think that an example of this is when two people talk about how they experience something, and in so doing, they learn from each other (grow) so that they each are able to experience that same thing differently the next time around.  The I-function of the first person analyzes and describes to another person how the first person’s nervous system interprets something, and this verbalization allows the I-function of the second person to internalize this different way of interpreting something.  I think that through this process of sharing by employing the I-function to look at what is going on internally, experience can be understood as something more than just an “ambiguous interpretation.”

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