This problem is easily labeled as the mother of all philosophical problems. I will simply describe a radical or immaterialist version of direct realism.

Everything is a construct of our collective mentality, including the objects of our perception. In our individual perceiving, we are participating in the process of cosmic self-awareness. Only on occasion, however, does the individual become aware of this absolute form of consciousness. If we subscribe to a relational metaphysics, then the ultimate reality is precisely this state of cosmic self-awareness. It is not possible to be more related than that.

Now let us consider some obvious problems:

For instance, why do we not have night vision? But this question ignores the fact that the dark of night is just another and rather useful collective construct.

Or, why do we not have direct access to other minds? Is mental privacy not another useful construct? We have the best of both worlds, public and private. Instead of telepathy we are challenged to produce telephony, which keeps many people socially occupied. And that is not to say that others of us should not be honing our telepathic skills.

And on it goes�.

Most of the limitations to direct perception arise out of the constraints resulting from the imposition of one or another sort of mental construct, the primary one of which is the space-time manifold. But without those constraints our field of perception would tend to be overwhelming, so clearly there are some tradeoffs. These perception limiting constructs serve as filters between our individual consciousnesses and cosmic consciousness. Our individual perspectives are indirect only relative to the absolute perception.

Awakening to the realization that these limitations are merely conventional compromises we will be challenged to develop our human capacities that will allow us to have the best of all worlds, and even to construct new ones on the way to our realization of the absolute.

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rev. 11/17/97