As long as we're on the subject of existence, you don't exist. I don't exist. The cat doesn't exist. Read the book "Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot for further info on what's really going on. For a while, I've been reading up on it, and I'm fascinated by how he has interpreted the "fundamental" life of human existence and what humans actually perceive as the truth. I've based this whole thread on basically what I learned from the book, whether it should be read as truth, or be judged as NOT the truth. I guess since my future career is going to be a neurosurgeon, I was even more fascinated by how the brain really "creates" this reality for you. I've known for awhile that the back of the brain controls what you experience, but never really thought of it this way. Anywhoo, read on, fellow AG members:
From the very moment you are born, you indoctrinate the idea that the world has an absolute material reality so you base your entire life on getting more material possessions and further pursuing this view. Everything that you think you know is conveyed to us by our 5 senses, (i.e. taste, touch, sight, hearing, and smelling). The world you know of is only consistent of what your eyes see, ears hear, noses smell, tongues taste, and our hands feel. You, as a human, have depended fully on those 5 senses your whole life, and that is why you know this material world only the way these 5 senses project it to you.
Matter makes up the whole external world. Man is an image and everything experienced is temporary and deceptive. This universe is a shadow. When you see something, clusters of light called photons travel to your eyes, travel through the eye lens, and focus on the retina, located in the back of the eye. In the retina, these photons are converted into electrical signals and sent by neurons to the center of vision, located in the back of the brain.
Everything you've ever seen in your whole life is viewed right there in the tiny, dark place we call the Medulla Oblongata. This text that you're reading, and the whole world you see when looking out of a window is all viewed in the back of the brain, a place of merely a few cubic centimeters. When you say "I see" you really only see the effect of the rays reaching your eyes form in your brain by being transformed into electrical signals. When you say "I see" you're really only viewing the electrical particles in the brain.
Michael Talbot wants you to keep in mind, the brain is sealed to light and the inside of your head is 100% dark.. Therefore the brain never comes in contact with light itself. If you view a candle, you're viewing it in the back of your brain but the candle light never illuminates the inside of your head, however we view a colorful and bright world inside of our dark brain. The same situation applies to all of our other senses. They are all perceived in the brain as electrical signals. Everything you see, touch feel, smell, or taste is all perceived in the brain so therefore our brains never confront the original of the matter existing outside of us, but rather an electrical copy of it formed inside of our brain. We are mislead to assume these copies are instances of real matter outside of the brain.
Everything we see, touch, hear, and perceive is matter. The world, and the universe is only electrical signals in our brain. Everything involving your senses is nothing but the brains interpretation of electrical signals. The distance between you and this screen is nothing but a feeling of space formed in your brain. The objects that seem to be very distant in one persons view are just images clustered in one spot in the brain. (i.e. Someone who watches the stars through a telescope assumed they are millions of light years away from him, yet the stars are right inside of himself, in the center of vision in his brain. You are also not inside the room you assume yourself to be in. On the contrary, the room is inside of you. You seeing your body makes you think that you are inside of it. However, you must realize that your body too, is an image formed inside your brain. How can we be sure an external world even exists? We can't. The only reality we cope with is the world of perceptions we live within our minds. To imagine matter to have an existence outside of the mind is indeed a deception. The perceptions we observe can possibly be coming from an outside source.
Let us suppose we can take our brain out of our body and keep it alive in a glass jar. Let us put a computer in where all kinds of information can be recorded. Finally, let us transmit the electrical signals of all the data related to a setting such a sight, sound, and smell to this computer. Let us connect to the sentry centers of our brain. Your brain will see and live the setting correlated with these. This imaginary world will continue as long as the simulations keep coming from the computer, just without the senses being the part of the body that SHOWS what the brain is perceiving. We would never realize that we only consist of a brain. It is very easy for us to be deceived into believing perceptions without any material correlates to be real.
This is exactly what happens in our dreams. To you, reality is everything that can be touched with the hand and seen with the eye. In your dreams you can also touch with your hand and see with your eye. In reality you have neither hand, nor eye, There is nothing that can be touched nor seen. Taking what youâve seen in your dreams to be material realities you are simply deceived. A person deeply asleep in his bed can visit different places, eat, drink, see friends, yet he hasnât stepped a foot away from his bed. It is when this person awakes that he knows all that was experienced were only perceptions, AKA a dream. If we are able to live an unreal world during our dreams, the same thing can equally be true for the world we live in. The same can easily be applied to what you consider "real life". We may eventually be awoken from what we thought we were living all along, just as we are awoken in a dream.
Our brain is a matter just like our arms, legs, or any other object, so it must be an illusion just like all other objects. Let us say that we can take the brain and take it out of our head and see it with our eyes, and touch it with our hands. In this case we can see the brain is nothing more than a perception. So then what are we? The ones who see, touch, and perceives smells and tastes? This metaphysical being that perceives is called the soul. Just as the bodies we possess and the universe we occupy have no physical reality. The absolute being is the soul. Matter consists merely of perceptions viewed by the soul. In conclusion, the cat does not exist. The woods in which the cat was in, does not exist.
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So there you have it. By the way, the philosophy that Michael Talbot used was called empiricism, where the human mind-- actually EVERY organism's mind is like a giant piece of white paper, collecting and recording experiences to use again in future events, whether they are remembered, or locked away to be forgotten. This somewhat-popular belief has been dead for awhile now, but every time I bring this up to people in a not-as-strong-as-the-book's fashion, people seem to be blown away by it, not knowing exactly what to think from it.
So, what do you think of this? Obviously, you can't truthfully post about this topic without reading it first, so drop the "tl;dr" act and start thinking. Is he a crackpot author, or is he making sense of all this? Obviously, we exist, but without the back of the brain, you couldn't possibly believe you are or did, because you technically "never experienced existence". All you would have is the mind, thinking and perceiving nothing while you float around in a vast, empty, black space called the universe. But I'm saying too much. It's now YOUR turn to do the thinking. What are your thoughts?
Apologies to that, but there was so much information about it that I HAD to post that much. I couldn't just go with the basics and expect it to be a forceful topic.
Anyways, any thoughts, Kirby? Again, sorry for the epic wall, ehehehe....
This form of extreme skepticism has been around for a really long time, and I've never found it convincing. The faultiness or uncertainty of our perceptions is certainly a good reason for thinking things might not be the way we perceive them. But to suggest that an eternal reality does not exist simply cannot be defended and isn't accepted as a legitimate theory in contemporary philosophy. Currently, skeptics posit that we might be dreaming, a brain in a vat, or a subject of an evil demon, but they wouldn't dare argue that we actually are. The argument here for the existence of a soul from these presupposed premises also simply does not follow. I would like to point out some standard moves to the skeptic to perhaps facilitate the conversation a bit - as I think this is a terrific topic and Shintetsu clearly put a lot of time and effort into this. 1) We can't tell if we're in a dream. The typical move to counter a statement like this is to point out that we have a state of dreaming that we can identify as separate from our waking state. Now, perhaps this is all a dream within a dream, but there is not justification for this sort of proposition. Besides, the dream state is relative to what we're calling a waking state. Whatever we happen to "wake up" to if this reality isn't real, we wouldn't refer back to this a dream, I wouldn't think. 2) We could be brains in vats. The simulation hypotheses that became really popular in the late 90's quickly had their shortcomings in some interesting philosophical results of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Without going into to much technical detail, I would just like to point out that this Theorem (which has been proven) shows that simulating our intelligence is impossible. 3) Our faculty of sense is not reliable. That much is clear; we make sense experience mistakes all the time. But our empirical faculties are nonetheless highly reliable. If the external world was simply a product of our minds, why can't we change it? The force and veracity with which visual, auditory, and tactile sense experience pervades the consciousness, it really seems much more likely that we are not in control of these experiences. Other things, like imagination, that are created mentally we have direct access to and can change. But not our experience of the real world.
This topic is similar to the idea behind the first Matrix. Maybe we all live in a computer program that tells our senses what to do. (I haven't seen the movie in a while so this may be incorrect.) That bald guy in the movie comments "This steak tastes delicious, but its not real and the taste I taste is false." Maybe we all live in a computer program and we should hope that Kennu Reeves saves us.
Any way, to what Moe was saying. In a dream you can do all sorts of things which you can not do in reality. You can teleport from place to place in an instant; you can be chased by dinosaurs; you can fly; or even get mauled by zombies. (Note: these examples are all based from the dreams I had.) When I am a wake from a dream I never can fly or be in fear of T-Rexes. True, when I'm dreaming in an unconscious state, I do feel like I am in reality. But towards the end of my dream, sometimes I realize that I am in a dream. When I realize this two things happen: 1. I wake up or 2. I have the power to control my dreams by merely thing of what I want. This is the difference between reality and fantasy.
Anyway, I would like to add something. if this world is in which we live in is a dream, then when we die do we "wake up"?
We have no definite proof of our own existence other than those 5 sense, so we rely on them heavily and that to use is existence. My only answer to this is that I don't think we understand ourselves, and we never can. Without understanding ourselves, we'll never understand the universe. Scientific theory's, laws of the universe, they all could be completely wrong because of our dependence on those senses. I guess that's one of the amazing parts of life, is that you could be anything and we can't really comprehend it. Scary, but still incredible to think about all the possibility's that might explain true existence.
The raw philosophy is always more interesting then how we practically apply it.
I mean, nothing may exist in the way I think it exists.. but even if there's a slight chance that it does, I should act in a responsible manner befitting 'reality' rather then 'non-reality' as the moral implications of doing otherwise would be reprehensible.
I'd be interested in commenting more, but I'm keeping it short because I feel awful & honestly I don't have the patience rght now.
this is amazing. maybe the key to traveling across the universe has, quite literally, been in our heads the whole time! fascinating! i'm definitely reading this book!
What we see does exist. What you are failing to realize is that our senses are stimulated. By matter, waves, electrons, ect. What was stated doesn't make any sense to me. By the way, nice wall of words.
I honestly went tl;dr on both Shin and Moe's posts. It 5:30 am, so I'll use that as an excuse.
But.
What we see does exist. What you are failing to realize is that our senses are stimulated. By matter, waves, electrons, ect.
What makes you certain those stimuli are real? That they are what you think you are?
Personally I don't really care whether this world is real or not. I'm in it, I deal with it (to a certain degree). Searching for a way out - I'm just too lazy to attempt such a thing, even though I do question our perception of reality a lot.
What makes you certain those stimuli are real? That they are what you think you are?
Because everyone sees them, and everyone feels them, etc. (Unless they're impaired, of course). Every one sees a desk as the same color, or the same size, or the same height. All things have characteristics that makes them what they are, and everyone sees that in the same way.
I thought I described that : /. If life is a hologram, then everyone is one, because everyone sees something as it is and in the same way. (Unless they're impaired from doing so. Blind, deaf, etc.) And that's what I'm not getting, everything appears the same to everyone, but it's not what it is?
I thought I described that : /. If life is a hologram, then everyone is one, because everyone sees something as it is and in the same way. (Unless they're impaired from doing so. Blind, deaf, etc.) And that's what I'm not getting, everything appears the same to everyone, but it's not what it is?
We don't know. Our sensory perception is not definitely correct - because we can't see or learn anything from beyond our own perception, we'll never know if our perception is correct or not.
Unless they develop an alternate perception device, which will never happen. It's just weird to me. Following that ideology how do we know that we're not in some video game? If what we're perceiving is wrong, then what's right?
Because everyone sees them, and everyone feels them, etc. (Unless they're impaired, of course). Every one sees a desk as the same color, or the same size, or the same height. All things have characteristics that makes them what they are, and everyone sees that in the same way.
Aside from colour blind and random impairments... We can't know that we see things the same way. We perceive the same degree of difference (unless impaired somehow), but we can't know that we see exactly the same thing.
Also, human sight is a FAR from accurate sense. And does nowhere near perceive all there is to perceive.
Following that ideology how do we know that we're not in some video game? If what we're perceiving is wrong, then what's right?
We don't know. It's that simple. For now.
Ever thought about what it would be like to perceive the reality a dog lives in? People say they're colourblind. It's pretty obvious they rely a LOT more on their sense of smell and sense of hearing than their sight. Can you even imagine what a world where you can take so much information in through nose that your sight becomes a secondary thing? (Talking to a general you here, no one in particular.)
