Reality is an Illusion
- Thread starter ThomasJ79
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Define "actually exists". What number of people does it take to co firm thd actual existence of something and be right?
People get all kinds of things mixed up. Like thinking that "illusion" means "not real" which is wrong. An illusion is very real. We're also incorrect in saying that an illusion is nonphysical.
Both of the above are quite trivially proven by looking at illusions that work for most people, such as the Lilac chaser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilac_chaser
Stare at the middle of the image and after a while the revolving gap will appear to turn into a revolving green dot, and shortly after all the lilac dots will vanish. This is replicable because the phenomenon of illusion is real and physical and caused by specific properties.
Woah that's weird!
Illusion works on many different levels
I heard a criminal investigator use an example recently where he told the following story
A man and his son are driving along a road one day when they are involved in an accident. The father is killed but the ambulance comes along and takes the boy to a hospital and into the emergency room
However the surgeon in the ER points to the boy and says 'i cannot operate on this boy, he is my son'
How is it possible for the boy to be the son of the surgeon when the boys father died in the crash?
In all cases where reality is perceived correctly it is done so by a process that necessitates illusion. Our ability to percieve the "shared objective reality" is entirely governed by unconscious systems of equating scene perceptions with with meaningful symbols in our psyche. So therefore all perception is an illusion.
(surgeons his mother)
Objective reality is based on our sense perceptions, for if you cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or touch something, you cannot describe it's qualitative properties and you are left with an incomplete picture of the object or phenomenon. All of the instruments we use to unravel the mysteries of objective reality are extensions of our perceptions, especially to aid in observation, such as the microscope and telescope in observing the microscopic and macroscopic, as well as X-rays, infrared, and ultraviolet light detectors allowing us to observe electromagnetic radiation that our eyes haven't evolved to see without the instrumentation.
Most scientists fall into the empiricist camp and reality is what we have found to be consistently true through observation and experimentation. However, this objective reality is imposed by the human brain, the same thing that observes, measures, quantifies, etc. Why is it that us humans, assume that we are able to experience reality in its entirety, while other animals cannot? It is often assumed because we possess certain mental faculties and a larger brain to body ratio that we can know reality more completely. There is a "human reality", that may be more complete than say a "goldfish reality", but is still incomplete because of the limits of the human brain. There may exist in the universe sentient beings that have a more advanced brain than we and may understand more about reality than we do, but this is speculative and is only meant to prove a point: Reality for us has a human bias.
This means that true reality remains unknown by us and cannot be known. This doesn't mean that reality doesn't exist, just that what we think is reality is a partial reality, or illusion.
Most scientists fall into the empiricist camp and reality is what we have found to be consistently true through observation and experimentation. However, this objective reality is imposed by the human brain, the same thing that observes, measures, quantifies, etc. Why is it that us humans, assume that we are able to experience reality in its entirety, while other animals cannot? It is often assumed because we possess certain mental faculties and a larger brain to body ratio that we can know reality more completely. There is a "human reality", that may be more complete than say a "goldfish reality", but is still incomplete because of the limits of the human brain. There may exist in the universe sentient beings that have a more advanced brain than we and may understand more about reality than we do, but this is speculative and is only meant to prove a point: Reality for us has a human bias.
This means that true reality remains unknown by us and cannot be known. This doesn't mean that reality doesn't exist, just that what we think is reality is a partial reality, or illusion.
Also we only perceive a very narrow band of what the scientists call 'visible light' which is only a tiny slice of the spectrum
So in terms of perceiving reality we, as a species, are virtually blind when relying only on our sight
There could be all sorts of things going on outside of visible light that we are not even aware of
'Science' does indeed as you say rely on instruments and quantifiables but mysticism has used other tools to expand our perceptual awareness for example entheogens which are like a telescope or microscope of sorts which allows us to perceive our reality differently
Once when i was tripping i saw everything as red and green. When i passed my hand through the air it was like water with ripples
I was seeing the matrix differently...as waveform energy
[MENTION=6303]Jimmers[/MENTION] not bad.
To experience "reality" we would need to be able to experience all aspects of what makes the universe. All wave forms, radiation, the spining of each electron and movement of each atom on an individual basis and when they combine to form larger structures.
Add to that the fact our brains would have to process all of that information and who would ever be able to say the way a brain processed that information was the correct way of doing it?
Reality is subjective. Reality is perhaps better worded as "common understaning of the physical".
To experience "reality" we would need to be able to experience all aspects of what makes the universe. All wave forms, radiation, the spining of each electron and movement of each atom on an individual basis and when they combine to form larger structures.
Add to that the fact our brains would have to process all of that information and who would ever be able to say the way a brain processed that information was the correct way of doing it?
Reality is subjective. Reality is perhaps better worded as "common understaning of the physical".
Define "actually exists". What number of people does it take to co firm thd actual existence of something and be right?
What actually exists is what actually exists. That's pretty well defined. What exists is what exists whether you know it or not.
If anything needs confirmation, it's the hallucination side of it, because technically speaking a hallucination is a perception in the absence of an appropriate stimulus. An example is hearing a sound when there are not appropriate sound waves to trigger it.
Proving it is an exercise of practice, not definition. But in most cases, a simple instrument would suffice. If you were to throw this out then you have to throw out everything - all science and all understanding about everything.
Yes.
Imagine there's a cat, but to you it appears as a tiny goat.
The cat is the cat by definition no matter what you see. The cat represents reality because by definition, reality is what is actually true and unaltered. This definition does not include a condition where you must ever actually see what is reality.
The tiny goat is an illusion because the real cat is causing you to see it. Look at cat, see goat. The goat represents illusion. If we were to equivocate we could say that the the cat is the goat and reality is an illusion, but that's slightly off because this equivocation is paradoxical since reality is what is true and illusion is not true. They contradict each other.
However we can say that the cat, reality, appears to be a tiny goat, the illusion, which we accept as a real property of the actual cat. So the tiny goat is what the cat appears to be, so the illusion is a reality [incorrectly perceived]
Nobody. It's predetermined before you ever think about it.
Moreover, illusion is unconscious and it works whether you want it to or not, provided you meet the conditions for it to happen. So it really has nothing to do with subjective judgments such as definitions or deciding which is which.
What is, is, and what isn't, isn't. And there's a big difference between the assumption that something is vs the assumption that something isn't. e.g. a tree is a tree so you have a singular entity that you're calling a tree. That which is not a tree is everything else: a horse is not a tree, a car is not a tree, a fish is not a tree etc etc. until you've gone through the potentially infinite amount of things in the universe that are not trees.
Basically it's probably easier to say what isn't real than to say what is real.
Fine so something that is, is. But how do you know what is, is what you are actually seeing?
Example, we may part of a computer program, our reality looks like x, but to someone else x looks like 1s and 0s. To someone else it looks like streaming electrons.
I disagree. That which we are actually perceiving is no more or less real than that which we cannot perceive. To use an example, we can see only visible light, and we cannot see ultraviolet light. That does not make one or the other any more or less real or true reality. We can simply only perceive one part of it.
If what you want is to experience the totality of reality, then sure, you must perceive everything every where at every time. That of course is humanly impossible.
Now I'd like to point out there's a difference between perceiving and interpreting. Most people perceive everything in the same way. There's really no difference between each of us and the capabilities of our senses. Sure there are those that are better and those that are worse in some ways, but for example, for everyone that has 20/20 vision can perceive the same patterns of light and shadow. There's some variation when it comes to color, but I argue that's just another piece of the total reality. One person just has a better set of tools for measuring this objective reality. The way we interpret reality is subjective, but I would say that, for the most part, the perception is the same. You know, assuming no drugs, schizophrenia, stuff like that. There is some question when it comes to stuff like a matrix example, but since that can never be proven one way or the other, we are left to assume one or the other and for this thought experiment, lets assume our objective reality is real.
Also, because I don't think anyone has mentioned this yet, but Plato's allegory of the cave is exactly talking about this issue.....
There seems to be good evidence that things change becaue they are being observed. That what was, no longer is because it has changed in accordance to the fact it has been observed. What say ye to that? How does this fit into "reality".
Well the premise of the thread is kind of all about this, isn't it?
What is, isn't what you're seeing.
This is true and in fact inescapable. This is trivially provable under the premise that your very presence alters the environment, so by even being around to observe, you have different conditions than if you hadn't been there.
A good example of this is that using a thermometer to get the temperature of water actually changes the temperature of the water, since the thermometer must operate on a heat exchange. It either takes or gives heat from the water depending on which one is hotter and this is what gives the reading. Another example that to get the PSI for a tire you must release some of the air into your PSI gauge which alters the PSI level ever so slightly - The PSI after measuring it will technically not be as it was before measuring it, though generally the difference would be considered negligible.
Edit: also one could get accurate readings by perhaps predicting the offset caused by measuring and mathematically cancelling it. You could do this on paper or by actually manipulating the object by causing a change which will be negated by the disturbance of the reading and thereby canceled out. However in any case no matter what, the thing you're observing ends up altered.
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