do you believe life is an illusion?

It is just a saying....was not begging..believe me....lol

 

Dreams are pretty random and I sure would not like to see most dreams I have come true....as some of them are nightmares........It is the subconscious mind feeding thoughts up to the conscious mind in sleep...things to deal with, etc.....all Freudian....
The dreams that are the imigination awake....can come true sometimes .......as they are a spotter for ingeniuty to set in to make the possible ones come true....as everything one can imagine cannot come true. I cannot fly up to a tree today and sit with the crows on a high branch in this body.......for example....The imagination is also a reality...because whatever the imagintion brews up is real in someone's mind.

 

For thedope.....lol


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQgmyQFFQjo"]Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons - Beggin - Original - YouTube

 

"you and i, we've been through that,
and this is not our fate.
so let us not talk falsely now,
you know the hour, is getting late"

- from hendrix, along the watchtower -

life an illusion? pretty much any approach to this question will be an over simplification.

our perceptions occur internally.
accurate or not, they are none the less,
at the very least, stimulated,
by whatever actually IS out there, beyond ourselves.

 

I believe that the only thing I know for certain is that I know nothing for certain including whether life is an illusion or not however even if it was it wouldn't change a thing would it? I mean I'd still want this illusion to be the best illusion possible haha

 

I don't remember if I posted this in my previous posts in this thread--I think I spoke more to the phenomenalist view on it, and the holographic theories on reality--but let me demonstrate just how much illusion the physical world actually contains. Here I will focus on reality qua 'physical reality,' so I won't even get into the strange realm of quantum super-position, and so forth.

As I sit and write this, it is about 2:00 am on a fairly cold winter night in Colorado. Outside I hear the occaisional howl of a wind marking the approach of a storm that may drop snow tomorrow. I stepped out to buy some pop about an hour ago, and found a definite bite in the cold air, that left me chilled for a while. But I am warm and cozy inside my home now. My Filipina wife, more accustomed to a tropical climate, keeps the house at a warm 74 degrees Farhenheit. My house is a brick house, and between the brick and the mortar, to me the walls are as solid as rock. The interior walls are not as hard, but they are dry wall, coated with paint. In short, the walls appear solid to me. No matter how hard that wind blows, it will not enter the house, I am protected from the cold air, and the warm air will not seep out. If I were to ever doubt that, I could simply place my hand on the wall, and see that, yes, it appears solid, and it will definitely keep the cold outside.

But the truth is, all of these walls are composed almost entirely of empty space. They are very little different from the empty space outside (filled with air), where the wind blows freely and the temperature is decided entirely upon the elements. There is nothing but empty space between the molecules these walls are composed of, between the atoms within the molecules, and between the electrons and the atomic nuclei of the atoms themselves. For example, if we took a single hydrogen atom out of one of my walls, and blew it up to the size of a football field in diameter, the nucleus would be the size of a marble on the 50 yard line, and the electron would be like another marble at the field goal.

We can rationalize that it is the number of electrons moving around the atoms that give each element its unique qualities, such as solidity and hardness, and in turn, shape the qualities of individual molecules, but nonetheless, there is a huge amount of empty space. My hand is made up of an equal amount of empty space, as is the wind and the cold air on the other side of the wall. I can move my had freely through the air, yet the air does not move through my hand, and neither the air, nor my hand, moves freely through the wall.

Let's consider this from a different persepctive, that of phase transition, which is a function of temperature. We can see this more clearly when considering water. Below 32 degrees Farhenheit, water freezes into a solid, and the water molecules are stacked upon each other in a crystalline structure (though there is still mostly empty space between and within the atoms). Ice seems so solid, that if your body struck hard enough against a thick layer of ice, it would be the same as hitting cement, leaving you bloodied, broken up, and possibly dead. At a higher temperature, the ice melts and we have a liquid. Here the molecules line up generally with the hydrogen atoms of one molecule against the oxygen atoms of the other. Now we can move our hand relatively freely through the water. There is no real difference between the two phases in terms of empty space. In fact if you were to hit a deep layer of water hard enough, then it too would seem just as hard as cement, and have the same effect on your mortal body.

Why is the quality of one phase so different from that of another despite all the empty space? We don't know entirely for sure, but we do theorize that it has to do with, as I said, the number of electrons.

Now let's look at how much empty space there is parading as solid material from a still different perspective. Our experience of the earth, and all the solid concrete material that exists within it, and on its surface, is that of something so great it is beyond our experiential comprehension. Yes we can rationalize how big the earth is, but all we can gain from experience is that it seems to stretch on forever. And every bit of that expanse, stretching further than we can see, is filled with solid material, some more solid than others, but solid concrete materiality just the same. Below our feet, is nothing but solid material stretching ever inward to a very distant center so deep that it too is hard to comprehend in an existential manner.

But now that we know that all of this is mostly empty space, what if we were to somehow see what would happen if we were to squeeze all this empty space out between the molecules, atoms, and the individual particles. As we squeeze out all of this empty space, the earth and everything on it and within it, would get smaller and smaller until finally we had almost all of the empty space squeezed out of it. At this point the earth would be smaller than a golf ball---and yet it would still have the same weight as it did at its normal existentially incomprehensible great size. The crazy thing is that this immense weight would make up such a small point in space-time that it would bend space time considerably. For all the little tiny people living on the earth, now so small, that even the most powerful microscope would not allow an outside observer to be able to make them out, time would seem to be moving very quickly.

But there is still a small amout of empty space left, so we make one final push to rid the world of this last bit of empty space, and suddenly there is nothing but a hole---a three-dimensional hole in space-time---a black hole. To an outside observer, the earth has disapeared--because the gravitational pull of the earth is so great (and yet the weight has not changed, the mass has not changed, it only covers a smaller portion of space-time), that not even light can escape it. There is no longer a primary phenomenal experience of the earth, for all practical purposes it no longer exists in our universe. Yet there is a secondary phenomenal experience of the black hole where the earth once existed---the x-rays and other photons that are given off as things near the event horizon, before the pull prevents such energy from escaping the hole.

So here I sit in the comfort of my own home---protected by walls that I perceive as solid, yet that are so empty and filled with void, that to remove it would cause the very walls to disappear entirely from the universe I perceive as real!

 

i'm not entirely sure what is meant by the question.
in a social sense it is easy to get out of touch with rocks and trees and everything that doesn't begin and end with people and what they tell each other.
one reason i prefer to stand back a bit of a ways from all that is human.
to not loose touch with everything else, that our species is such a tiny aspect of.

could we all be just me and myself imagining everything else i think i know?
the short answer could be "this way lies madness", but what then is madness?

too short answers have a habit of being at best inaccurate, and thus suspect.

science, if i recall correctly, defines life as metabolizing and reproducing.
i see no strong argument against this in reality taking place.

what we think we know, that is another matter,
and subject to the usual caveat of non-infallibility.

remove your walls and pavements and cars, and you will find not void,
but rocks and trees, and the air you breathe, until we have become so many,
as to remove everything that produces that air,
then there will still be rocks and the mineral substrate of a planet.

its just a matter of not getting so caught up in social bullshit,
as to forget, that we're really just one small planet after all.

 

Yes. It's all too good, too amazing to be true. This is some spiritual dream. We're not really here at all. See you on some other cosmos. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when.

 

I still think this.

 

You could also conclude that theory to the animal kingdom as well; all indeed empty space.

Light, to me, represents the 'measurement' from wave pattern to particle; which gives us the conceived notion of matter.

By taking in the input the light portrays: our eyes, of which deciphers the information, passes it along to our brain which completes the circuit (or organizes the information) and gives us the 3 dimensional illusionary substance we all perceive as 'reality'.

In essence, reality is just vibrating particles manipulated by our experiences, in which we have control over, if we choose to do so.

Life = Balance and fluidity.

 

Yes---everything physical has the same empty space, which if completely removed, would leave it as a blackhole. Of physical living things, there is however consciousness which I believe is transcendent of the physical-----in fact, I would say that everything, even what we percieve as dead or inanimate is alive.

I may have written it in this thread, but I have definitely talked about it in others, but I also define the wave side of the wave-particle duality as non-physical. We may perceive the phenomena of the wave, but only upon it manifesting as a physical particle through decoherence. The other, more controversial, process of wave-particle collapse involves awareness--the conscious observer. In this sense, absolute reality may be both wave and particle, but the physical is only the manifestation of particles----a manifestation that lasts no longer than one planck time. One planck length is the width of the hologram.

Something I find very interesting is Hegel's dialectic of being. He asked what one would think of if they tried to think of Pure being. The only thing we could actually picture pure being as is nothingness he reasoned. Therefore he presented the following dialectic: being (thesis) and nothingness (antithesis) provides the synthesis of becoming.

being + nothingness = becoming.

The hologram continuously blinks in and out of nothingness-----wave, particle, wave, particle, wave, particle...

One planck length is too small for any particle. But a particle is composed of subatomic particles such as massless gluons, and higgs particles (which supposedly solved the problem of atomic mass, but yet only represent 2% of an atom's mass). These same subatomic particles must undergo decoherence, and may also be subject to awareness. Therefore, in any one planck length at one plack time,a whole atom cannot manifest, but enough of subatomic particles can to begin the phenomena of an atom. Enough to present the smallest manifestation of the present-----the hologram.

In any one moment of manifested holographic reality--one planck length of time--reality is 'becoming,'

 

I believe that I do not and cannot know but if it is an illusion I still want to make it an awesome illusion for me and all the other fictional characters

 

Life is real.... every fuckin thing that happens around it is an illusion,,, only if you let it... but since we're on a drug forum yea all around ya is an illusion, You try to figure out reality. That wasn't a question, that was a um, whats opposite to a question) what was the question?

 

Life is only an illusion if that is what you make it for yourself.
Life is very real for many of us, though.

 

Life is real. It's only an illusion when someone isn't in life... that happens to the best of us sometimes lol
especially trying to type on a damn keyboard when yur wasted

 

Life can be fun when experiencing an illusion. All perception during life is electrical and chemical with loads of biology.

I'd be more curious about perception after death.

 

the illusion is that our petty little collective ego as a species is any bigger deal then anything else that exists.
or that the existence of anything depends on what we think we know about it, nor upon our doing so.

 

actually we are spiritual beings having a physical experience not physical beings having a spiritual experience, hence the illusion.

 

Where is the poll buddy??

I cant select yes!!

 

whats wrong with religious rules. Are whole illusion is based on rules.