is reality as we know it, really a dream?

Discussion in 'Metaphysics and Mysticism' started by mekia, Dec 1, 2019.

  1. Yes, but not necessarily a negative thing. Men have frequently found themselves in dire situations.
     
  2. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    there are things to stub your toe on, whether you believe in them or not. that is reality. as for "as we know it"; no, we don't, and it owes nothing to what anyone says they do.
    but those things we stub our toes on, we can observe that some happen more often then others and some happen more often when other things happen furst.
    and that is all the "knowledge" that there is. fortunately nothing has to be known to exist. because the unknown being unknown, is part of reality also.

    the hatred of logic is not a biological imperative. but it is a collective death wish.
    too many beliefs and cultures get this backwards.
    and there is no evidence it is the will of any god for them to do so.

    as for dreams, sometimes we can manipulate things in them. no more or less reliably nor easily then when awake.
    sometimes this can have a statistical effect in the awake world, but that is even less common.
    and doesn't depend on who or what anyone is either.

    a dream or some dreams, may be a parallel universe, with little or no connection to the one we're 'awake' in.
    it may be a fair question to ask though, if a majority of us may be a kind of sleep walking.

    that doesn't make rocks and trees any less real, only our perceptions of them and of each other.

    as for the non-physical, like the physical, they owe nothing to what we make up to tell each other.
     
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  3. tikoo

    tikoo Senior Member

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    When I awake in the morning , I pause . Within this time the dreaming becomes art and
    I am at play . Oh , but for now I don't want to make more stuff . I might not want to stretch
    canvases and paint there-on what I've seen . It's been vastly diverse .
     
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  4. everything bagel

    everything bagel Banned

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    I'm a lucid dreamer. I know when I'm dreaming and when I'm not. This is not a dream. Are least... not my dream
     
  5. DrRainbow

    DrRainbow Ambassador of Love

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    I go to sleep in reality before dreaming of waking in my dream and it would not surprise me to learn that dream is another distant reality weather it be this timeline or this soul.
     
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  6. Dreams occur; therefore, they are real.
     
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  7. Tyrsonswood

    Tyrsonswood Senior Moment Lifetime Supporter

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    Reality occurs, therefore, it is a dream
     
  8. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    what we think we know because we tell each other, is a very large percentage a kind of communal self deception.
    realty is that which begins beyond the box of what we tell ourselves and each other.
    reality is a rock, a tree, a solar system, the depths of space itself.

    all our human bullshit is about things that MIGHT exist. beyond where it stops, live things that actually DO.
    and yes, non-physical things really might, but even they, owe nothing, to what we tell each other.
     
  9. wilsjane

    wilsjane Nutty Professor HipForums Supporter

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    Dreams are something that has puzzled me all my life. I see some links to how people behave under hypnosis. This gives me a clue that they may be some form of regression, explaining why computers, modern transport, and most material things of my era never seem to feature and when they do, I can never actually find them. Streets, architecture and many everyday items all seem to date back to another era, although they seem normal at the time.

    I have seen undeniable evidence of reincarnation, but it is only a mental state, Perhaps the thing that seems to be ignored in reincarnation is that the person accepts that they were a different person, sometimes of a different gender.

    Scientists admit that much of our DNA is still a mystery and parts of our brain and how it forms our personality are even less understood.
    I think that our brain has fare more information locked away than we could even dream off. I can resolve engineering problems, but when someone asks me "who taught you that", I simply don't have a clue.

    Mankind undoubtedly has a shortcoming.....Which is the lack or ability to comprehend infinity.
    When people tell me that it all started with a 'big bang', I simply ask them, "which big bang was that" and when they talk about the entire universe, I ask them if it is surrounded by a brick wall.
    Don't try to work it all out, or you will end up as nutty as I am...... Really, their is no begging, no end, but we are still the bit in the middle.
    PS, don't tell me that it is all a circle, or I will ask you 'which circle'.??????
     
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  10. Dax

    Dax Members

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    An age old question ... Somebody and I can't remember who, once said: Reality is subjective. But our view of things is never an undisputed truth. Other people’s truths come from the reality that they perceive in their own minds, and their truth is as valid to them as our truth is for us.
     
  11. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    not unless the "as we know it" were to be taken as somehow the more important part of the question.
    which it isn't. we're guests here, in this universe, not its masters nor its reason for existence.
    which it does without requiring reason for anyway, though there always could be one or more we don't know.

    good intentions are good
    what is not known is not known
    and it is possible to avoid causing harm.

    i am no guru myself, but these things i know.

    love is not love when it is a word that becomes weaponized.
    consideration is everything in a universe that is so almost completely mineral, that all life is rare and precious.

    nothing that exists was created for our sole convenience.

    there is only one evil, and that is aggressive inconsiderateness. of anything.
    humility is that nothing is about ourselves, and very little if anything is about any one self aware being.

    we do not become humble by saying this or that god is wonderful, though it or they might be.
    humility is to know that sapience is the guest of life, and life itself is a guest of an almost totally mineral universe.

    yes i am being totally not humble to say these things
    nor do they come from some unseen force or being.

    they are only what i have observed by living the life that i have.

    i have been told by a sikh'i i have too many possessions.
    yet i have kept only those thing with which i create images of a world
    that our own would be, if every historical decision point had been based on the exercize of logic in the service of consideration
    that is the world my dreams take place in when i am asleep in this world.

    does any of this matter?

    truth is diversity
    morality is consideration
    logic is required to avoid causing harm
    and whatever is not known, and it is more likely then not, that more is not known then is
    owes nothing to what any of us tells anyone else

    no belief that has a name, is any exception, whether it is the most known and dominant, or the least,
    even the belief in the non-existence of anything, should one choose to belief that.

    there is nothing subjective about the unknown being unknown
    however much what and how we experience the non-physical might be
     
  12. Dude111

    Dude111 An Awesome Dude HipForums Supporter

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    How do we know if we are awake or asleep now??
     
  13. Tishomingo

    Tishomingo Members

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    Unfortunately, reality probably isn't entirely subjective.Reality bites! If you jump off the top of the Empire State Building, you probably really will make a big splash on Broadway! I remember a discussion I had on HF awhile back with a dude who was arguing that all reality is an illusion. I suggested that he test it out by jumping off the top of a high building. He never posted again. I've always felt a bit sheepish about that.

    As for "undisputed truth", I doubt that there is such a thing, at least not in this "postmodern" age of social media and "alternative facts". Nothing is certain, not even that . You place your bets and take your chances.
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2022
  14. MeAgain

    MeAgain Dazed & Confused Lifetime Supporter Super Moderator

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    All jumping off of a building proves is that illusions can have consequences, not that illusions don't exist.
    When we speak of the illusion of reality, it doesn't mean that because we suffer under an illusion as to the true nature of reality, we are free do do anything we want or to ignore the consequences of our actions.
    It means that each of us interprets the world differently depending on our individual understanding, sensory inputs, and intellectual analysis. None of these interpretations is the one and only correct one as all are dependent on our individuality.

    This can be extended to our understanding of our own idea of self, or individual ego. We build up a model of who we think we are and how we relate to the outside world; which by the way exists as another model inside our heads.
    Objective reality, the outside world, is a distorted view of the real world as it is filtered by our senses. Subjective reality is a view of objective reality which is based on the distorted sensory input. So we have a compound distortion of what is really going on.
    What we think is real is an illusion, a distortion, of true reality.

    That doesn't mean that reality doesn't have rules and consequences. Obviously it does as we all agree to a limited extent on what reality is and how it operates. But we all are subject to our illusionary understanding caused by our individuality.
     
  15. Tishomingo

    Tishomingo Members

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    Yes, it's true that we can never be certain we're in touch with the true reality, and that it is human nature to engage in cognitive constructs to orient us to our environment. Aspects of the three major schools of psychology come into play here in shaping our worldviews and religions. Cognitively, we are governed by what Shermer calls patternicity and agenticity. The former is the tendency to see patterns, even when there aren't any objectively, for example faces in clouds and the Man in the Moon. Agenticity is the tendency to attribute agency to natural phenomena, as in assuming that an ambiguous figure is animated. Both tendencies have been vital to human survival, patternicity in enabling us to see connections among diverse phenomena, agenticity in avoiding mistaking an alligator for a log. Psychoanalysis has made us aware of existential anxieties shaping our beliefs about an afterlife and heavenly beings we can appease. And behavioral psychology makes us aware of social conditioning, which is a powerful force shaping our beliefs about everything. For all we know, we could actually be brains in a jar in some science lab. A professor at Oxford U., Nick Bostrom, thinks we're in a matrix-style virtual reality, and physicist Frank Tipler has generalized Tielhard de Chardin's Omega point into our ultimate fate, in which robots will assign us to virtual heaven or virtual hell according to how naughty and nice we've been. As wayfarers making our way through the morass of life, though, we have to be careful about our constructs, since we do face real consequences if our constructed reality doesn't conform to the actual one.

    The solutions I opt for are existentialism, pragmatism, and utilitarianism. Existentialism sees life as a gamble in which we bet our lives on one or another view of reality. I prefer educated bets, based on reason, intuition, the available evidence and Occam's razor. Pragmatism judges beliefs on the basis of how they "work" or function in the life of the believer. What effects do they produce? And utilitarianism uses the standard of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It's ultimately a judgment call. I assume that much of what I believe is incorrect, but at least I try to have a rational basis for my opinions. And I reject the relativist notion that one opinion is as good as another--in the area of politics, religion and life. Some are likely to get us splattered on Broadway, others not. And that will be true regardless of what the believers might think.
     
    Last edited: Nov 21, 2022
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  16. Mountain Valley Wolf

    Mountain Valley Wolf Senior Member

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    Wow, this whole thread happened without me! I was too busy with other things--like being an anti-Trump activist. The last posts were a year ago November, and at that time I was nearing completion on a book that among other things did something that I struggled with immensely; It provides an introduction to Archephenomenalism that I hope is simple and straightforward and does not read like it came out of a post-graduate philosophy paper, or the hand of Kant, or Hegel, or Heidegger, or any other tough to read piece of philosophy. But then I reviewed Schopenhauer, and decided to add a whole new chapter to the book. But we've done a lot of travelling and other things, so I haven't gotten very far on it over the past year. Getting back on HipForums should help me get back to work on it.


    I used to read about the holographic universe and think, wow, that's a fascinating concept, but how would we ever know if it is true or not. it was like Kant's thing-in-itself. We can't know what we can't see, and if it creates the illusion of a continuous reality, we would never know.

    Then about 25 years ago, while still working in the stock market, I returned to my passion (and what was years earlier my original major in college) and decided to write philosophy. Originally it started as a search for meaning for myself and I wasn't sure if I would ever publish any of it, though I was published, and even had a weekly column in an english newspaper in Japan for a number of years in the late 80's. Long story short, it eventually morphed into trying to resolve the problem of meaninglessness in the postmodern world. I had no idea where it would take me. It took me down several rabbit holes---one with Einstein's theories, another with Quantum mechanics and so forth. I also needed something that would make rational sense of the crazy world of magic and the supernatural in another journey I was simultaneously taking in a search for truth and meaning---the Red Road of indigenous spirituality.

    Soon I was convinced that the universe is in fact a hologram or at least something very close. Quantum physicists realize that the reality they deal in is too weird, so they don't go there, they just stick with the math and shy away from what the math is actually telling them. So it takes a philosopher to do that, or, at least someone who writes philosophy. I don't see how it could be any other way. I tried to work out other scenarios, where collapsed subatomic particles manifest longer than just a brief moment. But how would they do this? If their presence is dependent upon what physicists abstractly call an observer, and that it is quantum information that determines what they collapse as, the probability of where and when they collapse, and their spin, and so forth, it makes more sense that this is only for a very infinitesimal moment than for a longer period of time, which in the quantum world would become astronomic in scale, and would require vast amounts of quantum information and then the problem of how long would it exist, and would it apply to all particles, and so forth. In fact, Quantum Physicists, as I have said many times, do not even know if particles actually collapse into being. It doesn't matter, They don't have to actually collapse into being, as what we experience is the phenomena of those particles rather than the particles themselves.

    We are unable to experience anything physical outside of the moment of Now--other than the fact that the moment of now we experience has already past. But physical things can only exist in the present. anything in the past or the future, is nonphysical. So this infinitesimal moment of now, where particles, as far as we can tell, exist, can only be the present.

    One of the implications of this reality---where everything 'appears' to blink into existence from nothingness, for an infinitesimal point of Now, and then blink back out into nothingness before a new set of particles blinks momentarily into being, which may or may not actually blink into being, but it doesn't matter because our mind picks up all of the phenomena thus generated and creates the world we know, and also considering that this nothingness is a superpositioned reality where everything represents infinite positions in all of time and space---is that size does not really matter. The universe could be a true hologram, which could be incredibly small, or it could be incredibly massive like we believe it to be, and just be like a hologram in its radical temporality. Size does not matter.

    In fact, I have a principle on that---but I haven't yet found the way to word it that I like--something simple that expresses it. I believe Einstein had a good way of stating this, though he didn't take it to the phenomenalist conclusions I did----basically that everything exists in the present based on the universal constant ('c' or the speed of light.) The speed of light, is literally the speed of time. A quick way to explain this is by my example of the dead friend paradox. Lets say you live in the future and your friend is on a space ship 4 light years away from earth. You communicate with him but it takes 4 years for each of you to receive the other person's message. Suddenly he sends out a distress call and his ship explodes killing him. This message is superpositioned meaning that it already exists all over the universe, in all times. The information was in your room as you communicated with him, it was in the hospital room where he was born as a baby, it is on the other side of the universe, or at the BIg Bang---it is everywhere----at least, from our limited three dimensional perspective, that is how we understand it. It exists with all other possible outcomes for him. But when his ship exploded, it collapsed into an actuality. But here is the thing, when it became an actuality, the distress call was right where you are, but only as a nonphysical reality. Your radio will not pick it up. You will have to wait until the speed of light determines that it can be physical--4 years from now. So all reality could be a souplike mixture of a hologram. You physically perceive and understand your friend to be 4 light years away because that is how you experience physical reality. But in truth he maybe mixed in this same soup that you are---a little minute droplet that is our entire universe, and he is thus next to you and mixed within you. But the universal constant determines that physically he is 4 light years away. Everything around us appears to be separated from us by specific light distances---the sun is 8 light minutes away, my christmas tree is probably 30 light nanoseconds away from me. Whether it truly is that far, or I simply experience the phenomena of that distance--all depth and space is determined by the universal constant as to when such phenomena becomes experienced in a physical sense. It is the speed of light (the speed of time) which determines when an electromagnetic wave will collapse into a photon, and it is probably the same for all waves. This is how space-time appears to exist in a physical reality that is really only space-present.

    Another fascinating implication is that not only is our physical reality one of three dimensional depth and space, but that it is consistent from one moment to the next, despite the fact that each moment of Now requires new quantum collapses, and that quantum randomness plays a significant role in the universe.

    In fact--I have a principle for that too---Principle of Sufficient Quantum Form, which is modeled after Liebniz' Principle of Sufficient Reason. It basically states that, 'For every physical existent, because it remains consistent from one moment to the next, there must be, at the quantum level, sufficient facticity, reason, and cause (i.e. quantum information) for each quanta to overcome its super-positioned wave-field state and quantum randomness in order to maintain such physical consistency.' In other words, there must be sufficient quantum information in order to keep reality consistent from one moment to the next, otherwise reality would break down into chaos and then nothing would exist. This is also a quantum mechanical proof of essentialism and even idealism.

    The idea that the world we live in is largely illusion, and that there is a side to reality which we cannot understand or perceive, which is on the other side of the world we function and live within created by our minds, is not new to philosophy. Immanuel Kant explained the same thing in the 1700's, and he basically shaped the world we live in today.




    I believe that was me. I do remember someone telling me that, and I tried to explain that whether we live in a holographic universe or not, it doesn't matter because what is real to us is the physical reality that we perceive and exist within. And, by the way, this requires an objective understanding to navigate. My push for subjectivism does not deny that. I probably explained, as I typically did in such debates about the world as illusion vs the world we live in, that I use a Jungian definition of the ego, which filters out all the unnecessary phenomena of existence and Being in order to keep us consciously in this realm of the here and now.

    As a matter of fact, upon your suggestion, I did jump off the Empire State Building and my legs broke off upon hitting the ground, because I only had enough time to alter the quantum reality of my torso, arms, hands, neck and head. So I had to regrow them, and they started as baby feet and legs. The Deadpool movie was based entirely off of me doing that. Finally they are long enough for me to reach my computer. So I'm back... LMAO!

    Anyway, MeAgain in his response above did well to explain why jumping off the Empire State Building does not solve the issue.
     
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  17. skip

    skip Founder Administrator

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    I'm reminded here of how Carlos Castaneda supposedly jumped into an abyss with the help of Don Juan. Similar scenario involving objective and subjective realities in your mind. Much of Castaneda's writings are about a "separate reality" from the one we perceive with our limited senses.

    For me, it's about transcending our limited senses. Science extends our senses to the outer and inner universes. But we are still limited by our tools. So we try to transcend these limitations with mind altering drugs and philosophical theorems. But we always seem to fall short.

    So some embrace religion for the answers cause those blinders stop one from asking such questions cause religions claim to have the answers we seek, so don't look elsewhere!
     
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  18. Twogigahz

    Twogigahz Senior Member

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    I dunno, but I have some really weird dreams sometimes. The ones I remember, they're rarely pleasant, many about loss or being late or not being able to find my way or find my school schedule that had a class session, say, Tuesday morning and then Thursday afternoon and I'd end up missing them....or being back at an old job I liked only it was all changed...and I didn't know what to do..

    I fear some deep psychological meanings here..............
     
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  19. scratcho

    scratcho Lifetime Supporter Lifetime Supporter

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    I was willing to consider that I was living in a dream --- Until I fell off a roof. Transcendence failed me just when I needed it the most.
     
    Last edited: Dec 27, 2023
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  20. Twogigahz

    Twogigahz Senior Member

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    Well, maybe it was a dream until you hit the ground. What did you break?
     
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