On the other end of your same statement, does that mean that there's a claim no other world exists outside our perspective or that we just can't know anything about it enough to make statements about it (moving towards solipsism of sorts)?

I don't think it even has to get that deep.

We are hallucinating constantly.

Some of us hallucinate approximately the same things and agree with each other that it is reality

Within each culturally accepted hallucination appear a multitude of splinter trips, both solitary and group populated. The splinters are however still attached to the main body. Things run along smoothly. The solitary hallucination that breaks away completely from any agreement or group belief becomes isolated. Sometimes we lock those people in padded cells on a steady cocktail of chemicals. To help them.

Another one that always makes me laugh is the economic excuse hallucination. Yes, we could do this thing that would benefit all of humanity and advance us to the next level of existence.

But who is going to pay for it?

We almost all of us subscribe to the culturally accepted trip that humanity cannot achieve something without paying humanity for doing it.

99.999% of us humans accept economics as reality. But it is no more real than the little green men who come to converse with the lunatic in the asylum.

Everything you both said can certainly be valid within your hallucination. If you convince me it is worth hallucinating about then it becomes valid in my hallucination too.

The term hallucination is defined as an experience of something created by our mind and sensory array that is in fact not real.

If anyone believes there is a definite line in the sand between what is real or not and they are prepared to be the one brave enough to say for certain where that line is then I admire their courage.

For me, currently, what we call reality is simply multiple votes for the same illusion.

That does not mean I do not believe that either of you exist. I feel fairly confident you do exist as conscious entities. We all three appear to accept that the existence of this message board is worth believing in. So here we are.

For me to really stop and honestly think about the absurdity of the universe and our awareness of it - to try to put my finger on just exactly what is reality - is the most terrifying prospect my consciousness can imagine. It just seems far more likely that we are all sharing a wonderful dream.

Well, now we're at a point where it "goes that deep."

Notice that I haven't made any claims one way or another. I'm merely providing a query wherein we explore what you mean.

And this seems to be a way to avoid what I've asked you.

In this case it seems that the perceived phenomenon is what as deemed not really here, not all sense experience that is had by the mind. The definition implies that the phenomenon is wholly supplied by the mind. What about sense experience of things that appear independent, conditionally (appealing to the idea of interconnectedness), to the mind and the sense? Would it not be more accurate to say that some of the input we receive is hallucinatory or illusory, as a by product of mechanisms and interactions of the mind and senses, and not the sum total of this input received?

What about the intersubjective nature of science and the scientific method? Are the people who appeal to this sort of modality merely adhering to some alternate hallucination, despite the goal and aim of their pursuit?

So to understand you correctly, I exist in some manner to you, but nothing is "real," so I exist as part of your hallucination, and so in a certain sense I don't exist at all?

In philosophy of mind there is the idea of solipsism, which posits that the only thing one can truly know to exist is the existence of their own mind. This is often misinterpreted as saying that nothing exists outside of one's own mind (including other minds), which, logically, is a leap, because it does not imply this. Though I'm not saying that you're implying you're the only thing that exists, this was just something that popped into my mind that I thought to share.

Your position has some parallels with the Brain in a Vat theory which has been more popularized by the Matrix, both of which are intimately concerned with how we know what is real and exists, which ends up being quite the epistemological and ontological knot.

I sometimes wonder if it's really absurd or if our thinking that it's absurd is just a reflection of our limits of capacity to understand and grasp it.

One love

What about animals or insects? are they also part of this shared hallucination?
Imagine a mosquito that leans on my refrigerator and I crush it, it can mean 3 things:
either my fridge, the mosquito and I exist and I have killed it;
the mosquito does not exist and is part of my hallucination (as my fridge);
the mosquito and I exist but the fridge does not, and it is so convinced of the hallucination that it died going against the laws of physics (since somewhere it has to lean to be crushed).

For me the conclusion is the first. Is it the second for you?

What I ask myself is: why should our perception be something to be taken into account to determine if behind something there is this matter that we call "truth"?

Precisely because we cannot escape from our perception we cannot make absolutist determinations like you did with "everything is an hallucination".

That said, I appreciate your vision, don't think not! but I think it comes from a desire to create that mystery that we human beings like so much.

Philosophy repels most humans as it only creates more difficult questions. Science is a wonderful thing, indeed, already in this post alone I have quoted biological science multiple times

an interpretation governed by a few supposed billion years of evolution geared entirely towards survival and reproduction.

Not at all. We are the same thing experiencing itself from a different angle.

What about animals or insects? are they also part of this shared hallucination?
Imagine a mosquito that leans on my refrigerator and I crush it, it can mean 3 things:
either my fridge, the mosquito and I exist and I have killed it;
the mosquito does not exist and is part of my hallucination (as my fridge);
the mosquito and I exist but the fridge does not, and it is so convinced of the hallucination that it died going against the laws of physics (since somewhere it has to lean to be crushed).

For me the conclusion is the first. Is it the second for you?

What I ask myself is: why should our perception be something to be taken into account to determine if behind something there is this matter that we call "truth"?

Precisely because we cannot escape from our perception we cannot make absolutist determinations like you did with "everything is an hallucination".

That said, I appreciate your vision, don't think not! but I think it comes from a desire to create that mystery that we human beings like so much.

Or more a desire to make the already existing great mystery something more than meaningless random fluctuations. Physics in all it's glory still fails to explain consciousness in a way that appeals more to me than the ideas talked about here.

quantum physics now is learning that many of the laws of physics break down when we get small enough. Classical physics has been running for a couple hundred years now by using placeholder formulae for the things it couldn't describe properly. Again from EW's post 'everything is mass and energy'. Is consciousness mass or energy, or both, or neither

You are also right that absolutes cannot be used. But belief is something we can form without conclusive evidence. Perhaps belief is just the defence mechanism of the eternally confused?

The laws of physics also likely what they are now during the "big bang." However, it's possible that said laws operate on different layers of reality in different ways.

Inflation and baryogenesis
Main articles: Inflation (cosmology) and Baryogenesis
The earliest phases of the Big Bang are subject to much speculation, since astronomical data about them are not available. In the most common models the universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with a very high energy density and huge temperatures and pressures, and was very rapidly expanding and cooling. The period from 0 to 10−43 seconds into the expansion, the Planck epoch, was a phase in which the four fundamental forces — the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the gravitational force, were unified as one.[25] In this stage, the characteristic scale length of the universe was the Planck length, 1.6×10−35 m, and consequently had a temperature of approximately 1032 degrees Celsius. Even the very concept of a particle breaks down in these conditions. A proper understanding of this period awaits the development of a theory of quantum gravity.[26][27] The Planck epoch was succeeded by the grand unification epoch beginning at 10−43 seconds, where gravitation separated from the other forces as the universe's temperature fell.[25]

At approximately 10−37 seconds into the expansion, a phase transition caused a cosmic inflation, during which the universe grew exponentially, unconstrained by the light speed invariance, and temperatures dropped by a factor of 100,000. This concept is motivated by the flatness problem, where the density of matter and energy is very close to the critical density needed to produce a flat universe. That is, the shape of the universe has no overall geometric curvature due to gravitational influence. Microscopic quantum fluctuations that occurred because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle were "frozen in" by inflation, becoming amplified into the seeds that would later form the large-scale structure of the universe.[28] At a time around 10−36 seconds, the electroweak epoch begins when the strong nuclear force separates from the other forces, with only the electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force remaining unified.[29]

Inflation stopped at around the 10−33 to 10−32 seconds mark, with the universe's volume having increased by a factor of at least 1078. Reheating occurred until the universe obtained the temperatures required for the production of a quark–gluon plasma as well as all other elementary particles.[30][31] Temperatures were so high that the random motions of particles were at relativistic speeds, and particle–antiparticle pairs of all kinds were being continuously created and destroyed in collisions.[1] At some point, an unknown reaction called baryogenesis violated the conservation of baryon number, leading to a very small excess of quarks and leptons over antiquarks and antileptons—of the order of one part in 30 million. This resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter in the present universe.[32]

For me, everything is a part of this big hallucination, even rocks and trees and elementary particles.

Mosquito exists and so do you and fridge. But all 3 of you are mental, not physical.

There is more empty space in your body than one that is occupied by molecules. It can be said that you are more empty than full, yet when I see you, I see a solid body.

So what I'm trying to say is that 1) of course it is all theories and totally unverifiable, beyond one's perfonal beliefs.

Science is the best tool, but scientific knowledge doesn't contain absolute truth, in sense that science itself built on questioning and checking and re-checking itself.

In Buddhist thought there are three characteristics that all phenomena share. That is nothing exists without the existence of other phenomena (anatta), nothing is permanent (anicca) and nothing is fully satisfactory (dukkha).

You are definitely right about the desire for the mystery. Or more a desire to make the already existing great mystery something more than meaningless random fluctuations.

Physics in all it's glory still fails to explain consciousness in a way that appeals more to me than the ideas talked about here.

You are also right that absolutes cannot be used. But belief is something we can form without conclusive evidence. Perhaps belief is just the defence mechanism of the eternally confused?

There is an ironic catch that is impossible to escape... If anything of this is true then it would also mean creation would need to experience itself simultaneously proving and disproving it.

Isn't the "truth" the truth, regardless of subjective appeal?

I didn't quite understand the meaning of "dukkha". Can you go deeper?

Goedel's theorems too?

I think that simply (as in so many cases) the problem is more of a linguistic nature. It is normal that if we speak in absolute terms as "this is that", others will investigate the verifiability of the thing. But of course, it's also absurd to think that you can ask someone every time to premise "this is just my idea, and I don't think that's the truth at all, but it's nice to go around things and make assumptions". So the discussion I believe is all around that, linguistic issues.

But it is precisely for this reason that it's what we can rely on the most to get closer to the truth. Because doubt is the driving force of science, and therefore is constantly improving. What would be the alternative? faith? feelings of someone? If you go out on the street you will probably find someone who has the feeling that in 1 week a meteor that looks like a burrito will wipe out the earth.