What evidence do you have that anything exists independent of your perception?

I think that what people assume is 'real life,' consensus reality, and so forth is simply the place that they spend MOST or ALMOST ALL of their time. That's how am lot of people choose to define it whether or not they understand it in quite those terms.

It kinda breaks down semantically if you think about it really hard.


And I agree with the above poster. If I experienced it, its 'real' to me by simple virtue of being experienced!

Very good point. It isn't possible to provide such evidence. All we really know is that there's a consensus reality. I don't claim that consensus reality and objective reality are the same, or that an objective reality even exists. I SUSPECT it does, but it's not possible to be sure.

The term 'self-evidently real' is very intriguing to me...



For me the only thing 'self-evidently real' is my own existence (and maybe Descartes'. Everything else is ultimately only an agreed upon reality (i.e., consensual). Being a scientist by training/upbringing/nature, I am wedded to the idea that any observation that cannot be replicated by other independent observers is speculative at best.

I suppose, however, if you can come to consensus with entities in hyperspace while in hyperspace about the reality of hyperspace then it is as real as anything can be. I think the problem is getting consensus while here with the entities here on this forum about hyperspace.

It seems to me that if we cannot establish consensus about hyperspace here then it simply isn't real with respect to here. It is like two tennis matches going on, on two courts side-by-side. The score on court 1 doesn't, and can't, affect the score on court 2.

I will acknowledge, however, that here could just as equally be an extended trip/hallucination/dream of my hyperspace self. The dream of a hyperspatial solipsist. In fact, I may have just done a truckload of anti-pharmahuasca using anti-DMT and was propelled here into hypospace to make this post.

We can’t establish consensus here because of the subjective nature of the experiences. But this doesn’t prove the experiences are not real.

Think of the criminal justice system. A jury may not be able to determine who committed a crime, they may not get consensus, but that doesn’t change the fact that a crime was committed and that it was committed by someone.


Yes, now we’re getting somewhere.

Many think of solipsism as the philosophical position held by an egotist suffering from delusions of grandeur. But the philosophical “problem” that solipsism reveals is not trivial: If all we know is our subjective conscious experience (or as you say, our own existence), how can we know for certain that anything else exists?

Some people say “there’s no evidence other than your subjective experiences that ‘hyperspace’ exists”, but from a philosophical standpoint, we can just as reasonably say “there’s no evidence other than your subjective experiences that ‘consensus reality’ exists”.

No its not real. Its a fabrication of my mind. It is intangible unlike the world which i physically gain tactile feedback from. I do not feel everything is generated in my mind as nothing would cease to exist without me

But if your mind fabricated it, it's 'real' in some sense. And as far as the second sentence goes, you don't interact with outer reality (assuming it exists.) You interact with with a model of the external world that your brain creates. I strongly suspect this to be true. People tend to forget that our brain is a very fancy yard stick. It takes measurements. We interact with those measurements, NOT what it measured.

The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal.

We have consensus!



That 'certainty' thing is indeed the problem. p < .05 anyone? Reasonable doubt?

Clearly there is no answer. But I always enjoy the question.

SWIM tells me that he hadn't though of that.... but upon thinking he thinks he has an answer

The level of detail and the level of ego present.

While some will be completely full of detail, waterparks with entities jumping and swimming all around.
While others will have very little substance, slightly morphing patterns sometimes resembling limbs.

The ego presence is also just as variant. Sometimes SWIM will lose his body completely in the experience.
Sometimes his thoughts will have no difference to sober thoughts.

When both great detail and loss of awareness of self occurs it feels as though a new dimension which is incredibly real is entered.

SWIM has not broken through a lot of times, though has spent hours in sub-hyperspace mostly trying to correct smoking technique and dosage testing.

SWIM has had a very rough pharma and a few nasty nasty breakthroughs so correct dosage to him is paramount.

SWIM has now a completely reliable and efficient smoking method and acetate tinctures which are measured by the drop and evaporated to produce incredibly accurate single dosages.

He is still working his way up to complete breakthroughs....

What seems to happen is that thoughts, however deep and incomprehensible, bleed into sensory perception. This makes it possible to explore them in a manner we would be otherwise incapable of. Some apply familiar identity or archetypes to the visions that occur from this, but it's possible to get beyond such interpretations.

Guess what? Your brain is made of matter! Therefore you can't claim that outside your brain is all this unreal matter that you just make up because of consensus or whatever.

Matter and energy are real.

Well…

According to cosmologists, most of the observable universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy. They don’t know exactly what these “dark” things are yet, but it’s estimated that ordinary matter makes up just 4.6% of the mass-energy density of the observable universe.

So ordinary matter seems to be a “minor player” in our universe.

Here’s a nice quote, especially the last sentence:



This is science, not magic.


Edit: Another nice quote:

I think DMT is quite capable of opening yourself, which enables you to contact "other" beings.
My reasoning here is, that certain kind of entities i did not yet encounter in this physical world, but in hyperspace.


My reasonable part in me tells me, that all i encounter is an archetype of my psyche.

I don't KNOW what reflects reality, and I think you shouldn't care so much about that.
You are the one who decides what's real for yourself.
In every way of your being.

Furthermore, DMT helps you to heal yourself.
Wheater aliens help you, or you do it yourself - It doesn't matter.

Fact is:
You benefit from these experiences, and that's the important aspect!

Are you telling me you've found a way to disprove solipsism? I think that pragmatically and functionally, solipsism is worthless and useless... but as far as I can tell it's logically unassailable.