Ya I wanted to say congrats on creating an awesome thread rjb! One thing we can all agree on is that we all see things a little differently. Now what does that tell you about reality?

Ughh I'm being misinterpreted. If one says that things only exist because I allow them to is like saying nothing existed before you were born and nothing will exist after you die. I feel this is an arrogant statement because one is denieing existence of everything outside of ones personal consciousness. If spice has taught us anything, we are a infinitely small but still significant to the whole.

I understand you

Does hyperspace not exist when we are not there? thats the question!

I think its something beyond our understanding as to how real works. but it would seem extremely ignorant to think you have to observe something in order for it to exist.

What if everyone in the world closed their eyes at the same time? The real has to be its own thing. We dont keep it around by being conscious of it.

Thanks man, I greatly appreciate that. I'll try to answer your question: what that tells me is that reality is unmistakable and undeniable, regardless of what we think it might be We all could think of it differently, but it's still what it is. It really can't be another way than it actually is, just like me and you can't be something other than we are. It's just impossible.



That doesn't sound right, I don't think any of us aimed there. But as with anything, it's not necessarily wrong, it's just incomplete because it's not properly understood. With a little tweaking, it could turn into a more accurate idea.

I'll say this: quantum mechanics have shown that particles act like waves when they're being watched by someone, and as particles when they were not observed. So we do have, at some extent, a way of influencing our reality. This could simply hint to the possibility that if we REALLY look at everything around us, it may be possible to control the experience. This is what perhaps all sorts of people tried to communicate to us over and over throughout time (gurus, philosophers, some scientists, etc), but now that I get it (just hope that I got it right), I can see why it's such a hard thing to understand, unless you just tune into it and just do it. Otherwise it can't be grasped and can't be thought of as possible. Because if you don't DO, you don't really BELIEVE, and only then the reality that you want coincides with the reality that you have. In all the other cases, it's just a biased choice and by making a biased choice you're automatically choosing to suffer, at some point or another, in some way or another. I'm not of course referring to "you" as an individual, but to the "you" in each of us.

Same with positive/negative thinking, which was discussed in a thread here. It's not that you need to be positive or negative, it's just that you have to be able to be both, each and none at the same time. Only then will you have understood all the sides of it and will be able to act on the right choice, without questioning yourself what the right choice is.

Some Alan Watts, to end this in good spirit: The Way of Waking Up

"So it's a fundamental question: do you define yourself as the victim of the world or as the world?" - Alan Watts

RJB, I guess you mean that untill we NAME things, that they do not exist. But they DO exist, because if you try to walk through that dense looking thing that others called a mountain, you'll soon find out wether you believe it or not.

Sometimes a slap to the face can be a wake up call!

You got it wrong. Particles behave like particles when they're measured, not like waves. Empirically they are always particles, while their so-called wavelike behavior doesn't exist for a single particle but appears only as a large ensemble of particles. It doesn't matter whether or not you are trying to measure particle properties or wave properties, you always measure a particle. So a single particle is always a particle, never a wave. The wave picture and particle picture are just two ways of expressing the same thing, namely a beam of particles. Quantum mechanics is a statistical theory used to calculate probabilites and not the behavior of individual particles.

It's really nothing in quantum mechanics to suggest that we influence reality with our thoughts. We influence reality sure, but that is by physical interaction understood through the laws of physics, not by mere thinking, which is probably just a pipe-dream.

how can you that things are. Are they really?
what the op says is that he sense that all reality is a illusion. and I agree. the illusion of duality still is a illusion.

I'm still surprise to see that some people dont understand the notion of: we are one.
we are one. one conscience.

We are indeed god, each and every living thing, are living different experience, but its the same conscience living it.
If you cant see god in everything, you do not see god. And that is true. here nothing egoistical about it. we are god. I am god. you are god. To even say you or I is a illusion. All of that duality that we experiement in the material world is real, sure! but its all a illusion.

So, life is real, but its a illusion.

My bad. But the point remains the same. I am referring of course to the Double-slit experiment.



Yeah, I agree Citta, it was just a connection my mind made, it's not something in quantum mechanics, but it's part of my experience, so I don't have any other choice but to take it as correct. I find that interpretation more personal and easier to accommodate, in the sense that now quantum principles suddenly are a part of my day to day live, where as only a short time ago I couldn't understand crap out of it. I actually understood quantum mechanics principles through personal experience, than the other way around. Go figure.

I don't subscribe to the idea that this whole universe is mechanical, simply because it's discarding a huge part of myself which I can't deny: something which we call the soul and this is something that screws everybody's theories up. That is what directly influences "reality", or that is my conclusion at this moment, based on my own experience; it's the "thing that makes the difference", if you will. The will to accept a certain idea, and then to further believe in it and involve in activities to prove or disprove that idea determines whether or not the idea will succeed. This will that I am talking about cannot be explained by any law. And there's nothing wrong with that, but we can't pretend we understood everything.

For example, think about walking from your living room to your bathroom. Sure there are some biological and thinking processes that are firing inside our head and make our body move - brain sends signals to contract muscles, gathers information from the senses and puts it all together very quick, balances all the info so that you are getting up at the exact right speed and angle, so you don't fall on your ass. So far so good. The moment you decide to move from point A to point B, that becomes your reality. The going from point A to point B. But, if you suddenly decide you don't want to go there any more, you can easily choose the reality that you're now not going from point A to point B, but have an icecream or what ever. So there's again that something which can't be explained, hasn't got a source (not a perceivable one anyway), but it definitely influences the hell out of reality. And it's part of each of us. I can easily make a parallel between how perplexing this is, and the quantum principles, where everything has a 50/50 chance of happening. Is this a quantum principle? Anyway, I'm sure we can just agree that there's a 50/50 chance of anything happening, regardless of what the concept is referred to as.



But there's nothing to be surprised about: it's not that easy of a thing to be one after all



Yeah, we all need one of those every once in a while

No, the point does not remain the same.



I seriously doubt you understand Quantum Mechanics without having years of mathematical training and studies in physics. You may have read some popular accounts of wave-particle-duality, the uncertainty principle and so on, but much more than that and you'll have to have years of study. Quantum mechanics is deep, strange and extremely advanced mathematically. The very fact that you say the point remains the same when you wrongly said particles are waves when they are observed, and particles when they are not, attests to that you don't really understand it.

Furthermore, your personal feelings are really worth jack shit unless you can cough up sound arguments and theoretical justifications for your convictions. Just because it feels right doesn't mean it is. The psychotic person might feel that his water tap is really screaming at him, when in fact it doesn't. It's just water coming out of it. You'll have to better than that if you wish to be intellectually honest with yourself.



There is no evidence for a soul, nothing. De nada. Complete lack. All the things that you talk about, the willingness to accept ideas and further on, can by far be explained by purely material processes in the brain. Considerable evidence exists to support the notion that what we identify as consciousness and mind results from natural mechanisms in the brain. So with respect to our current understanding of the mind, and despite the fact that the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not yet been entirely sealed, we can without much doubt discard any naive conception of a soul on account of the obvious dependency the mind has on the brain. That there exists some immortal soul capable of reasoning, making choices, feeling, love, memory and many of the things we identify with ourselves as conscious beings seems completely untenable.



Uhm, what are you talking about? There is not at all a 50/50 percent chance of everything happening in quantum mechanics, and again this attests to that you don't understand it. And certainly it is not a 50/50 chance of anything at all happening in general, this is ignorant. Let's take a most trivial example of this; throw a dice, now what is the probability that you will get the number six? It's 1/6, not 1/2. What is the probability of getting either 1,2,3,4 or 5? Well, it's 5/6. Probabilities do not come in 50/50s at all times, in fact it seldom does.

well that may or may not be true for quantum dice

What do you mean?

Quantum probabilities do not always come in 50/50s, that's for sure. The example of the usual dice was just to illustrate the very trivial fact that probabilities in everyday life, and not only in QM, doesn't come in 50/50s, as rjb wrongly claimed they did:

I see where the Original poster is getting at.
We define everything, and those definitions are recalled through our own memories instead of other person we are communicating to, so no body is really communicating their true thoughts. They are just relating to what the listener has already experienced.

As far as the double slit experiment the reason why it does that is because the photons are absorbed by the measurement tool (in the experiments case it was a camera -- a different type of camera then a snapspot camera). To my knowledge it is a camera that uses light(of some spectrum) to detect position and speed. Its impossible to know both at the same time because the camera are firing the same weight of the target measurement.

Imagine shooting cars at cars to measure the position and speed and the camera records the reflection of the cars bounce and takes that data to calculate its position(and with enough snapshots, speed as aswell) but your going to get invalid results because your measurement tools(shooting light/photons) weigh the same as your target(light/photons).

You are using this argument to assert that nothing is real, but this statement leaves room for that which is not interpreted. Immediate experience as it is felt and perceived, but not interpreted.


I hear what your saying though and appreciate the sentiment. We are social creatures formed by our language in so many ways, and I would agree that this formation is not real.

to quote a friend: "love is, until it is defined"

edit: forgive me if this has been gone over. I have read parts of this thread, but not all of it.

I didn't say I understood all of it, only that I understood a few principles; understanding does not mean agreement, let's be clear about that; I'm not a mathematician or anything of the sorts, but you're free to believe what you want. In my opinion, all I did was honestly inverse some terms. OK, so particles behave like particles when observed, and like waves when not observed. Does that change anything in my understanding? No, because I wasn't attending to the direction of the observation, but the particle. And 2 different states are 2 different states, no matter what the order is. Saying that there's just ONE way to understand something, and that is through math is simply arrogant. The world doesn't need math to work! Math needs the world, as twisted and unexplainable and wrong as it may be.



So if we can't explain something in the form of a "theoretical justification", it's not a valid experience? Remember the basic principle of science: trial & error. That's how I know what I feel is right. That doesn't need a theoretical justification, does it? No, because such is the nature of life itself: it doesn't need no theory to agree with it, it just is.



Then I really need to get it out of my head that I'm someone, and coming to terms to the fact that I'm Robocop. Call me unenlightened, but I choose not to do that. I've chosen once and it has been that choice. Now it's that time when I have chosen again.



Man, you need to let your creativity go crazy for a little while. Yeah, there's a 1/6 chance there will be a 5, and 1/1.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000+e chance there will be any dice at all in this universe; maybe another 1/500.000 chance that the dice will not be a duck. That's the thinker's game. But there's also the 50% chance that it's going to BE a 5, and another 50% of a chance that it will NOT be a 5. Is this really that hard to grasp? Does this make sense to me only? I didn't say you required the same filters you're already wearing, in fact I didn't say anything about any filter.

It's not even tied to a certain thing, but you choose to see things as such. Every situation has the 50/50 potential. Remember duality? That's the 50/50 "rule", if you'd like. So is meeting somebody, eating, going to work, getting what you want. Even death.

Allright, then I misunderstood, I apologize. Still, it seems your understanding of what you're talking about does not go very deep.



Particles are always particles, never waves. The wavelike properties are representative only of a large ensemble of particles. I explained this a bit in the other reply.



Yes, it does change your understanding. As said, all point-like particles such as the electron, the photon and what have you are localizable particles and their wavelike effects refers to the statistical behavior of a large number of them. When people say "an electron is either a wave or a particle" they are using sloppy, inaccurate language. An electron is always a particle while a large number of them are treated as a wave. Fundamentally, the two pictures describe the same thing; particles.



You can't really know that what you feel about the interpretations of quantum mechanics as pointing to us affecting reality with our thoughts or whatever is right. There is little to no sound justification for this except for your own personal convictions and feelings. In another thread you said that biases needs to go away, yet you are obviously biased to a great extent by what you personally feel must be right, despite the fact that you can't give credible reasons for why you must be right. You can't offer evidence, neither can you offer theoretical sound justifications for it so that others can take a look at it, see it is consistent and perhaps confirm with observations at another time (you might still be wrong, but having a sound theoretical basis is a good start, at least). So yes, when it comes to establishing facts that we can agree upon, more than your own personal conviction is needed, thus they are worth nothing unless you can come up with more than "it feels right to me".

No scientific principle or theory, no established knowledge about this universe has simply been accepted by the virtue of someone feeling it is right, more is always needed. If not we would have all kinds of claims flowing around and we would have little agreement. We couldn't judge what is obviously false from what is right, because everyone would be right because they felt they were. Sadly, this is not the state of real life.




Of course you are someone. You are a unique individual, defined by your genes, your life experiences, your biology, your immediate surroundings throughout life and so on and so forth. But no soul is needed to be an individual, to be someone. I am still just as much me even though I don't believe the existence of a soul is tenable.



There is nothing wrong with my creativity regarding this, but there is something wrong with your understanding of probabilities. There is not a 50% chance that it is going to be a 5 and a 50% chance it is not going to be, because these are not the only outcomes of the event. If there are only two outcomes to a stochastic process, then the chance is 50/50, but not otherwise. Perhaps you skipped probability class in school?



No, every event does not have a 50/50 potential of happening.

Hey Citta, look man, it's obvious our views don't converge, let's just leave it at that. Hopefully one day it will be possible to share one's whole mindstate and that will make matters easier for us. The fact that I can replicate results in my own personal life based on the information I have, no matter how wrong or unexplainable it is, still counts for something to me. It's my own interpretation. No one says you got to use theories exactly as you receive them. We each have our own imagination to help us out. Or, delude us. Maybe that's my case. Maybe that's everyone's.

I don't consider that to be biased in any way, this interpretation is just a shortcoming of chatting over a forum board. I just consider it "stuff that works in a certain way and doesn't in others". But in another sense, we're all biased because if we constantly doubted what we were doing, what ever that would be, we wouldn't be able to function.