We can define and have defined hallucinations, for example like Oxford Dictionary does:



Or as Wikipedia puts it:

Yeah, but does hallucination make something "not real"? How does one define what's entering our consciousness real and not? I think these are endless questions. That is, how can something be more real than the other something?

Of course the experience is real itself, but it doesn't mean that the object of hallucination really exists. If we define reality to be that which exists independently of observation, then everything that falls outside of this will not be a part of the actual reality as anything more than hallucinations.

Said in another way, the subjective is just a model of the objective, and this model can often be wrong because our senses aren't that good. If one is to define the wrong subjective representations of reality as being real, this would be very little advantagious and would further lead to the situation where what is actually real and what is not is unecessary veiled.

Generally, if we are not to disturb the endless loose metaphysical considerations when we wish to define what we mean by "reality" this would lead into the meaningless. To illustrate: If you went into a discussion about whether or not it is advantagious to consider a dialogue with a dead person to be real or not, and you say that we can't say anything about it because this in principle could be the dream of a bacteria inside the nose of a pig, it is more a point of semantics than it is a valid critique of the original statement.

But how do we determine what exists independently of observation? In order to know something exists, we must observe it. We cannot say that something exists prior to its being observed.

I’m not claiming that things only come into existence when observed, but just pointing out how tricky some of these definitions can become.

Before discussing such an interesting question, I guess we will first have to agree what is meant by observation in this context. What are you thinking about? I was thinking about it more specifically as existence independent from whether or not a mind observe it. If things would stop existing if a mind were not there to observe it, this would violate evolution and energy conservation, and it would lead to absurd consequences (for example that something will suddenly change its direction or even disappear because you blinked/looked away for a minute). There is no good reason to assume that the universe is dependent upon observation in order to exist (Occams' Razor is relevant here).

And yes, reality can get pretty tricky sometimes ^^

Thank you Citta.

I appreciate the olive branch.

I don't want to make this a Tête à Tête between us. I have no ill will towards you. I understand where you are coming from. Many of my best friends are die-hard materialists... and this type of debate is as old as the glaciers.



Nothing we can language is ever exactly what we would express in the perfection of direct communication. I surely recognize the problems inherent in trying to express the ineffable.

And... challenges can be irresistible...



This is the crux of the issue.

When we experience things that fall outside of the relatively narrow bounds of normative conceptions of consensual reality, we must always ask ourselves if we are not crazy.

It is fairly easy to ascertain whether one is behaving irrationally, though. The ability to compare and contrast one's experiential take on one's current existence to that of the people around one is a part of what I deem AWARENESS. Knowing what one can say to whom in any given circumstance is what keeps people who dabble on the fringes of human experience out of the mental hospital.

I find that you can say just about anything and babble the most ridiculous BS to most anyone... if you phrase it correctly, maintain a relaxed and playful demeanor, and are willing to meet people somewhere near to their current boundaries.

And yet, being honest... when you are able to prove some outlying or rare experiences to yourself satisfactorily... and repeatedly... at a certain point, you must recognize that your experience is A) Valid for you & B) Useful to you. And this is so whether or not you are ever able to convince anyone else of its veracity.



Many many times...

Hallucinating is a wonderful mindfuck. As is dreaming.

But in the end, if I wake up from a dream, and a friend calls me up to tell me the exact same dream from their perspective before I even admit to having dreamt it... this is a form of empirical evidence for shared dreaming. When this happens to you dozens of times, and the information you can bring back from such dreams proves to be factual and useful in your "waking life," then to deny this because most people can not replicate your experience and are prone to disbelieve it... would be foolish.

Not that I am adverse to being foolish.



Faith is a strange bird. The Hebrew word "Emunah" is often translated as faith... but it has a very different connotation. It actually means something closer to knowing. It is not the kind of faith that people talk about that amounts to mere hope hopped up on steroids until it is inflexible. It is rather the kind of faith you have that your lights will turn off if you turn off the light switch.

This kind of faith I have. In spades.

You have this kind of faith when you know how something works.

Should I turn a switch and the lights remained on... it would do nothing to my knowing. I would merely have to find the correct switch for that light or perhaps fix the wiring. This is because I understand how lights work.

I do not have this kind of faith in all of my conjectures and speculations... but when I have learned something well enough to trust it... trust it I do.

I was a regular lucid dreamer long before the current surge of interest in the subject. Back decades ago when I would discuss this with people, most of them did not believe it was possible. They tried to convince me I was crazy. It is not normal to imagine that you can create worlds, traverse galaxies... and wake up remembering it all. Now, things have progressed to the point where most people understand that lucid dreaming is real... even if they are unable to do it themselves.

I am sure that my other esoteric abilities will also become accepted in time.

Anyway, all the best to you Citta. Be well my brother.

This is exactly how things behave in dreams. One of the easy ways to become lucid, actually.

Unfortunately, dreams do not have to behave unpredictably. They can be very solid seeming and difficult to detect. The proof of this is that most of the dreams people have recorded throughout time are not lucid, but rather seem quite real until one wakes from them.

Thus, and I have said this before in other threads... we have an interesting situation where we can potentially prove to ourselves that we are dreaming (either by becoming lucid or waking up)... but we have no way to prove that any experience (no matter how mundane and material seeming) is not a dream.

We have proofs for dreaming, but none for so-called reality.

I am not going to argue here that reality doesn't exist. But I will say that from an epistemological point of view, materialism is on somewhat shaky ground.

Is there anything we know to exist that hasn’t been observed by a mind?

If yes, then how did we come to know that it exists?

likewise......

I postulate that Awareness is THE fundamental particle if you will.
Any attempt to argue against that statement will actually depend
upon awareness and thus put in place a circular argument.

At its most fundamental, no, there isn't anything we know to exist that has not in some way, directly or indirectly, been observed by a mind. But to go from this to suggest that all of reality itself is created upon observation is a long way to go, and one that I hesitate to go down again. Everything that we know about the universe suggests that even though we fundamenally cannot go around observation (directly or indirectly), we certainly do not create what we see. As I've already pointed out, it would violate fundamental physical laws and it would lead to absurd consequences.

Did we create the past when investigating it? Did we create the Big Bang once we traced the evidence? Did we create evolution when we wondered and investigated where we came from? Did we create dinosaurs? Did we create everything that existed prior to direct human observation? Then how the hell did we get here if evolution didn't exist prior to "observation"? Who "imagined" us into existence, God? The problems would be stacking up, and those who claim this to be the case have the burden of proof and serious explanatory problems. It raises more questions than it offers answers for. Certainly it is a pretty wonderful mindfuck to contemplate (I often do myself), but I do not think it is correct.

I've always thought that awareness/consciousness is the only thing that can't be extinguished. That is, the only thing that is impossible, is not to be aware. So yes I do believe in life after our physical bodies don't work any longer.
Yes, I know there are states such as deep sleep, but however one is still aware before and after those states, that is, the state in deep sleep for example, just isn't "recorded" like our daily awareness, that is, it passes without noticing it.

It is a fairly huge leap to go from the inescapable truth that we can not know of anything that hasn't been observed by some mind at some point... and that knowing is, itself, an exclusive function of mind (technically impossible outside of a mind)... to your whole "we create everything by observing it" model.

You see this right?

This line of argument amounts to a red herring (homonculus straw man type) because there are many other ways to see this. By focusing on only one explanation which sounds ridiculous enough to you (out of an infinite field of possibility) so that, in tearing it down, you appear to dismiss the original (still true) observation... you are using a form of logical subterfuge to avoid the salient point of the other posters here.

It is quite conceivable that there are other minds which also observe our Universe. Perhaps the Universe is itself conscious, and can observe its own phenomena without human help whatsoever. Perhaps, animals are conscious enough to collapse probability waveforms when they observe them. Perhaps rocks are. Perhaps there is co-creation of this Universe, but human minds are only a tiny fraction of that power. Perhaps suns and stars are conscious beings. Perhaps 8th dimensional denezins of Hyperspace observe our Universe from the outside while reclining in Omniversal luxury in hypercube studios on tesseract lounge-chairs. Perhaps we are all dreaming, and simply do not remember that we created this world. Perhaps there really is a G*d...

oooohhhhhh.... spoooky.

The fact is, that you can't make leaps of logic and then use your reductio ad absurdum stance to be the argument for adopting your concept of reality.

We know. The concept of a Universe that is not objective, stable, or even consensual is disarming. But I am afraid you might have to get over that.

If dreaming teaches us anything, it is that the entire Universe and all its laws and forces can morph & change around us without our being able to even notice most of the time... and even when we do notice, dreams are perfectly capable of rewriting our memories and retroactively creating what we perceive as the past. E could very well have equaled MC cubed until last week, and our memory of this famous equation could have been rewritten... or we could have simply leapt into an alternate parallel reality where relativity appears true... for now.

Sorry Citta, but it is actually impossible to prove that our vaunted cache of human knowledge and scientific understanding is anything more than inflated dream stuff.

And, for the record, I violate the laws of nature & physics every single night, without fail.

Nowhere do I suggest that physical reality pops into existence as we observe it. You are missing my point.

Here it is: We cannot say with certainty that existence is independent of mind.

So when you say that there is an existence independent of mind, you are positing the existence of physical reality. You have no basis in knowledge for coming to this conclusion. Observed macroscopic physical reality is mostly consistent with mind, so hypothesizing a physical reality is reasonable. But a hypothesis is not a fact. Ultimately, we can’t say if physical reality exists outside of mind.

Agreed. However, the assumption that physical reality is independent of mind is the most reasonable assumption, imho.

Exactly.

When light bounces off stuff "out there", it goes into our eyes, gets converted into electrical nerve impulses which go to the brain and are represented as "sight" (or smell, touch, taste, or sound.) It's a representation, an interpretation of reality, not necessarily reality itself. In a way, we dream up representations of the outside world. We don't know what's actually out there, if there even is anything out there...perhaps objective reality doesn't even exist.:idea:

IMO, it makes more sense to explore consciousness instead of spending so much energy on defending rigid, dualist, materialist assumptions.

Lucid dreaming is a fantastic way to open your mind and explore this and, to me, lends credence to the primacy of consciousness.

Morpheus: What is real? If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain

Yes, but I was just discussing one of the frequent ideas that pop up here when we get into these arguments, and how unlikely and absurd this consequence (that is observation = production of all of reality) is, and thus why it is not reasonable to assume it is correct. Nowhere do we really discuss, as far as I can see, other possibilities as consequences, hence why I discussed that spesific idea. And as you can see, I actually agree with gibran2 on the observation part, just not on the "favorite" consequence, so to speak.


Well, you are dreaming. Big surprise that you can violate physical laws. I have done that too, for example in lucid dreaming that I have experienced several times (but that I can't, as you can, experience at will). I have also witnessed violations in hallucinogenic states, for example while on DMT or on ketamine. It doesn't mean anything that physical laws are violated in dreams and hallucinatory states. Or actually, it is just the more reason to assume that something about that subjective model is wrong!

^Please edit some of the language from that post Citta..Trav wants to end the swearing in posts. Thank you.

Done. Sorry about that

This is an opinion you share with most people, I think.