Sociopath Community

Turncoat said: 

AliceInWonderland said: 

There was no denying its realness beyond the obvious ability to question it as I am now, but as is currently the case with my capacity to question the experience is real enough to not yield an answer.

It's essentially the Matrix question before it was appropriated to be about speed dating

lol

A key fundamental difference was that physics and causality fundamentally worked differently. 

How can we know that the world we're sitting in right now is consistent when we cannot gauge consistency from within the dream? This blind spot is what led to people questioning the nature of Solipsism. 

What was especially troublesome was the time each experience lasted. In all dreams but this one the experiences were ephemeral and discrete while this one was long lasting, it's whole duration seeming like it lasted decades and it was continuous. 

Starting to sound like the passage of time idea in Inception. 

More importantly though, we only exist in the moment with our perceptions offset behind it based on our reaction time. The notion of duration is only held in our minds, in our memories, so a fake memory could just as easily be simply convincing you that it's been a while... rather than it having been a while. 

If you remember years passing, that's why it felt like it happened. This does not even mean that there's a set duration attached to it, but rather that you in but a moment's time were potentially able to convince yourself of said passage of time. It's less about what we've witnessed and more about what we believe we've seen in hindsight. 

I'd only dreamed like that once, never before it and never again since, and the only reason I don't give it more merit is over Occam's Razor. 

I am not sure Occam's Razor suffices as I can't find one experience fundamentally more complicated than the other when. I could use bias to say "I am here now" so I chose this one but that may only be true only in its own context.  

I can rationalize that it was still a dream, but that it was influenced by something amiss with myself like if it were a fever dream or something (I didn't go to sleep sick or wake up sick, but as an example of what could offset the dreaming experience). 

Anything I believe I saw in the dream is merely a belief, and I have no way of proving if once I revisited California if it matched up or if I simply reinvented the memory so that it'd match up. As a matter of heuristics I cannot take what I believe now to be identical to what I once believed, even if it's over small shifts in details happening without my awareness. Memory is suuuper malleable, and our certainty in it is purely an ego thing. 

We only exist now, right now, right this moment, and everything we believe to have experienced only has as much validity as our ability to prove it to ourselves. 

I see this logic as encompassing the entire concept though, which is why it feels purposeless to me.  The human experience, and therefore arguably a human themselves, is a dream.  We're a collection of faulty perceptions, that's it.  Looking for an objective reality is an exercise in futility, it's ultimately irrelevant by our very nature.

Quietbeef said:

We're a collection of faulty perceptions, that's it.

Do you just sit there accepting this about yourself beyond the realm of logic though? 

I can sit here spouting Nihilism all day and still carry the illusion of self importance in contradiction towards it. It's the value that comes from experiencing something rather than just reading about it, like the value one gets out of traveling to other countries rather than just reading about them on Wikipedia while seeing it through Google Street View. 

If there is anything to be found beyond the philosophy of 'The Journey', we're only going to find it through yet more questions. It's the same notions that have stemmed philosophy and psychology in the first place, and as our processes become more utilitarian, more behaviorist, we'll be able to take these questions towards new places. 

Looking for an objective reality is an exercise in futility, it's ultimately irrelevant by our very nature.

The Sciences beg to differ, assuming The Sciences aren't all made up in my head just as much as you and Alice otherwise are. 

Objective reality beyond the room to say "We don't know anything" is found through consistency, but getting to the point of noting those consistencies took questions. Even if this reality is fake, a dream in my own head, then feeding this dream more nourishment is bound to make my understood reality more fleshed out. 

Alice effectively had an inconsistent moment, and is now mulling over if her pillars for reality that she once took for granted are really as stable as she once believed. It's through these sorts of moments that we find groundbreaking scientists and philosophers who dare to challenge the accepted canon. 

What is one meant to do with this kind of understanding?

Live in relativity like we already are, but from a different part of the social spectrum.

Maybe I'm being too utilitarian, but these questions can run circles around themselves for years, and as fun as that can be, I don't see it fundamentally changing anything about my experience of the reality I'm trying to dissect.

Perception is reality, and the fun of it is over how there isn't just one answer, but rather a multi-path journey towards finding it. The question is the answer based on our very natures. 

I'd compare the room for growth here to be about on par with psychedelics.

It's possible I'm projecting, but for the most part I see the concept as being too vague to be meaningful on a human level.

Or do you imagine there's some measurable value to be had in awareness of an objective reality, even if the exact bounds of that reality remain unclear?

It's a question of how much our reality is purely our own perceptions, the stepping stone for many who've theorized on the nature of dreams. 

But even if we can prove that what we see in front of us is objective, our comprehension of it can never be. Knowing that doesn't change it.

It matters as much as the room for adaptation does, and who knows, maybe after asking enough questions there will be an answer that is indisputable upon seeing it. It may just take machines to find them. 

But then how do we know that's real? : P

QuietBeef said: 

 

But then how do we know that's real? : P

That's up to the future philosophers to mull over, and the fact that we keep trying to find it gives me the impression that it's what we're meant to do. 

AliceInWonderland said: 

During my brush with death I fell into a coma and was forcibly kept there. I experienced dreams that were so vivid and real that I honestly have a hard time believing I had them at all. I had no doubt of what I was experiencing to be real. That reality, my place in it, and my experience of it was indistinguishable in character from the one I sit in now as I type this. I am reminded by Zhuangzi’s butterfly of which I pondered while younger but never truly appreciated until now – while he slept he dreamt himself to be a butterfly and he truly thought himself to be a butterfly, he fluttered around flowers and saw only as a butterfly could see, it was only upon waking that he realized that he was not a butterfly but a man- the natural question arises whether he is a butterfly dreaming of being a man or a man dreaming of being a butterfly. My experience differs though, it was so real that when I awoke, I still believed myself to be in a dream because for myself there was never a dream to begin with, all was a waking experience. The appearances, conceptions, and understandings, I forged in the dream were still so much apart of my waking perception that they continued to act as my lens and determined all. For three days I hallucinated a separate reality and thought it to be surely real as those who perceive it properly watched, studied, and continually explained to me where I was and what had happened. Or so they tell me, in all actuality they were hardly a part of my appearances and only bleeding in when my mind deemed it time to dream them up.  Only on the fourth day upon waking did this hallucinating stop and everything was as it used to be.  

I have struggled with the question posed, what is real and what constitutes reality, ever since. In some sense it seems nothing is real except for what you believe as my dream was so unquestionable that the validity of its reality could not be questioned. I really have no idea and sometimes cannot decide whether I am Alice or a butterfly.

I sometimes feel like I'm the only person on earth who is warm both on the inside and on the outside. Like a marshmallow.

I'm a marshmallow.

Turncoat said: 

Quietbeef said:

We're a collection of faulty perceptions, that's it.

Do you just sit there accepting this about yourself beyond the realm of logic though? 

I can sit here spouting Nihilism all day and still carry the illusion of self importance in contradiction towards it. It's the value that comes from experiencing something rather than just reading about it, like the value one gets out of traveling to other countries rather than just reading about them on Wikipedia while seeing it through Google Street View.

If there is anything to be found beyond the philosophy of 'The Journey', we're only going to find it through yet more questions. It's the same notions that have stemmed philosophy and psychology in the first place, and as our processes become more utilitarian, more behaviorist, we'll be able to take these questions towards new places.

But that's exactly what I'm saying.  I don't think it can be retained, not unless a person's mind is wired that way already.  Even if we experience a true sensation of emotional independence from our perceived reality, it's about as relevant to us as that moment is.  And as you've said, we only exist in the moment.  Once it's behind us, all we have is the idea of it, and the idea of being a collection of faulty perceptions doesn't override things as fundamental and chemical as the ego.

Looking for an objective reality is an exercise in futility, it's ultimately irrelevant by our very nature.

The Sciences beg to differ, assuming The Sciences aren't all made up in my head just as much as you and Alice otherwise are. 

Objective reality beyond the room to say "We don't know anything" is found through consistency, but getting to the point of noting those consistencies took questions. Even if this reality is fake, a dream in my own head, then feeding this dream more nourishment is bound to make my understood reality more fleshed out. 

I'm not saying looking for consistencies within our shared realities is futile, which is what science is.  I'm saying that seeking a level of objectivity beyond human perception itself is futile.

AppleGenius said: 

I sometimes feel like I'm the only person on earth who is warm both on the inside and on the outside. Like a marshmallow.

I'm a marshmallow.

Turncoat said: 

QuietBeef said: 

 

But then how do we know that's real? : P

That's up to the future philosophers to mull over, and the fact that we keep trying to find it gives me the impression that it's what we're meant to do. 

 Do you really believe in meaning beyond base natural function?

Quietbeef said:

I'm saying that seeking a level of objectivity beyond human perception itself is futile.

Even if it's done by something outside of the bounds of people? 

QuietBeef said: 

Turncoat said: 

QuietBeef said: 

 

But then how do we know that's real? : P

That's up to the future philosophers to mull over, and the fact that we keep trying to find it gives me the impression that it's what we're meant to do. 

 Do you really believe in meaning beyond base natural function?

Function arguably could denote meaning over it's consistency, much like the canon of science. 

With drugs or psychotic episodes, it becomes easier to see ourselves as less real through a contrast having been presented. It's at the foundation of growth within LSD trips, and with my own DMT trip where my body refused to rest it was operating on a different functionality entirely, a different basis of self-belief, one of preservation without identity or past experiences to gauge from save for the visually associative and recent enough impressions. Another time that I'd taken Ketamine on accident (it was supposed to be DMT) while on the comedown of an LSD trip also yielded differences in perception over parts of my brain shutting down while other parts continued to try, yielding the discovery to me that the brain is more like a switchboard than a casing for the soul, and that through a small alteration in one area you could witness an entirely different understanding of life. 

The world as I knew it was gone, and in it's place another, raising suspicion over if what I'd been experiencing is any more real. When the things you take for granted seem like less of a constant than before, the room for newer ideas canvases out.