Life and " Reality ". Making Do
 

So I really think a lot about stuff like this. I had a psychedelic experience once and it changed everything about how I look at life.

One thing that I realized was that everything and everyone is connected. I remember seeing myself through my friends eyes in the room with me, I remember feeling love for everyone in this world, absolute love.

I have been thinking...Lately about reality....Life just seems to be this thing that we have fallen into, an event composed of constant transitions. We seem to be (and I am trying to find ways of explaining this in my limited and simplistic human vocabulary and understanding) making do with what has been presented to us. Who has presented this " reality " or existance to us? or what? We do not know.

Let me explain further on " making do ". We came into this world and we were taught how to live life and to get by, we learned consistancies that our ancestors passed on to us to help us get by. But do we really understand......anything?....Do we really know anything about what the **** is going on? Why we are here? No.

Now don't relate what I am about to say next with the last paragraph. As I have mentioned before, I am a human so I really don't know what the **** I am talking about. Is this reality? Or is everything you are experiencing a subjective reality based on the collective human subconscious? Maybe this is not reality, maybe " reality " does not really exist, maybe reality is whatever we think is real.

I know one thing for sure, what we see, physically with our very eyes, isn't what that physicality actually looks like. There is FAR more going on in the world than we give credit to.

Anyway, I probably sound mad. I genuinely believe that all people and animals and well...Everything is connected. Just wanted to spill all that ranty ****e out at ye and see what people have to say.

Bill Hicks.

I don't really have the eloquence to go too deeply into the philosophical side of your ponderings but when it comes to vision apparently our eyes only see maybe 10% of what's in our field of view at any time. The rest of the details are kind of inferred and filled in by our brains. I guess part of the psychedelic experience is probably the brain being a bit befuddled and just making some pretty random guesses about what it is seeing.

Yeah, I dunno about our brain filling in the spaces, I think we just see more of what is actually there to be honest.

i think about what you said in the OP all the time

when i think too much about it, i get a disengaged and discombobulated feeling

i then try to pierce my own "consciousness" and end up feeling totally alienated from my own senses, and what i perceive as everybody's "reality" ( or "consensual hallucination")

we're just building the world according to our own limitations and sensory perceptions

nobody ever thinks out of the box

Every last one of us is truly a special unique snowflake. I really do mean that, no patronizing sarcasm.

Problem is, we're all special unique snowflakes within a big mother****ing blizzard

Also it's impossible to read Po's intro post and not have this pop into my head... sing it with me people!

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide...
No escape from reality...

I think we do and I could explain why - and have probably done so many times here in the past as similar topics have sprung up over the years .. but I don't think you'd buy it! :p:

edit :

I often feel like people will accept f.ex quantum mechanics helping us make orbiting satellites or computers and they'll accept that one can use a knowledge of chemistry to synthesize various substances for example. But, if you use disciplines like physics, chemistry and biology to explain why we're here, you're suddenly touching ground where people get spiritual and stuff and then they suddenly don't like explanations that seem "factual" anymore.

Or, possibly, they don't understand them when they hear them.

My opinion? It's just a bunch of regurgitated hippie nonsense. When you ingest drugs you are not ingesting ideas or insight - at most it will allow you to recontextualize your currently existing knowledge and emotions.

While I think you can make a "working hypothesis" based on science, there are still limitations to its application. The problem with science in relation to philosophy is that science won't say we know anything until we have hard evidence pointing to whatever it is we are curious about. While you and I could probably go back and forth on very specific details and how that relates to life in the bigger picture, it still doesn't answer a lot of the philosophical questions people have. One day, maybe will be have advanced science enough to be able to provide these answers, but for now there is a limit. This is why people aren't satisfied with a scientific answer when they are asking a philosophical question.

This.

Thats exactly what I thought when I heard stuff like this before.

I don't think this is quite right. It's a well known "fact" you can't prove anything ;) What you do in science is gather evidence, typically by trying to prove your hypothesis is wrong (attempt to prove null-hypothesis) and then basically building evidence for your case. After all, it typically "only" requires a certainty of 95% or more for an assumption to be accepted as "true".

At some point, you just have to apply a little faith and I think people might as well put faith in the things that seem the most likely, ie. is supported by the most evidence.

Of course, that's just how I feel and I realize that.

Yes, of course. I didn't say anything contrary to this. What I am saying is that to get to that 95% certainty, you need some hard evidence. Eventually with philosophy, you have to get too abstract to present any hard scientific evidence.

So how far do you think science can go before we consider something as "taking it on faith"? Can it answer what happens when we die? I think most people have a hard time mixing faith and science. Most either take something completely on faith or they stick completely to science. I myself am comfortable learning what I can through science and then extrapolating that to the most logical conclusion in terms of philosophy, but I think most have a hard time doing this. That was my point.

Tying in with the subject of this thread, PoorOldPo is wondering why we are here. Of course, I'd just say we're a consequence of the physical rules that apply to the universe. That elements were created and combined in various ways and at some point created early replicators which, through evolution, eventually gave rise to all the life on our planet. Extrapolating from that, I would think there is no objective meaning to our existence; there was a cause and we're a consequence.

If you start studying this rough idea, you'll find that it is supported in many little ways by present day proof, but we probably won't find fossils of the very earliest replicators. In other words, believing they existed requires a little bit of faith.

I think people who have a hard time having faith in science have either been more or less indoctrinated at some point with competing ideas or they don't understand enough science to make sense of it properly.

You use a lot of vague terms and I would say quite a lot of what you mentioned could be considered "scientific faith". I distinguish this from everyday faith because it is a more informed version of faith... Which is exactly where people like us will disagree with people who subscribe to a religion. There is no need to be informed with that kind of faith.

So, in that way I guess I do have faith... Scientific faith. Still, I feel you oversimplify existence to remain within the bounds of your scientific knowledge. You are very much a biologist and it would be clear without me even asking you that you study evolution in some capacity. Just try to remember that there are layers and layers of scientific depth covering many many fields of study. Not everything fits neatly into the idea that we are simply here because the physical laws of the universe just happened to make it so.

Everyone who is self aware, is just trying to make sense of it all.

Yeah. I agree. :)

This is how I'd explain it as well :). To me, junk theories or extremely vague ideas which explain little to nothing and without much progress is subject to the razor of Occam. Of course, sometimes the bluntness of science with reasonable evidence backing it up can shake people up. Evolution by natural selection is a prime example - at least in earthly terms (and with some aid from chemistry), it can explain why we are here. That we evolved from a common ancestor and many other animals share our features.

The implication can be terrifying - only those who successfully passed on the genes went on to survive with most others nearing extinction. But this also points to the vast imperfections all around us - that we don't see, hear or smell as well as some other species doesn't make it any less real and are just the consequences of the continuous sculpting process at work. I would certainly focus a lot more of my time on studying the fossil record or the images of the Hubble Space telescope or on improving (read: investing in terms of money) the current scientific framework than to inadvertently carry on along the lines of "to what purpose is all of this".

I agree!

Warm welcomes to MusicBanter by the way :D

I was thinking about this last night but I was wasted, I also like to think about astronomy and space quite alot. I don't even remember what I was thinking about but I thought "This is such an interesting subject, I want to do this at Uni" :laughing: as I said, I was wasted.

I always also think, what if this is a dream? and we're actually all in an unconscious state. What if something actually has to look after us while we're out? I just imagined that we could be dogs or other animals dreaming of being human.

Imagine if everything we thought might be our reality...was. As in, maybe reality is not as strict in terms of rules and what it is. For instance, if I say, what if I am in a dream right now, What about if none of this is real? Well by even having this thought, does that not make the situation in some ways real?

If you live in a dream, that dream probably seems to be quite consistent in regards to rules and so on. You can talk to a physicist who can do things in your dream that maybe you don't understand and when he explains them to you, you won't understand it. So your dream is more complex than you probably can comprehend. Could it be your dream then?

Either way, as long as the rules of your dream is consistent and consequence follows cause according to general rules - as long as the ball falls to the ground when you drop it - does it really matter? Not drinking water makes you thirsty, not being with people makes you lonely .. So the way I see it, as long as the universe behaves consistently, whether or not it is a dream has ultimately little relevance because we all still play by the same rules.

If hypothetically it was a fact that we do live in a dream, then that fact would only become relevant when living in a dream changes our world in a way which we can perceive.

If you know what I mean ;) Until then, it really doesn't matter.

life's what you make it

tra-la-la-la

Thank you.

Agreed but might I also suggest that whilst people are free to think what they want (who wants thought crime ;)), lengthy speculation on whether this is all a dream (or dream within a dream) which cannot be proved (or disproved for that matter) is susceptible to burnouts and diminishing returns. It also doesn't give me the satisfaction of knowing testable knowledge in the material world.