Solipsism

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.

If I get started on this topic, prepare for great walls of text.

To summarise my views on this matter with a question: How would the process of creation progress if it started with a single, unlimited awareness realising it existed?

There are lots of discussions about this on the web. Caspian and Vi pretty much summed it up in two sentences. If you really want me to continue in more detail, I will be more than willing. I'm trying to hold myself back from long and intricate posts, and not succeeding as well as I'd like.

Posted By Count_Emiya at 10:32 PM - Wed Feb 07 2018

Solipsism

The notion does not depend upon solipsism. Solipsism depends much more upon the notion. Insofar as the notion is an accurate representation of reality and reality is non-solipsistic, each of us is a unique simulation, unable to communicate with each or even become aware of each other's existence except with the tools that the simulation provides. Solipsism simply asserts that there are no other subjects besides me.

The beautiful thing about consensus reality theory is that it's a nice medium between religion and science as a philosophy. You can sub out the word "simulation" for incarnation to cover religions such as Buddhism, "the outside world" for hean for Christianity and pretty much any religion with such a system. "Purgatory" is your single-player-sim (solipsism), etc... It also covers the Big Bang theory (server/shard initiation) nicely.

Though of course, we need to consider that the technology necessary for this degree of emulation would be so far beyond our current capacity that we're not going to be able to emulate it to the same degree of quality for a while.

All this said... I'm not a believer in simulation theory, though I suspect something very similar to it is the case.

Earth is in fact a huge space ship. The only one possible to sustain life for millions of years and travel to our destination on the other side of the galaxy. We are not the crew of that vessel, we are just the cargo.

Change it's trajectory, and we will never reach our destination and possibly all be extinct and end as we came with a big bang.

No.

Posted By Barleyman at 11:00 AM - Fri Feb 09 2018

No.

Agreed, actually. Something has to be real, even if we don't know exactly what it is. If anything is a simulation, it's our explanations.

If you keep an open aware mind you'll see some glitches from time to time, also if you can imagine the universe has always been here then who's to say some civilization hasn't created a fictional universe and placed us in it, could explain random UFO sightings, reincarnation stories, miracles with healthcare, stories about two people being in two separate places, ghost, missing people that simply vanish in random places.

Posted By RobertOrr at 12:38 PM - Sat Feb 10 2018

If you keep an open aware mind you'll see some glitches from time to time, also if you can imagine the universe has always been here then who's to say some civilization hasn't created a fictional universe and placed us in it, could explain random UFO sightings, reincarnation stories, miracles with healthcare, stories about two people being in two separate places, ghost, missing people that simply vanish in random places.

Are the glitches only in the mind, or are they actually in the reality that the mind processes into a seemingly coherent picture for its subject?

I vote that the glitches are in the mind, or our minds to be more precise. I define reality as that which cannot have glitches, or perhaps that which is nothing but glitches. I maintain that we cannot know anything about it without mind.

Mind is a simulation or the product of a simulation; it can indeed be both. Reality is whatever is left after all the simulations are removed, by my definition. Perhaps reality according to my definition doesn't exist. We will never be able to know directly because all we can do is run simulations.

All this reduces to the question: Does something that cannot be entirely described be said to exist? That prompts the next question: Can we be sure that something that has not been entirely described has been confirmed to exist? Then, yet another question: Has anything ever been completely described?

Posted By Poldano at 5:05 PM - Sun Feb 11 2018

Posted By RobertOrr at 12:38 PM - Sat Feb 10 2018

If you keep an open aware mind you'll see some glitches from time to time, also if you can imagine the universe has always been here then who's to say some civilization hasn't created a fictional universe and placed us in it, could explain random UFO sightings, reincarnation stories, miracles with healthcare, stories about two people being in two separate places, ghost, missing people that simply vanish in random places.

Are the glitches only in the mind, or are they actually in the reality that the mind processes into a seemingly coherent picture for its subject?

I would say a little of both. Some "glitches" arise from false memory; usually an observer can spot the discrepancy. But there are also glitches that mismatch against very detailed memories. If these were isolated, individual phenomena, they might be possible to write off as false memory. But there's quite a few instances in which such inconsistencies have shown up in the memories of larger numbers of people.

I vote that the glitches are in the mind, or our minds to be more precise. I define reality as that which cannot have glitches, or perhaps that which is nothing but glitches. I maintain that we cannot know anything about it without mind.

This is a good definition, though. At its base, existence has to be built on something. That something would be the fundamental layer of existence we could call "reality".

And for the latter half of that definition... if evolutionary process is inherited from a fundamental process of creation, we can neatly do away with any kind of omnipresent shaper entity. Creation doesn't need to be something that was created; it could simply be an organism or algorithm, exploring possibility and growing to support its cognitive network and physical mass (the known 'verse).

Mind is a simulation or the product of a simulation; it can indeed be both. Reality is whatever is left after all the simulations are removed, by my definition. Perhaps reality according to my definition doesn't exist. We will never be able to know directly because all we can do is run simulations.

This I would disagree with, though I might be nitpicking here... I would say that imagination is simulation, and the mind itself serves as networking software for the brain and its associated systems and platforms. The imagination is one of those platforms, the body another.

All this reduces to the question: Does something that cannot be entirely described be said to exist? That prompts the next question: Can we be sure that something that has not been entirely described has been confirmed to exist? Then, yet another question: Has anything ever been completely described?

For this: Yes to the first, no to the second. An Absolute of the creative process would be impossible to define with the cognitive hardware of an entity Relative to it because we can't expand our sensory perception or our awareness enough to perceive it in its entirety. We would have to be Absolute (omniscient) ourselves to do so. We can speculate as to its existence and function... but we can never be sure that what we are describing exists and functions as we think it does.

To the third... I would say that depends on how you define completely describing something. Literally? No. If you were to completely describe something, you'd have to know literally everything about it. Not only its current state, but literally everything leading from its conception to its current state, and every possible variable on that thing's future. To describe a stone in its entirety would be impossible to do through vocal means. Even a computer would probably take decades to process the information into a digestible output. For a single, simple stone.

Figuratively, though... you don't need to know everything about the stone if you know enough. You can define it well enough that a person understands which stone you're talking about when you place it amongst others (try this in practice with enough stones, though, and people are going to hate you...). Enough can be inferred from one's background knowledge of the processes that formed that stone to give a reasonably accurate idea of the processes it went through to become what it is, and one can cover much of the common spectrum of possible futures it possesses from the present moment without needing to delve too far into minutiae.