The Nature Of Reality


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or maybe it is the matrix...
o_O

seriously now, there's so many different views on what's really real and what only seems like it's real.

Philosophers have debated it for years.

Chuang Tsu talked once about a man dreaming he was a butterfly. Which one was really him? the man or the butterfly?

Berkeley had said that there's no such thing as matter really, it's all a bunch of ideas interact to form an illusion of actual matter being there, a la the matrix. When his friends locked the doors on him and he banged aboutbegging to be let in they laughed at him saying that the door was just a set of ideas so poor Berkeley should be able to just walk right in.

XD


others such as hobbes took a materialistic point of view. the mind and ideas and such aren't really real. they're just chemical reactions and matter interacting with matter in rather messy ways that we often were deluded in to believing were thoughts and reasons.


Some people were solipists which meant they only thing real was them and everything else was something their own individual minds made up to keep them from getting bored.

I always felt life was like a dream, but such a realistic dream i wouldn't ever really know if i would wake up. or even more strange, if life is but a dream within a dream, and if i wake up, would that too be a dream?


what are your thoughts on the matter?
 
I once read a sci-fi short story that caught my attention. It was a bout a guy who ended up in the psychiatry and he didnt know why. Then a doctor came in and started talking to him about life, what he expects from life, bla bla bla and then he said: Imagine you were God, what would you do? And the guy replied: "well, this is a rather hypothetical question...... I am not God and I have no idea what I would do. Sincerely I have other problems... like being locked up here." In the end the psychiatrist didnt get a satisfying answer for his question and left the patient. At the end of the short story the psychiatrist wrote a report about the patient´s mental health saying: This is bad, very bad. God refuses to accept his identity. But we must hope for cure!!!

Ok, doesnt sound like much for the first second. But think about it. If you were God and lived for an eternity and had another eternity to live, how would you keep yourself busy?? No wonder God created earth and humans. So he was watching us for some time and then it became boring, so he figured: "humm, what if I started living among them, just to see what it is like. And the best thing would be to erase my memories temporarily, so I wouldnt know who I am... just for the fun!!!" Now, if something like that really happend, then any of us could be him, right? Even you.... coz in the end, how would you know? Sometimes when I think about life, about sence in life.... everything feels so strange, who knows....
 
QUOTE I always felt life was like a dream, but such a realistic dream i wouldn't ever really know if i would wake up. or even more strange, if life is but a dream within a dream, and if i wake up, would that too be a dream?
If it was like that i do say the waking up would be known better as the death..... also known as the end or is it? it is something that us the living will never know........

Anyway on the matter of this topic, This topic is kinda like zegapain raising the question what is reality?. Well in my opinion i believe that the word "reality" holds a meaning that can be interpreted in mutiple ways. reality can mean the acting of the normal but then again there are many other things we havent discovered yet, yet so what is the normal?
So for me i dont care if this life is all a dream or if so reality. I can feel, think and have a heart..which therefore for me is good enough. To me i will just live it out and be happy, enjoy it before it all ends even if it is a dream
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.........
 
Those philosophers that you speak of, simply have different definations of the two mentioned terms, "reality" and "dream".

Such thing as reality does not exist, for that we, if one is in a deep sleep with a nice dream, it will find itself feeling the materials or objects he touches/contacts. Heck, once I was walking in my dream then somehow ended up running and fell down. Don't remember much about what happened next but day after, my knees hurt a lot and I came to a certain conclusion. If your dream is real enough, it can cause you some damage. If, you're able to be damaged, whether mentally or physically in a dream, then what makes you think that is a dream and not the reality?
 
QUOTE (warita200 @ Sep 12 2006, 01:12 AM) I once read a sci-fi short story that caught my attention. It was a bout a guy who ended up in the psychiatry and he didnt know why. Then a doctor came in and started talking to him about life, what he expects from life, bla bla bla and then he said: Imagine you were God, what would you do? And the guy replied: "well, this is a rather hypothetical question...... I am not God and I have no idea what I would do. Sincerely I have other problems... like being locked up here." In the end the psychiatrist didnt get a satisfying answer for his question and left the patient. At the end of the short story the psychiatrist wrote a report about the patient´s mental health saying: This is bad, very bad. God refuses to accept his identity. But we must hope for cure!!!


man, that's a really thoughtful story! it makes you think alot! i think that life is what you see around you. if you don't see it, don't believe it. i mean, i believe in God, which is a complete contradiction, but that is because i have been brought up that way, but materialistic things that are around us are tangible, are real, what would they be otherwise?

life is what is in front of you and what happens around you. if you dream something, and you aren't sure if it's a dream or reality, then it's a dream. otherwise you wouldn't be so confused about what it really was.
 
The way that I see it, reality is the summation of your experiences and your experiences are altered by the way you perceive things. Acknowledging this perception is key to understanding the nature of reality. We look at the events in our life as if they really mean something to us when, in reality, they may just be nothing at all. We, as humans, want to assign meaning to each and every single thing that happens to us so that our lives can seem meaningful. What would happen if we found out that there was no meaning in anything and that we were just fooling ourselves? A realization of that degree could certainly be frightening yet liberating at the same time.

Could a dream be something more than just a dream? I would like to believe so. Dreams usually start out as a collection of random events. Your brain takes these events, colors them and strings them together to attempt to make some sense out of them. The distinction between dreams and reality at this point is that we have cognitive awareness of one inside the other. If you were to "wake up from this life", would the life that you had lived been merely a dream? I would hope not. It is my belief that there is some reality in all things perceived and to have no perception means that there is no reality.
 
Ooo.. maybe you should read the different ways psychologists theorized how the human minds worked? Because the most recent view is that we perceive reality differently. Each and every one of us construct our own realities based on experiences and outside stimuli combined with our own mental capacities. This is called "Constructivism"
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This theory has stemmed into teaching philosophies too, in which the teacher, instead of being the motor that drives a student to learn (the "Lecturer" if you will), constructs a learning environment catered to the individual student's learning styles/intelligence (When I say intelligence, I mean whichever intelligence category that garners the highest number of points. The intelligence categories being in verbal/lingustic, logic/mathematics, kinesthetic, musical, visual/spatial, naturalistic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, or a combination therof. For instance, someone who has a high visual/spatial intelligence can visualize things very very well and would do better learning in a high-visual lesson. If someone is confused I'll explain further about intelligences. It's more an assessment of a person's personal perception/understanding of the world.) and then 'guides' the student to learn.
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For a while i podered the idea well im not going to try to explain it ill just say what i think.

"what if all is see is created by my brain, the people i know and trust are all just illusions created by my brain, I can see and hear them and see their emotions but i can not feel there emotions see what they see or in some cases hear what they hear. What if the people im sending this message too are also just parts of this world that could be created by me, how will i ever know...."


yeah, thats what i was thinking as writing that message, just kinda thinking and typing.
anywho that was at one point my view on reality. untill i fell in love XD
 
QUOTE (Clowd @ Oct 09 2006, 03:18 PM) "what if all is see is created by my brain, the people i know and trust are all just illusions created by my brain, I can see and hear them and see their emotions but i can not feel there emotions see what they see or in some cases hear what they hear. What if the people im sending this message too are also just parts of this world that could be created by me, how will i ever know...."
We all live in The Matrix then.. and A.I. robots gone bad are feeding off our generated body heat to liiiive~
 
EDIT:

Well Since This Is Merged, This Is My View On Life As A Computer Program. No Confusion.
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View #1:

Look around you. What do you see? A lamp maybe? TV? A clock?

Examine the clock. It is round.(In this example. you might have a square clock, so look for something round) Look closely, you see a circle. Now imagine a perfect circle(Outside of a computer). It's a "perfect" circle.


But, what if, we were to zoom in on a circle, so closely, that we begin to see exactly what it is.

Is it possible, to zoom in on a perfect circle in real life, so close, that we might see it has rugged sides? SQUARE like detailing?
If you zoom in on a perfect circle on a computer, it is made up of smaller squares. pixels. Could it possibly be, that if we zoom in on a perfect circle, in real life, that we could see those same pixels?

It's like observing the chemical properties of a substance. If you've ever looked at something through a magnifying glass, you'll see that it looks much different. Such as string, look closer, it's made up of millions of smaller other strings.


View #2:


Is God Not A Computer And We It's Programs?

Picture it, everything we are, everything we've made, everything we've Done, is built up from scratch, no matter how big or small, made up from an idea that we conjur up by using our brains as a program, and create something from it like a machine.

If you keep looking deeper, do you remember those pictures? The ones that will show someone holding up a magazine of their own existance? and then on that magazine the picture is holding up a magazine of it's own existance. And on, and on, and on.

How can we be sure we are not a computer program? That WE, are not the pictures?

Right now, I could have been programmed by MYSELF, to be typing this out. And sometime in the future, I could re-write my entire existance on this computer, and remake it to the last scene, and that program writes it's own "fictional" program.

If you look at everything that goes on in this world, religion, race, politics, war, peace, the universe, inventing, etc, isn't it easy to believe that it's all just a setup?


If you look at everything, how do you really know? Can you tell?





[MODERATOR's NOTE: Thread merged.]
 
QUOTE "what if all is see is created by my brain, the people i know and trust are all just illusions created by my brain, I can see and hear them and see their emotions but i can not feel there emotions see what they see or in some cases hear what they hear. What if the people im sending this message too are also just parts of this world that could be created by me, how will i ever know...."

So when you die, you wake up in the real world.
Your lying on a white bed with wires all over your body and as you look around the large domed room, you see other people "sleeping"... Isn't it scary?
 
I don't have much time to express this... they will discern the content of this post soon, and trace it back to me...but it is within my function to determing if or when you are ready to know this...there are others who will disagree...but I digress...


All these philosophical concepts posted here are all sorts of fun mental games, but you need to know and understand the truth-

YOU are the only human being in your environment...You were taken at birth for study and removed from your natural habitat (no, I don't know where that is, I am sorry) and placed into an artificial environment with strictly controlled variables to study your reactions to various stimuli... the people around you, the way they act, when they come and go... all very carefully choreographed to study your reactions to the ongoing environmental circumstances. Do not let yourself be fooled. This is not some random post. It is address to YOU personally...you know it is for you, as you know you are real.

All others around you are artificial 'Life-simulating Constructs'. If you see one 'get hurt' it was because you were watched to observe your reactions to the trauma, to see if you are empathetic or indifferent, or whatever you may be. Only those constructs designed to 'suffer' such a trauma have 'blood' to shed or 'bones' to break. Testing this is futile, they will know if you need to have 'trauma-constructs' around you to allow you to discount this idea, they can and will read your intent by your increased agitation. BE CAUTIOUS. Try not to give away that you know the truth.

There are those among the watchers that wish to observe your reactions to knowing this truth, and it is at their behest I pass this information on to you.

I repeat...There ARE NO OTHERS OF YOUR KIND...even these posts are only generated within the program construct...there aren't even any 'people' posting these responses...why bother, when your situation can be controlled to bring you into contact with those that might claim to have made the posts so long as it serves the study regimen.

If this distresses you, try not to show it. There will be signs but you MUST do your best to supress them. If the isolationist arm of the observers holds sufficient power when they realize you know the truth, they may decide to terminate the experiment, and start over with another specimen...perhaps not even human.

This is no joke.

Best of luck...discuss this with no one.
 
i one heard that when your falling asleep, and your half dreaming, and then your leg shoots out...that apparently that is when your heart stops and is starting again

i also had a dream one, in which i was falling and i woke a millisecond before i hit the 'floor', and i could feel the floor along my arms as if id actually hit it


so if i could feel something from my dream, maybe we are dreaming now

we can feel things here and in dreams, maybe our dreams and just dreams in a dream
maybe that is a dream within a dream within dreams

its endless.


i personally do not believe in everything answered by science, like plants making their own food? with photosynthesis? i do not believe that could happen.
for tht to be true, the plant would have to have a consciousness, which i doubt.

so i dont really know what i believe
but i know i dont believe in what you see is real





also, we grow and learn by watching other people, our reality is created from being with others, whose reality was created by being with others etc etc.

so what if we were to grow, without other human contact
would we know how to walk? would we know what we can and cant do?


i, you probably think this is stupid but, think that humans cant do things because we KNOW we cant because of science
if we didnt know about gravity, would humans be able to float? would we be able to levitate things? would we be able to use planes?


i believe science makes us do what we do, believe what we believe
without science, we wouldnt be here now. so people are actually creating reality, scientists. discovering things out all the time, making reality smaller and smaller, reducing the chances of some things.
 
Whoa - this thread is Sugoi!

Having studied philosophy for the past 3 years having brushed over the various theories of perception and theories of mind and so on, this stuff is amazing! But here are my thoughts lol.

Ok, first of all - science doesn't limit us - it makes more things possible. It describes things in the world in such a way that we can actually use those descriptions to predict the future and to develop things further (aerofoil concept is an example which allows us to fly).

Speaking of what is real and what isnt we will never really know, because we (whatever we may be lol, human, some random specimen) are too limited to see beyond what we experience (like what we see, feel, hear, touch, smell, etc..). There is a "veil of perception" as it is called, where we are constantly aware of our personal experiences, but unaware of what is actually there!

When I see a red brick in front of me, I see what I consider to be the colour red. When someone else looks at the same brick, they also perceive the brick to be red - BUT - their RED, could be the equivalent to my BLUE (this is called the inverted colour spectrum). This illustrates how there is a limit to our perception of things - its is wholly personal and solitary.

However, this would imply the idea of solipsism - which would mean that only MY MIND exists and everything else is a mere construct of it, because I cannot be totally sure of my personal experiences as being wholly accurate. I see a person in front of me, but beyond the flesh and bone, I cannot see whether they have a mind, like the mind that I am sure I have (which I can be certain of due to the simple fact that I am a thinking being who can casually "observe" thoughts floating in my mind).

BUT! Fortunately, solipsism, this view that only my mind exists can be shown to be totally hopelessly inaccurate and unsustainable.

When we learn words, and learn about anything in fact, it does not come from inside us - it comes from outside our minds. We learn how to use words for instance by observing how they are used around us. So when a toddler hears someone say "car" every time a car-like object appears, the toddler will quickly learn what a car is, and how to use the word "car" correctly! For this to be possible, there must be others around, for them to pass on this knowledge, so my mind could not have been able to exist alone, because all my knowledge and ability to use language and therefore type this is due to 19-20 years of learning words.

Some might like to interject and argue that this information is being fed to us by some computer - and I put my hands up and say that it is totally feasible! But that doesn't really matter at the end of the day, because you can be still certain that you are not the only being present in the universe, for there must be something or someone inputting that information to your brain hehe.

Anyway, back to the points from before it has been shown that what is "real" is what we experience. So when we dream, it is real if we remember it and can think about it - because as far as we can be sure, all that really exists is "thoughts" and "perceptions".

Although this might be difficult to understand, it can be argued that we cant even be certain of the existence of a personal entity. Like the idea of a "me" is in fact not provable. One philosopher argued that we can be certain there is an "I" by saying "I think therefore I am....." but it has been argued against him that just because there is a process of thinking going on it doesn't mean someone is doing it! It could just be happening on its own......

In conclusion, I would say that reality is what we experience, and that when we dream, we are just re-arranging our experiences, so they are in some ways still real.

I actually also feel as though I am constantly dreaming - I remember when I was around 5 just before I went to bed one night, I thought "If I could dream about the whole future of my life in one dream, then I could wake up and then know what was going to happen!" I was afraid thought that I might never wake up again >.<

Who knows, maybe that night I drifted into a lucid dream that I will wake from at the moment of my dream death? hehe

(Damn this is LONG...)
 
QUOTE (postindustrialist @ Sep 11 2006, 10:58 PM) or maybe it is the matrix...
o_O

seriously now, there's so many different views on what's really real and what only seems like it's real.

Philosophers have debated it for years.

Chuang Tsu talked once about a man dreaming he was a butterfly. Which one was really him? the man or the butterfly?

Berkeley had said that there's no such thing as matter really, it's all a bunch of ideas interact to form an illusion of actual matter being there, a la the matrix. When his friends locked the doors on him and he banged aboutbegging to be let in they laughed at him saying that the door was just a set of ideas so poor Berkeley should be able to just walk right in.

XD


others such as hobbes took a materialistic point of view. the mind and ideas and such aren't really real. they're just chemical reactions and matter interacting with matter in rather messy ways that we often were deluded in to believing were thoughts and reasons.


Some people were solipists which meant they only thing real was them and everything else was something their own individual minds made up to keep them from getting bored.

I always felt life was like a dream, but such a realistic dream i wouldn't ever really know if i would wake up. or even more strange, if life is but a dream within a dream, and if i wake up, would that too be a dream?


what are your thoughts on the matter?
About the man and the butterfly, I think that the real him was the man and the butterfly as well, because our dreams are also a part of reaity. People tend to separate the dream and the reality, but they don't realise that a dream may be reality and reality may be a dream, these aren't opposite, reality and dreams complete each other.

The things that scientists call chemical reactions aren't dreams. Real dreams come from strong feelings, from strongly beliving, something that cannot be scientifically explained.
 
QUOTE (eien no sora @ Jul 27 2007, 10:09 AM) About the man and the butterfly, I think that the real him was the man and the butterfly as well, because our dreams are also a part of reaity. People tend to separate the dream and the reality, but they don't realise that a dream may be reality and reality may be a dream, these aren't opposite, reality and dreams complete each other.

The things that scientists call chemical reactions aren't dreams. Real dreams come from strong feelings, from strongly beliving, something that cannot be scientifically explained.
ure onto something here!

like reality is our experiences - it doesnt matter if they were in a dream or outside a dream - the emotions, and the sensations are all the same in terms of reality!
 
You guys might want to try this one.

We are actually living in the thoughts that we think up of reality but not reality itself.

Reality itself is actually just facts and objects.

Our emotions about what these facts are what we are actually meeting up with.

A more concrete example is this. Some people actually have a fear of lifts. It is actually not the lift that is giving fear but the person himself that is experiencing fear within his own thinking. That is why some people have fear of lifts and others don't. This fear is what seems real to the person, not the lift itself.

However, once the person's thinking has been re-patterned, the fear ceases to exist.

It is mostly a practical science to do the re-patterning, not a theoretical one.
 
I believe that we live in more than one plain of reality, that when we live our daily lives that is reality and when we sleep and dream that would be reality. I think before were born we lived/living ( I put living because we dont really know if life is a cycle *reicarnation*) is also reality. Our conscious IMO is what connects us to the larger picture, if that makes sense.
 
its hard to know what is reality - sometimes i feel as though i am not me. like i dont know who i am - even though my brain tells me i know who i am, where i am, what i'm doing, etc i get a heavy sinking feeling (alike fear) in my heart that just tells me i'm not who i am. so then what can i say reality is? the closest definition i can probably stick on the word 'reality' would be this:

Reality, is not defined by being awake. rather it is defined by one's self awareness and one's surroundings.

i can be self-aware in a dream and be acutely aware of my surroundings in a dream, so does that make it reality? according to my own definition yes. but reality only to yourself and no one else.
 
QUOTE (Zijian @ Jul 27 2007, 05:36 PM) You guys might want to try this one.

We are actually living in the thoughts that we think up of reality but not reality itself.

Reality itself is actually just facts and objects.

Our emotions about what these facts are what we are actually meeting up with.

A more concrete example is this. Some people actually have a fear of lifts. It is actually not the lift that is giving fear but the person himself that is experiencing fear within his own thinking. That is why some people have fear of lifts and others don't. This fear is what seems real to the person, not the lift itself.

However, once the person's thinking has been re-patterned, the fear ceases to exist.

It is mostly a practical science to do the re-patterning, not a theoretical one.


I agree with you! Things like Fear are in a persons mind, and not outside!

there are loads of things like this. For instance, if someone finds a subject like maths difficult, it does not mean that "maths is hard" it means that the person who finds maths difficult is not understanding the basic ideas and using them properly!

We are all human, and have the same anatomical structures - this includes our brains! So we are all potentially geniuses XD

We have to learn to remove the psychological blocks in our thinking!
QUOTE (j-fizz @ Jul 27 2007, 05:57 PM)I believe that we live in more than one plain of reality, that when we live our daily lives that is reality and when we sleep and dream that would be reality. I think before were born we lived/living ( I put living because we dont really know if life is a cycle *reicarnation*) is also reality. Our conscious IMO is what connects us to the larger picture, if that makes sense.

I also feel that this a possibility. When I dream I can sometimes remember myself thinking "This is real...." and then waking up to be dissapointed. I strongly feel that dreams are in fact another plain of reality that we exist in.


QUOTE (samthebear @ Jul 31 2007, 03:47 AM)its hard to know what is reality - sometimes i feel as though i am not me. like i dont know who i am - even though my brain tells me i know who i am, where i am, what i'm doing, etc i get a heavy sinking feeling (alike fear) in my heart that just tells me i'm not who i am. so then what can i say reality is? the closest definition i can probably stick on the word 'reality' would be this:

Reality, is not defined by being awake. rather it is defined by one's self awareness and one's surroundings.

i can be self-aware in a dream and be acutely aware of my surroundings in a dream, so does that make it reality? according to my own definition yes. but reality only to yourself and no one else.

Really good point! Self-awareness however can be criticised lol. When we look into ourselves, who is looking?? Surely it is a logical contradiction to look at your own mind, because you would have to use ure mind to look at it. Its like looking for your head. You can never see your head because of the way your eyes are positioned!

A different example is that of the Theatre stage and audience. When we look into our minds (introspection) we are like an audience who are watching actors on a stage (the actors on the stage are our thoughts, desires and feelings). However! What about the audience?? Who is looking at them?? and isnt the audience supposed to be part of our mind? So we can never be completely self-aware.
 
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