383. The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

676. [...] I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream "it is raining", while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

You missed my point. My point is that there is no difference between reality and dreams to begin with. Dream us reality. Reality is dream. There is no difference. That doesn't mean it's not there..that mean they are the same and our distinction between them is baseless in the first place.

this is all about the question what is reality/consciousness?
Thruth is you could be right because we don't have an answer.

I say our reality is real but this is an assumption. However before you disregard me, we need to start somewhere, and we need an assumption that works.

Reality is not any thing. It's just appearances without a substance. You can't find a ground to our so called"physical world " because every ground would need another ground to ground it..at infinitum =there is no ground to reality =reality is just appearance of reality without a reality to that appearance. Now think of an example of an "appearances " without a "ground" or a"substance " to them? ....dreams . Therefore.."Reality " is a dreame. Which means it's an appearance without any actual substance to it which does NOT mean it's not there..the dream is there but it's just a dream!!.

the dream is there but it's just a dream!!. — Nobody

Can you die in your dream?

The dream persona can die ..but dreams are infinite. Once a dream ends ..another one appears. That's what reality is..a dream within a dream within a dream.....

It's just appearances ..and there is no objective medium sourcing these appearances..beacuse if we ask what is sourcing this appearance right Now?..we say "x" is sourcing it. And what is sourcing "x"?..y. And what is sourcing "y"?...add infinitum. — Nobody

I do not see how this follows. Why would objective reality need to be "sourced" by anything?

We see an appearance of a "world" which is our perception. We assume that this appearance must be sourced by an objective world out there existing independently from our minds..otherwise where did it come from?..but then you have to ask what is sourcing the source itself?..add infinitum =there is no source..it just keeps going forever =reality has no ground=reality is not some solid objective medium "out there"=reality is just appearances..infinite appearances =infinite dreams.

Do you mean we are dreaming reality or reality is dreaming us?

I guess someone who's living life unaware of its facts can be said of as dreaming. For instance a naive child who doesn't know how the cookies crumble is in a dream world. A philosopher, on the other hand, who is cognizant of truths, their relations, their complexities can be considered awake.

Perhaps you mean that not even philosophers are awake and that reality itself is an illusion, like a dream. If you do then may I ask what follows from it that is/maybe important? Thanks.

"Reality " and "us" are one giant hallucination inside of a hallucination forever. It's like a simulation inside a simulation forever without a simulator.

again you are missing my point. I'm not saying that there is "reality" in one side and "dreams " in the other side and then reality is real and dreams are illusion . Dreams are real. Reality is real. They are both reality. We create that false distinction between them which is completely baseless..otherwise I'm challenging you to tell me whats the difference?.
Now what this "reality " Is? And where did it come from?
Well..ask yourself what is a dream and where did it come from and tell me..

Del

?!

"Reality " and "us" are one giant hallucination inside of a hallucination forever. It's like a simulation inside a simulation forever without a simulator. — Nobody

Why is it important to see things that way? Not being a dick, I'm just wondering.

How does it make anything difference if the data we receive is contrived instead of actual sensor data coming from a place that can be sensed?

What is your point? Dreams are real and reality is a dream isn't it?

Well, I wake up from my dreams but I haven't heard of anyone wake up from this reality of ours.

Please clarify your claim.

look..now I'm seeing a tree..im touching it..im smelling it etc..all of that is just appearances or perception of something. The actual thing that is there is not any of these perceptions..nor it is the sum of them. It is an objective independent object which we assume is the actual tree. You never see a tree .You see a perception of a tree. An appearance. Then you assume there is something behined the scenes to you call objective reality is causing these appearances.
Now..if the appearance if a tree in your perception is caused by an objective tree "out there" behined the scenes..then WHAT IS CAUSING THE ACTUAL TREE?
Answer me..please

ahaa here's the BIG MISTAKE. How do you know that wake up from a dream?what makes you sure that you didn't wake from a dream to enter another dream?..in night time you dream 3-4 dreams at least. And each time you get tricked that it's "reality " but it turns out it's a dream. Now whats happening right now is just another dream . You can't tell the difference..you know why? Because THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE. Otherwise you could have been able to tell that it's a dream from it's very beginning. Think of an infinite dream..you will live for eternity inside that dream without knowing it's dream. Now that's what reality is. Infinite dream which you will never wake up from but to enter another one.

.

The actual thing that is there is not any of these perceptions..nor it is the sum of them. — Nobody

How do you know that? Maybe the tree is exactly as it appears to be and your sense of it not being as perceived is inaccurate. If I use a telescope to look at a house 100 miles away. I will not know what the house feels like... because I'm not using the proper instrument to detect touch. Doesn't mean that the house doesn't have touch characteristics, just that I'm not perceiving the house with my sense of touch at that time.

And if there are elements of the tree that I cannot perceive with my senses, why would that necessarily mean that the tree is a dream... Maybe someday I'll invent a microscope and see elements of "Treeness" that were always there but that I could not experience. In fact this is what we perceive to have happened.

Why is it any less possible that the tree causes the tree than a dream causing a dream... It seems like you've just moved the problem.

Seem to me that there are somethings that have to be addressed: Is the tree there when a dreamer isn't perceiving it? If I take a log from that tree and use it to beat a person with no sensual connection to this world we call real...

Will they bleed? Even though they can't sense the bit of tree beating them? And much more interesting. What happens if the insensate man recovers his senses after such a beating. He wasn't in the shared dream during the beating. When he wakes will he suddenly experience pain and trauma from a wound I simply dreamed he suffered?

Are you the only dreamer?

I think this all comes down to this: Just because we don't perceive something in all of it's detail doesn't mean that the stuff we do perceive isn't accurate.

Let me put it differently just because the sense of touching a tree is different than the actual tree and doesn't encompass every aspect of the tree, doesn't mean we aren't getting accurate data concerning what it's like to feel a tree. Nor does it mean that the tree isn't real just because we can't see it's cells without a microscope.

Finally if I can dream things, why can't I just dream up a cheeseburger or a Dodge Viper? When I actually dream I can do these things. When I'm not dreaming I can't

This would seem to be a difference between dreaming and experiencing that something different than dreams we call reality.

ahaa here's the BIG MISTAKE. How do you know that wake up from a dream?what makes you sure that you didn't wake from a dream to enter another dream?..in night time you dream 3-4 dreams at least. And each time you get tricked that it's "reality " but it turns out it's a dream. Now whats happening right now is just another dream . You can't tell the difference..you know why? Because THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE. Otherwise you could have been able to tell that it's a dream from it's very beginning. Think of an infinite dream..you will live for eternity inside that dream without knowing it's dream. Now that's what reality is. Infinite dream which you will never wake up from but to enter another one. — Nobody

:lol:

You have a point. We can't distinguish dream from reality. So, why not call it reality then and do away with the description ''dream''? You'll, of course, refuse because the thrust of your post is to convince us that we could be dreaming and all this we experience isn't real.

Good observation but what's the point of such a claim? If this is a dream let it be. I'll play along and cross bridges when I get to them.

I claim that there is no difference between reality and "dreams " . I tried so hard to define or to catch what really makes night time dreams any different from the so called"objective physical reality" and couldn't find anyone in terms of the "substance " of it or the "actuality " of it..therfofer reality and dreams are identical. — Nobody

You seem to suppose that an inability to define a distinction implies a rejection of the said distinction. Is that implication valid? When a child starts to appreciate fiction, do parents first need to protect the child's sanity by supplying them with definitions for fiction and non-fiction? Doesn't the child have an innate sense of the distinction without necessarily having an ability to verbalise it? Aren't we the same as the child when it comes to our inability to verbalise most of our distinctions?

Consider a related problem; someone says "The set of images that I call "The Eiffel Tower" cannot be the real Eiffel Tower". We will ordinarily accept his thesis, yet how is it possible for him to know that his images are mere representations? If we demand answers from him, won't he invariably beg the question, or perhaps worse, contradict himself by supplying a counter-example image referring to his so-called "real" Eiffel tower? It seems that we must accept his conclusion, after all, he doesn't act insane to us, yet we cannot accept any of his verbalised arguments.

To conclude, the notion of reality shouldn't be considered to be a signifiable object, but rather the medium in which signification occurs. The notion of dreaming however, can be practically signified by the common phenomenal and behavioural hallmarks of dreaming as exploited by lucid-dreamers performing "reality checks" and the psychologists who study their rapid-eye movements.

383. The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

676. [...] I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream "it is raining", while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

The testable phenomena of lucid dreaming appears to fly directly in the face of Wittgenstein's arguments, yet the phenomena of false-awakenings within a lucid-dream is in support of his comments. Perhaps it is fair to say, that "I may be dreaming" can have context specific sense in a given situation relative to whatever criteria at the time is considered to constitute "wakefulness". Nevertheless, this doesn't imply any absolute sense of a distinction.

Simply, no.

Dreams are phenomenon occuring in sleep mode (you can also have hallucinations when you're awake). Dreams are the projection of recent memory of biological organisms operating at complete stillness at hyper-speed (or something along these lines; I study dreams and am an apt dreamer). Dreams are extracted, that is, whenever energy finds that it can withdraw a dream from your mind, there is enough interest to make it happen - a dream world is created.

On the other hand, our reality is part of the energy system in which energy of it can communicate with us directly. This is how we make the distinction but further, the Sun feeds the Earth, and Earth homes lots of life; this is a logical process - unlike a dream - you may sense the inner-working directly. Dreams are like conscious versus conscious versus logic, while reality is conscious versus logic versus conscious.

There is a middle-man in this reality, it differentiates reality from dream; if we cut out the middle-man, it is a dream. Who's to say if we cut the middle-man, a logical reality wouldn't manifest?

If you examine a dream closely it's like a blur or abstraction that easily fades. Like light dented space for a few seconds (that special effect you may know of). This is because the grounds for a dream are highly illogical, the reality is not there but it is perceived as if it were, that's a matter more of imagination.

My dreams are nothing at all like my waking life phenomenally. The phenomenal quality of the two is completely different.

We see an appearance of a "world" which is our perception. We assume that this appearance must be sourced by an objective world out there existing independently from our minds..otherwise where did it come from?..but then you have to ask what is sourcing the source itself?..add infinitum =there is no source..it just keeps going forever =reality has no ground=reality is not some solid objective medium "out there"=reality is just appearances..infinite appearances =infinite dreams — Nobody

This is just repeating what you already said. Why does the source need a source itself?

Coming right out of left field.....

IMO Dreams, dreaming is a way to allow at least some of the information being detected and used in very similar multiverse versions of ourselves to be transferred. Not overly effective but some is better than none from natures point of view.

If you don't mind i would like to try to build on this.

Animals, at least mammals dream. Dreaming is simply another information management effect. Imagine an antelope living its normal linear existence. Near the habitat the antelope normally occupies is a hill. Nothing unusual just a hill with exposed rocky outcrops, and partially covered by vegetation. Near this hill on the surrounding plains the life time environment for this antelope. One day the antelope has a dream, no language necessary. In this dream the hill appears dark and foreboding, the vegetation threatening. The dream elicits an emotional response. Next day as the herd grazes closer the hill, but within their normal range, dreaming antelope finds itself once again filled by the fear his dream spawned. Therefore dreaming antelope remains as far as possible away from scary hill, and is not near the hill when a lion burst from the cover and drags down one of dreaming antelopes herd mates.
Information has been passed from one universe to another and used.

So in conclusion..reality is infinite hallucination..appearances without an actual "substance " to them. It's a dream. — Nobody

If, by "reality" (lower-case "r"), you're referring to physical reality, then what you're saying might be another way of saying what I've been saying.

There's no reason to believe that "physical reality" is more than the hypothetical setting of one's hypothetical life-experience story, consisting of a system of inter-referring abstract logical implications.

As physicist Michael Faraday pointed out in 1844, there's no reason to believe in the "stuff" that the abstract mathematical and logical structural-relation is "about".

The question about whether that complex system of inter-referring abstract implications is "real" or "existent" is quite meaningless.

Michael Ossipoff

9 M (South-Solstice WeekDate Calendar)

...Monday of the 9th week of the calendar-year that started with the Monday that started nearest to the South-Solstice.

what seems real to me, is things like pain.

direct experience, which may be hard to deny.

Night dreams are similar to being awake; they seem to have similar rules. When you are asleep, different parts of the brain are active, or not so active, I gather...it seems to me, that 'night' dreams are a class of dream, which is set in the context of the waking model...this doesn't contradict what you said...it makes it no more 'real' to be awake; just a different set of rules to how the system works.
I have had thousands of flying dreams in my life, and have tried a few times to fly in a waking state....yes, I actually tried to throw myself at the ground, and miss...didn't work, but thanks for the idea Douglas Adams....I actually do think it might be possible to fly when awake, but you have to know how to....like Neo in the Matrix, he uncovered the key to play with the rules of the system.

I think the word 'real' does get thrown about a lot, without much of an attempt to define it. As I said, it seems that pain is real though...pain is a mystery...if you consider how you might try to bring about the experience of pain by some kind of AI....or pleasure ever...well consciousness itself really..just how would you go about doing it?

I have a theory about pain though..it may be an intrinsic part of the system, relate to malevolence..maybe pain is the awareness of everything bad that ever happened to any conscious being, and evolution utilized access to it in order that organism may realise that something was wrong; that the organism was in danger, and could then act to defend itself..

Maybe pleasure is the same, but in reverse..you become partially aware of all the good things that have happened in the system.

Pain though, doesn't provide any evidence that we are just in a kind of dream.......the pain might be real, to the person, but the reality of a rock that is kicked mean nothing unless you can say what you mean by 'real'.

Agreed.

I can smell bacon in life; I cannot smell bacon in dreams. I can dream I am smelling bacon but that is not a sensory experience.

But that doesn’t remove the possibility that life itself is a dream that includes sensory experience. In which case.....so what?

Agreed.

I can smell bacon in life; I cannot smell bacon in dreams. I can dream I am smelling bacon but that is not a sensory experience.

But that doesn’t remove the possibility that life itself is a dream that includes sensory experience. In which case.....so what? — Mww

I don't just mean that there are things that are absent in my dreams. I mean that the phenomenal quality of everything present in my dreams is nothing like the phenomenal quality of the "similar" waking experience.

So for example, "seeing" my wife in my dream is nothing at all like the phenomenal quality of seeing my wife in waking experience.

My dreams are more akin to daydreams, just when I'm asleep. If I daydream or fantasize about seeing my wife, that's nothing like the phenomenal experience of actually seeing her.

Maybe some people dream and daydream so that there's no phenomenal difference. I wouldn't say that no one can do that. How would I know? But I can't relate to it, because it's not at all like that for me.

Understood.

What do you think of the proposition we can’t dream anything we haven’t already experienced, either directly or indirectly, that is, what is said to reside in consciousness? Can we dream impossibilities?