It seems like the implicit argument here would then conclude that we all have the same grip on reality. There are no differences. The man who thinks he can fly on an acid trip and who dies when jumping off a highway overpass, is just as connected to reality as the person who avoids falling or jumping off high places. Even if the first guy wouldn't have wanted to die. He was surprised to be falling towards the highway and the trucks.I don’t follow, whatever the guy without the dog is doing he’s consciously aware of and interacting with something that must exist for him, unless he’s pretending. — praxis
If I see Amanda on the street and wave to her and wonder why she is looking oddly at me, I have not come any closer to reality when I realize she looks a tiny bit like Amanda, but isn't her at all.
No, in both those instances, I was being just as realistic. One can never gain deeper insight or get closer to a realistic understanding of something. — Coben
It seems like the implicit argument here would then conclude that we all have the same grip on reality. There are no differences. The man who thinks he can fly on an acid trip and who dies when jumping off a highway overpass, is just as connected to reality as the person who avoids falling or jumping off high places. Even if the first guy wouldn't have wanted to die. He was surprised to be falling towards the highway and the trucks. — Coben
At no point is anyone not connected to reality. To be mistaken is not to be unreal. — neonspectraltoast
There's this notion of false awakening where a person believes s/he has woken up but is actually asleep and dreaming; hence false awakening.
The idea has another, philosophical, meaning - describing a person who believes s/he has grasped true reality but actually hasn't; maybe s/he misunderstands, or s/he has only a partial understanding of, true reality.
If we bring these two meanings of false awakening together we get the picture of a person who thinks s/he's awake and understands true reality but is actually asleep, dreaming and still in the grips of an illusion, stuck, as it were, in false reality.
Consider now what we take to be true reality - the world in which we spend our "waking" lives in. We distinguish it from dreams we experience in sleep and declare, quite adamantly in my view, that the "waking" life we go through is true reality and the dream is an ilusion.
Bring to bear on the above notion we have of what true reality is, the idea of false awakening and suddenly we're no longer in a position to claim that our "waking" lives constitute an experience of true reality. To entertain this possibility is not to say anything new - Descartes' evil demon and the brain in a vat are old and well-known thought experiments. What bothers me at this point is whether any amount of "awakening" is sufficient to permit us to make the claim this, for sure, is true reality.?
To give you a glimpse of the problem we're faced with imagine me as asleep, dreaming and I "wake up" and realize that I was dreaming. I sit up in my bed and then the thought that I could be a brain in vat crosses my mind. I'm now no longer certain that the bed I'm sitting on, the watch whose alarm woke me up, the toothbrush I'll use, etc. are real. Imagine now that I am a brain in a vat and "wake up" to that fact - I see myself, the brain, connected to a supercomputer simulating the world I thought was real and so on. What about this reality, myself as a brain in a vat, can assuredly prevent me from thinking this too might be an illusion? "Nothing" is the right word I suspect.
It seems that to whatever level of reality one "awakens" to, the same problem exists - it could be a false awakening and the specter of an illusory reality constantly looms over us. Bottomline, every awakening could be a false awakening and although true reality maybe within reach, we can never really know it is that.
Comments... — TheMadFool
The person I was responding to seemed to think that all maps have the same value. — Coben
I have been thinking about this concept recently and as you said, there is no way to determine if we are in 'reality' or a waking life now. I would suggest that death is the only way to discover a more legitimate reality. But the the question is raised, how many times would one have to die to be in the life that is true and what would be different or more worthwhile about being in a real reality? You have articulated my train of thought over the last few weeks perfectly, thank you. — TheDarkElf
True but that doesn't add or take away from my previous post so I'm not sure what your point is? — MAYAEL
So you replied to me with a neutral statement because I had said something that you already knew? — MAYAEL
Ahh .. so much is lost over the internet that is instantly understood in person. Obviously I can hold a much better conversation in person lol — MAYAEL
So then if a person "wakes up and sees the elution " and says to everyone "I know the objective reality " you can confidently assume that they have only accomplished tricking themselves and are now living in an even more complex elution then before. — MAYAEL
What is there to figure out really? What is is. Until it changes. Then it's not. Then that is. Lol. Not too complicated really. — Outlander
Duality vs. non-duality — Outlander
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.