So when I dream, what external things am I aware of? What are the objects of experience?

It all depends on what you dreamed of. Let's say you dreamed about your friends. Your friends would be the object of that experience.

You're not really coming to terms with the original arguments from idealist and sceptical philosophers. If it was as obvious and simple as you say it is, then Bishop George Berkeley must have been a fool to believe otherwise - and really, Berkeley was no fool. These editions of Berkeley's works are presented in modern English, and it's worth your while to spend a bit of time reading them - especially the Three Dialogues. The opponent in those dialogues throws all these kinds of objections at the idealist, and the idealist responds to them quite ingeniously.

Now, the way I interpret the idealist claim is not that 'we are aware of experiences'. If you say 'we are aware of experiences', then you're saying that experience is one thing, and awareness is another. But if you go down that route, you will find many conundrums. When you ask 'what is experience?' it's not 'a hand in front of you', but your awareness of your hand in front of you. The hand is in front of you, but your experience of the hand is not 'in front of you'.

You can't stand outside of, or objectify, experience; you can't say that 'experience is the object of awareness', because awareness of an object is an experience. 'Experience' is a transitive verb, that is, requires an object; but all experience also requires a subject. The reality comprises the subject, the object, and the experience. In that sense, subject, object and experience are all aspects or poles of the totality.

Finally, it's worth noting that Immanuel Kant, who described himself as a transcendental idealist, differentiated himself from Berkeley, mentioned above. So whilst he was still an idealist, he claimed that Berkeley's form of idealism was problematical. And he did so by way of an argument that is not too disimilar to your own. But in order to understand why he differentiated himself from Berkeley, it's probably best to delve into some of Berkeley's actual writings, to see how he deals with objections to his contention that 'esse est percipe'.

What does it mean to be conscious? Consciousness is synonymous with awareness. To be conscious is to be in a state of awareness. And in order to be aware there are two requirements: the being that is aware, and the subject of the awareness. To say that I am aware of the hands in front of me, is to acknowledge myself, and the existence of my hands.The same is true for anything else.

I don't think consciousness is synonymous with awareness. I think consciousness is reflective awareness. We observe all sorts of creatures that appear to be aware, but I would not ascribe conscious intent to that awareness, that mosquito is not out to get me, it is driven by hunger alone. Scientific studies seem to show that awareness has a greater scope than consciousness, that we are aware of more than we are conscious of.

Logic has important but limited value when it comes to experience, it cannot account for what you are trying to make an account of, in my opinion.

It all depends on what you dreamed of. Let's say you dreamed about your friends. Your friends would be the object of that experience. — Purple Pond

What if I dream of something that doesn't exist in the waking world, like me having a child?

Or is such a thing impossible? How so?

What does it mean to be conscious? Consciousness is synonymous with awareness. — Purple Pond

You are already begging the question with this definition.

You can't stand outside of, or objectify, experience; you can't say that 'experience is the object of awareness', because awareness of an object is an experience. 'Experience' is a transitive verb, that is, requires an object; but all experience also requires a subject. The reality comprises the subject, the object, and the experience. In that sense, subject, object and experience are all aspects or poles of the totality. — Wayfarer

Then how can it be that we are aware, or know, that we have experiences? Is it not what differentiates us from other animals - that we can turn our own awareness back on itself - of being aware of being aware - to associate this awareness with my self and to say that I am self-aware because I can be aware of my own experiences? Descartes would seem to disagree with you when he said, "I think, therefore I am." His own awareness of his own thoughts is what gives him evidence of his own existence. How are you aware of your existence, and in what way do you exist?

'Objecitification' is not quite the same as self-awareness. Certainly I can reflect on my own experience, and indeed on what it is to be aware, but awareness and experience are not objects of experience in the sense that this pen or this chair is. The pen or the chair is a 'that' to me, or to any other observer, whereas the awareness to and in which the pen appears is not.

Is it possible to have consciousness if there is no external reality? — Purple Pond

External to what? The possibility to have consciousness is already assumed in talk of reality being external or internal to consciousness.

To have consciousness is to have the capacity to identify things in a network of things to be conscious of. We can call this network 'reality', and say that it includes things "external" to consciousness (e.g. the things we discover in our shared environment), as well as things "internal" to consciousness (e.g. thoughts and perceptions of things).

You can reflect on World History and ethical dilemmas just as you can reflect on your own awareness, or your circulatory system or neural system. "You" can also be aware of your arms and legs and even your heart, and interestingly enough, if "you" look in a mirror, "you" can be aware of your face and eyes. "You" may even come to be aware of how "you" have changed.

Is it possible to have consciousness if there is no external reality? I don't believe it is possible.

What does it mean to be conscious? Consciousness is synonymous with awareness. To be conscious is to be in a state of awareness. And in order to be aware there are two requirements: the being that is aware, and the subject of the awareness. To say that I am aware of the hands in front of me, is to acknowledge myself, and the existence of my hands.The same is true for anything else.

An idealist or a skeptic might claim that all we are aware of is experience. Thus being conscious only proves the reality of experience - not an external world. To that I would ask: what is experience? Again, I experience a hand in front of me. There are two requirements for that experience: the being that has the experience (me), and the object being experienced (my hands).

What about illusions and hallucinations? For example, you are conscious of an bent stick in water when there is no bent stick. To that I say that you are not conscious of any actual bent stick. What you are really conscious of is a mental image of a bent stick.

But couldn't everything be an illusion just like the bent stick in water? What if everything you see is only mental imagery? This brings me back yet again to duality of consciousness. What is an image? An image is a representation of a thing. In order for there to be an image there must be two things: the representation, and the thing that is being represented. In order to have a mental image of stick there must exist a stick somewhere in the past present, or future. — Purple Pond

I'll give my opinion for what it's worth. It's based on my studies of near death experiences, and what people have experienced while taking DMT. Reality seems to be far more fantastic than what most people believe, religious or otherwise. What seems to be at bottom of everything is a mind/s, or you could say consciousness. Consciousness probably gives rise to all reality. There seem to be different levels of consciousness, or higher and higher states of consciousness. Dreaming is an example of a low level of consciousness, nevertheless it's created by our minds. Waking reality is a higher state of reality, but it also seems to be created by our mind, or in conjunction with other minds. What people experience in near death experiences seems to be even a higher state of consciousness or awareness.

Everything seems to get back to the idea of some kind of oneness, but at the same time it seems to allow us to have our individuality, and yet remain connected to this oneness or consciousness. It's as though we are individuals amongst a sea of consciousness. But it's even more fantastic, I believe, than this. It seems that who we are is much greater than who we are as humans, i.e., we are beings of light that are having human experiences for a variety of reasons.

I know it sounds crazy. Our memories seem to be suppressed, just as our memories are suppressed in a dream state. The analogy between dreaming and waking and what we experience in higher states of consciousness is quite remarkable.

(Y)

In order to have a mental image of stick there must exist a stick somewhere in the past present, or future. — Purple Pond

I agree with that statement, with one picky modification: There need not be a stick, but something external to us. If I have a mental image of a unicorn, it does not follow that unicorns exist (past, present or future), but that I have experienced the basic objects that the image is made of: e.g. a horse + a horn.

To put your argument in a different way:
- Nothing can come from nothing: even our imagination cannot create images from scratch;
- we perceive an external reality;
- therefore an external reality must exist.

What people experience in near death experiences seems to be even a higher state of consciousness or awareness. — Sam26

What reasons do they give for claiming to experience a 'higher state of consciousness'? Is it a self evident experience?

On a similar note, what reasons do we have to claim that our waking state is a higher state of consciousness than our dreaming state? I can think of two reasons:
1. Our waking state is continuous from one day to the next, where as our dreaming state appears to change every night.
2. We can analyze our dreaming state during our waking state, but we cannot (at least I cannot) analyze our waking state during our sleeping state.

Many or most claim that their sensory experiences are heightened, viz., their ability to see, hear, understand, etc. Also that it's this reality that seems dreamlike in comparison to the experiences they have in an NDE or a DMT experience. I compare it to waking from a dream, generally in a dream our experiences seem dumbed-down. When one has an NDE, this reality seems dumbed-down.

external reality — Purple Pond

It's odd how when you drive a car through a narrow space, you squeeze your shoulders closer to compress yourself. Wittgenstein had a question about feeling one's way with a stick: if the stick taps hard ground, where do you feel the hardness?

As jkop said earlier, if you start with an assumption of external reality you're bound to find it necessary. But what justifies your starting there? I can close my eyes and inhabit Mahler's Fifth: am I not conscious in that orchestra there with old Gustav?

I find consciousness every bit as strange as Sam, though I conjure it in my mind differently, that each of us is almost constantly (though with pauses for breath) re-inventing their world, as we move through shared space among familiar objects. Either way, Sam's or mine, this oddness seems to fit quite well both with quite a lot of neuroscience about how human creatures act, and with something that's on the mystical slant of understanding.

It's odd how when you drive a car through a narrow space, you squeeze your shoulders closer to compress yourself. Wittgenstein had a question about feeling one's way with a stick: if the stick taps hard ground, where do you feel the hardness? — mcdoodle

Feelings appear only in consciousness as a representation of the state-of-affairs that is the ground.

As jkop said earlier, if you start with an assumption of external reality you're bound to find it necessary. But what justifies your starting there? I can close my eyes and inhabit Mahler's Fifth: am I not conscious in that orchestra there with old Gustav? — mcdoodle

You are conscious of the fact that you are imagining things. Does the orchestra sound exactly like you were there? Doesn't it sound less raw, or vivid, that you actually being there? How is it that you are conscious of the fact that you are imagining something and not really there and how do you reconcile that with saying "I am conscious in that orchestra"? Aren't you conscious of an imagining, and not really of an orchestra?

If there isn't an external world, then all of our words don't refer to, or mean, anything. We would never be talking about things that exist independent of the words themselves, or states-of-affairs that exist independent of our experience of them. Language is built on the premise of object permanence.

If there isn't an external world, then all of our words don't refer to, or mean, anything. We would never be talking about things that exist independent of the words themselves, or states-of-affairs that exist independent of our experience of them. Language is built on the premise of object permanence. — Harry Hindu

Yeah, I think this is one of the few settled things we can say in all this area. Things like Idealism and phenomenalism are actually incoherent, since they're using shared language, which presupposes the validity of the concept of external objects, to cast wholesale doubt on external objects (in a "discussion" no less! :) ). The very idea of doubting the external world is incoherent because "the game of doubt" itself presupposes an external world. You can only cast doubt on (one) external object by accepting the existence of (some other) external objects.

The Argument from Illusion, which is usually where these sorts of lucubrations start, moves from the possibility of illusion, to the possibility of wholesale illusion, but that move can't possibly be made, because the very existence and concept of illusion is only possible, only has meaning, in a context where we sometimes do experience reality.

IOW, the only reason we can peg a given experience an "illusion" at all, is because we've had a corrective perception that induces us to believe the previous experience was illusory; but that corrective perception must itself be non-illusory otherwise it couldn't correct the illusory perception, and it couldn't be illusory.

Yes, consciousness, experience, will, are associated with a body in a physical world. I'm an Idealist, and I feel that the Anti-Realist view makes the most sense. But, though experience is primary, and though there's no reason to believe in a fundamentally existent, objectively existent physical world, there's also no disembodied consciousness that was there without body and world. (...even if the physical world is a complex logical system rather than an objectively-existent collection of objectively existent things.)

You're the central, essential component of the possibility-world that is the setting for your life-experience possibility-story.

I don't think Realism vs Anti-Realism has to be an issue. I don't claim that either view is wrong. That's because the words "Real" and "Existent" aren't even metaphysically-defined. So how can there be an issue about what's real?

The Anti-Realist view, from the individual-experience point of view makes the most sense to me. All we know about the physical world is from our experience. It's best, most simply, most elegantly and parsimoniously described as a life-experience story. A possibility-story, consisting of a logical system.

The world from our personal experience point of view is the view that's relevant to us. For us, it's what there is. I's right for us to define and describe the world from that point of view. But that doesn't make it all that's "real" in some objective sense. To claim that would be chauvinistic. It's possible to reasonably objectively speak of abstract facts "being" without regard to anyone.There's what's there for us, and there's what can be discussed more objectively and distantly.

Michael Ossipoff

If there isn't an external world, then all of our words don't refer to, or mean, anything. We would never be talking about things that exist independent of the words themselves, or states-of-affairs that exist independent of our experience of them. Language is built on the premise of object permanence. — Harry Hindu

This isn't necessarily the case. It's possible that a very powerful mind/s could create a reality that's a virtual simulation, and while you're experiencing that reality with others you might refer to things in that reality as objective. That is to say, language would dictate how you would refer to that reality, because you have no other reality to compare it to.

Language isn't built on objective permanence, language generally takes hold as people agree on the use of words. Although a reality does have to have some permanence, whether it's a simulation or not.

Even the powerful mind that created the VR would still use it's language to refer to the objects in the VR, just as computer programmers and computer users use their language to refer to the objects in a 3D computer game.

Yes, but my point is that we might assume, for example, if we lived in a virtual world that it had an objective nature, but that's only true within that reality. If you were looking at that reality from outside, like outside a virtual reality, then you might not say it's objective. It just depends on where you're standing in relation to that reality. So in a sense the answer to the question is both yes and no. So what we call objective is relative.

If the answer is both yes and no, then you have problem called inconsistency.

Being inside the VR or outside of it doesn't matter. The VR exists objectively for everyone. For the person in the VR, their tree would refer to an objective aspect of the world - the computer code of the VR. To say that one is subjective and one isn't is really just talking about making category errors, where those that are making "subjective" statements are making category errors, while those making objective statements aren't.

If the answer is both yes and no, then you have problem called inconsistency.

Being inside the VR or outside of it doesn't matter. The VR exists objectively for everyone. For the person in the VR, their tree would refer to an objective aspect of the world - the computer code of the VR. To say that one is subjective and one isn't is really just talking about making category errors, where those that are making "subjective" statements are making category errors, while those making objective statements aren't. — Harry Hindu

No, it's not inconsistent, it's similar to a contingent truth, that is, it can be true in one setting and false in another depending on the state-of-affairs. I didn't say it was subjective, I said it was relative, there is a big difference.

No, it's not inconsistent, it's similar to a contingent truth, that is, it can be true in one setting and false in another depending on the state-of-affairs. I didn't say it was subjective, I said it was relative, there is a big difference. — Sam26

This doesn't seem to be much different than my explanation in making category errors when referring to something in the VR as if it weren't a representation of a computer program. You seem to be saying that it is true from a VR person's perspective that there really is an enemy robot chasing them, but isn't that because they don't have access to more knowledge - that they are in a VR program? So, it would be more accurate to say that the computer user has more knowledge than the VR person, which means that they have access to the truth, while the VR person doesn't.

It's no different than dreaming your girlfriend broke up with you and when you see her the next day, she acts like that never happened, because it didn't actually happen. You only had a dream that it did. Which is the truth - that your girlfriend broke up with you, or that you had a dream that she broke up with you?

This doesn't seem to be much different than my explanation in making category errors when referring to something in the VR as if it weren't a representation of a computer program. You seem to be saying that it is true from a VR person's perspective that there really is an enemy robot chasing them, but isn't that because they don't have access to more knowledge - that they are in a VR program? So, it would be more accurate to say that the computer user has more knowledge than the VR person, which means that they have access to the truth, while the VR person doesn't. — Harry Hindu

It's true that the person in the VR program has less knowledge than the computer user, but it's much more I believe. For example, let's suppose that you know you're in a VR, but you don't have access to the same reality the user has, you are still going to refer to things in your VR as real, and rightly so since you're living there. You can still refer to things in the VR as objective even if you know it's not as real as the reality the user has access to. So things are objective within a reality, much of this is relative and dependent on how we describe, or use the term reality. Reality is a vague term, and is subject to a wide variety of uses. I don't think there is going to be some definition that will solve this problem. I also don't really think it's a category error, although I can see how someone might think so. A lot of this also depends on one's ontological or metaphysical outlook.

Once I know that I'm in a VR, then it would only be useful to refer to the things inside the VR when speaking to others inside the VR that AREN'T aware they are in a VR. In other words, I'd have to speak on their level of understanding, which would be different than mine. Ignorance doesn't make one's objective language actually true. We can make objective statements about reality all the time that simply aren't true. Just look at the rest of this forum. Every post is filled with objective claims about reality - most of which, if not all, aren't true.

Once I know that I'm in a VR, then it would only be useful to refer to the things inside the VR when speaking to others inside the VR that AREN'T aware they are in a VR. In other words, I'd have to speak on their level of understanding, which would be different than mine. Ignorance doesn't make one's objective language actually true. We can make objective statements about reality all the time that simply aren't true. Just look at the rest of this forum. Every post is filled with objective claims about reality - most of which, if not all, aren't true. — Harry Hindu

I agree with much of this Harry, and I agree that people make claims about reality thinking their claims are objective when they're not. I think what's important is understanding that objectivity is contingent on many things, it's especially contingent/dependent on what we're experiencing within a given reality. What about the one who creates the VR, isn't that program objective for him/her? It has an existence, it's just a different kind of reality, a different metaphysical domain, so to speak.

Getting back to the title of the post, what if everything is simply a construct of consciousness, then everything we're experiencing could be within that consciousness or mind. There would be no reality outside that mind, every reality that's experienced could be a kind of holographic reality that we simply engage with from within a mind. There are some physicists who think that at the bottom of everything is simply consciousness, that reality is part of that consciousness. Consciousness may be the unifying theory of everything. In fact, the very particles themselves may be part of that consciousness. Of course much more needs to be done in terms of science, but it's very interesting.

https://tmhome.com/news-events/unified-field-of-consciousness-onemany/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mst3fOl5vH0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI66ZglzcO0

I agree with much of this Harry, and I agree that people make claims about reality thinking their claims are objective when they're not. I think what's important is understanding that objectivity is contingent on many things, it's especially contingent/dependent on what we're experiencing within a given reality. What about the one who creates the VR, isn't that program objective for him/her? It has an existence, it's just a different kind of reality, a different metaphysical domain, so to speak. — Sam26

Well, does the VR simulate experiences as well? If so, the those experiences would be programmed, determined. The "people" inside the VR would have no control over their perceptions, or what they say about it.

Getting back to the title of the post, what if everything is simply a construct of consciousness, then everything we're experiencing could be within that consciousness or mind. There would be no reality outside that mind, every reality that's experienced could be a kind of holographic reality that we simply engage with from within a mind. There are some physicists who think that at the bottom of everything is simply consciousness, that reality is part of that consciousness. Consciousness may be the unifying theory of everything. In fact, the very particles themselves may be part of that consciousness. Of course much more needs to be done in terms of science, but it's very interesting. — Sam26

If this were the case, then calling it a mind would be incoherent. If there is no reality outside a "mind", then the "mind" would essentially become reality. We use different terms to refer to minds, and reality. To switch the meaning of the two is ridiculous and unnecessary. One simply needs to follow the implications of what they are saying. If "mind" is the only thing to exist, then the "mind" is simply reality and there is no such thing as "mind".