It seems to me that we only experience things as a series of memories, when somethings 'happens' it immediately becomes a memory. We can only see backwards which has ceased to exist anyway, so we have to reconstruct those memories, which might help explain false memory syndrome, something which I have experienced when listening to people's accounts of past events which seem to become gradually more inaccurate over time.

So time is just a false memory.

OK, if it's not philosophy then I'm on the wrong forum!
Philosophy is the study of reality and existence, when that leads, inevitably, into the study of the nature of the divine it becomes theology, so I suppose I've crossed over from the philosophers camp to the theologians camp.

I do wonder why I've joined this forum.

Or any forum for that matter! Especially as I don't like camping or belonging to a camp.

I love this from Alan Watts:

Hide ‘n’ Seek

“God likes to play hide ‘n’ seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with! But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

“Now when God plays "hide" and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself! But that's the whole fun of it - just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But - when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self - the God who is all that there is and who lives forever and ever.

You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner.

Then we shuffle the cards and play again, and so it goes with the world”

Alan Watts - from "THE BOOK on the taboo against knowing who You are"

Question: Is there so called ‘life after death’?
Answer: There are two possibilities:
Either :
1 - Your consciousness or self awareness ceases to exist after bodily death, which indicates you are the sum total of your brain/body.
Or :
2 - Your consciousness or self awareness continues to exist after bodily death, which indicates you are not the sum total of your brain and body, that your existence is independent of your brain and body.
You have two choices:
1 - Decide that the first scenario is true.
2 - Decide that the second scenario is true
If you go for either option but the first option is the truth, then after death you will be none the wiser whatever your beliefs.
But if after deciding the first option is the truth and it turns out, after bodily death, that you were mistaken and that the second option is the truth then you will have missed the opportunity of a ‘lifetime’ to prepare yourself for that.

There are many that are desperate to believe there is no God and do likewise.

Proof is in the eye of the beholder?

If God the Creator exists then science is part of that creation. If, for whatever reason, God decides to remain hidden (which seems to be the case) then proving his/her/its existence will be impossible as God will be holding all the cards.

Yes I would say ultimate reality is God/Allah/Brahman/Creator etc etc, use any label you like. The only thing that really exists, every 'thing' else is just God etc pretending to be everything, the real You/Us/I is just the one, no here and there, this and that, then and now.

I don't know where the candle light comes from, I've read that it comes from the candle and converted by my eye into electrical impulses to be analyzed by my brain and interpreted as an image, but for all I know it could be a thought from God which is transmitted to my brain which converts it into electrical impulses that are fed to the eye which projects it as an image. Take your pick.

Are thoughts the function of a brain or is the brain just a device for conveying them?

Well obviously I am unable to convey my feelings using written language, anyway I don't feel the need to convince anyone or defend them

I can't differentiate with language only within myself.

I did say'us'

If everyone is God, as myself and millions of people believe, then all of 'us' are very familiar with God and even talk to Him/Her/It on a regular basis.

I think part of the problem of depression is not realising it is often a normal part of life and therefore thinking that something is wrong. I can't imagine an intelligent person never getting depressed.

I don't believe in authority but I'm saying that I believe he (Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan) is real, but not ultimately real.

'Real' is like saying a computer game is real, but not ultimately real

Maybe the only thing that exists is the all loving Creator who needs to experience what it feels to be the opposite to what it is, but as there is no opposite it pretends that there is, acting out all the different roles but deliberately forgetting who it really is so that the different roles seem real, getting into all sorts of bittersweet adventures and getting lost on the way, imagining itself to be individual and developing egos to reinforce that.

So maybe life is a conspiracy, a conspiracy by the Creator against itself.

What he was saying is that the world is not ultimately real. In the rest of his statement which I left out he said that viewing the world as ultimately real is delusion!

As to your question I don't know, everything is on shifting sands so there is no solid vantage point to make a firm decision.

As to reality I'll quote Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan:

"... the objective world exists, it is not an illusion. It is real not in being ultimate but in being a form or or expression of the ultimate"

That puts it much better than I can.

I like this version of an agnostic:
"Someone who finds his life meaningful enough to pursue; without admitting or dismissing a God, and tolerant enough to respect either ways as a possible answer.

But I prefer this one:

"A person who is sensible enough to admit that they have no fu*#i*g clue what is going on in the universe.
Contrary to both a Theist (someone who sits in Church thinking they have shit figured out) and an Atheist (someone who sits at Starbucks thinking they have shit figured out)"

But nouns aside, trying to describe what we imagine ultimate reality might or might not be we can't rely on oral or written words, they are just labels after all. But to me anyone being persuaded of anything is believing the persuader.

I don't know what is real, some of my experiences seem to suggest there is another reality behind this reality, so what is ultimate reality? As a human being with limited abilities I can't say, only speculate.

I've only succeeded once to realise that I'm dreaming, very subjective experience for everyone.

As for quantum theory I think it's largely bunkum with lots of buzz words.

We only know what dreams are when we they are viewed from the vantage point of wakefulness.

When trying to observe the quantum world nothing makes logical sense, we are faced with a conundrum, the logical observable world is built on an illogical observation, we know nothing if all our observations are based on nothing logical.

Assuming of course that the stars and the Sun are in fact what and where they are, we have no first hand experience, just what we are told, and the tellers could be misinterpreting what they are observing as all initial observations in the past were.

The objective world we seem to occupy could all be an illusion or dream, we don't know, if that is true we cannot prove or disprove it as any measures taken, any science involved, will be part of that illusion.

A few years ago I decided that in my next dream I would use logic to decide if I was in fact dreaming and awaken, sure enough I soon had a strange dream in which I was steering a narrowboat along a canal at an impossible dream, I rembered my previous decision to use logic to analyze things. But the problem was I had no knowledge of the laws of physics in the real world, if I did I would realise my dream world was separate, instead I looked around me and everything was in perfect detail, the weeds bending in the boats wash, totally convincing so I decided it was real, and carried on dreaming!

I believe the same as we all believe, we don't know, we can only guess, Einstein said something like "atheism is no belief at all" but I disagree, it is a belief in the non existence of God.

An instant in so called time must be just that, not something that lasts for a period of time but something that starts and ends at the same instant, in other words it has no length or substance so it cannot ultimately exist, it just appears to exist.

I believe we only observe what appears to be an occurance, like watching a film/movie, nothing is occurring, it's just a still shot observed for a fraction of a second then a shutter comes down until the next frame is positioned. No movement or occurance, just a convincing illusion really, the difference being we know it's an illusion because we understand the mechanism operating behind us.

My understanding is that it doesn't occur at all in reality, it just appears to occur.

We can only experience the present as a memory, it's impossible to experience it as it occurs.

The present consists of an instant which is changed for another instant immediately the present instant ceases to exist.

Really, everything only appears to be happening.

Exactly.

My only experience of 'supernatural' was in the early 70s when I witnessed a 200' long guideline, tied off at both ends, somehow got snagged, gently, on someone's breathing apparatus (fire service)

I was the only one to actually witness it snagging (in poor light) I immediately called a halt but was unable to disentangle it, on inspection it became obvious to the eight or nine of us present that it was physically impossible for the line to have finished up where it did. Oddly just a couple of minutes before the snag I had the most overwhelming de ja vu experience, it lasted a good two minutes and I was transfixed by it.

It was all a very spooky experience, it made me realise 'something' else is going on behind the scenes and totally changed my outlook leading me to pursue the nature of reality, but here's the funny part, I had the distinct and confident feeling that 'I', whoever that really is, somehow engineered the whole thing!

False ego - We think we are what we think others think we are.

But we don't realise it.