The Reactive Mind

the reactive mind:

"what i'm saying is that people are impressionable. they go by what they see. and that's obvious that materialism is built on a visual impression of the world, what we see is thought of as real. and dreams, because what we see is usually less clear, that's thought of as not real, because it's less than what we see in waking life."

"wait, what's your argument, that dreams are just as real? or they're both not real? because i would go with both not being that real."

"maybe they're equally real or equally not real, if you see what i mean. my point is that we place dreams on a lower status just because we see in waking life much more clearly and it's a more stable world. we prize clarity and stability. you could say the mind is a big snob about the clear light of waking life."

"that philosopher who wondered whether he was a human dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being human? that you could say both are true?"

"right. the mind reacts upon waking that the dream wasn't real but what if it was?"

"so you could be sharing a dream with real people just as you could be with philosophical zombies in waking life?"

"right. zombies without consciousness, human illusions, simulated people, hallucinations of people, non player characters, whatever. it is interesting that when we consider that a lot of people on earth may not be real, doesn't that mean we're hallucinating? that everyone on earth falls into the schizoid camp of people? that everyone is schizophrenic?"

"but you're equating hallucinations with schizophrenia. but yes, i agree, but not everyone is clinically diagnosed schizophrenic. i have a theory though. all real people may be schizophrenic to some degree, it's just that most people hide it better than those that end up committed to a mental hospital. they have better coping mechanisms. think of it this way, there's a statistic i've read that over 10% hear voices or auditory hallucinations. and if this earth is a simulated world, that means 100% see visual hallucinations of people. why are only 1%, that's the statistic, diagnosed schizophrenic?"

"what you're saying is most people are just better at acting normal so they don't get locked up in a psychiatric ward?"

"exactly. but that's just my theory. it's like acting not normal is illegal and they're well aware of it."

"probably from a very early age, i guess. and i've been trying to remember the first part of my life better. i'm still sure how i ended up here on earth was because i dreamed of earth and then woke up in it. born at the age of three. on the one hand, you've got the theory life on earth is a dream, then you have the theory it's a computer simulation, or that's it's a grand hallucination, but really i guess it has elements of all three."

"it's the frame of reference. like if you think it's a simulation then the question is who created it. the idea of god as the programmer just pops up like that naturally. but i think a lot of people don't ask who created your dreams last night, right?"

"it seems there's no getting away from the concept of god though. everyone on earth feels powerless really. and so everyone can imagine what god is. it's like it's one of the most common concepts that everyone arrives at. what if there is someone with power over it all, even if it's just someone who manages to hack the Matrix, if you like?"

"but is it run on what could be like computer code? are dreams coded too? what if, by inventing the computer and programming languages, we've made it run on computer code in the background?"

"and it wasn't before? so earth was fundamentally different before the advent of the computer age? and now it does run on something like C++? because now the code exists? and this is out there but like maybe before Newton's Laws of Motion, mechanical motion was different? humans somehow made motion work to the laws? who remembers?"

"right. once something new exists, it could change everything in the universe."

"what is the unconscious? is it just the material connecting our senses and the thought in our heads to everything else running in the invisible background? is it a random chaotic swirl happening around us?"

"yes. it's not easy to think about what really goes on, the metaphysics of reality. but all this talk of a simulated reality is the reaction to the Matrix movies, it really popularized the concept. the schizophrenia theory of earth and creation is not as popular."

"it's a loaded word. people fear madness. and chaos, which mentally is what schizophrenia is."

"again, people want stability. full on schizophrenia violently bends reality. it frightens people. it's like taking a sledgehammer to the world that is actually very delicate."

"the question is, if earth is hallucinatory, let's go with this, what makes it so stable?"

"maybe it's the code behind it now. computer science. now everyone knows and imagines the medieval world as a magical, chaotic place and time, it's fully in the culture. the thing is, what if we dismiss those that dismiss that as superstitious nonsense, and consider that's what life really was, nobody made it up later? ancient times really were the world of swords and sorcery?"

"and science banished that away and replaced it with today? science killed the magic? i don't know. i have my doubts sometimes that reality is even older than a few hundred years. i mean i've heard it's the Year 443. that means Year 1 was AD 1572 equivalent. it's like the dream world is constructed in an instant, and so could earth be therefore, i guess."

"that's true, it's just conjecture. but that's the way to think, i think. try to find the truth in everything. consider everything if it were true at first, without prejudice. hopefully eventually what is false will become obvious."

CLEARCHARGE

Understanding Reality with Words

understanding reality with words:

"the thing is, none of us were born knowing a lot, right? how much did we know at the start of time, assuming our consciousness existed even then? but now we know a lot more, we've built up complexes of meanings for words that are related to everyday life. now the search to explain reality inevitably involves using these complexes as metaphors, if you like, to describe how reality works. so the old either or argument is whether reality is mental or material, material in the sense that the things we see and can touch are real. these are the schools of idealism and materialism or physicalism."

"it's easy to see why materialism is popular. we're highly visual."

"right. we're impressed by what we see and touch. idealism is a pulling back from sense perception, doubt comes in. is it all in my own mind kind of question."

"yeah. it's not easy to believe in materialism when you find your mind can influence what you see. really, someone who completely believes in materialism is someone for whom everything completely works, like as in scientifically. i don't think any highly schizophrenic person can be a materialist. imagine seeing what are called "hallucinations" all the time, really bizarre things, hearing many voices you can talk to, just like with other people you can see, and so on. materialism soon seems the theory of a hopelessly naive person living the perfectly "normal" life where nothing weird happens. the idea that the mind is greater than what seems "material" soon occurs. the schizophrenic may be ill, per se, but the instability mentally that occurs during a psychotic episode shows this to be the case. i may be "hallucinating" but what if i can touch the "hallucination", what if i can talk to the "hallucination"?"

"the irony is that most of Earth may be described as a "hallucination". i mean a guy may be "normal", not clinically schizophrenic, but if the world is full of philosophical zombies, illusions of people, is he not hallucinating?"

"that's going on hallucinating meaning not real. i suppose maybe you could argue that everyone on Earth is actually schizophrenic, it's just that most don't know it, they hallucinate people all the time, assuming philosophical zombies are real, and that they all have the potential to blow out to full clinical schizophrenia at some point."

"i think the word that came up after i became schizophrenic was "belief" or "believe". because the onset radically alters your beliefs and you think if only i could "believe" i could make things real."

"do you mean like magical thinking?"

"yeah. like believing if you did something, something would happen, against all scientific reasoning of course. but like things happened. at a railway station, i was looking at a train timetable and then it instantly changed in front of me, the whole board, and the same day, i looked at the railway map, at a map where all the towns of the UK were in different places. it was like i stepped into a parallel universe for a day. if i believed any of it, things might have turned out differently on the day."

"actually that sounds dangerous. maybe you shouldn't travel when you're very schizophrenic."

"that's the frightening truth about schizophrenia and idealism. it is all in your own mind. if you're mind's breaking down, it's actually dangerous. there's no comfort that there's a solid material world out there that's stable."

"but what is beyond mental and material, if there is anything? because now we have computers and that brings in a whole lot of new concepts."

"right. so now we use computer metaphors to describe reality, like it's a "computer simulation", it's a "simulated reality", "bits", "information", "data" and so on. but there's another word that is a factor in all these explanations, it's the word "personal", like is there is a creator who programmed it all in the beginning, a person."

"maybe it's because people want to believe that there is power over it all, that there is a god, if you like. to think that it all is chaotic, non personal, and the situation is highly volatile is kind of frightening. it's like everyone's trapped in a bus going at 120 miles per hour and there's no driver at all!"

"but let's say it is all personal, it's mental, but it's the unconscious in control. what is the unconscious? we all know what consciousness is, we identify ourselves often as our consciousness. i think, therefore i am, but what if i personally am a lot more than what i think, and part of that a lot more is the unconscious?"

"maybe that's what the collective unconscious is, it's like an invisible cloud spread throughout reality that connects everyone. and everyone's head is a pinpoint of consciousness."

"yes. the head is small relative to what surrounds it. the idea of personal zones, assuming everyone is fixed in position in real space, where in that zone everything is more closely linked to and influenced by the head there, where does one person become another person, where's the border?"

"what if, using the computer analogy, it's not all personal, because that's too egocentric, it's all data, or bits? and like even a pixel of light we see is a bit?"

"yes. it's easy to see how new things change the way we think about everything. it's like a new frame of thought appears through which we filter everything old to try to refine what we know and make sense of things."

CLEARCHARGE