Celebrating individual life

General Discussion
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As Anil Seth observed, when people are in general agreement of what it is they experience, we call that reality.

Empathy is the ability to place yourself into someone elses’s reality.
Ever winced when watching someone hurt themselves, but you are just observing? That is your mind producing the same biochemical action potentials as the person actually getting hurt.

Note that at best people can only experience a very narrow sensory band of the total wave frequency spectrum . But we can build very sensitive detectors that can inform us of those parts of reality we are unable to physically experience.

There are many animals and organisms that are sensitive to a much greater frequency band width than humans. Each species that’s alive today has an evolved special survival skill that allows it to survive, if not thrive, in today’s environment.

The survival skill speaks directly to the reality these species experience and is proof of its existence for that species. People living in a fantasy are rarely successful survivors.

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Your logical fallacy is “moving the goalposts”. This is what you have been doing for a year and a half, but this one is so obvious, even you should see it. Which means you probably do. Which means you probably are a troll.

You moved from “everything is a lie” to “everything else is just a concept”. I don’t know the technical term, but “just a” is also a logical fallacy. Something like the “component fallacy”, saying one aspect of something is the thing that it is. But anyway, this is one of the clearest posts where you say there is something real. It doesn’t matter that you can’t define it precisely, no one can. You agree, something is real. So, when you start going off like this:

where you go from “what are distinctions” to “do people exists?” are either more trolling, or pure laziness. Either way, why are you on this forum? You have plenty of other places you can suck people into your fantasies and circular reasoning and just non-reaoning. Go there.

Here, you would start with “where are the distinctions” and you would actually answer them. You could talk about some atomic level where the finger touches the table but the two are indistinct, with electrons being exchanged, but your thoughts or sensations don’t change based on those interactions. Zoom out just a little and those particles become either “you” or the table. So, the answer to your second question, “yes”, there are divisions between you and things. And you could keep building from there.

Instead, you like to ignore possible answers, scientific evidence and data, thought experiments through history, and common sense. You keep asking questions as if you haven’t experienced the world as it is. I’d prefer you leave here voluntarily if you can’t stop doing this, but there are other means to how this ends.

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It seems to me this bears repeating:

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IT doesn’t really matter what he thinks, even we we agree on something that doesn’t make it reality. That’s certainly not how science works.

I have not. But that’s sorta proving the greater point about it being all chemicals. It sorta reminds me of this video that highlights how we try to make things more than what they are because it makes us feel better.

It’s not moving the goalposts, it’s tying the whole thing together. Everything being a lie is related to everything being a concept because we made up the distinctions, the boundaries, and reducing it to parts that we can analyze. But these boundaries only exist in our imagination, like the seasons or emotions. That what we live in a world of words and ideas of our own making that we project on reality.

The Logic of Mathematics and the Imaginative and Creative Process by which we Make Sense by Rendering the Continuous Discretely and Producing Continuity from the Discrete

Because it’s about questioning the distinctions and boundaries we impose on reality, it’s similar in vein to Eastern philosophy, namely Buddhism.

You’re not listening. Those distinctions and differences exist in our head, outside that they aren’t real like in the quote I wrote earlier about the dude talking about Pleroma and Creatura

Creatura and Pleroma . Borrowed from Carl Jung who applied these gnostic terms in his “Seven Sermons To the Dead”.[33] Like the Hindu term maya, the basic idea captured in this distinction is that meaning and organisation are projected onto the world. Pleroma refers to the non-living world that is undifferentiated by subjectivity; Creatura for the living world, subject to perceptual difference, distinction, and information.

My issue if with realizing that my entire life was more or less living in a fantasy world that we as humans created and then believed to be reality itself instead of us just projecting onto it. Systems theory argues something similar to that as well.

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Don’t tell me I’m not listening. Don’t ever speak to anyone on this forum like that. A “distinction” is a valid term, worth discussing.

Sure, they’re related. But you don’t get to hold the definitions and tell others they are wrong. You’ve had enough warnings. I don’t do those anymore.

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Well it’s like with day and night, or months, or even years. We break things up like that but it’s not always reality right? I mean if you went out into space I don’t think you’d have days anymore. Its similar to seasons. We make these distinctions but they exist only in our head, It’s not like you can draw a line between one “day” or another.

The point, like that quote from the sound cloud page, is that we created all this. The language we use to label and measure things and the concepts and all that, in a sense it’s like imagination. To cite systems theory again:

According to Clifford Geertz, “[b]elieving, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning”.

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You went from “everything is a lie” to “every thing else” other than our bodily sensations is made up. Convince me that you won’t change from “all that … is like imagination” to “well except those things”. Good luck, because you didn’t imagine the rotation of the earth or change of weather as the earth orbits the sun. We can’t label things if there aren’t things.

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Yes it does. Sensory observation is the fundamental survival tool. When there is concensus in observation it IS reality for those minds.

If you disagree then it is you who has an evolutionary disadvantage.

You may want to take this to heart:

Philip K. Dick

The phrase “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” is attributed to Philip K. Dick, an American science fiction writer known for his explorations into the nature of reality, identity, and consciousness12.

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If ITD were a real person, he would be a tragic figure because life is finite, you only have so many years, and the stages of life melt into the next, faster than most can recognize.

Spending these endless hour playing dog chasing tail. Where there’s a life to be lived, people to meet, and things to do and even more to meditate about.

Living in the here and now is really cool, if you got the right stuff. Some don’t, that’s sad, but it shouldn’t stymie those that do appear that living their life, is what life is about. Be present.

I got more to share, but there’s life to live, and my here and now is getting crowded with the ticking of the clock getting louder, . . .

later . . .

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You’re not getting it, we draw the lines between night and day and days and years. We made the distinctions between everything, we aren’t recognizing everything. Our knowledge of the world is very anthropoceptric:

I’ve heard that phrase but you’d be surprised how much of it goes away when you stop believing in it. Eastern philosophy touches on that a lot.

"Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: “The flag is moving.”
The other said: “The wind is moving.”

The sixth patriach happened to be passing by. He told them: “Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.”

Mumon’s Comment: The sixth patriach said: “The wind is not moving, the flag is not moving. Mind is moving.” What did he mean? If you understand this intimately, you will see the two monks there trying to buy iron and gaining gold. The sixth patriach could not bear to see those two dull heads, so he made such a bargain.

Wind, flag, mind moves.
The same understanding.
When the mouth opens
All are wrong."

Well when you peer behind the curtain of reality it’s hard to just go back to pretending again. There is no life to be lived or things to do. The people who are “living their live” do look too closely at things, from everything I have posted you’d see how quickly they unravel if they saw how much they took for granted.

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Well, I’ve peered behind the reality of my mind - it is not hard to go back to living with a clean understanding of being another biologically evolved animal. You know the physical reality ~ human mind divide, and the fact that you are the produce of a half billion years of evolution - and best of all - within your mom’s womb, while you were “gestating”, your body was recapitulating that entire evolutionary process in 9 months only to give birth to a creature who’s body knows what it had to do to survive,
and then only with time and nurturing did you acquire an ego and a sense of self.

That sense of self, comes from your body interacting with the world around you. Same as it does with the entire cornucopia of life this planet has hosted.

We happen to be the most extraordinary animal - who can look outside itself, like none other. We can appreciate life in a way nothing else can. We have become the Gods. But, gods, gluttony rules our hearts, there is no humility or wisdom down in there. So easily things can turn into this vapid existence you keep describing.

Understanding that nothing “matters”, doesn’t mean matter isn’t real.

Unfortunately, we possess bits of the entire spectrum of emotion and thinking within ourselves - What will one be present to?? -
We can possess the sublime, or be left groveling in the mud of confusion and bitterness - there we reach for the basest emotions and brute behavior with such ease - Way too many humans with power, prefer the brute, it’s all for me, me, me. MAGA man.

Well at least until those forces once again destroy’s existing society, only to start the cycle all over again. Lessons are learned all over again - only to be forgotten after a few generations of when the lazy, and greedy and freeloader (intellectually, civically, financially) can once again, mesmerize all the sheople out there. :cry:

You have the arrogance to think that the universe owes you an explanation. Not to mention the Dunning-Kruger thing you got happening. Keep digging - but can you please find your own thread to do it at.

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In the Buddhist tradition, @inthedarkness is granted six months of silence.

1 Like
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Person A and person B are standing along a railroad, a mile apart.
Between them a train is travelling at considerable speed .
While in motion the train is blowing it’s whistle
Each person hears that whistle and makes note of the pitch
The next day, they compare notes and surprise their sensory observation does not agree.
Person A : I clearly heard that whistle as the note of C
Person B: Naah…that whistle was an unmistakable note of D
Q: Who was lying and who was correct?

They were both telling truth, but both were also incorrect.

Person C (on the train) heard the whistle at its true pitch of C# or Db.

A perfect example of relative experience depending on one’s POV.
To wit: Special Relativity