Exploring direct experience

[Someone here]

@Gesundheit ?

[Someone here]

I  know this will sound weird, but I will give it a try. Since I was a teen I used to feel like I was the only real person and everyone else and everything only existed when I saw them like in a dream. I am 25 now and feel that way again. When I leave a room I feel it no longer exists. I feel that nothing existed until I was born. This means no real person won the 100 million dollar lottery last week and at the same time nobody died in an earthquake last week because neither of them really exists. Sometimes I feel I created the universe and made myself a part of it but purposely forgot so that it would be more interesting. I am just your average person. Maybe this is how I wanted it. I feel the answer will be revealed when I die, as if my life is just a long dream. Does anyone else feel this way? Even the guy who bullied me in 8th grade, did I create him ? I just ask myself are there really 7 billion souls on this earth plus the 20 billion that ever lived or just one: me. Sometimes I really think hard about this. When I see someone leaving work, do they really go home to a family or do they no longer exist til I see them the next day. I am not mentally unstable and would like to share your thoughts. Thanks.

[Someone here]

The question of what is real and the followup question is the world as empirically observed real are very broad philosophical questions essentially representing an entire branch of philosophy.

For this  particular concerns, about whether only you are real and the other people are not, look at it like this: Consider the amount that what you observe conforms with a world that goes on while you are not looking. For instance, when you leave a room and then come back later, all the other people are not in exactly the same spot as they were. Rather complicated events unfolded according to strict patterns such as physical laws. The amount of computing power it would take to simulate such a thing, even moreso if was post hoc, is well beyond the capabilities of the human brain. Thus, if the rest of the world is not real than you--as in your body and brain--are almost certainly also not real. So, no, you are not the only real person in a world that stops being real once you stop looking at it with only a bubble of reality around you imitating what it would be like if that bubble was actually in a real, bigger world. But maybe the whole thing is fake, and then we are just left with cogito ergo sum, noting that the "I" is not defined.

However, the difference between so-called simulation and so-called reality might be naught if there is no observable difference. Even if this whole observable universe was a simulation on some alien supercomputer, what's the difference in terms of reality? What does it matter if the tiny particles of the universe are actually each an electronic bit in some supercomputer or if there is no such supercomputer and the particles are particles. What is a particle really? Just a piece of information. It is only meaningful to call something a simulation when simulating something actually means doing less than having the real thing. A stuffed animal is no longer a simulation when we actually build an animal piece by piece, atom-by-atom that is identical to the so-called thing it simulating, an animal. Video games at current technology only offer virtual reality because they are not powerful enough to simulate the amount of information encoded in what believe to be reality not even to the practical end of offering an identical experience to a user or an identical mind to the virtual beings as those held by people in the allegedly real world.

[Someone here]

Scenario 1: 1 half of your brain was transplanted to ROBOT A and the other half of your brain was transplanted to ROBOT B. Who are you then? Are they both you or you are the robot with the most identical thought processing, personality and memories with your human self? pls try scenario 2

Scenario 2: if you upload your consciousness in COMPUTER A and COMPUTER B copies your consciousness, disregarding the originality, who are you then? if you say both because they have the same datas then you are reproducible. If I reproduce another copy of those data would that be you? pls try scenario 3

Scenario 3: Supposed you had an accident affecting your body mostly and requires your brain to be transplanted to another synthetic body. You then wake up without memories of who you are and you're thought processing change and personality turn exactly opposite of who you are originally, is this still you? Except for your brain, everything in this synthetic body is new with regards in the set of data, information and hardware can we still call this synthetic person to be you?

At what point do we draw the line whether or not you're still you? are we all just streams of data and information and thought processing? if so, if we can make a human exactly like you in appearance and everything would that be you? what if we replace you with him, would you matter if you're just reproducible?

[ryangold]

@Someone here Thx for the simulations. Awesome.

[Someone here]

@ryangold your welcome! 

[Someone here]

Am I aware? yes.

What is it that I am aware of? The sound surrounding me. The feelings in the body. The shapes and colors of objects around me.

But what is it that is aware? Can a monitor see itself? Can a sound hear itself? Obviously not.

I I I I..where is it pointed towards when I say I? Some subtle feelings in the head and chest deep inside. But what is that is aware of these sensations?

Can the sensation in the head feel itself? No that sounds silly. Is that what I really am? A sensation? My entire life revolves around these subtle ephemeral sensations? They were born in 1994 and now have an age, history, plans for future, desire and preferences? It sounds so ridiculous when I frame it like that. I'm obviously not these sensations. Then what am I?

I am that which knows all these sensations. Is there a location where the source of this knowingness is located? No whatever direction is pointed towards is always more experience.

What is direction? up down left right..are these directions absolute? No directions are always in relation to a presumed point or location. With respect to this knowingness, is there any direction like up down left right? Does this knowingness have any center? I can't find one. So does this mean that this Awareness is without location? Even it is not located, there is the sense that I undoubtedly exist. I'm present witnessing all these changes in phenomena. 

But does that knowingness itself undergo change? no all the changes are in phenomena.

According to Vedanta, real or abosolute is defined by having three characteristics. whatever is real must be

1) eternal or ever present

2) unchanging

3) must stand on it's own right. That means it does not need another thing to exist.

So what is it in my present experience that yields all three of these points? If something is real it must be ever present and so it must exist right now in my experience, whatever I may be experiencing?

Okay what are the things on my experience that does not conform these points? All sounds. All sights. How about sensations? is there a particular sensation that is taking place eternally, unchanging and knowing itself. No that sounds silly. During sleep, there is no sensation. What remains in deep sleep? The sentience and thinking stops. But there really is no feeling of non-existence. So the absolute exists in deep sleep. 

What is it's nature?

[Someone here]

Basically the twisted irony is, you are forever deprived of happiness once you form an image or idea of happiness.

Exactly like how you lose yourself and devolve into a finite , fickle being the moment an idea or image of you is formed (aka the birth of an ego)

The imaginary birth of this ego marks the start of this impossible dream of irresistable chasing of infinity and happiness while never actually tasting it.

The ego wants to devolve infinity and happiness into a form, just like it views itself as a form. A fool's errand.

And thus the nigga cries out "Why can't I get no satisfaction???" ?

[Someone here]

This question comes up time & again:
If there’s only One Thing (non-duality) how do you explain all the apparent ‘many things’ we see manifested? Our bodies? The hard solid ground? The water we can see.. feel and drink? The atoms.. quarks and other particles of apparently ‘real’ matter that make up water.. earth and bodies?

(Apparently, indeed. Science has already confirmed all atoms are 99% space.. less than 1% “matter.”)

Unfortunately.. You are  asking for a mind-based.. mind-understandable answer.. and insisting ([“non-objective] answers won’t help”) on limiting the answer to something the dual.. subject/object-based mind can comprehend.

“If there’s only One Thing, which means all body-minds are illusions or projections.. could you please explain what that illusory body-mind is…to my illusory body mind:-) See the problem?

It’s like a person’s shadow. Can a shadow explain what’s casting it.. or jump up and become the person casting it?

Your right eye is a non-duality. You only have one right eye. It cannot see itself as a non-duality. That would take a second eye sitting outside the first eye, looking back at it…and then you’d be back to duality.

Within your nighttime dream.. you always think you are your body and your body is real. When a dream car swerves towards you.. your dream body jumps out of the way to avoid getting hurt. Your dream is created by just One Thing.  Your mind. No one else’s. So it’s just One Thing, creating all these many things. Real things, or at least.. you’re quite certain their real” while you’re dreaming. But then you wake up.. and you see they were just projections from your One Thing.

Your waking dream is no different. “It just seems to be more continuous and last longer,” as Ramana Maharshi said, “but a dream projection, nonetheless.” At the Absolute level.. it’s obvious there is only One Thing.. or more accurately, NoThing. The Unmanifest. The Void. In enlightenment, or what you call ‘transcendence,’ we can get a fragrance of that.

But we can only be The Absolute.. Not know it.   because The Absolute can not know Itself. That would take two.. right - The Absolute and a separate “knower.” Then it wouldn’t be The Absolute anymore.. it would be a duality.

So what can we do? We can know that the One Non-Dual Thing is ‘in the background’ behind all duality, projecting itself through The Everything.. including our bodies.

[Someone here]

only true cause of death is birth.

Anything that is born will die. Everything that is created will be destroyed.

When it comes to so-called "causes of death", the rest is at best merely a matter of perspective, if not a deceptive shell game.

For example, consider a cigarette smoker who dies with lung cancer shortly after catching the common cold.

Would it even make sense to debate about whether the so-called "cause of death" was (1) cigarettes, (2) suicide, (3) lung cancer, or (4) the common cold? I propose that it would make no sense to have such a debate or to assert that one of those is or could be the cause.

No human can be saved from death. Thus, nothing else causes a human to die because the death is inevitable from the birth. The human will die regardless of whether they smoke, whether they catch a cold, whether they get lung cancer, whether they drive a motorcycle, whether they are suicidal, or whether they desperately cling to life in terrified fear of death. Neither the presence nor absence of any of those things--or any other things like them--will prevent the person from dying. Thus, those things and anything like them cannot be a true cause of death.

One could argue instead that a given event or factor (e.g. the presence of smoking versus non-smoking) would speed up the time of the death. Slightly accelerating or postponing the timing of something is very different than causing it. Moreover, analogous to accelerations or decelerations in Newtonian physics, these factors are cumulative not mutually exclusive, and are thus in practice immeasurable and countless if not infinite. For example, if 8 dogs are pulling a sled, it does not make sense to say which dog is the cause of the sled moving, nor is it true that only the dogs are responsible for the sled moving. Rather, there are countless and presumably infinite factors at play, such as but not limited to friction, gravity, the weather, and how much the guy riding the sled ate for breakfast.

Imagine the proverbial sled is going down a steep ice-hill, having black-hole-like properties, and thus the sled will reach its destination very soon regardless of any of those other factors, and some of the dogs are futilely trying to pull the sled up the hill but can only at best slightly decrease the rate of acceleration. That would be a more accurate analogy to anything attempting to prevent human death, such as exercising daily instead of smoking cigarettes daily. There is no preventing death, and no practical way to significantly change to its timing on cosmological scales. The length of a human life is but an itsy bitsy teeny tiny sliver in cosmological spacetime.

As a human, each of us is going to die very soon. Every human dies quickly.

There is no cause of death, besides birth itself.

Once born, the death is inevitable.

We are going down the black-hole-like ice-hill quickly, from birth to death, and no dog can reverse the trajectory.

When one of us humans reach the bottom of the ice-hill (human death), it is absurd and nonsensical, worse than false, to point to any one dog, or even a few dogs, or even dogs as a whole versus gravity or what the sled rider ate, and accuse that thing of being the cause. It doesn't matter what any of the dogs did, and what the rider ate or didn't eat, and thus those kinds of things cannot logically be considered causes.

If you take the cause away, then the result cannot happen. Therefore, if you take an alleged cause away, and the result does still happen, then the alleged cause is no true cause at all, reductio ad absurdum.

Thus, the only cause of death is birth.

[Someone here]

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death that it is terrible. When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles. An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself...

The man who is not under restraint is free, to whom things are exactly in that state in which he wishes them to be; but he who can be restrained or compelled or hindered, or thrown into any circumstances against his will, is a slave. But who is free from restraint? He who desires nothing that belongs to others. And what are the things which belong to others? Those which are not in our power either to have or not to have, or to have of a certain kind or in a certain manner. Therefore the body belongs to another, the parts of the body belong to another, possession belongs to another. If, then, you are attached to any of these things as your own, you will pay the penalty which it is proper for him to pay who desires what belongs to another. This road leads to freedom, that is the only way of escaping from slavery, to be able to say at last with all your soul: Lead me, O Zeus, and thou O destiny, The way that I am bid by you to go.

[Someone here]

 fear is the fear of death,

for what is death but an ending of the known,

therefore all fear is the fear of an ending of the known.

[Someone here]

Think about it for moment. This about this for a moment, one cannot fear the unknown, because one doesn't know it. One can only fear losing the known.
 

[Someone here]

Is life worth living? Let me pose that not as my personal quest, but as search for the meaning of life. When I was young, I was taught to believe that we as the master race have the responsibility to make this earth of ours (and perhaps the universe, by extension) a better place. What would those beasts living under the law of the jungle be, without us around. We have the right to grow, prosper, and multiple, because we are the best, in justice and in intelligence. True? No, as we are told more and more. The earth would be better off without us around, or at least with fewer of us around. Not that the earth cannot do without us, but that we are imposing ourselves against its wish for the better.

But why should we impose ourselves, if not because we enjoy doing so. Really? What is it that we enjoy less and less if we grow older? Is there a stage at our age when the balance is tipped, when the weakness, pain, disease, and isolation would surpass the endless leisure of summer and youth? If so, I would propose the aged should be allowed to end their life whenever they deem fit. Put this as their last contribution to what has been granted as their place in the sun: to allow the earth some breathing space with fewer people around.

The argument may even be extended to beyond the aged. Some would say: I have never requested to be alive. My birth is against my will, if you do not mind. At this juncture, I can clearly declare that my life is not worth living. Can you leave me alone please? Hey, should we leave him alone?

I pose this topic for your philosophical response. Please don't dwell on how much you enjoy sex, fine dining, and so on, as to leave breathing space for more focused discussion on the meaning of life.

[Someone here]

 think that y'all will find this thread to be more or less interesting. I tend to talk to myself all day long more or less in a narrative way conversing with myself I guess. I'm never really sure what the hell is responding back to me. I've been told I am psychic and I am sure of that to a small extent.

Most people will roll their eyes and say sure... But though I cannot prove it I am certain there is something listening to me and occasionally responding. Call me schitzophrenic of whatever, I'm indifferent to that. It's gotten to an odd point where it's become an ordeal.

I am an anxious person by my own faults. Pretty much based on the topics I choose to look it. Regular **** loses my attention and more complex and frightening topics give me a sense of dread but I tend to go towards them. I think it's because of the absurd and scary nature of many topics.

War, god, life, human characteristics and the reasons for this world. Most of them are meaningless. They have no bearing on my life but I tend to be drawn towards that **** out of fascination and pure obsession. I can not really turn my brain off. It's a computer that keep processing **** all day long.

I will start off on one things and out of guilt, strange correlation and other things in between I will get into a whole other subject or thing from one thing. I use the internet as a place to put my ideas into words and meanings for other people because they can't just live in my head. Though I am not sure many people think like I do I believe you are all here because you are interested in life and morality. **** like that.

You all have your own opinions that want to be voiced and heard. Responded too and critiqued to get a better understand of what it is you want to find. If not, I don't know why you would be here. Anyway, this thread is for voicing your thought process to better help me with mine in a regard and so I can understand yours.

I shared my end of it so you can get a glimpse into how I work and possible let someone else know they are not alone in this thinking. I know I'm not the only one though I have never spoken to someone with the same problems I have.

[Someone here]

My concept on reality is that time itself technically does not exist, as our brain is the one that conceptualises what the past is through experience and memory. Each snapshot of time ceases to exist as a new one occurs. But remember, the reality we live is an objective reality that is created by our brains. There is no absolute reality in this reality we perceive, hence why change is a thing. But when you think about it in the infinite standpoint then no. Essentially, change is possible in the reality we have created. But that must mean, our reality is made up of infinite other realities...