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[Jackie Blue]

We have no evidence that werewolves, vampires, dragons, elves, fairies, unicorns or griffins exist either, but I could find you a fair number of people who think they ARE one.

Oh, please.  Billions of people have spiritual experiences.  How many people honestly believe they're vampires?  A few hundred, MAX?

Their spiritual experiences count to them, of course, but they can hardly be used to establish empirical truth.

As has been stated over and over again, I'm not trying to establish "empirical truth".  I'm trying to establish a reasonable explanation for why something is worth discussing.

Who was it who said something along the lines of "Isn't it funny how God always tells people exactly what they believe?"

Probably some jackass atheist who had never studied theology or spirituality.

Terrence McKenna's studies with DMT and the remarkably similar experiences people have with it - encountering the "machine elves" as he calls them - hardly qualify as being told "exactly what they believe".

[Johnny C]

Hey, remember when we had a werewolf on these forums?

Those were fun times.

[Alex C]

Yeah. Such a shiny pelt.

[KvP]

I knew a guy who thought he was a werewolf once.

You'd think he'd be a fun guy to be around. But he was mostly just depressed all the time.

[KharBevNor]

Terrence McKenna's studies with DMT and the remarkably similar experiences people have with it - encountering the "machine elves" as he calls them - hardly qualify as being told "exactly what they believe".

People have remarkably similiar experiences when they take alcohol. It would seem your skepticism is broken. You really can't conceive any non-natural explanation for this? Remember Occams razor, my friend. Experience tells us that pretty much every claim of paranormal or supernatural activity ever properly investigated is complete hokum, whilst science works. People hear voices in their heads and see things that don't exist without magical creatures mindraping them*.

Your problem, really, is that you're still refusing to acknowledge the difference between subjective and objective reality. You keep conflating them, and claiming that subjective experience is part of objective reality.

I really don't think I should have to explain this all to you, but here it goes. Objective reality is the empirical 'classical' world, the world of physics, mathematics, chemistry and so forth. It's the environment we all share, however, none of us has the same perspective on it: each of us sees our own individual perspective: our subjective reality. Each of us has sets of filters through which we view objective reality: our language and vocabulary (both linguistic and semiotic), our ethics, our political views, our spiritual beliefs. We then process the filtered information and use it to amend our filters, with the idea of trying to find one that fits, and makes sense of the world. However, even if we find such a viewpoint, it is still within us, not a part of the outside world. The most important thing to remember, however, is that information arises within subjective reality without existing in objective reality. This is otherwise known as your imagination. What I am saying is this: internalised experiences have no objective truth. They may be incredibly meaningful to you, but they don't prove anything. There are thousands, maybe millions, of Star Trek fans who have imagined flying on the Starship Enterprise, but that doesn't make the Enterprise real. The only way for subjective reality to affect the objective is through a human agent.


*HINT: A GOOD WAY TO SEE AND HEAR WIERD SHIT IS TO TAKE DRUGS.

[Jackie Blue]

Your problem, really, is that you're still refusing to acknowledge the difference between subjective and objective reality. You keep conflating them, and claiming that subjective experience is part of objective reality.

Actually, I reject the notion of an objective reality existing at all.

I think you are misinterpreting nearly all of what I am saying.

[KvP]

That's... interesting. And also wrong. There are different kinds of objective existence. The concept of numbers may not be physical, but 2+2=4 is objectively true. To question that is well stupid, and a great way to show that you are a fundamentally irrational person. That's a different sort of argument than saying this computer is "real", but still. There are objective things. I'm what you'd probably call a "dumb realist", in that I hold that all things that I perceive in a normal state are objectively real.

[Jackie Blue]

There is no such thing as objective reality because there is no way to measure it.

The only reality I acknowledge is the information I am presented.  I have no way of knowing it is not all a hallucination.

No one can define reality, let alone "objective" reality.

[KvP]

How would you measure objective reality, then? How do you know the proof you would need isn't a hallucination? Is it just an infinite regress? Your problem is irrational, and thus ignorable.

[Jackie Blue]

I don't have a problem, I have a philosophical position, one shared by a lot of other people.

There simply is no way to measure reality.  There likely never will be.  All I know about reality is that it appears to be a system of data that is presented to my consciousness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel

[KvP]

Oh, Timothy Leary. And Robert Anton Wilson. I get it.

[E. Spaceman]

While i suscribe to the classical notion of the incapability of percieving objective reality in an objective way. I do find a lot of the tenets of reality tunnel thinking laughable. You will never see outside the tunnel, you'll just look into another tunnel.

[Jackie Blue]

You will never see outside the tunnel, you'll just look into another tunnel.

Er, that's rather the point?  Nothing Leary, McKenna, Wilson et al say would disagree with that.  Some of them just think that it's possibly more useful to observe life through various different tunnels instead of just staying comfortably in one all the time.

[KharBevNor]

reading comprehension 101. See if you can spot the crucial mistake that is being made above.

First, zerodrone says there is no objective reality! then he says he ascribes to the reality tunnel notion. Now read the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel

The theory states that, with a subconscious set of mental "filters" formed from their beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets this same world differently, hence "Truth is in the eye of the beholder".

This is not necessarily meant to imply that there is no objective truth; rather that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. The individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel. The term can also apply to groups of people united by beliefs: we can speak of the fundamentalist Muslim reality tunnel or the scientific materialist reality tunnel.

A parallel can be seen in the psychological concept of confirmation bias - our tendency to notice and assign significance to observations that confirm our beliefs, while filtering out or rationalizing away observations that do not fit with our prior beliefs and expectations. This helps to explain why reality tunnels are usually transparent to their inhabitants. While it seems most people take their beliefs to correspond to the "one true objective reality," Robert Anton Wilson emphasizes that each person's reality tunnel is their own artistic creation, whether they realize it or not.



This is...pretty much what I was saying up the page about subjective and objective reality, except for two factors:

1) I don't get all my philosophy of Robert Anton Wilson
2) I understand it.

[Jackie Blue]

I don't get my philosophy from RAW either.

And yes, it would be more useful for me to say that, while an objective reality may exist, we can never prove it does or does not.

Much like God.

[supersheep]

I kinda agree with zerodrone on one level, while disagreeing on another. Taken to the extreme, I don't believe that you can prove the existence of anything except the current sense data I am experiencing. On the other hand, in general I believe in objective reality. The extreme skepticism thing is a pretty silly belief to hold as fundamental.

[Jackie Blue]

I have no problem with people who believe in an objective reality, only with people who claim that their belief in it is anything more than faith-based.  In the big picture sense, reality itself defies any kind of rational explanation our tiny human minds can conceive of.

Also, and this applies to me as much as everyone else, "Never believe your own bullshit."

I think perhaps it has not come across in this thread that I am just as able to laugh at my own beliefs as I am to adhere to them.  Po-faced, unquestioning rationalism just really gets on my tits.  It's a form of Puritanical style thinking that studiously and arrogantly ignores the absolutely absurd nature of the human experience.