It does sound like that. But what if there's some truth to believing?
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Eh. That's your loss, but I respect your opinion on the matter. We're trying to be open-minded here, remember?
Anyone believe that we create our own realities?
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Well, for the sake of appeasing my own ego, and in the theoretical sense, saving my own ass; I am going to say yes.
For example, if I had been on the Titanic when it was going down, I'd definitely want to identify my self as being a woman so that I could get dibs on one of those rescue boats. So ya, when it works for our personal benefit, sure, everything is fucking relative!
For example, if I had been on the Titanic when it was going down, I'd definitely want to identify my self as being a woman so that I could get dibs on one of those rescue boats. So ya, when it works for our personal benefit, sure, everything is fucking relative!
Let's try to keep this civil. Just a word, in advance. I'd really like to keep this topic open! It's really interesting
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For me, it's almost like when I KNOW it'll happen, it does. It's really weird.
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Well, that could also come back to doubt. It's just a thought. If you truly believe somehting will happen (zero doubts) and it does, vs hoping it'll happen, but having many doubts, or even a single doubt, etc.
For me, it's almost like when I KNOW it'll happen, it does. It's really weird.
Hahah! That made me chuckle.You can believe almost anything with the power of imagination!
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Woah. Also, the Global Consciousness Project seems pretty great at pointing towards this.
No, non-causality is absolutely not confirmed. Waves were made in the scientific community when an experiment had shown Neutrinos to apparently break the speed of light, which would break the causal model of the Universe. The conclusion of the experiment was met with much skepticism because proving the Universe to be non-causal would turn everything we think we know upside-down. And the skepticism was proven valid when it was shown that the reason the neutrinos appeared to reach their destination faster than the speed of light would permit, it was because they hadn't taken into account the curvature of the Earth and the Neutrinos took a short-cut directly through the Earth, keeping in tact causality.
Reality is an illusion. Living is being in a war of perceptions that continues until there is only one survivor, the truth. The truth is what a majority decides to put their trust in, whether it truly is actuality or not.
The newcomer is attempting to outwit us. Everyone get out Brain Games!
I think the answer to this question depends on what you mean by 'reality'. We all have our own perception of our environment and also our inner self, but I have to believe that there is also an objective, physical reality outside of what is perceived by conscious minds.
Of course our mindset affects our perception of what we experience. That in turn affects our behaviour, and our behaviour has the potential to affect the environment around us (including other people within it).
I don't believe, however, that it was the power of thought or belief which directly affected the objective reality. I can lay in bed and believe all I want that there's a nice hot cup of tea next to me. But until I alter my behaviour to get out of bed and make some tea, that tea is not there. Me believing it won't make the tea just appear.
So to summarise, yes we have the ability to affect reality. But we do it through our actions, not our thoughts.
Of course our mindset affects our perception of what we experience. That in turn affects our behaviour, and our behaviour has the potential to affect the environment around us (including other people within it).
I don't believe, however, that it was the power of thought or belief which directly affected the objective reality. I can lay in bed and believe all I want that there's a nice hot cup of tea next to me. But until I alter my behaviour to get out of bed and make some tea, that tea is not there. Me believing it won't make the tea just appear.
So to summarise, yes we have the ability to affect reality. But we do it through our actions, not our thoughts.
I do think about this from time to time but sometimes I feel like we do. Though I continue my normal life as if we dont make our own.
I completely respect your views.
Just a thing... That's why I kind of put having a sense of knowing or belief in the equation. - Wouldn't you not fully believe that a cup of tea would just appear out of nowhere?
I don't know. Every time weird crazy things have happened I've either had a strange sense of knowing or full-on, 100% belief that it was going to happen.
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It's a very interesting thought! Unfortunately it can't be proven or disproven.
I've seen crazy things in my life, that can't just be coincidences. It's weird, dude!
So why haven't you imagined yourself the perfect life? If all you have to do is *know* that it's going to happen then that means you personally have the power to make *anything* happen. That's a pretty impressive power to have. I know if I had that power then I wouldn't be spending my time posting here...
It's not just "Oh hey, I'm going to trust this will happen and I'm sure it will". It's an odd sense of 100% belief and actually knowing (as in the actual definition of knowing.) Not just "eh. I'll just try to trust it'll work".
But yeah! It's an interesting concept!
I've read most of this mess, and while I normally stay away from topics dealing with metaphysics, I'm gonna give this one a go. Do I think that we each create our own reality through our wants and desires? I want to be asleep right now, but instead, I can't. I'm reading a message board at 2:30 a.m. listening to someone muse about being a demi-god. We had a member of this forum die of cancer, what, yesterday? I highly doubt that was the reality a promising young medical student created for himself. I think there are plenty of people in 3rd world countries who would will copious amounts of food in their future, or, if you want something a little less dire, maybe gay teens could perceive the gay away, or that woman born in a man's body make wake up one morning in the body she feels she was always meant to have.
Now our perception of reality? That's something different entirely. That is something that cannot be definitively shared with another human being. We can write, paint, film, create to our hearts content, but we can never really know 100% what someone else experiences. We are each alone in the universe created for us by our minds. How close it is to the truth is something that most likely just depends on each of us.
That doesn't mean that I don't think you can have affect on the world around you by putting out positive thoughts or just by visualizing what you want to be and acting like you already have it. This has more to do with interpersonal communications and relationships. People usually treat you the way you expect them to. Not to mention the fact that someone who believes they can simply has more motivation to do something than someone who believes they can't. It all comes back to perception.
Now our perception of reality? That's something different entirely. That is something that cannot be definitively shared with another human being. We can write, paint, film, create to our hearts content, but we can never really know 100% what someone else experiences. We are each alone in the universe created for us by our minds. How close it is to the truth is something that most likely just depends on each of us.
That doesn't mean that I don't think you can have affect on the world around you by putting out positive thoughts or just by visualizing what you want to be and acting like you already have it. This has more to do with interpersonal communications and relationships. People usually treat you the way you expect them to. Not to mention the fact that someone who believes they can simply has more motivation to do something than someone who believes they can't. It all comes back to perception.
I think that people have influence on reality and therefore each other, but to say that we create our own realities then that implies we have some kind of supernatural control over our and other people's lives which doesn't seem true to me. That said there isn't really a way to disprove this theory or any of the theories in that vein.
Empirical evidence would suggest that this is not the way the universe operates. Things do not just appear without a physical cause. I would love to be proven wrong, but I would need more evidence than an abstract example involving theoretical subatomic particles. These theories don't seem to have any practical application to human experience of reality, as far as I can tell. Again I would love to be proven wrong about this. Just to preempt such a reply, I personally (and indeed anybody in the scientific community) would not accept "you can't disprove it" as evidence; the scientific method does not permit disproving anything, only the supporting of hypotheses by demonstration of evidence.
I can see why it might seem that way if you believe it to be the case. Could it be the case that because you believe this to be true you are looking for evidence to support it? To truly know if what you are perceiving is a valid perception of the objective reality outside your own perception, you would need to gather some data. Measure the frequency of the occasions in which you feel that you preempted an event and it then happened, and the times when it did not. Then carry out a statistical test to determine whether the number of times when you felt you had predicted or influenced the situation was statistically significant.
I personally feel that situations like this are the result of there being too many variables for us to perceive them all, or that some of them are imperceptible. For example, you may have seen your friend out the corner of your eye in the book shop but not consciously registered that you had seen them. This led your conscious mind to think of them, so when you finally recognised that they were present it felt strange that you had thought of them immediately prior to (consciously) seeing them. But think about this logically: how could you thinking about that person possibly have made them appear in that environment? They did not just disappear from where they were and appraisal before you. Wouldn't they have noticed if that happened? No, their recollection would be of making their own decision to travel to the store. So it is much more logical that the direction of causality was opposite to your perception; your thoughts did not influence their presence, but their presence influenced your thoughts.
Why not?
As you have said, I respect your views. I just see things very differently
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And what exactly is that, in the epistemological sense?
Well I have the power to see the unforeseen stuff. Like that allows me to reverse engineer machines, but so life, most will call this bullshit, but imho, feeling the "life flowing" and understanding that allows me to understand how life is built right now.
Let me give you an example, i bought a tablet-notebook now, labeled as ¨refurbished¨, and when it goes down to sleep mode it doesnt, but blackscreens, for some reason I got files transfering all over from a phone to this machine. When it enters sleep mode, it blackscreens, but if I close the lid and open, the interrupt causes to resume kernel , thus user stuff. I restored PCI-express power management drivers and guess what, its fixed!
how did I get to know that, magic. XD
Let me give you an example, i bought a tablet-notebook now, labeled as ¨refurbished¨, and when it goes down to sleep mode it doesnt, but blackscreens, for some reason I got files transfering all over from a phone to this machine. When it enters sleep mode, it blackscreens, but if I close the lid and open, the interrupt causes to resume kernel , thus user stuff. I restored PCI-express power management drivers and guess what, its fixed!
how did I get to know that, magic. XD
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I love topics like these - it's like running mental exercises, taking others people's views and challenging them against my worldview (a collection of these views where I selected the one I believe best, yet is always subjective to change).
If our thought had the potential to create something in reality (say, a cup of tea), as in thinking of a cup of tea was able to project a cup of tea into reality, then the reverse would be logically possible. You could think of nothing, project nothing into reality, and everything within your scope of influence (e.g. The amount of reality you can perceive at one time... Everything you see in front of you?) could wink out of existence like some kind of anti-matter annihilation event. Just food for thought.
Another aspect that you might consider is that your level of cumulative knowledge would limit not only your control of reality but also could potentially cause disaster to occur inadvertently. When driving, you might wonder how all the mechanical components of the vehicle work together to allow you to drive, and in your lack of understanding you might influence something the wrong way and cause the vehicle to break down. And the knock-on effects that follows, e.g. The car crashing into another and collateral damage... The brain is not capable of processing the entirety of that information all at once, at the time, so where does this control go to during such an event?
And then you also get the suspension of causality effect to consider, where if you observe something, but then your view/perspective gets blocked or obscured, and things happen that you can understand but can't directly observe, when does the effect take place. I'm referring to Schrödinger's cat experiment here. A living cat gets put into a box, and the box is filled with poison. Logically you know the cat should be dead, but until you see the dead cat, you can't confirm its current state... So it exists in a state between life and death until you open the box and find out. Poor cat...
The above can be explained by having a universal consciousness, external to yourself, that is keeping things in check... Keeping the order of reality (and causality). In Berkeley's idealism, this would be the 'universal observer' (also referred to as God's mind and external reality in other philosophies), so even things you can't see will still continue to exist, will still continue to experience cause and effect, and might still include someone sneaking up behind you to stick a dagger in your back. Just because you never observed them, and were never aware of them, doesn't protect you from getting stabbed because an external observer is always watching and making it possible to happen.
The model I prefer to subscribe to is the one others have already touched on... Rather than your consciousness affecting reality directly, it only affects your perspective of reality. Your knowledge, understanding, and viewpoints all make up a filter through which you experience reality. This is why depressed people find it easier to see things pessimistically and people in love see things with rose tinted glasses. Reality still persists and one car crashing into another will still happen no matter how much you try and influence things with just your mind. If you want to change causality, you have to use causality yourself (e.g. Stopping the crash by blowing up a big balloon between them... But you'd have to have such a balloon already at hand). Well, my explanation and example might be messy, but you should be able to understand the point. You influence your own internal reality, which is your perspective/filter/reflection of reality, but external reality is beyond that influence.
As for the idea of multiple divergent universes... It's a fun way to escape from reality, thinking that things may have turned out differently if choices or conditions were slightly altered, but ultimately without a way to jump between realities (like in the TV show Sliders, or with a proper time machine subject to paradox) then it's nothing more than a thought experiment and doesn't have any effect on the "true" reality.
If our thought had the potential to create something in reality (say, a cup of tea), as in thinking of a cup of tea was able to project a cup of tea into reality, then the reverse would be logically possible. You could think of nothing, project nothing into reality, and everything within your scope of influence (e.g. The amount of reality you can perceive at one time... Everything you see in front of you?) could wink out of existence like some kind of anti-matter annihilation event. Just food for thought.
Another aspect that you might consider is that your level of cumulative knowledge would limit not only your control of reality but also could potentially cause disaster to occur inadvertently. When driving, you might wonder how all the mechanical components of the vehicle work together to allow you to drive, and in your lack of understanding you might influence something the wrong way and cause the vehicle to break down. And the knock-on effects that follows, e.g. The car crashing into another and collateral damage... The brain is not capable of processing the entirety of that information all at once, at the time, so where does this control go to during such an event?
And then you also get the suspension of causality effect to consider, where if you observe something, but then your view/perspective gets blocked or obscured, and things happen that you can understand but can't directly observe, when does the effect take place. I'm referring to Schrödinger's cat experiment here. A living cat gets put into a box, and the box is filled with poison. Logically you know the cat should be dead, but until you see the dead cat, you can't confirm its current state... So it exists in a state between life and death until you open the box and find out. Poor cat...
The above can be explained by having a universal consciousness, external to yourself, that is keeping things in check... Keeping the order of reality (and causality). In Berkeley's idealism, this would be the 'universal observer' (also referred to as God's mind and external reality in other philosophies), so even things you can't see will still continue to exist, will still continue to experience cause and effect, and might still include someone sneaking up behind you to stick a dagger in your back. Just because you never observed them, and were never aware of them, doesn't protect you from getting stabbed because an external observer is always watching and making it possible to happen.
The model I prefer to subscribe to is the one others have already touched on... Rather than your consciousness affecting reality directly, it only affects your perspective of reality. Your knowledge, understanding, and viewpoints all make up a filter through which you experience reality. This is why depressed people find it easier to see things pessimistically and people in love see things with rose tinted glasses. Reality still persists and one car crashing into another will still happen no matter how much you try and influence things with just your mind. If you want to change causality, you have to use causality yourself (e.g. Stopping the crash by blowing up a big balloon between them... But you'd have to have such a balloon already at hand). Well, my explanation and example might be messy, but you should be able to understand the point. You influence your own internal reality, which is your perspective/filter/reflection of reality, but external reality is beyond that influence.
As for the idea of multiple divergent universes... It's a fun way to escape from reality, thinking that things may have turned out differently if choices or conditions were slightly altered, but ultimately without a way to jump between realities (like in the TV show Sliders, or with a proper time machine subject to paradox) then it's nothing more than a thought experiment and doesn't have any effect on the "true" reality.
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