Thread: Subjective Reality tied to lucid dreaming.

Thoughts are waves, and the physical universe is the summation of all those waves.

This seems counter intuitive. The waves are the summation of the physical, not the other way around. This ideology, that what beyond our perception does not exist, is an ignorant one that is held primarily by infants, because they do not know any better.

"I am the only consciousness, because that is the only one I perceive."

That is not evidence that I am the only consciousness. That's an assumption. A drastically unapplicable assumption, at that. This assumption is only applicable to the believer. Just as a colorblind person cannot perceive color, we know that our consciousness can perceive color, and that certainly doesn't mean that there is no such thing as color! Why then, would someone try to shovel the same claim on consciousness?

Consciousness is created by the brain. The brain can exist without consciousness, but consciousness can't exist without a brain. There are multiple brains out there.

To accept subjective consciousness, to me, is the ultimate proclamation of selfishness.

Others perceive. Others are conscious. The past existed. The future will exist long after own our candles flicker out. Those are the facts.

Others are conscious. They behave differently than we do, they perceive differently than we do. Each conscious body is unique. Altruism, development, learning, cannot exist without acknowledging our fellow living creatures, and their separate consciousnesses.

Quote:
What about the physical laws of science? Can I break them?

Not if you believe they are real. Whatever you believe to be universal law, the physical universe (including your body) must obey. You cannot break any law which you “know” to be true. But you can change what you know to be true once you begin to recognize that you are consciousness itself, not merely a body-mind in a physical universe.


now this is something i beive in. im not a blogger and im notinterested in many of these topics. but this one hit home... how many people have done something they convinced themselves to do knowing it was undoable??

doing what you know is impossible can be possible if you tweak your mind into believing it is so. but you have to have no doubt and no room for "no" in your mind for the mind is far more capable of making the unreal real.

i folded a paper into a tent shape. adn i told it to jump. it didnt work of course. but i studied it, tweaked my mind into believing i could do it. and hten it jumped up maybe an inch. no body saw but the room was filled with people. i wanted to tell someone but i knew they wouldnt believe me.

but i know what i saw. and its doable with enough concentration and major tweaking. humans have so much more potential to be something greater. but we dont. we read words and take them in so literally. books, theories, movies. we are capable of using our minds as a great tool. humans use 10% of our brain. use 12% and we might become something differant altogether. unlimited knowledge is for the taking if only we knew how to grasp it.

I'd like to address the issue of the collective consciousness, simply because I am among those that believe it to exist, but I do not hold any metaphysical beliefs about it. The collective consciousness can be demonstrated rationally and scientifically and so I feel as though I can convince at least some of the skeptics here of its truthfulness.

If we operate under the assumption that human consciousness is purely physical, then we must assume that it arises in some way through the communication of nuerons. This is how our brains work, and working brains exhibit signs of consciousness, therefore there is a strong correlation between the mechanisms of a functioning brain and the appearance of consciousness.

Now, I realize that 'consciousness' and 'awareness' are far from being completely understood by science, but much research has shown that a sense of consciousness is strongly related to a firm sense of self. The sense of self can be loosely described as a feeling of oneness, or totality. Because all aspects of my brain behave as though they are one thing, I 'feel' a sense of self and am conscious.

This feeling of self or oneness arises from a concensus in the brain. It can be shown that when a brain functions, individual nuerons do not act independently of the whole, but that specific wave patterns extend throughout the entire structure in repetition. What happens in one part of the brain will invariably effect all other parts of the brain in some way. The entire system is a action/reaction process that operates in a multi-cyclical process similar to the 'six degrees of seperation' concept. With a strong enough impulse, every part of the brain can be made to react to a single stimulus.

Now, human society follows the same basic patterns of the structure of the brain. In much the same way as nuerons, we communicate with each other in order to spread information. You are told something. Your reaction to that information is to make a decision, and then repeat the information with slight variations to others. The stronger the impulse, or more believable (and novel) the piece of information, the more likely it is that it will stay unchanged and spread. In this way, we reach community concensus, and this is what most of your beliefs are based off of. Truth becomes whatever is the most popular belief, and the most popular belief is whatever is most likely, that being truth. This is circular logic, but that fact does not make it invalid. The reason why this mode of thinking persists is precisely because it is circular.

This of course has been shown to be true. Any indepth study of mob mentality will show you that given a strong enough impulse and a large enough group to negate divergent individual beliefs through mass consensus, anyone can be 'forced' to do things contrary to their normal actions through their inclusion in the mob. Whats more, they will believe that it is their own beliefs and desires that drives their actions while they are part of the group, but will be dumb founded later when they examine the experience from a personal perspective. This is because while a part of the mob, they relinquish their own self and succumb to the larger consensus, and thus the larger 'collective' consciousness.

All communities work this way. The only reason why it is more difficult to see on larger scales is because the larger the community, the more complex the motives. Because of this, it is hard to fathom the drive of the collective consciousness from an individual perspective, and therefore it is assumed that there are no over arching motives.



This post is long enough as it is, so I'm going to stop for now. Perhaps I'll write more on the subject later.

Originally Posted by Abra

"I am the only consciousness, because that is the only one I perceive."

That is not evidence that I am the only consciousness. That's an assumption. A drastically unapplicable assumption, at that. This assumption is only applicable to the believer. Just as a colorblind person cannot perceive color, we know that our consciousness can perceive color, and that certainly doesn't mean that there is no such thing as color! Why then, would someone try to shovel the same claim on consciousness?

It is hard to wrap your mind around. The basic idea here is that since we only live our lives through subjective experience, that subjective experience is all that is real. To say that I am the only consciousness is true from a subjective standpoint because the way in which I experience my own consciousness is completely different from the way I experience other people. From a subjective perspective the possible existance of other consciousnesses in some external, permanent, objective reality is irrelevant because our subjective experience might be the same regardless of whether these consciousnesses exist. To take your example, for the colorblind person, from a subjective standpoint there is no such thing as color because it will never enter the world he experiences.

Consciousness is created by the brain. The brain can exist without consciousness, but consciousness can't exist without a brain. There are multiple brains out there.

That statement is only true within the context of an objective model of the world with very specific rules, and only within that model. This objective model functions to predict our subjective experiences in a way that is consistant with our memories of what we have read or heard or experienced. From a subjective standpoint consciousness is synonymous with existance and consciousness exists before the concept or image of a brain does. Existance(consciousness) preceeds Essence(the objective model of a person or mind). Brains wouldn't exist for us if we weren't conscious of them.

To accept subjective consciousness, to me, is the ultimate proclamation of selfishness.

That's a moral and emotional argument, not a logical one.

Others perceive. Others are conscious. The past existed. The future will exist long after own our candles flicker out. Those are the facts.

Those are your assumptions.


Please note that I'm not defending Steve Pavlina's philosophy. Many of the things he claims are unfounded. He assumes that we can change the way we experience the world by believing it will be a certain way and he really doesn't explain why(because he can't). I claim that we can have no certain knowledge of what causes us to experience the world the way we do. To support Pavlina's claim that we can change the way we experience the world through belief you would have to assume causality and the accuracy of memory which also happen to be the only things you have to assume for science to work.* In that event I would have to say that science explains experience much better in my experience than Pavlina's "believe and you can fly" ideas, but then again I'm not psychotic.



* Interestingly enough, psychologists have shown that an individual's expectations play a large role in influencing their perception of the external world. I think it was LaBerge who put forward the idea that dreams are what we experience when we are effected by these expectations without external sensory input. This accounts for why events in non-lucid dreams often follow our expectations.

@Merlock: I fully agree with you on most of your posts; open-minded individuals are pretty rare these days. Especially your statement that 'anything is possible'.
Have you heard of Deepak Chopra? I've been reading and listening to his stuff. Very fascinating man, even more fascinating ideas.
His explanation of reality is just as abstract as Steve's but a bit more believable. He provides more believable evidence.

Also, you sound pretty well grounded in your beliefs. What got you there? Have any book/article recommendations?


@everyone else: If there is anything I completely believe in, it's that all we have are our beliefs. Nothing is set in stone.
The lives we live as humans prevent us from actually knowing beyond a doubt that things are the way we think they are.

We are trying to make generalizations with a limited set of tools (our senses). Imagine if nobody on earth had the sense of sight.
Nobody would even be able to conceive what 'sight' is. Just like that sense, I'm sure there are other senses we don't have that are
limiting our perception of how everything works.

Everything is probability.

If you are very logic based, go study quantum physics. It's an interesting subject and it will give you a bigger appreciation
for the elegance of the universe and at the same time, it'll make you more open to possibilities. Most (if not all) of the limitations we have in this lifetime are self-imposed.