It's called solipsism. And it can't be disproved so there's that.

It is also one of the oldest questions in philosophy (and by extension humanity)

Can you think of which philosophers talk about this for the OP?

start with Kierkegaard and read Schopenhauer. Prepare yourself for Nietzsche, let it sink in, you will be okay but at this point you are down the rabbit hole and you will need to find any bit of hope. Let yourself go to Sarte and read a little Camus. Have Derrida take you on a trip and listen to Cioran as he will make things easier to handle. After, have some fun with Zizek

There you go /u/IownaFerrari

DAE Moore's not even relevant to debates about external world skepticism?!? Le continental defener 5ever

Try Berkeley and Descartes too.

Solipsism seems like the least probable reality to me because it is the most egocentric. I do not take my own existence as self evident. "I think therefore I am" is meaningless without clear definitions for "I," "think," and "am." With clear definitions the proposition fails as an axiom for me.

"I am therefore I (falsely) believe I think," is the proposition that I have taken as my starting point. That is, I am a group of particles governed by the laws of the universe. And because they exist in the order that they do, they believe that they are doing something called thinking. In reality, all this group of particles is doing is constructing representations of particle interactions. I am a metadata machine. I am a piece of the universe creating metadata that describes other pieces. And I'm doing this for no reason, the metadata has no purpose.

This isn't a self-evident proposition either but it seems to be the most probable one to me. Nobody wants it to be true and the empirical evidence is pointing in this direction.

A recent post of mine that dives deeper into this subject:

https://np.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/3c4xt6/ames_room_illusion/cssyj9k

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It's absolutely not solipsism, it's idealism, the philosophy that reality is mentally constructed, solipsism is the belief that you can only be sure that one's own mind exists and the existence of everything beyond that must be doubted. German idealists are the way to go on this, Hegel and Schopenhauer although you might want to start with Kant so that you have a basis for much of what Schopenhauer argues. If you want to explore further the idea of consciousness based reality in a more spiritual sense, the Upanishads are a great place to start, Eastern mysticism at its finest which influenced the German idealists a great deal.

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You might really enjoy listening to Alan Watts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMRrCYPxD0I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o

Pantheism is more along the lines of what you are talking about

I believe that's quite true, but it's a fact that's very difficult to remember ;)

Here's some other details about how it works.

• When you come into the world, you gradually assimilate the reality according to how everyone around you sees it
• All 'things' (matter, energy, etc.) are alive. "Life" is a particular arrangement of matter that amplifies subjective experience the greater the level of organization. The bigger the brain, it's like a bigger black hole sucking feelings out of the universe into wherever god and souls come from.
• All living creatures (including matter) contribute to the 'generation' of reality.
• Nothing beyond perception exists (until it is perceived)
• Everything is "magic" (has no cause); we impose causes upon the world according to our predilections of thought which are based on a natural mathematics, which is why physics also obeys the laws of mathematics. Ultimately, though, the reality you see is this way because of the way humans and animals on this earth like to think.
• Once you absorb a "scientific" explanation for something, it's almost impossible to unlearn that, so the apparent "magic" of it goes away. (really though, it's all still magic)
• The corollary of this is that, for example, if you learn that telekinesis isn't real, you will never be able to do it.
• Sleight of hand magic is also real magic because the audience expects to see something incongruous, thereby allowing it.
• You can undo these beliefs which cause reality to be a certain way with drugs and, most noticeably, sleeplessness.
• The extent to which you can undo or change your underlying assumptions about reality is the extent to which you can start to shape it like in a dream.
• Conflicts between the beliefs of two people are always resolved by the universe (thanks, universe!) by temporarily creating two separate realities that are each mutually and respectively coherent. E.g., I take 30 shrooms and believe I'm walking through a wall (and experience that), while my friends see me climbing over the wall. Both happened; both are real.

I know all this because.... I was in a state, according to psychiatrists, of "florid psychosis" for about two years during which time a small, white pterodactyl who sounded like Eric Cartman popped into my reality and sat on my shoulder and guided me through a crazy, philosophically didactic quest and told me all this stuff.

You should definitely read Carlos Castaneda if you haven't yet.

I knew you were talking my language by the first bullet point. I hoped Carlos Castaneda's worked helped you through your psychosis since don juans view of reality lessens the impact of making to strong of attaching thoughts of what is and isnt real.

I would be interested in hearing more of your story on how this all came about for you sometime.

I read all of Castaneda's work in the late 90s, and it definitely had an impact on my personal philosophy. However, it wasn't until the psychosis that I was able to put a lot of it together. One of my key realizations was how in the absence of 3rd party observers, my reality could twist and contort, eventually according to my will. I developed profound telekinetic abilities, but they were only really effective when I was alone, isolated, and when the time was between 3:00am and about 5:00am, which I reasoned was because most people in the vicinity were deeply asleep and thereby not causing my reality to have to resolve according to their reality.

That was the really weird phenomenon that I felt was touched on a lot in Castaneda's work – for example when Carlos turns into a crow and flies, and he keeps asking Don Juan whether he really flew or whether he simply hallucinated that he flew.

Don Juan responds in his typical way that the question itself was irrelevant in that context. The strange creature that "befriended" me during that period had a personality and style that was very similar to Don Juan, I thought, but even harder, bringing me face to face with these existential phenomena through trickery and scaring the shit out of me, basically, but I would always emerge with the realization that I could never have learnt the lesson without being tricked.

If there hadn't been a huge break in my perception based on a false belief (but one that I was so paranoid about that I simply bought it, hook, line and sinker), then reality would have just behaved like it does in normal life and I would never have been able to see past it.

Actually, the principles that I put down in my previous comment feel like that's not quite how it is. I never reached the end of my 'initiation' (what it called this process) because I was getting really sketchy and had become obsessed with scrying rocks, of all things. I'd spend my days wandering old mines and other geologically interesting locations with my hammer, breaking rocks apart and "reading" them – to me, the mineral patterns on the inside of rocks looked like perfect english and I could read them like a book. The whole world came alive in that way. The birds sung, but I could hear what they were saying, and even speak back, and they'd respond! In English!

This was too disturbing and I was too obsessed, my family got spooked and had me arrested and put in a mental hospital.

Yes, it was a funny time and it was caused by 18 months of only sleeping every other night on account of being addicted to phenethylamine and deprenyl. Once I was forced to stop, that whole alternative reality collapsed in on itself and I was back to normality (albeit with some new quirks). My magic disappeared, the birds were no longer intelligent and the world, whereas before every atom sang a song of joy, retracted back into itself and went back to sleep.

I still get glimpses every now and then, and I'm trying to find another way to explore that separate reality again, but no drugs I've tried yet seem to get one there. It's like LSD and psilocybin let you look over the fence, but the force of one's own prejudice is still too strong, even when you're tripping really hard, to quite cross over. If you take enough, you can get there, but you're too incapacitated to "assemble" it into something coherent.

I guess I haven't tried ayahuasca yet, and from what Graham Hancock writes about it, it sounds like one maintains a fair amount of coherency in the face of the hallucinations.

Anyhow (sorry for length of this , I'm meaning to write a book about my experiences but can only manage long comments on reddit so far) I believe I can work out a way to follow the path and effect real magic, but I have a feeling it won't be taken seriously because putting it all together, conceptually, it just sounds a lot like "The Secret" with a bit more of a (pseudo)scientific explanation.

The funny thing was that at the beginning of my relationship with the entity, I asked it through a ouija board if there was any book I could read that might make it easier to get the gist of what I was being told without having to divine the answers all the time. It said "The Secret of the Ages". I googled it. That's just the original book from which the movie "The Secret" comes from! At the time, I hadn't seen the movie nor read nor heard of the book, but I had a bad impression of it, that it was completely ridiculous etc.

I still haven't read that book, but I now know the basic premises and the fact that all the things I was taught are kind of just an advanced version of it makes me somewhat more amenable to the concept that our thoughts create the world and the universe really does give us what we ask for and expect. The trick is to know how to ask for and expect the right things.

I developed profound telekinetic abilities, but they were only really effective when I was alone, isolated, and when the time was between 3:00am and about 5:00am, which I reasoned was because most people in the vicinity were deeply asleep and thereby not causing my reality to have to resolve according to their reality.

Its funny that you say that, I have been having a really hard time going to bed until around that exact time. Must be something going on either in the planet or in consciousness.

I have read a lot about altering reality, but my world view tends to be pretty solid. Probably because I haven't been trying to shake up my reality that much.

I remember reading a book called the practical guide to stalking or something like that. Where you start to change your reality though the not-doings which is making your day to day life less structured more like your dream state, and when your waking life is like your dream state your dreaming becomes more like your waking state and you can get more out of dreams. You seemed like you did some of that during or before your psychosis. which probably helped you shake of some of your conditioning.

I keep putting of my plans for taking a no-doing roll cause im scared, lol.

Your 7th bullet point, "The corollary of this is that, for example, if you learn that telekinesis isn't real, you will never be able to do it."

Makes me wonder when we hear about people doing superhumans things, is it their preconceived notions of what is and isnt possible blocked out to allow this to happen? (IE lift a car, dodge a bullet, etc)

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So what youre saying is people can drive there own realities? Very similar to what the Matrix portrayed?

No, it means that your brain can switch off its limiters and push your body dangerously far, to the point of serious injury. Your muscles are perfectly capable of tearing themselves off your bones, but since you usually don't need that much strength, your brain won't let you go that far.

I think so. At the time, one of the "abilities" I developed was balancing rocks on top of each other. Bear in mind that in the reality I was experiencing, there were these ghostly tendrils floating around the air like streamers of seaweed that reacted to thought.

I could draw these tendrils out of objects, in this case rocks, and like strings, tie them to other objects, then tighten them. Tying three from the rock to other objects in the room would stabilize the rock and make it very easy to balance.

Now, the takeaway is that I don't think the tendrils were objectively real, and it was rather my belief and expectation that because I could see tendrils and do that with them, then of course my rock would be stable, it was held down by magic strings, of course!

But, in truth, I think it's just the way reality works. It conforms to BELIEF, and that's all there is in the end. In my reality, there were strings, but I guess in everyone else's reality I was just balancing the rocks really skillfully. Both and neither are true.

The other takeaway is that while I can say "reality follows belief" someone would say "well that means I can just believe anything and have it happen" and that's true, but how do you go about really believing something? Either you've got to lose your mind like I did or find some other way, and I don't know yet what that other way might be.

In your example of superhuman strength, the dread fear and desperation and the sheer blind wishfulness that I can lift the car!! is presumably what does it.

Yes, the reality that is readily perceived through the five senses is an illusion, a front to deeper, more absolute reality. It's been said for thousands of years, Buddha and Jesus both picked the idea up.

The absolute reality, beyond superficiality, beyond space and time, beyond causality, is consciousness.

Enlightenment traditions seek to remove all the superfluous content from our spirit so that consciousness can radiate forth completely and uninhibited. This state they seek is the our most natural state, this is why Jesus says to become like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Subtract all the fairy tales from the process of becoming into knowledge of the spirit realm that's beyond the superficial, and it becomes clear to see all good things come from the creative life force we may or.may not call the spirit.

And then you get into the whole thing about God being ultimate end all truth, and then you spend the next three years dismantling all the ignorant beliefs about God that we learned in church, dismantling all of the aversions that keep you from realizing that there's an omnipresent spirit that connects all of reality.

And the, we create reality, we create our subjective reality, that's the nature of mind, learning this we stop creating for ourselves personal hells.

You are definitely are on the right path to Samadhi, gnosis, enlightenment etc

It is just a simulation

Nick Bostrom (author of Superintelligence) argues that if certain conditions are true, it is much more likely that we are living in a simulation than living in the real universe.

"A technologically mature "posthuman" civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true:

1. The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero;
2. The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero;
3. The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3). Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."

Nick Bostrom's Paper: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

Video Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnl6nY8YKHs

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

I highly recommend Waking Life! I think it might sync with you right now.

I recommend this as well. Every interviewee has a beautiful mind.

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The concept of sanity is yet another control factor.

Absolutely. 100% of what the average person believes was chosen for them. As children, we are handed a set of beliefs by our parents and society. When we grow up and we believe that we are forming beliefs of our own, we are building those beliefs on top of a foundation that has already been laid. The method by which we judge the truth or utility of all new beliefs is the belief system that we already have.

My journey began when I started asking myself questions like, why do I believe that empirical evidence is the best method for judging new beliefs? Why do others believe that faith is the best? Why do I believe that the truth is important? What if there was a set of delusions that I could convince myself of that would allow me to better accomplish my goals?

The challenge of freeing one's mind from the shackles of belief is that one cannot change those beliefs that do not first become questions. A child born into a Christian family cannot change their belief in a god until it becomes a question. For many, this process only begins once that child or adult meets someone that calls that belief into question. Up until that point, god is a fact of reality.

Look at all of the beliefs that almost no one questions. Who questions the golden rule? It's the golden rule! Question the golden rule and you'll be labeled a crazy sociopath. Society tells you to feel guilty about questioning beliefs like this. But if your mind is not free to question them guilt free, how can you ever claim these beliefs as your own? If you cannot arrive at this belief on your own terms why should it remain a belief?

It was about six months ago when I first realized the extent to which I was a product of my environment. None of my beliefs were actually my own. When I realized that I could only see how full of shit everyone else was I considered that maybe I was full of shit too. I believed what I wanted to believe just as much as anyone. The only difference was that I wanted to believe things that were backed by empirical evidence. Was that even a good choice? It seemed to be but how would I know?

Once I began to uncover how full of shit I was I had what I would describe as an existential crisis followed by ego death. No one who hasn't experienced enlightenment/awakening likes to hear someone claim that they managed it but that's how it felt. Maybe it was derealization, depersonalization, or dissociation. What really matters to me is what I got out of it. And it started by questioning everything. "Why do I believe that? Because of this. And why do I believe that?" Each and every time, when I hit the bottom, I realized that nothing was down there to support that tree of belief. I had been handed all of my foundational beliefs as a kid and none of them were supported by anything beyond wishful thinking.

Everything had been manufactured. Either by people or by nature (fear of death, desire to procreate). A huge majority of our values were the product of our biological instincts. Values like equality supported the survival of the group. The golden rule was beneficial to the group. Hypothetically, it would be more advantageous to only pretend to believe in the golden rule if you could get away with it. If you could eliminate those beliefs that made you feel guilt. If you could deconstruct your belief system and eradicate your empathy in those situations that were advantageous to you.

I chopped away at my belief system until all of them were hanging by a thread. I searched for a starting point. Some self-evident truth of the universe that I could build on. Was it knowledge/truth? I liked truth but I'd always liked it. It seemed just as arbitrary. Maybe the truth wasn't important. What if I started with the axiom that only I existed? That seemed worse. Nothing could be known. How do you build on a foundation on that? What meaning could exist? I realized that there was no objective justification for empirical evidence over faith but I settled on building on evidence. It was less egocentric and at this point I had realized that the self was probably an illusion too.

I armed myself with a goal. Stop believing things simply because I wanted them to be true. How would I do that? Eventually I figured it out. I asked myself, "What don't I want to believe? What would be the worst possible reality?" And I thought about that. Suddenly all of the evidence pointed in that direction. And my mind unraveled.

All of the available neuroscientific evidence points in one direction. The one I never wanted to look in. The self is an illusion. I had heard the argument before but I had compartmentalized this fact. I knew that free will was an illusion but I had never felt it. I had some doubt, some conflicting beliefs. Those were gone. I believed 100% for the first time that the self was an illusion. I didn't exist. Nothing actually mattered. There was no purpose and no purpose to invent a purpose to occupy my time.

I entered into an intense dissociative state that lasted about a day. I had absolutely zero fear of death. I had no feelings at all. I had no sense of being a being. I had a voice in my head but it was different. And it began contemplating suicide. I wasn't depressed or sad, I was numb. I felt like a machine. As if all of my emotional states had been so overwhelmed they switched off and went silent. I contemplated suicide as a logical choice. I wondered what it actually meant to die when the meaning behind it had been so clearly manufactured. Alive and dead were things we made up. The line between life and non-life was blurry because we invented the rules. Why fear death when that fear was so obviously manufactured. Why fear anything when there was quantitatively nothing to lose. I would always be particles. I'd just be free of the illusions.

I decided there was no reason to live but also no reason to die. And logically, even though all of this made perfect sense to me, I had learned the most important thing of all. I am capable of being wrong about everything and not knowing it.

About a week later I came out of that experience with a totally different view of reality. I decided I'd go on living with an ego. Without it there was nothing to do but sit in a cave. I decided I was ok with the illusion of me, the illusion without an observer. I reexamined my goals and rebuilt my value system such that it served them. I got rid of those values that I had no use for and stood in my way. I had a new value system. One that I actually had a hand in manufacturing. One that wasn't based on the survival of the species and passed down to me as a kid as though it were fact.

And I get to change it whenever it stops serving my goals. Because I know it's just a story I tell myself. I know it's all an illusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJY6fOt8Okk

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If I knew, it would probably make life seem insignificant.

That's a pretty common concern but it's a bit like how some people fear that without a higher power there can be no morality. Or, absent manufactured controls like guilt or shame, we'll lose our empathy for one another and become sociopathic. Or, absent actual "real" free will, no one would be responsible for their actions. It comes down to belief. These arguments rely on a set of assumptions that I believe are false. 1. That we inhabit reality. 2. That reality is actually really important to us.

Let us assume for a moment that purpose does not exist. We can never prove this but we can ask ourselves what reality would be like without purpose. What would the implications of that be? Logically, that would mean that the universe would be purposeless, right? I don't believe so. That conclusion is a story that we tell ourselves within a context that presumes purpose. It as an interpretation of a "fact." Our intuition tells us that absent purpose nothing matters but I think that's a mistake.The problem is that purpose implies purposeless. Without "purpose" there is no "purposeless." The distinction is what creates the actual meaning. You cannot have purposeless without purpose. Absent the distinction, purpose and purposeless lose all meaning.

All of the meaning in our lives comes from those distinctions we create. Life implies non-life. Alive implies dead. Self implies other. Consciousness implies unconsciousness. Order implies chaos. Beginning implies end. We invented the rules for every one of these distinctions and then we forgot all about it. We forgot that we constructed the dream we live in. We forgot that reality was our own design. Every once in a while we'll discover something that should clue us into our mistake but we look the other way. Something like a virus that doesn't quite fit into one of those boxes we constructed to feel special. It's neither alive nor dead. It's not life or non-life. Instead of constructing new boxes, we'll make an exception, force it into a box, or we'll say that we don't know where it belongs. We recently invented a new box for pluto. How did we do that and why did this upset so many people? Because changing the boxes changes the only reality we inhabit, our subjective reality. Pluto, like everything else, is a collection of particles. We invented the concept of a planet and gave it meaning. Pluto is a planet if you believe it is. And purpose exists if you believe it does.

Sure, the idea that there is no purpose can be a depressing one. The discovery that there is no meaningful reason to even invent a purpose is even worse. But that is a misguided and momentary pain. That is not what I found at the end of the journey. The journey is a journey towards realizing that there is no journey. The journey towards awakening is a story like anything else. The journey is a choice. It's a story that you construct to give meaning to a reality without any.

None of the implications that come with the deconstruction of our illusions are actually negative. They only appear negative. When an abstraction is dissolved, you gain something in return. A fundamental understanding that our experience of reality is a choice. We chase this fantasy of escapism every time we read a great book, play a great game or get lost in a great movie. We inhabit another reality and forget about our own. But this is the exact same place we live our lives. We just don't realize it. Instead of manufacturing that world based on words in a book or pixels on a screen, our minds construct the "real" world using a sea of particles we don't yet fully understand. As with a movie, all of the meaning, drama, hope and fear we experience is constructed in the mind. The film is simply a tool used to manipulate the mind into constructing a reality. The mind does the heavy lifting.

Suspension of disbelief comes easy to us with fiction and the only thing holding us back from doing the same in our lives is pretending that reality isn't fiction. Delusion is our most powerful tool and we treat it like it's a bad thing. All belief is delusion. Beliefs are metadata that masquerade as meaningful descriptions of reality when in fact they are what gives reality meaning. We can accept those lenses which were handed to us or we can create our own. We have the power to inhabit a world of our own design. We can escape from our subjective reality and enter another. But it requires accepting that our subjective reality is not real. It requires abandoning the belief that we inhabit reality. Life is a dream. Our dreams are dreams within a dream.

We have the freedom to create those illusions that we desire. We have the power to destroy those illusions that cause us to suffer. I continue to live my life with purpose but it is a purpose that I manufactured. And if I need a grander story to tell, I can say that the universe gave me this purpose. If I believe that then it's true. I am a part of a sea of particles, pretending that there are edges between my self and other. The process of giving myself purpose is the same process as the universe giving itself purpose.

Reality comes down to the story we tell ourselves. It's not important what you believe as long as you understand why you've picked the particular delusion for yourself.

You're not going crazy. Dreams are fascinating and reality is, well, not very well understood. I'm in the same boat. In a dream, you are someone else, you see things, imagine things, create things in which you have no idea where they come from. Life is the same. You can change "life" with thought and you can influence people with thought. You can mold reality to your desires, to a degree. It's a blurry line of what's real and what is not. Is life real or are dreams real? I suggest looking into the universal consciousness mind and deism. You are the creator, for the creator created you in it's image. Gandhi said it well, "be the change you want to see in the world". This sums it up and people truly do not read that statement for what it is. Cheers and happy rabbit hole falling.

How deep does it go!? I am still considering flat earth. I understand for a fact now how rulers rule via deception, thats what makes the people you rule over controllable. What's next?

The rabbit holes go very deep, dating back to Egypt and beyond (Atlantis). I'm far beyond that and have evolved into a spider. I do not dig deep as I once did, I weave webs. There is a reason why Moloch and the Bohemian grove have a sign saying: "Weaving spiders come not here". Also, fun fact... 33 degree masons get there by knowledge, what happens in the winter time if snow reaches above 32 degrees (hint: it melts)?

Heres more on spiders...

http://sagesigma.blogspot.com

I second your critical thought OP. Youre not crazy, youre aware.

Edit: I for one am gonna be pissed if when I die, & wake up to a tube being pulled out of my mouth and someone standing over me saying "welcome to the real". Yoooooou fucking assholes, couldve gave me one free bone. As I laugh, I cry.

No you're not going crazy. I uses to think like that and still do. When you think about it, yes it is an illusion, without our mind and senses, how would we have perceived it all? Are our senses really sensing reality or what it perceives to be reality? This is borderline philosophy and quite enjoy such topics. Tdlr: no you're not going crazy, just thinking deep

Occam's razor, dude.

Occam's razor has a spherical blade.

It's not an end all explanation. Do you even know what Occam's razor is?

The hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is probably the correct one. Of course, the meaning of that could be twisted if you're talking about brain-in-a-vat questions about reality, but there is no good reason to not accept the probability that we are animals living on a rock that was particularly hospitable for animals to live on it, the moon is a smaller, colder rock fixed to our rock's gravity, the sun is just a ball of plasma and nothing else, and all of conscious life is just a particularly complicated arrangement of the same materials that make up the rocks and the stars.

Between hypotheses that predict equally well the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is probably the correct one.

You don't just pick the hypothesis with the least assumptions and call it the correct one.

The hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is probably the correct one.

My hypothesis is based on only one assumption. My only assumption is that the universe exists.

Once you stop assuming that you are thinking and that you (the self and observer of other) must exist, reality becomes very simple. If all that actually exists is a meaningless sea of particles interacting with one another, you and I are parts of a whole. The diving lines between self and other, life and non-life, alive and dead, are all illusions. Every one of the lines we have drawn is an illusion. They are all assumptions about reality. I assume that the universe exists. I don't assume that anything else does.

When you leave those assumptions behind, I become nothing more than a group of particles governed by the laws of the universe. Because this group exists in the order that it does, it believes that it is doing something called thinking. It believes that it is a conscious being that can experience. In reality, the only thing that this group of particles could be doing is constructing representations of particle interactions.

I am a metadata machine. I am a piece of the universe creating metadata that describes other pieces of the universe. And I'm doing this for no reason. Creating metadata has no purpose. It's just something that happened.

It seems to me that taking our perception of reality at face value is a proposition filled with unjustifiable assumptions. It assumes that I exist. It assumes that you exist. It assumes that we have free will. It assumes that I am conscious. It assumes that I am alive. It assumes that life is actually a thing. It assumes a million things.

My proposition assumes that the universe exists. Then I stop assuming.

but there is no good reason to not accept the probability that we are animals living on a rock that was particularly hospitable for animals to live on it, the moon is a smaller, colder rock fixed to our rock's gravity, the sun is just a ball of plasma and nothing else, and all of conscious life is just a particularly complicated arrangement of the same materials that make up the rocks and the stars.

Umm, apply Occam's razor to what you just said. That is not the most simple explanation. That explanation requires physics, math, evolution, study of the cosmo's, and many other fields. The more simple explanation, is... We are beings here, whom create and define our existence through thought. Your mind, is what makes reality and reality cannot be measured through math or physics. Your mind is your mind, and reality is what reality is, to you.. Do I see red the same as you see red?

As I said before:

Do you even know what Occam's razor is?

OP is talking about the sun and the moon representing life and rebirth and shit. Our brains like seeing patterns that aren't there. It's like how before the Rosetta stone, people were speculating that hieroglyphics were a complicated system of metaphors and abstract representations of ideas. Then we found out it was a simple alphabetical system that happened to use some neat drawings as syllables.

Suns and moons don't have penises and vaginas, nor do they have minds.

The Sun and the Moon are two different celestial bodies. The Sun is life, and the moon is death. Light (sun, harvest), Moon, darkness and scariness, freaks come out in the night!). Comparing them with the the Rosetta stone is like comparing Ancient Chinese to Norse Runes. We think we know, because of similar ideology, but truth be told, we have no fucking idea. Use Occam's Razor on what you are saying. Not calling you out, but you mentioned it, so I am mentioning it.

Are you saying that using occam's razor on anything automatically gravitates towards a solopcist approach (e.g. The cup fell because the table rocked has more assumptions than the cup just appeared to fall but really it is just a figment of your imagination)?

With math and physics explain why I will choose to jack off, rather than walk my dog. That is my point. We both enjoy both, but I chose one over the other. My dog may not get ticks, because I didn't walk her, I wont get an std because, I fucked myself.

directly from /r/conspiracy

Have you checked out /r/Glitch_In_The_Matrix ?

We created everything, good and bad, all the other people on this earth are actually you but in a previous or past life, they are living through all the good or bad things that you put them (yourself) through, its like a simulation that punishes and rewards itself, this is heaven and hell, its whatever we created and destroyed, if we selfishly take then we will have to experience the pain of our stuff being taken, if you invent cocacola then you will have to experience the obesity you created, if you start a war then you will have to experience that war firsthand, but no one realizes this because they are stuck in their self centered world and therefore they live a blissful selfish life at the expense of themselves(the other you's), the only way out of this whirlpool that leads to hell is to realize that your decisions impact everyone, you have to realize that your existence is destructive if you live it for your own personal gain

http://imgur.com/4tRhQr0

Am I going crazy? Is there a philosophy like this?

No, you are not going crazy. And yes, there is a philosophy similar to what you are describing, and it's called panpsychism. However, your version is rather nuanced because it limits or defines the underlying conscious aspect of reality to be a "collective subconscious" rather than just 'consciousness' itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuANDlrTHyI

please watch. they're life changing.

Solution: can the illusion be detected?

If yes, search for evidence and try to break free.

If no, live normally, as if the illusion were true because the illusion and your reality are functionally identical and you can't break free.

If maybe, get drunk; it's gonna be a loooooong life.

Even if you can't break free, there are benefits to recognizing that everything is an illusion. The reality that each of us construct inside of our minds is the reality that we live in. The distinction between self and other is constructed by the mind. The perception of both can be changed. Changing the stories that we tell ourselves about reality changes our subjective experience of the world. With practice one can change their subjective reality. If you forget that self and other are an illusion then you are stuck with the stories handed down to you as a child.

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But we have no control over how they are created. (Read up on quantum theory)

Take some powdered root bark from the Acacia Confusa tree (around 12 grams) and boil it down on a slow temp for a number of hours. Strain the liquid, and repeat the process with the lees a few times, keeping the liquid. Boil the final brown, horrid mess down till you have about a half cup of vile syrup. Eat about 8 or so grams of seeds from a plant called Syrian Rue, wait about half an hour, and then hold your nose and drink liquid you made earlier. Struggle with all your will and strength to not vomit, for as long as possible. Sorry, but you WILL vomit. Copiously, and with great vigor. Enjoy.You will soon find the philosophy you're looking for.

Does yours need to remain unaffected?

dmt?

Am I going crazy?

A bit yes, you seem slightly confused. I mean your ideas are not very clear.

Like in

In reality, nothing exists but our subconscious is creating something out of nothing.

If nothing exists how come there's a subconscious to create things?

You seems to assume there's another reality and that ours is somehow fake. Which is quite different from saying there's no reality at all.

So there's a reality but it's not physical, and we perceive this non physical reality but our perception might be wrong somehow. I got it right?

And what kind of evidences do you have to conclude that what you perceive is totally off.

Like if you see a chair in front of you, touch it. What does hint you it's not really there ?

Well it's one of the two ways you can assess the validity of your ideas. The other one is internal consistency, coherency.

That's said perception is a big subject in philosophy. Some people claim that what we see (i.e. the image you perceive, taken as such) is not reality but some sort of internal representation of the world. But those will still assume there's a real external world out there, and that our internal image (in most conditions) still has the correct sort of relation with the external world that allow us to know about it.

I like this guy work, although I think he's not taken seriously by people that know about the subject:

http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html

I'll have what he's having.

Love isn't something constructed in some reality that only you are experiencing. In fact, you experiencing reality is not separate from love at all. Opinions of reality that miss the unity of it all can really take its tool and I'm sorry to see that you're missing it too. It's the attempt to solve this dissonance (the opposite of resonance) that you're experiencing a reexamination of how you come to know or how you know what you know, your epistemological belief.

For most of us, accepting anything as knowledge is never an option and neither is never accepting anything as true. Consequently, we all end up developing, whether consciously or not, a complex belief system that can't be black and white. I do subscribe to a belief system that does seem simple at it's surface but the matter of fact is no one epistemological system will apply to all that you've experienced. Unfortunately that's what most theories of epistemology end up confusing. On a scale from solipsism to divine unity, I'd say you're leaning heavily towards the solipsism end. Things are starting to reflect that opinion; those things being what you think, feel, and do.

I'm happy you're aware of this change. Obviously, none of are born or raised with this opinion and people don't just wake up one day and mistrust everything their loved ones say as unprovable experiences. In a way that's tantamount to "I don't believe you" without saying it but in reality it's really "I don't/can't/won't believe you." Because we're locked into that frame of mind. But needless to say, we gradually end up there but most of the time we're dangerously unaware of the causes and effects this opinion.

Anyways, God willing there's something in here that'll send you down a rabbit hole. People give them a bad rap but you end up learning things you can't just toss up as random or meaningless, which is one step below only being meaningful to you. But we all get there at one point and my advice would just be to teach. How else could we prove our knowledge isn't meaningless or damn near meaningless by only being personal? When we have knowledge and feel this way, we've lost or will lose the reality of knowledge, its value in being shared. Rather than just contemplating its origins or internalizing it with emotion, the act of sharing tends to be more profound in realizing the meaning behind our experiences.

And now we're back to love... but I won't get into it :p

When knowledge is distributed it increases. when wealth is distributed it decreases.

Solipsism is the mainstream occult. Knowledge goes in but hardly comes out. Still, hoarded knowledge gains depth and dimension while coins rust.

We could be philosophically bankrupt or a solpsistic fatcat but the banker knows his game is corrupt. He still believes in money because value is not something he could make up.

http://www.amazonintl.in/forum/index.php?topic=2198.0;wap2

Solipsism isn't possible without epistemological solipsism, so I use it as a representation of it. I end up conflating the two and treating them as one in the same, possibly to the annoyance of others. Sorry, just how I see it ;p

Illusive compared to what?

How do you know that there is an "ultimate" or "true" reality?

How do you know that consciousness is "fundamental" "nondual" "nonlocal"... et al? Why consider this "truth" when it is also a possibility that consciousness is an illusion?

I work in machine learning and have spent a great deal of time considering the hard problem of consciousness.

This video below is the best explanation of consciousness out there (in my opinion) and best reflects our current scientific evidence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP1nmExfgpg&t=34s

This is a very old thought. Look up Gnosticism and Mysticism. Run it past the folks at r/psychonaut it will be nothing new to them.

/r/holofractal

You may find some answers in the Law of One. I did. Its free to read at lawofone.info.

it is. things are not as they seem, accidents do not exist, coinciding events do.

reason most miss it is they are unaware of their own thoughts, unaware of their influence, so it appears random.

we can rest assured mind is the ai we are developing, most are lost in mind..

existentialism (many here mentioned nietzsch and kierkegaard..i would add Camus and Sartre to the list)

I think, Therefore I am.

I cant walk through a tree however, society is based off many illusions.

You might like buddhism.

Reality absolutely does exist and it is real, but it's not as real or ultimate as we sometimes imagine.

Check out some reading on the holographic principle, and simulacra and simultaneity

Perception is our reality. Everything we know is now served up on screens big and small. So, yes, reality as we know it is the illusion showing on billions of screens as we speak. We judge and consume the illusions presented to us...on screens.

Yes of course, reality is an "illusion" (so to speak - mainly when compared to a deeper reality of being) . The best "philosophy " for this is oriental philosophy and eastern esoteric and spiritual traditions (the core/principle teachings in Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism) as well as much of the new-age philosophy. Try someone like Eckhart Tolle if you're starting out, his teachings are very insightful and practical.

The mind is formed from consciousness not the other way around.

http://www.robertlanza.com/biocentrism-how-life-and-consciousness-are-the-keys-to-understanding-the-true-nature-of-the-universe/

Have you ever had a Psychedelic Experience?

Hmm interesting. That philosophy/conspiracy can be very fortified by the exploration of reality- something that, for humans, at least- psychedelics are the most effective tool for.

That works as well, and so do I.

Meditation is a psychedelic experience in a sense- it's very mind-manifesting.

Yes. So stop asking

Hi, Agent Smith.

start with Kierkegaard and read Schopenhauer. Prepare yourself for Nietzsche, let it sink in, you will be okay but at this point you are down the rabbit hole and you will need to find any bit of hope. Let yourself go to Sarte and read a little Camus. Have Derrida take you on a trip and listen to Cioran as he will make things easier to handle. After, have some fun with Zizek

This sort of thinking, left unchecked, can be dangerous. Both to you and those around you.

If you go too far with it certain unnamed forces will take notice of you. If you realize certain things.. the rest of the 'simulation' will take note of it and attempt to stop you from thinking that way. Often not in the most obvious way. It might be someone beeping their car horn at just the right moment. It might be someone sneezing at just the right moment, or coughing, or something someone 40 feet away says that you just hear the tail end of, but it resonates with what you were thinking in such a way that it disrupts your thought process. The system is self correcting.

From experience.

man.... i want what you're smoking :D not being rude.

No. it's not crazy. The fact that a chunk of fat in a skull is controlling a protein based, meat concocted, Calcium cored, finger tips which are frantically banging on a Petroleum based keyboard, attached to a computer who is sending 0s and 1 at the speed of 46 million pulses per SECOND (speed test.net is saying 46mb up.. i know.. not using all of it) across a vast glass based fiber optic network based on a TCPIP protocol routed via BGP peers across a planet to communicate with you using reddit servers is crazy.

Using CIA/AmazonCloud. Welcome to the dream machine.

It's not crazy, check these articles out theyre pretty interesting

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/06/new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it.html

http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/new-study-confirms-universe-is-a-hologram/

:)

No. it's not crazy. The fact that a chunk of fat in a skull is controlling a protein based, meat concocted, Calcium cored, finger tips which are frantically banging on a Petroleum based keyboard, attached to a computer who is sending 0s and 1 at the speed of 46 million pulses per SECOND (speed test.net is saying 46mb up.. i know.. not using all of it) across a vast glass based fiber optic network based on a TCPIP protocol routed via BGP peers across a planet to communicate with you using reddit servers is crazy.

Pantheism is more along the lines of what you are talking about

Solipsism seems like the least probable reality to me because it is the most egocentric. I do not take my own existence as self evident. "I think therefore I am" is meaningless without clear definitions for "I," "think," and "am." With clear definitions the proposition fails as an axiom for me.

"I am therefore I (falsely) believe I think," is the proposition that I have taken as my starting point. That is, I am a group of particles governed by the laws of the universe. And because they exist in the order that they do, they believe that they are doing something called thinking. In reality, all this group of particles is doing is constructing representations of particle interactions. I am a metadata machine. I am a piece of the universe creating metadata that describes other pieces. And I'm doing this for no reason, the metadata has no purpose.

This isn't a self-evident proposition either but it seems to be the most probable one to me. Nobody wants it to be true and the empirical evidence is pointing in this direction.

A recent post of mine that dives deeper into this subject:

https://np.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/3c4xt6/ames_room_illusion/cssyj9k

It's not crazy, check these articles out theyre pretty interesting

http://themindunleashed.org/2015/06/new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it.html

http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/new-study-confirms-universe-is-a-hologram/

:)

How do you know that consciousness is "fundamental" "nondual" "nonlocal"... et al? Why consider this "truth" when it is also a possibility that consciousness is an illusion?

I work in machine learning and have spent a great deal of time considering the hard problem of consciousness.

This video below is the best explanation of consciousness out there (in my opinion) and best reflects our current scientific evidence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP1nmExfgpg&t=34s

It's absolutely not solipsism, it's idealism, the philosophy that reality is mentally constructed, solipsism is the belief that you can only be sure that one's own mind exists and the existence of everything beyond that must be doubted. German idealists are the way to go on this, Hegel and Schopenhauer although you might want to start with Kant so that you have a basis for much of what Schopenhauer argues. If you want to explore further the idea of consciousness based reality in a more spiritual sense, the Upanishads are a great place to start, Eastern mysticism at its finest which influenced the German idealists a great deal.