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>your senses are the only way to interface with reality This is technically true. >and if you can't sense it it's not there This is where it gets crazy. Wha

>your senses are the only way to interface with reality This is technically true. >and if you can't sense it it's not there This is where it gets crazy. What I find interesting about this is that you never actually have direct access to your senses. For example things in the corners of your vision are fabricated by your mind based on assumptions. See optical illusions. So anyone suggesting that things outside of your senses are not real should first accept that your senses as presented to your conscious mind are not even necessarily 'real'. In fact your entire reality is fabricated by your mind which is making an internal model of the external world at all times (except when you are sleeping). You only ever see the model never the material world directly. This is why science is so important. By observing things in controlled environments over and over from many perspectives we can build a more accurate picture of the material world than our senses would normally allow. In addition through the process of replication we can find a model of reality that we can all agree on. Your senses in the most raw form your body will allow are usually only useful for tasks you evolved to do. Things like reading social cues, catching moving objects and sensing immediate danger. When people take these senses and intuitions and apply them to complicated things derived from science like electromagnetic radiation (e.g 5G) they break down. But people keep doing it because it feels right, it feels natural. And it is natural just not useful.

titzer 6y ago
For sure these people are quacks, but if you're curious to take the next turn down the rabbit hole, let me seed you. Even the concept of senses and reality are concepts in your mind and consequences of the model you have accepted as reality. So the problem recurses on itself, too. Can you directly experience your mind? Is the feeling of your mind delivered to you through a sense you haven't realized is a sense yet? Can you trust that sense? Total radical skepticism lies below that. But it's only logical. You can't escape that tarpit at the bottom. Or maybe it's the screen isn't there for anything to be projected onto? So we have to rebuild from what we can sense, sure. What is repeatable. We must develop an axiom that what is repeatable is real. That what we can understand, the system, the model, the prediction, is real. We believe the planets and stars are real because we can draw maps and pass them between us and furthermore make predictions about where the stars and planets will go based on our mathematical models. But even our models tell us that the world is too huge of a system to compute even the slightest more than the tiniest fraction of a smidgen of it all. We don't even have computers big enough to fold proteins. Yet they do. And what we don't have models for--we can't predict. Is it unreal, then? Where did our axiom go? What is real and isn't? I'm not so sure it's logic that decides that, after all. Because you gotta have faith that them there proteins are getting folded right, because you can't. fucking. check it!
- lidHanteyk 6y ago
  You are over-complicating this. People are not infinitely deep; they have strange loops which make one level of depth look like many levels. Consciousness is a hallucination.
  - titzer 6y ago
    ..and Haskell lists cannot be infinitely long? So, take a second. We don't understand fully how the brain's memory system works. There are some people who have an extreme ability to recall autobiographical details about literally every single day they ever lived. What the weather was like, what clothes they wore, who they talked to, things that happened. That's far beyond most people. But that establishes that clearly the brain has both the capacity and wiring to this at some level, and it can actually be turned on. We only need to be open to the idea that perhaps all brains do this at some level, recording our whole experience at some level of fidelity, below our conscious mind. I say, "at some level of fidelity" because we don't really know how detailed our memories really are. If it was just a heartbeat counter, it would only take 33 bits (!); if it was a transcript of the words we spoke, it would fit in less than 100mb. Of course it is probably not a full dump of any kind, but a patchwork of cross-referenced, reinforced, compressed, maybe slightly damaged things. Sometimes just emotions. It really doesn't matter what format it is, because the following will always be true. At some point in your life, there will come a "midpoint" where more you have already experienced more before that point than you will afterwards. Before the midpoint, there are still more events in your future than in your past, so you are fundamentally not capable of imagining all the future events--not only their nature, but the weight of their existence. The fidelity of your memories really doesn't matter here; you cannot fully appreciate 20 years of experience when you have lived only 10. After the midpoint, one of two things is true: Either, 1. We cannot remember all of the details about our lives. We have a radically simplified and compressed form which pales in comparison to the real moment-to-moment experience (i.e. low resolution). 2. We can remember all of the details about our lives (i.e. high resolution), but we don't have enough time left to replay them all in full quality. Either way, our past life, in its full glory, is beyond our capacity to imagine. So that means before the midpoint and after the midpoint it is subjectively infinite; there is always more, even in our own experiences, than we can experience or re-experience. And that's just our own minds! If we aren't completely solipistic and believe all the rest of this vastly complicated world really does exist, then its doubly infinite, because every time we learn something new about how it works, we have to reimagine and reinterpret the complexities of the past with the new information. Like learning about people. Sometimes you seem them do things that make no sense; only when you get to know them later do you understand why they might have done that, and what they might have been thinking. Or looking at an old photograph you see someone you didn't know then but know now, and the past is even more detailed and rich than what you knew. So I don't know who told you that consciousness is a hallucination, and that it must be meaningless and trite. Maybe they just lived a boring life, because TBH you're missing a hell of a good show as this whole thing unfolds. Try LSD sometime.

titzer 6y ago

For sure these people are quacks, but if you're curious to take the next turn down the rabbit hole, let me seed you. Even the concept of senses and reality are concepts in your mind and consequences of the model you have accepted as reality. So the problem recurses on itself, too. Can you directly experience your mind? Is the feeling of your mind delivered to you through a sense you haven't realized is a sense yet? Can you trust that sense? Total radical skepticism lies below that. But it's only logical. You can't escape that tarpit at the bottom. Or maybe it's the screen isn't there for anything to be projected onto? So we have to rebuild from what we can sense, sure. What is repeatable. We must develop an axiom that what is repeatable is real. That what we can understand, the system, the model, the prediction, is real. We believe the planets and stars are real because we can draw maps and pass them between us and furthermore make predictions about where the stars and planets will go based on our mathematical models. But even our models tell us that the world is too huge of a system to compute even the slightest more than the tiniest fraction of a smidgen of it all. We don't even have computers big enough to fold proteins. Yet they do. And what we don't have models for--we can't predict. Is it unreal, then? Where did our axiom go? What is real and isn't? I'm not so sure it's logic that decides that, after all. Because you gotta have faith that them there proteins are getting folded right, because you can't. fucking. check it!

lidHanteyk 6y ago
You are over-complicating this. People are not infinitely deep; they have strange loops which make one level of depth look like many levels. Consciousness is a hallucination.
- titzer 6y ago
  ..and Haskell lists cannot be infinitely long? So, take a second. We don't understand fully how the brain's memory system works. There are some people who have an extreme ability to recall autobiographical details about literally every single day they ever lived. What the weather was like, what clothes they wore, who they talked to, things that happened. That's far beyond most people. But that establishes that clearly the brain has both the capacity and wiring to this at some level, and it can actually be turned on. We only need to be open to the idea that perhaps all brains do this at some level, recording our whole experience at some level of fidelity, below our conscious mind. I say, "at some level of fidelity" because we don't really know how detailed our memories really are. If it was just a heartbeat counter, it would only take 33 bits (!); if it was a transcript of the words we spoke, it would fit in less than 100mb. Of course it is probably not a full dump of any kind, but a patchwork of cross-referenced, reinforced, compressed, maybe slightly damaged things. Sometimes just emotions. It really doesn't matter what format it is, because the following will always be true. At some point in your life, there will come a "midpoint" where more you have already experienced more before that point than you will afterwards. Before the midpoint, there are still more events in your future than in your past, so you are fundamentally not capable of imagining all the future events--not only their nature, but the weight of their existence. The fidelity of your memories really doesn't matter here; you cannot fully appreciate 20 years of experience when you have lived only 10. After the midpoint, one of two things is true: Either, 1. We cannot remember all of the details about our lives. We have a radically simplified and compressed form which pales in comparison to the real moment-to-moment experience (i.e. low resolution). 2. We can remember all of the details about our lives (i.e. high resolution), but we don't have enough time left to replay them all in full quality. Either way, our past life, in its full glory, is beyond our capacity to imagine. So that means before the midpoint and after the midpoint it is subjectively infinite; there is always more, even in our own experiences, than we can experience or re-experience. And that's just our own minds! If we aren't completely solipistic and believe all the rest of this vastly complicated world really does exist, then its doubly infinite, because every time we learn something new about how it works, we have to reimagine and reinterpret the complexities of the past with the new information. Like learning about people. Sometimes you seem them do things that make no sense; only when you get to know them later do you understand why they might have done that, and what they might have been thinking. Or looking at an old photograph you see someone you didn't know then but know now, and the past is even more detailed and rich than what you knew. So I don't know who told you that consciousness is a hallucination, and that it must be meaningless and trite. Maybe they just lived a boring life, because TBH you're missing a hell of a good show as this whole thing unfolds. Try LSD sometime.