I didn't participate in that thread because I lack the right equipment so to speak to do so.

Anyway, from what I can gather, to call those items you listed in your next to last post hallucinations is to only expose the fact that they're intersubjective. I wouldn't call such entities hallucinations or if I must they would be collective hallucinations (mass hysteria?).

A shared hallucination is closer to reality than one specific to an individual by virtue of consistency in the group that experiences it. What do you suppose are the implications of that?

On the contrary, I think we can (with this rule-of-thumb): where "the difference" is ambiguous (or vague), we encounter "reality"; on the other hand, where it is clear, explicit, definite, we perceive "illusion" – just like "the difference" between waking and dreaming, during the latter we don't get tired and cannot fall asleep (as if we're "more awake" than awake). Also a problem with the "Simulation Hypothesis" is the (conspicuously) hidden assumption of 'ontological (substance) dualism' whereby it makes sense to pose the question which can be answwered, if only in principle, one way or another; otherwise, absent this assumption, the philosopher (e.g. Nick Bostrom) is also a simulation and therefore the "hypothesis" makes no sense, as :strong: 'Conan the Barbarian' points out ↪180 Proof. — 180 Proof

You mean to say that clarity, consistency, certainty are markers of illusion? That's interesting! So the more you (think you) understand something, the more deluded you are (psychotic individuals tend to be 100% certain about their beliefs); vagueness, uncertainty, cognitive dissonance are the defining features of the real world, the real world is, as someone once said, messy.



Philosophy then must be a waste of time considering how it aims for the very things you've declared as hallmarks of illusions!

My instincts, however, inform me that he's not entirely correct about the relationship between language and philosophy. — Agent Smith

I think he's actually quite wrong, having a number of things backward. He's too enveloped by the idealist tradition.

.such as property, money, government, credit...? — Banno

These things are not created by language, they are created by human beings, with language as a tool. Remember the principle, "meaning is use". This makes language something used, like a tool, as the means toward various ends. When we use tools to bring about the existence of things, it is incorrect to say that the tool is the cause of existence of the artificial thing, the tool is just the means to the end.

This is the problem with platonic realism which Wittgenstein helped to expose. If we tie the symbol directly to the idea, as if we were naming an object, like when we say the symbol "2" represents a mathematical object, the number two, then the idea must be something eternal and unchanging, making it passive without causal capacity. This issue is commonly presented to dualists as "the problem of interaction".

We can avoid this commonly cited problem of dualism by portraying symbols as tools being used for various purposes, rather than as necessarily the name of an object (Idea). But then we have to account for the reality of intention, apprehending intention as having causal influence in the world. This is what is known as final cause.

Language doesnt refer, it enacts realities, and the danger is that in our interactions with others , we can enact meanings in a way that leads to confusions about what we are doing — Joshs

Language doesn't enact realities. It's merely a means of reinforcing and express them. To a minor extent It's involved in shaping realities.

You mean to say that clarity, consistency, certainty are markers of illusion? That's interesting! So the more you (think you) understand something, the more deluded you are (psychotic individuals tend to be 100% certain about their beliefs); vagueness, uncertainty, cognitive dissonance are the defining features of the real world, the real world is, as someone once said, messy. — Agent Smith

In a sense, yes. When we stand vis-a-vis the material world, it offers resistance to our expectations, ideas about it, and our perception of it. In our dreams, the ideas and perception, the illusions, have free play, and as such are seen as perfectly real. When illusion and reality meet, the world comes to be.

You mean to say that clarity, consistency, certainty are markers of illusion? That's interesting! — Agent Smith

That's not what I "mean to say". :roll:

That's not what I "mean to say". — 180 Proof

But it's an interesting angle, oui? The clearer the picture of reality in your mind, the less real it is! Where have I heard that before?

Too good to be true? :chin:

:ok:

idealist — Metaphysician Undercover

Remind me to stay away from idealists! I lived a life as one! It didn't work out!

These things are not created by language, they are created by human beings, with language as a tool. — Metaphysician Undercover

@Banno

Is there a philosophical argument that attempts to prove that language & thought are the same?

Muchas gracias señor/señorita for the suggestion.

Would you like to discuss hyperreality? I've come across the idea in connection with the use of psychedelics. It's been described by people who were tripping as "realer than real". That makes it possible that this world we experience as normal people not under the influence of mind-bending drugs is a simulation/illusion; in a sense, with mind-altering drugs, we wake up and catch a glimpse of the real world!

Fascinating, wouldn't you agree? — Agent Smith

I see no rational deduction coming out of that interpretation of reality so I don't really agree with that idea. When it comes to Hyperreal and Baudrillard it's mainly about how the simulation and reality are impossible to differentiate between. It's about more than just a cartesian analysis of reality and has to do with more stuff like how we invent concepts of reality on top of the actual reality we experience, and through that we lose touch with the actual reality and cannot know which is what. His philosophy is more advanced than describing it in short segments but I recommend Simulacra & Simulation if you want to know more.

We're in the dark and we're shooting! What could go wrong?

Language doesn't enact realities. It's merely a means of reinforcing and express them. To a minor extent It's involved in shaping realities. — Hillary

Then you and I support different philosophers and psychologists on this subject. Phenomenology , postmodern philosophies , enactivist cognitive approaches and Wittgenstein all argue my view.

We're in the dark and we're shooting! What could go wrong? — Agent Smith

:smirk:

I look from the scientific side. Not the philosophic side.

Well we should probably leave Witt out of this, but I was only in a way agreeing with your conclusion that there is ultimately nothing "essential", nothing we can know, that saves us from the skeptic’s claim. There is no ultimate predetermined, right, certain, "real", in a word: knowledge that solves the intellectual problem we concoct to control our separateness from the world and each other. Not that the problem is silly, or that the skeptic’s framework is correct, but we collude by fighting in the same arena because we want knowledge to allow us to avoid our being a part (individually) of the equation.

It all depends, I guess, on whether we're baffled or not?

So, are we baffled or not?

Aporia $\to$ Ataraxia [The Greeks anticipated all this 2.5k years ago]

I look from the scientific side. Not the philosophic side. — Hillary

Then you’re not reading the same scientists I am

Then you’re not reading the same scientists I am — Joshs

Dunno. But I do know that language, insofar the genesis of ideas is concerned (and thus realities) has not a profound influence and certainly not as once thought.

are we baffled or not? — Agent Smith

We are beyond being merely stymied and reflecting on our history and practices to problem-solve; we are lost and don't know how to continue (having come to an end, Witt says); all our knowledge has not prepared us for this novelty or won't stand in our place, make the new decision for us, settle our accounts with each other. But from this moment (this "event" Ricoure points out) the skeptic has generalized to everything (and created reality as a solution), all the time, stuck trying to solve for the future.

Our doubt (Aporia, I gather) creates our fear (yet perhaps trembling), our wish to slip out from being held responsible for our choices and words. We court our confusion hoping for something "objective" "real") so it won't matter who stands on this precipice, whose character is forged by acting into the void. This is the time for philosophy to turn us on our community (for Witt, through language--what we say) for the possibilities of its extension, and the creation of our next self. Perhaps our perspecuity, our new attitude (as in perspective), our expansion, the ordinary made alive, is like Aratraxia as an epiphany, a deeping into the unnoticed already-there, a settling, at peace with our duty in response.

I'm afraid I lack the background to grok your post. However I've encountered the particular strain of philosophy you're espousing - reads more like literature (a novel) than philosophy, but I don't hold that against you or those like you (necessity is the mother of invention).

I read somewhere that the naysayers of philosophy accuse it of being nothing more than literature review. How would you respond?

I'm afraid I lack the background to grok your post. — Agent Smith

I do take those who need to put something a particular way (say, Emerson, the later Heidegger, Wittgenstein (and Austin), Nietszche) to be as analytical as, even in response to, Kant or Plato (who insisted on things being put a certain way), say, by mustering "arguments" to get around our integral defensiveness to abandoning certainty as the only acceptable criteria of reason. Philosophy is inherently in critique ("review") of itself--reading itself differently, obliquely, further. The dismissals of: emotivist, subjective, relativism, or other easy label ("strain"), are analogous to logic's exile of "poetry", equivalent to the brush-off of saying something is "rhetoric" (syntax), in the same way that anything not involving "reality" is illusion, because we can not face that life (our categorical condition) is subject to illusion, isolation, madness, judgment, consequences, injustice, frailty, temptation, so we cling to certainty and are left with only chaos as the alternative, blind that we approach perfection, however pedestrian our ways.

Doing serious philosophy here for me would involve first questions and discussion, but what we probably have is a lack of interest rather than capability.

I'm not as certain as I'd like to be but does your philosophy have psychological underpinnings? It sure looks like it does.

From actions we move on to motives?

A shared hallucination is closer to reality than one specific to an individual by virtue of consistency in the group that experiences it. — Agent Smith

The opposite though, mìght be the case as well.

The opposite though, mìght be the case as well. — Hillary

Who the hell turned off the lights?!

Shared darkness might be closer to reality than the lonely night. I'll leave on a light... The Enlightenment hallucination, bathing the the Earth globally in it's hot radiation, might be a mass hallucination farther from the truth than the reality many lonely wanderers perceive.

Enlightenment hallucination — Hillary

No pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!?

Reminds me of Meno's Paradox:

If you know what you're looking for, inquiry is unnecessary.

If you don't know what you're looking for, inquiry is impossible.

What is nirvana? Is it a very private experience? Wittgenstein did make an interesting point. Was he into mysticism (re religious experiences)?

Shared darkness — Hillary

:up: Different degrees of darkness! Scientific!

No pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!? — Agent Smith

The Enlightenment light originally was a warm, comforting, and promising light. The yoke of God could be buried and the future was indeed the pot of gold awaiting at the end of the colorful rainbow, shining in it's light.

We know how it turned out though...

If you know what you're looking for, inquiry is unnecessary.

If you don't know what you're looking for, inquiry is impossible. — Agent Smith

:chin:

What is nirvana? Is it a very private experience? Wittgenstein did make an interesting point. Was he into mysticism (re religious experiences)? — Agent Smith

The Nirvana, in my humble (but not necessarily dumb,) opinion, is that Nirvana is the timeless eternal, infinite, higher dimensional structure of the quantum vacuum on which the universe and all life in it can play the games they do. The contemplation of this world beckons, like a liberation. Don't take it too seriously though... Eat it and laugh at it!

I read somewhere that the naysayers of philosophy accuse it of being nothing more than literature review. How would you respond? — Agent Smith

I’d respond that that is probably your view as well. It was also mine when I was in college. Took me awhile to realize that it was a product of my own ignorance rather than some fault of philosophy.