All this brain hallucinating reality stuff pisses me off because people use it as a springboard to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I’m just not aware of can’t REALLY kill me. There is a uniform and self-consistent reality which we all have only limited perceptual awareness of. The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality, not to fabricate wishy-washy arguments for how that reality doesn’t exist or doesn’t have meaning
"Trippy" Reality
Submitted 7 hours ago by ekZepp@lemmy.world to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6aaeb6a5-aab3-4037-8cc7-76730cf733a3.png
Comments
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 2 hours ago
Supervisor194@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I’m just not aware of can’t REALLY kill me.
It’s not that reality isn’t subjective it’s that acting as if it isn’t subjective isn’t useful for our everyday experience. So we act as if it is objective. But acting as if reality is objective so you can live your life does not mean reality is objective, and personally, I think being absolutely certain that it is objective leads to shit like “Jesus loves you and died for your sins” - not to great science.
There is a uniform and self-consistent reality
The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality
I’m really not trying to be shitty or anything about this, but science is increasingly showing us something considerably more complicated than that. Science absolutely gives us greater understanding of classical reality which is useful to us because airplanes fly. However, like it or not, science also is telling us that reality is a strange miasma of superpositions and that we actively participate in the creation of reality by simply existing/observing. At the very least, your outlook that it “is… uniform and self-consistent” does not appear to represent what is truly happening, it just represents what you think is happening, which is, ultimately, the point of the OPs meme. Everything you think you know is being filtered through your experience of it and whether is represents some objective reality or not, it represents it enough for you to live your life and feel like it is objective and consistent. But that isn’t necessarily so. As wild as it sounds, there may be an infinite number of branching realities and you are walking down only one, and considering it as “objective reality.”
For anyone interested in this stuff, there’s a great video from Sean Carrol about quantum physics that outlines the uncomfortable unanswered questions in quantum physics and their implications about reality here.
droans@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Are you still alive? How’s that blood clot doing?
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Woah there, where are you getting this idea that any of this has meaning from? Reality being coherent doesn’t imply any kind of meaning. I can’t even think of a theoretical way to determine if we’re here for a reason (other than cause and effect) or if we’re just here.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 2 hours ago
Yeah sorry, horrible choice of words. I am a nihilist in fact. I was using meaning in the very dull sense, like how a red light has the “meaning” to bring your car to a halt. And similarly a blood clot in my leg means that I am at increased risk of death, the rising of the sun means that the air will heat up (even if I’m blind), cooking garlic means the air will be filled with scent molecules (even if I can’t smell), etc.
I am so accustomed to only talking with IRLs who know what I mean by meaning that I forget what a loaded word it is.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 1 hour ago
Putting this as a separate comment because its unrelated. I think theoretically the problem is that the notion of “purpose” or “reason” is extremely fraught with psychological quirks. We say that flowers are colorful for the “purpose” of attracting pollinators, but it might be more accurate to say they just coincidentally ended up that way. But a more ironclad claim of purpose would be something like “I made this fruit salad for myself for the purpose of eating something healthy and sweet”. Here we are hard pressed to deny that the salad has a real purpose. In fact, anything that has real purpose seems to have been designed by a conscious entity. Only a conscious entity can imbue its creations with purpose, when we look at how we actually use the term in that sense. This also handily shows that purpose is not a physical quality, but purely a genealogical quality. A purposeful object doesn’t need to bear any physical markers that show that it came from a conscious entity - it is purposeful either way. Since “purpose” aka “reason for being” is now a matter of nothing more than being created by a conscious entity with some purpose in the mind of the conscious entity, it seems like the theoretical way to determine if humans have a reason for being, or if the universe has a reason for being, could ONLY be to determine if these things were created by a conscious entity.
Obviously religion comes to mind, but outside of that unfalsifiable realm, theoretically we could learn for instance that humans were actually designed by aliens to be fun little pets to watch, like Tamagotchi. If we found that out then our purpose would factually be “to be entertaining”.
So I actually think the theoretical path of establishing the existence of a reason or purpose is quite clear! Its just that the path clearly leads to the conclusion that there isn’t one.
ceenote@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
It’s just more efficient for my brain to only render what I’m looking at.
chortle_tortle@mander.xyz 4 hours ago
Dismissing: lacks object permanence. Embracing: optimizes render load.
Have we considered I don’t have ADHD, just triple A blockbuster brain engine??
aketawi@quokk.au 3 hours ago
god learned from steam frame
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
The image really does illustrate a fascinating thesis
ieGod@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
What an apt comic. The first time I tried mushrooms I came to the conclusion we are essentially peeking through the keyhole of a door trying to understand an environment we can’t even be sure is limited to the ‘other side’.
ascend@lemmy.radio 5 hours ago
The one time I tried shrooms I died, then I saw everything I needed for what I was going through and woke up the next day after all the nightmares feeling at peace with life and had a new perspective. Kind of like a speed run midlife crisis. I wouldn’t do it again but I’m glad I did
ToastedRavioli@midwest.social 3 hours ago
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I assume you mean ego death and not literal death
Deceptichum@quokk.au 1 hour ago
Last time I did shrooms I saw geometric cats on everything.
Can’t wait for next season.
yuri@pawb.social 2 hours ago
bad trips can be really really enlightening. i got the cliché “i am so tiny and the universe is so big” and it changed the way i think about things on a fundamental level.
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz 7 hours ago
Bitch don’t do this to me
fleem@piefed.zeromedia.vip 3 hours ago
but please do do this to me
CubitOom@infosec.pub 6 hours ago
amanita muscaria will give you the shits for hours. There are better psychedelics.
BanMe@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
There’s a valuable lesson here, and it’s to avoid using comic strips to identify the mushrooms you should eat to trip.
GandalftheBlack@feddit.org 4 hours ago
Instead, rely on the comments
GreenBeanMachine@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Amanita muscaria is NOT psychedelic though, it’s a deliriant. It can cause hallucinations, but it is not serotonin based, and psychedelics work on serotonin receptors.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 3 hours ago
If everything we experience is a hallucination, then we should use psychology to engineer a just and useful hallucination. For example, we should hallucinate trans people as closer to their preferred gender presentation.
ekZepp@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
discovered how to use this power for evil
They already have. Is called propaganda or “the narrative”.
GraniteM@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
The podcast “You Made It Weird,” with Pete Holmes is great. He has a lot of smart and funny people on, and the pattern is usually to start with “What’s going on with you? What are you working on? What makes you laugh?” for the first two thirds of a given episode, and then the last third is stuff like “Do you believe there is a purpose to life? Have you ever seen a ghost? Have you ever tried psychedelics?” Pete is clearly on his own spiritual journey and has a lot of heavy stuff to talk about and share, and he makes good a great conversation.
Two highlights were when Reggie Watts talked about going on a trip in a bathroom where he traveled to a parallel universe and met with a sentient planet, and when Judd Apatow talked about how ayahuasca brought him into a meeting with the embodiment of his childhood self.
I don’t necessarily want to get into psychedelics, but it’s a very interesting topic of conversation, if the person is smart enough to ask and answer intelligent questions.
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 3 hours ago
If offered in good faith the answer should be yes.
Zerush@lemmy.ml 31 minutes ago
Image