I could care less about all this, frankly the only reason I made this thread was to allow people to enjoy the though, but considering its turned into a pointless argument about what we BELIEVE, I dont think its worht me even posting on anymore. Enjoy your knowledge and logic, thats all fine and dandy with me.

May I remind you all of Kiri-Kin-Tha's first law of metaphysics?

Nothing unreal exists.

Reality is completely subjective, and can actually be changed via medications. Whenever you do drugs that are hallucinagens, you convert your reality into something much different. Anything that you believe in is reality. If you are a devout Christian, then God and Jesus and Satan are part of your reality. Buddha might be part of anothers.

If one were to ponder on this for too long, he should surely descend into madness.


btw, Jozan, I loved that answer.

*Blinks eyes*

It all depends on your breadth in believing

Real is anything that can be perceived physically, thought of mentally, or felt emotionally at any given point in time.

Your focus determines your reality


If this is true, I think it's safe to say whatever we can sense with our five senses is as real as it gets.

Your perceptions are subjective and can be changed by hallucinating. Reality are those things which, even when you don't percieve them, can still hurt you. Let me ask you a question: If you perceive that I slapped you across the face with a handful of posies, and I perceive that I did it with a hammer, how do we know which of us is right? According you to your philosophy, we're both right. According to mine, one of us is wrong, and if it's you, you're going to be severely injured.

I suggest we test Ryst's new theory immediately.

I want to join in.

I'm a scientist so if I can test it then it's real, reality, whatever it is, is real. The placebo effect is real. Religion is real, but, in my mind an god of any sort can not be real as I can't test it/him/her/them. And if I could test it/him/her/them then I would prove its/his/her/there existence and the cease to exist as I have proven that they exist and so belief is not needed so they can not exist.

If this doesn't make sense to you then don't worry, and yes, it's very similar to the "Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy"'s view on God, but it makes sense to me.

In short this is real. But what is this?

Have you ever had a hallucination that someone was bleeding profusely? It makes you feel nauseous. Therefore, it affected you. Which made your perceptions real to you. You are right about there being a difference in perception and reality. But when a perception has an effect, whether positive or negative, then it becomes reality to that person.

If you imagine yourself on a roller coaster hard enough, you can almost feel the weightless feeling in your gut. Then your senses are acting on that sensation, which makes it a temporary reality.

Perceptions do not make reality, and neither do hallucinations. You see, reality is that which affects you anyway. Regardless of whether you percieve it or not.

...or are you of the opinion that if you hallucinate hard enough, the hammer won't cave your face in?

Yes there is a difference between perception and reality, and there are many things that my modern mind would agree are undeniably real. Still I maintain that reality is a construct. The nature of reality is not so facile as black and white. I certainly agree that a hallucination will not change what is real and not, it is a temporary altering of what we can perceive. A momentary shift in our perceptions isn't going to alter our reality, being born into and raised in a culture/time with certain concrete views on reality will. Within our culture on a micro scale, and within our time on a macro scale there is much that we see as indisputable; what goes up must come down, ect. However these things that we now see as undeniable laws of reality do not necessarily define the reality of a mind outside our time or culture. We live in the same time, and come from most likely similar enough cultures (we are from the same construct of reality if you will), so yes if you thought you hit me with a hammer and I thought you hit me with a handful of posies one of us is hallucinating. Though perhaps they really were posies and not a hammer? Who can tell? Try your exercise with someone from a completely different construct of reality and you might find a differing result (though you'd be hard pressed to find someone with a completely different construct of reality than yourself).

If they're posies and not a hammer, then I'm wrong, and you don't get hurt. Simple. If someone from another society/time perceives the hammer as not a dangerous object, and I hit them with it, either they are wrong, and suffer grievous injury, or they are right, and it is not dangerous to them for some real reason that was not influenced by their perception, but by reality.

If you percieve reality to be that "what comes up must come down," then you are wrong. It's not a different reality, you're just wrong. You can raise a bunch of kids into a culture to believe pretty much anything you tell them, but if you told them that hammers can't hurt them, they're wrong.

Once again, reality is that which is unaffected by your perception and belifs about it.

I agree with you there, Ryst, but mind over matter can change that outcome.

I used to be a big druggie, so I know about hallucinations pretty good. If you tell yourself that hammer blow doesn't hurt as much, or if you take your mind off of it, it doesn't hurt as bad. So that reality of pain is only perceived. Yes, the body is still deformed, and bones are still broken, but pain can be defeated. And reality is shaped by the senses.

You can make the pain go away with a variety of methods, sure, but it doesn't make the damage less real. You can close your eyes so you don't see the train coming, but that won't make it not real, either. Reality is not shaped by our senses, it is only perceived by them.