Thank you, I have spent quite some time reading the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, as well as the (English translation) of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Before I found those sources, I had found the rewritten version found in the Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in my youth when I was interested in LSD. There are quite a few parallels between what I've heard from those close to me that were dying, psychedelic experiences of my own and friends, as well as a near death experience I had myself. I have found the amount of memory that can be recalled from the unconscious to be amazing. The "life flashing before my eyes" was something I fully experienced, and I somehow recalled even minor events over 16 years of my life (I was 16 when I had my near death experience).
Whether or not someone believes this to be real or a hallucination, it is still a human experience, and should at least be treated with respect. I think it's perfectly fine to not believe that it is something higher than brain function, but in Buddhism there is the concept of non-duality.
The supernatural part is unfalsifiable—they can't prove it's real, you can't prove it isn't. You assume it's not real because that fits your priors better, they assume it is real because that better fits their priors.
Dogmatically defining metaphysical claims as "not real" because they are unfalsifiable is no more rational than dogmatically accepting them—the only purely rational approach is to say "we don't know and cannot know" and then move on.
When I was quite young but literate, I began investigating the paranormal. Snapped up books on UFOs, OBE, SHC, Astral Projection, Bermuda Triangle: all kinds of phenomena and ghosts and spiritism-age weirdness.
But being Catholic I was also going to a big fancy theater once a week where there was cosplay and fairy tales and lots of singing and a snack. All your friends hung out for coffee and donuts. And really that was my surface-level experience of the Christian faith, because Star Wars was more real to kids like us, than the Old Testament (at least most of the NT folks had been photographed and copied...)
But upon returning I considered how this is a way of life for millions-billions, great intellects, vast civilizations, isn't there more than fairy tales? And it really took dedication and concentrated effort and perseverance just to open up to those possibilities of a spiritual realm. But once you grasp that there's something to it all, and a breadth and depth that's unfathomable, and things might get rocky or difficult, decision point time: follow him to the Cross, or turn away and you'll never know?
Moreover, it became apparent but surprising to me that my reality was unlike others' reality, and I simply have no way of being inside the other's experience of their reality. There's no film or video game or book that can convey to you how people really live, love, and die. We just set out on life's journey and hack through the jungle, making friends along the way.
Unless you somehow possess the ultimate, complete and provably correct description of reality (which is, of course, an oxymoron), or direct access to the underlying territory (which would mean, of course, you are high), everything is a model, and a model is essentially just an interpretation.
Your argument is that unless one is omniscient and know everything with absolute certainty, one cannot know anything at all with any certainty, and therefore the models of science are no more or less valid than the models of religion.
This is about as banal and useless a claim as one can imagine. The model of science is an interpretation of data based on observation and experimentation, with objectively verifiable results. The model of religion is literally just vibes. The rain happens because the man in the sky is angry.
If you want to regress further into the solipsist trap and retort that no one can prove objective reality even exists then fine. At some point, to have a conversation, conversants must accept even simply for the sake of argument some minimal set of common axioms. Reality exists. Objective reality exists. Objective reality operates according to understandable rules. Science creates models which more correctly describe the nature of reality than religion.
If you can't even get that far then I don't know what to tell you. Go talk to the machine elves living in your walls or something.
All we have is maps, and all maps are bad. Some maps are useful for some purposes, others for others. A map that helps us go to the moon may not be the best map for the purposes of, say, mental well-being, living in harmony, things like that.
> Reality exists. Objective reality exists.
Remember, the only information about that reality is supplied via/by our mind. Our mind also suggests choices about what to measure, what experiments to hold, and more generally what sort of maps to create. It is all subjective from the ground up.
> Science creates models which more correctly describe the nature of reality than religion.
Science makes testable predictions and creates models which help make further testable predictions. Those models do not “describe the nature of reality”. If you think natural sciences make statements of absolute truth, you are mistaking science for religion.
Well, I'm certainly glad that you have figured out the answer to the universal question.
I have spent many years pondering it myself, as I'm sure most of us have. I've even spent some time pondering it while not under the influence of mind altering substances (again, not unique, just wanted to throw that out there).
"The question" is, by design or by accident, unanswerable. At least not with any technology that we have yet contemplated.
Honestly, I could probably write for hours about the many possibilities I have pondered, and some of them are quite interesting (and some are just stupid), but I don't want to ramble and HN is not the place for it.
However, there is a good one that gives me some comfort from time to time. So I will at least share that particular thought:
Assume there was an entity with the characteristics one would normally ascribe to a god: the power of creation, omnipotence, all-knowing intelligence, and being eternal yet simultaneously timeless.
At the moment such a being were to come into existence, certainly in an instant, it would experience the "ultimate realization": it would be forever alone.
In my feeble human mind, that is indeed a twisted fate for such a powerful being. Something straight out of the Twilight Zone.
So then I pondered what I would do in that scenario. And the answer seemed fairly obvious: Everything, with a capital "E".
If it could be done, created, built, lived, experienced, dreamed, loved, hated, you name it.
Where would I do it? Everywhere.
For how long? As long as it took. Even if it required doing it all just a bit different 1000^1000^1000^10000000000 times over.
Why? Because then I would have memories. I would have friends.
You could imagine a God who is infinitely delightful. If he's the only thing in existence, he could delight in himself without end and would not be wrong in doing so, being actually delightful.
Having no limitation of knowledge or thought, he could think about himself. His thoughts would not be deficient in any detail, and thus would be an exact representation of himself. [1]
He could delight in that representation with his whole being, and that would be yet another full representation of himself. And thus he would not be alone or sad.
And he could have the propensity of emanating his delightfulness, expressing it outwards like light out of a star. And that emanation could be expressed as the creation of everything else. [2]
"Hallucination" is just a strange scientific word that seems to stigmatize experiences that are probably far more common than anyone admits.
As a child it was understood to me that certain drugs (only the illegal ones) precipitated hallucinations and this was quite undesirable.
After a lifetime of listening to disembodied music on radio, shows on TV, and sailing through Cyberspace, how can we not question reality as moderated through pixels or remote broadcasts... even just your printed paperbacks?
Religions speak of voices/visions all the time and perhaps it's perceived as bunk when an oracle, a psychic, a shaman or a seer receives messages. But generally Western Medicine is concerned with dull-witted people hallucinating detrimental and dangerous things for them. Not people who are guided by encouraging voices or just hearing music in their head at a snap of fingers. One time after college, my mom just goes "don't you think listening to all that awful music is hurting you?" and I was like "welp, vicious cycle."
For myself, I don't remember/experience dreaming and my visual "powers" are limited to watching the world go by, but my inner voices are myriad and a rich tapestry. Unfortunately they're overwhelmingly bad and evil and pessimistic, [they had eventually come to parity with the way people treated me in meatspace,]
so I went through a series of physicians and medications as they attempted to exorcise those daemons by means of human chemistry experiment. Strangely I rarely had the experience as auditory or any sort of "sound in my head" so it's difficult to explain how they're there, and it was harder for me to accept that they were, and my intellect questioned the proposition that a pill could be a voice-killer like heroin is a pain-killer?
And just like antimicrobials or pesticides, it's not easy to find drugs that quell only the bad voices, lol.
So ... only what is physical is real? Like only matter and energy? Then there's no such thing as significance or value, only different combinations of matter and energy. Any opinion or argument, held however strongly, is only a set of chemical reactions, nothing more?
You're being purposely reductive in describing the brain - the most complex object in the known universe - and its processes as "only a set of chemical reactions." But yes. All thought, argument, emotion, sense of being, etc are bound within the brain and the body and the physical universe and its laws. It's all physical. There is no "soul" or any other paranormal aspect to any of it.
So the squashing of a tomato or a human or a civilization -- they're just different rearrangements of matter and energy. Our feelings about each are also just chemical reactions. Any feeling or argument to the contrary has nothing to stand on. There's no such real thing as better or worse ultimately -- only better or worse within a context but not ultimately.
If you're on a hike and you see blueprints for a working automobile, you don't assume it assembled itself by mere chance. There's a language of a working design and you assume some minds created it.
But at the same time you interact with humans who have a working blueprint expressed in a 4-letter language and suddenly deny there is any mind behind any design?
This one is so obvious and yet boy do a lot of people suffer from not having realized it yet!
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