Voidmatrix wrote:Exitwound wrote: I think there is no way for us to figure "the truth". Why would you ask? Because Goedel's incompleteness theorem and its implications.
This approaches the heart of what I've been getting at.
Conditional:
When we say "everything is an illusion," our assertion is a statement about how things are. It makes a definite claim. This claim, by what it claims and how it claims, implies that it is true. But if everything is an illusion, then everything is a falsehood, and so everything's truth value is false, including, "everything is an illusion." Any statement that would be made in the illusion are part of the illusion, so are illusory themselves, and as such, false. If we consider what's true as real, what's real as true, what's false as unreal, and what's unreal as false, then an absolute approach saying that everything is an illusion immediately invalidates itself. It's similar to the Cretan saying, "all Cretans are liars."
And being uncertain/not knowing doesn't mean that we can jump to the conclusion that everything is an illusion or is false, for making such a claim also claims that that is something that is known.
One love
Yes. Although i think it is likely that our reality is for a great part an idiosyncratic illusion, the "real world" must also have things in common with that illusion.
And for something like a consensus reality to be possible, there must also be something that our shared illusions of objective reality have in common.
I think that there most likely are objects outside of us that correspond to objects in the world as we experience it. These real objects could be anything. Even just codes of the matrix.
If there are relationships between these real objects that are simmilar to relationships between there corresponding objects in our personal realities, then the picture we think we have of reality corresponds with reality on a structural level and it is also possible to agree with other people on it because we can also create pictures of that reality with language, visual pictures, math or computercode, that share these structural characteristics.
A reason to believe that something like this is probably the case, is that there is at least one object that we know realy to exist in both our private reality as in the outside world. And that is the object we refer to as "me". And it is also true that this object can interact with other external objects, like for instance psychedelic drugs, and that these interactions tend to cause undoubtedly real alterations in the prime object, that correspond with the alterations we would expect based on our private beliefs.
So that seems to verify to me that there are real objects that correspond to objects in our personal reality, that sometimes have relationships that correspond with the relatiinships their corresponding objects within our personal reality have.
The point is ofcourse that all of this still says close to nothing about reality itself. Because we still don't know the exact nature of the real objects and their relationships.
To give an example of what i mean: you can disect sentences, arithmetic operations or computercodes to reveal their internal structure. But sentences with corresponding structures can have a totally different meaning. Arithmetic operatiins with an identical structure can have a totally different outcome, etc.