Who really CAAARES if it was real?

[Shaper]

@dreamosis

The reality of lucid dreaming has been verified in a sleep laboratory under strict scientific conditions.

Alan Worsley and Stephen LaBerge monitored sleeping subjects with an EEG and asked them (beforehand) to signal their lucidity by a specific eye-movement pattern. They did. Both scientists published their results, and have repeated them too.

That humans can dream lucidly is a scientific fact.

Exactly

Another scientist working in the UK actually did pretty much the same experiment as LaBerge a couple of years before he did…I think his name is Keith Hearne. Anyway, it has been scientifically verified twice by two different scientists working independently of one another. Can’t really get much better than that, if you’re a scientist.

In case anyone is interested in continuing the discussion about what is real and what isn’t, reality and our experiences, etc, I’ve started a proper thread about it here in The Cloud. We can continue there, before I drag this thread even further off-topic

[Svilaja]

@Shaper

Well sure, your experience of things depends a great deal on what’s going on inside of your mind. But does it come completely from your mind? (If it did, could you and I even be having this conversation?) I don’t think it does.

In fact there are plenty of good reasons to think the external world actually does exist. Really (pun intended). Just look away and look back and what I’ve written here for instance. Chances are, it stayed the same…but try that in a lucid dream, and see what happens

The reason it stayed the same when you looked away and back again just now, most likely, is because there’s something that exists out there in the world that we can both experience fairly consistently, because it doesn’t change (not at our level of experience anyway). What I’ve written here is more or less static (unless of course something goes wrong with my computer or this website) for example. But if you were to do this in a dream, my words would change if you were to look away and back again, because there is no such stable source of information for your mind to put together into an experience. So, dreams are actually a good example of an experience that does come about internally. When you compare how our experiences in dreams behave to our waking experience, I think it’s pretty obvious that something out there exists, separately and independently of your experience and mine, even if we experience it in different ways (as in my number 11 example above).

Just because something is different from a lucid dream, doesn’t make it real. Dreams and waking life are just two levels of experience. I call waking life the tougher one. The reason why this text you’re reading remains the same after looking away is because you believe it will stay there. Believe something firmly in a lucid dream and it will manifest. The same will happen in “real life”. Waking life is just a construct of our own minds. And you can wake up IRL just like you do in a lucid dream; though it is much harder because it seems more ‘real’ than a dream.

[Shaper]

@Svilaja

Just because something is different from a lucid dream, doesn’t make it real. Dreams and waking life are just two levels of experience. I call waking life the tougher one.

That waking life is simply different from a dream isn’t why I’m saying waking life is more real. Instead, I think the outside world is real insofar as it keeps on existing regardless of whether there is someone there to experience it, and perceiving something in waking life generally depends more on what is out there in the world than dreaming does, which draws from memory, expectation, and so on.

The reason why this text you’re reading remains the same after looking away is because you believe it will stay there. Believe something firmly in a lucid dream and it will manifest. The same will happen in “real life”. Waking life is just a construct of our own minds. And you can wake up IRL just like you do in a lucid dream; though it is much harder because it seems more ‘real’ than a dream.

I think we’ve arrived at an impasse

Yes, waking life is a construct of our minds. All perception is like that, but the reason the waking experience is more stable is because there is a world out there that exists apart from us. If not, we couldn’t even have a conversation like this. And belief has nothing to do with it…what about all those philosophers who were skeptical of the existence of the external world? Rene DesCartes is a good example; he wanted to establish the existence of things via systematically doubting everything he could, rather than by believing in them. And he still managed to believe, after doubting it, that no only did he exist, but so did other minds, and indeed the world.

[thermopylae]

apologies for not reading all if my point has already been raised but, in being a complete athiest i have no belief whatsoever in a god or “all knowing being” yet to me this “un-real” thing has had more of an affect on “real” things than anything else i can think of thus making the line between real and unreal more hazy than some of my LD’s