We have in languaging conception a perfectly clear and ongoing demonstration of consciousness making objective its own subjective experience. The words we are presently using, the private thoughts and feelings they are expressing, immediately fading into memory as a “something” that really happened and is now a “thing-in-itself” that exists separate from us. This transition is so subtle and natural that we don’t even notice it. The expressed and immediate conscious state transforming itself into the just previous and now referred to remembered state. The phenomenal presentation of the image as us now the instantial representation of it as not us. The spoken organically becoming the spoken about. The thought crystallizing into the thought about. It is inside of language itself, inside its essentially temporalizing phenomenology, that we intuitively know how the subjective and objective intertwine even as they are falling apart.
Do we remember a movie thru episodic memory, as something we experienced, or thru semantic memory, as something that exists objectively in-itself? Perhaps both. Thus we vascillate between critiquing the movie from our perspective and critiquing the movie as a thing in itself. "I personally didn't enjoy the movie" then "It was a bad movie." And we probably do this all the time, confusing our own impressions of some thing or person with some moral or aesthetic property of the thing or person. Strange that this error could be solely due to the dual way we have of remembering it.
“Objectivity of whatever kind is not the test of reality. It is just one way of understanding reality.”― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere
Our conception of objective reality, by which I do mean conception and not perception, posits Nagel's view from nowhere, as if things could still exist non-perspectively and so outside of their being perceived. This results in the conception of things called objects, strange entities that are believed to be happening to no consciousness whatsoever, outside of time itself even, deriving their being not from their phenomenal immediacy to a consciousness but from some imagined property of being phenomenally manifest in all directions and all scales at once to the possibility of being perceived. IOW, in space which is the pure static reification of the now nowhere to be found conscious subject. An absolute manifestedness of a thing being in-itself and detached from the need for any consciousness of it.
(Oct 15, 2026 09:40 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]“Objectivity of whatever kind is not the test of reality. It is just one way of understanding reality.”― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere
Our conception of objective reality, by which I do mean conception and not perception, posits Nagel's view from nowhere, as if things could still exist non-perspectively and so outside of their being perceived. This results in the conception of things called objects, strange entities that are believed to be happening to no consciousness whatsoever, outside of time itself even, deriving their being not from their phenomenal immediacy to a consciousness but from some imagined property of being phenomenally manifest in all directions and all scales at once to the possibility of being perceived. IOW, in space which is the pure static reification of the now nowhere to be found conscious subject. An absolute manifestedness of a thing being in-itself and detached from the need for any consciousness of it.
For the (radical?) empiricist... It's an objective environment if it won't obey one's wishes (personal thoughts and will), if it follows its own rules or regularities, if it can be perceived or detected by others, and if it endures for years or decades before turning out to be a dream or hallucination (
). Places the qualifications in the external part of experience itself rather than dependency on an inaccessible metaphysical counterpart.
Quote:It's an objective environment if it won't obey one's wishes (personal thoughts and will), if it follows its own rules or regularities, if it can be perceived or detected by others, and if it endures for years or decades before turning out to be a dream or hallucination (Wink).
Sounds like a sound justification to regard the DMT machine elves to be as objective as rocks are. Granted of course they are conceived as existing in their own kind of absolute non-perspectival space or dimension.
Maybe what we call reality is just an unchanging and consistently repeatable hallucination induced by light waves. Two slightly skewed 2D scenes from 2 eyes that our brain delusionally merges as one immersive 3D mirage. Maybe what is real can only be seen in pitch darkness. It is certainly more repeatable and unvarying and less brain generated than seeing in the light is.
Taking this line of thought to even greater extremes: if stimulating your brain from the outside, whether with light waves or with DMT, consistently results in the same or similar completely private phenomenal experience for everyone, who's to say whether it's a reality or a hallucination? Maybe there is no difference between these after all.
Everything I touch now with my mind falls apart in the most beautiful ways.
Musings on Darkology..
If I shine a light on a sealed box, the darkness inside is not suddenly the shadow of the box cast inside itself. There has to be some coupling--some contact--between the light and darkness for it to be a shadow of something. If you should remove three sides of the box and shine a light on the remaining propped up side, then it WOULD be a shadow. The light only casts a shadow if it can also surround and inform the shadow. This strongly suggests that whatever light and darkness are, they are but two sides of the same coin.
There's many reports of shadow beings haunting various abandoned places where great suffering occurred. But what sort of entity can cast a three dimensional shadow in empty space? And what kind of being is embodied in the 3D shadow it is casting? I suspect some sort of higher dimensionality going on here. Could material objects themselves be but shadows cast from some higher hypersolid dimension? Maybe material objects are themselves shadows cast into our 3D space of hypersolid 4D objects.
Not everything that is possible in the future actually happens. Many possibilities zoom right past our present and straight into the past, where they forever remain as our regrets, our might have beens, and our if onlys.
Why is tangibility more convincing than visibility? Why do people, when confronted with the proposal that objective existence may not be real, typically reply with something about kicking a rock or punching a wall? It's because we seem to trust what we can feel with our hands and feet more than what we can see with our eyes. I believe this is because there is little interpretive wiggle room in what is happening when you touch something whereas when you see something there is always a purely semantic question of WHAT we are seeing which can lead to misperceptions and misidentifications caused by wishful thinking or mere ignorance. This is why the phenomenal "proof" of the existence of objective reality really comes down to its solidity, its resistance to our acting upon it, and the seeming lack of any other interpretation other than that is at least as real and "there" as our own bodies. As if a rock retains its touch and feel and resistance to force even without being touched or felt or resisting any force.
"The job of the popularizer of science, trying to get across some idea of quantum mechanics to a general audience that has not gone through these initiation rites, is daunting. Indeed, there are no successful popularizations of quantum mechanics in my opinion, partly for this reason. These mathematical complexities are compounded by the fact that quantum theory is so resolutely counterintuitive. Common sense is almost useless in approaching it. It's no good, Richard Feynman once said, asking why it is that way. No one knows why it is that way. That's just the way it is.."----Carl Sagan ; The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark
We our all biased by our own culturally-ingrained common sense realism. That color is "out there" and not generated inside our brains. That space is static and empty and not in fact constantly percolating and filled with energy. That events are objective and happening independently of us and not in fact only ever happening TO us. As Wheeler put it, reality is a participatory experience
I feel like alot of the reason we stubbornly believe in an objective and independent reality is because of this direct experience we have of the past thru memory. Memory provides us with the immediate demonstration of things and experiences and events as no longer present and yet still existing as if not being remembered.
Of an ideational state of static unchanging existence projected as though it was parallel and concurrent with our immediate experience instead of being derivative from it. But this objectification of our present state is only ever just another present state of events and experiences seeming to still exist no longer as present and only in the past. Objective reality a mere afterimage of our immediate reality retaining its absolute realness--its physical in-itselfness-- without even being phenomenally present at all anymore.
If stimulating your brain from the outside, whether with light waves or with DMT, consistently results in the same or similar completely private phenomenal experience for everyone, who's to say whether it's a reality or a hallucination? Maybe there is no difference between these after all.
The old popular axiom of occult magic: "As above so below." I cannot help but see the phenomenal experience of consciousness to each of us as just a microcosm of the macrocosmic happening of World Time itself. Our remembered and objectified memories like history and the objective past. The vivid presence of the immediate echoing the burgeoning happening of present reality. And what of this mystery we call the future? What we experience as the pure ideation of values--of the projected vision or intention? What is ITS real world counterpart? Something along the lines of a Universal Mind? A Platonic implicate order? An infinite chaotic attractor? An Omega Point? A God even, never itself either objective nor subjective but ever luring us and guiding us beyond the real towards the creation of novelty and meaning?