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Full Version: The Physical Universe is a Chimera
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The basic idea is that the physical universe exists because we perceive it — it’s a sort of mass hallucination we use to make sense of the mathematical relationships of objects.

Make no mistake[b],[/b] this is a pretty far-out idea. But, according to Kastrup, it’s gaining ground.

“To some physicists, this indicates that what we call ‘matter,’ with its solidity and concreteness — is an illusion; that only the mathematical apparatus they devise in their theories is truly real, not the perceived world the apparatus was created to describe in the first place,” Kastrup wrote.

-From: Physicists are starting to suspect physical reality is an illusion

This article struck a chord with me. I've proven in the past that the physical universe is an illusion. But this takes it to a whole new level.
I'm reaching the conclusion that the physical universe is dialectically instantiated by our own movements inside and interactions with it. All the properties of the world, and indeed all properties we can ever know about it, are always projected generalizations of our own firsthand phenomenal experience. Hence this spectacle of illuminated 3-D objects springs from our intuitively felt and self-evident action of seeing, and their solidity and motion and mass spring from our intuitively felt and self-evident action of movement and resistance. They are only "out there" as abstractions from our phenomenal consciousness and so are not objective or real in any "in itself" sense.

This is why properties themselves always mysteriously haunt the physicalist's scenario--always side stepping the question of their own origins and ontological status. Physical things "exist" but only insofar as physicality is not itself even a physical thing but rather a metaphysical property abstracted from our direct experience. The phenomenal unmediatedness of consciousness itself, as grasping itself even in the act of grasping, is thus the irreducible ground from which all our objective world-building schemata emerge and operate from. The physical world IS a chimera or illusion, but it is also functionally real, much as our reflection in the mirror is both unreal and yet a very reliable pragmatic tool for self-grooming.