Article  Reality is not a controlled hallucination

From the standpoint that "hallucination" already entails manifestation or is a type of manifestation itself -- it would be circular, and in itself would not explain the latter or its association with certain matter organizations and interactions.
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Reality is not a controlled hallucination
https://iai.tv/articles/reality-is-not-a..._auid=2020

INTRO: The idea that 'reality is a controlled hallucination' has been recently popularised by figures such as neuroscientist Anil Seth. But this claim, which purports to be hard, down-to-earth science, is, in fact, bad philosophy. Philosopher and author of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, Evan Thompson, here argues the 'controlled hallucination' hypothesis brings nothing new to the table regarding the problem of consciousness. And there is a circularity problem: if the theory claims that reality is a hallucination, then that theory itself is part of the hallucination... (MORE - details)

Another problem with the controlled hallucination theory is that it presupposes a physical world to interact with and to acquire actionable feedback about. Presumably when you stub your toe in the dark you are literally encountering something outside any hallucination your mind is projecting that is real and other than the mind. Just at the bare minimum, we are acquiring information from the outside about a state of affairs on the outside. If it were all in our heads already, there would be nothing to correct nor indeed correctable about that construct. There has to preexist a real physical world that the hallucination at least roughly corresponds to and is constantly being updated about.

In reality consciousness and physical reality have a mutually causal relationship on each other. Much like how music, while being wholly generated by the instruments playing it, also determines thru the sheet music how the instruments play that music. Likewise the brain generates a working conceptual model of our world while our bodies continuously update that model with intentional movement and consequent sensory stimulation. It's all so iterative or reciprocal, like a spiraling self-creating fractal.

Aren't you the same idiot who proposed on sciforums that consciousness is brain-dependent recently?

(Mar 14, 2026 04:24 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: Aren't you the same idiot who proposed on sciforums that consciousness is brain-dependent recently?

Aren't you the one who begged us to: "Tell JamesR that I graciously accept his decision to ban me as I was out of my depth in the discussion and attempt to prove the existence of God"?

So it's not that you really lack the diplomatic tact and middle self-restraint to navigate through a hostile environment. You just indolently fail to utilize such when it is relevant for survival in a place that you clearly and ardently want to keep returning to.

I find myself arguing equally for a physical reality and a mentally constructed reality seeing them both as irreducible premises of my worldview. That makes me a dualist I guess left struggling as I do to account for how they interact and fuse into one Reality.

"There's an alternative. There's always a third way, and it's not the combination of the other two ways. It's a different way."----David Carradine

(Mar 14, 2026 06:59 PM)C C Wrote:

(Mar 14, 2026 04:24 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: Aren't you the same idiot who proposed on sciforums that consciousness is brain-dependent recently?

Aren't you the one who begged us to: "Tell JamesR that I graciously accept his decision to ban me as I was out of my depth in the discussion and attempt to prove the existence of God"?

So it's not that you really lack the diplomatic tact and middle self-restraint to navigate through a hostile environment. You just indolently fail to utilize such when it is relevant for survival in a place that you clearly and ardently want to keep returning to.

My point is that consicousness can and does exist outside of the brain. Your response falls under the trappings of atheistic delusion (that consciousness is merely an emergent phenomenon of the brain). Nothing can be further from the truth.