(Without Ockham's razor) The chances that this is reality is the same as it being an illusion?
The proposition is, without Ockham's razor, the chances that this is reality is the same as it being an illusion.
Even if there is no evidence of this being an illusion, there is equally no evidence this is reality. None of our experiences can be trusted as evidence that this is reality as those experiences would be the same if this was an illusion.
Maybe Ockham's razor is all that can help us? Or maybe not even that?
Even if there is no evidence of this being an illusion, there is equally no evidence this is reality. None of our experiences can be trusted as evidence that this is reality as those experiences would be the same if this was an illusion.
Maybe Ockham's razor is all that can help us? Or maybe not even that?
Comments (51)
This comes up from time to time. But if this were so, that is, if everything you see and experience is an illusion, then what happens when you have what people normally call an "illusion"? Would this be an illusory-illusion or an illusion-illusion?
From the outset, you need to have an idea of what an illusion is so you could say when it happens. Otherwise, the concept doesn't seem to have any meaning.
So the fully involved dementia patient is solidly in their own created reality; they see the little people dancing, they hear the music playing, they smell the food at the buffet. They are immersed in this reality. To them it is not created, it is fact. It disturbs us, not because the patient is distressed, or in pain, but because it is a reality that has nothing to do with us and the only way we can influence it is to destroy it through the application of drugs, enough to reduce the patient to a quasi-nonfunctioning state. We can't even confirm that the state no longer exists, however, as the patient can no longer communicate with us due to the amount of drugs we have given them, we feel better as our reality is not challenged.
Comforting eh?
We could be completely involved in an illusion; the last fleeting ideas of a dying mind. Really, since we are all in it, who would know?
Is there any way to determine, at least in principle, whether or not we live in an illusion as opposed to what you call "reality?" If not, then there is no difference between the illusion and reality. If reality is an illusion, the illusion is reality.
Quoting Down The Rabbit Hole
...right up until the truck hits you.
What this shows is that you have lost track of what is to count as evidence.
Quoting SolarWind
Yes, I wouldn't like the illusion of a toothache either.
Quoting Manuel
A "dream within a dream". Have you seen the film Inception?
Quoting Book273
Yes, even when you're in a dream/nightmare it seems real at the time. There is no reason to believe we are in reality, other than it is the simplest explanation.
Quoting T Clark
I think there would have to be something built into the illusion that proves it is an illusion.
I think it's reasonable to call the original place that hosts us reality.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Down The Rabbit Hole
Being hit by a truck is the same if it were real or an illusion? How do you know that? Wanna give it a test?
Sure. Fun movie. But I don't know if there's a way to test one of the fundamental ideas in that film: that a dream within a dream lasts longer the more "dreams down" you go. Maybe it happens, maybe not.
But the question would be: who's the dreamer? Is it a super intelligent AI? Is it "God"? Or is it the universe? If it's the AI, I'd have to say that I think the probabilities of that being the case are so impractically low, that I'd almost say it's impossible.
If it's God, then you'd have to give me some of his/her characteristic to get a better idea.
If it's the Universe, well, I'm familiar with Bernardo Kastrup's idealism, it's quite interesting and it's a refreshing perspective. It solves some problems, but I think he's wrong.
I don't think the universe is "conscious" in any manner that remotely resembles what we have in mind when we use that word.
So you'd have to tell me a bit about the dreamer or who is causing the illusions.
Quoting Tom Storm
Our experience as to its realness is the same. Because, by definition, we wouldn't be able to tell an illusion from reality.
I think Ockham's razor might make it marginally more likely that we're living in reality. Though, even if it was 50/50 I would prefer to err on the side of caution, and avoid any trucks.
You cannot reliably work out the probability of the illusion's origin, while in the illusion. You would need the illusion to be a copy of reality.
Ockham's razor aside, there is no reason to believe that this is reality over an illusion.
That's the commonly held view.
Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.
Andy Warhol on nearly being killed.
It's less probable, there are less step involved in thinking that this is "normal" reality vs. an illusion. If you speak of representations caused by stimulations of "things in themselves", then I'd agree.
If you have in mind some other reality, or some other origin, I don't see why there are good reasons to accept such a view.
Quoting Manuel
(Assuming that our rules of logic are the same in the illusion and reality) I think that's the only reason reality is more probable - because there are less steps involved.
If a doctor told me that I have a terminal illness with a standard 50% survival rate but on this occasion it would be more because "there are less steps involved". This wouldn't be enough for me to believe that I wasn't going to die from it. Why should it be enough for us to believe that we are in reality?
Quoting khaled
Yes it's certainly real enough.
I don't understand what you are getting at with the analogy. Illusion-based world or not, you'd still have 50% chance to die. The "less stepped involved argument" was merely an illustration of one problem:
Could the world be an illusion? Sure. But this world could also be the dream of the third turtle down, in a world in which there are turtle's all the way down. That could be true too. Or this world could be the result of God's suicide and we are his corpses as we head the way to total annihilation of the universe, some have said this, using interesting reasoning.
But that's the point. It could be all that and much more. But why add to our situation if something can be satisfactorily stated without recourse to further complications? I don't see how postulating an illusion can help clarify the status of reality.
Perhaps you could explain what is made easier by such a postulation.
I don't entirely disagree with you, but I think there is an important distinction that needs to be made when trying to determine what is true. You seem to be coming from the direction of, true until proven false. I think @Manuel correctly comes from the opposite direction of false until proven true. However, I will make one precondition to this rule. At the end of any claim, a person must implicitly mean "so far as I know" because, of course, no one can know what they do not know. That is to say, some things are beyond our current knowledge, or beyond our capacity to know, and we cannot know what these things are. If you knew what they were, then you could no long say that you don't know them.
There is not any evidence, so far as I know, to support the view that our world is an illusion. The only reason we even believe it is a possibility is because "we don't know what we don't know," it is a question that we can neither prove or disprove and therefore it could be true. However, how can you attribute any sort of likelihood to such a thing? Likelihoods are based on evidence. When there is no evidence, where does that leave us? Certainly not at a 50/50.
I could say, for example, I do not know if all crows are black, but I cannot say that some crows are purple. One is a statement that leaves room for a truth that I am unaware of, the other is a statement that asserts something that I do not in fact know to be true. I can only say the first in so far as I know I am not omniscient, I cannot say the second with any credibility.
Very well put. :up:
Exactly. We can easily come up with more and more scenarios in the blink of an eye. But this doesn't clarify the situation, unless an argument is given to the effect that certain things make more sense on the supposition that X is the case or is likely correct. So evidence for any of these views must be substantial for them to gain plausibility. Or, absent evidence, good reasons.
The "so far as I know" should be taken as a given if the discussion is attempting to be honest, which I have no doubt is the case here.
But then there's something here which seems obvious but has not arisen yet:
What is meant in this case by "illusion"? Does it mean "not real and/or imaginary" or does it mean based on a simulation of some kind or does it mean something else entirely? If no further clarification is articulated, I'm only left with the common meaning of the word.
Quoting Manuel
I was comparing the chances of this being reality to that of surviving the terminal illness.
"Less steps" aside, there is the same amount of evidence that this is reality as it being an illusion (zero).
So if the doctor said that you had a better chance than the standard 50% survival rate, solely on the basis that there are less steps involved in surviving, would this be enough for you to believe that you are not going to die? If not, it's equally not good enough reason to believe we are experiencing reality.
However, an illusion wouldn't have to share the same rules of logic as reality. The "less steps" argument could mean nothing in reality.
Quoting Manuel
Yes, it's all could be. I suppose it helps us see that many of our assumptions may not be as likely as we think they are, and we should be open to the idea that our foundational beliefs could be wrong.
Quoting Andrew F
It does if there is an equal amount of evidence. There is no evidence that this is an illusion, but there is also no evidence that this is reality (our experience as to its realness is not evidence, as it would be the same in an illusion).
If a doctor said I have a better chance of surviving if I do what? If I do something that takes less steps than doing what is usually done? Is that more or less what you are getting at? He'd have to give some evidence that the option with less steps actually improves my odds of surviving. If he doesn't then that argument carries no force.
But that's the point, can you give me any evidence that an illusion makes some aspects of reality more plausible?
That equation of Real and Illusory may be true in one sense, but it seems to be based on a loose use of terminology. I prefer to make a comparison between Real and Ideal. That's because everything you "know" is a mental construct, a Subjective Idea, not a direct perception of Objective Reality. Kant's Transcendental Idealism used the terms Phenomenon and Noumenon to describe what we perceive (appearances) and what we imagine (noumena) to be really out there in the world.
A more recent formulation of the same notion is cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman's theory, expressed in The Case Against Reality, that Evolution, in the interest of fitness, filtered-out the messy complexities of "Reality" from human observers -- like the smoke & mirrors of a stage magician -- by reducing our incoming sensory information to simple symbolic Icons (mental imagery = Ideality). In that case, the subjective illusion (phenomenon) is all we ever know about the objective ding an sich (noumenon). His "Fitness Beats Truth theorem is a modern version of the ancient notion of Maya, the veil of illusion".
Fortunately, the human mind has developed a method to get closer to the underlying truth : the Scientific Method (including Okham's Razor). It's still not direct access to Reality, but it allows us to peek behind the curtain to see the mechanical dials and levers that produce the iconic mental images that we naively accept as True Reality. :cool:
Kant: Experience and Reality :
Phenomena are the appearances, which constitute the our experience; noumena are the (presumed) things themselves, which constitute reality. ... Since the thing in itself (Ding an sich) would by definition be entirely independent of our experience of it, we are utterly ignorant of the noumenal realm.
http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/5g.htm
Reality is not what you see :
In his doctrine of Transcendental Idealism, 18th century philosopher, Immanuel Kant argued that our perception of reality is limited to constructs created in our own minds to represent the invisible and intangible ultimate reality that he mysteriously labeled “ding an sich” [things-in-essence, as opposed to things-as-we-know-them]. In other words, what we think we see, is not absolute reality but our own ideas about reality.
http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page21.html
Is Reality a Cosmic Simulation? :
“Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence. If it sounds a lot like The Matrix, that’s because it is.”
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page23.html
Reality is a Theory :
“Let us remember that our knowledge of the world begins not with matter but with perceptions. I know that my pain exists, my “green” exists, and my “sweet” exists. I do not need any proof of their existence, because these events are a part of me; everything else is a theory.” ___Andre Linde, theoretical physicist
http://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page15.html
Reality is Ideality :
Physics is ultimately Meta-Physics
http://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page17.html
Quoting Manuel
Yes.
Quoting Manuel
Ahh, but if we are in an illusion we have no evidence as to the steps that would be in the real world. So to make the thought experiment fair, all we have to rely on in both cases is the fact that there are fewer steps. If it isn't enough for us to believe that we're not going to die, why should it be enough for us to believe that we are in reality?
Quoting Manuel
No, all I can say is that the odds that we are in an illusion are similar to those that we are in reality. This is not a common view.
Ok. Let me try to put that in another way, otherwise I'm going to get confused. Either we are in an illusion or in reality. Let's assume we don't know which world we're in. In both cases illusion and reality, the doctor says I have 50% chance of dying in a week. That's fine. It would hold true of both cases.
Either we die in the illusion or we die in reality. The only meaningful difference I can extract from that is that if this were an illusion, I might wake up to reality. Or I might not and I'll still be in an illusion.
Is that possible? Sure. But I would make no attempts to verify such experiments in this world. And the only reason you've given so far, is that it's a possibility.
I only say that it's a possibility that either we are the dream of the third turtle down, in a world in which there are turtles all the way down. Or we are the rotting corpses of God, who choose to commit suicide because he thought death preferable to existence.
There's no reason to accept these arguments at all.
Quoting Down The Rabbit Hole
Which is just as plausible as saying that we are a turtles dream or part of the corpse of God.
I think you misunderstand the move @Down The Rabbit Hole is making. He is using the analogy with the doctor to show the weakness of Ockham's Razor in his original post. Ockham's Razor was originally formulated as "entities should not be multiplied without necessity," but it is often used in metaphysics today as "simpler is better." If you are presented with two options that seem equally likely, in Rabbit Hole's example the options are living or dying from the terminal illness, you would not think that one is more likely than the other just because it is simpler (Ockham's Razor). In the same way, it does not seem like the simpler option when it comes to illusion or reality would be any more true just because it is simpler. I haven't mentioned Ockham's Razor yet because as Down The Rabbit Hole has pointed out it is not an immutable law and so it doesn't make much sense to appeal to it as such.
Quoting Down The Rabbit Hole
Good point. Off the top of my head I can't come up with any reason to say that this is reality as opposed to a really good illusion, so the evidence for each is equally zero. However, zero evidence does not lead to likelihood or probability. It is not a 50/50, it is unknown/unknown. For example, what is the likelihood that there is a purple crow? Well, it is very hard to disprove the possibility of anything, let alone the possibility of a purple crow, but with no evidence for its existence you cannot quantify the probability of it existing. Granted, our world being reality or an illusion is a little different because one of the two options must be the case. However, the probability of each possibility is still entirely unknown.
That probably seems nit picky, but apart from that I really can't add anything else at the moment. I don't know of anything that would count as evidence in favor of our world being reality. I have been trying to put together some kind of common sense argument that takes world as reality as the default, but I'm thinking that may only be a pragmatic move.
Sure, I see that. I mean, if we go straight to the point, I could say that the simplest explanation possible for everything is "strict" or "strong" solipsism, everything is a creation of me, this very moment. My immediate past, and the near future, don't exist. The only thing that exists is me and my projections.
Of course, this can be debated endlessly. Someone will say that such a view is not simple, as it assumes that I was the cause of Tolstoy and Beethoven and everything else. Surely there are many, many examples in which Ockham's Razor fails. It should be used, when it is sensible to use it. That varies by person to some extent.
I still don't think the illusion option follows. Let's put aside the "less steps" argument and just argue from plausibility alone. If it is true that this world being an illusion is just as realistic as assuming a "normal reality", then why should it not be the case that we aren't in a world in which we are the remains of a God who killed himself?
The point here, as I take it, is that such scenarios can be stipulated instantly and there are infinitely many scenarios one can imagine. So if this world is an illusion, it could also be heaven or hell or someone's dream. But then we postulate an infinite number of scenarios, as we have to, given this line of thinking.
We are left then, with an infinite number of alternative worlds and the real world. But then we are not considering one view (illusion) being as likely to be true as another view (we are in the real world).
Things looks like either we are in an infinite number of hypothetical worlds or in the real world. So it's not even that there's an equal chance of either being the case, there's an infinite number of options on one side and only one option on the other.
This makes the illusion argument look weak, I think.
Thanks for commenting.
@David Pearce was defending the view that our perception of reality is fundamentally different to reality in his thread, and of course Hoffman wrote a whole book putting the case. The difference is that in their argument we are assuming we are in reality, it's just our perception of it that's illusory.
I was thinking of getting Hoffman's book a while back, but the reviews were terrible.
The book is fine. I mean, I think it's good to put idealism back on the table. The main problem with the book has to do with him saying that science does not tell us about the nature of reality. But he relies on science to lead him to his idealism.
But I did not think the book terrible, even if it was not persuasive to me. You might like it, or not.
I suspect that the reviews you referred to were negative, due to the slightly New-Agey tone of his book. New Age guru, Deepak Chopra, was much more positive : “A masterpiece of logic, rationality, science, and mathematics. Read this book carefully and you will forever change your understanding of reality, both that of the universe and your own self.”
Personally, I am wary of some New Age notions that cross the line into Magic & Mysticism. But, what I most appreciate in Hoffman's book is the useful and meaningful metaphor of our subjective worldview as an "Interface", which represents ultimate reality via symbolic icons. I wouldn't call that an "illusion", but a pragmatic necessity due to the limited capacity of the human brain, which is still a work-in-progress. Anyway, I have no problem at all with combining Realism and Idealism into a single comprehensive belief system. :smile:
True Reality : Both Real & Ideal :
For empirical scientific purposes, those ideal aspects of the world can be safely ignored. But for theoretical personal reasons we have no other choice but to deal with the unreal.
http://bothandblog.enformationism.info/page30.html
Quoting Manuel
Doesn't look likely we are in the real world then? :grimace:
Quoting Manuel
Thanks.
A lot of the bad reviews might be people that don't agree with his conclusions. I don't think this is good reason for disliking a book though - I am happy with a book that is well written and challenges my worldview.
Thanks for coming back and providing some reassurance that I'm not going crazy :wink:
Well, there are few certainties (if any) in life, so there's no way to know for sure. But based on probability and plausibility, I think this is the "real" world. But as an idealist of sorts, take that with a grain of salt. :chin:
Quoting Down The Rabbit Hole
:up:
Honestly, the one clear PR mistake Hoffman made, to my mind, was to put Deepak Chopra as the top blurb in the back of the book. At least that's how it was with the hardcover version of the book. It's fine if you think people ought to be open minded or don't find Deepak silly.
But having that name as the top comment will turn off many people who don't take Chopra seriously. This happens to include many of the people you'd want to get to take "conscious realism" seriously.
That one issue aside, the book is fine and mostly enjoyable.
Then how is it that we happen to have these two distinct words?
There is a difference between being hit by a truck and having the illusion of being hit by a truck.
Quoting Banno
If this is the illusion, we wouldn't know the method/s the real world uses to produce it. As @Manuel said, it could be the dream of the third turtle down, in a world in which there are turtles all the way down.
Quoting Banno
There may be a difference, but the subject/s of the illusion wouldn't know it. The illusion would be indistinguishable from reality for the subject/s.
As we cannot prove this is reality, and we cannot prove this is an illusion, I am thinking the odds are equal, but @Manuel made an interesting point:
Quoting Manuel
You can't be proven wrong, but you can be shown to be foolish.
If this post is an illusion of the third turtle down, then there is a first turtle.
We can only talk of illusions because we understand the difference between illusion and reality.
The possibility that reality could be an illusion is predicated on our inability to distinguish reality from illusion (deus deceptor, brain in a vat, simulation). In other words reality is, in every sense, identical to illusion. If so, it doesn't matter if we're in an illusion or reality, right? Both are, if you really think about it, one and the same thing. Were they not, the question, "are we in an illusion?" would never have seen the light of day so to speak.
Quoting TheMadFool
Except those in reality could turn off our illusion at any time. :grimace:
There is a difference between what is and what we can perceive. There are two distinct words, illusion and reality, because there are differences between what is an illusion and what is reality. However, that does not mean that we can perceive that difference when we encounter illusions or reality in our lives. If the experience of getting hit by a truck in a world of illusion is the same as the experience of getting hit by a truck in reality then how would you tell the difference? Furthermore, if all you have ever experienced is the world of the illusion then how would you even know what a real truck feels like?
Quoting TheMadFool
I think what you describe is one possibility, but the one does not necessarily follow from the other. It is possible that both our reality and the more fundamental reality are the same in many ways, but it is also possible that they are not. We can only imagine them as the same because it is impossible to imagine anything beyond the limits of our understanding. That is the only reason the examples we come up with are so grounded in our own reality. However, the real source of the problem is in the fact that we have no way to "look behind the curtain" so to speak and see whether our reality is independent or dependent on another reality.
Indeed, all very well-covered territory, the stuff of neo-phyte wet dreams... (see what I did there??)
Tell me, given the choice betwixt the illusion of being hit by a truck, and being hit by a truck, which would you choose?
If you have any sense, you would choose the illusion, and with very good reason: in one, you have been hit by a truck, while in the other, you haven't. Yes, yes, all that stuff about it being impossible to tell the difference and so on - but despite that - even if the experiences are the same - in the one case you have been hit by a truck, in the other, you haven't.
Furthermore, even if all you have and might experience is the world of illusion, the distinction between an illusion and reality remains. Sure, you don't know the difference, but you still haven't been hit by a truck.
Y'see, even in positing the all-encompassing illusion, you are contrasting the illusion with reality; and ipso facto, positing reality.
Wittgenstein, Moore and all that. The Matrix wasn't all that clever.
The problem with this question is that it is not a matter of which one I would want to get hit by, but which one I do in fact get hit by.
Quoting Banno
I'm not sure what positing reality has to do with whether or not we are in an illusion or reality.
The main question for me is, what kind of evidence do I have that our world is an illusion or reality? And so far as I know, the answer is zero on both accounts.
Indeed; and the point is that in fact you can only get hit by the real truck... Think on it a bit*.
Quoting Andrew F
Really? (Pun intended...)
Quoting Andrew F
Of course it is zero - that's the joke! To think this zero shows something interesting is to show a deep misunderstanding of the difference between reality and illusion.
Edit: * for those having a hard time with this, if you get hit by an imaginary truck, you haven't in fact been hit by a truck...
Why can you not get hit by the illusory truck? Do you think that illusions do not exist, or are you saying that they are not physical or that they cannot be felt? Are you saying that there is one thing called a real truck and one thing called an illusory truck, and that one can be felt and one cannot? Perhaps I now get what you were saying about positing reality. I'm guessing you were implying that there must then exist a thing called the world of reality and thing called the world of illusion. But these things are not known to exist except in conception. Figuring out which one exists is the problem at hand.
It's kinda in the premise...
But it seems you are starting to understand. Again, you can't have an illusion except in contrast to reality.
The point of my questions were to show that I disagree with your premise. Of course, even an illusory truck is real in a sense. When we are talking about whether our world is an illusion or reality, our world is still real in the same sense. That is, it still exists, and we still have our experiences in it, etc.
I never said that we couldn't have an illusion within an illusion à la The Truman Show. Jim Carrey's acting was superb.
My bad, I wasn't clear enough. Even if one, somehow, experienced what in Eastern religions is referred to as an Awakening, one would never really be certain that one has...awakened for the exact same issue we had regarding the authenticity of what we left behind, awakened from, would persist even in what we now believe, after having allegedly "awakened", is the real deal, true reality. Why do you think this is so? Any ideas?
I see. We are operating under different definitions of illusion and reality. I think people use the word illusion in these types of conversations because it implies a deception, that something about our world is not what we expected, there is something else beyond, something unknown. Illusion is just an easy way to summarize all these feelings. When I talk about illusion and reality, in the context of this type of conversation, I am generally talking about a world within a world. The world within the world being the "illusion" and the world beyond it or above it being the "reality." However, this is just the common language that has been used to describe this problem so far. In a strict sense, an illusion of a truck is opposed to a real truck (as you have been stating). The illusion of a truck is different from the real truck because it is missing some important property or properties that are found in the real truck. When I talk about the "illusory" world I am not implying that there is a "real" world that it is copying because that would be to imply that every entity in our world has a more real copy in another world. That would be limiting the problem unnecessarily. In the brain in a vat example, the "real" world only has a brain and a vat. There are no trucks in that world, and so the truck in the illusory world would not, by your definition, even be illusory. It is not necessarily trucks that are illusory. It's moreso the fabric of the universe itself. I'm sure there is a better word to use than "illusory" and "real," but they are the common language when talking about this problem in this thread and I don't know of a more appropriate common set of words.
Are you saying something like, "you don't know what you don't know?" Meaning, you can never know how much more knowledge potentially lies beyond your current understanding, and so you could always doubt whether, using your example, you are truly awakened?
No! My question to you is this, why (give reasons) did the possibility of reality being an illusion arise in the first place?
Why do I ask? If that reason persists, is a part of what we believe is the genuine thing, authentic reality then, we're back to square one, not having made an inch of progress.
I'm not really sure. Some people are inquisitive or skeptical and they imagine possible explanations for the existence of our world.
That's a bummer! Sorry!
Quoting TheMadFool
It's been a while since I've seen that film. With Jim Carrey worth a review.
Presumably, if base reality turns off the illusion, the illusions within that illusion go off too.