Hey Roberto,
— Indeed memories do have the power to make you angry Omar.
O- Especially if it is a related to a past experience. I don’t get angry when I remember a bad dream, something that is patently imagined and nothing more. Instead a memory is based on an unimagined event from my past.
— Just like Santa Claus has the power to make a child jump with joy.
Does the child’s imagination play a part in its real experience?
O- Sure, but his imagination is based on a collage of actual experiences. He imagines getting a bicicle he really likes. He cannot point to a bicycle before him, but he must have some experience about a real bicycle. Perhaps the one he saw at the store that mommy didn’t buy for him. Now he imagines he is going to get THAT bicycle. So, here you see how an experience of something unimagined is used by our imagination.
— Maybe if we gave the child drugs and chemicals then the child would no longer believe in Santa Claus and then the real experience would cease.
O- Of course, drugs will affect the “real” experience of believing in Santa Claus. Drugs could make you “really” experience Santa Claus as well, so long as by “real” we understand brain states.
— The experience of people with psychosis appears real to them and it produces effects that appear real.
But the second they stop believing in their delusions is the same second that the symptoms stop.
O- You take the right drugs then it will not matter if you believe in pink elephants or not, you will still, really, experience the illusion of seeing them. Other drugs will remove the disposition for hallucinations, again, whether you choose to continue to believe in them or not.
— Believe in them and they will create your experience.
Follow them and you will create your world.
O- I just began to believe in pink elephants. I have yet to experience even one. I’ll update you as we keep this up. I just began believing that I drive a Porshe…damn…unfortunately I must report that so far I have yet to experience me driving one.
— If you believe in anger then it will create your experience.
O- You say “if you believe” and then, after that, as if an effect, you create the experience of anger. My question here would be, first of all, “Why do you believe in anger?”
— If you believe that anger is only imagined you can then choose to imagine something else.
O- But I don’t believe that. It is easily refuted by experience. If I believe in war it is because war exist. If I believe in peace it is because peace exist. I can imagine perpetual war, or perpetual peace, as different degrees of reality.
— A flexible mind that can choose the type of world it wants to live in.
O- What you mean by “flexible mind” means to me “an insane mind”. If so, then yes. Crazy people live in their own little world, unchecked by brute reality. I would hardly call them the norm. Certainly it only goes to prove that We are NOT All insane, as you first suggested.
— We do have a choice in what we believe in and we have a choice in how we react to situations.
O- This isn’t the Matrix Neo. If you fall of a 20 story building, if doesn’t matter WHAT you choose to believe; your terminal acceleration is not a matter of choice. You can’t fly.
— If it is all real, then what part of a sub-atomic particle possesses anger.
O- Anger is not at the subatomic level, just as “you” is not in an atom of carbon. It is an emergent quality arising from a complex structure, a system, a collection of incredible amounts of sub atomic particles. The interaction of atomic particles (electrons being moved, creating an electric charge that is transmitted through and processed by a network of neurons. It is there that you can begin to look at a electro-chemical state of anger or correspondent to the subjective experience of the emotion “anger”.
— Is the heart or the gut is anger.
O- Let me ask you: Don’t you know when you are angry? Or is it just you “choosing” to be angry or not? Me? I know when I am angry because there are somatic effects associated from which I may infer that I am fucking pissed the fuck off. How can you tell that another person IS angry, instead of happy? Empathy is not up to a choice.
— Is anger an experience?
O- Yes.
— Are experiences real or do they appear to be real?
O- Well, as Morpheus would say: “What is ‘real’?”. How do you tell what IS real from what APPEARS to be real?
— The real experience of a child can be changed in an instant by telling them that Santa Claus does not exist.
O- It depends. The child has no reason to believe what you say. You could tell a child that monsters do not exist. that won’t make them more affectionate to the dark. You can tell some UFO abductee that aliens do not exists and that we are alone in the Universe. If that person has really been abducted then that experience won’t be changed.
— The mind plays no part in the events of the child’s experience.
O- Not always, no.
— It is not imagined, you are correct, and the child’s experience is independent of its imagination.
O- “independent”? No. The same organ is used when experiencing reality as when experiencing hallucinations, but that does not make reality=hallucination. The difference is that reality “checks” our imagination, limits it in such a way that you can, if you’re normal, tell when you are awake and when you are asleep.
— The truth is real too and it exists independently of our mind.
O- Reality? Yes. When I close my eyes the world is still there. I can’t prove it, but it is less of a miracle that the physical universe continues when I close my eyes, that the idea that the physical universe bliks in and out of reality as I open and shut my eyes. Remember that I am reality itself, so if I exist during the time my eyes are closed then so too the universe in which this brain or mine, this “I”, moves about.
— There are photons of truth in the universe that impart truth upon human beings. The more photons of truth we have the more truth we accumulate. Who on ILP has more of these photons?
O- Maybe you should go to NASA. The Hibble telescope does exactly what you just parodied.
