Good to see you. Hope all is well.
Thank you so much for this thorough post! It’s exactly one of the kinds of answer I was hoping for. And yes, I can’t speak for anyone else, but my interest for the topic is still there! I haven’t been able to post much because I was captured by all the studying I’ve been doing for my university exams.
I will get back to you later and answer specifically some of the parts of your post that might have raised a few more questions in my head (I’ve read it all already, but will read it again later to make sure I didn’t miss anything). All of this is so interesting.
I love when you pop up, dude.
1 Like
You’re gonna think I’m crazy, but I teach myself to purposefully do that as a therapy tactic.
Since I eat and drink right out of the fridge often enough, I end up taking a big swig of either orange juice while looking at/thinking about milk or a big swig of milk while looking/thinking about the orange juice.
That mixes things up and makes for a funky experience.
1 Like
That’s still very valid in my book.
Yeah. Due to the power of assumption and expectation mixed with a sensory input like sight sometimes you can get a fair bit of milk down before your brain says “That’s Not Orange Juice!” or vice versa.
1 Like
1 Like
That got IRL lols. 
So, I’m sorry to have abandoned this thread for a little while but I had other things going on, but I kept thinking about all of the points that I raised here.
Before I go on with my post, I’d like to link two videos I saw recently that address some of the points I made in my posts. I really enjoyed watching them.
So, after talking about this to some people, and reading many interesting opinions online (among which @EyeDentist’s contribution, which I appreciated and would like to see continued), I have come to new conclusions and lots more food for thought.
One sentence I read online, in an unrelated context, which stuck with me was, “meaning is a human construct.” That’s something I had intuitively been considering, but seeing it spelled out like that was a little bit of an epiphany for me.
The first thing that I considered is how meaning doesn’t stop to the linguistic, rationale, and conscious definition we usually associate it with, as in “the meaning of a word,” but is something which is involved with every brain process that involves processing an external stimulus and creating an experience.
Without meaning (so without a brain), a sound is nothing more than contractions and changes in air pressure, and color is nothing but photons at a specific wavelength. Without meaning, right now I’m not a human being typing on a cell phone keyboard in English, I’m just a mass of atoms.
If an outside observer that doesn’t understand human logic could look at me, they wouldn’t see anything meaningful. There would be displacements in masses of atoms, that we give a meaning to (my fingers tapping on a screen).
I look at all the things around me, everything that’s so familiar to me, and then I imagine what it really looks like without the bias coming from our limited brains. I once heard the phrase “chaotic nothingness.” A giant, maybe infinite mess. Without meaning being given to anything, it’d be a humongous chaos where all of (what we know as) the perceptual stimuli compenetrate each other and form a unique “saturation.”
Next thing I want to tackle is time. Perception of time is thought to be a sense, like perception of temperature or pain. Would it be too far-fetched to think time is a construct of the human mind as well? There are some theories that everything already happened, and we just perceive it a little bit at a time.
If this were true, then going back to the previously mentioned chaotic nothingness (and “everything-ness”), this means that just like all imaginable (and more) perceptible stimuli are found in this hypothetic space free of the limitation of human perception, that is also all “compressed” in one place, even time-wise. This would mean that everything just exists, and our brain do a terrific job of breaking everything apart into small chunks that we can interpret and make sense of, for our survival, and even makes us perceive all of that little by little with the construct of time! Something that would likely be relevant to the issue of time is the Boltzmann’s brain theory, which I read quite a lot on recently. I’m not going to go in depth with this because this post is already loaded with enough stuff, I might address this in a later post. Those interested can look it up meanwhile, if interested.
One last thing I want to address is a thought experiment that should stress a bit how much we perceive things to exist as a function of how our brains are calibrated. What I want to show is how the strength of our perceptions (heat, light, sound…) depend on how our senses are calibrated to begin with.
As an example, we are used to living in a certain range of temperatures. As a result, we are able to perceive changes in temperature and again, for instance, if the temperature gets hotter, we feel hot. We are good at telling where the temperature moves from 25 degrees celsius (77 deg F) to 30 deg, for example. But when we go to “inhuman” temperatures, past a certain threshold we can’t tell temperatures apart anymore. In severe burns, nerves get destroyed and we lose feel, we don’t even feel hot anymore. So just like you can tell 25 degrees apart from 30, you can’t tell 300 deg apart from 350. A light that is too bright, immensely bright, will make you blind, just like a 5000 dB sound will make you deaf and probably kill you because I just made that number up. But, there is a difference between 5000 dB and 5030 dB, isn’t there? Why wouldn’t we be able to tell them apart?
One last effort. Imagine being inside a start and, due to some granted immunity, not die instantly. What would you be able to perceive? I guess it’d be so much that it would feel like nothing. There would be an amount of brightness, heat, sound, and much more that would just destroy our senses. Now imagine a being equally able to survive inside of such an environment, but calibrated to live in that heat range. What would it feel like to them? Probably nothing much. Just an ordinary day inside the sun.
Comparably, to a living being designed to live in -400 degrees taking a step on the earth surface would mean getting destroyed and being so hot that the senses would get saturated and it wouldn’t be able to process the stimuli.
So everything appears so relative. The very fabric of reality, of what we instinctively take for granted because “it just is like that” now seem to be constructs of our minds, with no actual foundation.
I hope I made some of you interested in these topics, and I’m looking forward to hearing your opinions.
Never quite understood the 'if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to witness it, did it fall?"
I played along…but really my mind was thinking, “absolutely it fell”
I understand this is involving Schrodinger, quantum mechanics and observation, but even if no ‘observer’ is around, what about the breeze or rush of wind created from a large fall and the effect it has on the weather?
Say it causes a rainstorm…no organisms around, even bugs, to ‘observe’ the rain (justifying the observer requirement). The theory then suggests it never rained either because nothing was there to realize the environment is wet?
I have a PhD in chem from a tough school as well so I’m not stupid. This was just something that I could either never grasp or thought was entirely BS.
My question, that I was initially trying to ask in this thread, isn’t quite the same as asking if the tree fell or not.
I never quite managed to find the right words to phrase it.
Let the physical definition of sound and the experience of hearing a sound be two different concepts. One can define sound as all the expanding and contracting of air at specific wavelengths and so on and so forth, and that would be the physical definition of the phenomenon.
Then the experience of sound, which doesn’t map 1-to-1 with the physical phenomenon as everybody perceives sound differently (and, more in general, different living organisms have different capacities of perceiving sensorial stimuli), would be what you feel consciously when a sound stimulates your ears and subsequently your brain.
According to what we define sound to be (the phenomenon or the experience of its perception), or once again more in general, what we define any sensorial stimulus to be, one could ask if, given a tree fell and nothing or no one was around able to perceive its sound, was any sound produced, at any point in time?
If it falls in a forest, the other trees will hear it.
Did we ever figure this one out?
What exactly?
On whether we are living in reality, or if we are living in a simulation
Yeah, I definitely figured it out. You can send a payment of $ 500 via PayPal to the address on my profile and I’ll fill you in.
1 Like
Eh. Mebbe I’ll just enjoy my life in the dark for now.
Sounds good. Don’t come complaining to me later tho 
1 Like
Haha.deal @samul