Yes.
Ok.
How do you know that reality is there?
How do you know that reality is there?
I asked the same question to Theophane and **The Hamster King ** because I am not a solipsist.
I ask the question to everyone, including Czarcasm:
How do you know that reality is there?
Sounds like a great topic for another thread to me.
If it’s not, you aren’t there either, and I sure didn’t ask this question. So you must exist, and some outer reality exists, or I’m having one hell of a dream.
I refuse to believe you’re dreaming me. 
Yes; however, I thought I salvage nole.'s thread. I’d be interested in your answer to the question and I’d be even more interested in you replying to this. :eek:
Reality is what it is, and will be what it is whether we perceive it or not, in my opinion, and I have seen no evidence otherwise.
There is nothing without reality. You can’t prove that.
SOMETHING is out there, even if that something is merely a Matrix-like simulation, or my own subconscious playing tricks.
The “something that’s out there” generates sensory inputs that demonstrate a degree of organization. By noticing patterns in my sensory inputs, I’m able to construct a model of “reality” that has predictive value. It doesn’t really matter if the “reality” that I’m modelling is really there, or is an elaborate simulation, or is a delusion. The truths that I learn about its behavior are valid whatever its fundamental nature happens to be.
It just so happens that treating reality as real is a convenient way to model the “something that’s out there”. That doesn’t mean that I’ve proven reality is real, only that I accept it as a provisional computational convenience. If you’re able to articulate an alternate conceptual frame that better accounts for my perceptions and has superior predictive value, I’ll happily switch.
Could one of the things the spirit would say be a description of the items currently resting on top of my television set? I’m willing to take a picture, encrypt it, send it to a mutually agreeable neutral third party and await the spirit to pass details on to you. At that point, I’ll send the key to the third party, let them decrypt the image and determine how accurate the description is.
An accurate description wouldn’t freak me out, but it would interest me in further study.
What would valid proof, or even evidence, consist of in your opinion?
By any chance was God saying “would you like fries with that”?
I’m real, therefore at least some reality exists. As for the rest, it’s a simpler and less arrogant assumption than claiming I’m somehow imagining a consistent universe. And if reality isn’t there my positions on the nature of reality don’t matter since there’s no one to care. “If there is no reality” then we might as well not have a conversation, because there’s no one to have a conversation with.
To be fair, and I’ve raised this point before, ALL people use ingrained knowledge as fact. You didn’t do all the experiments, you didn’t always utilize the scientific method, you don’t completely understand all the science behind everything.
You just believe what someone said about this subject, perhaps even a middle school science teacher.
The likelihood of a correct answer isn’t the point, the foundation for your decision is the point. How is a child trusting a teacher over a priest that fundamentally different?
Not that science doesn’t win (who in their right mind would chose prayer over cancer treatment?) but the arrogance of your position is ridiculous.
The priest is feeding them nonsense that they’d almost certainly never buy into if they weren’t children, for one. That’s why they are teaching it to children.
Untrue. I did plenty of experiments at school and saw the results for myself, and I have plenty of solid evidence all around me every day to direct me to a conclusion beyond any reasonable doubt that the scientific method provides real results.
The more advanced stuff that I don’t understand falls into two categories:
a) I can see my GPS, my cellphone, my TV, airplanes working. Just because I can’t build one doesn’t mean I refute the clear evidence in front of my eyes that they do.
b) I do, indeed, take some stuff on faith (particle physics being a big example); but the evidence of (a) builds a reasonable degree of trust for (b).
Depends on your teacher, I suppose. Yours may have just told you stuff and asked you to believe him/her, but my science teachers were very strict about evidence based methodology, experimentation, and discovery.
I don’t even understand what that means; sorry. As I said in my post, I also have the vestige of ingrained religion. Are you under the impression that I was claiming immunity from it?
I wonder if the OP meant the word God differently than you see it, to Him it isn’t a name(Like Zeus or any other name for any God) It is like saying(as I understand him) the word for the totality of all that exists, not ‘a’ God,but Being or existence.
If you are saying God existed then he was in existence…who created that? If God is not in existence he doesn’t exist!
Can anyone prove divine inspiration? That is a matter of belief.
If he exists, then he was predated by existence.
And I *answered *your question. Any comments on that answer? Do I get a gold star?
I believe in God as well. But only in the sense that something “out there” must guide our lives. I’ve seen really odd things happen, good or bad, which simply can not be confused with coincidence. Cannot be explained in terms of reality. And honestly, what hope has humanity if we didn’t believe in “something”.
More so if your theory of “10 levels of being” exists. It would possibly hint at the possibility that someone “is” out there watching. That we are participating in a huge human recycling system. It would give credence to the phenomenon of “past lives”. That the “white light” people see who have a near death experience might be merely a vacuum between “levels”. That some of our earthly journey (mentally or spiritually) might be taken with us between levels as well.