More and more I’m believing that this material realm is something akin to a hologram, dream, or illusion. When I say “illusion,” I don’t mean that this world does not exist, but rather the material realm is not the fundamental reality of the universe- it’s existence is not anywhere near as ‘solid’ or ‘objective’ as we believe it to be.
It’s sort of like a Gigantic Dream, and the only reason we experience it as so real, tangible, and acute, like when we feel cold water on our face, or burn ourselves, is because of our infinitesimal size in comparison with the totality of what is out there.
The same would apply to the cells in your body. You are dreaming of a unicorn walking towards you. Is it real? Does the unicorn exist? Well, in a way it does. It exists, but in this case, it’s a dream. and you know it when you wake up. But for some of your neurons and other cells of your body, the unicorn was as real as the cold water on your body, or the flame on your skin, just as acute and as tangible. If you could talk to some of the neurons in your brain and nervous system, they would tell you that, for them, there was no difference between the experience of cold water being splashed on your face and the unicorn in your dreams.
What are some arguments in favor of this view? What are some opposing arguments to this view?
Congratulations, you have discovered the problem of hard solipsism. Arguments in favor: n/a, it’s a fundamentally unresolveable problem. Arguments opposing: dito.
No, he’s discovered words. Words can do anything that our minds can conjure. However, they can seldom be placed into a one-to-one correspondence with reality.
As soon as one uses words to try to say what really is, the game is lost in fog and chaos.
I’m pretty sure OP is not asking whether the 3D unicorns are encoded on a 2D surface. It’s more on the level of - have you ever looked at your hands, man? I mean really looked?
Even if it’s true, it brings up a different set of problems. If it’s a hologram, who made it? The Big Bang made the universe, not a hologram representing the universe.
I too see little use in knowing this. It’s kind of like wondering if you died and are actually in hell. If hell is indistinguishable from real life, then why not live as if it was real life?
And the hologram / dream happened last Thursday.
Since you will act exactly as if you believe the universe is real, not a dream, the cases are in some senses indistinguishable.
If you don’t act this way you won’t last very long.
So if I’m understanding you correctly (which I’m hardly certain of), you’re just arguing for classic solipsism - that all of your perception processes, all the inputs from your senses, are processed in your mind, and for all you know you could be hooked up to the Matrix at the level of your sensory inputs or even your entire mind could itself be running directly in a simulator such that there is no physical existence at all (at least as we think of it - the simulator would be real and presumably exist somewhere).
The big shining argument against a simulated/hallucinated/evil demon’s reality is that it’s so darned consistent, and so darned detailed. If it were a simulation it would have flaws, bugs. Trust me, I’m a computer programmer, the damn things are everywhere and inescapable.
The counterargument to that is that the simulation could be operating on very simple, consistent, easy to maintain rules with no exceptions or special cases. Like if all of reality operated like Conway’s Game of Life - the rules are simple and applied equally everywhere, and all apparent complexity is just an emergent result of large numbers of simple elements interacting in complex ways. There is some evidence that when you start looking at the submicroscopic level our observed reality does indeed operate that way, with universal consistent rules for everything.
I seem to recall hearing of a things called the Planck length and Planck time, which I’ve heard referred to as ‘the resolution of the universe’ - the pixel size of reality. Things like pixels (when referred to that way) are suggestive that reality is a digital, simulated thing. Or alternatively it could just be reality’s way of giving Zeno and his paradoxes the middle finger. Hard to say.
It’s easy to find people saying that but it’s non-scientific. Quantum mechanics cannot say anything about lengths shorter than the Planck length, but it’s not at all clear that has anything to do with actual reality. Whether space is quantized in the first place isn’t even known.
I think a related question is not whether the universe has some sort of existence, but why exactly do we convince ourselves that our senses reveal it? Let’s assume for a moment that evolution and natural selection are true. Then it would stand to reason that our senses describe things in a way most conducive to survival, not in a way most corresponding to objective truth. Some of this we get very intuitively. When most of us see a snake for example, we have a fear reaction, even if the snake is harmless. We recognize that our emotions are not always tied to objective reality. We like to assume though that even though both our senses and our emotions are products of the same organ and both evolved through the same processes, that our senses are truth tellers, while our emotions lie. I’m not convinced that that’s true.
I suggest considering how this idea can help or hinder you. If you’re developing a self-driving car, designing algorithms that correctly detect and respond to unicorns will likely be a vast waste of time and resources. If you’re writing a morality play for a particular theater group because you want to spend more time with the horse-loving set designer, you’ll be better off believing that unicorns, griffins and centaurs are real, at least in the context of the play. If you’re trying to find a fundamental truth from which to deduce all other truths, then I’d at least urge you to try to find a positive statement (X is true) rather than a negative one (solid things aren’t).
Personally, even if everything else is a construct of my mind (or an external matrix), everything else seems to interact as if it were real and independent of me, so I see no benefit in treating it as anything else.
I would suggest that you might find some value in an examination of the ideas of physicist David Bohm, specifically in regards to the relation of consciousness and matter. From the Wiki regarding his conception of “implicate and explicate order”: