The Universe Is Your Imagination

[El Dildo]

if the universe is my imagination, then how come whenever I imagine a stack of 10 million dollars sitting in front of me, it never appears?

 

yeah, riddle me that

[Mr.Mister]

 

if the universe is my imagination, then how come whenever I imagine a stack of 10 million dollars sitting in front of me, it never appears?

 

yeah, riddle me that

Because if our imagination became the physical immediately, we would all be f*cked. It gives it time to review our desires, plus you need to put in physical work to make it happen.

 

The tree falling over thing is bullsh*t. It fell over, it made a sound, but nobody was around to hear it. Its only out of your realm of knowledge

[DEALUX]

I forgot to add something to that myself. If somebody dies and nobody is around to witness it the man still exists because someone will find the body.

[Brown Sugar]

Isn't this concept linked with explaining deja vu in terms of parallel universes, like you explained with the letter W having a possibility of being any of the letters in the alphabet until we see it there could end up being multiple universes in which the letter could be C or any other for that matter. This could also cover more significant events, for example if a path suddenly split into two paths one going left and one right in one universe you would go left whereas in the other you would go right. I don't know if I'm explaining it accurately but there was a documentary on the discovery channel I think (the series narrated by Morgan Freeman) which explains it well, this kind of stuff is really interesting to me even if I don't understand it.

[S5L3T0]

The tree falling over thing is bullsh*t. It fell over, it made a sound, but nobody was around to hear it. Its only out of your realm of knowledge

How do you know? The whole point of this thread is the fact that we DON'T know. You don't know if it made a sound, because you weren't there. If there is nothing to hear it, how do you know it made a sound? Maybe 'sound' only happens when there's ears to percieve it? These are interesting questions. Philosophers/scientists/physicists have been discussing this since before you were a sperm, who are you to say it's bullsh*t?

[DEALUX]

Leave a tape recorder (it doesn't count as an observer, right?) on and then you'll know for sure.

[TheGodDamnMaster]

If a tree falls, it emits a sound wave, regardless if it is intercepted by out eardrums.

 

However, the multiverse theory is absolutely fascinating.

 

Every tiny thing that happens in your world creates another universe.

 

For example, if my nose itches, I may scratch it with my finger, but in another universe I scratch it at a different angle, even if the angle is at an atomic level. Then when you combine this with the fact that trillions of other such occurrences happening at the same time, like someone combing their hair diagonally instead of horizontally, somewhere else on the planet, then that creates another universe.

 

The combinations of possibilities as to what we do in our daily lives are innumerable. There is never one point in time, even at the nano-second or atomic-second level, where there is a solid number of universes. You simply cannot measure them because they are happening all the time.

Edited January 16, 2013 by whatsstrength

[GrandMaster Smith]

Hmmm..

 

 

Audible sound is a perception created within the mind of the one experiencing it.

 

What causes audible sounds are waves traveling through air molecules.

 

 

If a tree falls and no one is around to pick up the vibrations in the air, then there is no audible sound since it requires a conscious being to perceive it into audible sound in the first place.

 

 

[Adler]

The tree falling scenario is more of an analogy for the behavior of particles on the quantum level than a question meant to be taken literally...

[GrandMaster Smith]

The tree falling scenario is more of an analogy for the behavior of particles on the quantum level than a question meant to be taken literally...

I'm pretty sure the falling tree thing has been around much longer than quantum mechanics. I may be wrong but I think some old monk came up with it long ago.. those Buddhist weren't far off with their claims of reality being illusory..

[DarrinPA]

 

When a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it fall, does it make a sound? Well Dr. Lanza says no. He proposes that everything in the universe is dependant on our imaginations and the perception of the viewers. Nothing exists until we observe it.

This sounds a bit like Schrödinger's cat, some scientists have an inflated sense importance. It doesn't matter if we [as a person or society] have observed things, things exist before hand otherwise we'd never come to the point of being able to observe it.

 

Sounds like this guy needs to be sucker punched in the back of the head. How did that happen if you didn't observe it first? Maybe that will sort out his ego problem.

[t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m]

Sounds a little too absurd for my beliefs. Nonetheless, it's certainly something interesting to think about. We have so much to learn about this universe.

[DarrinPA]

Hmmm..

 

 

Audible sound is a perception created within the mind of the one experiencing it.

 

What causes audible sounds are waves traveling through air molecules.

 

 

If a tree falls and no one is around to pick up the vibrations in the air, then there is no audible sound since it requires a conscious being to perceive it into audible sound in the first place.

Sound 'waves' are changes in air pressure increasing and decreasing very rapidly [depending on the frequency] so sound does exist when there are no ears to hear it. Look up the Krakatoa eruption, it was a sound that traveled around the world. It was picked up by barographs everywhere.

 

Air can change in pressure despite people not being present, for example storms can cause drastic pressure changes. Nobody is going to deny that storms don't exist unless somebody is present - why would sound be any different? It wouldn't.

[GrandMaster Smith]

Hmmm..

 

 

Audible sound is a perception created within the mind of the one experiencing it.

 

What causes audible sounds are waves traveling through air molecules.

 

 

If a tree falls and no one is around to pick up the vibrations in the air, then there is no audible sound since it requires a conscious being to perceive it into audible sound in the first place.

Sound 'waves' are changes in air pressure increasing and decreasing very rapidly [depending on the frequency] so sound does exist when there are no ears to hear it. Look up the Krakatoa eruption, it was a sound that traveled around the world. It was picked up by barographs everywhere.

 

Air can change in pressure despite people not being present, for example storms can cause drastic pressure changes. Nobody is going to deny that storms don't exist unless somebody is present - why would sound be any different? It wouldn't.

I'm not saying the air waves that produce sound don't exist, but audible sound itself is only a perception and can only exist within our bubble of consciousness. Outside our heads it's dead silent, its our brains that turn these fluctuating air waves into what we can know as sound.

[JRZ]

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that it is impossible to know anything as a certain truth.

Everything that we experience which is external to ourselves is, in itself, only an interpretation based on the message that our senses are sending to the brain (assuming that we actually exist).

This interpretation depends on the perspective of the self, but does not the perspective of the self also depend on interpretation?

 

We place ourselves in context through a process that relies more on the self than reality.

[TheGodDamnMaster]

Just because we are not around to have a sensory interaction with an object doesn't mean it's not there.

 

For example, if I'm standing in front of a tree and then face away from it, then I have no need to be convinced that it is there. I just "experienced" it. But if by random chance, I never once noticed the tree and my back was being pushed up against the bark, then that proves that the tree is ALWAYS going to be a tree, irregardless of whether or not someone is around to "experience' its' presence. The tree gave my body a message to let me know it's there. The message was it's bark texture. If you took millions of people who were blind-folded and pushed them up against that same tree one at a time, the tree would still give off the same message. This concludes that the state of the tree is PERMANENT. If it could be anything other than a tree at anytime, then why does it always give off that same message?

 

Let's just say that the tree did indeed have the ability to become anything it wanted anytime there was no one around. Say, it wanted to be a skyscraper. Take the same scenario as before; I'm being pushed up against the tree and I feel the bark, only this time I feel concrete behind me, the concrete that is the building's foundation. However, I turn around and I see the tree, not its' skyscraper form. The matter of the tree/skyscraper is inconsistent because I FEEL the concrete, but I SEE the tree. Not only that, the tree doesn't contain enough matter to equal the size of the building, so matter would have to be CREATED, which is impossible.

 

The theory you're talking about does say that anything can turn into anything. So it's saying that a human being can turn into a door when no one is around that person. If I am said person and I decide to transform into a door, then I would die. My organs and brain and brain waves would be completely dismantled into something completely different. And then when I did turn back into a human to accommodate the presence of another human, I would still be dead. My organs were ripped apart and would then have irreparable damage, so my body would refuse to function. The cause of my death would be inconclusive. There would be millions of such cases happening en masse every day; inconclusive deaths and whole forests disappearing.

 

We would all be born with the abililty and knowledge to transform into anything. But we can't.

 

There is absolutely no reason, and more importantly, no evidence, to suggest that the matter that the tree is made up of will transform into something else when we are not around it. It's pure lunacy and crackpot theory.

Edited January 16, 2013 by whatsstrength

[Cheat]

The point of the whole tree-in-a-forest thought experiment is to prove that without perceiving one cannot truly know of the existence of something. No matter what method of rational thinking, be it physics or mathemathics, one uses he or she cannot prove that the tree actually make a sound. Supporting the claim with scientific evidence is merely finding ways to argue why would it be more likely for the tree to make a sound but doesn't prove anything one hundred percent.

[JRZ]

 

The point of the whole tree-in-a-forest thought experiment is to prove that without perceiving one cannot truly know of the existence of something. No matter what method of rational thinking, be it physics or mathemathics, one uses he or she cannot prove that the tree actually make a sound. Supporting the claim with scientific evidence is merely finding ways to argue why would it be more likely for the tree to make a sound but doesn't prove anything one hundred percent.

To take that further, even once something is perceived, you still can't really "truly" know that it exists. You can only know that your perception (flawed or unflawed) is leading you to believe that it does.

 

If someone sees and hears a tree fall in a forest, does it really make a sound? Does the tree itself even truly exist?

 

On the note of science, the idea still comes down to the same thing: All scientific studies are based on observation, observation relies on perception, and perception can be flawed.

Now, repeatability plays a large role in science, which makes it seem more likely that the universe does indeed exist, as multiple observations reinforce each other and generally tend to make sense.

Either that or all perceptions are flawed in a similar way, which may seem incredibly unlikely, but it is still a possibility.

 

Then again, to an individual, all the perceptions that seem to reinforce each other are subject to one single perception: their own.

Even a belief in science requires some amount of faith.

 

Despite all of this, I, for one, do believe in science. It just seems logical to do so.

Even if science isn't really an "absolute truth", I think it's probably the closest thing we'll ever get to explaining just what the hell is going on around us.

Edited January 16, 2013 by JRZ