Why does anything exist?

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Hallucination as a category becomes a problem if it catches literally anything that doesn't follow x preconditions. It gets circular.

Then the claim that the universe is sentient cannot be substantiated.

That is true. It's a matter of metaphysics.

I've always wondered this as well. Why do we exist? Why are we on this earth to be born and die?

We're just an advanced video game in some advanced entity's computer.





.... I've just watched Tron, again.

Research has found that many factors that include fatigue, hunger or thirst, physical or emotional trauma, exposure to a variety of substances, and mental illness and brain disorders can cause hallucinations.

Additionally, human senses and memory have been found to be much more faulty than we thought. This is cast into question the reliability of eye witness testimony.

This is why accounts of personal experiences are unreliable.

The Simulation Hypothesis is very popular among high level thinkers.

But even if we are all part of a computer simulation, that still wouldn't answer the question of why anything exists; we would then find ourselves asking why does whoever created the simulation exist.

Turtles all the way down.

This question gives me a headache. I mean, where did all the matter in the whole of space come from, to make all these trillions of stars and galaxies?

Not sure why you tagged me with this because it doesn't follow my criticism. It's a horribly sloppy category, especially when it's used as a patch for personal metaphysics.

I'm saying personal experience accounts are not reliable evidence.

I'm saying if a person wants to believe in ghosts, spiritual things, spectres, etc.....let that person believe.....

As long as that person doesn't let a belief in ghosts or whatever prevent me from taking a trip.

Part of what I'm harping on: it's a blend of things we tend to understand relatively easily (a good example of that - sensory flanging), and things we typically don't understand very well but throw into the same basket under the assumption of reductive materialism.

What you said earlier - that people who are hallucinating 'don't know that they're hallucinating', that may be the case with schizophrenia, if its sensory distortion in any other cases most people know that the typical coordination of their senses is off (sometimes that distortion can turn into dysphoric visions like seeing someone in demon-face, like Mikhaila Peterson having a food allergy), that's the brain panicking and it's a bit like a bad dream invading life.

For psychedelics people will, for the most part, have enhancement to internal visualisation such as minds-eye processing. In a way if someone drops LSD, eats mushrooms, or gets into a 2nd or 3rd plateau DXM, what's popular about that state is it's a bit like having their own mind up on four or five computer monitors and - it's a state where you can see a lot of your own gears and get a lot of good cognitive work and self-reprogramming accomplished, like seeing things that were in your own wiring schema that you didn't know were there, could be false assumptions, could be trauma, but whatever it is it was like a stuck gear that needed maintenance. In that sense for people psychedelics are a lot like a system flush.

Most of those above, on the scale of 1 to 10, can range from 3 to 5 intensity. What gets people's attention as 'odd' is something very narrow or specific that hits the 6 to 8 out of 10 range when dead sober. Some of those can be feeling a 2nd person 'other' from within showing up, relating to them, and leaving, and on the high end you may actually sense an entity which is made of a kind of sparkling radiant light that you can feel in a tactile sense but can't visually see, and quite often your body, even down the cellular level, has a very strongly positive reaction to these constructs.


This is why when people talk about 'halliucination' - it's a very mixed basket with a lot of distinct content and I really don't think people know what they're on about very often when they wave it around as a plug figure. I mean, I'd highly respect a Jungian who happened to be a reductive materialist but wondered at the depths of the human mind or wondered how the brain, simplified by Darwinian evolution for fitness payouts, could have as strange of experience as some of the later I just mentioned or something as exotic as spherical 360° degree vision (where does your wiring schema for that come from?).

A lot of things are in that bag that need to get shaken out. Really when we want to talk about edge cases in edge states (such as hypnogogia, fatigue, fasting, psychedelics, etc.), you're seeing operations in your brain that normally hide away under the hood and you get to see them in rare relief. There's a lot to be seen, grappled with, and understood better about the fundamentals of what's down below our common processing that feeds so much of what we take as normal.

All of that I don't think gets wrapped up well as a blanket concept though. Its too wide a variety and too many different things happening.