Theory on where subjective reality comes from

[Zukin]

The subjective reality perspective (where life is like a lucid dream) sounds a lot like the neurological state of altered perception called derealization:

Derealization (DR) is an alteration in the perception or experience of the external world so that it seems strange or unreal. It is a dissociative symptom of many conditions, such as psychiatric and neurological disorders, and not a standalone disorder. It is also a transient side effect of acute drug intoxication, sleep deprivation and stress.

Depersonalization is a subjective experience of unreality in one's sense of self, while derealization is unreality of the outside world. Depersonalization and derealization are often used interchangeably, although evidence suggests they have distinct neurobiological mechanisms. Chronic derealization may be caused by occipital-temporal dysfunction.

Derealization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

From Steve's blog post "Subjective Reality vs. Solipsism":

Subjective reality is the perspective that recognizes that you are in fact the dreamer and that everything you perceive in the dream world, including your dream body and the other dream characters and objects, is taking place within your larger consciousness. When you’re fully lucid, you know that the dream character you control isn’t the real you — the real you is asleep on a bed somewhere, having the dream. Your dream body is merely your first-person interface to the dream world, a construct of consciousness. If your dream body gets hurt, you may still feel the pain. If it experiences pleasure, you may feel the pleasure. If something in the dream startles you, you may feel that emotional reaction. But when that dream body dies, the real you lying in bed remains alive, and you simply wake up.

The non-dream version of subjective reality, the one I’ve described in my previous writing on the topic, is basically the same concept of having a lucid dream, except that you apply it to waking physical reality instead of your nighttime dreams. In effect you become lucid while physically awake, recognizing that there’s another layer of dreaming and that this physical reality is also fully contained within a larger consciousness, and that outer consciousness is in fact the real you. Your physical body-mind is merely your first-person interface to the dream world.

Once you reach this level of lucidity, everything changes. You’re still experiencing reality — it doesn’t simply stop – but because you recognize it as a dream, you’re able to interact with it on a whole new level. You will still experience pleasure, pain, and fear as you react automatically to in-dream events, but because you know you’re really the outside dreamer who cannot be truly harmed by anything within the dream, you begin to relate to life from a state of inherent fearlessness.

Maybe I'm still misinterpreting subjective reality, but it sounds a lot like derealization. I've experienced this state during the one time I tried marijuana, and also when I was feeling stress and anxiety.

[Max Power]

All the fancy labels like SR etc, dress up the the premise that you're god. SR isn't about human beings, it's about one entity realising they're god having a very dense physical reality experience with direct control over a single human form.

Steve has a very telling line about SR............

"We can make this self referencial to you or me, but we both know who is the conscious being here don't we"

He dances around the belief itself, but clearly states that SR (or his version) implies one single conscious being having a physical reality based experience.

If we buy into SR and feel lonely then we're not fully understanding SR.

An energy being, a god like figure/entity can not be (at it's core) human form and therefore is something else. When a human form considers being god, it must align itself with the only thing that isn't physical reality........thought.

Take away thought and you got a dead human body. As for where the theory come from, it's a self realisation where a person like Steve is you telling yourself something for a reason.

It's frustrating because we are two things, formlessness and form side by side.

Max

[Mark Lapierre]

Originally Posted by Zukin

Maybe I'm still misinterpreting subjective reality, but it sounds a lot like derealization. I've experienced this state during the one time I tried marijuana, and also when I was feeling stress and anxiety.

It might be the reason why some people feel that SR is a valid perspective. I've also had many similar experiences, both natural and caused by drugs.

However the distinction is that SR says the normal, unaltered, non-surreal "reality" is subjective. The comparison to lucid dreams is a tool to try to get the message across, but as with most dreams, lucid or otherwise, you normally don't experience that surreal feeling.

But you could be right. Maybe repeated experiences of derealization could convince people that there is something to those surreal feelings, even if it is truly just a neurological event.

So the question is, why do some people believe there's more to it, while some believe it's a neurological event? I'm pretty sure the answer is that the framework of their beliefs is likely to accommodate only one interpretation unless they change some other significant beliefs, and most people are generally very unwilling to do that (even if there's a good reason to do so, which in this case is debatable).

[cdn2wheeler]

Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre

So the question is, why do some people believe there's more to it, while some believe it's a neurological event? I'm pretty sure the answer is that the framework of their beliefs is likely to accommodate only one interpretation unless they change some other significant beliefs, and most people are generally very unwilling to do that (even if there's a good reason to do so, which in this case is debatable).

It's an unprovable. Identical experiences can be induced artificially through drugs and even through tiny electrical stimuli in the temporal lobes of the brain. It can be tested, measured, proven.

What happens, though, is that those who have those sorts of experiences without various artificial forms always come up with some sort of excuse or reason why they refuse to submit to double-blind experiments. So we don't know if what they're experiencing can be measured, or if it's a misfiring in their brain or something entirely different and even possibly supernatural.

It's very sad, because those who insist that their experiences are supernatural are completely unwilling to challenge their own preconceptions, and challenge the preconceptions of the scientific community. Everybody loses by their intransigence.

[Mark Lapierre]

Originally Posted by cdn2wheeler

It's very sad, because those who insist that their experiences are supernatural are completely unwilling to challenge their own preconceptions, and challenge the preconceptions of the scientific community. Everybody loses by their intransigence.

Thankfully there are people like Ken Wilber and Rupert Sheldrake, who, while they have some strange ideas, are at least willing, if not passionate, to show that they're not just speculating on personal or anecdotal experience.

[Savage]

A natural consequence of a subjective belief system is that you would consider the entire scientific community to be just as much an imaginary manifestation as anything else in your reality. So doing a double-blind experiment would be a rather nonsensical and pointless undertaking.

Why would it be pointless? Because it would be tantamount to consulting with dream character scientists in order to ask them whether you're dreaming or not. No matter what your dream scientists report or how they conduct the experiment, the outcome would be irrelevant, since the scientists and the experiment are just figments. For such an experiment to even make any sense whatsoever, you necessarily have to already be viewing reality through an objective lens.

The subjective version of such proof would be to ask an objectivist to prove, to a degree of reasonable satisfaction from the subjectivist's perspective, that the scientific community (or any part of it thereof) actually exists independently of the subjectivist's own imagination. Until the objectivist can actually do this (which is inherently impossible), the subjectivist must always remain skeptical about the objectivist's faith-based belief in the imaginary scientific community.

If you want to devise a meaningful experiment of this type, then you'd need one that doesn't require you to first assume that reality is either objective or subjective but which remains open to both possibilities. I submit that such an experiment is impossible to devise, even for a god. You could consider this the basic "uncertainty principle" of consciousness.

Consequently, I think the most intelligent path is to view reality through both lenses, subjective and objective. Since neither can be proven right or wrong, it's seems wisest to consider both and to steer one's life down the path where both perspectives appear to be in agreement. In practical terms this means to live life in such away that would make sense whether your dreaming or not.