Always Dance

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We don't know that the laws of reality can change. Nobody could prove that they couldn't, either.
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Like I said, it would be technical in both cases. Did the world change to one where light was particles to one where it was waves when we did the experiments that proved each? No, you would argue, we simply did not understand reality fully.

It is the same in a dream. You say the dream changes, I say reality changes. You respond by saying we merely misjudged reality, I say you merely misjudged the dream. Do you have a way to differentiate them that is not arbitrary?


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Because it's different, when you hallucinate (I'm thinking of dreaming while asleep here), you are not perceiving what your eyes see, you perceive thoughts in your head. It's a different part of your brain.
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That is a meaningless distinction (and it is based on the assumption that you are not also hallucinating your body). A mind is subjective and you cannot watch yourself watch the tree, so to you, or as far as you personally can tell, the experiences are exactly the same.

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That was a bad way to put it on my part, I meant, "My existence revolves around others".
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It revolves around the idea of others. If you acknowledge that you do not know anyone fully, or that knowing someone fully is theoretically impossible, then you acknowledge that what you revolve around is actually 'what your mind is capable of seeing' and not 'how things really are'. Do you acknowledge that?

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Because there is no reason to extend my flexibility on my basis of reality. I wouldn't gain anything from it. My concept of realism is my concept of what I can and can't make use of. I don't have to be a practicalist to make use of a dream. I can make use of the dream with the understanding that it isn't real. In that sense the line between what is real and what isn't real doesn't matter, but I still choose to acknowledge the distinction.
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Why do you?

You do gain. You gain the freedom to view things without loyalty. You gain objectivity and a freer mind. Think of your conscious mind like RAM. When you 'believe' in things, as soon as you become conscious, it automatically loads up those beliefs or programs in the RAM. This not only decreases your capacity for thought but will inhibit you from running ideas through your head that conflict with these boot scripts. Let's say you are running Windows, and can only run Windows programs, or programs that do not conflict with the Windows startup programs. What I suggest is to go back to nothing, so that when you are faced with a problem, you deal with only that problem, and are not hindered by all of the predefined variables that Windows has. You can boot into Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, or build up from nothing if need be.

So I say do away with unnecessary assumptions and deal with each problem without assuming anything. That position of full capacity and freedom is reward in itself.

Do you have anything to lose, or is this somehow not a gain?

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Oh sure every dream has its own consistent rules, but the point is they change with each dream. They can also change mid-dream, however.
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As they can change in reality, but it is technical in both. The way in which the dream can change is still limited, so there is consistency. It just becomes more complex. Like with reality. When new evidence presents itself that changes everything you think you know, you don't deny that the universe is consistent. Instead you deny that your view of it was accurate. The same should be true in a dream world.

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Because it is functionally true. Take when I perceive a tree, for example. The tree exists outside of my head. My eyes see the tree, and my brain unscrambles the mess that my eyes see, allowing me to perceive (See) it.

Okay, I will use your definition of dreaming.
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It is also functionally true that you are hallucinating the tree, since hallucination and a 'real' sensory experience are can be exactly the same. There is a 50/50 chance the tree is outside of your mind. Why do you default to assuming that it is external? What makes you so sure that it si more likely to be external?

Thank you, and thank goodness.

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That's interesting. The backstory is less real than what you play through in the game, even though it must have happened, even though it didn't happen...that's a good example. I see where you are coming from now.
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Ah, finally. I can breathe easier...

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My entire existence depends on others, so.
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Why do you believe this? If every other sentient being ceased to exist, you could still exist, right?

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No.
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Then why do you value reality more than remaining flexible?

Pabu is way cuter than that thing! :l

..though it is still rather cute.

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I dream every night and I've had a few lucid dreams.
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Then are you completely unobservant or am I the only one of the two of us who can work out the dynamics of each dream individually and find them to be consistent within the dream, like how magic is consistent within Harry Potter and others? It seems more likely that you are unaware of or ignoring it because it doesn't support your position.

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The world is not in my head, it is outside of my head, my head is only perceiving it.
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Why do you believe that?

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You write stories and such while you are awake, not while dreaming.
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Being awake and dreaming are the same thing, you still do not get it. A daydream is still a dream. A hallucination is a dream. Anything that you experience as a projection of your own mind is a dream. What you meant to say was this:

"You write stories and such while you are awake, not while sleeping."

Do you see why this is incoherent, or am I still preaching to the choir?

If your mind does something under any circumstances, while sleeping or while awake, it is capable of doing it.

Having a body and hallucinating while sleeping without your full functionality (akin to being drugged) is not the dreaming that I am talking about. The dreaming that I am talking about is something similar to the Matrix in which nothing you see experience has mass and is only a subjective experience of your own mind. There are no limits to this. It is, for all intents and purposes, a mental exercise not unlike Schrodinger's cat, and for it, I expect you to stop using the following definition of "dreaming":

1. A series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep
And instead use this:

1. A series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind
This is a requirement if you are to try to understand my meaning.

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The holocaust happened because the consequences of it are still alive today.
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It didn't necessarily happen, though I will concede that the current time frame you are experiencing has that as a factor in its explanation. Remember what we were talking about just a bit ago. You cannot know that anything happened before you were born. As far as you know, this is a machination of your mind, and your mind has offered this backstory, but none of it really happened.

Let's say that you jump into the middle of a game and the world is set in an age that is greatly affected by a past war. But you never play through that war in the game and the only existence that it has is through the 'consequences' you see while playing and the text that told you about it. Did the war 'really' happen or not? You have the consequences and the history. The parts you played through really happened because you were a part of them and experienced them, but what about the backstory of the game?


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Okay, then I am moral less often than you are. Acknowledged.
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Your morality is borrowed from others. More, you only have a conscience if you 'trust' those others; that they exist, or that they are the people you think they are. I have no respect for it as such.

You have continually failed to answer these question, but they are of utmost importance. Please answer them as completely as you can.

Do you profit more from caring about what is real than from being a practicalist? Yes or no.

If so, how do you profit from caring about what is real, and why don't you get this profit from being a practicalist?

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Sure. If only my dream existed it would be real to me, but I would need to have a different concept of realism than I have. And I can't make use of its dynamics consistently either. Dream rules do not seem to have any consistency to them at all.
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Do you dream often? Have you ever had a lucid dream?

Also you are still using a dream to mean 'what happens when humans sleep', not, 'an internal subjective experience of oneself'.

If you acknowledge the principle, then you must acknowledge that for all intents and purposes, this reality is the equivalent of a dream, and that this dream is all you know. You are not sleeping, you have no world to wake up to, this is the world. But it is in your head.

If your only counter-argument is "but I can't control this" or "but dreams don't make sense and this does" then you are only repeating yourself.

You can't control things that you are experiencing subjectively. You would have to take an objective perspective and stop being an individual to control the rest.

Why should all subjective experiences of your own mind not make sense simply because the specific experiences that humans have while sleeping do not make sense? People write books, draw from their subconscious minds, and they make sense. In fact, a lot of the time inspiration comes on its own without consciously creating. You start to build a world and then it builds itself, all while making sense. Please stop clinging to some notion that everything your imagination comes up with will be inconsistent.

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Fine. There is somebody in Africa, an infant who died at birth. I do not know this infant, I will never see it, I will never see anybody who has known it. It is of no use to me. How can it exist then?
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It exists only as an idea, just like everything else. As far as you know, that child is exists only on the piece of paper where they are mentioned. Practicalism says that what has no practical use to your goals is worthless to believe in. Now, let's say that one of your goals was to help a child in Africa. You would want more evidence of the child's existence so that you would know that your efforts were not wasted. If that was all the information you could get, you might even turn it down because you think the donation company is lying about them. From there, it depends on your assessment of the risks, not 'belief'. There is ##% chance that they are real, and that if you do not help them they will die. There is a far larger chance that they are not real and that you could have spent your money on a real child. Are you willing to take the risk? In the end, it doesn't matter if the child is real unless you are obsessed with certainty and feel a 'need' rather than a 'want' for full proof; if you are not willing to accept that chance exists and that taking risks is natural. It is how people learn. No one has ever made a discovery thinking that it was not worth trying unless they knew for a fact that they would succeed.

The holocaust is similar. You weren't there, you only saw films or read about it. For all you know, those films, books and stories from people who were supposedly involved are the only thing that actually exists. Just as King Arthur never happened, the holocaust didn't either. Well, it did in the same way that everything else did, you just didn't see it with your own eyes.

Statistically, more people have experienced ghosts than the holocaust, so according to your arbitrary reality, I have more reason to believe in ghosts than the holocaust.

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Yes, my morality is for myself, but the principles of my morality and the reasons I must be moral are for God and for other people. That it is what matters. I have different reasons than you to be moral, that does not make me less moral, it means we have different perceptions of morality.
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Please acknowledge this argument.

In a group (of beings that you believe are real), you are moral. As an individual without that group holding you accountable, you are not.

I am moral regardless of whether I am dreaming, doing a role play, writing a story, actually dealing with what seem to be people, like you, or otherwise. I am moral in a group, and I am moral without the group.

I am moral in a group.
You are moral in a group.

I am moral as an individual.
You are not moral as an individual.

Let me put it this way:

GROUP . INDIV
Mak ✓ . ✓
Sla ✓ . ✗

This makes you less moral than me, or without any doubt less convicted than me.

That I could, bro.

That I could...

*grumbles* Fine. Only if Korra doesn't need me then, though. And only if I like the music.

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But I wasn't.
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Do you acknowledge the principal? It sounds like you do. The principle says that no matter what world you are in, it is real to you so long as you know nothing else and can make use of the dynamics of it consistently. Even if the world you have always been in is a dream, it will be real to you if you know nothing else. You have just acknowledged this by conceding my point and instead saying that your world was not one where that has happened to your knowledge.

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I cannot make use of a pair of pants that are too small for me. Do they not exist?
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Yes you can. You can tear them up and use them as cloth for something else or give them to a projection of your mind that is smaller than you because you like to see that projection happy.

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Because the science I know has proven that it cannot happen, and I trust the knowledge.
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It has not done so. It is theoretically impossible to prove that it cannot happen. You are denying that medical advancement will ever allow us to reattach a head. You are denying that further research has value or that the evidence you had could be flawed or incomplete. That is called self-righteousness.

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Yes, reality would still matter to me. I would act more selfishly because I am not sharing the existence with anyone but myself and nothing is real.
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Then your morality is worthless. If your morality exists because you fear consequence (not to be confused with punishment) then it has lost all of its validity.

Every person lives for themselves. When you help another, it is because doing so pleases you. When you decide not to kill another person, you do so because it pleases you more than killing them. It is a fool who fails to acknowledge this; that all right and wrong are personal convictions and that your morality is for yourself and no one else.

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You are misunderstanding me. You say I would kill you in a dream with no regret because I wouldn't have to deal with the consequences, but that's not it at all. I would kill you in a dream with no regret because we don't share an existence. The you I see in a dream is only a part of my brain, I'm not sharing an existence with anyone but myself. So I would have no regrets killing you in a dream if it is what I wanted to do. If I knew I was in a perpetual dream state in which I had to deal with the consequences of my actions, my actions would only be to aid myself.
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I am not misunderstanding you so much as overestimating you. Truly, it is only those of faith, either in law or in deities, that believe that morality comes from consequence. You are crippled in the way of morality. Indeed, you are more dangerous as an individual than those like me who hold right and wrong based purely on personal preference. If I were put in a world of people that I could not be sure were real, I would act no different. You would instantly care less about the outcomes, out of your own mouth. It could very easily be said that you will only do what you call good if you are rewarded for it in a way that you consider real. I will do what I call good regardless of a reward, real or not. Which of us is the more selfish, and which of us is the more moral, then?

In a group (that you believe is real), you are moral. As an individual without others holding you accountable, you are not. This makes you more dangerous than me who believes that no one is real, and certainly less convicted than me.

If your morality depends on others for existence then you are not moral at all. You are inhibited by fear. Doing the right thing at gun point, to give a logical extreme, is not doing the right thing at all. It is doing as your survival instinct dictates.

You are less moral than me if you depend on others to be 'good' as you call it.


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There is nothing that is not worth researching, there are only things that are more worth researching than others. And I would consider reattaching heads and magic to be very low on that list.
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You acknowledge this intellectually, but you are willing to say that things cannot happen simply because they are low on the list. How can I trust your judgment?

In saying "that isn't possible", you are saying, "We don't need to research reattaching heads anymore because we have failed in the past."

If you said magic wasn't possible, you would be saying that the study of the supernatural is unnecessary because we already know it can't be done.

Please tell me you can understand my frustration.

You have no idea how hard I just laughed from that. hahahahaha

I am getting impatient with you claiming what reality is like you know how it works when at any other time you would say that you cannot know. When you aren't really thinking you assume that you can know. The contradiction shortens my temper. Apologies for my tone.

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It would be more real but still not real. Dreams have different rules than reality. I can cut your head off in a dream and you can just pick it up and put it back on and be fine. That isn't possible in reality. That's a big deal.
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Again you are misusing the word as it is used here. Here, a dream merely means "something cooked up by your subconscious mind". It does not mean that it does not have rules. The only reason why you are daring to assume that that 'could not happen in reality' is because you were born into a world where it does not happen. If you were born into a world where peoples' heads could be put back on that would be real to you.

Furthermore, if you were born in a world with magic and things that 'are not real', like Harry Potter, you would see that as real, too. Real is 'what you can make use of'. You are continually ignoring this fact. Science itself is practicalism applied. Trying to get 'the most consistent usage of the world your perceive' is science. You have gone a step further, denied what made the science you know of possible, and decided that my head falling off and being put back on simply cannot happen in 'reality'.

Why on earth would you choose to say that it cannot happen instead of thinking, "I'll choose not to believe in 'cannot' because I have not seen every single occurrence of a head coming off nor am I seeing all of them that are happening right now"?

You acknowledge that you cannot know on an intellectual level, but then you go and say things like "it can't happen in reality", betraying yourself. Do you believe it or not?

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If I was in a perpetual dream state, I still wouldn't consider it real because I wouldn't be sharing the existence with anybody but myself.
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That isn't the question I asked you. Would 'real' matter if you had to live with your actions for the rest of your life either way?

However, what if you never woke up? Things would seem permanent. If you stayed in a dream for forty years, it would be more of a reality to you because it encompassed the majority of your experience.

You are dreaming right now and have not woken up for since it started, with your 'birth'.

What if you went back to sleep and those actions were permanent in the 'dream' world? What if the dream world is an alternate universe?

Why do you believe I am real now but that those in the dream are not? Isn't the only difference that the me right now is more consistent, or that you see the effects of your actions for far longer?

If so, then why should you favor naïve realism over practicalism? What is better about assuming something is real and moving on and using what is available to you at any given moment?

You would kill the me in a dream without regret because you won't see the effects of it the next day. But what if you never woke up? Let's say you're in a perpetual dream state for the rest of your life. Does 'real' matter then? You would have to face your actions for the rest of your life even though it didn't 'really' happen.

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But only one can be trusted the same way only a real painting can be hung on my wall.
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Which one?

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What if my goal is attaining knowledge? Then knowing whether I will survive the fall will help this goal. Under practicalism why do you care about unicorns? How could they possibly help you achieve your goals?
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Then there is no problem there. However, you cannot know that you will not survive, because you do not even know if your existence will end when your body stops functioning, assuming that it will. That is three assumptions:
You are a physical body.
Your body will stop functioning if you fall.
You will cease to exist if your body stops functioning.
Under practicalism I am not truly interested in unicorns, that was just an example. The concept has no use to me at all other than as a general knowledge of culture and myth; it may become useful in a conversation. It does not even bring me joy to think about, so it is useless.

Now, for you, what is 'real'? I can understand your fascination with "really" dying, that's an actual concern and it is logical to care about what will or will not end your enjoyment in this world, but why do you care about anything else being 'real'?

So far you have used "shared perception" as 'real'. I gather this from your notion of ownership, as ownership is simply "boundaries accepted and acknowledged by other entities". If you imagine a unicorn and no one else perceives it, then you do own that unicorn—in fact, only you can. Instead of accepting this, you seem to be seeking the acknowledgement of others. You seem to be holding that you can't own something unless other people are able to steal it from you. Which assumes that they themselves are real.

You should be noticing that it all leans together. You assume others are real first of all. Then you use them to prove everything else.

"Oh yeah well my friend saw it too," or inversely, "only I see it so it isn't real."

You are assuming that they exist in order to validate all other points.

This is a problem you need to get over if we are to move on.

I ain't a taxi service, Mr. Boomerang. This saddle belongs to Korra.
*huffs dog breath in your face*