Illusion

[Little Bang]

Suppose that you suspected someone you know to be an illusion, can you think of any test that would prove or disprove it.

[UncleAl]

An illusion of what? The government can create personas at will, with full credientials and past existences. If you suspect the person is insubstantial, punch him in his nose. An objective answer will be rapidly forthcoming.

[bumab]

Ha!

[Harzburgite]

Suppose that you suspected someone you know to be an illusion,

If I suspected this I would consult my psychiatrist; unless he was the one I suspected.

[Little Bang]

A little more info. This question goes to Bell's Theorem and quantum reality. This not a joke I'm seriously asking if anyone could come up with a test.

[Erasmus00]

A little more info. This question goes to Bell's Theorem and quantum reality. This not a joke I'm seriously asking if anyone could come up with a test.

 

It depends on what you mean by illusion. If you mean the person is a hologram or some such, then you could walk through them or throw something at them.

 

If the illusion is more of a scizophrenic sort of thing, you could take anti-psychotics, see if they go away.

 

But, if your idea of illusions is that an evil demon has control of all your senses, sort of Descartes doubting of everything, then no, you can't prove anything at all.

-Will

[Little Bang]

From Sherlock Holmes' " Eliminate everything that does'nt fit the facts and what every is left, regardless of how impossible, is the truth. " Admittedly I'm grasping at straws, but we don't have any theories that fit all the facts. We have some that come close but nothing that works. What if everything that you see (the entire universe) is an illusion created by your consciousness? Now where your consciousness is located while it is doing this I have no idea. So what sort of clever test could we come up with to get rid of this idea once and for all.

[Harzburgite]

Stop Press: Cogito ergo estis - I think, therefore you are.

[Tormod]

What if everything that you see (the entire universe) is an illusion created by your consciousness?

 

What if the alphabet consists of only letters?

[Qfwfq]

I don't see why you so strongly relate it to Bell's theorem and QM, the idea has been around for quite a time.

 

What if everything that you see (the entire universe) is an illusion created by your consciousness? Now where your consciousness is located while it is doing this I have no idea. So what sort of clever test could we come up with to get rid of this idea once and for all.

I can remember when I was a kid, even I wondered about it. I was somewhere around grade 1 but I'm not sure exactly.

 

Harzburgite reminds us that Descartes thought about it too, and his famous "cogito ergo sum" solution led him to the doctrine that however things are in math and geometry must reflect physical reality. I wonder what he would have thought of projective geometry, or of some exotic multidimensional manifolds with odd topologies.

[Little Bang]

I don't strongly relate them, I just said the idea is related. If you see a magician do a trick, you know that it is a trick and that if you think about it long enough you can figure out how he did it. My question is the same. We know that when we look at a particle it becomes real ( the wave function collapses ) because we look. An event in the macroworld is the culmination of billions and billions of quantum events. Does this make the macroworld event an illusion and if so how do we test it.

[Qfwfq]

...and if so how do we test it.

By looking at it!!!

:xx:

[Tormod]

I don't strongly relate them, I just said the idea is related. If you see a magician do a trick, you know that it is a trick and that if you think about it long enough you can figure out how he did it. My question is the same.

 

My point is the same as the others brought up: Your consciousness cannot dream up a universe that is not there, because your consciousness is a product of said universe.

 

If the universe is an illusion, then so are you (and absolutely everything else), and it really wouldn't change anything. So our universe may well be an illusion.

[Qfwfq]

It's a very subtle point.

Your consciousness cannot dream up a universe that is not there, because your consciousness is a product of said universe.

We take for granted that what we perceive is there, that we perceive it because it is there. This is an axiom that we can only take for granted.

 

We "know" how we perceive things through sensory organs and how this reaches our brain through the nerves, but we learn about it throuhg the same senses that we are learning about. It's a bootstrap argument to say that we (our brain) knows about the reality out there. We can only take it for granted.

 

Build a machine able to work as well as our brain, or that of some other animal that knows it's way around. Instead of giving it eyes, nose and ears etc. feed it the signals of any reality that you choose, also according to it's motor responses. According to it, reality would be that which you are feeding it. How could it ever tell the difference?

[bartock]

An illusion of what? The government can create personas at will, with full credientials and past existences. If you suspect the person is insubstantial, punch him in his nose. An objective answer will be rapidly forthcoming.

will you include usama bin ladin in when you say that to see if he is real(or alive) to punch him in the nose :xx: could he be a CGI :) we'v only seen him on TV .

[bartock]

If I suspected this I would consult my psychiatrist; unless he was the one I suspected.

:xx: psychologist is the doc. to cure that kind of stuff not psychiatrist(who is maybe 1/4 trained in dealing with pronlems of the mind, he mainly deals in drugs )

[Tormod]

will you include usama bin ladin in when you say that to see if he is real(or alive) to punch him in the nose :xx: could he be a CGI :) we'v only seen him on TV .

 

Who is "we" here? Did you ask any Iraqis if they have seen him in person?