I agree I meditate constantly every day
I just ran across this, interesting as I have watched talks by Anil Seth and recently read his book “Being You”. In his thinking, everything we experience is hallucination since we don’t experience the world itself but the model we have created of it. So you might say that what we call “reality” is a more-or-less shared hallucination, albeit a useful one because it corresponds to the real world in useful ways.
Hallucination
a false perception of objects or events involving your senses: sight, sound, smell, touch and taste.
I don’t see how something can be both a false impression, and simultaneously correspond to reality? Apart from the fact that this seems like an unfalsifiable idea, it also seems to be using a false equivalence fallacy, because although our perceptions and thus the beliefs we form must be to some extent subjective, they demonstrably are not equally subjective.
We also know that methods that are designed to remove as much subjective bias as possible, like science and logic, are more efficacious at understanding objective reality.
A circular reasoning fallacy that is begging the question. Do we need to ask if he demonstrates any objective evidence to support his claim? Oh he can’t of course, as objective evidence wouldn’t be possible if he’s right, he seems to have cut the branch his idea is sitting on.
I don’t know but I think what Seth is trying to say is that the mechanism that generates false perceptions is the same one that generates those that resemble reality, the brain’s model of the world. Also I don’t think he is denying that there IS an objective reality but that the model is only an approximation.
We often have false perceptions - optical or auditory illusions and the way the brain fills in the blind spot in our visual field. Are these hallucinations?
Perhaps it was the word everything, that threw me there. yes our senses can be deceived, making our perception inaccurate. All one need do is watch an illusionist to confirm this, and that’s when we know our senses are about to be deceived. This is why objective evidence is so important in validating beliefs.
Auditory hallucinations are the ones most often experienced, and they’re surprisingly common as well.
An hallucination is defined as “where you hear, see, smell, taste or feel things that appear to be real, but only exist in your mind.”
Something to bear in mind, the next time someone is using secondhand anecdotal claims as evidence for miracles or the supernatural.