Is this true Veeky Forums?

oh, I thought it was the same thing. What do you have to do to be considered "astral projecting"?

View the real world, rather than your imagination, from a third-person perspective in real time without technology.

Drugs, usually. Though, obviously one could dream one was astrally projecting with no drugs at all, but it may not have anything to do with reality.

To prove you were astrally projecting, you'd have to remotely observe events taking place elsewhere under controlled conditions, and there's been no reliable study leading to evidence of anyone doing that.

There's no known physical mechanism to allow for it either.

Maybe that'll change someday... But for now, I just tend to blame drugs and folks believing their own vivid hallucinations. Sleep paralysis can result in some pretty powerfully convincing shit.

I understand that this is just a tinfoil hat thing, but it would be really easy to disprove. It would probably still have regular dream traits like clocks not working right and letters being distorted.

Those types of stereotypical distortions aren't real consistent across individuals. The idea that you can't read in your dreams is likewise untrue for many (hell, I code in my dreams.)

There seems to be many different types of dreams - waking dreams have properties very different from REM dreams, for instance, usually with much more intense and often terrifying experiences. Electromagnetically induced dreams also seem to produce a spectrum of experiences different from what people usually feel they experience dreaming.

>Electromagnetically induced dreams
We had a god helmet experiment at our school.

Fuck, that, shit. Saw a bunch of flashing lights and screams and it scared the living fuck out of me. Pretty much everyone that tried it either got nothing or nearly pissed their pants. Some kids ended up puking their guts out. Think only one chick reported anything positive... Looking back, it was stupid to even try, as I could see some serious brain damage resulting.

How do we prove we dream,yet we take dreaming for granted,science doesn't deal with subjective reality?

Neural science deals with what happens to us biologically when we dream, and with "subjective experience" in general - namely translating it into objective data, insomuch as we can.

We can identify the dream state, we can influence it, and we can induce it.

That's true, but aside from that you could look at small details like the number of steps on your staircase or a minor detail in a picture and then check it when you wake up. Or if anyone is awake in your vision you could see what they're doing and then ask them about it when you wake up.

You're suddenly expecting someone who believes in astral projection to "undergo" it and disprove it for themselves. That's asking for a lot.

It's difficult to establish the objective reality of reality itself when reality changes according to how your brain interprets the sensory information its receiving or the schematic of the brain itself. If all I need to do to be in a whole different section of "reality" is to change a few brain states, or if my perception of time changes because I took shrooms, it really fucks up any epistemic claims we have on anything we see. The qualia, or the conscious experience of a particular sense-datum, like time can, possibly be affected the structure of your mind. If some evil genius found the secret to eternity in the brain, he could change a few functions in the brain, fuck up your time perception and trick you into experiencing eternity. Well you might say well you're not ACTUALLY experiencing eternity, but what's the fucking difference anymore? if a evil scientist starts toying with my brain by touching particular sections of my brain or pumps me with pain-experience-chemicals but says that I'm not ACTUALLY experiencing pain but just the "illusion" of pain I'm gonna look at him like he's some sort of doltish Veeky Forums autist. Like dude wtf? I can still feel pain even though you're only artifically manipulating my brain to feel the pain: there's still qualia. This is why I have a hard time buying the whole objective reality bit about your post. Oh its only an hallucination. You're only claim to objective knowledge is that most people experience reality a particular way and therefore that makes it objective. How do we know that everyone isn't experiencing a collective hallucination though?

Yeah, but while there's a lot of anecdotal stories of folks remote observing others in their sleep and being right about what they saw, most of them could easily be guess work "I saw you having breakfast", and no one's managed to recreate it with enough consistency to say anything empirical about it, save that there's no known physical mechanism to allow it to happen.

by*
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you're getting into philosophy can't know nuffin shit now man, this discussion requires the axiom that the observed reality exists.

you'd think at some point SOMEONE other than /x/ users would figure out how to do it

if I ever figure out how to do it I'm going to drop a dice down the stairs every night and look at it during my dream

If in a particularly vivid dream,the dream added value,or was helpful to conciousness reality,would the dream reality be valid,apart of our whole experience

>How do we know that everyone isn't experiencing a collective hallucination [in which i am wrong only when I astrally project] though?
How do you know you're not the only real person? This is meaningless unfalsifiable bullshit that contributes nothing to any understanding.

Oh stop trying to sound deep with this "science only deals with the non-subjective" pseudo philosophical crap and cut back on the drugs.

There's the empirical world, and then there's the ephemeral world of the unknown. The latter shrinks and the former grows. It's not as if science denies consciousness exists, but it only deals with what it can measure, because once you leave that empirical realm, you can't share your conclusions in any verifiable way. Until you can find a way to do that with the subject at hand, that's what poetry and art are for.

>axiom that the observed reality exists
no shit, but which observed reality exists, your axiom isn't even properly defined. I'm not denying "something" exists, but I'm asking how real it is, real being defined as being true in all possible worlds, everywhere, everytime, etc.

Nevermind, you're expecting for a normal person to be able to reliably enter a state that when some others have entered they believed is astral projection, and prove to themselves that it is not. That doesn't prove shit to the /x/ idiots. It does nothing but confirm what we already know: the other possibility is that these people are mistaken.

You're accomplishing nothing but giving yourself a finite probability of falsely believing something magic happened.

Only insomuch as doing math in your head does...

There's some neurological and psychological sleep studies that suggest that part of what the brain is doing in a sleep state is going over the most recent memories of the day and puzzling them together to create more effective solutions upon waking - discarding the weaker connections as it goes. So in that sense, if it is true, every dream is aiding your waking world consciousness.

Doesn't mean that dreams are any more "real" than memories though.

Then at least use 20 siders. People gamble on guessing two six sided dice right.

>real being defined as being true in all possible worlds, everywhere, everytime
Again, see

I'm not claiming that the ephemeral world exists or that the empirical world doesn't exist. I'm just doubting whether the evidence you use, questioning whether it qualifies as evidence or what the evidence for reality would even look like. None of the things I said are unfalsifiable, time perception can be changed with the inducement of certain states. That's just patent. Subjective states of mind can be falsified by the individual, perhaps not by a majority though, or even by more than one person. If the fact that I see myself moving in space-time is determined by my memory totting out the previous steps I have taken or the previous slices of space-time I've been, then I could easily just destroy all my previous memories of myself moving and only remain in one present section of "reality." To elaborate, if my memory just kept getting deleted instantaneously, or if I wasn't able to form any short-term or long-term memories, that is, I remove any trace of memory-traces whatsoever; and lets say I'm observing somebody moving across the street, how would my subjective perception of that person moving in space-time be affected if all my memories of his previous steps are removed. That is, if he does move, how would I see him move. Would I see jumps? would I see no movement at all? I'm not trying to sound deep, I'm trying to explore the connection between the subjective and the objective, and where the fuzzy logic betwixt the two interconnect.

either that or I disprove it, and then have sex with Chloe Moretz because fuck yeah lucid dreaming, I win either way

>hell, I code in my dreams

I'm not trying to add to your knowledge repertoire, I'm just trying to find out how we would even begin to answer some of the questions that were raised in the thread.

I'm confused, are you questioning a person's ability to accurately recall the details of their supposed astral projection?

Dunno why every other Veeky Forums thread falls into solipsism lately, though this one was more destined to than most.

Look, it doesn't matter if the world is real or not. Or if you're the only person or not. Play with us here. These hallucinations of other people you are having are reporting experiences they can share with you, that you yourself seem to have, and they can boil them down to cause and effect, and make predictions they can demonstrate to you.

So yes, even if you are the only consciousness in the universe, and the universe itself is merely a hallucination of your own creation, you can work together with your human hallucinations to work out the consistency of the system behind it all, and invent air conditioning, the internet, or what not.

...and even if your entire experience is being recreated from one moment to the next, and memory is but a delusion, you still have to make all your decisions based on that delusion, and have nothing else to work with, so work with what you got.

It's not as if denying reality is going to let you escape the Matrix or some bullshit.

>either that or I disprove it to myself and no one else, which has no better effect than not believing in mystical bullshit to begin with
Fixed. Also, if you want to learn to lucid dream, focus on that instead, you're not going to get good at controlling your dreams without waking up if you're trying to find out if you can be in the real world instead.

no I'm talking about, in general, if a persons memory was deleted constantly, and his ability to form new memories was taken away, whilst still keep his conscious experience intact, if all the aforesaid was done, whether or not he'd experience movement in space-time (his own, and others).

Objectivity seems to be a tool for learning, subjectivity is the way we interpret our reality.

>So yes, even if you are the only consciousness in the universe, and the universe itself is merely a hallucination of your own creation, you can work together with your human hallucinations to work out the consistency of the system behind it all
Only if you accept first that your hallucinations magically speak factual information about the world from a perspective that you do not have.

Then you're missing the entire point. Convincing yourself of something that is impossible to convince others of is moronic. You are doing nothing but convincing yourself of the power of your imagination.

>thinking your mistakes are the way it should be
>not accepting that 2+5=8 cause a million first graders said so

what the fuck? these subjective states of mind can be induced by chemicals, and perhaps in the future, by other technologies. I'm not trying to convince you of the power of my imagination. These are things you can experiment with yourself.

Thank you, president of the universe. Tell me when you're ready to leave the Chinese room.

Say... The past is a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between your immediate physical sensations and your state of mind.

So what?

Solipsism doesn't change anything in terms of analyzing the world in which you exist, whether it is real or not.

It's not deep. It's just a meaningless possibility that changes nothing. There's no reason to derail every damned thread with it.

I think as long your working memory still exists you still experience time

...that's a good point
however, if a moderately credible scientist were to declare to the world that he'd correctly observed a 20-sided die's position in his dreams for 2 weeks straight that might convince more neutral parties than a kid from /x/

>Its derived forms include whom, an objective form the use of which is now generally confined to formal English
sry buddy but the times they are a changin'

>Only if you accept first that your hallucinations magically speak factual information about the world from a perspective that you do not have.
Said hallucinations are constantly bringing you information you do not seem to have, and they're right often enough that maybe they're useful in whatever dream you think you're having.

Doesn't change the fact you need to shave and get up in the morning or risk said hallucination becoming rather miserable right quick, Mr. Anderson.

please elaborate on what the fuck this thing is

Well, I thought you had implied you expected it to be wrong. If you think there's a chance of fame then do what you want.

You said....
>but I'm asking how real it is, real being defined as being true in all possible worlds, everywhere, everytime, etc.
But from only one perspective, you can only ascertain if this appears to be the case. It is insanely easy to fool yourself about what appears to be the case.

The perception-only-in-present seemed like a huge shift in topic that I have almost nothing to contribute to. I've heard suggestion that consciousness is more of a stream activity, so I think such a hypothetical state would render someone basically braindead.

If you're you're relating it with "what if i did that to myself" - you would never be able to prove to yourself that you were in the state you described. You'd only be sure that in whatever state you were in, x happened.

I'm not him but I had to wear those for a long-term psychology experiment I was a guinea pig for at my university.

Mine at least was used to read electric brainwaves from the brain.

It was cool cause I could move a finger and see the brainwaves spike up on the screen.

If you accept that your hallucinations have such a property, then you use them and conduct sane reproducible science with them as normal. I am sleepy and have lost track of your argument.

It's a hat that electrically stimulates your brain to produce hallucinations.

The more sophisticated ones can induce specific wave states, including dream states, with a maybe 20-30% success rate - usually just end up making everyone else feel sick.

There's actually a tiny industry growing up around these little home made self-induced shock treatment thingies that are supposed to induce states of consciousness, aid with memory, and the like, but these "9v nirvana" devices are, predictably, proving to be rather dangerous.

>Can astral projection be done?
Yes, picrelated: projecting astral light.

Dude, not even a trigger warning!?

I think the problem you're having in understanding what exactly I'm trying to say stems from the fact that you're are not able to distinguish between the subjective state and an objective state. The fact that the subjective state can be changed whatsoever means that collective reality for most of us would probably change if a majority of us started to experience a different subjective state of consciousness, thus making this new subjective state "objective." I'm not claiming that subjective reality is the panoply, the end-all-be-all of the state of affairs in the world. I'm only trying to sneak in the fact that subjective reality has the capability/capacity to affect the objective, seemingly by affecting a majority of people in the world. If what you define as real is predicated on what the majority of the people in the scientific community observe, then all I'm claiming is that it could just as easily change at any given moment according to how your brain interacts with the world, or how it functions schematically. I'm just doubting whether everything is as uniform as you imply it to be. If you tricked the entire world into seeing a natural phenomena a certain way, you'd essentially be forcing them to accept that phenomena on the basis of a majority opinion and/or a constant conjunction of impressions (in the Humean sense).

Which is half the reason science exists as a tool... To break down subjective hogwash into bits that are as objective as possible. To, insomuch as humanly possible, remove the human element.

There's limits to that, of course. We can't break down relay able information into bits more basic than numbers and formulae for instance. And external motivations can cause one to focus on the wrong numbers... But the fact that we can all communicate at all suggests a common and objective reality, and one of the primary goals of science is to uncover that reality and distinguish it from the imagined through constant testing and challenging of accepted norms through constantly improving empirical data and observation.

It maybe everyone decides circles are squares, but if everyone is wrong, and someone is doing science right, someone, will eventually, figure that out, and with luck, he'll reproduce his results enough times that some like minded science folk will begin to listen to him.

Not that such things don't always happen as quickly as we'd like, due to "prevailing wisdom", but most scientists literally make their name by proving other scientists wrong, so it happens more often than not.

In order to astral project you first have to learn how to quiet your mind. It's kind of like being outside in the morning when the birds are chirping and there's a bunch of stuff going on. Can you sit still and forget about everything so you hear the singing? Or can you not bring yourself to and just hear noise no matter how hard you try?

Same concept. It's not about shutting out distracting thoughts, that's the point and the result. But first you must acclimate yourself to nature, like a radio finding its station.

Why do you think Nostradamus spent 8 years strolling the countryside, or Edgar Cayce was said to go out into the wilderness and read the Bible so often he read through it once for every year he lived?

The thing about AP and why it's hard to study is because to do so you must awaken your latent psychic talent. Everything with a soul, has this. However, if the ideal is used for self-aggrandizing, then it's true, like some people on /x/ say, you "lock yourself out" (that's the only thing they get right btw). You don't even have to believe in God, but if you're not a moral person, then forget it.

AP'ing forces you to meet yourself. I.e. any baggage you carry; grudges, perverseness, or idolatry of material or people. Basically, what you devote your most time into. When you're out of your body those are the things you think about that make you indecisive about what you want to do in that state.

There's a difference between discovering that you can't find a square-circle and finding a unicorn somewhere in our universe with a penis. The first case deals with a priori synthetic knowledge, or knowledge that is constructive, amplifying (i.e., tells us something new about the world) and can be confirmed independent of experience. It can be confirmed independent of experience because of the fact that it structures our experience and first makes our experience possible. We wouldn't even be able to have this conversation at all, you're right, if it wasn't for the fact that certain forms of intuition (in the Kantian sense) and certain categories are in place in order to make that experience first possible. That is, there is a given (which is experience) but what must be in a place for that given to be true? well you need to have categories, i.e, a prior synthetic concepts in place to even begin to dissect how your experience is possible. The other case deals with natural phenomena, which is what is under contention here. The natural phenomenon we observe seems to be a product of how our minds function in the first place, and also how our minds intuit the information it receives. My claim was that these forms of intuition and other concepts that make experience possible can, in a way, be hypothetically toyed with, thereby changing what we perceive and believe to be objective phenomenon. The problem is that we're already inherently working with subjective states of formation, to wit, subjective schemata that predetermine what will be classified as real or not real. With these schema changed, we would be ready to conclude a new science, a new way of viewing the world. I'm not denying that science is valid tool, I'm just trying to get you to concede that it is based upon subjective fiddle-faddle and isn't as uniform, absolute or objective as scientists claim it to be.

I'll give it up to different views, but I feel you have simply proposed that irrational belief can spread. It is still possible for the objective truth to be discovered reproducibly and spread in the future. If anything, it seems like pointing out that not everything widely accepted is objectively true, which is obvious. I also highly disagree with the usage of "objective" in quotes - all of humanity claiming something is objectively true does not make that the case.

Science's *goal* is to be objective as possible, but it's a human endeavor, so it can never be entirely objective. It maybe impossible for us to actually conceive of the universe as it really is by our limited design. But Science is a work in constant progress, and as working theories produce practical applications and result in the predicted observations, we have daily evidence as to the progression of said effort.

Until we find a unicorn with a penis somewhere in the universe - then we're fucked and have to start over.

Lmao. Gcod conversation user, nice talking to you.

>cant know nuffin

the only nuffin I can know is that I know nuffin

My bad, bro.