Everything is an illusion

[blp]

Yes, well...

I've just been reading How To See Yourself As You Really Are by the Dalai Lama. I have read other Buddhist things, and while it is intriguing, I can't help the feeling that it is... plain nonsense. Yes, everything is fleeting. Yes, material things don't necessarily bring happiness. Fact is, though, and as un-spiritual as it may sound, those material things often do bring happiness! And while wealth may not make you happy, poverty sure can be relied upon to make you miserable...

'I've been poor and I've been rich and rich is better' - common saying

'All I ask for is the chance to discover that money can't buy me happiness.' - Spike Milligan

The common economic wisdom now is that happiness increases with wealth up to a certain point, then the correlation stops. The plateau is not very high - it's just a matter of having enough to get by and something left over for enjoyment. Vast wealth, or even mildly excessive wealth, it seems, do not buy happiness (and may even decrease it).

A guy I met recently had briefly fallen into the world of finance. The (vastly wealthy) people he met there were overworked and unhappy, but unable to imagine even small reductions in their circumstances. One of them was having his pay cut from £250K to £200K a year and was furious about it. Another, who was on similar money, advised my friend not to make a life for himself in the job: 'Don't do what I do.' Why didn't he just stop? I asked. 'It's just not the way they think', said my friend.

[Sweets America]

Just wanted to say I personally agree with Blaze. I really appreciate these kinds of thoughts, they soothe me. I practically know nothing of Buddhism so I cannot reallly talk about it, but what Blaze said reminded of Kerouac's book The Dharma Bums, which I greatly loved, and in this book he explains how everything is an illusion, how human life is so little compared to the universe, how we can be happy and find the nirvana when we realize that we just do not exist because our life is so short that it's as if we were already dead anyway, and I loved these ideas, it really made me feel good.
I loved what he said about meditating on the emptiness of the universe, how the universe is only perceived through our senses, and how we are nothing, and when we realize this, we can relax and feel that we are not only part of the emptiness, but we are indeed this emptiness, and since everything is made of the same emptiness, we can feel compassion for the whole universe.

That also made me think of Borges' essay on Time, how time does not exist, just like space, and how time is not something chronological as we usually perceive it.

[DapperDrake]

everything is an illusion

That I can agree with, but you have to extend it to everything, you can't put human life in a box and say "that is an illusion", that seems pretty absurd to me.

In fact I would say you have it all back-to-front, life is no illusion but everything else is illusion. Descartes famous "I think therefore I am" - we do exist, that is to say I exist, you are just an illusion - an idea in my mind partially conjured by my senses and partially by my imagination, you are not real, you do not exist.
I'm happy to say that is a fact, but I'm also happy to concede that from your perspective the converse is true - to you I am an illusion, I do not exist.

Or at least so I suppose, of course I can't really know anything about you (assuming you are more than just a construct in my mind) because all I have of you is an impression, a few chemicals and electrical impulses in my brain, or so I'm told, of course that's something I'm supposing as well.

In fact of course we can't really know that there is anything outside of ourselves, what's to say that our senses are what we think they are - perhaps the are just a wonderful aspect of our imagination, with no real external stimuli. Perhaps our minds are being fed information that creates the illusion of a tactile spatial reality, with people, animals, wind, compound interest, cup cakes and pain.

but that's not really the point, that point is that the illusion is solid, its our illusion - it matters not one jot whether the world exists outside of me because quite simply it doesn't - everything I perceive exists only in my mind, what's really "out there" if anything, is certainly something quite different to what exists in my mind.

The universe I live in, every single aspect, exists only in my mind. When my mind ceases to exist so does that universe, that reality or world or whatever that I was living in is destroyed completely.

I guess if everything is an illusion then that illusion is our reality.

[NikolaiI]

everything is an illusion

That I can agree with, but you have to extend it to everything, you can't put human life in a box and say "that is an illusion", that seems pretty absurd to me.

In fact I would say you have it all back-to-front, life is no illusion but everything else is illusion. Descartes famous "I think therefore I am" - we do exist, that is to say I exist, you are just an illusion - an idea in my mind partially conjured by my senses and partially by my imagination, you are not real, you do not exist.
I'm happy to say that is a fact, but I'm also happy to concede that from your perspective the converse is true - to you I am an illusion, I do not exist.

Or at least so I suppose, of course I can't really know anything about you (assuming you are more than just a construct in my mind) because all I have of you is an impression, a few chemicals and electrical impulses in my brain, or so I'm told, of course that's something I'm supposing as well.

In fact of course we can't really know that there is anything outside of ourselves, what's to say that our senses are what we think they are - perhaps the are just a wonderful aspect of our imagination, with no real external stimuli. Perhaps our minds are being fed information that creates the illusion of a tactile spatial reality, with people, animals, wind, compound interest, cup cakes and pain.

but that's not really the point, that point is that the illusion is solid, its our illusion - it matters not one jot whether the world exists outside of me because quite simply it doesn't - everything I perceive exists only in my mind, what's really "out there" if anything, is certainly something quite different to what exists in my mind.

The universe I live in, every single aspect, exists only in my mind. When my mind ceases to exist so does that universe, that reality or world or whatever that I was living in is destroyed completely.

I guess if everything is an illusion then that illusion is our reality.

Yes, the life of an animal is just as much an illusion as the life of a human. The question comes from: what is observing? Because the answer is actually: the whole system is observing itself. Individual consciousness means nothing because there isn't anything individual without the whole. In reality, the individual is related to the whole, and neither is greater or lesser. The individual is the same as the whole, in quality, though not quantity. So there is actually no difference between the whole and the individual.

If life is illusion, then it just means that we don't know where we are. It doesn't mean that there is one reality, and then another reality, it just means we don't know what reality is-- or what we are, for that matter. What are we? We are souls, and this means our natural state is knowledge, rather than confusion; is peace, rather than anxiety; is eternity, rather than temporary. We are in illusion because we do not realize this. I only say we are in illusion as much as there is suffering.

One part of what would be considered illusion is the idea of separateness. But it is actually more than that.

[blp]

Has anyone mentioned Kant? I'm slowly going through The Critique of Pure Reason at the moment and the first chapter is very much on this time and space theme that Sweets America and others have mentioned.

Kant's idea seems to be not that everything is an illusion, but that we simply have no means available to ourselves of knowing what absolute, transcendental reality is. All we have are our methods of representing reality to ourselves. Time and space are these methods. How do we know that they are methods of representation? Well, we know that we cannot imagine reality without them.

In fact, says Kant, they are what makes it possible for us to perceive objects. This seems self-evidently true. The tricky part, which I'm not sure I quite get, is that he also says that other than acting as subjective ways of representing objects to us, time and space do not exist. I think the point may be that, if they are not objects in themselves, they cannot be said to have any objective reality.

Schopenhauer uses this to argue that there is, effectively, no such thing as death. If, at the point of death, our perceptual faculties disappear, it 'follows' that time and space do too. This renders the (fundamentally temporal) concept of death meaningless. Schopenhauer extrapolates from this to defend the idea of metempsychosis (reincarnation).

[jgweed]

Kant's point is that everything we know must exist in space and time, because the transcendental aesthetic is the condition of our knowing; granted the condition, granted the conditioned.
One might argue, for example, that the similarity of "minds" means that these minds function alike in many cases and different in others. Where there is similarity of function there is similarity of objects of cognition. Thus humans and dogs, insofar as they sense objects in the same way, see the same objects. But dogs hear (at least) sounds we do not, and in that sense, their perceived world differs from ours.
It may also be argued that language, in a way, assures a commonality of perception and thought, since its origins appear to the socially transcendental. If one argues that knowledge is socially constructed, knowledge functions much like Kantian space and time.

To say that everything is "in" the mind, while theoretically possible, seems not to account for many things. For example, there would be no reason or explanation for the time continuum of past/now/future or cause and effect. Events could easily float around willy-nilly or move backwards if they were simply our idea. Again, there would be no reason for the endurance of objects; Fido during the morning walk would not necessarily be Fido sleeping at night. Nor, if everything were "in" the mind, could one explain either world history or indeed our own. The vast multiplicity of the every growing encompassing of facts would be, one would think, beyond the ability of any imagination to construct ex nihilo, as it were.
Then, too, absolute idealism seems to depend on the existence of some-thing called "mind." And by implication, the "mind" would be born full-grown like Athena from the head of Zeus; yet in fact, even our own individual experience seems to show that we "learn" or perhaps better, that our world continues to expand through our lives. If everything were simply and only mental, then one would think that everything would exist "in" the mind from the beginning, and at least in the mind, there would be no passing away or coming to be.

And of course, idealism must be able to point to the existence of at least one "mind." But more and more, don't we understand by mind some extremely complex, dependent on all sorts of circumstances, and not a unitary substance that is easily identifiable?

[mukta581]

GOD is far from every illusion
GOD is heights truth above all illusions
But life is mystery
GOD is mystery too.
Still we are in deep fantasy
We are still in slumber
Life is full of anxious
Some time it seems empty
Some time it seems full of gloom
full of illusion
GOD is far from every illusion
GOD is heights truth above all illusions!!!!!

[blp]

Kant's point is that everything we know must exist in space and time, because the transcendental aesthetic is the condition of our knowing; granted the condition, granted the conditioned.
One might argue, for example, that the similarity of "minds" means that these minds function alike in many cases and different in others. Where there is similarity of function there is similarity of objects of cognition. Thus humans and dogs, insofar as they sense objects in the same way, see the same objects. But dogs hear (at least) sounds we do not, and in that sense, their perceived world differs from ours.
It may also be argued that language, in a way, assures a commonality of perception and thought, since its origins appear to the socially transcendental. If one argues that knowledge is socially constructed, knowledge functions much like Kantian space and time.

I may be wrong, jgweed (I'm still struggling to get to grips with Kant) and I may not even be right about what I think you're saying, but I think you've misunderstood. Kant's point is that everything we know only exists for us in space and time - and outside of our own perceptual framework, space and time cannot be said to have any meaning at all. Space and time are what we bring to the situation in order to know, not just the condition of our knowing. They are our methods of representing objects to ourselves.

This really has nothing to do with the similarity or difference of minds, though I spent quite a while thinking it did. Kant's point is not simply that we have a certain kind of mind (or eye or ear) that perceives in a way different from that of another mind such as a dog's or a bee's or a person's who is colour blind. The difference between perceptual faculties certainly interesting and one can extrapolate from it that there is no absolute reality and, in this sense, everything is illusory. But Kant goes beyond this. He gives the example of a rainbow, saying, yes, we can show how this is illusory within the framework of our perceptual mode, but from the point of view of how we represent objects to ourselves, it doesn't matter, it's simply another object like any other - in that we are only able to perceive it, or anything, thanks to our modes of representation - time and space, which must be common to all minds that perceive, no matter how different they are in their perceptual abilities.

We can represent to ourselves what a different kind of perceiving mind would experience - the 'fractured' vision of the bee or the absence of colour in a dog's vision, or the way sounds it hears that we can't would sound. But we cannot imagine reality without time and space. Yet, absolute, transcendental reality, which we can never perceive or represent to ourselves, is devoid of these things, according to Kant. This is something he proves logically, not scientifically, which is important at a historical point where philosophy and science were coming to be seen as distinct from one another.

[JoanS]

says who? descartes? dont believe to that christian thinker... everyone can say so.. me too... but what he says is truth...

[jgweed]

I think we are saying the same thing, but in different ways, and perhaps I was not careful to distinguish a more contemporary illustration/perspective/example/analogy (drawn from biology and linguistics) involving the transcendental aesthetic, from the Kantian original, which argues that the pure intuition of space and time is prior to all experience, and indeed makes experience possible (e.g., Prolegomena, part one).Given this analysis, the noumena cannot be known, and for that reason discussion of it ends in antimonies.

[blp]

I think we are saying the same thing, but in different ways, and perhaps I was not careful to distinguish a more contemporary illustration/perspective/example/analogy (drawn from biology and linguistics) involving the transcendental aesthetic, from the Kantian original, which argues that the pure intuition of space and time is prior to all experience, and indeed makes experience possible (e.g., Prolegomena, part one).Given this analysis, the noumena cannot be known, and for that reason discussion of it ends in antimonies.

OK, that seems closer to what I understand.

Slavoj Zizek suggests what might be a contemporary, and more scientifically concrete spin on those antinomies. He compares the way, when you zoom in close on an object in a computer game, it breaks down, and the similar breakdown into fuzzy logic that occurs at the quantum level. It's as if, he says, God, the ultimate programmer, just didn't think we'd look that closely at his creation, so didn't properly bother with that bit.

[CognitiveArtist]

Interesting discussion.

I think if everything is an illusion that means there is something really real which we're not grasping, as everything we know is an illusion. This is going off the definition of illusion in my dictionary: "false or unreal perception or belief". I also wonder what's gained by accepting the statement "everything is an illusion". Either "every thing is an illusion" meaning every material thing & item in the world is illusory, or "everything is an illusion" meaning our seemingly non-material thoughts & concepts are illusory, along with all material things in the world. The former I think soon gets contradictory and lapses into Cartesian dualism, whereas the latter is so useless it may as well be rejected. The idea that we are living in the wrong reality (living inside a false & unreal everything) I don't find a very good idea. The idea that there is no such thing as "reality" or things which are really real I am partial towards.

Slavoj Zizek suggests what might be a contemporary, and more scientifically concrete spin on those antinomies. He compares the way, when you zoom in close on an object in a computer game, it breaks down, and the similar breakdown into fuzzy logic that occurs at the quantum level. It's as if, he says, God, the ultimate programmer, just didn't think we'd look that closely at his creation, so didn't properly bother with that bit.

The Elvis of cultural theory, I agree that Zizek's ideas are very interesting. Although one thing to keep in mind about Zizek is whenever he is talking about something, its as if he is in a dialogue with other thinkers whilst he is talking about a subject. The end result is often very original ideas, but his ideas often have very firm inspirations (not at all to discredit the value or thought of Zizek in anyway, the point being if you want to get Zizek you have to understand others, especially Lacan).
This idea of our zoom breaking down and fuzzy logic resulting I think is exactly Lacan's idea of "the real". The real is that which escapes signification, or that which we lose and cannot conceive of when we gain language. I think Kant's idea of the sublime comes rather close to the Zizek/Lacan idea of the real, both emphasise that some things are experienced as so overwhelming that we are unable to grasp/conceive of them, yet there is some kind of experience of this loss to grasp/conceive of this overwhelming thing.
Another little thing is Lacan's psychoanalysis isn't judgmental that we are distant from the real, and that people primarily live on the symbolic order and imaginary order.

It's all a very interesting way of talking about reality and our experience. Kant also I am really just discovering now, and despite him being an older and always noted philosopher I haven't paid much attention to him (I do also find him very difficult next to many other philosophers, including contemporaries).

[jgweed]

Precisely. If everything is an illusion, it seems that we are owed an explanation about what everything is an illusion (OF), and those who so argue cannot provide this whilst remaining consistent.
It is one thing to say that we can be deceived by appearances, and another entirely to say they are appearances (OF) some other reality that is "really real."

We look at a painting from a distance, and it appears to be a portrait of a late medieval prince; we approach it to get a closer look, and discover that it "actually" is a collection of fruit and vegetables. We move backwards and forwards, our attention drawn to the optical illusion, until we find the more or less precise distance that it occurs. We knew how to resolve (and understand) the illusion by concentrating our attention on it, and following clarifying procedures; in this example, there is no reference to some meta-reality in working through the conundrum.

Cheers,
John

[blp]

This idea of our zoom breaking down and fuzzy logic resulting I think is exactly Lacan's idea of "the real". The real is that which escapes signification, or that which we lose and cannot conceive of when we gain language. I think Kant's idea of the sublime comes rather close to the Zizek/Lacan idea of the real, both emphasise that some things are experienced as so overwhelming that we are unable to grasp/conceive of them, yet there is some kind of experience of this loss to grasp/conceive of this overwhelming thing.
Another little thing is Lacan's psychoanalysis isn't judgmental that we are distant from the real, and that people primarily live on the symbolic order and imaginary order.

Hello CA. Nice to chat to another Zizek reader. Sorry it's taken me a while to get back to this.

I think Zizek's quite explicit about the the Kantian sublime and the Lacanian Real being pretty much the same idea. It's interesting though that if Kant had used a term like 'the Real' he would probably have meant something different - his notion of transcendental reality, which is not just beyond symbolisation, but beyond our capacity to perceive at all. Or

is that really so different after all? I mean, what is really beyond symbolisation other than that which is completely beyond experience? In which case, what does this mean for the definition of the sublime?

I admit this question's a bit beyond me since I haven't even got to the Critique of Judgment, which is where the beautiful, sublime and monstrous are discussed. But it seems to me that people go around happily claiming that the sublime is beyond symbolisation all the time, yet keep managing to convey it through symbols, whether in music, literature or visual art. Not an easy brief, I'll grant, but it does happen.

Two other philosophical ideas seem pertinent, Derrida's 'There is nothing outside the text' and Wittgenstein's 'Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent.' I would say, the latter could refer to Kant's Transcendental Reality, the former could refer to everything within Kant's Phenomenal (perceivable) Reality and are, thereby, not mutually exclusive. The sublime, then, and perhaps the Lacanian Real too, would be the furthest limit, the point where the ability to symbolise experience threatens to break down.

Or

Lacan's Real actually does introduce a new idea, a second level of remove from 'reality', as follows: first, already, as a condition of experience, we must be separated from Kant's Transcendental Reality, but are able to experience, prior to the acquisition of language, The Real. Second, the acquisition of langauge separates us inexorably from this initial, non-linguistic experience of Phenomenal Reality.

This idea simultaneously has an interesting psychological effect on me, in that talking (writing) about it seems to rather wake me up. At the same time, it seems inadequate. From what I can understand in Zizek, the Real is a lot more than just a baby's eye view of the world.

[blp]

But then again, for all I know, this 'baby's eye view' of the world is something pretty mad and overwhelming and quite adequate to the notion of The Real.

Years ago, I read a book by a young doctor who'd investigated drugs. As part of his researches, he'd tried LSD (though not addictive drugs like heroin or cocaine). He found LSD's mind-altering process wearying. He took it with his wife and describes sitting in bed with her, both desperate for the experience to end and their ability to percieve coherent reality to return. However, he also hypothesised that the experience was analagous to that of a baby's and cited the experience of seeing his own infant son touching himself on the head, then looking up in shock to see what had touched it.

This seems to accord with Lacan's notion that the infant experiences its own being as fragmentary. At the Lacanian 'mirror stage', the child becomes fascinated with its own image precisely because it presents a more coherent bodily image than the child is aware of.

Ah well, who knows? If Kant is a tough nut to crack, Lacan is positively rocklike. The question I have at this point is, what, if any, is the relation between the child's 'loss' of the Real, its greater feeling of physical coherence (which I imagine remains somewhat incomplete in a lot of people anyway) and its acquisition of language? It seems self evident that, ultimately, some greater ability is being acquired, the ability to function and manipulate the world to meet one's needs etc., but it's worth bearing in mind that a loss of some sort occurs too. And perhaps its in our terrifying/wonderful experiences of the sublime that we are able to acknowledge that loss and give it its due (i.e. admit that we've lost is not just terrifying and debilitating, but wonderful too). This would say a lot a lot a lot about the really extreme difficulty of being human.

Oh I don't know.