Subverting Reality

Is consciousness something you get when you arrange unconscious bits of matter in the right way (physicalism), or is consciousness its own substance (mentalism or dualism), or, is all matter, in perhaps a looser sense of the word, conscious?
For example…take a beach.

As the day goes by, the beach gets disturbed by all sorts of people, animals and elements such as water, wind and fire.
At the end of the day, the wind will have blown its sand to and fro, the bonfires will have scorched it, turning some of it into glass, people will leave behind their footprints, handprints, bumprints, all manner of prints, and some of their belongings, their refuse.

While these prints and things may grow fainter with time, none of them ever really disappear, so long as it remains essentially what it is, a beach.
They will still exist days, weeks, perhaps even decades later, microscopically, imperceptibly to us, or at least imperceptibly to our consciousness, perhaps everything is perceptible to our subconscious, even events millions of miles away.

In a way, you could liken these disturbances to the beaches memory.
There’s what’s happening on its surface which’s more akin to raw experience, and the fresh indentations they leave which’s akin to fresh memory, and how all disturbances accumulate and compound over time, underneath the surface, forming a repository, however faint, which’s akin to its long term memory.

Similarly the beach responds to all of these experiences, the more you stomp on the it, the more compact it’ll get, the harder and harder it’ll be to disturb it, just as if you beat a person, if you don’t kill them, they will be made stronger and more callous, and what’s going on in one area of the beach affects other areas in various ways, if you stomp on it here, you’ll generate ripples over there, just as our brain cells and regions speak to one another, bestowing the brain/mind the capacity to coordinate its responses.
The beach also moves away from whatever’s, hurting, it.
Is it an organism?

We are not conscious of other peoples consciousness, we infer their consciousness based on the motions their bodies make, but just as we’re experiencing ourselves and them from our point of view, and they’re experiencing themselves and you from their point of view, is the beach, and all of the components it comprises, not experiencing everything from its point of view?

We divide things rigidly into life and nonlife, and say only the latter, particularly if its sentient or at least has a brain, can be conscious, but perhaps everything is alive and conscious on some level, and we can think about them more in this way.
After all, the fact that we feel the need to and come equipped with the hardware and software to divide existence simply into the living and the dead, the conscious and the unconscious, says as much or more about our own consciousness, as it does things themselves.
Things may be much more varied, more complicated, and/or also more related than that.
Living, dead, conscious, unconscious, black, white, 1, 0, but is there no room for anything in between, or outside of these categories?
Or are we all, everything from stars to humans to atoms, basically doing the same thing, but putting our own unique spin on it, our twist, like we’re all doing the same dance, but everyone’s doing it a bit differently, according to their natures, causally, or according to nothing, whimsically?
Perhaps its all of these things I’ve mentioned…and more…and less.
Existence can be thought about in all sorts of meaningful ways.

Is the mind something other than the brain?
Is brain/mind I’m feeling with my thoughts different than the brain/mind I’m feeling with my eyes, when I’m looking at a picture of it taken by a ct scan?
Is the glass I’m feeling with my hand something other than the glass I’m also looking at with my eyes?
Two sorts of perceptions, one thing, or, two sorts of perceptions, two different things?

Maybe everything is totally or partly different depending on which apparatus you 're using to apprehend it?
Maybe everything is totally or partly different depending on which person is apprehending it?
Maybe everything is totally or partly different depending at which time you’re apprehending it?
Maybe everything is many things rather than one thing.
Maybe, we don’t know diddly about reality, existence is open to interpretation, and maybe our science would change, or at least would look different if we began thinking about things in different ways, just as our philosophy and our lives, would.

How many equally valid ways can we rearrange our framework for making sense of reality, do we even have a collective framework, or do you have yours and I have mine?
What would our civilization look like if we adopted a different one?

UFO: Hallucination, hoax or (para)normal phenomenon?
Reality: Hallucination, hoax or normal phenomenon?
When is an experience out of the ordinary?
How out of the ordinary does it have to be to be a hallucination?
Why’re out of the ordinary experiences equated with hallucinations at all?
Would out of the ordinary experiences become more frequent if we began paying more attention to them?

If we look upon the earth and all its contents as being essentially lifeless, mechanical, separate and unconscious, we’ll be more apt to feel about that way, and treat it as such.
And man goes on doing just that, reducing everything into a concrete desert wasteland.
Sometimes I wonder if Nasa might be lying to us about what they found in outer space, the moon and mars, that the universe might be teeming with life we’re just not privy to.

If we regard something as fundamentally unconscious, we’ll be more inclined to treat it unconsciously.
Adopting a different metaphysics may even be essential for our survival.

I’m seeing a lot of doubt creeping in. It’s okay to entertain these thoughts, but we should be mindful that they not lead to an obsession. Doubt has to be handled carefully. And I think it’s best to err on the side of simplicity; better not know than to know the wrong thing. Many people choose to carry it too far, and then start to fill in the blanks with their own projected fears and hopes/mixed with personal fantasy. I am noticing an emergence of these extreme doubters/social pseudo intellectuals on youtube (extreme sceptics that have an alternate explanation) and such, where they are trying to convince everyone that earth is really flat, google maps feeds us false info, government is trying to kill Us by adding fluoride to water, and mercury to vaccines. We are being controlled by electromagnetic waves, and sprayed by chem trails. Also, we never went to the moon, the Egyptian pyramids were built by aliens, and Antarctica holds a secret portal to another dimension. Theories like these are becoming common among extreme doubters.
This seems to be a rather normal consequence of doubting reality for some people, creation of alternate worlds and explanations, one more fantastical than the other. If our reality is not real then what is and how do we get to know it? And this is where pure imagination/fantasy really starts to kick in, because where else are you going to get that information from?

Evmandu, that applies to you too.

I would say go with what makes sense to you, rather than being totally skeptical of mainline thought on the one hand, or totally disinterested in or skeptical of marginal thought on the other.
Try not to be so polarized about it, weigh the observations and interpretations of conventional metaphysicians, scientists and historians against the observations and experimentations of the unconventional, and decide for yourself.
You can also come up with your own ideas about what’s going on, based on your own research.
No two people share the exact same experiences, sorts of thinking or values, even two members of the same cult, so we’re never going to agree on everything.
I’d say get away from cultish thinking, and it could be argued mainline politics and academia themselves can be cultish: all or nothing, black and white, you’re either with us, on the side of light, truth and reason, or against us, with the heretics wallowing in darkness and despair.
No individual or institution can have a monopoly on truth, value or meaning.