So I've been told that evertything on earth is a matetr of perception...I put it to you...is this true? I haev an argument for why it's not, but let's see what more people believe.

Perception is a big part of all things mental and emotional. Physics not so much.

I'll elaborate. When dealing with physical reality, then yes, there are many things concrete, such as freezing and boiling points for water. However when you get into philosophical debates, then yes everything is subjective and depends on perception.

Take this into account: a car smashes into a lightpole. Three people see it. You have three different stories as to how it occured. One could say that the lightpole moved three inches and hit the car. One could say that the man was acting drunk and overcorrected. One could claim that the man was side-swiped. Who is correct? Well, in essence, the fact remains that the car did hit the lightpole. There is no question about it. How it occured is based on perception of the individual.

hmmm...except that in that regard the fact that everything is a matter of perception is in itself a solid fact, and so makes itself untrue. Kind of weird ot think about, but still.

Reality is Our Perception of Life

The narrative of life oscillates between the appearance, the imagination, and the subtle inklings from some deep unknown place. Life pulses and vacillates, and man, from the dawn of time, has pondered the underpinnings of his perception of his essence. The truth lies somewhere amidst the hard factual world, the soft beating of the heart, and the glimmer of our awareness. As humans we continually seek to define reality, to distinguish between what is real and what is imagined, to answer the why, what, and how of our existence. From Plato's theories to modern movies, we strive for answers.

The Fundamentals of Reality

Remember this working definition of reality? Reality is one’s perception of life. With this definition you are empowered to change your reality because reality is a living concept ever changing with your perception from each vantage point of your life. This theory of reality is unique because it outlines a view of life that goes beyond philosophy to practical application. The authors have lived the techniques that changed their reality and have proven that they work. A man that believes that he can and a man that believes he cannot are both right. Each is defined by his own beliefs.

Energy Between The Realms

The elements of conscious reality interact and exchange energy. If a change is produced in one element, there will be a corresponding reaction produced in the other elements. Most of us have accepted our perception of reality as a non-changeable part of our existence. This perception, however, is easily disproved. Our choices impact our reality every moment of every day. Our failure to plan and purposefully choose has given us a sense of fate; but truly our fate is in our own hands, heads, and spirits. We have the tools to change reality from the inside out. By understanding the basic principles and practicing those principles in our daily habits, we can change our lives.

The Power From Harnessed Energy

It is common knowledge that energy is released by accelerating a mass to the speed of light squared (E=MC2), but this mathematical equation doesn’t even touch our every day understanding. Energy is better understood by turning on a light switch, eating a candy bar, or rubbing two sticks together. These kinds of energy are common to us, but there is another type of energy that is unseen. This energy comes from our words, our thoughts, and our imagination. Many have grasped that if by hard work they obtain a college degree and land a better paying job, they have changed their reality. Most have not grasped that by utilizing their words, thoughts, and imagination that they can also change their reality.

Positive Virtue

To make a positive change to your reality you must focus on the positive. This is a habit that can be consciously developed. What is spoken from your mouth is the best place to start working on the positive. If you have a friend, family member, and/or co-worker who will agree to kindly remind you of your goal, your words will soon be consistently positive. Also, you need to become conscious of what you think. Catch yourself when you are mulling and daydreaming. Ask yourself what you were allowing your mind to dwell on. Replace negative thinking with positive words or thoughts. Choose to change the direction of your thinking toward your desired life.

Fear Not!

Fear is an emotion as well as a powerful force. Fear comes in many forms. There is healthy fear -- a respect for things that can harm us. Healthy fear is not really fear at all because there is little or no emotion associated with this type of fear. Instead, proper, healthy fear is a type of wisdom or common sense that helps us to make logical decisions to avoid pain or bodily harm. Healthy fear, or common sense fear, will keep us from stepping in front of a moving vehicle or remind us to take a jacket if it is cold outside.

Eliminating Resistors

When something bad happens, people have a need to place blame for the incident on someone or something. If we blame ourselves, we feel guilt. If we assign blame to another person or people, then we often experience unforgiveness, which can lead to bitterness. If we place the blame on God or the cosmos, the result is unbelief, doubt, and fatalism. If we manage to keep from holding ourselves, others, or God responsible, we still have painful memories and the associated hurt that remains. Guilt, unforgiveness, unbelief, and hurt are the most common and potent resistors preventing us from changing our lives to a more positive reality

The Impact Of Self-Esteem On Your Reality

Self-esteem is the primary mindset that governs your life. Self-esteem is how you esteem or evaluate yourself. Self-esteem has two major components – your estimation of your capabilities and your assessment of your worthiness to receive happiness. Since self-esteem is based upon your judgment of your capabilities and your worthiness, your actual abilities and worth may be totally different from your opinion of the two. An arrogant, narcissistic individual will have an inflated self-esteem; an individual who has contempt for himself will have a diminished self-esteem. A balanced, ideal self-esteem includes high self-confidence, high self-worth, but a reasonable assessment of one’s competences

Time Matters

Some interesting facts about sound, light, and subatomic particles relate to time. Sounds are produced by the vibration of molecules in a material. The vibrations of the person’s vocal cords produce the sound of a person’s voice. These vibrations cause vibrations in the molecules in the air. The vibrations of sound travel in waves made up of kinetic energy. This kinetic energy is transferred from molecule to molecule in matter as it moves farther away from the source of the original sound. The kinetic, sound energy is lost to thermal energy as it travels through matter so that the sound diminishes until it can no longer be heard.

Money Is Just An Idea

Many people are stuck in the paycheck-to-paycheck rut. They work to exist and spend most of their lives working at jobs that barely meet their needs. They think if they only had more money, their lives would be great. Unmet desires are the norm instead of the exception. Often they hate their jobs until they lose them, and blame the system for all their frustration and unmet expectations. Hope may exist in unlikely lottery winnings or inheritances from some tightwad relative. But, the day-to-day routines are unfulfilling, disappointing, and seemingly futile. Monetary obligations consume the thoughts of those individuals participating in the

True Prosperity

America’s forefathers thought of true prosperity as being health, wealth and wisdom. Being healthy alone is not true prosperity. Though you may have your health, a constant bombardment of financial stress would probably chip away at even the strongest, positive attitude and would also eventually erode your health. A homeless man may be healthy, but he probably doesn’t enjoy relationships with a loving family, keep his belly satisfied, or keep his body warm on cold nights. The homeless man may be free from debt and avoid paying taxes, but he is not successful or prosperous. Being wealthy alone is not true prosperity. Many men have set their course on achieving wealth at any cost, sacrificing the relationships with their mates and children only to find that the riches they obtained were a monument to incorrect thinking.

And so this still remains an absolute truth: That everything is a matter of perception. All of reality, according to this...which is very wise, I reread it many times. But the statement and idea undo themselves...it is circular, as is all of life. If everything is a matter of perception, then everything cannot be, simply because for that statement to hold true, it would have to be an absolute truth, and be true for everyone, everywhere. And in that, it is not debatable, it is not a matter of perception.

This is a frustrating argument for me sometimes. Because I want to believe, have always believed, that everything IS a matter of perception. But this argument ruins that for me, so if anyone can talk me out of it...find a realyl good counter argument that undeniably makes the above false, I would be grateful, and they would be very wise indeed.

Ah, but its only an absolute truth if you believe it is an absolute truth. Some people, like yourself believe that all things cant just be a matter of perception because if they where it would be absolute, however other think you are just being difficult and argumentative and will disagree with you intern no matter what meaning a different point of perspective that contradicts with your, ie a different perspective which means more than one possibility, neither set which mean a matter of perspective which, well you get the picture.

If I put your brain in a jar and hooked it up to a virtual reality room. From MY point of view, your point of view is an illusion, but from YOUR point of view your world is completely real and tangible, hovewer, you cannot know of my existence unless i decide to manifest myself in your world.

Likewise, I have no way of knowing if MY point of view is in turn an illusion as well

Therefore everything is a matter of perspective

Perception is what you think you see, feel, hear, smell, taste, or know.

Alvin and the Chipmunks screwed my perception. Now I'm seeing double.

Being difficult and argumentative is how I learn...I am skeptical of most things, and so I lead myself (or others help me) into a conclusion that makes sense to me and becomes a belief.
You're right though...this is just one of those topics where I know my argumetn makes some sort of sense, and yet so do others...it becomes circular, which is sort of the significance of everything being a matter of perception anyway.

Ah. So basically, even the fact that everything is a matter of perception cannot be certain, and is in itself a matter of perception?

Perception is relative and speculative. Learn to live with it.

Hey hey I get it now thanx. I just meant that I had a similar argument with someone not too far back, and had sicne adopted their point of view since I could at the time think of no better argument. Things like this...is how I learn and change. Now I have heard better arguments than his, and what I believed before (that everything is indeed a matter of perception) makes even more sense than before!

[germanaccent]'hey man, if you ever figure out what real is, you come and tell us, ok?'[/germanaccent]

Another approach would be to discuss the "thing in itself" ( I cannot even begin to spell the german term for this) and whether or not we can trulu know what reality is. For it can be argued that since we are limited by our perceptions, and thus to conclusions drawn from said perceptions, we can never truly know the "thing in itself". But it has also been argued that our perceptions DO reveal the "thing in itself" and so what we percieve as reality is real. ( I tend to lean more towards the former than the later, made me VERY unpopular in modern philosophy class last year.)

Edit: I found what my teacher called the "thing in itself", "Ding an Sich"

Even from a physical perspective, most of our perception is extrapolation. For example, our eyes only actually see a thirty degree (I think, it might be forty-five) area and our brain extrapolates it out to ninety degrees. We don't know our brain does this because we're only aware of what we perceive - but our perception only has a tenuous connection to reality at best.

That said, I dislike subjectivism. It gives people too much credit.

So someone else (not on the forums) told me the following, and it makes a lot of sense to me:

Perception is subjective. Absolutes are objective. Since virtually everything we encounter in the world we do from the subjective point of view, everything - even absolutes - is filtered through our own life's experience, knowledge base, etc. Therefore, even absolutes are a matter of perception.

I pose this question as an example: red is, well, red. If you need to be very specific, red is listed in PhotoShop (as an art standard) as the color #FF0000. That the world accepts THAT particular color as RED isn't really argued (although I suppose you could). For the purpose of this conversation, let's accept that the color #FF0000 is RED. Here's where perception matters:

no one else has EVER seen the world through MY eyes. Everything I see through MY eyes is how I've learned it. Now let me ask you: how do YOU know that what I see as RED appears the same to me as it does to you? You've learned that the color you see as RED is the same color I see as RED. It's the color at the top of the traffic light that means stop. But for all I know what YOU see as RED is really GREEN or BLUE... I don't KNOW what color YOU see because I'VE never looked through YOUR eyes with YOUR brain. Some people are color blind. How do THEY see RED?

RED may be an absolute as defined by #FF0000, but how each of us sees it is entirely based on what we've learned and the particular perceptive organs in our body and how the data gets translated by our brain. Therefore...

Everything is a matter of perception... even how you interpret that statement.

Yeah, it's that kind of pseudo depth that just gets annoying.

I could argue with that - and there are arguments against it, believe me - but I don't long extending those sorts of debates. I find it best to leave those debates to people who are particularly fond of marijuana.

As your avatar says, you're very spiteful, aren't you?

It's a bunch of circular "wonder" when a certain analytic view is applied to a narrow concept. You may as well wonder about whether or not the words you hear and see are the words others hear and see. Or why some arbitrary sounds were selected over other equally arbitrary sounds.

Aside from the fact that we are seemingly capable of communication wherein we share concepts and experiences and can successfully convey such to one another, it's pretty irrelevant anyway.

And that, mi amigo, is what makes it so much fun to discuss. It doesn't matter at the end of the day, but to an annoyingly curious person such as myself, it is quite fun to ponder when you're bored.

I prefer something with a useful function of some description.

understandable. example?

Ethics, in the purely theoretical. Contrary to the common crapness of opinion, there are answers. We don't have to agree to disagree.

I like that idea right there...and I hateit when peopel say that to me..."agree to disagree"...it never really made any sense to me to begin with

"Agree to disagree" is a term used as an amicable way to end a debate in which neither side will budge. Its just saying, "we won't agree, so lets drop it and agree that we have differing views."

The thing about perception is that it is subjective. A classic example would be: a person got assaulted. 3 witnesses give their statement. Person 1 says: It was a tall hairy colored man. Person 2 says: it was an average height built person with a 5 o'clock shadow. Person 3 says: it was a small slender light skinned person.

All three are describing the same person as they see it.

Anything that isn't a concrete fact is up to subjectivity.

It makes sense. It's just wrong.


And everything that is happens to be subject to perception. What we believe informs our brain on what we see. There are more neural pathways from our brain to our ears than the reverse: our brain tells our ears what we're listening for. It's why foreign languages sound like complete gibberish, an endless stream of sounds, but our own speech sounds so easy to understand and separate into words and sentences.

Not everything happens is subjective. If I were to kill you ... you're dead. Now, how anyones perceve the death is completely subjective, but the fact that the person is dead has no subjectivity about it. Anyone's perception will not make you any less physically dead.

Well, perhaps you didn't actually 'kill' them but rather 'freed their souls from a physical captivity'? See, once again, its all perspective.

Fact remains... dead people become inanimate due to failure of the brain, heart, and other vital organs. They then begin to decay. Until my undead plague gets perfected

Well, they aren't 'dead,' simply 'awaiting the afterlife.'

The body is dead. All the cells are dead. The afterlife is debatable.

How can you be certain?

All of your experience, all of your senses, are purely programmed by the brain. Your existence is what it feels like to be a mind but that mind is purely perception. Somebody stabs you in the webbing between your thumb and index finger and it hurts, but that pain isn't being felt where you got stabbed. It's all in the brain and you feel it elsewhere because it's how your brain is perceiving some sort of stimulus.

All the physical "facts" in the world are just perceptions. That doesn't make them real or true. Schizophrenics frequently experience events that are as real to them as your last meal was to you but only they can experience it. It's not "really" happening.

Aw, Skepticism. This was my favorite section in moder philosophy, though no-one else in my class could wrap there brain around the idea that one could not only question the nature of reality, but to doubt reality itself. I loved how this one guy in particular gave a very passionate and impromptu speach about how that was the dumbest thing he had ever heard. He got very frustrated as the teacher gave perfect counters to every argument he had for why reality is as we perceive it.

I know what you mean. I like to tune out when people in lectures start asking questions unless I told them what to ask.

The best way to make someone who is using opinions the wrong way shut-up, is to strangle them and keep saying 'It is my opinion I am not strangling you!

I have a long list of insults pre-prepared for that sort of thing.

Nice. I would like to see that list...
wait it's you, maybe not so much

In the interest of them seeming off-the-cuff, I don't memorise them in the sense that I remember all the words exactly as planned. I leave them in my memory and let them fly out on their own.

whatever works