darkideals wrote:You say "hypnosis cannot alter reality", and I respond by asking "what is reality?" Seriously, what is reality? All reality is, is what your 5 senses bring back to your brain and interpret as "the world" you live in.
Imagine for a moment that you have no sight, no smell, no hearing, no touch, no taste, no speech etc.. What would your reality be?...you wouldn't have one! You couldn't talk to anyone, if someone came in front of you then you couldn't see them, if they fed you then you couldn't taste it, you couldn't smell anything, and if they touched you then you wouldn't even feel it if they picked you up and dropped you in a river somewhere. All that our reality is based on is the stimuli that our senses experience and give to the brain, and the brain "makes" it into reality. Without those senses there IS NO reality.
Somebody once said that "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Assuming you have human senses that work okay and don't lie to you, that's a pretty good answer. We don't have to be sure that the world is how we perceive it. As long as we can make predictions about it and see if they come true that's good enough.
You throw up an apple and it falls down. That's reality. With freaky quantum effects it might fall up once in 10^10000 times and that may also be part of reality, but it's so unlikely that most people need not be bothered by it.
And the key thing is that the person giving the hypnosis is using HIS/HER senses to speak to you and snap their fingers etc.. just like you would in "reality". Are their brains and senses any less real than yours? Nope. So why is it that the stimuli given to your mind by THEIR senses is considered "not real" while yours is? For all we know what we consider "reality" might be fake, we could all be in the matrix, and as mentioned in the matrix "we'd never know".
That's mixing up concepts. Their stimulation of your brain is perfectly real. It does however make your brain/senses lie to you about what is actually happening. That doesn't make it real. It just changes your perception. Since you just argued that other people's minds are just as real as your own, it should be a point for why it's not real. They are not participating in your altered perception of the world.
Really, in the end it's all just arguing semantics. "Real" is a useful concept and understood intuitively until you start overthinking it. If you change it to mean "that, which is subjectively perceived" it becomes less useful, because it can mean anything and then you need to make up a new word for "things happening the way they usually happen."
"if a tree falls in an empty forest and nobody hears it does it make a sound"
This one is easy, it's semantics again. The whole issue is that the word "sound" can mean "ripples in a medium" or "perception of those ripples." Split it up and the tree makes ripples in the air, but they are not perceived.
If you become a woman in your mind as well as the minds of the only people who know of your existence, then are you really still a man?
But how likely is that, unless you are a hermit? Are you going to hypnotize your doctor? The ER surgeon if you have an accident? Are you going to stop checking for prostate cancer?