Or tiresome, witness New Age folderol.
(But, yes, definitely great fun!)
Your first question was
Your second question (to me at least) was
And by pure hallucination you clarified that you mean
Your third question was
After some back and forth you clarified that you were asking the question (to me at least)
So noumena, hallucinations, mind-dependence and mind-independence (and yes, what is meant by the word ‘mind’ is inseparable from your question) - as well as processes - have all elicited a response from me.
But so far, no substantial or interactive responses from you.
So we have failed to get to the bottom of any of them. We still don’t know, for instance, whether you even accept that an hallucination takes place within a brain (it seems you do not, otherwise you would have said as much).
I’m not being disrespectful, but I don’t know if it’s really worth playing a game of flitting from question to question - like a butterfly - never settling on any question, or getting to the heart of any question.
So why not (if I might suggest) not remain with one question - such as what do you mean by an hallucination - until it is finished with?
Your third question was
Do ‘processes’ exist independent of thought?
The question I posed about processes was the start of a new ‘musing,’ not related to the earlier investigation into noumena. Sorry if that was unclear! I should find a way to separate musings to avoid confusion.
So noumena, hallucinations, mind-dependence and mind-independence (and yes, what is meant by the word ‘mind’ is inseparable from your question) - as well as processes - have all elicited a response from me.
But so far, no substantial or interactive responses from you.
I put some good time and thought into my responses to you. (Don’t forget, I’m Less is More Man!) If you find none of them them substantial, then maybe we have different notions and expectations of what is and isn’t substantial?
I’m not being disrespectful, but I don’t know if it’s really worth playing a game of flitting from question to question - like a butterfly - never settling on any question, or getting to the heart of any question.
Yes, I flit, it’s true! It’s how I like to explore, comes naturally to me. I don’t know if it prevents me getting to the heart of the question but it definitely slows things down.
So why not (if I might suggest) not remain with one question - such as what do you mean by an hallucination - until it is finished with?
Sure, but bear in mind that, as I said earlier, the hallucination parts of this thread are for me unrelated to the process inquiry. If you want to connect them, or feel they are connected, go for it!
By hallucinating I mean seeing (hearing, feeling) something that isn’t actually there, so there is no external basis for the seen, just an internal basis, the mind of the seer. Contrast this with a mirage, where you see something that isn’t actually there, but there’s an external basis for it: heat waves.
I can imagine the puncturing of the “knower-known gestalt” balloon, but I can’t imagine its dissolution without a clue as to its form.
This sounds interesting but is a bit inscrutable to me Inquiry. Is there another way you can express this?
You used two metaphors, The first conjured a deflating balloon; the second conjured nothing because, what does “dissolution” look like?
Oh. I don’t recall where you said the topic of hallucination was secondary or irrelevant? It was part of your very first reply to me. You said:
and
And because you have used similar language before, I took this to be a key analogy for understanding what you were saying.
You were responding to the idea that an appearance always implies some kind of ground of appearance, and challenging this idea by suggesting that there can be an appearance without any ground: i.e. an hallucination.
You repeated this again in a further reply:
And you have put it into words again in your most recent reply:
This means that you reject everything I have said about what an hallucination is. But you have not engaged with the content of what I said about hallucinations, and so I am unable to see precisely why you have rejected what I have said (about hallucinations).
Your basic view seems to be that hallucinations can take place without a brain, without a nervous system, without a world of objects - purely as a projection of a contentless subject (this is the implication of everything you have said).
But you do not make any attempt to argue reasonably, or persuasively, why this is so.
An ordinary hallucination involves the projection of sense-experience in the absence of an immediate external stimulus for those sense-perceptions.
The word immediate is important here, because hallucinations do have chemical, biological and neurological causes; and - in their content at least - hallucinations reflect a relationship of the brain to a real physical world (an hallucination is always an hallucination of something).
Strongly active hallucinations are relatively rare, but most people have experienced weak hallucinations when very tired, on the cusp of sleeping or waking, when exhausted by vigorous exercise, when fasting from food, and so on. So these biological factors are the immediate cause of such hallucinations.
Other immediate causes for hallucinating are: hallucinogenic drugs, sleep paralyses, schizophrenia, psychosis, epilepsy, substance withdrawal, and other forms of mental and physical disturbance. All such disturbances imply a local brain and an external environment in which to occur.
Strong or weak hallucinations take place of course when we are awake, but if we look at a more common hallucinatory experience that everyone has on a daily basis - that of dreaming in sleep - it might help to make this relationship of hallucinations to an external world more clear.
A dream is an hallucination that takes place when the brain is resting in sleep. It can project an entirely convincing world that has all the hallmarks of waking experience: one can see people and places, experience fear and pleasure, feel sadness and joy. One can have all kinds of apparently real perceptions of a world, that on waking disappears.
But are dreams truly based on nothing? Have they truly nothing to do with the external world?
No. The content of a dream is based on one’s memory of objective waking events. While the immediate cause of a dream is the objective brain shutting down in order to rest (or disturbances in the immediate environment).
What is an hallucination but a form of waking dream?
Thanks. I’ll have a look at this again tomorrow (it is too late for me now).
The two quotes about hallucinations were both from the noumena ‘musing’ on 6/17, the process musing (which we’re in here) started 6/18 and is its own thing, not a continuation of the noumena discussion.
But, yes, let’s return to hallucinations, see if we can fix what needs fixing.
Not my view! This from Oxford Languages sums up my view quite nicely:
To hallucinate is to experience a seemingly real perception of something not actually present.
When I suggested pure hallucination has no ‘mind-independent referent’ or ‘underlying existent that is seen/heard/felt,’ I meant it has no referent/existent that is actually there. Obviously a hallucination can have a referent that is not actually there. If a child has a high fever and sees a horse in their bedroom, the referent horse exists but is not actually there. I don’t know if it’s possible to hallucinate something which is utterly referent free.
Yes. And, as was made clear in the rest of my reply, hallucinations are not merely referent-free with respect to their content, but neither are they a-causal with respect to their simple actuality.
-
The child sees a horse in her room that isn’t there, because she has seen a horse before in her waking life of general perception and has remembered what a horse looks like (the memory of which is stored in her brain). This is the content of the hallucination.
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And the child sees a horse in her room that isn’t there, because she currently has a high-fever, which has effected her brain in a particular way, chemically and physically. This is the immediate cause of her seeing a non-existent horse, and constitutes the actuality of the hallucination.
So, as with dreams, hallucinations depend on an objective world both for their content as well as for their actuality.
Therefore one can, if one wishes, use the empirical fact of hallucinations as an analogy or metaphor to point to a feeling we might have of the unreality of the world - such as when a poet says that ‘life is but a dream’.
But then it is a metaphor and an analogy only. It is not true literally.
What do you mean by objective world?
What we see (and grok) is produced by the brain - based on what it knows.
Consider the person blind from birth who suddenly (via surgery for example - true story) has access to the same occular data as normal-sighted people.
What they are presented with (the controlled hallucination projected by the brain - as experience is sometimes defined by neurologists) is a for a time incomprehensible : a mish mash of what we (who are used to our habitual vision) would call : colours, shapes, perspective, movement, separate objects entering and exiting the field etc - but is experienced just as bluuurghh.
Here’s an interesting take on the nature of process by N. Rescher:
A process consists in an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in conjoint coordination in line with a definite program.
The ‘in line with a definite program’ is noteworthy in that it implies an overarching intentionality/goal to a process. Is the intentionality of a process inherent in the process? (Vs. projected by the observer.) Would a universe sans observers have a teleology? In what way? Speculate away!
Here’s the quote expanded for context:
A process is a coordinated group of changes in the complexion of reality, an organized family of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally. It is emphatically not necessarily a change in or of an individual thing, but can simply relate to some aspect of the general “condition of things.” A process consists in an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in conjoint coordination in line with a definite program. Processes are correlated with occurrences or events: Processes always involve various events, and events exist only in and through processes.
Works for me: our experiences are controlled hallucinations. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily …
If we continue the (hypothetical) example you brought up - of the child having a hallucination - would you admit that the the high-fever that she currently has is an actuality? An actuality taking place in her actual brain and physical body?
Further to this, would you admit that the horse she is seeing in her hallucination is projected from her previous experience of perceiving an actual horse (or, if she has never seen a living horse, then at least her previous perception a toy horse, or else of a faithful cartoon image or photographic representation of a horse)?
Yes, and yes. 
Then this is all I mean by an objective world.
‘Objective world’ also sometimes points to that which exists independently of observers.
What is the relationship between this and your use of objective world?
Does the high-fever continue even when the girl is asleep and her parents have momentarily stepped out of her room to dampen the washcloth they have been using to cool her forehead?
Aïe! Aïe! Aïe! This seems like an obvious trap to invoke the confusion of our misinterpretations of the math involved in Quantum. 