As I noted in my previous post, believing in subjective reality as Steve Pavlina defines it requires struggling with some strange and thorny questions, including to what extent you can trust your own memory, how the “rules” of physical reality are learned, and whether you can use the Law of Attraction to generate other conscious beings with true free will. In this post, I’m going to lay out an alternative model that addresses these issues.

Continue reading “On Subjective Reality II: the Belief Community Model” →

I’d like to take a couple of posts to talk about Steve Pavlina’s recent remarkable podcast on subjective reality. Steve tries to explain the Law of Attraction — that is, the observation that your reality strongly reflects your thoughts — by proposing that everything you observe is caused by your own consciousness. In fact, nothing exists outside of yourself. This is a pretty serious break from the belief systems of most folks, and I began to wonder if there were some other way to explain the Law of Attraction — to explain it in a fairly rigerous way, as he tries to do — without accepting the idea that all of reality is simply a reflection of your own personal consciousness. Subjective reality, in Steve’s terms, is consistent, makes few assumptions, and is impossible to refute — but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. There may be other ways to explain the Law consistently, and I want to explore one of them in this series. In this first post, I’ll talk about some of the stranger consequences of Steve’s conception.

Continue reading “On Subjective Reality I: Strange Questions” →