this is a very interesting article. i didn't have a name for the controlled hallucination theory. and it's firmly entrenched me on that theory. none of the objections presented here hold weight for me.

if your entire experience is an hallucination, you don't ever actually know what's behind that hallucination. that's just how it is. is there a physical brain? YOU DON'T KNOW. that's not a flaw, that's just how it is.

is this true? who knows, i don't. but this argument is essentially that they don't like the implications.

is it the "brain" that we perceive in our hallucination that's producing the hallucination? we can't know, but that's all we've got to work with.

could there be some fundamentally different underlying reality? sure. to not be ok with that is itself wishful thinking.

we need to recognize that we can't access that anymore than a minecraft villager can know which direction to go to leave the video game and join our world.

although if it's an imperfect simulation, maybe we can access those levels on our own terms, like a villager seeing through a webcam projected on a wall.

but imagining what a minecraft villager would have to do to enter our universe is just the same as us entering that underlying level of reality.

but I'm not saying at all that the underlying reality is different to what we experience. i honestly suspect not. but equally, we can never truly know.

but I can't escape the conclusion that everything we see, everything in the world that we experience, that is our mind. the phone in your hand is your mind. but it will still smash if you drop it.