Does the Eiffel Tower really exist?

Question

If a neuroscientist can recreate my experience of seeing the Eiffel Tower by stimulating my brain, does the Eiffel Tower really exist?

If a neuroscientist can recreate a mystical experience by stimulating my brain, does that prove all mystical experiences are illusory?

Answer 1

yes

Answer 2

I think you're getting at the limits of experience/knowledge. Supposedly, when someone has a deep enlightenment experience, they literally experience themselves as something other than this brain/body/personality. But then... WHAT experiences it and WHAT is the experience? That's a Zen koan in and of itself. If the experience is somehow related to something where we literally are the whole universe, then is 'that' experiencing it and/or is the experience realized in the brain? At the very least, the brain at least records it so ... it somehow gets involved, even when the supposedly illusory self is seen for what it is. But maybe that whole stuff from the famous Zen master Dogen about the absolute and the relative comes into play - I assume that if the whole universe is just one thing then, of course, any part of it is also just IT (and if the part has a mechanism for recording the experience then it will). I think that no matter what we do, we're mired in concepts and 'what ifs', the same as religion. The only way to resolve any of this is to cultivate the direct experience under the guidance of someone who has gone thru it (in order to avoid pitfalls and misinterpretations).

Answer 3

The Eiffel Tower actually exists. It's near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. I've seen it myself.

It exists independently of the achievements of neuroscientists.

All mystical experiences except for inventions the solutions to riddles (such as Kekule and the benzene ring) appear to be illusions. or if you will, the only mystical experiences that aren't hallucinations are ones that can manufacture a new product or be demonstrated in a scientific laboratory.

Answer 4

can a neuroscientist recreate your experiance of seeing the Eiffel Tower?

Answer 5

Good try, but the eiffel tower is verified by millions of french. Just ask one of them. Now if you said do the voices in my head exist, a doctor can put the voices in your head too. Then you would be on to something.

Answer 6

No. Don't confuse a lack of absolute reality for the lack of any reality. Reality is constituted through various kinds of communication: language gives it its very structure.

That said, just becuase an ideoreality is a reality doesn't mean that that perspective is of equal value to another- some perceptions are better thought through than others. And an assessment and comparison of these figurative systems is necessary for the existence of realities in the first place: realities are acts of predication that are responses to consciousness of other possibilities for ordering the world.

Answer 7

Yes Will, there is an Eiffel Tower but no Santa.

Answer 8

ummm..... i don't know about a neuroscientist part but the eiffel tower does exist in reality

Answer 9

recreating something that exist in reality is something entirely different to creating an experience that can not be proven in the physical realm. What point are you trying to make?

Answer 10

Yes,it does exist. I have been there and seen it. As to your other questions, I don't know. It hurts my brain too much...lol

Answer 11

If it doesn't exist, then I was standing on air for a few hours, and that's no good.