Hello,
Please excuse the deleted posts. I am new to the forum and kept using the quote button instead of normal text. In regards to your question, I boldly reply that one’s sense of self, including my own, is a chemical hallucination, albeit a complex one. Indeed, all experiences are. Waking experiences are akin to a dream constrained by stimuli received by the brain’s sensory organs. Anil Seth, a contemporary cognitive scientist, holds a similar view.
But isn’t it naive to believe in things like chemicals ? And brains ? Aren’t these also hallucinations ?
If that is your position, then go and drink a bottle of sulfuric acid. See where that gets you. That would be naive.
Ok, you can call it a hallucination I have no objection to how you apply it consciousness but functionally it’s an evolved function or process which allows us to manipulate the physical world. Will you now claim that the physical world is also a hallucination?
It could be, but if consciousness itself was a hallucination then we would not be able to fully function in the physical world we would jump off buildings, get hit by a car etc.
so your claim does not appear to have merit from the hallucination angle.
But you said experience is hallucination ? ?? How can I find any sulphuric acid if all that I see is dreamstuff ? I would be hallucinating drinking a hallucinated drink. People don’t really have mouths. And people don’t die. Or get born. That is all naive fantasy fairy tale stuff.
I’m with you. It is all hallucination, generated by a brain within that hallucination ! And science tells us that science is a hallucination too. Let us embrace this profound paradox, while yet remembering that it too is mere hallucination.
I think these people are real, not merely chemical hallucinations. They are real individuals who exist on planet Earth, each with their own unique consciousness and subjective experience of reality.
Perception is the hallucination. What the brain does—that’s the trick, as it sits ensconced in its cranial vat. In this sense, we are all BIVs. The vat is our skull. Synapses ensure that no neuron will ever have direct contact with what lies beyond it. Hence, the need to hallucinate. Hence, the pseudo nature of the HP.
You said you think they are real. That is the hallucination. Thought itself.
What you claim is essentially that we’re all sleepwalkers, yet the survival instinct is inseparable from consciousness, without it we would have a shorter lifespan than a butterfly having emerged from its cocoon.
Because there is evidence that they exist independently of my perception. Their behavior, communication, and interactions with the world provide evidence that they are real individuals, each with their own subjective experiences. Treating them as mere hallucinations would require evidence that outweighs these observations.
Waking experience is an hallucination guided by sensory stimuli and consequences. You’re leaving that part out. We call it learning.
So then why call it a hallucination ? When the interaction with stimuli is not induced in the brain alone but involves the external world providing feedback to the brain and consciousness.
Why don’t you do whatever you want when you want to? Because you know there will be consequences that unfold independently of your wishes. Ah! We call that reality. That’s what persists when the greedy neurons stop hallucinating.
I consider it a moderate hallucination when there is immediate sensory stimuli to back up the perceptual claim, such as a beaker of sulfuric acid. This is the basis of waking perception. It is a “strong” hallucination when such stimuli is lacking. In this sense, the dreams of REM sleep are the latter. Either way, the brain is an hallucinatory organ. It has no direct contact with what lies beyond its cranial vat.
Consequences are hallucinations too.
I’m joking !
I have been joking with you to demonstrate my objections to dualistic indirect realism. I also reject the hard problem, but I don’t believe that perceptions are hallucinations. I basically agree with Mach on this issue, and his position is not well known.
Nothing is more real than the shared world. Nothing is more real than other people. To go against either of these claims is to indulge in performative contradiction. So I suggest that we work out from what what we already take for granted when we engage in earnest discussion.
What you’re essentially saying then is that we’re all philosophical zombies or sleepwalkers.
Do you think that you are perceiving directly with no possibility of mistake or hallucination?
That happens if you didn’t sleep so well, but the experience is real
I am not a dualist at all.
“Objective reality” is a nonsense phrase. “True” is just a noise that indicates belief. A “mistake” is a meat move that doesn’t work out as planned. I adjust my meat vector. Finally my meat is destroyed. Even the meat code is an experiment. Mutations that sometimes work out long enough for meat babies to carry them to perhaps another first down.
Basically I’m a phenomenalist and a pragmatist. Consciousness does not exist. Consciousness is a ghost story. The world exists, but it exists as a system of perspectival fragments.
There is only the shared world, but only from points of view. The world is umvelt, world-for-meat-vector. This might be called (discordant) ontological perspectivism. Or cynical pragmatism.
Since I write about my position all over this forum, I won’t be redundant and go into detail here.
That is a mischaracterization that you yourself conjured up in response to a perspective that scares you. I guess that makes me the Boogey Man. 
I have an inner life. I think and feel and I can infer that others do too. That’s why I’m not posting from prison. I respect people because I understand our sad condition. I’m a realist, not an idealist.