What are these feelings telling me? A philosophical inquiry.

2184 Views 4 Replies 3 Participants Last post by Psyborg, Mar 15, 2019

revuptheglory

Discussion Starter · Nov 22, 2018 (Edited by Moderator)

Depersonalization, as I'm sure many of you are already aware, is defined as the "feeling" of being unreal. I believe, with further inspection the "feeling" of being unreal is simply a general distrust of.. [insert phonemena]. The specifics of this range anywhere from despair, anger, fear, or even, immense relief. I think most people, such as myself, In attempts to again trust, feel connected to, or gain a clarity from and of reality, began to question the ontological nature of being, of existential consequences of meaninglessness, etc. all in attempt to make sense of what is.. because what does it really mean to be "unreal" and if we are sensing it, it must surely have some grounds, even if those grounds are in anatomy and neuroscience. Personally, I understand it to be a odd metaphysical condition, or an abstract despairancy of the sort.

Dreams, meditation, and drugs are all things known to elicit such particular feelings. I don't like to dismiss the existential thinking portion that usually accomplinies these experiences, because I understand it to be a way of integrating them to your philosophical understanding at large, although the integration portion can be explored through physical means, answering what does this experience mean for how I must live my life.. which seems to be a very, If not a very relevant question. If you are going to strictly ask the questions instead of live them, it's important to ask the right ones, or at least most clarifying.

Furthermore, I think it's important to explore a particular what if.
if these feelings are somehow representative of any truth, to be trusted and believed, than what can we say about our disconnection/separation at the world at large?
If these feelings however, are false, what within us is missing/incorrect about the connections we have to our universe?

Depersonalization is perhaps, a very strange and chaotic manifestation of "universal" connections. What can we do to make sense of not "being real" or in a basic sense, not being connected, and assign meaning to such heavy feelings of estrangement.. an existential take.

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PerfectFifth

· #2 · Dec 6, 2018 (Edited by Moderator)

The fact that some people choose to call it feeling unreal doesn't mean it actually has anything to do with a diminished sense of realness, because who knows what reality even is? I believe calling it "feeling unreal" is just a vague and poor way to put into words what these individuals are experiencing-namely a detachment from the self and/or surroundings, among other feelings-and that there are more explicit and intelligible ways of describing the changes in perception verbally. "Feeling unreal" doesn't communicate anything to me that I could possibly comprehend with any certainty. There's no certainty that this feeling of unreality means the same thing to the person next to me. It's something that could be interpreted in a million different ways; it's a very inadequate description.

I believe that using that descriptor is merely a semantic issue, or a poor choice of words, and that someone using it to refer to the changes in their perception doesn't prove it has any pertinence to an actual objective sense of realness or diminishment thereof.

That's how I see it, anyway. I believe it has a neurological basis sooner than anything else.

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