Is hypnosis real?
#13217
was thinking earlier about this idea, but i became very confused when i was trying to determine what it actually means for someone to be 'hypnotized'. the most readily apparent example of this would be something like what you'd see at a magic show where the magician does some weird trick with a coin and convinces someone they're a monkey a few minutes later. while i find such a thing dubious at best, the idea of it raises important questions about the nature of the integral self and of perception

the absurdity of the magic show stunt lies in the rapidity of it and the visible use of overt subconscious cues to illicit a conscious response, but if you were to draw out the span of time to weeks, months, or years, and the cues were less direct, would you not just be practicing rhetoric? while it may seem like rhetorical strategies appeal to the conscious mind, i would argue a great deal of work when it comes to trying to convince someone of an answer to a foundational question heavily involves subconscious appeals to the recipients' current mood and general perception. even without a direct human stimulus, the mere passing of time and of experience shifts the perspective of a person as well as their fundamental understanding of the world

if this is the case, wouldn't experiencing anything be hypnotism in some way? you're getting new conscious and subconscious information which affects your perception in the very same way. is it the length of time for the change? is it the type of change in perception?

what actually separates someone being convinced of any principle or idea from the act of parlor hypnosis? if it's a matter of truth, then what is truth, and how do you separate it from hypnotic 'truths'?

it's a strange question to me because in many ways i think both large and small groups of people hypnotize, or condition in more common terminology, their members to accept certain methodologies and epistemologies through mostly subconscious tactics, though this is rarely an intentional act. at present i feel as though i see things in the light of an actual platonic truth rather than merely from social truths. looking backwards at myself in the past i find it very peculiar to analyze how i thought about certain things and the answers seem obvious to me now, but at the time they were utterly confounding and caused me some level of dissonance that i couldn't resolve

then again, maybe i'm just hypnotized in a different way now °w°

obviously i don't think that, and i do firmly believe in absolute truths, one of those truths being that the self is a complex illusion which is ever-changing rather than a fixed entity as the matter of some consider it to be

but i'm curious to hear your opinions on this idea. what is hypnosis, does it exist, are there deeper implications, and how does it differ from other times where someone's perception changes? i'm especially interested by those who completely disagree with my analysis here
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#13224
I was going to respond before but I ended up only writing about the claim you made near the end of the post. And not about hypnosis. I certainly hope people believe hypnosis is real because they're probably under some influence of it. Not hard to see how it's practiced today with many cults like Rajneeshpuram, NXVIM & the other MLM groups, Ram Dass, etc. all ran out of a common playbook when they were operating. Of course many of the active cults today are designed as marketing/corporate "self-improvement"/"management skills" directives. You can see people use lots of these cognitive programming "tricks" like repeating someone's name in sales pitches, telemarketing, debates, etc.

Operant conditioning on human beings is well known. There is a great animalistic and instinctual part of our nature and to be quite honest, if you read the behaviourist literature in isolation it's easy to see why one could have been a hard behaviourist during its heyday. & Behaviourism was just as much a philosophical theory as a scientific one. Of course, to me there seem to be things like Generative Linguistics which show behaviours that can't be due to reinforcement learning and consequently, hard behaviourism is false. There are lots of Skinner Box-like structures today which I definitely don't have to enumerate. The only question to me that remains is to what extent we retain our own free will under suggestion. To me, it is a complete mystery.
#13226
do you still have your writings on those claims? i would love to read them
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