Do you have a personal opinion on the nature of reality?

I should look into acid again.

all matter is nothing but energy condensed into a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing ourselves subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.

Fixed that for you. There is no need for "beliefs". We are biological entities, we experience the outside world and ourselves subjectively, because our senses and the processing of senses evolved to offer us better chances of survival than without those senses. This evolution does not improve our senses to make them more objective, it may even make our senses cruder to make it easier for the mind to focus on the stuff relevant for the survival or the reproduction.

I'm still forming an opinion. You could say that I have an intuitive model of reality, which is guided by visual thinking first, and followed or refined using the language of words. However, the words i use are not defined in exactly the same way as others commonly define them.

Sometimes, when I check the etymology of a word I've just used, before posting a comment somewhere, I will find that this word might have it's roots in something other than as it first appeared intuitively.

The other night, I was arguing that cognition was purely a physical thing. My reasoning was visual and misguided etymologically speaking, or at least to some extent.

Maybe it's my dyslexia or adhd that causes this thinking... I learned most of my written and reading of English by reading fantasy fiction as a child and then progressing to psychology and philosophy. There was two ways I figured out what words meant.

1) The context of the situation and the patterns of how it is used over multiple situations. compositing in my mind all these things, helps me refine down the meaning to a principle or definition.

2) I cut the word up into smaller words, which creates a context of the word and both of those contexts interacting gives me a sense of meaning.

Cognition for me was seen as cog-nition.

I think of a mechanical cog turning gears. So I think this is a physical process of parts interacting. This is materialism, not metaphysics for my mind.

When I see "nition", I think of ignition, and with the context visually of the gears and cogs, I surmise that cog-nition for me is the physical process of thinking, where there is physical interactions, and energy igniting thoughts and actions. It's sort of a blurry interpretation, but intuitively it feels spot on. However the etymology is slightly different in the roots of the word. Not related to cog at all, but some other latin words etc. Some of the words associated were physical, but also some were words like "mental", which to me is metaphysical in many ways. Because ment in government I think infers mind and to govern. And mind is metaphysical to me, because otherwise I would have said brain or cognitions.

So that was a guide to my definitions, at least partly. I also have read and looked up words as I go, and can use true etymology. But if you see two possible functional words joined or separated like cog-nition or Know-ledge, you will know what I'm doing there.

My model of reality is inspired by Nietzsche and this form of personal definitions. Language is just a tool to assist my main style of processing, which is visual.

So far, I believe(be-live? :p) that what we call consciousness, is an illusion of sorts. That it is not a thing in itself within this universe. It doesn't really exist. Only as an idea within the framework of our thinking. Much like unicorns if you catch my drift. I don't want a comment saying that actually they found a unicorn fossil, okay?! XD

What I believe for now, is that the body has physical processes like cog-nition, which includes the electrochemical reactions between neurons through synapses etc. Courtesy of the wonderful Ian McGilchrist, I see that the right hemisphere is likely more inclined to take in metaphorically speaking, while the left goes out. This is because on split brain patients, the left hemisphere was always grabbing things with the right hand and so sure of itself and had a distorted compartmentalized view of reality. While the right hemisphere would not, but seemed to have a clear representation of reality as a whole, albeit quite tentative. But could not focus in, if i am remembering correctly from years ago...

Now if we move past the split brain patient, to a connected brain, we might consider more seriously the idea that the brain is creating a sort of mental loop through their combined cog-nition.

The thinking, which is metaphysical or phenomenal, is the sensory product of this cognition[s] combined.

When I say I am conscious of typing this monologue(sorry for the wall of text), I am saying that my body is sensing the cognition and re-presenting it to itself as my thinking; because I need an ego(feedback loop) to survive the complexity of my reality and abstract it into memory(physical and possibly partly metaphysical), so it may be put to good use.

"con-" is also used in many words, and that pattern seems to indicate the interaction of more than a single entity. Like the interaction between two hemispheres. Or the interaction between a hemisphere and the rest of the emotional body.

So really, there is no "I". It is just an illusion that the body uses to navigate this reality(or plane of existence).

Really my body has experienced it's life here and holds those experiences as senses within the organs, brain, maybe tissue, probably the gut lining etc etc. For all I know the cells in my gut lining could have some form of cognition, which can be collectivized among many of it's type, like a network, which has a feedback loop as well; using this to store sensations or control the host/major/universal collective. Gut microbes have already been shown to control our behaviour and tastes/desires, using chemical signals and reacting to sensory information coming from the nose and mouth senses.

So, my body is writing all this, because it experienced the original post through it's senses, and has decided that this is how it will respond.

The host or collective, needs coordination, a president, or for the hardcore philosophers "presidency"/presence. So this president is the "I", it's "me", and I represent the host often while feeling and thinking that it is I who has chosen this course. Which re-affirms to me(the president) through practice, that my job is important and that I am a legitimate source of power. But alas, it's the administration who really runs the show, and also those powers outside of the presidency which influences various senses, microbes, organs, memories and even the president, who can send feedback to the collective as a whole or possibly even individually. But we all know the president can try to make decisions, and sometimes, or even often, that president is over ruled by some committee or other. The president may want to give up smoking for example, and he does!, but somewhere in the collective, it has been over ruled each time a bill is put through. Sometimes the president tells itself that it didn't want to give up smoking anyway. It is pretty egoic really.

Yeah, I snuck in some propaganda, intuitively LOL

In fairness, that wasn't me. It was my body. don't shoot the messenger.

So consciousness is an illusion to me, because it is a trick of the cog-nition, which creates a mind form, which must necessarily be a fool, in order to step forward into the world of the wary right hemisphere, and grab or predate objectives in order to serve the collective. I nearly wrote to keep it alive, but I am a will to power kind of president :D

Just as I have explained the feedback loop of consciousness and ego, I also think that time is an illusion in some kind of similar fashion. That we can measure speed, or we can measure position, but we cannot measure speed and position at the same time. This is apparently a fact within conventional relativity in physics. We can only measure these things in relation to other things, to come up with a local speed and location. Never a universal.

A bit like how consciousness might work right?

I'll leave it at that. My model is highly intuitive. Which means that I can't place it before you in a neat categorized way. It springs up from beneath intuitively as I need to refer to it.

you must ask me a question or inspire me, and I will have to start typing words and discover what my body has to say on the matter.

Of course, within this model there is no individual will, that is free from this universe and it's causations.

I've never read any of Whiteheads philosophy of process, but on hearing the word process around his name and maybe a friend explaining years ago, I assume it might be a decent enough fit or access point.

I am though, fundamentally going through Nietzsche's will to power and metaphysics in general as best I can. heavily inspired we could say.