TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 28)

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TG Comments: Misc Communities

POST: Beside personal anecdotes, what evidence for anything paranormal exists for which you adamantly believe in? (/r/LucidDreaming/)

we at least know the probability of getting it wrong or right.

Really? How do we calculate this probability?

It's important to realise about science is that it doesn't tell you how things actually are - it does not reveal truth. Rather, it is a process by which we make observations, identify situations which appear with regularity, and then invent concepts and stories to connect them together for the purposes of description and prediction. For instance, there is no such thing as "gravity" other than as a concept - in fact, the concept called "gravity" has changed quite a lot over the years. However, it has been an extremely useful connective idea. In science, observations are primary and theories/models are secondary:

• Observations limit the possible models.
• Models do not limit the possible observations.

The whole "paranormal" thing is difficult, because by their nature the phenomena reported aren't repeatable, either on demand or under a controlled conditions. So we shouldn't dismiss it as "not existing". We must simply say: "science has nothing to say about it at the moment". Otherwise we end up dismissing things like ball lightning:

Until the 1960s, most scientists argued that ball lightning was not a real phenomenon but an urban myth, despite numerous reports throughout the world. Laboratory experiments can produce effects that are visually similar to reports of ball lightning, but whether these are related to the natural phenomenon remains unclear. Many scientific hypotheses about ball lightning have been proposed over the centuries. Scientific data on natural ball lightning are scarce, owing to its infrequency and unpredictability. The presumption of its existence is based on reported public sightings, and has therefore produced somewhat inconsistent findings. Given inconsistencies and lack of reliable data, the true nature of ball lightning is still unknown.

The tendency of modern scientists (or actually: popular science reporting) to imply that if our theories don't accommodate something then it is not "real" is a foolish misunderstanding of the method - and something that the great men and women of science last century would have laughed at.

Gravity isn't real but only as a concept? Then how the hell do we send space probes out 3 billion miles to hit a target that is 65 meters by 75 meters?

"Gravity" is a concept we invented to connect certain observations. That concept allows us to make predictions, including those relating to the launching of projectiles. It is a real... ly useful conceptual framework. Come back to what we actually observe - objects in motion. We never see gravity, and gravity itself as a concept has been changed many times. What is real is the observation that "objects move in relation to one another even in the absence of contact". The rest is a story to link those observations. If you don't understand that, then you don't understand science and the nature of theories at all. It will lead you to think theories are "how things really truly are in reality" and you'll end up being defensive and arrogant and warrior-like about the theories of today, even as others are trying to replace them with the fresh observations and theories of tomorrow. Of course, this is old news: science often only moves on when proponents of the old theories die. (I'm not implying anything by that, I hasten to add.)

EDIT: Recommending this Physics Today article and this Nature paper to help clarify where I'm coming from. Thanks to /u/ccarrot for the first link.

Q1: Related reading... [http://www.ehu.eus/aitor/irakas/mes/Reference/mermin.pdf]

Thanks for that - new to me! Reminds me a little of this Nature paper, although more thorough. It's amusing to note how the groundbreaking scientists of the early-to-mid 20th century were all philosophers as much physical theorists (e.g. Bohr as mentioned in the article), but in today's science-as-engineering-certainty view the philsophical ideas are often dismissed as "mystical meanderings" of the wayward minds of retirees (e.g. Schrodinger's What is Life? lectures; Pauli's collaborations; Bohm's ideas). Actually, those meanderings were the basis for the physics, and there was always caution separating the "thing-in-itself" from the description. I guess that's a problem with how these things get taught in school and university: "here is how it works" is the approach, and students start to confuse ideas with existence. Paul Feyerabend should be mandatory on the syllabus! :-)

[QUOTE]

Philosophy of science of article Paul Feyerabend
In his books Against Method and Science in a Free Society Feyerabend defended the idea that there are no methodological rules which are always used by scientists. He objected to any single prescriptive scientific method on the grounds that any such method would limit the activities of scientists, and hence restrict scientific progress. In his view, science would benefit most from a "dose" of theoretical anarchism. He also thought that theoretical anarchism was desirable because it was more humanitarian than other systems of organization, by not imposing rigid rules on scientists.

[END OF QUOTE]

It can't though. There has to be a start somewhere. Stars don't form out of the blue. We need stars to have planets and the other elements that we see.

Well, nothing has to start somewhere - that's a limit of our imagination, surely? In the same way we find it hard to imagine that something doesn't have boundaries, that there might be no "outside". Sometimes, we might be asking the wrong question. After all, what physics actually is, is a "bunch of cool ideas that some people have had". We've already been round the loop a few times, I'm sure there will be more ideas to come which flatten the previous ones. Change is fun:

The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
-- No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning, Phys.org

EDIT: Oops, sorry, I see this has already been brought up. I will add that, yes, "they are discussing it but that does not mean it is a fact". However, that is precisely true of the big bang, dark matter, and all that, as they stand. They are connective ideas not observed facts. All of them are invoked mainly to make the math work (see George Ellis' Nature commentary for a good moan about that). Disclaimer: I am an admirer of David Bohm's work generally.

Physics is the mathematical law that describes our universe. It's way more than just a bunch of cool ideas.

What I was getting at is, physics is a collection of concepts and frameworks that we have invented, inspired by observations.

No it's not because the Big Bang is described using physics. It's not an idea, guess or anything like that.

Of course it is. "Described using physics" just means we are using a certain language and set of concepts. A 'theory' is a description which fits observations and/or other theories. If that's not an "idea", what is? There are plenty of theories which offer another interpretation to things like the big bang (one of them being based on Bohmian mechanics). Things fall in and out of favour. Another take: do you think that the multiple solutions in the equations of quantum mechanics indicate that Many Worlds are literally "real"? Or do you believe that the delayed choice experiment indicates that a participatory universe dictated by the observer is "real"?

“we are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here, but the far away and long ago.”
-- John Wheeler

Only the observations are real(ish). I did study physics...

POST: I just made a breakthrough in my ability to control dreams, here is what worked for me (/r/LucidDreaming/)

Really, if you can conceive of something at all then that's effectively a memory (a thought pattern that exists and you can access) which you can make 3D-immersive and experience more fully. As your post implies, you can't do it by "manually" trying to create the experience (like "drawing it" on the screen of your dream), you have to sort of request-summon it and let it come to you. Just like recalling a memory in waking life!

Q1: Well, I think the question of wether concieving a new idea, structure or labdscape is fundamentally similar to recalling a memory is far into highly advanced neurobiology and well beyond most, if not all, people's current knowledge of the field. I don't feel it is safe to assume the processes of imagining something and remembering something are alike because both are "thought patterns" in our brains.

Hmm. Forget about brains, I'd say, when it comes to this?

We have no access to our own brains (in the sense of a correspondence in type between subjective and objective) and neurobiology is in its infancy. And when it comes to consciousness, there isn't even an idea of what a theory would be like, never mind an actual theory. Memory also lacks a decent account (the location of memories, and therefore the process of retrieval, is still unknown). Nothing much of use for us lucid dreamers. So practically speaking, the important thing is the subjective process, because that's something we can actually investigate. Which leads me to...

Whether a memory or a thought or an environment "actually" exists prior to your experiencing of it or not is pretty meaningless. However, it must exist in "logical space" - it must be conceivable, a possibility. Experimenting a bit, the process of creation and discovery both seem to take the form of triggering part of a pattern, and having the rest of it "autocomplete" into experience. A type of associative traversal or "creation by implication". So "imagining something" and "remembering something" booth seem to be a similar subjective processes - both involve triggering patterns in logical space, it's just that one of them (the "memory") has been activated before, whereas the other (the "creation") has not.

Q1: While I do agree that it is immensly dissatisfying that we as of now do not have the scientific theories and framework to describe dreams and conciousness in a detailed way, I do not think that gives any more credibility to subjective and personal speculations. They remain just that, speculations. While this is frustrating, we really have much yet to uncover about the inner workings of our immensly complex brain. This does not mean we should stop practicing the highly enriching experience that is lucid dreaming or stop developing sucsessfull techniques for mastering it. I just do not think being lucid dreamers gives us any expert understanding of our brain. Secondly, I disagree that just because both imagining and remembering are processes in "logical space", in that they are conceivable, they must be alike. I think the notion that when ideas or constructions share some properties this implicates, or even suggests, that they share all properties is very illogical and wrong. To summarise, I think we should just accept that we do have very limited knowledge in this field for now. As you say, neuroscience is in its infancy, who knows what serious, structured, scientific research might teach us in the coming decades and centuries?

Thanks for your interesting thoughts. EDIT: Tidied things up a bit, apologies for length.

My Short Answer

The concepts we use to describe the external view are not necessarily the ones most useful for describing the internal view. Just as the fictions of “fields” and “matter” prove to be useful abstractions for exploring and optimising the physical, so others may be useful for things like lucid dreaming. One day the two may join up, but we’d be foolish to elevate and restrict ourselves to the ideas in one realm when exploring another. Since science isn’t about truth - rather, it's about creating useful fictions which connect observations and have predictive power - this approach can be equally applied in the shared, waking realm and the dreaming, personal realm.

My Long Answer

I do not think that gives any more credibility to subjective and personal speculations. They remain just that, speculations. . . Speculation based on personal experience is of little help to gaining true understanding.

I disagree with this. Experimentation within personal experience is exactly the way to gain true understanding of how personal experience works as personal experience. An MRI scan of someone's brain, for instance, is no "truer" than the experience the person in the scanner is having at the time. It is simply a different (and still subjective) representation of the same thing, which cannot in itself be grasped.

Secondly, I disagree that just because both imagining and remembering are processes in "logical space", in that they are conceivable, they must be alike. I think the notion that when ideas or constructions share some properties this implicates, or even suggests, that they share all properties is very illogical and wrong.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that sharing some properties means something shares all properties. All that matters is that they functionally share the same properties. What I am suggesting is that in terms of direct experience, when experimenting in a lucid dream environment, one cannot differentiate between the processes of creation, discovery and recall - and that this leads to a useful description.

• All three can be described as the “associative traversal” of a logical space. (By which I mean an abstract configuration space containing the next-steps which might follow from a particular state.)
• The dream environment in effect has the properties of a 3D-immersive strand of thought arising within the perceptual space of mind. In particular, experiential patterns tend to “autocomplete” with their implied next-steps.
• Adopting the approach of “thinking your way through the dream” - by recalling or triggering partial sensory patterns (call them memories or ideas) - is more aligned with the way dreaming actually operates than other methods.
• This can be tested by performing experiments while in the dream environment.

To summarise, I think we should just accept that we do have very limited knowledge in this field for now. As you say, neuroscience is in its infancy, who knows what serious structured scientific research might teach us in the coming decades and centuries.

For sure, but that’s not really relevant to understanding the mind on its own terms. It will hopefully one day link the two sides (although I suspect the answer will be: there is only one side). So indeed, I don’t doubt that it’ll change drastically over the coming decades, and be quite different to the direction of today - what with neuroscientists like Christof Koch turning to panpsychism, cognitive scientists like Donald Hoffman playing with interface theories, and QM theories such as QBism promoting a "private view" description of experience. Fortunately, the absence of theories doesn’t mean the absence of experiential truth - just as we explore the subjective external world by prodding it and discussing it, leading to abstractions with utility and predictive power, we can do exactly the same with the subjective internal world.

POST: [Logline] Down On My Luck (/r/Screenwriting/)

I like the general idea, but it seems a bit light for a feature? There needs to be an underlying purpose and something which explains his death/luck duality. It might be more interesting if (random thoughts):

• His misery is required by "reality" in some way, and that's why he can't permanently die (he must suffer so that others can be happy).

Then:

• If he gets into happy situations, "reality" will generate events to kill him to reset his circumstances (he must suffer so that others can be happy).

And:

• The manner of his death dictates the situation he wakes up in, with hilarious consequences and much irony. (Lacking inspiration here, but this would connected by imagery: if he died in a swimming pool he would come to as a lifeguard, if he died as an aviator we would come to cleaning out an aviary.)

The main character's discovery sequence is: finding he can't commit suicide due to luck; eventually finding a way and waking up alive; learning he can't die; deciding to turn things around and be happy only to get wiped; realising he's not allowed to be happy; finding a "cheat" in the definitions of happiness and death to escape the cycle and so allow both himself and others to live happily ever after. For maximum Sandleresque humour possibilities, search-replace "others" with "otters".

Persistence of Vision

Logline: A suicidal optician overcomes a series of unlikely interruptions to take his own life, only to discover that his ongoing misery is built into the structure of the universe. Faced with a choice between eternal unhappiness or the destruction of all existence, he must use his spectacular skills to hack the prescription of reality itself. Unfortunately, the laws of nature do not see things his way...

POST: Why does film make physical reality look more interesting? (/r/TrueFilm/)

An image (moving or otherwise) can have a beauty which is somewhat independent of the subject matter, and instead arises from the more abstract form of the image itself. This includes the way the edges of objects are aligned, their proportions and position in the frame; the way the movement of the camera matches the movement of an actor and follows a particular pattern; the choice of lighting to create additional shapes and contrasts; the colour palette chosen to create appealing relationships. And that's before we've gone into contrasts of meaning and evocation of archetypes, etc. As a random example, even this frame of an annoying man leaning against a car can be in some way beautiful and ultra-real, because of the alignment of the lines of the car, the contrast between machine and natural backdrop, and the pleasing (although now overused) orange-and-teal palette.

A good if extreme version of this can be found in the UK C4 TV series Utopia, where every scene was carefully framed and the palette tightly controlled to give a hyper comic book type effect. See this brief article and check out the images in this search.

Q1: And that's before we've gone into contrasts of meaning and evocation of archetypes, etc.
Could you expand on that? Thanks!

It's a bit of a meandering topic - but objects and relationships trigger their extended patterns mentally and physically in the viewer. In the same way as the colour "red" might produce associations of heat, and "blue" cold, so other forms similarly. Note, by "produce" I don't mean they trigger thoughts-about it; they actually trigger the direct experience within you, to a subtle extent. In real life, objects and forms and associations are just scattered around the place, in a mess of unstructured background. In a film, however, the scene is deliberately constructed and the environment is more "pure" - it is an stripped down set of meaning, focused. So the samurai sword mounted on the office wall and the red tie worn during the business conversation evokes by association additional meaning about and for the scene. Rather than just aesthetic beauty, we also create a conceptual structure which can have its own elegance. That kind of thing!

POST: Symbolic vs literal storytelling and defense of american style (/r/TrueFilm/)

Actual phenomenas outside the mind are much more interesting for some reason.

I've never actually encountered a phenomenon outside the mind, and neither have you...

Philosophical retorts aside though, movies in general face the problem of meaning. Having it, conveying it. And to tackle this efficiently, they of course must connect to our own experiences - to "real life". But this does not correspond to being "realistic" in the sense that you seem to mean it. When you wander about your daily, "realistic" life, you encounter all sorts of objects and circumstances which do not just represent, but are literally experienced as a network of knowledge. Decades worth of accumulated context are directly felt in each encounter, whether that's while on safari or during an exchange at the coffee counter. A film doesn't have the time to create "the memories you and I take for granted" from scratch. The format lacks the ability to build up those extended patterns. So it taps into pre-existing ones directly. Fortunately, our culture already contains, and imprints its participants with, vast interrelated "networks of meaning* - and all films call upon this. The so-called "realistic point of view" you see in American sci-fi is heavily dependent on this; every romantic comedy uses it; and the film-making process in general relies upon lots of techniques derived from it. See for example: the 500 Days of Summer palette theory, or the quandrant system in Drive. These are levels of symbolism also. Symbols are "sensory inputs which trigger extended patterns of meaning". Colours, geometric arrangements, outlines, shapes, objects, houses, spiders. Real life is symbolic, and all films reflect that to a greater or lesser degree. Any realism/symbolism divide that you draw is in fact arbitrary. What does this "mean"? It means that the spider in Enemy is in fact a real spider. As real as any spider you've ever encountered. It's just that for your entire life so far, you've been misunderstanding what "spiders" actually are.

You say this but then the rest of your post is philosophical! :D

Yes indeed. That was my little trick I played, I suppose. :-)

I won't labour the point because we're drifting from film discussion to the nature of experiencing here, but since film is basically all about producing experiences, let's explore it a little bit... EDIT: I did labour the point, after all. I would strongly assert that all onscreen images and real life encounters are pointers to, or activators of, emotional and mental states - as part of larger patterns. I'd disagree there is a fundamental difference between physical-literal and symbolic. The difference is merely one of personal historical encounters. We might tell ourselves a story about light and retinas and visual cortexes - it's our current narrative about "what happens", although one that has changed constantly over the decades - but that's really not our actual experience. (What were people's lives like, before brains and photons were discovered?) What we experience are images, sounds, textures, emotions, and "felt-meaning" arising in a sort of "open perceptual mind-space". When I see an apple, I don't see a "round red shape with a bit on top". I really do perceive an apple. A complete sense of appleness appears in my "mind-space" with all its implications and meanings and context immediately present. If I'd had a terrible apple-related bullying incident as a child, the "colour" or felt-knowing of that incident would arise too. In a very real way, when I see an apple I experience the whole world and my entire history through the context of that apple. When onscreen, two men shake hands, is that literal? Literally two five-fingered objects temporarily intersecting? When the uncaring lawyer always wears a bright red tie and the edges of his eyebrows are slightly upturned, is that literal? Literally just a red tie and unkempt eyebrows? Or does it trigger a larger pattern that tells you something about his character?

Now, I know what you mean really. You mean something like:

• "Could I see the actual image displayed onscreen, with my own everyday eyes, while walking along the street someday?"

And your own mental filter doesn't really like things that stray too far from this. That might be an interesting to explore, personally, actually. I wonder whether, when you watch films, you are a person who thinks-about what they are seeing as they watch it - verbally assesses it and works it out - or a person who experiences it via the felt-sense that it triggers within you. The former tends to prevent a direct experience of the extended meaning, I find. If you are literally thinking the words "ah that's a spider representing a woman's power and the entanglement of influence over all areas of life" rather than directly-feeling it, then obviously it kinda reduces and ruins it, and makes it into a reflective experience rather than an immersive one.

I also liked the spider over the cityscape as it reminds me a feeling / "vision" I have of my own...

That phrase "feeling/vision", the experience that comes with that for you, likely encapsulates exactly the sort of thing I am talking about, I'd say.

What i would argue is that it would be inefficient for the brain to activate all those associative neurons every time you see an apple.

I'd say that the brain is "dumb" and it doesn't activate or create anything intentionally. It doesn't "do" anything. What happens is more in the manner of a passive pattern completion: a part of an pattern is stimulated and the extended pattern is correspondingly activated, but to diminishing extents as distance increases. In effect, every stimulus activates the entire brain as one pattern, but the level of activation varies proportionally. A metaphor for this might be dropping a tank of water on a mountainous landscape, which very rapidly flows across the landscape. The volume of water represents the intensity of activation of that part of the landscape. A short moment after the task is dropped, we see the distribution: intense activation at the drop point, and diminishing activation along the pathways leading away from that point. Note: the landscape doesn't "do" anything to activate those pathways; it is simply there. (Extra bit: every time water passes along a path, the path is deepened and so becomes more likely to be activated in future.)

It has to work this way, because otherwise there would be no such thing as an apple. Think about it: when you see an apple, a "circular red shape with a bit on top", why do you perceive an apple? What exactly is an apple? (Hint: it's not "out there" in the same form as it is perceived.)

I suggest that an "apple", like any object, is a collection of all previous image impressions from all possible angles which have become part of the same extended pattern. "Apples" aren't things at all. An "apple" is just a massive set of dumb patterns which have become intensely associated with one another, along with the pattern "A - P - P - L - E". So you're right: the brain doesn't create a whole new apple that is unrelated to the apple in the world. It doesn't need to. Because the only apple there ever is, is the "apple pattern" in the brain. And the same applies, therefore, to "the world". Which loops back to me saying earlier:

• "I've never actually encountered a phenomenon outside the mind, and neither have you..."

If this wasn't the case, then film as an art form wouldn't work.

Sometimes, you just don't get a movie when you watch it.

Yeah, agreed and this and also the retroactive re-contextualisng that can happen. I find this very interesting. Don't you think that the more "symbolic" a film is - the more abstract it is in at least some of its patterning - the more flexible and meaningful and applicable it can become?

I don't necessarily mean spider-wives in that case. I just think that films which provide you with a new abstract relationship which becomes overlaid like a template over your life in the week which follows, and so makes new sense of it. It's as if you'd never really thought about the idea of, say, a triangle before. You see a film in which the characters and objects are often arranged in a triangular relationship onscreen, with positions in the triangle corresponding to particular properties. For days afterwards, you notice things in the everyday world being arranged in that way, and discern meanings that you hadn't noticed before, which in turn update your interpretation of the film retroactively.

The Philosophy Section

Photons and so on are basically invented concepts - what one might call "connective fictions" to link our observations together. All that you ever actually experience are those observations (consisting of the experiencing of image, sound, texture, feeling). You might choose to infer that such things exist in some sense prior to experience, but it's not in a sense that you ever actually experience. Really, that "world beyond experience" is just a thought you are having - inside experience. The same, in fact, applies to the idea of brains as the "doers" of experience. Truly, you never experience being or using a brain at all. Any brains you observe always arise as images-sounds-textures inside experience. This goes back to George Berkeley and his Three Dialogues, where he says that all experience arise in mind and that the concept of a "solid, external substrate" which lies behind experience is just that: a concept. We simply confuse the stability of experience with there being an external foundation that persists beyond it. There is no evidence of such a thing. Patterns of experience do not, in fact, require substrates as an (unfalsifiable) explanation. More recently, we have fallen into the habit of viewing our theoretical abstractions as "real", often treating them as being more real, more "primary", than direct experience. Popular science publications have always done this, but over the last 30-50 years actual physicists, as they dismiss philosophy and assert models as "true", have made the same mistake. Physicist N. David Mermin wrote an good article about that here.

The Film Section

It's fascinating, that film can do that - change the meaning of the world for us - isn't it? And it's not that we have to actually think about the film for this to happen. The film just does leave an imprint on us, and the world appears differently, automatically, as a result of this. It makes film a very powerful thing, beyond simply entertainment or even being art. You can actually stimulate the effect in your daily life directly, without watching anything, but that's drifting a bit off-topic really. Well, your original post turned out to be quite thought-provoking eh!

POST: Can we formulate panpsychism such that it doesn't sound completely ridiculous? (/r/philosophy/)

[POST]

EDIT: This certainly got away from me. I was hoping to keep it short, but I also tried to cover a lot of ground. The result is that it is not as short as I'd like it to be, nor as detailed as I wanted it to be. I'd appreciate any responses. Thanks very much.
EDIT 2: I should be more clear about my project here. I'm not even really endorsing panpsychism (or if you prefer, panprotopsychism). I'm pointing out the reasons why it has some appeal, and then defending it against a particular objection: namely, that it is ridiculous to think that fundamental particles could have full-blown conscious experiences.
I will (quite briefly) argue that we can.
Panpsychism, for those who are not familiar, is the view that all matter is mental in its fundamental character. There is something mental, phenomenal, or experiential about all matter-- right down to the electron. It sounds like a bizarre view, but it has some appeal and is gaining traction.
For those of us who are convinced that there is a Hard Problem in explaining how conscious experience can arise from a physical system, the doctrine of panpsychism offers a way out.1 If panpsychism is true, we know where consciousness comes from: it comes from the mental or proto-mental properties of the matter which comprises it.
Galen Strawson goes so far as to argue that if physicalism is true, then panpsychism must be true. That is, if the universe is comprised of nothing but physical matter, and consciousness exists in the universe, then physical matter must just be consciousness. consciousness must just be something physical. Otherwise, consciousness "emerges" from nothing at all-- a phenomenon sometimes called "radical" or "magical" emergence.2
Still, it seems like panpsychism solves one problem while raising others. How could something like an electron possibly be conscious? How could we even entertain the idea? Some may say that we must be pretty far afield of the truth to give panpsychism any credence at all.
But perhaps it's possible to characterize the mental content of matter in such a way that it does not sound completely ridiculous. In his Two Conceptions of the Physical, David Stoljar provides one possible avenue for exploring this possibility.3 According to Stoljar, there are two kinds of physical properties. There are t-physical properties, which are the sorts of properties which are explained by physical theory. If physical theory talks about a certain property, than that property is a t-physical property ("t" for theory). On the other hand there are o-physical properties, which are those properties of objects which comprise their intrinsic character. t-physical properties are grounded by, or have their basis in o-physical properties ("o" for object). In other words, o-physical properties describe the properties of the object which make it the kind of object that it is. The t-physical properties are those properties which explain why it's behavior is in accordance with physical theory.
There is an intuitive shift to be made from panpsychism to Stoljar's two conceptions of the physical. Perhaps those o-physical properties which describe the intrinsic character of an object are also the mental or proto-mental properties described by panpsychism. In that case, physical entities would be mental in their essential properties. And those mental properties would provide the basis for the way physical things behave as described by physical theory. As David Chalmers explains, this approach might kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it provides an explanation of the intrinsic properties which ground physical relations and dispositions. Physics tells us about the relationships between physical things, but not about an intrinsic character to ground those relational properties. Augmenting our definition of the physical with an essentially mental character might plausibly solve that problem. On the other hand, it provides a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. If matter is essentially mental, it is much easier to explain the mind arising from the brain.
To be sure, this still sounds like a strange metaphysical thesis. One might still object that it leaves us with a stranger metaphysics than that with which we started. We started with a Hard Problem, and no we're left with conscious electrons. Is that really an improvement?
To answer this question, we must explore the meaning of "consciousness" as it applies to an electron. Could an electron be said to hold beliefs, see colors, hear music, and so on? Certainly not. No one argues that electrons could have sophisticated experiences. But could they have any experience? It seems absurd that they could, but then, if they don't, what is so "essentially mental" about them? There are two possible problems the panpsychist faces at this juncture. The first is to attribute too much mentality to fundamental particles, which would be absurd. The second is to attribute no mentality at all to fundamental particles, in which case the assertion that electrons are "essentially mental" is empty and meaningless. Moreover, attributing any mentality whatsoever to an electron seems ridiculous, so it seems like the panpsychist must face one of these two absurdities.
Despite his predicament, I think the panpsychist has a way out. Consider the higher-order thought (HOT) account of consciousness. According to this account, a mental state is conscious by virtue of our having a higher-order thought about it. My sensory states are not therefore conscious-- they only pop into "the light of consciousness" when the spotlight of higher-thought comes to rest on them. I take this to be an independently plausible theory. Cognitive psychology has shown us time and time again that our conscious experience is much narrower than we often take it to be. This makes sense; as soon as we want to pay attention to something we shine the HOT spotlight on it, so to us it seems that everything is in the spotlight all the time. But that just isn't the case, as famous selective attention tests have shown.
I believe the HOT account of consciousness can save the panpsychist from absurdity. If electrons are somehow mental in their character, they can have a sensory mental character but lack a conscious mental character. Unlike us, they lack the sophisticated mental machinery to access their own intrinsic phenomenal character. Therefore, also unlike us, there is nothing it is like to be them. Despite the fact that there is something mental about them: namely, that they have phenomenal states.
One final bit of explanation. It might seem a bit ridiculous to attribute sensory states to an entity but not attribute to that entity any consciousness. But actually, I think we can sympathize a bit with the electron's lack of consciousness. I have often suddenly come to the realization that I have been having some experience without realizing it. For example, I will realize that I've had a song stuck in my head but not realized that I've been replying the lyrics over and over. Or I will realize that I've had a slight headache but not been thinking about it-- despite the fact that it has actually been bothering me, even when I didn't realize as such!
Perhaps these experiences are something like the existence of electrons under this formulation of panpsychism. They have some intrinsic phenomenal experience which provides the categorical grounds for their behavior, but they have no access whatsoever to that experience.
I hope that if nothing else, the links scattered throughout this brief exposition have provided some food for thought to those interested in the subject.
1 If you aren't convinced that there's a Hard Problem, panpsychism is likely to sound like utter nonsense, and reading on will certainly not convince you. Arguing for the existance of a Hard Problem is beyond the scope of this brief exposition.
2 A counterexample (employed by Strawson) is the property of liquidity. Although liquidity emerges from a system of molecules, it does not radically emerge. The property of liquidity can be explained by reference to the property of the constituent properties.
3 Stoljar does not endorse this interpretation of his view, but other philosophers have. David Chalmers, in particular, describes Stoljar's physicalism as a kind of panpsychism.

[END OF POST]

Thanks for the thought-provoking post.

I'm thinking: is the basic issue not just that of mixing up consciousness, conscious-of and self-consciousness?

Conscousness/of/self

An electron isn't conscious - rather it is consciousness. That's what it is made from, and everything else is too. All things therefore have being-awareness, the experience of being itself as itself. This is not the same as reflective consciousness.

From there, we have:

• Conscious-of: If there was patterned structure within the boundary of the electron, then the electron could be said to "experience" or be conscious of that structure. For a human, this means the sensations, perceptions, and thoughts which arise within themselves.
• Self-consciousness: This would be the ability for something to (incorrectly) identify with one part of the structure within its boundary and not another. This is what humans do: They identify with certain sensations, perceptions, thoughts (within themselves) and not others.

Within this, we would then go to more subtle structures, such as directed attention (often described as a "torch" but really better referred to as a "filter" perhaps).

The Blanket Metaphor

For this overall picture, I quite like the metaphor of a blanket of material whose only property is awareness. Laid out flat, the blanket would only experience being-aware. It wouldn't experience being aware of anything; it would just be "consciousness". It would have no perceivable boundary; it would have no characteristics at all. Until, that is, folds or ripples were made in the blanket. At this point, the blanket would be "conscious of" those patterns. Those folds and ripples would be its "world", as far as it was concerned. Patterns would change and shift and over "time" (measured as one shift relative to another) the world would become different. However, perhaps one part of the pattern would remain reasonably consistent or change very slowly. As the only consistent thing in its world, the blanket might incorrectly identify that part of the pattern as "itself" - confusing its knowing of being unchangingly simply being-aware with the persistence of one of the experiences, the content of its awareness. This would be "self-consciousness".

Worlds, Ripples and Nonlocality

I'd say the bit that comes after this, though, is the form in which facts-of-the-world are then present. The notion of a literal extended-in-space world that is "external" to localised peaks of consciousness starts to seem dubious. The world as experienced may be better described as a shaping or enfolded patterning of consciousness within that area. This would mean that the enfolded topology of a region of consciousness would be identical with its experience of the world (and basically would be the world, for that region). Furthermore, one's mode of thinking would deform the topology as much as sensory experiences would - one would to an extent literally experience one's beliefs. Referring to the blanket metaphor: In a sense, the "blanket" is simultaneously everywhere, only the "patterns" are located. The "blanket" is non-spatial and non-temporal; the whole world is therefore within it at every point. (Obviously this is trickier to imagine, because the picture we have of a blanket is spatially extended - however, we can see that it is all "blanket" and that "blanket" is everywhere and nowhere.)

Wow thank you for this. I have argued for exactly this for a while (and below) without realizing that the terms I use interchangeably and make sense in my mind because I understand it conceptually might be very confusing for people who think of consciousness in other terms. (I'm not the gold giver by the way).

I completely empathise - I've been wrestling with ages to get terms that make sense to more than just myself (consciousness, awareness, everything means different things to everyone). It's a painful process!

Turns out an excess sprinkling of hyphens and italics is the way forward! ;-)

Q: I like this formulation. A while ago, I had the realization that "this" (my personal experience) is what my brain actually "looks like" in the sense of what matter or the substance of the universe actually is. Ever since I've been trying to formulate it in a way that other people can understand without having had that personal experience. I'll try to see if this helps if you don't mind.
To start, strip yourself of all assumptions and truths you believe about the world. Reduce yourself to the most basic experience, and examine what it is that exists. It is clear that this, what you are experiencing, exists. There are qualia of different natures: colours, sounds, shapes... There is also a sensation of a sort of continuous stream of information feeling like it originates in the "center" of this experience, yet nowhere and everywhere at once. Examining the qualia, you can see most of them are static, except a few connected oblong shapes, whose movements seem to correspond some sensations in that continuous stream of information. Intuitively, it feels like commands are originating in this stream of information, commanding these oblongs to move. Let's call them the body. Commanding the feet (the bottommost oblongs) to move around seems to cause the entire field of qualia to change. However, there are some patterns to this change. For instance, an area of a certain colour may grow larger and larger, until it stops, the feet can't move anymore, and there is a new sensation at the point where the consistent area is closest to the body. We'll call that sensation touch. Moving the feet in a different way, you experience the consistent area of colour move sideways, until it disappears from your experience. Then, moving the feet a different way again, the consistent area of colour reappears. From examining your experience like this, a few things become clear after a while: There appears to be some sort of "things" which cause certain predetermined qualia to appear by affecting the body. For instance, the hands are stopped with "touch" at the exact point where the areas of consistent colour begin. You conclude that there must exist some "things", separate from your sphere of experience, acting their influences upon what exists as your personal experience. However, you cannot access the "thing" as it exists by itself. You can only access the influences the "thing" works on your sphere of experience. There appears to be a sort of "space" to move around in, but the body is always at the center of the experience. Further, you notice a lot of "things" are shaped very similarly to the body. And these things tend to move and create information very similar to the continuous stream of information. Through looking in mirrors and exchanging information with these things, you conclude that "the body" is also one of these "things". You conclude these "people" all must have spheres of experience centered at their bodies, with their own continuous stream of information. Hence, in their spheres of experience, they experience your body in the way you experience theirs: as a "thing" acting influences on their experiences. Further research leads you to know all people have an organ in their heads, and the nature of the activity in this organ, the brain, tends to correlate with the nature of the activity in their spheres of experience. You have come to believe in a kind of physicalism, that all that exists are these "things" you can describe through information gathered in your sphere of experience. Yet, the true nature of these things are inaccesible to you as anything but the reflections they cast in your personal experience. Just like the true mind of a person is inaccesible to you, except as this image of a grey lump transmitting electrochemical signals, as which their mind appears in your personal experience. Is there any reason to believe this gray lump is special in the domain of "things"?
Occam's razor tells us we should prefer an explanation of these spheres of experience which does not assume some sort of special intangible property assigning mind to these brains but not other matter. Is it not reasonable to assume that a "mind" is simply what a brain "looks like" when its existence is not seen as a reflection caused by sensory input into some other mind?
Just in the same way as there is an inaccesible property to other objects. Their "true" nature as objects in space: That which exists outside your personal experience and is the cause of you "seeing something" at an area in your experience. Is there really any reason to believe the "true nature" of a brain and a chair is fundamentally different?
The brain contains and manages complex information whose true existence takes the form of complex qualia like "feelings" and "memories". However, the basic unit making up qualia, let's call it "consciousness", is just "what the mind is made of". Which is exactly the same as "what the chair is made of", only configured differently. Here's where IIT falls short. It is in a sense similar to this kind of panpsychism in the sense that it says mind is something that appears when matter is arranged in a sufficiently complex manner. However, it claims that matter fundamentally has a different sort of existence from mind. I.e., not only mind, but consciousness appears only when matter is arranged in a sufficiently complef manner. You cannot make one thing from another thing which has a fundamentally different kind of existence. IIT, as I understand it, claims as soon as matter reaches a certain treshold of complexity, 'pop', the kind of existence which we call consciousness appears. Panpsychism on the other hand would claim "consciousness" is the intrinsic nature of matter, and that complex phenomena like "feelings" are simply consciousness arranged to contain that information, the same way we can observe "experiential matter" to be arranged to encode information in our brains.

Good stuff. Working from direct experience onwards is definitely a key approach. Everything you experience exists as experience, and if you imagine turning off your senses, you find there is an open unstructured background to it. (I had a fun play with this in a post elsewhere. ["Why did the devs implement dreams?" /r/outside]) If you shift your perspective to this background (and it can be done, simply by deciding) then that sense of the world passing through you becomes prominent, and the nature of objects becomes clearer. You have to be careful when pondering this to stay 1st-person and not drift into 3rd-person thinking-about mode. That way you realise when you are supposing "external things as the source of experience" and so on. It's important to realise that we never have an experience outside this perspective, no matter what clever conceptual frameworks we come up with.

Is it not reasonable to assume that a "mind" is simply what a brain "looks like" when its existence is not seen as a reflection caused by sensory input into some other mind?

Or rather, that a "brain" is what a mind looks like, as an image?

If "awareness" is the fundamental property, and everything is patterns of that, then all reality has an experience of being-aware, of being itself. Sufficient complexity is what allows one part of a pattern to reflect upon itself, using patterns within itself. Meaning chairs and brains are indeed the same, fundamentally. Complexity doesn't change the nature of things, but it does allow more degrees of freedom.

Cristof Koch has in the past taken IIT and then adds to it that: "consciousness is fundamental". There's a recentish article by Koch on panpsychism here [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-consciousness-universal/] which is worth a read.

It still doesn't get there though, because it still has a duality to it that you can't find in direct experience.

EDIT: Excuse the major extended rambling on my part. You're about to see how difficult this stuff is to put into language, and that when you do attempt, it usually sounds mystical and slightly nonsensical... Perhaps a bit of dialogue can clarify it though! Thanks for engaging in the discussion. If nothing else, it means I'm forced to try to describe it more clearly (or not).

Steps Along the Way

It might be confusing if you're using it to explain to someone who doesn't quite get the idea of panpsychism yet.

It's so often the case that we have to describe things "incorrectly" for a while until we're along the path a bit, at which point the context has shifted and we can reformulate that description. The "brains and images" concepts definitely fall into that category. And "standard panpsychism" itself is really a step along the way. It still assumes a fundamentally n-dimensional spatial-temporal world. But we leave that once we've established the "matter" of the matter, when we start to see the implications of a "single nonmaterial material".

I don't have the time to read the article by Koch this week or the next, but I liked that post of yours.

Personally, I wouldn't bother with the Koch article except for context, if you are already on-side with our discussion so far. But I feel obligated to include links like that in an "other opinions are available" way. :-)

this open field in which experiences unfold themselves, if I understand you correctly, would in the context of panpsychism represent the entire universe?

Right. Although to say "universe" is even too much, because "universe" would be patterned content. This is before that. But that' just a language thing - if we say that the term "universe" means "all patterned content" then the universe is entirely within and made of that open field, then we can put that aside.

Whirlpools Reviewed

I believe this is the separation between those who believe we all are fundamentally the same "I", or "God" if you will, and those who believe we are fundamentally separate "souls" (one blanket per person). . . I tend to be in the former camp

I believe we can join the two together, and solve most of the problems you pose. We've already done it, in fact, we just haven't realised it. The whirlpools metaphor is great, but it has the difficulty of being "spatial" so it only goes halfway. (The blanket metaphor is identical in this respect. The whirlpools really correspond to localised little circular folds within the blanket metaphor.)

It leaves us with our the experience of the body, mind and world (specifically: sensations, thoughts and perceptions) appearing within the perimeter of the whirlpool. But... where do they come from?

If every person were to be an individual whirlpool, how do we perceive one another at all? How does that information "cross the space" between whirlpools? What are the boundaries of the whirlpool?

The answer is to reconfigure the metaphor a little.

Perspectives and the Enfolded

To say the "world is within you" doesn't just mean that the present moment sensory experience is within you. It really does mean the whole world - all patterns everywhere - are within you right now and you are actually experiencing it at this moment. However, only one aspect of it is "unfolded" as senses; the rest is "enfolded" into the background, simultaneously everywhere.

Metaphors:

• During day time we see the sun shining in the sky, we do not see the stars. But the stars are still there, it is the brightness of the sun that conceals them. Just so, visuals and sounds and textures conceal the subtle global felt-sense in the background of experience. This global felt-sense is the entire universe, summarised.
• Imagine a stretch of unbounded water. Waves and patterns within it, your gross experience. Now, take some coloured dye and place a drop into the water. From the perspective of the water:
  • Spatially: The colour is simultaneously everywhere, while being nowhere.
  • Temporally: There is no record of a time when the colour was not there.
• To take on the ultimate perspective of awareness is to take on the perspective of the the colour rather than the patterns within or structure of the water.

So let's return to being-a-person. Language will cause us problems here, but we can get halfway.

You are not a person, you are a perspective. An area of awareness, made of awareness, but unbounded (because it is non-spatial and non-temporal). Within every perspective is everything, enfolded. Because everything is enfolded everywhere. Your present moment sensory experience is an unfolded aspect or pattern of the complete enfolded universe. Your felt-sense is your experience of that everywhere. If you think of yourself like this, as a "perspective" that is *tuned-into" a particular part of the overall pattern, then you can solve the other problems. If you release a hold on your present attention, you will find you relax and deepen as the unfolded aspect dissolves into the background of experience. The waves settle and you identify as the colour-that-is-everywhere, or the entire-sky (with both its stars = universe of all patterns, and its sun = present moment experience). Your present moment becomes unformatted, dimensionless, timeless.

The Overall Picture

The implications of this could be summarised thus:

• The only fundamental property is awareness or being-aware.
• The "universe" is all patterns in currently formed in awareness.
• A "person" is a "perspective" which has experience in the form of "unfolded" sensory experience and "enfolded" background experience.
• The "enfolded" background experience is actually the entirety of patterning everywhere. By which we mean "all existence" not just the post-big-bang universe we theorise in physics.
• All information is accessible to you, to be unfolded, because all information is everywhere, enfolded.
• Deep sleep or meditation corresponds to there being no unfolded content in your perspective.
• Death of the body just means those particular bodily sensations no longer appearing.
• True dissolving would mean the ending of the "perspective". But this cannot be comprehended, because the "perspective" is not spatially or temporally defined.
• Your absolute true nature is the true nature of everything: simply unpatterned being-aware.

Phew. That's my best attempt for now.

Q: Perhaps a bit of dialogue can clarify it though! Thanks for engaging in the discussion. If nothing else, it means I'm forced to try to describe it more clearly (or not).
It's appreciated. It's difficult to find occasions to genuinely examine these perspectives with some attempts at logical rigour to make sure what you're saying is meaningful. Pretty much the only places I've found to discuss "mystical" matters are the psychonaut subs, and the environment there isn't very conducive to inquisitive rational analysis. In order to be avoid some confusion, I believe it's a good idea to introduce two terms. The transcendental "I" , the "spotlight self", and the "ego" (not the freudian one). Essentially, the "I" is the blanket, the "spotlight self" is the particular pattern, all the sensory and mental activity which makes up an individual mind, and the "ego" is a person's sense of being a separate acting agent. The difficult part of trying to think of everything as one consciousness is the question of "why am I experiencing 'me' then, and not someone else, or everyone else?". There's some intuitive perception that you're aware of everything within your consciousness. This can be helped somewhat with examples like the control of your breath, which clearly passes in and out of the spotlight self multiple times a day, demonstrating that what the average person thinks of as themselves is not a static thing, but rather a conglomerate of experiences changing in nature continuously. From there a better understanding of how a spotlight self is an occurance in a greater field of self might make more sense. Noone has any trouble understanding why a cup is not a different cup: they're different occurences in the spatial model people are familiar with. In the same way two "minds" are different occurences in the conscious model. I don't know if it's very clear to call it a perspective, because it's a very antropomorphic and spatial term. It might be better to say that these experiences are, and they exist fundamentally as consciousness, and when they exist within the conglomerate of experiences that is the spotlight self, they are experienced as a part of that loose collection of experiences. These collections contain basically only one constant component, which is the ego. The ego is the experience of other experiences being evaluated and manipulated, interacting, in this spotlight self. The ego is the individuality of a person, and what most people identify with. The point is that the source of the feeling of "me" as an individual, is the same as the source of the feelings that make up "my mind", meaning no one but "me" can experience "my mind". So if you clear your mind completely, you'll see that this ego was just another one of the experiences in this field of consciousness. Nothing fundamental. Just like what the ego thought was experiences happening to it. It's curious though, how it's always the same set of experiences that are unfolded. You don't go into deep sleep and wake up in a different room as a different person. And there's lots of different instances of such unfolding, each separate. It's really difficult to come to terms with how my mind is a perspective arising in this field because of how mind-bending it is. I guess the point is when you experience the whole of it, you don't experience the individual perspectives that occur in it. What's difficult is for me to reconcile is that in some sense when I enfold my spotlight self and try to experience the whole, in some sense it's still jonluw trying to experience the whole, nlt the whole itself, since jonluw can recall the experience. Jeez, this is difficult to write about. The Tao that can be named is not the real the Tao and all that.

Thanks, I think we can get somewhere here. So, if we talk about selves and so on we are still talking about partitioning the content of experience in some way. I basically say "this part of experience is me, the rest is not". The "ego" is our identification with one part of experience and not another part of experience. Why is your arm part of you, when the cup is not, for instance?

The distinction is surely arbitrary and is simply convention:

• We make the distinction based on spatial proximity. Perceptions that are near the point-of-view are assumed to be "me". In particular, bodily sensations are assumed to be "me" whereas visual perceptions not near the body sensation are assumed to be "not me".
• We make the dissociation based on temporal proximity. I intend my arm to move, it moves shortly afterwards. However, I might intend all sorts of things - passing thoughts - all the time that arise as experiences later. I don't say I caused them and they are part of me, though.
• Things that seems to persist we identify as "me", things that are fast changing we see as "not me". For instance, body sensations and thought locations persist and recur; the scene around us changes dramatically all the time as we "move about".

All of this, though, occurs in the same "open space". (Yes, "perspective" is an awkward word and I'm not all that keen on it. I mean it more in terms of "assuming a perspective" or "taking a point of view" in experience. Unfolding this rather than that.)

Obviously, when you let go of all content then you are not really a perspective anymore. A perspective is something you temporarily become.

So if you clear your mind completely, you'll see that this ego was just another one of the experiences in this field of consciousness. Nothing fundamental. Just like what the ego thought was experiences happening to it.

Right. All that is fundamental is the being-aware. None of the content is fundamental, whether it is being experienced unfolded or not. And by content we mean both the current experience, the background facts of "this world", the broader patterns of "all worlds in existence". If you let go too far, you stop being/having an experience completely and totally dissolve as an apparent separation in Awareness.

The point is that the source of the feeling of "me" as an individual, is the same as the source of the feelings that make up "my mind", meaning no one but "me" can experience "my mind".

Different "spaces' could have the identical experience, maybe? Not sure on this. You could "take on the perspective" of my position right now. But this would mean you'd also be taking on the present moment in its entirety, including memories. So you'd actually just become TriumphantGeorge.

It's curious though, how it's always the same set of experiences that are unfolded. You don't go into deep sleep and wake up in a different room as a different person. And there's lots of different instances of such unfolding, each separate.

Well, you don't know this, perhaps. There could be a complete discontinuity in the arising experience and you (as an open space) might be unaware of this.

e.g. The experience of being a Japanese Professor could be arising - experiencing from the perspective of a Japanese Professor - and the next step you are experiencing from the perspective of Jonluw typing at the computer. Unless a memory was available of the previous experience (i.e. there were traces of the Japanese Professor Walking experience in the Jonluw Typing experience), you would not know.

I guess the point is when you experience the whole of it, you don't experience the individual perspectives that occur in it. What's difficult is for me to reconcile is that in some sense when I enfold my spotlight self and try to experience the whole, in some sense it's still jonluw trying to experience the whole, nlt the whole itself, since jonluw can recall the experience.

Right!

For as long as you try to do this while holding onto a point of view you won't be able to. If you do release your hold on that point of view, however, this means when you re-adopt the perspective of Jonluw, you perhaps won't have the memory. If you let go of the Jonluw experience absolutely completely then you may reattach to another perspective. If you release too far, you may cease to be a partition at all?

The phrase "pure perceiver" might be a nice one to adopt for this discussion; it's the "most subtle perimeter". The three-dimensional camera, as it were.

See, I believe what we see as objects within each spotlight self experience, reflect some nature or behaviour of the field of consciousness.

Right. That we see consistencies simply means there are persistent generalised patterns, though. This is not to be dismissed; they are the channels along which the experience of "this world" forms, and while we are in that context then this is quite important!

It means the world isn't subject to eternal, independent laws; it does mean that generalised regularities can be seen as incorporated within consciousness in the same way as the actual experiences.

Basically, I think the entire physical sciences are a very advanced form of the blanket metaphor.

Yes, the blanket metaphor says "there's the fundamental" and then "everything else is folds". Anything we observe or become corresponds to such pattern. The generalised regularities of science (as noted above) are such patterns.

So even though it's one continuous blanket, I can still identify and describe with physics, one relatively simple fold and one ludicrously complex fold.

Right. Physics, say, is an accounting of a particular subset of folds. (And also, as a subject and mode of thinking, takes the form of a subset of folds.)

Scramble these nerves, and there would be no jonluw. There'd still be a transcendental I, but the experience of jonluw would not be manifested in it.

Transcendental I (the blanket/property), pure perciever, perspective-of-jonluw, ego of jonlaw.

This is important because what we can see in our physical model reflects what is going on in the world of actual existence, consciousness.

Only a particular, greatly-reduced subset. And we have to be careful and not assign the human experience to other aspects. For instance, cups experience being cups, they don't experience "sadness". "Sadness" is a sensation in the body linked to various other perceptions and thoughts. Cups don't have thoughts and feelings. They have... ceramic. Cups aren't even "cups" as we conceptualise-experience them.

It is, however, easy to say something is spatially separated in the physical model. Not so much in the field of consciousness.

Right, although things are separated out in the physical model, they are not separated out even in experience or apparent reality, if you truly investigate it. Nothing is spatially separated, fundamentally. But when we think of things, we are forced to imagine them in some sort of extended space, in metaphor and in daily life.

For jonluw to experience what "you" are seeing as well as what "he" is seeing, the two sets of experiences would have to be arranged into one set. In the physical model, the brains would need to be connected with some seamless form of communication.

However, this is possible I think - having simultaneous experiences. And I don't think it requires literal brain connection. Remember, our "pure perceiving" isn't actually bound to brains or any particular structure.

However, with the help of the physical model we can see that consciousness arranges itself into complex structures, where "sound" only exists as a structure within that structure.

In fact, by adopting the physical model as the structure of you perception/mind, you directly experience this physical model as if stable and underlying. If you let go of that, it stops being unfolded in that manner and you have the raw being experience. Or, it has you...

A problem arises: You can't separate out the "physical model" from your patterned perception of "the world". And changing your physical model changes what you perceive. Effectively, your world is the structure of your mind. This is before brains.

There's something else to cover here: Fundamentally, there is only the property of being-aware. Within that, patterns appear.

Immediately when we imagine this we are incorrect: we will tend to think of the patterns as spatially extended or interrelated, but this not the case. (Space in fact would be one such pattern, which might from the structure from which other patterns borrow.)

There are no limits on the form those patterns, although we cannot think of this. And there are no rules, inherently. Only temporary regularities. To describe a particular arrangement requires a language that corresponds to it for the duration that it persists. Our physics codifies a certain subset of patterns (patterns of perception which exist as regularities in mind, persisting in memory, tied together within conceptual framework which also exists as regularities mind, persisting in memory, in a mutually-reinforcing relationship). Because it involves a shaping of mind and perception, it seems obviously true that we are describing an external, dependable world. But we are not. The world is not external, it is internal. However, the shifts in language required to describe one aspect of experience deny us the ability to describe - and even have - alternative experiences. We need to kill one point of view to shift to another.

...

Hi, thanks for taking an interest and joining in. Just going to bash out a quick ramble here for now to keep things going. Some of the disconnect here might be that it is reaching for terminology to describe a foundation that is not itself an object - it is simply a property, something we'd come to - but can "entertain" objects.

You can build any number of complex, internally consistent, frameworks to defend any number of views, but there must be some basis for believing one over another, correct?

Yes, and this is exactly about anchoring a framework in that way.

So, why is the idea of a pure-perceiver relevant?

The source of this is an effort to connect the description of consciousness with the facts of direct experience. Rather than, say, just connecting it to another accepted framework, as is more common in this area. Hence the earlier hyphenations of conscious-of and so on.

After exploring this (our direct experience), we end up identifying a basic experience which does not have a boundary, but has content appearing within it, with no discernible "outside" form which it comes. Further investigation reveals a non-gross background felt-sense which encapsulates the whole experience and can be to some extent "unfolded".

There is no sense in which there is a "thing" experiencing the content of experience.

The felt-sense and next-step corresponds to a variation on Eugene Gendlin's philosophy and psychology efforts; the enfolded-unfolded to David Bohm's implicate-explicate order model as described in Wholeness and the Implicate Order.

i.e. The concept of the "pure-perceiver" arises from the need to have a borderless context for subjective experience. The notion of enfolded meaning/facts is to provide a link between the structure of subjective experience (the behaviour of the context, the current moment, and the felt-sense) and an objective or 3rd-person description of the world (time, space, objects, etc).

I guess this comes back to my previous response to you, why is it that "Within every perspective is everything, enfolded"?

The short answer would be, there is nowhere else for it (the content of the world) to be. On the enfolded thing, it's in the following sense that the world is dissolved within the pure-perceiver:

[Imagine a device that] consists of two concentric glass cylinders. Between them is a viscous fluid, such as glycerin. If a drop of insoluble ink is placed in the glycerin and the outer cylinder is turned slowly, the drop of dye will be drawn out into a thread. Eventually the thread gets so diffused it cannot be seen. At that moment there seems to be no order present at all. Yet if you slowly turn the cylinder backward, the glycerin draws back into its original form, and suddenly the ink drop is visible again. The ink had been enfolded into the glycerin, and it was unfolded again by the reverse turning.
-- Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm

TL;DR: The "pure-perceiver" is fundamental and is the non-thing whose only property is awareness or being-aware, which means that it "is" awareness.

what do you think of the idea that there is one experiencing subject, entertaining multiple, simultaneous self-contained experiences? This idea is in a way the opposite of Parfit's resolution to paradoxes of personal identity. Instead of there being no enduring persons, there is one subject, this "blanket". Instead of never stepping in the same river twice, persons endure simply because the conscious property of the universe endures.

That's pretty much where I'm going with that.

There is only the blanket - the infinite nonmaterial material whose only property is being-aware - and transient patterns forming with it. There can be multiple, apparently self-contained experiences - shallower patterns within the perimeter of deeper patterns - and any number of them.

Remember, though, that nothing is really separate. Any pattern can be said not just to be made of blanket, but to be "blanket". This is simultaneously everywhere, all-at-once. So in that sense, all patterns are available from within all other patterns if you drop down and quieten yourself to "blanket" level.

Being a "person" could be to be your own localised experiential world. However, you would also be all other localised worlds and the non-spatial, non-temporal background. However, given the subtle structure we might call "perspective", we tend to focus on the immediate large clumpy sub-.patterns. If we completely let go of that though, "our" experience could expand to encompass it all.

Our present moment is experience is just what we have unfolded right now. One enduring property is all there is?

So it's more like the one property that's guaranteed to endure during survival.

Of course. I don't mean it's all there is right now - but it's the "basic thing that never goes way" so it's all there truly is. Which is reassuring because it changes our relationship to "stuff".

If what we truly are a subtle "perspective" - needn't be annihilated if all the patterns of this world dissolve. Although we would cease to be this "person" perhaps.

I'm not sure what "transhuman technology" would mean given that context though.

...

This leaves us with the question: what the fuck is it like to be an electron?

What is it like to be a human arm?

On the electron: If you could transfer and localise your attention and somehow become just the electron for a while then return, you would never be able to describe it. All your concepts are human-experience-based.

What is it like to be a human in deep sleep? You do that every night. Try to describe the experience.

Fucking electrons.

"What is it like to be a human arm?" : Absolutely nothing: minds are conscious, and the human mind is the human brain. What is it like to be a human brain? Well, it's what I'm doing right now! So the answer is: quite complicated, actually... "What is it like to be a human in deep sleep? You do that every night. Try to describe the experience.": Fuzzy, still, fluid, lukewarm. (Also, sleep is unconscious. You're not supposed to be conscious when you're asleep.)

Why are brains conscious and not arms? Is your arm inside your brain? When you are asleep, do you stop being a "mind"?

If sleep is supposed to be unconscious, what about dreams and lucid dreams?

Is it more accurate to say that deep sleep involves a ceasing of there being something to be conscious-of rather than a ceasing of consciousness.

Now you're just shifting the definition of "consciousness" so that you keep panpsychism while leaving behind the original evidence and intuitions that helped you get to panpsychism in the first place.

Actually, you are right to some extent. But the wrong way around. Everyday panpsychism leads you to a perspective which forces you to kick away the basis of the original view, it having done its job. This is because you end up recognising that panpsychism's flaw is the assumption of a spatially-extended world. But you can't do this from the beginning.

However, I am careful in my definitions. That's where the whole consciousness vs conscious-of vs self-consciousness thing comes from. Remember, I am not OP.

...

A1: Ladies and Gentleman, the Chess Metaphor (not invented by me): A very experienced chess player, is playing a game of chess with himself. No chess set is at hand, so he plays the game "in his head". This mental chess game can serve as a model of a (very tiny) panpsychic universe. It's panpsychic, because its ultimate foundation is the player's consciousness. It's also a model of a universe, with space (chessboard), matter (pieces), time (moves), and physical laws (rules of the game). In this model, there's just one fundamental consciousness, but we could imagine that being divided among non-fundamental consciousnesses: the roles of white player and black player; a pawn "trying" to get promoted; any "theme" in the game which is engaging the attention of the player. We don't need to insist, that every object we can name is conscious.

Right, nice metaphor - differentiate between made of consciousness vs one part being conscious-of another part.

Every object has being-aware - it is what it is as it is - but that is not the same as self-consciousness and being able to take a stand as one part (chess piece) in order to manipulate another part. The human player has the whole chess board within him. An individual chess piece just has wood grain within him.

I question whether panpsychism does any of the work we want an answer to the Hard Problem to be doing. "What is consciousness"? "Consciousness is an intrinsic property of everything". Well...ok? Isn't this just an updated version of the homonculous, one of these infinite turtle regresses?

No, it skips that - it says that consciousness is the material from which everything is made. This doesn't mean everything is self-conscious though.

Whereas "matter" at a fundamental material has no intrinsic properties at all, "consciousness" as a fundamental material has the of "awareness".

It basically means you don't need to magic-up consciousness as mysteriously "emerging" at some stage of complexity. (What complexity allows is self-consciousness, of a particular structure being able to represent itself by having an "idea" inside itself. One part looking at another. This is what we casually just call "consciousness" usually, which is half the confusion.)

POST: David Chalmers' TED talk on "How do you explain consciousness?" (/r/philosophy/)

I think the "inner movie" idea is a poor metaphor, even for a general audience like this, since it inevitably implies "content" and a "viewer of content".

The subjective experience is more like being an aware material which "takes on the shape" of experience, and therefore all experiences are you experiencing yourself. It is in this way that "consciousness" is fundamental. Self-consciousness is something else: It is the identification with one part of experience as "you" and the rest as "other", from an expanded perspective containing both. In moments of no content (perhaps in deep meditation and the like), there is simply the experience of being-aware without objects or a "you".

I think the inner movie idea is a good conversation starters for people who haven't really considered the idea of consciousness and that this bad explanation actually opens the door to your better explanation.

There's something in this - stages of explanation, where each new layer begins with revealing the previous one as false - actually. Start with the movie explanation, then say you are the movie screen and the image, and then that they are one and the same.

Depends what concepts and culture the person is familiar with. Problem is, though, that these halfway islands of explanation become the habitual way of describing something, with the next more-fiddly stage neglected.

Q1: One would be better to trust their consciousness as real and true as oppose to any scientific theory which is simply a byproduct of the consciousness.
Is there a reason you single out scientific theories here? It seems like you should reject philosophical theories as well?

Q2: It sounds like a solipsistic notion to me. If I had to guess I would say that his/her position is that only one's own consciousness can be sure to exist. Scientific and philosophical theories as well as everything else cannot be objectively proved to even exist let alone trusted.
The problem with this argument is that it is unfalsifiable. That is supposed to be the mark of a weak argument as Christopher Hitchens would say.

Problem is, perhaps, that something that is completely true might be unfalsifiablem - e.g. Everything is consciousness / everything is my consciousness.

"Everything is made from matter" would be vulnerable to the same thing surely?

Saying "everything is made of matter" can be verified through experiment

I'm not sure it can, though? It's equivalent to saying "everything is made of stuff, the stuff that all experiments detect"?

I follow the argument. What I was getting at is that the statement "everything is [made of] consciousness" basically predicts everything exactly as it is observed, including subjective experience. So -

Perhaps a better judge of it isn't whether it is falsifiable, because "correctness" is built in in a sense, but whether it leads to a more coherent or intuitive framework than the alternative. (e.g. Not needing to fall back on the hope for "emergence", etc.)

Well the claim "everything is made of matter" is not perfect, but you could see if you were say something a little more specific...

It could only be made more specific by assuming a certain subset of matter, I think. Which means you'd be testing the properties of a particular instance of matter, rather than matter itself. The same I think applies to "consciousness", except "consciousness" has the property of being-aware.

How does that statement predict everything as it is observed? what exactly does "everything is made of consciousness" mean?

The quick way to suggest this would be:

• Consciousness is a "material" whose only property is awareness or being-aware.
• All things are patterns in and of this "material".
• Therefore all things are have being.
• This does not mean they are self-aware, in the sense of being able to reflect upon themselves or think or whatever.

In truth, it's basically materialism but with the property of fundamental being-aware inserted into the lowest level. If that makes sense. You get all the same "objective" observations, but you also get subjective "being", the ability to be *conscious-of, built-in with no need for emergence.

Experiments also detect space, time, energy, and information.

They don't detect those things in depend of matter. But you get my point, don't you? That the "unfalsifiable" has limit potentially when it comes to discerning the truth.

I can clearly feel myself existing within my body, it feels like my skull is a house and my eyes are windows and there is an entity (me) that is in the house.

Which is interesting, because it can't be true. In what sense are "you" housed inside the skull?

In the sense that "I" am not outside of my skull ??? :/

Surely that's not your actual experience though?

So, light may go in your eyes and then travel along your visual cortex where the signals are interpreted and contribute to a "3d world" that you then perceive yourself to be in - but that whole representation is inside your skull. As in, the room around you is all inside your perceptual space - it's all "you". If you try and find the boundary between 'inside' and 'outside' right now, you'll find there's no barrier in perception - you don't feel a wall between the room and you, do you?

You imagine being inside a skull, but that's not your actual experience I'd suggest. (Hopefully that made some sort of sense.)

Top tip: Point to your "real" hand. If you are pointing to one of your hands that you can see, remember that that's inside your skull; it can't be your real hand. If you are pointing to your head, then the same applies: where is your real head? (Answer: If it exists at all, then it is completely outside this perceptual space.)

This is definitely an informative area to explore I reckon...

Ok in that sense, yes my mind is everywhere. but finally I have to logically say...

Thing is, it is a jump, because you never experience that outer world. Indeed, you never really experience a "self" other than a thought of one. You suppose your brain is making all of the external observations (and 3rd-person experiment suggest there is a correlation between brain areas and subjective content) but the fundamental background perceptual space itself cannot easily be accounted for in this way.

It is not clear in what way that 3d experience is inside your skull; when we look inside we do not see a room, for instance.

it's the difference between a movie and the watcher.

What is the "movie" and what is the "watcher" in that metaphor?

I suggest that upon examining your subjective experience, you will not be able to find a "watcher". If you think you do, then examine it further and you will discover you are perceiving it from outside of it - meaning it can't actually be the watcher of course.

... the only thing left will be "you". I like to call this observing entity the soul, at the moment most people are calling it the consciousness.

Right, the unbounded aware openness. I'd say most people are using "consciousness" to mean something a bit different, like the content or a notion of self, rather than this fundamental background. Which is why things get confused I reckon.

I cannot isolate the location of the soul...

Because it is what the experience is made from. Investigate any sensation or thought and you discover it is that too. Hear a sound in the distance, you discover you are both "over here" listening to the sound and you are "over there" beside the sound. It has no location, because it is the unbounded aware space in which experience arises, which is you.

But yes this is an informative area to explore, although I understand that my metaphysical ideas are way out there,

Not at all - they follow naturally from a direct, experiential exploration of this stuff, rather than just thinking-about. If you conceptualise it as a space which takes on the shape of experience, including sensations, perceptions and thoughts, then you don't need to deal with the duality of experience and experiencer.

... my body would be doing all of the typing all by itself without any sort of conscious awareness like a robot.

Well, your body and thoughts and the world around you all seem to arise as spontaneous experiences, "by themselves". If you examine closely the way in which you "direct" these things, you will find you cannot locate the "doing" of them - only the experiencing of them. After all, when your attention becomes absorbed in the words onscreen, your heart doesn't stop beating. Hopefully.

conscious awareness

Perhaps better to say conscious-of or attention-on for this usage, since it is a particular shape of experience adopted by the background awareness.

Right now, isn't seeing just happening all by itself? And when you type, isn't most of that happening by itself? Only if you have over-focused your attention or if you have tensed up do you feel "effortful doing", I'd suggest.

But that's the thing, there cannot be an experience without an experiencer.

Ah, we're only slightly disagreeing. I'm saying that there is only "the experience", by which I mean that you experience something by being it. Your awareness "takes on the shape of" an experience you are having. The apparent separation is a language thing. This actually plays to your "trees in the wood" thing. I'd suggest something extra, which gets around Berkeley's "God is experiencing everything and so keeps it existent" thing. That is, that you are experiencing the whole world right now, it's just that you are only experiencing part of it as a sensory experience. There rest of it is dissolved into the background, as it were.

The facts-of-the-world are here right now. When you walk into those woods are see the fallen tree, you are "unpacking" the tree from the background and into perception.

through meditation I control my emotions and eventually my heart rate.

Right, it is all potentially accessible; you can unpack any part of the background (that which is not within current attention) and make it so, with a bit of practice and (importantly, of otherwise you block the route) belief.

he truth is whenever I think a lot I can feel my brain getting denser like as though I'm flexing a muscle so yes I do feel a little effortful when thinking.

Is this not different?

There is a difference between making thoughts and thoughts arising, in response to an intention. Effortful thinking brings tension, because it involves a suppression and redirection, due to misunderstanding. You feel a pain because you are implicitly tensing up muscles in an attempt to control what arises. Although also, I think you can experience pain wherever there is "stuff that shouldn't be happening".

I then realized that I do in fact "exist" as an entity that was experiencing this depression and that I was running the boat that is my body. Through constant pessimism I had corrupted my boat to the point that it negatively affected the conscious observer (me).

You do exists as an "awareness in which experience arises". And if you screw up the spontaneous flow, block up those patterns, I think you can get into deep depression mode. Basically, you end up creating persistent structures that prevent movement.

An approach to thinking of this:

• Experiences leave traces which "in-form" subsequent experiences.
• Thoughts are also experiences, and effortfully generating or allowing thoughts is equivalent to experiences them as events.
• Hence both bad situation and bad thinking will funnel your future experiences in that direction.
• It is possible to almost completely halt the natural flow of experience by doing this.
• The natural state is one of open allowing, with no trace accumulation. This implies that one should let thinking and action arise spontaneously, and direct your experience only indirectly - through intention.

Pessimism is (accidental) active programming of experience. Unfortunately, this means that to improve you have to choose to think and act in a positive manner - completely ignoring the evidence of the moment!

I do agree that there is a difference in our language, of course the experience and the "experiencer" are one and the same, I just meant that there is an entity within which all of these experiences are experienced. It's more of a ying yang, inner-outer world idea based on compatibilism, the soul does not have any solid boundary, the experience can go as far as the thought wants to go (this is where we might talk of auras). But finally all of this is experienced by a single central awareness which you can call as a soul.

Right. Unbounded. It's all 'within the aware perspective' I'd say.

If you try to find where "you" are, you'll discover you seem to be everywhere, and that the world experiences arises within you. I think this flipping around or inverting of our usual way of approaching the world is quite key to having a direct understanding of consciousness.

do you perhaps believe in the immaterial soul ?

Not that's how I would describe it, but the broader idea, yes. We are "whatever is aware" and, not inside a skull, but rather "tuned into" an experience. It also not at all how clear how much of that experience is external to us. Now, there may well be philosophical zombies - not all "people" have consciousnesses looking through them, perhaps - but I certainly am not. :-)

How on earth could you possibly to say that ? are you looking at blackness ? consciousness isn't looking "through you", you ARE consciousness. I'm sorry but I couldn't really comprehend what that meant, how could we be talking if you are not a consciousness ? What I mean is that a philosophical zombie can be artificially programmed to perfectly behave like a human but there is nothing inside the zombie looking back out the way you are looking back out at the screen.

I am consciousness, and the experiences I have appear within me. I am not "inside a body". I am having the experience of being a body. A philosophical zombie could potentially behave exactly as a human, without a consciousness being aware of it, if that makes sense. It's not about programming. To cut to it: Do you believe that the "soul is in control" at all times? Do we finely manipulate our behaviour? Or are we mostly aware of it, with certain adjustments now and again?

The word here my friend is compatibilism, The unified soul can be divided into the conscious awareness and the emotional subconsious (ying,yang), the conscious awareness is completely free to do whatever it may but the subconscious is extremely deterministic. The subconscious consists of these instincts that are in tune with the best approach in the chaotic world, this can be described as the brain activity that occurs before the person becomes consciously aware of it. It would really benefit the free will listen to this subconscious but free will is also the source of critical thinking and reasoning, the free will can freely choose to listen to the subconscious and access the different possibilities the subconscious has to offer or it can ignore it completely. But because it would benefit to listen to the subconscious we can track the subconscious on monitors and predict the outcome of the persons choice before he becomes aware of it. The choices that the free will makes also affect the subconscious which could later determine how future decisions are made. The subconscious can be described as all of the experiences inside and outside of your mind, it is everywhere and limitless, however the conscious free will being the source of this consciousness should technically exist inside of your brain.

Yep, good summary! We can go into further details about the nature of the encompassing awareness, etc, but overall there, is after all, you-and-your-preferences + the world experience. There is no "free-beyond-this" will.

I have created this really crazy theory that shows that there is a subtle conscious force that permeates through the universe and this force is responsible for the creation and sustenance of life. Literally everything is consciousness ! The whole universe is an ocean of this energy and our awareness is like a whirlpool in this ocean.

There is a nonmaterial material whose only property is being-aware. Everything is patterns within this "awareness"; individuals are semi-localised areas in which their world appears. However, at a fundamental level, everything is everywhere and always, like the colour "blue" is the whole ocean, because at root there is no time or space division.

I feel like as though my mind is pouring out of my eyes and is enveloping everything around me, but at the same time the world is entering inside me.

Right, well I'd phrase this as that you are the background, so therefore awareness is everywhere (and all experience is made from awareness), and the apparent world arises within it.

chakras

Although I'm familiar with chakras generally, I'm not really up on them being applied specifically. I guess I find it difficult to link their "physical" side with the less structured background idea.

The etheric feild interacts with the soul...

So, in this way, what is the "soul"? Or are we just talking about different 'types of pattern' within, and of, me? Is "energy" really just a movement, a shifting of patterns in consciousness then?

there is not a single part that isn't you really.

What are the implications of that?

This is where things seem even more far fetched for you, I used to be an atheist myself, but atheism never really answered any meaningful questions, it was only a an idea of rebellion and nothing more. I used spirituality aided by my critical reasoning to help me get through my depression and it genuinely worked. Believe or not, but through spirituality I have left my body twice and now have a little command over the movement of the wind by tuning by body and mind with the consciousness of the wind. (yes I said I can move the wind, believe me if you want but I am having a lot of fun with my aerokinesis)

Aerokinesis is a great word. :-)

I am an atheist in terms of an entity god. I am not religious. I am aware that all my experiences arise in a space of open awareness (consciousness) and is shaped from them. The best description is perhaps, that I am God taking on the shape or perspective of being-Triumphant-George. I am still everything, but my bright sensory experience makes me think that I am "here" instead of everywhere. It's as if I have my face pressed up against a window pane or I have VR goggles on. It seems that I am in that world and it is independent of me, and yet if I relax and detach a little from the show on display, I can somehow "feel around" and find levers and switches which influence the scene...

EDIT: You might enjoy reading The PK Man by Jeffrey Mishlove, if you haven't already.

Being an atheist is okay, I used to be one too. But never disregard your own consciousness, it is by far the most valuable thing that could have ever been conjured up by the universe. I used to be a hardcore atheist at the age of 12, because I learned that the earth was made by consolidation of mass through gravity and that could just discredit the existence of a creator. But eventually I realized that atheism was only an idea of rebellion, it never sought to answer the more meaningful questions of life and is content with nothingness.
The multiverse theory that most atheists use to explain the creation of the universe eventually only became nothing but a gigantic assumption and just as far fetched as believing in a creator. I just could never logically accept that all of this order came from random chaos, I mean the shear amount of order that is present in this world really doesn't leave a lot of room for such random chaos to even occur let alone chaos being the main driver of the universe.
Eventually I logically deduced the existence of God to be there, and slowly began establishing a connection between myself and God and tried to become "one with the universe". Eventually all of the answers for the most important questions of the world just became so apparent and crystal clear to me. Questions like why are we here ? why does evil exist ? what is the purpose of creation and of course telekinesis and some other cool tricks.

I have a completely open mind - happy to have my ideas shift around. So probably to say I'm atheist jumps too far; I am a whatever-it-looks-like-to-me! :-)

I'm not sure there is a "purpose" though. If everything is for all eternity, the only purpose that one can imagine is eventual collapse back to infinite potentiality, from where it all begins again.

The purpose exists in being, I mean think about it, if there was no purpose why would there even be an existence in the first place ? If things collapse back into the source then the purpose would exist in being, if there was no purpose there would be no being, there would be nothing to expand into and nothing to collapse into, just a purposeless dot. I later on realized that every element in existence exists with a purpose whether we understand that purpose or not.

I follow you, but I sort of "put that aside" because I have no access to the information. I'm quite happy to have unanswered questions, if the alternative is to have a placeholder answer from logic only.

Since we don't seem to retain memories prior to our lives (and it's not clear what is happening in cases where such things are reported), we are left in a wait-and-see position.

Which isn't to say we can't probe the nature of this environment we're in, the nature of ourselves. It definitely seems less "substantial" than one would assume, and more responsive. Which again makes me wonder about a larger given purpose. I'm inclined to think there can't be a purpose from an eternal viewpoint, except fluctuation itself.

Q: Well on the topic of recalling past life memories, you have to understand that doing that is a skill in itself, it is something to be honed and trained. If you saw a weak man failing at lifting a dumbell, would you say that all human beings can't do that ?
Take life for example, every single element of life exists with purpose. All of life exists with the conscious intent to change the circumstances of it's environment and bring order to it and thus creating it's own purpose of existence. Order can only exist through intent, no matter how much you try to word it order can never independently exist in an environment of chaos.
You might call it a fluctuation, but that's just saying that you don't understand it enough, a fluctuation is change that's it, you could say that all of life is nothing but a fluctuation, but even you know that life is a lot more than that. Try taking the time to understand the forces that govern our universe, take gravity for example, we can see it happening, we have the equations to have an idea of it's power and we are capable of predicting the force. But do we have any idea of why gravity even exists ? why are particles attracted to each other in a constantly expanding universe (order in chaos) ? Take any force of the universe, polar forces, magnetic forces, If you go deep enough it doesn't look like anything else short of magic. I mean Max Plank pretty much discovered God in the Quantum universe, the rules the particles follow in Quantum space are as unpredictable as free will, he had a glimpse of the ether.
Just for that sake of humor I decided to connect these forces to human traits, I found that gravity connected with universal love and electrostatic forces were similar to polar love (love between a man and woman). Gravity holds entire galaxies and the major part of existence together while polar forces holds the atoms together thus keeping reality in check.
Every force suddenly seemed like a conscious act of God, every movement had purpose and reason, the whole universe was conscious, every force all the way up to the neurons in our brains a movement of God. Your very conscious mind is God separating from himself in order the observe existence from a different perspective.
I can explain to you what's happening in recalling past memories, and the ultimate purpose of existence. But all of these explanation are going to be all about the etheric space.

I guess I could have been more precise: We can't know from this present perspective. It's in the nature of being a perspective. Science, of course, doesn't answer "why?" or even "what?" it just answers "in what way". I can't answer purpose and so on. Those answers must be direct rather than thought about?

However, the true nature of things is timeless and spaceless, it seems to me; this is a created experience by me, but not the "me" that I conceptualise (the thought I have about me), rather the larger background me in which experiences arise. All information is accessible potentially from that perspective. The localised perspective is a filtering rather than an identity.

etheric space

How would you define that? As the background conscious aware space which knows no boundaries but within which all things appear?

the ultimate purpose of existence.

Is the ultimate purpose not... just to create and explore?

You may not realise it but you've pretty much answered most of those questions yourself. The etheric space is basically just as you have described, now you say that the perspective that you say is created by you, so does the whole world get created the more you explore it ? At the same time you cannot deny the identity of the perceiver because he is a creative observer. The observer creates and interacts with the world with his own "source" of being, because it all comes down to this, our minds are deeply interwoven with the rest of reality in an extremely intimate way, a machine can only analyse data no matter how complex you design it but a person is intertwined in the experience around as a single identity. You would now have to have two assumptions, say that you are not alive just like the rest of the universe or say that the rest of the universe is alive along with you, physically there is no difference between you and the rest of the universe and it is paradoxical to call yourself dead, so the most logical conclusion is that the whole universe is conscious in a way that we have yet to comprehend. The ultimate purpose of course being that the unified conscious force extended it's consciousness into manifestation to create this world and into us in order to have a more creative subjective experience.

Yes, I pretty much agree with this; this is my view.

I would say that what I am is a consciousness, and that I am in effect exploring the memories of a particular world, from a particular perspective. (This is experienced as creativity, discovery, and creation-by-implication, which are in fact the same thing.)

Since memories are "made from" thinking and thinking is "made from" the consciousness that thinks, there is no physical world as such. And I am not physical. Furthermore, all this means there is nothing special about "content". It's fun-stuff, explore-stuff, and it's all part of you. You're exploring your own mind. But that means you're also exploring every silly notion you might have. Don't take what you think-see too seriously; there is no "background solidity" to it.

Finally, the "content" that suggests I am limited to being-a-person is just that: an imagining. Actually, I am always the entirety of consciousness, it's just that I am experiencing the sensory image of a limited perspective. My intentions are always global, even when my perception is local?

Q: Awesome, I like your thoughts. I can't help but feel that we have been incessantly agreeing with each other, I'd like to know what are your thoughts about God ? For me after realizing that there are no boundaries between my mind and the rest of the world just meant an infinite amount of implications. Before I used to be an atheist, but after my reconnection I pretty believe every single religion that exits (or at least comprehend it to the extent of my critical thinking), I now understand unconditional love with wisdom, the origins of evil, and now I have a bottomless pot of pure joy which I can tap into whenever I please and just "trip out" in any location. Would you believe me if I told you I practice telekinesis ? no I'm not shitting you I can literally move shit with my mind ! As we speak I am making the wind blow through the branches of my neighborhood trees by just tuning my mind to the spirit of the wind and imprinting my spirit upon the wind. All this spirituality jazz is some absolutely sensational stuff which I really think you should have a go at ! And a person like you is in the perfect position to explore these realms because you have come to this conclusion of boundary less consciousness through your own reasoning and critical thinking, now just submit yourself to the beauty that is existence!

I can't help but feel that we have been incessantly agreeing with each other

I think we are! Same view with just different ways of describing it. Same reality, different metaphors kinda thing. Which is nice. :-)

The Big Guy?

I'd like to know what are your thoughts about God?

Hmm, I say:

It's the name we use to describe the undivided experience, that which everything is made of and from and is. What people call "unconditional love" is the direct experiencing of that undividedness - which is a matter of ceasing to narrowly focus your attention on an aspect of content. The water analogy is often used: water and the waves. But I think it is more accurate to say that "God" and "consciousness" is the colour blue. In other words, "blue" is everywhere in water, water is blue, and all waves are blue. The only property "blue" has is... blue. Consciousness and God have the property of being-aware and no other property. All divisions, relations, patterns, forms, shapes, content and experience are 'made from' this being-aware. It is a "non-material material".

Whats On Tele? vs The Dissolved World

Would you believe me if I told you I practice telekinesis?

Of course! Everyone's doing it all the time, unwittingly. We think we "act" but we don't - we experience actions. :-)

-- Allow me to ramble a little...

We confuse the present sensory experience with the world. In fact, I'd suggest that the world is a set of dimensionless facts-of-the-world dissolved into the background of awareness. There is no distance between objects or events. Both space and time are sensory formatting just as colour, sound, texture is. They are part of experience, not of the world as it is.

Sensory experience is like a mirage floating atop the true world, which is the shifting shapes of the sand dunes beneath (within a certain perspective).

And there is only First Cause.

So, when we decide to raise our arm what we really do is "request the experience of arm-raising". At that exact moment, a pattern is triggered, and laid out before us, which we subsequently encounter as our attention passes over it. We call that "doing", but that act of creation already took place. Our "doing" is actually the experiencing of patterns already laid down. When we attribute causes to effects, in actual fact both are effects - results from accumulated patterns created by will, deliberately or implicitly. If you want to lose weight, you might eat less and go running. But the eating less and running are just experiences; they have no causal power. It is the intention that these correspond to a later experience of weight-loss that produces the results (provided there are no contrary patterns).

Realising this, we find that all of our experience is directly caused - by the direct creation of patterns, partial aspects of which later appear in sensory experience. The only power is will, and will operates directly on the patterns. We "imagine that" the world is a certain way, and subsequent sensory experience falls in line with that. The weather unfolds in exactly the same way as the raising of an arm, for the same reasons and due to the same cause. Usually we only identify with "local" experiences (content arising in the body-space area; content arising within an arbitrarily limited timeframe) but all experiences are "our patterns".

You might find The Patterning of Experience worth a read - it's one of my attempts to encapsulate this aspect of things. And this one is relevant to weather. The weather definitely seems to be a thing!

-- Okay, ramble over...

He Sure Can Move!

I can literally move shit with my mind!

So I'm gonna say the better way to say this is: Update the facts-of-the-world, which you then experience. You are changing the "fact of where something is". You never actually move an object (there's no such thing as a spatially-extended object when you're not experiencing it).

I like that way of saying it because it's nice and general. It highlights that you can change "facts" that are the pattern behind your sensory experience right at this moment - or those that are supposedly not apparently here in "space" or in "history" or in "the future". All the world is here, now, and available for change; Your sensory experience arises spontaneously in alignment with it, effortlessly.

...by just tuning my mind to the spirit of the wind and imprinting my spirit upon the wind.

Is the feeling of this for you a bit like detaching then "sensing out" the thing you want to change, sort of "becoming it", and then "shifting the shape of it/you"?

How did you get into trying that, by the way?

Q: I'm enjoying the way you think you are not holding back your questioning mind in the least, and I'm enjoying the people here in r/philosophy because they actually take the time to question the world around, the people at r/atheism piss me off to new levels, they preach their ideas like dogma and refuse to see the world in a different perspective, the worst part is that they have no sense of direction what so ever and sometimes just end up becoming rude and terrible people.
Your thoughts are exploring the spatial world around you and they look like they are about to burst! For me the conclusion of God came from the analysis of chaos. Chaos is nothing but the loss of order, is no different from entropy chaos in it's purest form without a shred of order would be nothing but sand like particles in space, with no direction, no internal forces like gravity or electrostatic forces, just plain dispersion of sand that is the final stage of chaos. To assume that order can ever be created from chaos is an extremely magical assumption because order is only a conscious force, order is an act of consciousness, you can never expect these sand particles to ever make up their mind to kind of fall in love with each other and recreate gravity where all of the particles begin to tightly hold on to each other in the dispersing effect of the void. I mean let's talk about gravity for a second, we have all of the equations that can predict the force of gravity and this equation is made up of variables that rely on a gravitational constant that apparently changes every few years so it's far from accurate, we have flexible 2D representation of gravity showing how it warps space time but this is only a visualization, we don't have a basic explanation of why one iron ball is attracted to another iron ball in space it's like as though all of these particles are in love with each other (unconditional love) and this love is what holds galaxies together, holds the solar system together and the love of Jupiter is what keeps us alive from meteors. There is just way too much order in the universe to say that all of this happened by chance, it's actually very foolish to even assume such a thing as order occurring from chaos. The very fact that the universe exists by default proves the existence of God.
After taking the time to accept these truths and shift my perspective to unity consciousness I began unlocking many hidden powers that fully conscious entities are capable of, telekinesis being one of them. And no my friend I am not practicing telekinesis in a metaphorical sense, I can quite LITERALLY move objects at my command. Here check out these videos
For me I have the most fun with aerokinesis where I make the wind move, With better established connection I can even control the rain and lightening. Again it's about tuning your mind to the substance of your target and impressing your soul upon it, to get a better idea of this would require a good understanding of chakras which I would be happy to tell you about.

I enjoyed your take on chaos! Loosely, I'd say that the structuring of reality is the structuring of experiencing - and this is the structuring of our minds. Which is very much the same idea, with different words, I suppose. This is not a new idea - Immanuel Kant and others long ago said that things like "space" is more like a sense than a reality. And he basically says something like I do: the world is unstructured and dissolved and effectively an "infinite gloop". Which is really to say, it is nothing at all.

We are the order. And behind order: nothing.

Quick note: When I talk of "metaphor" I don't mean that we can't literally make changes. I mean it in the sense of what I call "Active Metaphors" - that the metaphors you adopt to describe experience end up shaping that experience (described a little in my post about The Patterning of Experience elsewhere). In your case, adopting the idea of chaos and love has pre-formatted your world to allow such experiences to occur (in my thinking). So, in terms of influencing the world, your examples are quite direct. By which I mean, you are dealing with objects and the environment that you can see and are present. Have you also experimented much with stuff outside of that, more abstractly?

Like, experimenting with things which aren't restricted spatially and temporally (since space and time are part of the mind's experience, and not part of "a world"). This is where we cross over from being an "Entity God" (a located presence with power) to a "Fundamental God" (that which constitutes the world and creation itself).

Aside - Can't recall if I've mentioned it before, but have you read Jeffrey Mishlove's The PK Man? Anyway, it's quite decent read for those unpersuaded of the possibilities of direct influence. Kirby Surprise's Synchronicity, meanwhile, deals with more metaphor-based approaches (decent interview with him here). If you get very bored, over the last while I've posted a few things at this subreddit [/r/Oneirosophy], in terms of techniques and worldview. Mostly about opening ourselves up, rather than specific targets.

Q:I was just checking out the r/onerosophy subreddit and I'm in love with it, that's it no more beating around the bush with you, I am going to tell you my ultimate theory about existence, I am primarily Hindu but I am going to use Christian metaphors which are very easy to understand. By default it is impossible to assume order can ever come from chaos, so therefore there was a source of "intent" for everything to be, let's call this source as God, the basic crucible of light for all of existence. I'll explain to you several theories regarding God and I hope you can piece them together, let's first start with the 'Lucifer Experiment', imagine God as a ball of light, all of existence and consciousness comes from this single source, God is a force of creation and does not find solace in an empty and mundane existence of just being a boring ball of light, this ball wants to explore and manifest into the void around it, the ball begins to grow tentacles at the ends of which are tiny balls of light, each of these balls are still the same source consciousness of God and God observes the rest of the universe through the awareness of these tiny balls. Let's call this tiny balls angels, they remain constantly tethered to God, but God is still bored because he is still not outreaching himself into all of existence fully, so he decides to separate and divide himself in a very unique way. One of the tiny balls under the will of God decides to separate itself from the central ball of light by disconnecting the tentacle like tether that kept it attached, because of this tiny ball of light who we will now call lucifer was disconnected from divinity, lucifer now after seperation no longer felt the divine bliss of unity and complete awareness, but through this seperation he now has independence and free will, he can make his own decisions without the interference to God. As Lucifer explores the void, he gains the strength to manifest and the knowledge of the existence, but due to natural causality many of the decisions that Lucifer makes is subjected to the destruction of natural consequence and because of this he begins to manifest his own hell, there is nothing he can do about it it just plain causality and this was a part of God's intention to experience the void since God and Lucifer are still one and the same, and thus Lucifer remains meditating in the fires of hell where he is in unity with reality and in unity with divinity, God and Lucifer are constantly helping each other in maintaining balance. Now that this duality is set up, God can begin the creation of a middle earth where he can experience the ultimate form of a subjective reality, In the Garden of Eden when God created Adam and Eve through which his consciousness exists, he wanted to Adam and Eve to live a world of conscious freedom, Adam and Eve only remained in the Garden of Eden as long as they were "tethered to God" but God wanted them to be free so through the spirit of Lucifer he enticed them to eat the apple of knowledge which will give them the ultimate strength and knowledge to face the harshness of the world of causality, but in order to make this experiment pure he had to make sure that Adam and Eve chose to eat the apple under their own free will, so he pretended to not be watching while Adam and Eve disobeyed him to eat the apple. The experiment was a Grand success although not entirely for Adam and Eve, since they were capable of demonstrating free will they had the power to face the harsh and real world and thus they were disconnected from God and the Garden of Eden disappeared thus leaving them to face the world with nothing but their own knowledge, strength from Lucifer and unity and divinity from God.
My life after death theory:
When it comes to life after death I believe in the Hindu theories of reincarnation as they make the most sense, I don't believe in an eternal hell or heaven since one is unnecessarily evil and the other horribly mundane and pointless. I believe that that once you enter the metaphysical space after you die, the space naturally reacts to your thoughts and your mind but only temporarily, just like in a dream if you have good thoughts you will get good dreams, if you have bad thoughts you will get nightmares, in the same sense if you were a good person you will only manifest good things but if you were a hateful person you will only manifest a horrifying and cruel reality which will attack you back because in this place there is literally no boundary between your mind and the rest of space. Only until you are cleansed of your wicked thoughts and you are capable of creating a beautiful reality will the metaphysical space react naturally to your purified mind. Lucifer makes sure that the souls who are experiencing this cleansing do not get destroyed and lost into oblivion, he keeps them all in one place where the evil souls can atone for their sins together in a single hell space. Every single thing in existence has the breath of God present inside it, everything from dogs and cats to trees and rocks, literally everything is conscious in some sense. In life this conscious energy keeps getting recycled through the process of reincarnation, as each soul gets more and more purified with each incarnation they receive more and more energy from God to reincarnate to a higher conscious creature, so if a person lived a good life he gains a lot of conscious energy of love from the people around him and his surroundings that he will end up getting a better afterlife in a family where that level of energy will match and resonate, while a bad person will end up losing energy and thus end up in a much more poorer after reality or even worse might have to be reborn as a creature of a lower intelligence and conscious awareness to relearn what it truly means to be alive. as of now the whole point of our existence is to improve our subjective reality to such an extent that we exist in resonance with the rest of reality to the point that we can consciously re-tether ourselves with God and leave the cycle of birth and rebirth and achieve moksha or liberation and take all of our experiences back to God.

Ah-ha!

More later, but at its root, this seems to be the story of "cause and effect" vs "direct will", of second causes vs First Cause. Of accumulated memories shaping subsequent experiences - and the tale of their realisation and dissolution!

Yup, in all of existence we are the main show, life trying to establish itself against causality and be in resonance with manifesting reality!

...

Consciousness comes first becasue it is the material which takes on the form of experience. (Let's call it "awareness" maybe, since "consciousness" has multiple meanings - really we are talking about three ideas: consciousness, conscious-of, and self-consciousness.)

All other thoughts and content are shaped within that. It is before science, it is before metaphysics, it is before everything. It has no particular properties iteself at all - except the property of being-aware.

Science is the study of "observed regularities in experience", inferring concepts via distinction and reconnecting them with relationships. What those regularities are "made from", it cannot say. That would be like trying to describe water as being "made from" waves. Not a "byproduct", then, but something that appears within it.

Q: It is before science, it is before metaphysics, it is before everything
does this mean anything? It sounds like poetry

In the same way that "matter" is before atoms, and "colour" is before a painting, "consciousness" is before content. Actually, that's not a great comparison. Maybe "eyes are before seeing" and "water is before waves" - you can't describe water as being made from waves.

I don't understand or condone this form of thinking

In what way?

The point being made is that the reason it is difficult to study consciousness with science is that science deals with the observation of regular pattens in experience. Consciousness being what those patterns are made from, cannot be studied by it. Which is not to say that self-consciousness and the experience of being conscious-of something can't be studied; but that is content. The reason for the "form of thinking" above is that at this level you can't really say anything about this, apart from something like "consciousness the fundmental nonmaterial material whose only property is being-aware, everything else is patterns in and of this" - or similar.

Q: science is that science deals with the observation of regular pattens in experience. Consciousness being what those patterns are made from, cannot be studied by it.
This doesn't hold up though - the study of the patterns we see in nature brings results. The reason consciousness is beyond the reach of science so far is that we haven't been able to define or measure it. We come at it from our personal experience side of things but have nothing in the physical world to point at and say "lets measure that". So I think we agree that it can't be studied directly at the moment but with slightly different paths to that conclusion.

Yes, the study of patterns we see in nature brings results - "observed regularities" - very successfully. For consciousness, though you hit it right...

The reason consciousness is beyond the reach of science so far is that we haven't been able to define or measure it.

We don't really observe consciousness at all, externally or internally; I'd say because it is not a thing. We only experience being it. (It is that which, in subjective experience, things are made of.)

So, as you say, we can't define it, we can't detect it with the senses - so it can't be studied scientifically. And nor will we ever, I suggest. (We might be able to study the self, and the content of consciousness, but not actual consciousness.)

I'm glad you brought this up, because the objective existence of Self is at the center of the discussion about the nature of consciousness: we're not actually talking about the nature of consciousness, so much as the nature of Self. It's also at the core of a philosophical problem camouflaged as a consciousness problem: free will vs. determinism - is consciousness a movie "we" are watching and choosing (separate from the brain somehow) or is it just a light show brought on by conditioned biological reactions to an environment (the brain itself)? I've spent the last 4 years studying the mind and meditation in Zen monasteries and probably the most frustrating part of this whole inquiry about the nature of consciousness is that when you try to investigate it experientially it is seen as inseparable from reality itself, which is why Zen masters went so far as to deny the very existence of this thing we think of as "mind" or "consciousness" as anything but a mistake of perceptive illusion for reality. There is something else, however, Mind without any preconceptions or illusions; I've only glimpsed it a handful of times, but I feel that no matter how long I was able to see it unfold I wouldn't be able to actually describe its quality or function. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," which is some bullshit frankly haha.

You're right about this, and it's the next step of subtlety for the metaphor. It's a bit more long-winded, but the quick version is that the mind is "structured" with accumulated patterns. At any moment is the current spatially-organised sensory expereince, but also the "format of mind" which are the habitual patterns which experience "snaps-to" or is funneled along. These patterns are "dissolved into" the background.

Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences. What you experience as reality is really the "format of your mind" therefore. You can't separate the two. There is no reality "made from objects" beyond your mind; objects are patterns of the mind.

If you release your grip on expeirence, the first thing that relaxes (the first folds in the blanket to release) is the sensory experience, then the sense of space and time, then increasingly the other levels of "formatting" untl you are experiencing just "openness". Since this is not patterend at all, it cannot be described in language (because language requires division and contrast - it is built upon distinction).

That's my best edited version anyway.

Q: There is no reality "made from objects" beyond your mind; objects are patterns of the mind.
You went full idealist. You never go full idealist.

Ha :-) Well, I'm not sure it's quite the full "Idealist Jack" thing...

I have to first apologize as one of my deep conditionings through my training kicked in as I read your comment: there's an intense prejudice towards conceptualizing the mind in formal Zen training, which I'm sure you can understand and appreciate (the ideal Zen student is a genuine mystic, not a philosopher, even studying Buddhist literature was highly discouraged). I am however interested in the source of this iteration on the "levels of formatting" you mentioned. Could you hook me up?

The source as in, practically?

In terms of experience, I think you can experience it through different levels of attention and so on, and by inference. (That background "felt-sense" is what I thinkof as the dissolved meaning, which can be probed.)

In terms of a history of how it comes to be like that within you, I'd say you start off blank - then noise, then clustering, then linked channels, then more complex patterns, then forms - from birth onwards the world starts forming itself in you.

I am an epileptic, who has unfortunately lost consciousness several times due to seizures. I have always just drop to the floor and go straight to black (nothing there) and woke up disoriented a few minutes later with a badass headache and a sore shoulder. The best way to explain consciousness for me is to control your surroundings and see how it effects you. If it isn't the desired effect, you aren't conscious. I am using my dreams as an example. Usually when weird stuff just start appears out of nowhere is when I wake up... I feel dreams are just past experiences mashed together with that days stress/emotions desires. Call me crazy I guess.

The idea of testing the (nature) of consciousness by attempts to control the environment is quite interesting. Not sure I agree with you on dreams just being past experiences - if you have lucid dreams (aware you are dreaming while in the dream), you'll see that it's much more creative and interesting than that, and that there is no way to tell the difference between waking and dreaming except for the fact that you can recall having "been somewhere else" before you were in the dream. Without that memory, you would not be able to tell.

Well my experence will vary from others. I am on 4 seizure medications. Depakote, Lamictal, topamax, gabapentin. More importantly, I am on a decent dose Dilaudid for pain. And have been for a couple of years I have a feeling that influences my dreams a lot as well.

Can you remmeber what your dreams were like before, vs now?

EDIT: Apologies to other readers - thread goes slightly off-topic now, but was interested if any consciousness effects that ran over into dreaming.

I have had my epilepsy since the summer of 2002. It started two weeks after I started working at a grocery store :/
No it feels like they have always been this way for me. And I have only been on my dilaudid for 2 years. Are you a M.D. or Professor, or just curious? I'm willing to answer whatever I am just wondering.

No, just curious! Because the topic is about consciousness, and I think the area of dreams has a lot to say about it. But more than that - because the whole "brain functioning vs subjective experience" area is at the cutting edge of it - people with unusual experiences, like yours, are fascinating.

Yea sure. I understand the whole REM sleep usually starts around 3 hours into your sleep (where the actual dreams are at), but I usually sleep around 10 hours a day... My body needs it. The dream I remember is at the end.
For me its one of 3 situations. 1'st a real external event sets me off like a loud car, and it wakes me up. 2nd. Things start to feel out of control. You are talking to someone at work, but you don't remember what. Someone else joins the conversation that has no reason being there. Say someone from High School or that special someone on Facebook you really like. Then someone else joins as well. You start to feel the anxiety build, and build, until you can't take it anymore. And I wake up feeling like a failure. 3rd one and the most scariest one for me. I am falling into the infinite darkness with my arms folded on my chest. I only fall for a few seconds, but you wake up feeling like you almost died. Not short of breath or anything, just huge amount of adrenaline there...
Edit. Most of mine seem to be based at work. Seriously when I was hallucinating at the hospital from being hopped up on so much seizure meds (they OD'd me) I was dreaming that I was calling people up to check customers out because it was so busy.

The infinite darkness... ego death? Impending annihilation into the backgroudn awareness! Pretty good dreamstuff. There's a book by Robert Waggoner on lucid dreaming that's really good, if you ever feel the urge to explore. Having an "interestingly wired" brain might make for good exploring territory!

Q: [Deleted]

That's great. As said elsehwere, my problem isn't really the metaphor, so much as it gets left at that - you need to next step to avoid a dual perspective and more accurately correspond tp expereince. I'm all for anything which helps folk along a step, really.

I think the idea that "deep meditation" is about experiencing without objects or a "you" is a total misconception: that's called deep sleep.

Actually, I originally had "deep sleep" as the completely objectless, and "deep meditation" as just being a perceptual/space pattern object with no content - but it was getting a bit detailed for a quick comment.

POST: What is consciousness for? — Consciousness is a life-transforming illusion [Keith Frankish] (/r/philosophy/)

This sort of theorising seems a bit pointless if we don't actual state what we mean by "consciousness". Several different sorts of things seem to get muddled in together, or mistaken for one another. From a subjective point of view, to begin:

• Consciousness-Of - A person's awareness of the content of an experience.
• Self-Consciousness - A person's identification with part of that content as oneself.
• Consciousness - A person's raw experiential sense of "being" or "presence" or "I-am-ness" which persists independently of content or identification, but which content seems to appear within.

The first we can explore as the correlation between environment, body and brain states, perhaps. The second with brain states and psychology, possibly.

The third is more problematic:

The texture of it may vary with content, but the presence itself seems independent. And it can only exist in the present, since any reports of experiences then are reports of content (or the memory of content) now.

It's a direct fact of experience, and it's probably the only thing we all know for certain. But it is not associated with any particular content, and so it cannot be studied by looking for correlation. It's an "isness" that precedes thought, and so cannot be funnelled through the division into parts and subsequent arrangements in mental space that theorising requires. Perhaps it cannot be captured by a story at all.

POST: The Simulation Argument (/r/philosophy/)

The simulation argument is surely just a modern way of describing the notion that the world-as-it-is does not exist in the form that we experience it.

In other words, it is not really a "spatially-extended world, unfolding in time". Space and time are aspects of experiencing rather than aspects of the world; they are more like "base formatting" of the human mind. The room next door is not actually "over there".

The world then becomes more like a collection of "dimensionless facts" dissolved into the background of experience; a superposition of implicit patterns which can be unfolded into sensory form with attention. Which sounds like a mix of Bohm and Zen - the "background" would be consciousness?

--This comment is running on KantianOS v8.3 with the optional auto-dismissive module installed--

POST: "Philosophy is the quest 1) to discover the tacit assumptions that we operate on; 2) to critically examine those assumptions; and 3) to improve upon those assumptions by replacing them with better alternatives." (/r/philosophy/)

Q1: Another way of saying my favorite definition--philosophy is essentially metacognition. Thinking about the act of thinking.

Q2: Generally speaking, agreed. My favourite formulation is that "Philosophy is the black-box scientific investigation of human minds."

Q3: Really? I'm not sure how metaphysics could be encompassed in such a definition. Or ethics. Surely the unreliability of the human mind is an obstacle that philosophy strives to deal with, but the mind is not necessarily itself the object of the study.

I suppose he might update it to say something like: the investigation of the content and properties of mind (by the mind). So in that sense, the mind is always the object of study, since all study is the study of appearances within the mind. Typically, we distinguish between two categories of content - "thoughts" and "sensory experiences" - but neither are outside of ourselves (as mind).

Maybe it would have been clearer to say "brains" rather than "minds". (Incidentally, this is where "black box" becomes important - no neuroscience allowed.)

"Brains" is perhaps problematic though, depending on the context? Unless we are just using it in the loose sense of "the place where my thoughts appear", but I think that can be confusing when exploring certain areas. We never actually experience "brains" ourselves - only sensations, perceptions and thoughts arising in mind (where by "mind" I mean something like "awareness" rather than just "the place where thoughts hang out"). Maybe there is another term with less baggage that can be used for referring to "the context of experience".

POST: If i ever got time traveling powers (/r/timetravel)

Q1: What if time operated on the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle? That is, all alterations to the timeline have already been incorporated, so you can change nothing about the perceived past. In the example in that article, it basically states that while you can't prevent the Titanic from sinking, you can allow it to happen, save the people who would die, and replace their bodies with perfect imitations. This way, nothing in the perceived past has changed. This interpretation of time would mean that if you did go back in time with the purpose of stopping the Titanic from sinking, you are doomed to failure because we know that it did sink. I like this view of time because it elegantly avoids so many of the paradoxes that naturally arise from time travel.

[QUOTE]

Novikov self-consistency principle
The Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture and Larry Niven's law of conservation of history, is a principle developed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the mid-1980s. Novikov intended it to solve the problem of paradoxes in time travel, which is theoretically permitted in certain solutions of general relativity that contain what are known as closed timelike curves. The principle asserts that if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes.

[END OF QUOTE]

We only know that it did sink now. If you go back and change the Titanic sinking, it will not have sunk anymore, and we will all know it never sank. The whole landscape of facts gets updated. The sequence of events, if I go time-travelling from 2016:

Global Memory Landscape Version 1:

• In 1912 it was true that the Titanic sank in 1912
• In 2015 it was true that the Titanic sank in 1912

In 2016 I travel back to 1912 and prevent the sinking of the Titanic, at which point:

Global Memory Landscape Version 2:

• In 1912 it was true that the Titanic did not sink in 1912.
• In 2015 it was true that the Titanic did not sink in 1912.

Personal Memory Landscape:

• In 1912 it was true that the Titanic sank in 1912.
• In 2015 it was true that the Titanic sank in 1912.
• (I travel back in time and tweak then return.)
• In 2016 it was true that the Titanic did not sink in 1912.

Everyone else's memories would be updated to the not-sink version; only I would recall it being different. Consistency is preserved at all times.

Q1: The problem with this is that it would have to affect yourself before you ever went into the time machine. At the point where you travel back in time, you separate your own timeline. You have pre-travel you, and post-travel you. If you go back and change the timeline, then only post-travel you would retain the memories of the Titanic sinking. Otherwise, you would have to be born with an alternate set of memories. The paradox arises from this- how does pre-travel you ever become post travel you? Pre-travel you never has a reason to travel back in time because, in his memory, the Titanic never sank. This leaves a post-travel you without an origin, so you are an effect without a cause.

You're right ... yes ... that this amounts to a personal timeline perspective: my end-point is not actually the same square on the "grid of all possible moments" that I left from. In fact, as soon as I jump to 1912 it is not the 1912 of my history, simply due to my presence. This side-steps the assumption that time is sort of always running (constant cause and effect). It avoids the paradox, but it means that I didn't truly change the present moment that I left - which remains self-consistent but now without me - I instead went to a different moment where my actions are its history (guy suddenly appeared; ship was saved).

What I've really done then is more like dimension jumping - jumped from Global Landscape 1 to Global Landscape 2 - rather than time travel, although it will seem like time travel ito me. Unless we allow Primer-style multiple instances of me, without a "causal catch-up". In short, a constantly overwriting time loop. But then I can never get to the Titanic anyway; I can only go back to the moment of the availability of time travel.

Right. So self-consistency must be preserved, and that can be done without having "causal catchup", but it means either revise-able timelines or an additional dimension. Phew!

POST: New to the sub, and have found this link quite interesting. (/r/timetravel)

[POST]

In theory, is this possible? With the we are all one? I think I read something about the infinite grid? As us just traveling a grid which is "time line". If this is possibly true, then wouldn't reddit be just one big load of conversations with myself?

[END OF POST]

The Infinite Grid.

Basically: what we actually are is "perspectives of consciousness" which are having a being-a-person-in-a-world experience. Nothing is really happening, and time never passes, it's just that we scan our attention across a subset (or "trajectory") of all the possible experiential moments. You could call this a "time line", although it is completely personal. All the moments already exist. We could think of a trajectory as a "strand of thought" that is appearing in our conscious aware space. It's just that this particular thought is very bright and 3D-surround and fully immersive, so we assume we are "there" somehow. We are all "one" because consciousness itself has no properties. The consciousness you are cannot be distinguished from the consciousness I am. You can even get a feel for this directly:

• Currently, you are looking at this screen with your attention. Now, turn your attention towards "the place you are looking out from". What do you find there? Can you describe it?

These leads to relevant-to-link questions like: who or what are the other people we encounter? What happens when we get to a position where there is no plausible next-moment? And so on.

Could you lead me in the direction to learn more about this theory? I find it very plausible.
Once you become aware of the infinite grid and your tragectory, is it possible to change it? Or is everything already predetermined?

Well, I made it up! The notion of a configuration space of possible states is nothing new of course (see Julian Barbour's The End of Time, for instance), although this formulation and the connection to subjective experience is probably fairly novel. It's what I call an "active metaphor" and is based on the notion that there is no actual underlying structure to experience. This means we are able to choose a conceptual framework we like and format ourselves with it. So we get to pick one like this which has "enabling" properties...

The grid itself is basically an unsorted set of all moments; your trajectory is an ordered subset of those moments defined by your current state. The trajectory is deterministic in the sense that for as long as your state remains the same, the path is defined. However, if you can change your state, you can change the path to a new determined state!

This is doable because the entire grid is actually dissolved in the background of your conscious perceptual space at all times, and the subset (or "world-pattern", or definition) is simply the moments which are being associatively triggered into prominence by your mental patterning. Changing that patterning = changing the world-pattern = changing the trajectory. A potentially useful way to envisage this "dissolved" aspect: The Imagination Room

Sssh... play along like we are all separate. There is plenty of time to stop playing after you die.

Speak for yourself! I mean, myself. Oh, we are so confusing...