TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 20)

POST: Can abstract dualistic matter exist?

[POST]

I'm reading through the Three Dialogues and got past the bits about the impossibility of abstraction, but I didn't feel like I grokked it, or that abstraction was given due diligence. I also feel like matter is too often dismissed in the book simply because the sensory experience of it is contingent on the mind. Let's pretend that we live in a dualistic universe. Let's pretend it's just you, me, and a single other piece of matter to observe. To really simplify things, the only thing that we can observe is this piece of matter, and we can't observe it from other perspectives... because we're tied to rocks in Plato's cave. This piece of matter works like a function of both its own properties and the properties of the observers. When the piece of matter is observed from my perspective, it outputs a "0" and I experience that "0". When it's observed from your perspective it outputs a "1" and you experience a "1". So our experience of this dualistic object is contingent on our own mind, as well as its own spooky properties. This is analogous to me and a dog looking at a rainbow, and each of us seeing different colors. I know nothing about the structure of this matter, except that it imposes consistent sensory experiences on an observer relative to its own properties and the properties of the observer's mind. f(own_properties, observers_properties) = experience!!!!
Isn't there about as much reason to suppose this matter exists as there is that our sensory experiences are contingent on a greater god-mind?

[END OF POST]

I'd say your story already begs the question; it presumes the existence of something and then creates an image based on that something, in an attempt to prove or disprove it. Some thoughts:

• In what way do we ever experience matter?
• How exactly would the boundary between matter and mind be breached? How would they interact with one another?
• How can something have properties other than those that arise in experience? Where do those properties exist?

Certainly we can conceptualise additional objects and patterns and properties to form an explanatory link between observations, but they belong to mind and arise in experience too, and don't belong to some external thing (except as the concept of "an external thing"). In other words, matter "exists" only as a fictional story to connect sensory experiences. Unwitting reification of abstractions is one of the worst habits we can have.

EDIT: The additional part is that what we call "observations of objects" are themselves collections of ideas and their extended patterns.

A Reformulation

Perhaps you should reformulate your question, which is in fact:

• "Is it possible for me to have experiences as if there was such a thing as matter?"

The answer is, "yes".

Then you should ask:

• "Does that mean there exists such a thing as matter, other than my conception of it?"

The answer is, "no".

One of the problems with personal experience is that it has the property of aligning with our current worldview. The fact is, that if you adopt almost any philosophical position, you will start to experience the world as if it were true. Only by personal experimentation can you demonstrate this to yourself. If you genuinely adopted the notion that only mind exists, your thoughts and experiences would quite quickly fall into line with that view. But that makes us ask: what is the "real, essential truth" then?

The Truth(s)

For the sake of discussion, and simplifying by division, we might say there are three types of truth:

• Direct Truth - The immediate experience you are having right now, without analysis. The only definite fact is the content of your experience at this moment.
• Conceptual Truth - The is the 'truth' of having a self-consistent conceptual framework which we use to describe the world. This does not necessarily have many contact points with direct truth; it can be a 'castle in the sky'. The more contact points, though, the better.

Since the content of direct experience is changing all the time, and content of conceptual experience is arbitrary, then neither can be the fundamental truth. The absolute truth must be unchanging.

• Absolute Truth - The only definite truth is that experience is being experienced. In other words, that you exist and "are". Essentially, this is consciousness. It is the only certainty.

So all truths apart from this one will in fact be relative truths. "Matter" is a conceptual truth, a self-consistent framework, but one with minimal touch-points to direct truth because it supposed an external view beyond what is possible to experience directly. There are in fact many ways a world can conceptualised in any number of equally coherent ways. But none of those ways are "out there" in reality, they are "in here" in thought.

The Conceptual Question

Finally, let me suggest a way to tell whether a conceptual framework is approximating direct truth, rather than simply being a connective fiction:

• If when thinking of your conceptual truth, you see it from an objective, 3rd-person view, the "view from nowhere" - then you are immediately wrong, and all that your are imagining in that view is a complete fiction disconnected from direct reality.

It would be an interesting exercise for you to pause right now, and think about "matter" and how it interacts with personal experience. Probably you have some sort of vague imagery that appears in your mind at that point, perhaps a little illustration or diagram or example. You should write down a description of that imagery.

...

What do you mean "who am I"?

I'm simply presenting the common argument that is used, the logic supporting that position. The basis is that anything that has ever been observed interacting has had a commonality. If instead of "interact" we say "push against one another" then it becomes clearer. Only things which share a common property can push against one another, otherwise: what is pushing against what?

(If there is no commonality, then you have to propose an intermediate processes which contains aspects of both and acts as a bridge between the two - but then you have implied there must be an additional type which underlies that, something which underlies mind, matter and the bridge.)

So we end up eventually with the idea that matter must have a mind-aspect or mind must have a matter-aspect. Since we only ever observe mind, then it would seem that matter must have a mind-aspect. Furthermore, since we could never observe a non-mind-aspect of matter, it exists only in our concepts. Effectively them, observable matter = mind. Hence, there is only mind.

The short version is: Anything you can't directly experience, is something you are inferring, and cannot prove the existence of - you can only demonstrate the usefulness of it as a fictional concept.

The even shorter version: Matter is not impossible, but it is perhaps pointless!

I reckon that if we keep going at it, what we'll discover is that we do agree entirely, it's just that we're cutting up the world differently; our experiences are the same, we're just categorising them into parts in different ways. :-)

To wrap up a couple of stray points and go around one more time for fun:

• I'd suggest that in order to recognise that two things are affecting one another, a commonality has by definition been established of some sort. Even if that commonality is simply that they are (say) both "patterns in consciousness" in the same way as there is commonality between "folds in a blanket".
• We can have commonality without cause and effect. In fact, I don't believe cause and effect is a very good model; I think it's better described as an account with partial observations of a larger pattern, etc.

We probably have to define what we mean by "exist" to get any further. It does depend on the level at which we're talking. If I'm saying matter is essentially a concept to us, does that mean matter doesn't exist or cannot exist? That's a reasonable question. (The other was "does it matter?", pun-fully, which speaks to my short version!)

Concepts do "exist" as concepts, as thought-patterns. And one could look upon our ongoing sensory experience as an "immersive thought". And so experiential patterns are themselves "concepts" or "collections of ideas" in Berkeley-speak. So "matter" does exist as a concept-idea and one which is experienced in a way... but only in the same way as "a vase" exists and is experienced, which is only as a concept-idea... and which is associated with certain sensory patterns, which are also concept-ideas. And so on.

We are left with: okay, it turns out that everything exists at least as concept-ideas, so what are concept-ideas made from? And the answer is something like "awareness" or "consciousness" or "experiencing" or... mind.

So again we're back to a commonality, and to mind. But it's a commonality in the sense of different folds, as concept-idea patterns, belonging to the same blanket, as mind.

POST: Oneirosophic music that cultivates the feeling of lucidity.

Nice selection. Music, yes, completely. Oneirosophic Soundtracking™. Coincidentally, I was already listening to Boards of Canada's The Campfire Headphase when I clicked on the link - I find their stuff and Plaid quite good for background mood-setting. Also some Moderat/Apparat remixes:

Seamonkey - Moderat
Tomorrow - Ladytron (Apparat Remix)
A New Error - Moderat
Milk - Moderat

Yeah, I like Moderat, their Bad Kingdom video is one of my favourites in the last few years. Those were quite pleasant. Remind me a bit of classic atmospheric drum 'n' bass like Omni Trio's The Haunted Science album - dreamlike with a persistent beat, good for traveling. Kinda stripped down and without much in the way of effects. EDIT: And liked that last video.

Organic, yes. Really I think there is a sweet spot where drum and bass, atmospheric electronic, and hip hop meet up. Things that are "soundtracky" in particular.

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The Devin Townsend "drone" albums are good - thanks for the tip! If The Field's Sound of Light EP, which was meant as a soundtrack for Stockholm's Nordic Light Hotel, was less relentlessly intense, it would be like that. And I agree with the Terence Malick and Into Great Silence, particularly. The latter really puts you somewhere else.

POST: Dreams, Subconscious and the Goetia

In subjective idealism, all demons are "you". As is everything else you experience. (Using the word "thing" is perhaps slightly problematic, since it is often taken to imply an "out there" spatially extended place with objects in it, that are "happening and unfolding in time, but we'll let that pass.)

So you can make up anything you want and have it behave however you want, potentially. If you choose to imagine that there are demons and they do such things, then you will have experiences "as if" that is true. You'd have to actually define what you mean by "subconscious" and "greater collective subconscious" to go further than that, within a larger context. Here, I would suggests that "subconscious" is just a word for all logically sensible patterns which are activated to a greater or lesser degree within your perspective. "Conscious" is the brightest pattern at this moment, obscuring the other patterns (think: the sun shining in the daytime sky, obscuring the stars but the stars are still there). "Greater collective subconscious" would mean all patterns in logical space, full stop (think: all possible locations in the sky where a star could be).

[have it behave however you want.] Not if you imagine it has some independence or free will.

I would count that as part of the original "imagining" though. You should be careful and specific, definitely. Certainly, once you've set something in motion, it can (apparently) be operating under its own steam. Although I would view this as the pattern of that thing being overlaid upon subsequent experience. The problem is that this happens "by implication" or association.

For instance, you summon a particular Greek hero for his strength and wit, knowing it's "all you", but forgetting that doing so also triggers all the associated patterns, and you subsequently find your music tutor dead with a lyre embedded in his head.

POST: The Mental Tendency of Preferring Multiplayer

In discussions elsewhere about subjective reality and influencing reality, a concern that comes up again and again is that doing so implies that other people won't be "real", or at least not independent. (The other version is where it's assumed that they are "real" now but that the act of making change will mean they won't be the same people afterwards.)

This "peopleness" issue might well be one of the main problems for accomplishing unusual things, and explain the "urge to forget" that occurs after spontaneous unusual experiences. For instance, witnessing objects vanish and reappear may seem like a small glitch of no consequence - but in the back of your mind you follow through the implications: that the world is not solid, stable, reliable, but instead flexible, randomised and arbitrary. If that can happen to objects, then it implies that perhaps any fact-of-the-world at all could change on a whim, including those relating to people. Maybe this is why it's often only under extreme and desperate circumstances that reality-shifts are experienced.

The world is dead independently of us, only we breathe life into it. Perhaps this is a fear of loneliness? Perhaps that's why we invented a world with imaginary friends in the first place?

Q1: The world is dead independently of us, only we breathe life into it. Perhaps this is a fear of loneliness? Perhaps that's why we invented a world with imaginary friends in the first place?
One of my earliest experiences with anything I'd call oneironautical was meditating in a dark room after having eaten four grams of dried Gymnopilus luteoviridis. The hallmark of the experience was an overwhelming, metaphysical, inescapable sense of loneliness. It was like masks had been pulled off of everyone I'd ever known (or could ever know) and they were all just reflections of my self, devoid of any -genuine- otherness. And that devastated me to such a degree that I decided, "There's a very good reason I decided to be a human. Realizing you're It is not fun. It's way more fun to be a human." And I stopped meditating or doing drugs or contemplated anything important for... months, definitely. Maybe upwards of years. I wasn't ready for that at all. And it didn't just mean that I wasn't open to that realization. It pushed me, repelled me backward, stunted my progress, took me out of the game for a long time. Cultivating your sensibilities, molding your desires and tendencies, and learning how to subtly establish your own, internal sense of validity (i.e. some kind of ultimate Otherness is not necessary for something to be just as valid as you feel it to be right now) is one of the absolute most important aspects of spiritual progress IMO. Maybe the most important.

I think /u/3man had a similar drug-related experience, but it was more of the sort of a character telling you how it is; he felt the potential horror of everyone just being our puppets too. Can't find the link right now. Yes, I think that having a right worldview, and a shifted perspective of what "meaning and purpose" are, is required before being fully exposed to this. For instance, many people's response to the oft-banded theories that "this is a simulation" is that it would make their lives pointless. Similarly, people who accidentally have lucid dreams and just wake themselves up because "it's just a dream". They rarely seem to interrogate the underlying assumption, the assumption that things "being made from atoms" is somehow inherently more meaningful than things being made from information or dream-stuff. Are solids more meaningful than gases? Are rocks more meaningful than oxygen?

If a person hasn't addressed these things, then even straightforward philosophical idealism will be problematic for one's identity.

cosmicprankster420: To me the whole point of oneirosophy and lucidity is to have the freedom to create any kind of experience you want for yourself not to come to some ultimate realization that this is all some kind of solipsistic nightmare that we are trying to forget. You are making the mistake of assuming there is some kind of ultimate reality, but the way I see it is that neither the realm of otherness or the realm of just me ness are ultimately real. To say that one realm Is the real one and one is illusory creates a kind of objectivity because in order for something to be real something has to be unreal and vice versa. I was definitely going under the solipsism trip for awhile but I then realized if everything is subjective and not ultimately real then solipsism isn't real either. I think what our mental tendency actually is, is having a kind of foundational primary worldview in which everything stems from. To me being an oneirosopher is about being a kind of metaphysical nomad moving effortlessly from one type of dream to another via there lucidity and if you are stuck in one type of dream like atheism, Christianity, or the case of solipsism then you have actually lost some of your lucidity. It is realizing that if nothing is real then nothing is unreal either. The idea that everything is lifeless hologram under your control is no more or less valid then a world of otherness and others the former is simply more practical when it comes to controlling things. But if we say that one type of experience is real (being the only thing that exists) and one type of experience is unreal (there are other independent minds out there) then we are actually disempowering ourselves in terms of creating the types of dreams we want because what if we really want to create a dream where other independent minds exist, if everything is just us are we not able to or allowed to create that kind of dream? That's limitation to me paradoxically. I think instead of trying to come to some ultimate realization we need to learn how to switch back and forth at will from these perspectives because both the everything is me perspective versus the there are things independent of me perspective both have their own uses, but we should be very careful about fully commiting ourselves to one dream to the point that we forget we have a choice.

Yeah, the only "ultimate realisation" is surely that there is no fixed truth in terms of content. No content-based realisation is ultimate. I think people sometimes confuse "nothing is real" with saying that experience is hollow, that there's no aliveness. But that's misinterpreting it as " 'nothing' is what is real", that reality is nothing. In fact, if you-as-consciousness is shaped into the experience of being a body in a world with other people, then all of that is alive, is intelligent, formed from your aliveness and intelligence.

So oneirosophy becomes the recognition of the ability of whatever-you-are to take on the "as if" experience of any relative truth.

cosmicprankster420: misinterpreting it as " 'nothing' is what is real".
thread closed

POST: I've learned how to wake up, but I'm too afraid to do it

It doesn't mean loss of identity - it means recognition of identity and context. It's like you've been watching a TV show all your life, confusing yourself with one of the characters - and then one day you relax, your attention opens up, and you discover you're actually a guy on a sofa in a nice apartment holding a TV remote. And you always were that guy.

Now, that initial opening up might be uncomfortable; it'll feel very exposing at first, but that's just like how tight muscles are uncomfortable when you first unclench them. It's just like a lucid dream: you realise you are dreaming, and then your realise that this means the "you" that is dreaming is not the dream-body or perspective, it is the whole "space" in which the dream experience arises. The experience of awakening in a lucid dream is truly freeing and exhilarating. For starters, you understand that your intentions have global effect, not just local body-movement effect. When you decide to go to the grocery store, it isn't that you bodily move there - rather, the whole dream shifts towards the experiential state of "you-being-at-the-store". Meanwhile, it's incorrect to say that the dream "happens" at all. Nothing is "happening" while you are not experiencing it, although we infer it must have from our observations. Reality isn't this other thing that does stuff, like it has a separate intelligence operating independently of you. That's too movie-ish.

Short version: You don't need to worry.

Q1: Hey, George, I've been reading your theory on so many occasions now and I'm grateful that you keep sharing it.
Something is kind of itching me though, and I would like to directly address it.
"Reality isn't this other thing that does stuff, like it has a separate intelligence operating independently of you." - that, and other such ideas, imply that the whole world is "my dream". Okay, maybe we could say that, but then why does this dream follow it's own routes in so many occasions? For example, I would like to have this monetary system off the table, and have all the people on planet Earth to be conscious, generous and kind towards everyone and everything. I would like to have my country run by strong people who really do well for it. I would like to have us able to travel in space right now.
Why are these wishes not true already? Why does it even seem that it could be the exact opposite coming to reality? Is it my fault or is this way of thinking just a kind of mental disorder?
Please, clarify! I bet you know what I'm talking about. :)

Hey! Getting straight to the important stuff, I see! So I suppose we should start with a question: Why do you expect that those wishes should be true already?

Q1: Because in my dreams things change instantly "on demand". Let's say this "physical" world might have a bit of delay in manifesting desires, partly because we have too many of them and have a hard time focusing. Maybe that is one of the reasons things are so messed up - because we don't really know how we want them to be? You have said about the various patterns which "reality" manifests and I agree with that theory, but what if my desire is to remove some of those patterns entirely? Anyway, how long do you expect that it should take to manifest if I intend those wishes right now? The current situation shows that it might take a bit too long, if it ever does happen, and I might not even be alive to see some of the manifestations. What if my intention is to have all of this in a few, three to four years max

Well, this world has been around a lot longer than most of your dreams, and has become pretty stable - although you can create persistent dream realms and you'll find they operate very much like this one. You can indeed have on-demand changes though; any delay is due to "plausibility", related to the form of your intention, and that's something you could work on by examining your ideas of what the world is. (Just because you accept it's a dream, doesn't mean you've dispensed with the idea that it's still a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" of some sort.)

Meanwhile, to remove a pattern completely, you need to remove all "amplitude" from it, but it's generally easier to abandon something and switch to a replacement, just as in a lucid dream you'll tend to open a door to a new scene, rather than morph the current scene. Anyway, as to your "wishes"...

How exactly have you gone about wishing for things so far?

Q1: So far I have put myself in a workplace where, although I spend quite a lot of my time, my work would bring those wishes closer to reality. I'm actually in a position where my influence could greatly expand, thus even further manifestation could occur. However, some things seem to be beyond my control, like what the EU, USA, Russia and such "great powers" decide for our globe. So far I've gone about wishing for their powers to be more and more diminished and their influence over people and reality itself to be lesser and lesser. I've just been intending that my country (somewhere in the Balkans) be too far away from their clenches, thus being able to become an independent, sovereign power. Still, not long ago, NATO put even more military strength around here, which seems to be quite the contrary to what I wished for. Also, the public seems quite powerless to all this, and this is also contrary to what I wished for. Perhaps my "wishing" has been not specific or ritualistic enough? I've read about the dimensional jumping, perhaps I should jump to a dimension where these wishes are closer to reality? Can I just jump to a dimension where they are already true?

The problem with these "wishes" is that they can be outside of your daily experience - and what your life is, is experiences and that's the key to selecting things. You have to identify what the actual end-state experience is that you actually desire. Vague notions of things often aren't helpful and can be contradictory. You also have to be careful what you wish for. For instance, your country becoming a sovereign state may necessitate NATO preventing other movements during the events of the transition phase. There is going to be a transition in time between this-state and the end-state. It also matters how you conceive of the world. If you really think that the EU, USA, Russia are "out there" and that they "happen" unseen, then that can be problematic. Those ideas become part of your intending if you "wish" in terms of those assumptions.

All of this is why manifestation approaches tend to, in some form or other, advocate deciding on the desire and then having faith and forgetting about it, by which they really mean do not define or interfere with the apparent means by which the desire manifests. Meanwhile, the so-called "jumping" approach will give you all the same problems if you don't have the formulations down pat; it's really just an active metaphor to allow yourself to let the world-pattern shift more drastically, it's a decision that it's "okay" if things change discontinuously.

So... make it specific in terms of an end-state and how it would actually be experienced. All manifestation must be about subjective experience, because that's all there is. Maybe pick one single thing and focus on that first?

...

A1: How are you going to wake up?

A2: He'll dream he woke up.

POST: All the Feels (Are Yours; Act Like It!)

Something that can be helpful: viewing bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings as part of the world rather than part of "you".

If what you (as consciousness) are having right now is an experience of being-a-person-in-a-world, then your preferences (which really about to feeling-states) are just part of that world-experience. Just because that part is closer to where you've typically narrowed your attention, doesn't mean that it is more "you" than other parts of the world. This leads us (hopefully) to identifying with the background space which takes on the shape of experience, rather than identifying with the experience itself. (Yes, they are the same thing, but the context is unchanging whilst the content is ever evolving.) It is much easier to detach, modify, release something when we aren't grasping onto it as part of our identity.

My garden is blossoming with purple trees, obviously.

Q: ==It is much easier to detach, modify, release something when we aren't grasping onto it as part of our identity.??
Actually two conditions need to be satisfied:
It's not part of your identity and it's within the scope of volition.
It's a bit of a contradiction, because we consider the so-called "external" world to not by part of our personal identity by convention, but because it's also considered to be outside the scope of volition, it's not easy to modify directly by will.
In other words, while whatever you want to modify shouldn't be what you are, it should be your emanation/imagination/activity, etc.

Yes. In easy imagery, I see it as not "standing on" the particular fold of the "reality blanket" that you are intending to move. But you have to see that the fold is within you and therefore accessible, without it being you and therefore not movable.

We can easily fall into language that has come to imply the opposite of what we mean. For instance, to make ourselves understood we might talk about how "everything is internal" - in order to dispel the idea that there is an "outside". But really we mean there is neither internal nor external, or at least that those are artificial divisions which divide a whole into parts arbitrarily. The use of internal-external then leads to misunderstandings on what subjective idealism would mean, assumptions of solipsism and so on, all based on trying to think of one perspective through the lens of another. And so on. There's a common thing where an idea is accepted partially, in such a way as to be "made safe" and less radical. One example is that Neville Goddard's instructions on revising the past are interpreted psychologically rather than literally, or with new-age swirlings about releasing emotional energy and so on. It's only half the message with the other half replaced by something more comforting, less philosophically disturbing.

Physicalists love your post.

"Materialists just won't believe number 4 on this list!"

POST: Techniques are a double-edged sword.

I guess that if you think of a technique as a straight up pattern-activation - using what's currently prominent a bridge, like triggering one memory via another by association - then it doesn't seem so bad. It's a way to get to an experiential result without having to detach from everything in order to create it discontinuously. While there is no technique to intending itself, getting to a result by intending the starting point of a chain of activation seems valid to me - and can be used in innovative ways.

Yes, totally, particularly if one particular pattern becomes too "bright" and dominant, obscuring others. Since everything is "us", then all technique and cause-effect is fakery. So I tend to think that any move away from a "taking on the shape" approach (no cause-effect, we shift ourselves as ourselves as a whole), by identifying with one part of ourselves and using it to try and operate on another part, tends to intensify division. By using tools, we withdraw ourselves from the target - but being the target is exactly how to make deeper progress.

On the other hand, representational approaches (attaching meaning-patterns to objects and then creating experiences involving the objects) can be fun and easy and does get to the heart of treating all experience as a dream environment, where anything can mean or do anything.

Q: [Deleted]

Good analysis - the problem of Second Cause in a nutshell. The confusion of association (linking of memories) with causation.

Yes, "being the target" isn't easy; even the phrase already implies a division. The only way that seem to work is to "stop generating". In other words, cease maintaining division. Even the direct approach of "becoming" requires that. Detachment and intention all over again.

That's how I interpret the situation.

A better interpretation is: there is no "way" to do this, so there's nothing for me to say.

Whatever I might say, would be a description of a technique. There are no doors or way to make it easier, because it isn't hard or easy. In truth, I wrote everything I had to say about it around 7 months ago and 4 months later. Anything else is really just a reformulation into different language, the creation and application of different metaphors, which might generate fresh ideas for experiential direction, but none of which change the underlying message.

Q: [Deleted]

Sorry, I got distracted by my own typing there: expand on that ignoring or running away from subjectivity? Something I've noticed repeatedly: being all too willing to be distracted from settling into that.

I knew that. I still think there are things to say.

Yeah, I agree that it's about removing obstructions. But how are they removed? By the same non-way approach of intention. There are always things to say, because the total pattern is always changing in terms of distribution, but there's nothing that can be said about intending and "the truth" except saying that it is not doing and not this or that. There are infinite ways to not-say-it though. :-)

Cheeky on the criticising=technique! ;-) Now, I don't say anything can't be done, but by that I mean that I don't believe there is anything that cannot be experienced, so I'm really talking about "the experience of doing". Which would be Second Cause again...

Do you figure your contemplation will change at some point?

Well, the underlying thing of it I don't see changing (which amounts to a not-this), but everything else will definitely right? And subjectivity is a good one: there's that whole thing of realising that for there to be a notion or experience of being subjective in one way, that's not being subjective in another way. If it is discerned at all, then there is somewhat of a division or contrast in experience. So yeah, you're spot on that the style of contemplation will change quite dramatically, because even to look at something is to have it shift by the looking. I think that just knowing this means it's more of an "exploring possible experience adventure" rather than an "uncovering of fundamental truth" though?

I don't care about a fundamental truth. Not anymore. I want a powerful and useful truth. Useful to me and powerful for me.

Right - and this speaks to your other comment too, which I found really evocative of a certain struggle that goes with this territory.

I suspect a lot of us (naturally) get into this looking for some ultimate knowledge, something that can be discovered and seen and used - a "thing". Then eventually, it a cliche, but we find that it was here along along and that, so obvious, it must be everything and everywhere already. As you seem to have, I spent a lot of time wrestling with should about "me" and tried to manipulate it into a certain way, relative to a world, to overcome boundaries and all that.

But then, if I instead view everything as "experiences", and that the experience of being me "comes-with" a world, I realise I don't need to worry about boundaries or separation. I view it that I am having the experience (taking on the shape) of being-a-person-in-a-world, and that "the world" is a state that includes all of this. Spontaneous body and thought experiences arise from and are part of the world, a continuous pattern, and reveal its present state. Intention-imagination is then the act of directly being and modifying the distribution of patterns that constitute that world. There's no room for "me" at all, in one sense; I don't need to worry about it.

No, the world isn't a ground of experience. By "world" remember that I don't mean a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time"; I mean something more like the current state or pattern of your present experience. To leave the world would be to allow those constituent patterns to fade, and others to become brighter and more dominant. Essentially, there is no world other than the experiencing of it (of course), but it's usually to have some way of referring to the present state.

There is no room for anything other than "me." What isn't my choice? I can't find it.

If it's all you or there's no you, it amounts to the same result. No division, no (apparent) existence.

Oh, I'm not claiming any definition is "the ground of experience". There is no "ground" except in the sense that experience is "made from" consciousness-that-is-me or whatever. I'm just suggesting that repartitioning our idea of person-and-world can be helpful. More later.

Q: [Deleted]

Hmm, I was talking structure there, but yes the "fundamental" is will/being/potential and all that stuff - the attributes of a "something" that can become anything. Y'know, God. Yes, I'll sign your bible if you want.

The world is my Bible, Nefandi. I've noticed you reading it on a daily basis, which is great. Not that you have any choice of course. I'm here for all eternity, so do tell you your friends - thank you and good night! ;-)

...

A1: In other words, cease maintaining division.
I very much like this phrasing.
Edit: Jives with my model of experience that I base off of the Hindu trinity. All of experience is creation, maintenance and destruction (actually transformation). I find this to be a nifty way to view things. Creation can be seen as the intending, maintenance as the confidence or knowledge of one's intention as truth, and destruction as detachment or the act of experiencing truth.

Ah, interesting about the trinity. Particularly specifying "maintenance", which is usually hard to incorporate into a model. I've tried to push away from those divisions too by having all possible patterns pre-existing, and varying only in their levels of contribution - their "intensity". This means that creation, maintenance and destruction are just the experience of redistribution, and intending is the act of reshaping that distribution (by activating or "recalling" a particular pattern into prominence). It makes it clear to me that everything is a shifting of experience; nothing is made or destroyed; it's always transformation and transformation is actually mundane. But of course, it's yet another way of chopping up the same thing into different language!

Yes I can see that too, all being transformation. I find chopping it up to make it more digestible.

I think the benefit of the approach of this subreddit is, we can feel free to use whatever "chopping-up" feels appropriate at the time. Freed from concerns about being "right", we can adopt whatever view is the most useful for our purpose. Your trinity description has the definite benefit of being static - you can hold the concept in your mind and refer to it easily without having to "run" it mentally - whereas the shifting-transformations description is dynamic, so a bit slippery for everyday use maybe. (I'll be adding it to my armoury!)

POST: A question about tables

I suppose we would have to start by tackling what we mean by "yourself", "outside" and "tables". Basically, we have to begin by discussing the nature of experiencing itself.

Eventually, we'd get to something like: what "you" are, is subjectivity; there is no outside to subjectivity; all possible forms can be thought of as being "dissolved" within subjectivity like patterns at different relative intensities of contribution; a perception of the table is the table, or rather a direct sensory aspect of it; there is no need for an independent "feed" and in fact this would be nonsensical; our subjectivity "takes on the shape of" states and experiences and is not separate from them. Furthermore, we would have to address the possibility that the world-as-it-is is not necessarily of the same "format" as sensory experience - in other words, it is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Spatial extension and context, and change, are aspects of experiences rather than aspects of the world as such. Only "experiencing" happens; the world does not "happen". And so on. There is no contradiction, I suggest.

The first two parts imply that our purely-subjective sense-inputs are...

In your reading of the first two statements, you have presumed such a thing as "sense inputs". The notion of "inputs" of course implies an external world - but that is begging the question. In your current experience of this moment, can you identify any "sensory inputs"?

The most consistent explanation would be that there is some external "it"... Though how exactly that happens is subjective, yes.

If there were an external "it" - what would it be external to? And could we ever ascertain whether something was being caused by an external "it" versus that something arising purely internally? Do we ever in fact experience anything external, other than as a thought about something being external (a thought which of course arises internally)?

An additional line of questioning would focus on what the "stuff" of the external would be made from. In order to interact with the internal, would it not have to be made of the same "stuff" as the internal?

I suggest that we aren't dealing with "sensory inputs" here; there is no "outside" to experiencing. I also suggest that it's vital that we note the difference between attending to our experience and thinking about our experience. It is very easy to build "castles in the sky" which are self-consistent and so "make sense" when we think of them, but in fact do not correspond to the structure of our ongoing moment as it is experienced. These "parallel constructions in thought" have an inherent problem: they arise within experience and so cannot capture experience. It's like trying to build a sandcastle which accurately models both "the whole beach" and also "sand". If one is not careful, one ends up making a partial duplicate of another sandcastle and calling it "the beach" or "sand", when it is neither (but also, somewhat ironically, both).

I think believing you are everything you experience is nonsensical.

It is not a belief. It is, finally, a direct observation, from which follows a self-consistent description. Whether that description seems nonsensical or not, depends on that platform from which you think about it. For starters, as I indicated in my first response, it matters somewhat what you consider to be "you". The thinking that occurs within one "castle" does not necessarily translate - often cannot be translated to - the thinking which occurs in another. They are, however, self-consistent within their own perspective. In the end, then, the reason to go for "B" is that direct observation does not in fact support "A". Never having observed an external world, and discovering no edges to one's experience, the only possible conclusion is that the world is entirely within experience, which is you, and is entirely made from experience, which is also you. A coherent description can then be built - in fact, many can be built - from that starting point, each with their benefits as relative truth, while only the observable nature of experiencing itself is held as the fundamental truth. [1]

Aside: There's not much point in quoting stretches of philosophical writings. What matters is how you are bringing their insights - or rather, your interpretation of their insights - to bear on the discussion you are having. I can copy-paste you a whole load of Kant if you like, but I don't see how that furthers a discussion?
__
[1] Please note that kicking a stone is no refutation.

Don't be silly.

That's not very helpful. My point was that just quoting doesn't engage the points raised, as they were raised and in the context they were raised. It's not a discussion. My "kicking a stone" comment was fairly obviously a gently playful allusion to that. No spaghetti monsters involved.

Subjective interpretation is indeed undeniable.

Do you not mean to say that subjective experience is undeniable?

What you are interpreting is most simply explained by the external.

I don't think it is. Now, you may have an "instinctual belief" in an external world, but many do not, after attending directly to their experience, and find reason to question it. And I don't agree that an "instinctual belief" in something is, of itself, any reason to refrain from exploring parallel constructions. No justification at all is required to do so, other than curiosity. Beyond that, the benefits of a parallel construction will likely only become apparent after it has been constructed.

"can never be any reason for rejecting one instinctive belief except that it clashes with others"

I would disagree. See above. There is no reason at all to commit to a single view - besides lack of interest or curiosity. In fact, the recognition of an instinctual belief may itself be the motivation for putting it aside and seeking alternatives. You realise it's just a "castle in the sky", suggesting there are other such "castles" to be constructed and explored. You seem to be implying that an alternative construction, based around a purely subjective view, could not allow for "a harmonious, complex system..."? Why do you think that? (Of course, a "purely subjective view" isn't a subjective view at all, since there is no subjective/objective dichotomy. There is just "the context of experience".)

POST: Lucid Dreaming Question Which Pertains To Reality

Basically, the only "correct" or fundamental truth is that "there is an experience that is being experienced" - made up from sensations, perceptions and thoughts (which are really of the same nature: "awareness"). This is the context of experience. Beyond that, all content of experience is relatively true only. There is no "how things really are" behind the scenes; there is no "how things work". In fact, there is no "behind the scenes". What there is, in effect, is experiential patterns within your subjective perspective. And since it is you-as-awareness that "takes on the shape of" these patterns, then by shifting your own shape you shift the formatting of your experience. So that's probably the two main truths, really the only ones and the same one actually:

• The "nature of experiencing", which corresponds to the true nature of "you" - context;
• The implications of this for the structuring of your experience, and how it can be re-patterned or reformatted - content.

If we conceive of the latter as amounting to a set of "facts" corresponding to the sum of all intentions so far (and their implications), then we have a better idea of how to think about "lucid dreaming" and "how it operates".

POST: How to start? Or maybe not.

Oneirosophy is less of a concrete path and more a topic of study.

Quite so. And as you point out, the reading list is intended to raise questions - it simply points out possible texts for contemplation across a range of areas - rather than provide answers.

...just an inability to read the sidebar/faq is all.

As more and more people use the Reddit app, the tendency of people not to read the sidebar - or even know that there is such a thing as a sidebar - is becoming a problem for more nuanced subreddits everywhere, I think. It's not necessarily the user's fault; the app is just a bit of a crap design generally. One approach is to make a sticky which contains the text of the sidebar. Provided users don't have their app settings sorting things by "hot", then at least the introduction will be the first post on the front page. Would take two seconds to do that - shall we?

POST: Clarifying a few things. (By cosmicprankster420)

[POST]

Alright so some readers here are still not fully clear on what the idea of Oneirosophy is, and maybe there are a few things i didn't explain. A few people mentioned how they don't understand how it is more than just lucid dreaming or feeling like this is a lucid dream. The importance of this feeling of lucidity is recognizing that this very well may be a dream right now (I believe that, but i'll let you decide for yourself) and that if this is a dream then it can most definitely be changed with magic. In HP lovecrafts short story Celephais there is a part in the story when Kuranes is exploring the dream lands that he comes to a place outside of what he calls infinity inhabited by intelligent glowing colored gases that study the secrets of existence. This is the kind of place Oneirosophy takes you in that realizing the dream like nature of existence you are in fact stepping outside of conventional reality into a place where the talking purple gas clouds live.
The reason it is a practice is because although one can claim to be a subjective idealist on an intellectual level they may still have materialist habits and thought patterns at the unconscious level. By blurring the line between waking and dreaming and achieving lucidity this mindset becomes integrated at a more fundamental level emotionally and experiencially rather than just conceptually. When this is integrated successfully there is a feeling of peace as well as a sense of courage to do things one was normally afraid of doing. And like Nefandi said somewhere its not just about making the dream world seem real but making the real world seem more dream like.

[END OF POST]

This is good. Yes, the point is to recognise that this actually is a dream. And not just to think it or recognise it intellectually, but to feel the truth of this in your moment to moment experience.

And (magickally speaking) what could be more flexible than a dream?

POST: Proposal for terms?

Since part of the point of this subreddit will be (I'm assuming) to mess with concepts, break them and find new ways of saying things as required, it might be better to just let things flow freely.

POST: Dreams - what are they good for?

This is not a sub for philosophy!

Except perhaps for what we might call "practical philosophy", since we'll be using and pushing idealism to its limits, i assume...

POST: Resignation

I feel that this was going to happen eventually; it wasn't something that could have been resolved by discussion, and it wasn't really anyone's fault. How do you agree or compromise on fundamental matters of style, with a subject which demands you speak from your identity? Some styles are mutually exclusive, and it's difficult to host both in a single forum, in terms of moderation or amongst subscribers. So in some ways, although it's obviously somewhat bumpy as transitions go, this is actually probably the most efficient way for it to get sorted. The challenge going forward is that this subreddit and whatever else emerges from these events must clearly set out their stalls in terms of "mode". Although "nice" isn't always necessarily the best way to grow, it is "nice" to have the choice to select the style that works for you in any moment - and maybe that's what will come out of this: an opportunity for people to pursue their chosen way without compromise.

Personally, I'm about the ideas whatever context they might be embedded in, and I'm good with whatever communication style does the job at that time. Not so much on the fence, as playing sport badly in the fields either side of the fence simultaneously...

POST: An Outside Observation

It turns out that the moderators were having a "people-shaped" experience - who knew, eh? Anyway, when two or more directions arise in direct conflict, like with tectonic plates, a shake-up is probably inevitable. And perhaps the use of anger is that is sometimes the most efficient way for a change to happen in strained circumstances.

Non-duality doesn't necessarily correspond to "everyone being nice to each other all the time", even though it's my own preferred approach; non-duality is impersonal. Events arise, this includes apparent interactions between people, sometimes those interactions corresponds to an angry narrative, then that part of the story completes. Regardless of the manner of its occurrence, the right thing has happened overall. And now, we have a subreddit for one flavour of this topic - a looser forum to explore the perspective "life is dreamlike in nature" - and there will be another for more hard-nosed philosophical discussions of subjective idealism. The right thing doing itself, for everyone. I wasn't speaking in support of how things played out really - "my preferences lie elsewhere", you might say - and I do get the point you are trying to make overall (why are people shouting into the mirror?). However, it's kind of done now, and the final result is probably the best outcome (in my personal view of course) that doesn't mainly involve, as of this moment, just wishing that situations and people/aspects were different than they are.

"A thing", indeed. :-)

Thank you kindly.

If something good has come of this, beyond the overdue bifurcation, it's that lots of people have piped up to explicitly say that they care about the subreddit and the topic it explores. This bodes well for the future!

* * *

TG Comments: /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix

POST: [META] People should look into a few things before they post

[POST]

• Cognitive Dissonance
• Baader Meinhof Phenomenon
• Schizophrenia, psychosis other hallunicatory illnesses
• Depersonalization
• Sleep Paralysis
• Fugu State
• Absence seizure

Way too many people post things with a whole thought of "Lel I shifted realities" before checking out what it really could be. I'm all for mysteries and shit but some things can easily be explained by things mentioned above. If anyone knows any more just post it below.

[END OF POST]

Good list, although: The point surely would be that if people read a post and think one of those is the explanation, they can then post a comment describing how, exactly it accounts for it. So long as a post is "an everyday-mode experience that OP is confused by and has no explanation for", it's valid. OP can then choose among submitter contributions. A key problem is that glitches (as defined in this subreddit) are usually one-off experiences that can't be repeated - hence not scientifically studied. We are then left with personal opinion - what one deems to be "likely" or "plausible" given their own life experiences to date. In other words, if we can't test a theory, then it stays a theory.

Short version: Certainly take these things on board, but don't be dissuaded from posting your experiences. Simply naming or categorising something is not the same as having explained it; and it certainly ain't science.

And it's okay sometimes to just not know.

What if the answer is something mundane that we don't know?

Exactly. The real answer to most glitch reports is: you'll never know, but pondering it might turn up some interesting lines of thought. The discovery is in the discussion. However, there's a real urge "we" have to choose an option from the available ones, to wrap things up and "be right" or at least resolved, even when none of them are much good as an explanation. Why do we feel so uncomfortable with that? Is it because we don't like acknowledging we know very little of our world? Not in some mystical way; I mean simple things like not understanding basics of visual perception. That uncertainty = instability, vulnerability?

But still I say, when it comes to choosing between crap explanations: "why not none?"

The problem with a lot of this stuff is that we don't have the equivalent of a "theory of gravity" for, say, memory. Fundamentally, we don't know what memory is (the sense in which it exists, where it is stored, how it is experienced). So we can identify similarities with other reported experiences (psychological studies, brain damage studies), but that is comparison and not explanation in a deeper sense. When we make progress along those lines, we'll get our mundane explanations. (Although I'm sure there will be radical leaps in understanding to get to the mundanity.)

Not remembering how many chicken nuggets you ate is not a comment on our understanding of memory. It is a person grasping for a reason to feel important, for a reason to believe they are one of the privileged few to peek behind this "curtain".

That's... a bit of a straw man, isn't it? (EDIT: Ah, that other comment.)

Well, I suppose a desire to experience something of importance is better than having a mission to stay committed to unimportance! But I don't see that's what's happening. Mostly, people aren't very happy at all when something odd happens to them; they find it disturbing.

A desire to feel important is good, but it can't be a delusion ("It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring"). To think these things are sincere occurrences of a rift in space or time is delusional. To think you are important because you noticed them is satisfying and reassuring. We should want, as people, to be satisfied under true and honest circumstances. They might find it disturbing, but they seem pleased enough with it to post it to reddit. This community is fervent enough about believing it that they will downvote me for thinking it's silly and speaking out calmly about it.

I think they are downvoting you because you are responding to my comments as if I was saying something I'm not. In other words, you are replying as if I am promoting one view or the other - when I'm saying that the judgement should be on whether an explanation is well-constructed or not. Entertaining different views is not delusional; dogged commitment to a view in spite of shaky foundations, probably is. I don't think "this community" is a bunch of fervent believers at all. In fact, compared with other subreddits which highlight unusual experiences, it is pretty balanced. Most subscribers don't seem to have an opinion one way or the other; they just find it interesting to read and think about these things.

...

Q2: I say this from an educated in the sciences background. What if what science/modern medicine names as pathology because it is rooted in the belief that physicality is all there is, is actually glimpses into other dimensions and other cultures would call it a talent? I think there is room for that in this sub.

Q3: Yeah no, these pathology can be measured, diagnosed and treated, they have nothing to do with dimensionnal jumping and such.

Hmm. While I don't endorse "parallel dimensions!" as the answer to everything (or indeed anything), nor am I very impressed by the approach to "measuring, diagnosing and treating" many of what we call psychological illnesses. Perhaps it's because I studied physics, but when I look at the actual models being used, I see the very worst examples of "vague ideas someone had once" that become self-fulfilling diagnostics - lots of begging the question, no actual deeper theory that has or can be tested. In short: not science. In other cultures, many of these symptoms would have been viewed quite differently (I don't just mean primitive tribal cultures here) - however, our current society has little time to give, and the priority is on keeping people "productive", or at least reducing the inconvenience they cause. The aim is efficient bypass or overpass, rather than compassion and comprehension leading to solutions.

The experiences are real experiences, but the nature of them (and therefore the appropriate response) seems open to question - which is why it's fun to discuss them on this subreddit!

...

A1: YOU have schizophrenia! and YOU have schizophrenia! EVERYONE has schizophrenia!

Schizophrenia! It's the new absence seizure!™
© Glitch Explanations, Inc.

POST: Lots of snide self righteous comments

We discussed this recently in the comments of this post [POST: [META] People should look into a few things before they post]. Mostly it's just an internet conversation thing, mixed in with a misunderstanding of what it means to be level-headed or scientific. It's not that commenters should believe, disbelieve or neither - it's that if you are going to comment, then you should be contributing to the discussion. And the point of joining the discussion here is to explore the topic raised by the post. Skepticism has become a misused word. It does not mean that you remain attached (often emotionally so) to the currently dominant worldview, defending it until you are forced by "extraordinary evidence" to reconsider (this is what the behaviour of many would lead you to think). It means you are a curious and questioning individual:

Skepticism or scepticism (see spelling differences) is generally any questioning attitude towards unempirical knowledge or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere.
-- Skepticism, Wikipedia

A true skeptic would treat observation (direct experience) as primary, and be wary of the reification of any explanation, including the current dominant one. He would be equally suspicious of jumps towards any single-phrase explanations - "brain seizure", "schizophrenia" and "parallel universes" alike. His question would always be: how, exactly does that description account for this report.

My own guidelines are: experiences are real experiences; explanations are useful narratives. We must be careful not to treat the concepts we invent as actual things, even when they seem to work really well. Our observations are what define our stories, our stories don't define what it is possible to observe. That's why we should welcome different ideas, because fragments of them might be useful later on.

Note: welcome the ideas, not believe them.

POST: [META] Possible explanation for some doubles/dopplegangers

[POST]

Subject line should start with [THEORY] instead of [META]. Sorry.
For many years, I worked security, usually on the technical side. If your keyless entry card stopped working, I was the one you went to for help. Imagine the following...
"I'm Betty Brown. My card won't let me into [location] anymore."
"Sorry to hear that. Let me look you up in the computer." Clickety. "Hmm. I can't find you. Let me see your card. I can look you up by ID number. Ah, here you are. Wait a minute! This card is for Rebecca Jones!"
"Oh, that's me."
"You just said your name was Betty Brown. Why is your name different on your ID card?"
Rolls eyes. "When I went to nursing school, I went by Rebecca, and I was still married to [first husband] so I had his last name. All my professional certifications are under Rebecca Jones. But my friends here at [this hospital] shortened my name to Becky, then it kinda evolved into Betty, and now I'm married to [second husband] so I'm using his last name, Brown."
"Okay, let's just double check that with HR." Checks out. "Okay, let's just call your department head and see where you need access." Dial, dial. "Yeah, what area does Betty Brown need access to?"
"Who?"
"Betty Brown AKA Rebecca Jones. Registered nurse, works on 4th floor, [physical description]?"
"Oh, you mean Ann Smith. She needs access to [location] and [other location]." Click.
"Why does your department head call you Ann Smith?"
Rolls eyes. "We went to high school together. Back then, I was using my middle name, and my maiden name..."
I had some variation of that conversation about once a month for 20 years. Several times, I'd be talking to coworkers about one security problem or another, and we'd realize that we were talking about the same woman using different names. Or to find that three or four of us had written incident reports about the same woman, all using different names.
On a related note, I was once speaking to a woman when a man walked up.
"Ann, is that you?"
"Sorry, are you talking to me?"
"Yeah. You're Ann, right? We go to [church] together."
"Sorry, you must be mistaken. I'm Betty. I don't go to that church."
"Oh, I thought for sure you were Ann. Sorry for bothering you." Man leaves.
"I'm glad he left. I didn't want to talk to him today."
"What? You knew him after all?"
"Of course. We've been going to the same church for years. I just didn't want to talk to him right now. I'm sure if it's important, he'll tell me Sunday."
"So, you acted like you didn't know him?"
"Well, I didn't want to hurt his feelings."
"Let me get this straight. You pretend to be a different person sometimes just so you don't have to talk to people?"
"Sure. Doesn't everybody?"
In the words of my favorite old boss, "I don't like people anymore..."

[END OF POST]

"Sure. Doesn't everybody?"

It's surprising what some people think is normal, and they've never been called out on. It would make a good AskReddit thread, except of course they are unaware of their own behaviour, so it would be empty.

Q1: The crazy (ha ha) thing is that I worked in hospitals for nearly 20 years, often dealing with patients with mental health issues. 99% of them realize they have mental health issues, freely admit it, and actively seek help. In spite of their issues, they are as a whole very nice people who generally act and sound normal outside of their one or two specific issues. The mental health professionals on the other hand are the weirdest bunch of jackholes I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. You know how you hear that every medical doctor became a doctor because they were very sick as a child or someone close to them died? That goes double for mental health workers. But every one of them I know, no matter how strangely they act or sound, will insist they are perfectly normal. I think I remember that the woman in the second story was a mental health worker. I know she was employed at the hospital in some kind of authority role.

Heh, yeah. I've always been interested in psychology and the mind and so on, and one of the things that comes up is, often the reason people become therapists is because "to explore and heal the client's problems is to explore and heal your own". You never really have access to the client's mind; what you are dealing with is your own fabrication, an "inner client" you are imagining - i.e. an aspect of yourself. It's not the client who projects, it's the therapist, and the client becomes the therapist's way of working through their own issues.

Q1: On the one hand, I kind of think it's a good thing that mental health professionals have a background of mental health issues (either their own or a loved one) as it obviously makes it easier to understand where their patients are coming from. On the other hand, back in school we had a joke that one of our teachers wasn't really a teacher. He was just a really big dumb kid who had never been able to quite pass 4th grade, being held back year after year, until eventually he was an adult and just kind of took over the class. I sometimes see therapists not as highly trained and schooled professionals, but as therapy patients who attended therapy so long that they know all the answers and somehow got put in charge. In the movie What About Bob? Bill Murray's character, a mental patient, corrects a doctor's diagnosis of another patient and suggests a different drug therapy. The doctor agrees and changes the drug he was going to prescribe. I worked at hospitals for nearly 20 years and I can honestly tell you this actually happens.

Ha, I love your teacher example. Your larger point is accurate too. Sometimes professionals are too busy "being professional" in order to be actually good. It's often not their fault; the environment they end up working in does it to them. There is a general trend towards abstracted careerism, a sort of "meta" approach to what you do (see particularly: career politicians). Whenever the job involves a subjective experience and an empathy aspect, this has a particularly dire impact. I have family members who work in health and mental health, and encountering some of the (genuinely nice) people who work in that industry, I am often shocked at how there are very basic things they have given no thought to. There's a trend towards "solutionism" without having an underlying model - a lot of it seems to work on ideas on the level of "gee-whiz" popular science magazine articles, or in response to current marketing. It was always thus, but the increased focus on "being a successful business" rather than "succeeding at your purpose" has made it far worse than ever before. Meaning: politics aplenty!

And what is a career politician, if not a skilled gaslighter who can change his or her view on a whim? A multi-opinioned doppelganger of themselves! (Had to loop it around somehow.)

POST: [META] Try it at home! See the matrix in a laser cat toy.

The speckle pattern? Not a glitch as such, but interesting to ponder because it encourages us to revisit assumptions we might have about our experience. From that Wikipedia entry:

[QUOTE]

A speckle pattern is an intensity pattern produced by the mutual interference of a set of wavefronts.[1] This phenomenon has been investigated by scientists since the time of Newton, but speckles have come into prominence since the invention of the laser and have now found a variety of applications. Speckle patterns typically occur in diffuse reflections of monochromatic light such as laser light. Such reflections may occur on materials such as paper, white paint, rough surfaces, or in media with a large number of scattering particles in space, such as airborne dust or in cloudy liquids.

[END OF QUOTE]

There's a nice little summary which corresponds to your own experimentation somewhat, here. Excerpt:

[QUOTE]

1. The speckle is not on the surface you are viewing. To prove this, hold a pencil at your near point and focus on it while gazing at the screen. The speckle pattern is still sharp! If you wear glasses, take them off: no difference. Speckle is an interference pattern in space caused by the coherent light of the laser being reflected from the rough surface.
2. Because the speckle pattern is not located on any particular plane in space, you will have trouble focussing on a laser-illuminated surface; the eye involuntarily tries to focus on the speckle grains. Try reading a printed page by laser light. Try again while moving your head.
3. The apparent "grain size" of the speckle depends upon your distance from the viewing screen and also the aperture available to your eye. For example, if you hold a variable iris in front of your eye, closing the aperture will increase the coarseness of the speckle pattern; the same thing happens if you step further away from the screen.
4. The speckle pattern is sharp regardless of your visual acuity. In fact, you can use speckle as a crude eye test: stand about 2m from the illuminated surface, and move your head slowly from side to side. If the speckle pattern appears to move in the same sense as your head motion (i.e., pattern moves left as your head moves left), you are far-sighted. If motion is in the opposite sense, you are nearsighted. If there is no motion of the pattern, you have normal, 20/20 vision. If you wear glasses, try this test with and without your glasses; if you have normal vision, simulate nearsightedness and farsightedness by holding positive and negative lenses in front of your eye.
5. Speckle is observed only for stationary surfaces. For example, your hand will not display clear speckle, nor will the surface of a glass of milk (use the milk surface, not the glass) -- milk is a colloidal suspension and the Brownian motion of the suspended particles destroys the pattern. This fact can be exploited to detect vibrational motions with amplitude as small as a quarter-wavelength (about 0.15 micron) with the unaided eye.

So, your final idea that the pattern is "in the universe" is not a bad one - although I would probably phrase it as the pattern being "distributed throughout space" or something like that.

My crush doesn't exist.......

[POST]

So I there was this girl I worked with that I liked.... I actually created this account 5 months ago and posted on /r/dating_advice looking for help. I had finally gotten the courage to ask her out yesterday. She was supposed to be at work, but I didn't see her... I looked at the day-schedule and didn't see her name on there. When I asked my boss (who knew I liked her) where she was, He asked me who I was talking about. So she no longer exists. I tried to find my other posts, but this reddit account didn't exist, so I had to re-make it. I know she was real. There were so many interactions I can remember. The feelings were real... HELP!

[END OF POST]

Consciousness can easily be described by physical laws we know about.

Actually, really? How exactly? Because you should write that up if you know, and save neuroscientists like Christof Koch resorting to panpsychism and cognitive scientists like Donald Hoffman proposing reverse interface models!

Perhaps you are referring to the hope that somehow, one day, we'll be able to describe how consciousness arises as an "emergent property" of brain chemistry - but the fact is that not only do we lack a theory of consciousness that could lead to this, we do not even know what form such a theory could take. Alternatively, you might be referring to a correlation between brain patterns and reported experience, but that is the problem of content not consciousness - i.e. the soft problem vs the hard problem. Most solutions being proposed currently involve some sort of flipping round of consciousness in the hierarchy of structure - in other words, making it at the very least a more fundamental property, and in some cases the fundamental property. (Note: this doesn't mean "self conscious intelligence", it means "the property of awareness".)

Apologies for the rant, but this is an area which is fundamental to perception and to science generally, and it's always a shame to see something so important dismissed with a couple of ill-informed one-liners, especially ones based on such simplistic metaphors...

Q1: Thank you for that. I know that some level of skepticism is certainly healthy no matter what arena of life we're talking about, but this is one subject area where I find that people tend to have an infuriatingly common kneejerk reaction to any suggestion of intelligent discussion or philosophy. I find it confounding that so many people are so rooted in the presumption that the consciousness is derivative and not originative when all existing scientific evidence seems to suggest the latter.

I think the strange, almost-emotional reaction stems from where they subconsciously (haha) fear this would lead: that if "everything is made from consciousness" then there is no solid substrate behind reality (true) and anything could happen (yeah, well). Nothing would be "real", life would have no meaning, the world would be in chaos!

But if it is true now, then it has always been true, so nothing changes in the knowing of it, except perhaps a greater sense of interconnection. Our understanding of the nature of our experience changes, but the actual content does not. And one has to ask: in what way is a description based on "dead" atoms interacting deterministically particularly meaningful in comparison?

Or perhaps the fear is more fundamental even than that. Perhaps it is that it would force us to recognise that the only thing that ever "happens" is our observations, and absolutely everything beyond this - our "explanations" - are merely connective fictions that have no reality other than our thinking of them. It's unusual for a discussion on this topic to get that far though...

...

Q2: She still exists, just not in your perception. From what I've expierienced and read it's not that hard to get a person out of your perception, because there can easily be a coherent story (hit by a bus, heartattack, move to another country). Thing is, in our world view there is no coherent explanation of someone coming back into our perception (except someone just moved to another country), so this one is not an easy case.
edit: mh but now that you expierienced that people can simply vanish, a step in the right direction could be to truly accept that people can simply appear too

Q3: Or he's mentally ill

Or "worse".

Q4: worse being...?

Exactly.

[META] Has anyone else noticed that we never actually SEE anything disappear?

Q1: I saw an article a while ago that talked about how the eye won't notice some sudden changes. There were pictures in which a part of the picture would disappear, then reappear a while later, and you wouldn't even notice. Things like a plane's wing would vanish while I stared at the picture trying to figure out what changed. Perhaps we witness the disappearing, but don't SEE it.

Yes, this is how I think it happens. Unless we are looking specifically for that object. For instance, if you had been looking for the wings you would notice they had gone. Everything is running on permanent "autocomplete"; attention does the detailing.

Q2: I recently had a physical and neurological check at a hospital, because I often see, well to best describe it, blue squares in the corner of my field of view (they disappear when I try to directly look at them) they said I'm one of the healthiest persons they ever tested, so I was a bit clueless till now, do you know how I get rid of this?...

Q2:...the color is not as solid as on the picture, it's shiny and almost glares

I don't specifically, unfortunately. But... a couple of things, though: do you wear glasses or contacts and/or do you have a tendency to stare when looking at things? (The reason I ask is related to an idea about shifting you attention, which can be quite helpful with perception in general.)

Q2: Yes I wear contacts and it mostly happens while I'm staring at something, for example when looking at my computer screen or out of the window (sorry if my english isn't good right now, I already had some prosecco)

(I'm on beer, which always makes for maximum eloquence, or so it seems to me, as the evening progresses. Hmm. So you'll excuse any meandering.)

Okay, well my vague suggestion is that you are "fixing" your vision by staring, and that causes the blue squares. Basically, it's your mind's best pattern-matching interpretation of areas in your perceptual field which haven't been "updated" because your eyes aren't moving freely, perhaps coupled with pressure you're creating by staring. So, I'm gonna give you my top visual perception tip, which others have found useful. See if it helps. The main thing to realise is that you are not meant to actually see! By which I mean, you are not meant to be "using" your eyes. Your whole perceptual system is automatic: information enters your mind, is clumped up into objects and locations, all spontaneously. Any effort to "make seeing happen" actually interferes with that.

The essence of it:

• You want to "let the world come to you" rather than trying to grasp it with your attention.

Okay, but how to do this practically speaking? I suggest you take a moment to notice "the place you are looking out from". Do you feel that you are "located" right behind your eyes? Do you feel that you are trying to "narrow" onto them in order to see? Probably the answer is yes. Instead, try this:

• "Sit back" mentally in your head, about halfway back, to somewhere at about the centre line of your body. "Look out from" that location instead. Rather than reaching out, sit back and just let vision arise within your perceptual space. You will probably feel your eyes and face relax a little.
• Now, experiment with changing your position along this imaginary vertical line running through the centre of your body. You can even "look out from" your chest or your abdomen. Find the vertical position on the line where you feel most "at home".

So, hopefully that helps in some way.

Why does this work? Because you don't see with your eyes as such - rather, you are perceiving the result of seeing with and within your mind's "perceptual space". A lot of vision problems can, I believe, be caused by unintentionally "deforming" this perceptual space by poor use of attention, which in turn leads to more tension in an attempt to compensate, and so on in a downward spiral.

TL;DR: Sit back in your head, allow the world to come to you.

This would also imply that everything is void, while I'm not looking at it, scary

Well, it's the first inkling of a larger understanding I suppose, but you don't really need to worry about that...

The way to look at it, I suggest, is that focusing our attention is the opposite of what we think it is. We tend to assume that focusing our attention ("concentrating") is how we should go about seeing things, but actually that is how we narrow onto things and block other stuff out. This is a bad idea!

In other words, the reason you get voids in the first place is because you are unwittingly excluding information by narrowing your attention on a small part of the world. What you should actually do is leave attention alone, let it open out and shift as it needs to according to what you are doing. We should live our lives by directing intention (deciding what we want to happen and letting our nervous systems move towards that spontaneously) rather than controlling attention (gripping onto our nervous systems and interfering with their natural movement). Otherwise we're doing the equivalent of commanding ourselves to move whilst determinedly staying still. So if you are, say, reading through your messages - like this one - rather than focusing on the "how" by controlling your eyes, instead sit back mentally and "just decide" to read them. Sit back and let your body and mind take care of the details. You will find that they move appropriately by themselves, if you don't interfere.

This is the "secret" behind improved eyesight (really: perception) and also effortless body movement (really: shifting state). It's not really a secret though because it doesn't involve a technique; it just about not doing something that gets in the way of what's happening anyway. Fun to play experiment with, and lots of potential for making the moments of everyday life more enjoyable.

Q2: Sorry for the late reply, went on holiday. I now use this always in everyday life and I guess I experienced a "glitch" because of it too. I dropped a glass and fetched it with some kind of lightning fast reflex, it was impossible to catch it the normal way, but when I asked a friend of mine who witnessed this, if she had seen how abnormally fast I fetched the glass she stated that there was nothing unusual about how I fetched it. Why did she witness a normal body movement? From my view it was discontinous (like minimal teleportation)
effortless body movement (really: shifting state)
So now that I've read through your comment again, I can comprehend what you meant, which leads me to:
We should live our lives by directing intention (deciding what we want to happen and letting our nervous systems move towards that spontaneously)
When you wrote about this, I didn't realise that it also seems to allow things to happen that aren't usually possible, but now that I'm a bit acclimatised I'm curious and will watch now more closely in my everyday life, anyway thanks for sharing your knowledge.

Thanks for dropping me a note (and not that glass!).

Well, you'll find that everything becomes the most efficient it can be - sometimes "more" than that - but you'll also start to realise that people don't really perceive things properly (they don't tend to notice the unusual) - just like you didn't used to, until now. Anyway, happy I could help.

...

Q3: I don't think I've ever mentioned this to anyone, but when I was 5 or so, I had a small plush Ernie doll from Sesame Street. I vividly remember being in the kitchen and laying the Ernie doll on the breakfast table and POOF, the hair disappeared right in front of me. I don't exactly remember if I had looked away, but it was shocking. I loudly protested to my mother, who would have none of it and told me I was imagining things. I still have no idea what the hell actually happened there. I assume I was somehow hallucinating, maybe I had a fever.

Q4: There's actually an explanation for that; You were very used to the Ernie doll having hair, and it was removed for some reason (through rough play, cut off because of gum being tangled in it, pulled off in the dryer, etc.) And prior to that instant, you hadn't noticed it was gone and your mind assumed it was still there, and then when you finally did notice it was gone, your brain 'corrected' what you were seeing, causing it to 'vanish'. This effect is more common in adults because we have more knowledge and experience and fill in more of what we see with symbolic placeholders for what we expect to be there, while kids tend to see things without the symbolic filtering, but it can happen to kids as well because of their narrow focus of attention (i.e. they tend not to notice things a lot.) This effect is usually associated with a 'sinking' or 'lurching' feeling or a sudden feeling of 'wrongness' that can be quite upsetting, even to adults. Another great example of this is a misspelling on a street sign. You might walk past the sign for decades and always read it 'correctly'. Then one day as you're walking by, you get a feeling of 'wrongness' about the sign and a sinking feeling in your stomach, so you stare at the sign trying to figure out what is wrong with it until finally the letters appear to shift and move, revealing the misspelling as your brain rebuilds the visual symbolism of the sign to incorporate the new information (the misspelling) and 'correct' the image.

Right, variations of this come up a lot, although we rarely give it much attention unless the circumstances are unusual:

"When I got in the darkroom, I realized that I could very faintly see the big table in the middle of the room with all its individual tubs of developer, stop, and fixer. This disturbed me, since a darkroom is supposed to be absolutely dark. I reached for the corner of the table, and when my hand reached it, there was nothing there. The table immediately vanished from my sight. I fumbled around a bit, found the table by feel, and instantly it popped back into view in a new, and "correct" location."
-- Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams

...Did the hair stay disappeared?

Yes, Ernie was forever bald after that.

Poor Ernie! But perhaps it was Bert's revenge.

POST: (META) The Physics of Information and Unknown Unknowns

[POST]

Eric Wargo expands upon Jacques Vallee's proposition that in order to understand the science behind the occurrence of mysterious events, we first need to develop a language for the physics of information. It's a very long read, but some here may enjoy it. (and yes, there are some interesting glitches contained therein)

[http://thenightshirt.com/?p=3060]

[END OF POST]

From the article:

If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association.

Uncanny, I've been playing with just that idea lately. What we call "the world" is our subjective view of a particular strand of associative thought, albeit a bright and immersive one. The "physics of information" proposed sound a lot like Kant's noumenal - which I think of as a collection of dimensionless "facts" which are basically your observations-so-far, dissolved into the background of subjective experience. The point: all facts about the world are either here and now, or will appear on-demand when observed as if they were here and now.

Q1: Yes, our ingrained belief in absolute, observable and linear causality may hinder our understanding of what is really happening. For example, 'forward memories' might explain a lot of glitchy events. Take the story of the broken plate that's up today. When the Redditor broke a plate, it seemed to be the second one, because the person had a double awareness of it happening. There was the actual event, and the memory of the event, an associatieve forward memory that the mind could only handle by slotting into a past time line. Or not. But as a theory goes, it is as possible as apporting plates!

Or it could be even simpler! Imagine that what we call reality is really a super-basic experience with no depth. When I say the world is a strand of thought - that we are thinking about a world - let's take it literally. In a certain defocussed state, random thinking might get blended with the world-thought and be incorporated into it.

Thought Experiment:

You draw a picture of an owl on your TV screen. It is always there, but its visibility depends upon the rest of the imagery onscreen. When the dark scenes of the TV show switch to a bright white scene, suddenly the owl "appears" - it is "manifested". Now instead imagine an owl idea being dissolved "holographically" in the space around you, and replace the notion of dark/white scene with appropriate contexts. Having "drawn" the owl into the space, you go about your day. Mostly the owl isn't anywhere to be seen, but wherever an appropriate context arises then aspects of the owl idea shine through and are manifest: A man has an owl image on a t-shirt, the woman in the shop has massive eyes and eyebrows like feathers, a friend sends you an email about a lecture at the zoo highlighting the owl enclosure, a newspaper review of Blade Runner talks extensively about the mechanical owl in the interrogation scene, and so on.

EDIT: Actually this was part of the original thread I'd linked to anyway! Oh well, it's so good I've pasted twice! ;-)

Q1: This kind of 'summoning' is great for thrift shopping, when you know what you want. But I think it can also be good to approach it in the reverse way...if you start to see a lot of owls...ask to understand the 'message.' Why were you drawing owls on your holographic screen to begin with?

Yes good, the world you see around you is your current state!

Because it is the extended pattern of "owl" that is triggered, then your experience might be "hey, why am I seeing loads of things about eyes, beaks, feathers?" and you eventually infer "owl". Perhaps you encounter lots of TV shows, films, news articles about duels and wrestling sports and so on, overhear conversations about competitions, keep coming across literal forks in the road that you don't remember being there before. You eventually infer "my wife and I are at odds about a certain issue, a choice to be made, and I've been ignoring it". All patterns are of-a-single-piece. And so on.

...

Q2: The concept of pyschokinesis doesn't follow the concept of thermodynamics whatsoever, so it's kinda BS.

Q1: I'm sorry, a lot has happened here in the last few hours, and I'm writing in a hurry, but I'll have to reread it the article to see what claims were made about pyschokinesis in regard to the physics of information. If there was a claim that it follows the concept of thermodynamics, I missed it.

Q2: Well, it simply aknowledged that pyschokineiss is a believable concept, implying that the author doesn't understand how energy works.

Hmm, and how does energy "work"? ;-)

Not to back up the article necessarily, but it seems to be suggesting 'energy' (it uses quotes) in the sense of non-local information transfer. Something like Bohmian mechanics does permit non-locality, and some of his stuff is becoming popular again. (EDIT: This paper is worth a read as regards energy, thermodynamics, and information.)

Of course, having a theory or not doesn't prove or disprove anything - if someone makes actual observations, then that's that. As far as I know, there are quite a few studies showing beyond-chance influence over random processes, but nothing dramatic like levitating chairs and so on! There's some coverage at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and work at Edinburgh University.

TL;DR: Undergrad physics can give us the illusion of certainty in a world of ambiguity. Maybe it's more about informational patterns than quantities and fixed relationships/laws?

So if you do predict something, and get it correct above the expected number of correct guesses, it doesn't really mean anything.

Um, you should maybe "just read up on this" some more. Plenty of papers out there proving some small effect. The nature of the effect is something else of course. Princeton's PEAR not a bad place to start. Individual experiments often show something like the decline effect, though, which is interesting in itself.

Also, why did you bring up undergrad physics?

I just got that vibe - someone who has the certainty, but not the knowledge or larger context. I was the same. Things are more subtle and less definite than one might assume; models aren't truth, they are simply efficient fictions with predictive power. Just reading beyond textbooks and popular science quickly puts things in perspective, whether that's Schrodinger's lectures or George Ellis, etc (more recently here [https://www.nature.com/articles/516321a]).

EDIT: My own view is that unless we study some philosophy of science - I like a bit of Paul Feyerabend - and have some familiarity with the reasoning behind idealism and materialism (nice bit of Berkeley or whatever), then we don't really know what "doing science" actually is, and are in danger of fooling ourselves.

Can you make a post about this on /r/physics?
I'd like to get a larger group of people on this.

We could but, what about exactly? There are experimental observations of an effect but no satisfactory theory to discuss (as far as I am concerned).

And that's because we have no sensible account of consciousness yet ("emergence" being a non-explanation), which is of course vital in this. That would, in some sense, be the "cause". There are things like Integrated Information Theory and Hoffman's Conscious Realism which attempt to relate consciousness to the underlying nature of the world, but then we're talking metaphysics rather than physics. We're hitting the observer boundary. We're at "the thing before" an experimental observation takes place. From an experimental point of view, all that happens is (say) the ball bearings have a distribution which deviates from chance in the predetermined direction. There is no apparent mechanism.

EDIT: Ah, or did you mean something on "how we should view physics"?

This is kinda out of my range of knowledge.

It's the "mystery zone", everyone's in the same boat to some extent, from this point!

Some thoughts to agree or disagree with:

Science is, I suggest, an approach in which we conceptualise the world as being made up of "parts" and then try to link those parts back together again via useful stories.

How do we do this?

By noticing repeating regularities in our observations. We then create explanatory fictions which can describe those regularities and anticipate what will happen when the same circumstances arise again - by taking the "parts" and inventing additional concepts to act as glue. But this leads to an important couple of points:

• We (can) only do this process for observations which are obviously "part-based" and whose patterns can easily be identified and deliberately repeated.
• This is equivalent to only recognising objects that there are words for. In fact, it's more like only recognising objects for which there are words for, and which rhyme with one another.
• The models we create are fictions. Their power is in their applicability and reuse, not in their correspondence to a deeper reality. (We must therefore be careful when we say that energy, mass, fields and so on "exist" independent of this context.)
• This is why we have to be careful when we use our models as the basis of declaring something possible or impossible, outside of their applicable realms. The observations limit what models can be made; the models do not limit what observations can be made.

When we're talking about "psi effects" or (unexplained) so-called "glitch" reports, we tend to be talking about things which fall into these gaps. In fact, pretty much all of everyday life falls into this gap (despite bluster to the contrary), due to the consciousness issue.

EDIT: your mileage may vary... ;-)

"Are intentions really acting at a distance in the present, or are they actually leading us to collapse wave functions at a future scene of confirmation."

I like the idea of "scenes of confirmation"! It relates a little to how I think of my perceptual field right now as the only "definite fact". This leads to a couple of ideas:

• Reality builds up and stabilises by Observation Accumulation. Each observed "fact" further defines the world.
• It follows that there is only one law and that is The Law of Coherence.
• New spontaneous observations are always consistent with previous observations.
• The apparent world is always coherent - which is to say that the current fact and the previously active facts will "make sense" as a single pattern.
• If one could force a new observation which defines a new fact, then the world-pattern would in effect be shifted to a new state. All subsequent observations would be consistent with that new state. This would be independent of time.

This last point means that we can selectively define or perhaps even re-define the world, budging it from its previous trajectory. "PK and psychic healing" would be just such "intervention events" where we assert new facts into the world.

If even one glitch report is true, there is something going on here that we don't yet understand.

Agreed. I say... no mechanism (as in it isn't made from "parts" and so can't be observed) and we'll never be able to describe it as a structured model, because we won't be able to bridge the gap between "inner" process and "external" result. The reason for that is that, from a subjective perspective, there is only inner processes. All experience occurs in the mind. It is that overlap, that sharing of the same space, which is the key to it. The "way it works" will be dependent upon the "mind-formatting" of the subject, which is to say the metaphor that they are adopting at the time. The only way to tackle it would be to have a model of consciousness. However, I don't believe that to be possible - since it's "that which experience is made from". It's the material of both inner and outer. It can become parts but it is not itself partitioned or located. The so-called mechanism behind ESP/PK/Healing will turn out to be, in effect, acts of directed imagination but, importantly, acts directed into the same mental space as our experience of the world, rather than the parallel space where we "think about" things.

Or pray about things, perhaps.

Yeah, indeed. That's basically imagining it, right? If you pay attention to what you're actually doing when praying. When you pray for something, you're bringing to mind that - or imagining-that - some sort of entity is making something happen. Meanwhile, if you are "using your mind-powers", you're imagining-that "you" are making something happen. It might be easier to commit fully to one or the other, depending on your beliefs.

Probably. Though it is easier to say to someone that "I am praying for your health" than "I am imagining that I am making a positive contribution for your health," At least for me, anyway. :D Though of course I know what it is that I am doing.

Haha! "Hey, I'm imagining that I'm contributing to your wellbeing!". "Um, well thanks darling, but why don't you maybe actually do it? Thanks." :)

POST: [THEORY] How would you know if you switched dimensions?

Well, surely "Jumping Dimensions" is just a metaphor for describing discontinuous change in one part of your experience relative to another part? Basically, that your personal-sensory-experience doesn't match your personal-memory-experience. You can theorise about whether the world changed, you jumped worlds, or your memory changed - but all of those are basically fictional concepts in any case.

• There is no "world" other than your experiencing of it.
• There is no "memory" other than your experiencing of it.

Both are experiences that you have now. When they stop matching up, you could call it "switching dimensions", but really that's just an explanatory fiction. Nobody has ever seen a "dimension".

Q1: A dimension isn't a place you go. It's a mathematical index used to parameterize a particle.

To be fair, I think that in this case "dimension" is meant in the sense of a location in a configuration space, where each position would correspond to a particular "world-state" - or a variation on the more colloquial use of "dimension", meaning a "realm" which is in such a state.

Q2: I'm not trying to be cute. I'm simply using physics terminology accurately instead of throwing sci fi terms around.

Don't be so tedious: "dimension" is a word with many uses, generally meaning something like "measured aspect", and predates modern physics and mathematics. Like "theory", it has a specific use in certain subject areas, which is narrower than its general use. This ill-informed pedantry causes lots of problems besides simply annoying people. For instance, it leads to the mistaken idea that the "time and space" of physical theories are directly equivalent to the "time and space" of subjective experience. It's usually folks who have smug "science enthusiasm" but have never read any of the corresponding philosophy or metaphysics who make these errors, though.

I see the utility in philosophy, unlike many of my fellow physics people.

Glad to hear it! :-)

I really think that without being conscious of the philosophy implicit in our theories (and there always is one), we are doomed to be in effect ignorant philosophers. (I'm with the other George on this.) In particular, it can lead us to confuse "conceptual coherence" - the self-consistency of a framework - with the "truth" of a situation.

There is no difference between the subjective time and space and the time and space manifolds.

I heartily disagree. I've never experienced a spatial dimension, although I have inferred one from a measurement. And I have definitely never experienced a temporal dimension. I have however experienced thinking-about those things during an experience.

A dimension in physics is a well established thing.

For sure - well, actually it has many different context-dependent meanings - but it's pretty obvious that here it is meant more in the sense of "realm" or "world" rather than geometric dimensionality, right?

Although I'd certainly agree that if terminology is used to imply a connection to physics incorrectly, it should be pointed out (e.g. everything being a "quantum" this or that), the reverse - the restriction of certain words simply because they are also used, more narrowly, in the sciences - is just as dubious a trend.

I favour the term 'world-line'. It's a bit vague, but in terms of conveying the concept of moving from one universe to another, I think it's conceptually appropriate.

"World-line", okay similar.

Elsewhere, I've been using "world-pattern". This consists of the now pattern which includes the bright unfolding shapes of present sensory experience, plus the dimmed shapes that we call "the past" and "the future", and the shapes we call "thought" and so on. All as part of one single interconnected pattern. (There is nothing outside of this pattern; the formattings we call "time" and "space" are patterns within this.)

The only rule of the world-pattern is:

• The world-pattern is always self-consistent, since it is a single coherent pattern. The world always "makes sense" overall.

If a change is made to the world-pattern, this rule means that:

• All subsequent observations will be consistent with the new state of the world-pattern.
• Changing one part of the world-pattern may "tug" upon other parts. If one fact is changed, other apparently unrelated facts may change. This includes the apparent past (which is just a present part of the world-pattern).
• The only evidence of a state change may be the personal memory of the observer.

What we call "changing dimensions" is really changing this "world-pattern" such that knock-on effects are observed. This results in an experience that feels like we have shifted to another world with different facts and a different history.

The fact that you move in 3-space and have a temporal displacement in time and can observe increasing entropy in various systems means you're moving forward in time.

That's rather begging the question, isn't it? Those concepts are certainly useful for creating a description of particular measurements within experience, but they are not the experience themselves, or "the nature of things". In particular, it's not at all clear in what sense I am located in time or how I can move forward in it. Note, I'm not saying there's no value in self-consistent descriptive frameworks (they're incredibly useful), however you can't claim truth by promoting one part of the framework by referring to another. In other words, no description is fundamental; the world is not "made from" spatial dimension and time. (I'm getting Kantian here.) So to restrict our descriptions and language to a certain set of concepts, albeit useful in certain contexts, is an error.

This entire thread is precipitated upon the (false) idea that you can travel between dimensions.

In what way is it false?

Only if you restrict the word "dimension" to its narrow use of (x,y,z,t,etc) rather than its other meanings. Which is akin to dismissing all uses of the word "colour" unless they refer to the (R,G,B) gamut.

Why is that not a cause to use terminology correctly?

Because it's wouldn't be correct use of the terminology; we're not talking physics or mathematics here. I think I said this elsewhere, but it's not using "dimension" in the sense of length, breadth, height, time. It's using it in the accepted sense of "world" or "realm" or "reality" or "another dimension" (literature sense), although it could be formulated metaphorically as a configuration space in another descriptive scheme. I mean: you understand what is meant, right?

POST: [THEORY] Shared Fading Reality Theory for Mandela Effect - Not Quantum Shift

I like the phrasing of "fading" reality. But then I'm biased, because I love the "world as memory" and "experience as associative recall" way of thinking about these things!

So something like:

• The facts-of-the-world aren't inherently stable because they are not bound to some solid substrate.
• They are perhaps (in effect) shifted by the behaviour of people, by what their behaviour implies is true.
• Previous facts-of-the-world can be forgotten through neglect, and replaced by new assertions or assumptions.

The extra rule is: The world-state must always be self-consistent, so if a fact drifts then from that point on all future experiences will be consistent with that new state. Only personal memories may remain.

POST: Am I the only one who has had a dream about something that happened in the near future afterwards?

Ian Wilson's little (free) book on his research is worth a peek: The Theory of Precognitive Dreams [http://www.youaredreaming.org/assets/pdf/Theory_Of_Precognitive_Dreams.pdf]. He also has made a few posts here and over at /r/dreams under /u/Ian_a_wilson.

/u/Ian_a_wilson: Thanks TriumphantGeorge, I did an AMA recently in /r/dreams on this topic.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Dreams/comments/3e82bm/my_name_is_ian_a_wilson_dream_explorer_and_this/]
Lots of posters who have the experiences commenting in the thread.

Really enjoyed your AMA and also the discussion in the other post. It's great to see conversations which are about exploring a topic and presenting ideas as clearly as possible, rather than winning an argument. Although you partially cover this, I wonder if you could give me a snappy summary of your view on one question:

• What do you see as the relationship between these three aspects of our experience: waking experience, dreaming experience, and thoughts?

/u/Ian_a_wilson: Our waking experiences and dream experiences are parts of a much larger reality system and precognition reveals that there is a dualism between the dream expeirence and the waking expeirence where the waking experience itself is a type of dream world in the literal sense of the word but has a more complex rule-set so to speak to ensure it behaves how we all experience it. But a dream none-the-less. Thought is more than just our inner monologue that we have when awake and ties into how we think relative to content. For example day dreaming is a different way to think. Dreaming is another form of thinking. Thought is capable of programming a reality interface by which we interact with. A dream is an example of what this interface looks like, and how thought describes the dream content much like how computer code would describe a 3D simulated game world. It is all part of language and communication between our individualized waking self and a unified field or collective which embodies the whole reality system et al. It is through this mechanism of organized thoughts forming communication and shaping dream experiences that we see a creative process where we are contributing not only to our dream content but our waking experiences albiet unconsciously for the most part.

Yes, I agree with the idea of different types of thought. When talking of it being a programming mechanism, I'm not too sure. I think it's perhaps more direct than that (although it's perhaps nitpicking with metaphor to say so). But it's definitely the way to go. The niggle I had was: why should the waking world be considered special?

So, following some experiments with synchronicity and more dramatic types of change, I've been playing with the view that all experiences are thought/imagination, and all that's special about waking life is that it's a very stable 3D-immersive thought. Other thoughts tend to be localised in mental space and transitional; waking life is a thought that has become stabilised and fills up our mental space, it localises us and the scene surrounds us. It has become a thought "about" being-a-person-in-a-particular-world - which really means it "is" being-a-person-in-a-particular-world. (When we experiment with direct-entry lucid dreaming, that process of the 2D-thought "snapping into place" as an immersive environment seems to have the same quality?)

This would mean that we don't have to talk about communication between things, between me and the world through some sort of conduit or mechanism. To create a thought "about" the world is to interact directly with the world. And any other thoughts belong to their own little world-spaces, although some of those worlds we create might be very small indeed. So we'd have that passing thoughts are simply aspects of the current state of the world flickering by; whereas intended thought is an amendment of that state.

This would imply that all time exists at once for any particular world as a sort of "world-pattern". If I change nothing, a particular future is already existing, and my "world-thought" will unfold spontaneously towards that. If I change something by intending change now, or intending change in the future, then I shift the whole world accordingly. Hence being able to have precognitive dreams (really: directly accessing that part of the "world-pattern") and updating them (really: directly updating the "world-pattern"). This also means that the passage of time belongs to the experiencer, not the world.

The main issue we end up with - in my view definitely, in your view implicitly - regards the dreamer-thinker themselves. If the world is a dream, then nothing we experience in the dream can be the dreamer or the mechanism of dreaming (if indeed there need be a mechanism). For instance, we might dream that we have brains, but those dream-brains can't be what we actually are. So how are we to view ourselves?

/u/Ian_a_wilson: I take the programming mechanism as a metaphor as the role of information processing (thinking) seems similar to how computers process and simulate Cartesian 3D geometry. It's all part of our thought process however which invokes our ability to dream, and the end result of what those dreams are. As you say, the Waking world is an immersed stable 3D thought. Much more organized and constrained to have consistency, chronological order and almost "genre" specific in how it delivers experiences to the participants. The Lucid Dream which acts like another interface to other reality experiences simply extends us into more creative patterns of experiences. I always view that the experience is real, however the content may not be objective or relative to the waking world. Still relative to the subject having the dream. I agree that as information past/present/future already exist much like how the World of Warcraft exists as information. In our system, there are those tangents of probability which if left alone we course through on auto-pilot but once we engage them and spike change in the probability those qualities cause new probabilities to emerge in the time-line trajectories. Hence as you say the precognitive experiences emerge and we can interface with that information through lucid dreaming and invoke change at run-time. I agree with the updating the world pattern. The world is information, the datastream of thought we interact with and render is what gives us our experience with that information. We are not the body, nor the brain. They are merely interfaces enabling the feedback and rendering of the datastream describing content. We are much much more than these "rendered" artefacts of organized information patterns. It's a good question on how to view our self as we inherit the personality and avatar of a human in the human experience but what we really are is that and more. What is our true self in this? It's astronomical like an awareness fractal branching out into a multi-dimensional informational dataset defining itself through the dreams it has. Lot's of great points and thoughts as always.

I like the notion of a "genre-specific" strand of thought!

So, I think my problem with the metaphor is that it implies that the world needs to be "run" or "processed" or "rendered" by some mechanism, and I don't find evidence for that to be true in experience. Strictly speaking, we can't say that the brain or body do this, since these are things within our experience. For instance, our experience might be "as if" we have eyes that are the source of vision and colour, but that does not mean eyes are the source of vision and colour - see dreams. The same argument applies to brains. How to avoid a potential misstep, remain true to direct experience, and have some sort of sense of the "true self"? Your "awareness branching out into a multi-dimensional informational dataset" is a nice image that points the way.

I would avoid the need for mechanism by introducing a nondualist angle. If what we are is an "open awareness" and the world is a static information set of "all possible experiences" which are already dissolved into that awareness, then we simplify things:

Ongoing experience is like us shifting our shape to reveal individual moments, like an origami paper game [https://dreamalittlebigger.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/fortuneteller-animation-dre.gif], or an evolving filter which lets different patterns become more prevalent, like constellations brightening [https://64.media.tumblr.com/5619757016199f1a1afb9c40ab366f6a/tumblr_npuk11cUST1tqp1d2o1_500.gif]. In both cases, the information set and the awareness are one thing, and the "selection mechanism" is a self-evolving emphasis rather than a processing event.

/u/Ian_a_wilson: The mechanism that renders is consciousness, not a computer. This is why any time we become self-aware and self-realized be it when "physically" awake or lucid in a dream (even non-lucid) we have a reality experience. It is consciousness, and I know how ambiguous that sounds which acts as the rendering farm of information. We are literally software emulating hardware when it comes to physical reality and how this information system bound to our awareness manages experience patterns. It's all self, and the thoughts it generates which yield a myriad of experiences and I do believe it has been evolving this way beyond our concepts of space/time rather in what could very well be absolutism.

I think we're on the same page. Are you essentially saying (as I would) something like:

• All there is, is consciousness, and consciousness "takes on the shape of" both information and the transformation of information into sensory experience.

My feeling is that space and time arise-with our experiences, they are part of our sensory moments or strands of immersive thought. The world-pattern itself is static, flat, eternal but updatable, consisting of a superposition of "dimensionless facts", moments, other organising concepts. Patterns overlaid upon patterns like moire fringes. Since this leaves us with the notion that we can directly edit the "facts" of the world-pattern (via your precognitive dreams or perhaps simply though targeted imagination of other sorts), we are left to ask:

• Is the world-pattern I'm editing shared, or do we have our own copies, or some mix of the two?

(Where the "me" in that statement means the conscious perspective or agent I am, rather than the particular body sensation or whatever.)

/u/Ian_a_wilson: My view of consciousness is that it's an attribute of the "self" or the being through which becomes self-aware through consciousness. That all there is, is the Self, and through consciousness it becomes self-realized. However all the creation and transformation of information into sensory forms is how consciousness plays a role in providing the feedback to the self. Answering if Reality is shared or not could invoke some sense of Solipsism as I do "believe" the following currently until disproved: At the root of all reality we find the self which has partitioned into many subjective and individualized awareness nodes. We look at our subjective individuality as an awareness node as being separate however we are in fact one unified awareness field so the pattern you are editing is shared with other parts of this unified universal self of which all of us are parts of. However if we move from the part having the experience to the whole we'll find our individualism is like an atom to a molecule, and a cell to a body. All parts of a larger whole. So is it shared? Yes but with whom? Other parts of yourself in the grand unified field. Where we are all interconnected and literally one cosmic self (hence the Solipsism when addressing the whole)... individualism when addressing it's parts. Does that mean you have to experience what all the other individualized parts are going through, no... but you do retain a thread of experience and personality that defines your role in the ongoing creative process. What we do affects other parts of this whole self. It's all interconnected.

Ah, so probably some definitions are in order, although the overall picture is similar I think. "Consciousness" is a tricky word. I've played with calling it "awareness" and so on, but there's not really a winning term. One thing I'm never quite decided on is the "creation" aspect; I'm increasingly inclined towards an "eternal" view which means creation must already be complete, it's just a shifting of attention. This has implications for the description.

Anyway - added headings to break it up a bit - apologies for length.

Consciousness As Material

I define "consciousness" as "the non-material material whose only property is being-aware". So it's the "stuff" and it is the "true self", before anything has arisen. And through taking on the shape of experience, it knows its-self (becomes conscious-of content and self-conscious if it views a part of that content as itself). You can imagine this as a blanket of material which has the property of awareness. Laid flat, it simply "is". When it ripples and folds itself then it can experience itself relative to itself. However, importantly:

• The blanket itself has no properties of "space" and "time", although those are things the blanket can shape itself into.

This image has a couple of implications:

• In this way, no experience or content is ever "the true nature" of things. There is The Truth which never changes and that is simply "being"; and there are the relative truths of the patterns which emerge in consciousness/awareness.
• All patterns and facts are dissolved into the entirety of the material, of consciousness - in much the same way as if you put blue dye into water, "blue" is everywhere and all at once. (See also David Bohm's ink droplet analogy.) These are available everywhere, all at once.
• There are no multiple consciousnesses; it is uncountable. There is simply "consciousness". This means that the idea of solipsism and individual consciousness experiences are both meaningless. It is in fact impossible to talk about the way in which "multiple" consciousness experiences exist. This is because time and space are aspects of the experience, and do not exist outside of that. There is no "space between"experiences, and there is no "time interval" between them.

In order to think about a concept, we have to divide things into parts then arrange them in mental space, because thinking is basically a "shadow-sensory" experience. The underlying reality is before such things. So here we must simply not speak.

The World-Sharing Model

However, we're not completely stuck. Personal experimentation tends to reveal aspects of both a "private view" model and a "shared world" model. I think they can be reconciled for the the purpose of daily life as follows:

• The world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". It is not a shared environment. Time and space are aspects of experiencing, not of the world.
• What the world is, is a coherent collection of all possible patterns that can be experienced. These are available everywhere-simulataneously, dissolved into the conscious space you are experiencing now.
• The world, then, is a shared resource, a toy box of patterns, rather than a "place".

So everything is the most deeply interconnected it could possibly be: there is no separation at all except as an experience. The experience you have now is that of being The Entirety, having a particular experience.

God Of The Private View

This means we end up saying stuff like: You are God of the entire universe, a private universe that you own, and it is directly under your control, to be directed and edited as you please. However, this is also true of everybody else in a "parallel-simultaneous" fashion. So probably the same description as yours, just reworded in other terms. I think the insight into the way that multiple selves are not related in time and space (or that it is meaningless to discuss it in those terms) is important though; it allows "private views" without solipsism.

The next question:

• If I am the entirety of my current experience, in what sense can I "do" anything?

Because surely any "doing" is just another experience; my actions can have no causal power. Do I not instead have to "become" the desired state, by shifting my shape? Do I need to go through the "have a dream and update it" precog process necessarily when I make amendments, if really the whole world-pattern is here right now?

Can I perhaps simply "recall" my desired state into experience, like recalling memory from the "memory-block" of all patterns dissolved into the background of consciousness?

POST: I think that I hopped dimensions and it unsettles me.

[POST]

So I'm going to contribute something to the whole "Berenst#in Bears" thing.
Okay, so a year ago my sister showed me this article. It distinctly said, "You remember them as the Berenstain Bears. But get ready for this, because they were never Berenstain at all. They were Berenstein." Naturally, we both had a good flip out moment, saying how it was weird that both of us had grown up with it being "stain". I even looked it up on Google, remembering the results spelling the creators names as "Stan and Jan Berenstein." But soon enough, we let it go. Y'know, we were wrong. It was the end of that and we moved on. Fast forward to about two weeks ago, me having long forgotten about the incident. Someone in my group chat on skype posted a link to an article, very similar to the article me and my sister had read just a year before. But something was off.
"You may remember them as the Berenstein Bears, but you'll find your mind blown when you realize that they are in fact the Berestain Bears."
...Okay, so this was mega weird. I started freaking out. I knew in my mind, distinctly, that everything was spelled "stein," when everybody was swearing that it was "stain". I know, all my life, it was stain. There was never stein, until I looked on Google that day before.
I called my sister up, and asked her if she remembered the article. Everyone was swearing it was "stein", and here I was, the only person remembering it as "stain". But my sister had agreed with me when we had talked about it before. She had agreed that "stein" was just plain weird.
But things get freaky, because when I called her to be reassured that I wasn't crazy, she came out to me with, "You're remembering wrong. We both said that it was Stein, and that Stain was wrong."
Naturally I would just assume that I was in fact remembering it wrong, but then she mentioned that we had asked mom and dad about it at the time, too.
I don't remember my dad being in that conversation. Dad had been asleep, because it was pretty late and he had gone to bed already. We had only asked my mom, who had been sitting in the recliner catching up on her show.
But no, he was there, according to my sister. Mom had been on the couch, and he had been in the recliner, and it was the afternoon when this had taken place.
...I don't remember it like my sister did. And I know that, in all my life, "stain" was right. I would have never agreed that it was "stein". And looking on Google now, of course it says Berenstain.
I really wish I had taken a screen cap back then--anything to have some kind of proof to this madness. But at the time, I just naturally assumed that I was wrong and had put it to rest, so I didn't feel the need to.
TLDR; In the Berenst#in Bears delema, I am a native from the A verse. I lived in the E verse for an undetermined amount of time, and somehow ended back up in the A verse. Me and my twin recall a certain memory regarding our reaction very differently.

[END OF POST]

There is indeed a sticky thread for "The Bears", but this post seems to be more about you and your sister having contrary experiences/memories than the actual B-topic.

Q1: Yeah, that's what I was going for...more about the fact that we remembered something totally different than the theory itself. (Although the theory IS mentioned to give a backing to my claims.)

If that's what happened, then what it suggests is: you are alone in your own trajectory, you are the only one with your particular past set of experiences.

...this comment here is just... profoundly disconcerting.

From one perspective, yes - although even in everyday terms you are confronted with something like this, that your knowledge and connection with other people is to a large extent just imaginary. However, if we get philosophical on this, there is a more hopeful approach perhaps.

If OP is alone on a trajectory throughout the parallel realities...

Well, it doesn't even need to be parallel realities as such - perhaps our lives are better thought of as filtering our way through an "infinite gloop" of potential experiences. Rather thinking of the world as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", what if we imagine the world as a vast collection of all possible experiences from all possible perspectives - an Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments? Instead of being "human" we become something like a conscious perspective, an experiencing space which simply "takes on the shape" of being-a-person-in-a-world. Now, initially that might make you feel very lonely indeed - until you contemplate what it means to be lonely. Loneliness is separation, it is division, it is identifying with being "here" and not being "over there". However, if the nature of our experiences are as I've just described, then there is no division. In effect, the entire world is sort of dissolved into the background right now along with the experiences of every other conscious perspective.

So on the one hand we are alone - only we will have this particular history or "trajectory across the grid". But on the other hand we are completely undivided from everyone else, and when we share experiences we share them on a much deeper, blended level than the usual "two people in a room" viewpoint.

...then can he be sure that he really 'knows', the people in his life?

The answer: He knows them absolutely intimately because if you follow this to its natural conclusion, the people he encounters are in a sense extended aspects of himself, as he is at that time. This of course would put quite a different slant on what it means to be alive. After this experience... more experiences?

Q1: Both of you bring up good points. I'll be honest, when my twin admitted to remembering everything differently, I felt pretty damn lonely. Like, 'this isn't the same twin I grew up with. This is an alternate version'. That may be far fetched to think, but I was counting on her validating my memory. So when she couldn't, and even explained an event that did not happen how I remembered it at all...it was pretty horrifying. I am 110% sure of how it went, and she is equally sure of how things happened on her end. It's just one of those memories that are so clear, I can recount the argument word-for-word.

I totally understand. But, say tomorrow you somehow remembered it the other way, the memories come flooding in, and you reply to this comment. Would you be telling me that you were now "not the OP you were yesterday"?

Surely not!

And in the same way, your sister is still the same sister, despite not apparently sharing the same past trajectory. The way I think of this is: we can view ourselves and other people as Extended Persons. Even if other people appear to change and have different experiences to us, that is still an aspect of the larger reality of that person. Part of the "set of possibilities" which constitute them. After all, I'm sure your sister's mood (and therefore apparent personality) varies quite a bit over time - and you don't declare that the different moods correspond to different people! So it is with this thing.

Q2: Bear with me (wink, wink, nod, nod)...but is it really possible for even one moment to be truly shared? No two people could possibly have the same exact experience-turned-memory because it is all processed through our individual filters. Any given two people would have different interpretations, even if it is just minutely. Looking at existence this way, we are all utterly alone without hope of a single truly shared experience.
And not to be a Debbie Downer, but I have enjoyed some truly life altering moments of connection and not one of them appears to have lasted in any meaningful way as a communion between me and the one with whom I was communing. In fact, quite the opposite appears to be true: the more astoundingly, earth shatter the connection (I'm talking about telepathy and a great, soulful Knowing spanning years), the bigger the heartbreak that has resulted. Despite having been exceedingly powerful and heartbreaking, those moments and experiences have left a lasting impression on me...albeit a less dreamy one than they started out to be. If we are allowing for the theory that all "things" are connected, for a belief in unity, a singular consciousness, then despite the fireworks display of wowza connections ending up being nothing more than a splashy let down, we can quietly embrace our wholeness and recognize that we are never alone...despite this worldly experience big banging us to pieces to try and convince us otherwise. This physical experience is all about the belief in separation. The Matrix is coded for this by Unity pretending to be duality. The best it can do is pretend to be a dreamlike hologram, where time is an illusion and all effects caused by every decision "each" of us makes, in all our many lifetimes, unfolds all at once, where sometimes, we perceive the glitch. Eventually, we will wake up to realize that we are the makers of The Matrix, the cause of the glitches and even the glitches themselves. Maybe then we will be able to sit back and laugh at our incredible ability to put on one hell of a good show... and will cry over how adept we are at torturing ourselves into believing that we are all alone. I'm right there with you. Have been feeling painfully alone for a good long while, even though I "know" otherwise. I always thought of Neo meaning new, but maybe it means Knew?

Nice little essay! Of course, perhaps I was just being nice when I wrote that last comment above. :-)

Perhaps the only relationship you can ever have, is with yourself, because (in a more general sense), that's all there is. The problem with a completely intimate, total connection is that, by its very nature, it involved the dissolution of the border, the end of separation, and therefore the end of relationship. All desire is the desire to "complete", fulfilment of desire is to be completely everything...

There's something I've found useful to (here it comes) bear in mind: after the dream... more dream. If you have an amazing experience, it is still just an experience. All there ever is, is "existing-being" and "the current experience" (which are not divided, but for the sake of communication in language we separate them here). Experiencing never ends. If you reach total fragmentation, the next moment will be a step towards unification. If you become totally undivided, the next moment will be a step towards separation. Understanding this is all that's required; one doesn't need to do anything with it. Realising that to try and get "beyond experience" is to attempt to get beyond being-ness itself, one gives up on that and immerses oneself in the shapes one has and can take on. "There is no spoon", said The One (who thought he) Knew. What he hopefully realises is that there are no things other than the experiencing of them.

Immanuel Kant said that time and space and objects were attributes of the mind rather than some external world. The world is more an "infinite gloop" which is turn into a "place" through ongoing distinction. As you suggest, this means that we can "pretend" something and live as if it were so, and it will seem to be so - because there is no "so" other than this. Keanu Reeves was an imaginary spoon in a dream of soup!

POST: Asked myself for an answer I couldn't have known, and received the correct one.

Good story! Did you know it and then say it, or did you simply find yourself saying it?

...Nice method - grab info from your memory of a later event, then use it so that it never happens! Hmm. You were literally stealing from your own future.

EDIT: Down vote? Ah, that was meant jokily, not seriously!

...

Q3: I think you lost an opportunity there, instead of future you thinking of a random number, you should of thought of the lottery number.

Q4: She doesn't have omniscience. She only has access to what her future self would look at. Theoretically, she could only produce a future lottery number if she set herself the task of looking them up for a particular date. You should read a guy from the 1920's named JW Dunne. He had a precognitive dream where a train jumped the tracks in a small Scottish village, killing 111 people. He was so disturbed that he wrote it down. Then two weeks later, while reading the newspaper, his jaw dropped as an article recounted a tragic train accident in the same small Scottish village with 111 people killed. The thing about precognition is: You don't have omniscience. You only have access to what your future self sees. How did Dunne realize this? Well, after a few weeks it was discovered that the actual number of dead was 113. In the first reports they'd miscounted. So Dunne didn't have an objective knowledge of the accident--just what the paper said. If the paper got it wrong, his precognitive vision would be wrong, too. It was then that he realized that he only knew about it because his future self read about it in the paper. To get the lottery numbers, you'd have to know that you'd be looking up the numbers in the future. I actually experimented with it and got 4 of the 6 Powerball numbers. (I've also won the Pick-4.)
See this guy here, who also did the same experiment--with similar results: [http://techno-anthropology.blogspot.com/2012/02/my-story-about-lucid-dreaming-and.html]
Footnote: It seems easier to breach space-time while asleep, because your mind is more at rest. Dunne theorized that "precognition," per se, is a misnomer. Because--according to physicists like Eddington and Einstein--time wasn't really linear (as we perceive it). Past, present and future are actually happened all at once. Your future self already exists. Your past self persists on another level. So, when you sleep, your mind relaxes and is able to pick up on a mix of past, present and future. In other words, it's capable of glimpsing a less-processed version of reality (as we see when we're awake).

Good on referencing Dunne there and good analysis. His work and others suggests some thoughts:

• A complete landscape of experiential moments pre-exists. Your present moment is your attention looking at one of those experiences, those moments.
• When in dream or otherwise loosened, our attention is more open and can see other parts of the landscape. (Really, it's all always there, it's just that the present moment is so much "brighter", like the daytime sun concealing the stars in the sky.)
• Precognition is therefore attention looking at other parts of the landscape.
• Extra bit 1: The landscape is not necessarily fixed. Actions in this-moment based on advance knowledge of that-moment can reshape it. For instance, acting on those lottery numbers will reformat the landscape accordingly. So precognition applies "if the current trajectory is not derailed by interference".
• Extra bit 2: Since precognitive dreaming involves "being in that future moment" to some extent, it opens the possibility of changing the event "in advance". Changing the landscape by altering that-moment rather than altering this-moment.
• Extra bit 3: This suggests that the whole "world-pattern" is always available, non-spatially and non-temporally, at all times. The entire facts-of-the-world are dissolved into the background of your conscious experience right now, and can potentially be accessed (and modified?) at any time.

Q4: The hard part (for me, at least) is becoming lucid when I dream. I utilize a technique I read about in some dream study. Basically, they discovered that your subconscious is like a film director in a movie. According to Alfred Hitchcock, "A director is like God. He is everywhere in a film, but never seen." Likewise, in this dream study, they discovered that everyone has a "director" who stages dreams; and that you can speak to "him". For instance, if you become lucid and say, "Director, can I have a harem of hot chicks," he'll actually produce them. Or: "Director, this scary monster is harassing me. Delete him." And he will. My first test came when I became briefly lucid and said, "Director, can I have the notepad in which I always write down the winning lottery numbers." And, to my astonishment, the pad appeared. My heart raced as I grabbed it and flipped it open. But, as any lucid dreamer will tell you, the adrenaline spike of excitement can wake you up instantly. And that's what happened to me. (While managing to get a few numbers, I was shunted out of the dream, before I could memorize the rest.) In the past year, I think I only became lucid 4 times. And to me that's the hardest part. Footnote: As to your other question, there's a physicist named Russell Targ, who was a founding-member of military remote viewing. (It started as a particle physics experiment at Standford Research Institute, and went out from there.) At any rate, after decades of study, they noted that remote viewing takes place on the left side of the brain. The right side (that you try to shut down) is bad because it controls imagination. And imagination is the last thing you want to use while remote viewing. So you try to shut down the right side (as much as possible) and only view with the left side. The problem? Numbers and letters typically reside on the right side. Making number and letter recognition tricky in remote viewing. Of all their viewers, only a guy named Pat Price could do it reliably. . . . Long story short: This is why it's exceedingly hard to do it with lottery numbers. Although one remote viewer [I think it's Joe McMoneagle] uses the Pick-Four as a graduation exercise for his classes in remote viewing. To graduate you have to win it. When I won the Pick-Four, by the way, I used an old remote viewing trick. I associated numbers with celebrity ages. That way I could view a face [rather than a number, which would require the right side of my brain to kick in]. This was a waking experiment [not a sleeping one]. I just lay in bed, closed my eyes and stared into the darkness, telling my subconscious to show me a celebrity. I saw nothing for a while, and then--from out of the inky blackness--came Linda Lavin from TV's "Alice". I wrote it down on my pad and went in for another try. I then got character actor Johnny Brown [who played the maintenance man Bookman from the old TV show "Good Times".) Freaked out that my subconscious complied, I looked them up on Internet Movie Database and discovered that they were both 76 years old. I was freaked out, because I knew nothing about these actors. The fact that my subconscious knew that they were both 76 fascinated me. At any rate, that's how I assigned the first two numbers for the Pick-Four: 76. I then went in for the next two numbers, using the same technique. . . . At the risk of rambling, yes: You can do it. It just requires patience and practice. I did it multiple times. And that's the thing that cracks me up. When skeptics parrot the Amazing Randi and say, "If psychics exist, why don't they win the lottery?" The answer is: They do. You just need to stop being lazy and read. Like 86 year-old Mary Wollens, who won the lottery twice--using numbers she got from dreams. Or Stanley Bobbit. Or Robert Prodnick. Etc. So far, I've found dozens of people who got the numbers from a dream. Here's one article on it: [http://www.mdlottery.com/dream-leads-novice-lottery-player-to-scratch-off-win/] By the way, I brought up physicist Russell Targ for a reason (beyond his work with remote viewing]. I was reading a book on his and he was talking about experiments in quantum mechanics which demonstrated that cause and effect doesn't just happen with the past affecting the present. It also happens with the future reaching back and affecting the present. I can't remember the experiment he cited, because I read it a number of years ago, but it fascinated me. Because it suggests that, yes, our future selves can reach back and help our present selves.

Excellent coverage. Coupla thoughts: On the lucid dream side, I'll pop in a recommendation for Robert Waggoner's Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, which is probably the best non-beginner book out there. Philosophy, experimentation, well written. And once lucid, the logic described in a post on persistent realms in Dream Views is the best way to create things: if you can't create directly, do something that implies its creation and then see it unfold subsequently...

Relevance?

This applies to everyday living and attempting to access information: create a situation or adopt a metaphor, such that what you want logically follows from that situation or metaphor. That's what "accessing your future self" is. In fact, that's what "the future" is: a self-fulfilling prophecy about the continuance of experience. "Time" is an idea - and ideas structure experience. Your experience operates on an "as if" basis. So in a dream, if you ask The Dream Director to do something (Waggoner calls this "the awareness behind the dream"), you are implying the existence of such an entity, and then have experiences "as if" that were true: perhaps a vocal response ("I shall make it so!"), then some polite company ("well, hello there!"). But all of it is you. Not the perspective "you", but the conscious environment "you". The "awareness behind the dream" is you, dreaming of a dream perspective, in a dream environment. Then in waking life, if you ask Thor or the christian God show you a sign, again you are implying the existence of such an entity, and you may have experiences "as if" that were true also...

Q5: By the way, by sheer coincidence Reddit had a link to one of the quantum experiments I was talking about (where the future affects the present just as much as the past does). The thread is entitled: "Scientists show future events decide what happens in the past - An experiment by Australian scientists has proven that what happens to particles in the past is only decided when they are observed and measured in the future. Until such time, reality is just an abstraction." [http://www.digitaljournal.com/science/experiment-shows-future-events-decide-what-happens-in-the-past/article/434829]

Yes, that's interesting. We discussed it a bit at /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix recently. See it and my playful ponderings [POST: [THEORY] Scientists able to make the present determine the past]. It's not really that the observation changes the past, it's that the past never "happened" as described anyway, except as a story in our imagination. The particle/wave is an observation, it is not a thing other than that. (Is one interpretation.)

...

[COMMENT]

Q1: Any tips for how someone might do this themselves? As an experiment I tried the following:

• Open this random number generator [https://www.random.org/].
• Decide that I will push the button soon, and understand that after I push the button, I will know what number it delivers.
• Empty my mind by focusing on the sounds in the environment around me.
• Think about my future self, and ask my future self what the number is.
• Press the button and compare to the number in my mind.
  Every time, I'm way off.

[END OF COMMENT]

Great idea! Experiment time. I can't try now but suggest: don't focus on the environment, put your attention towards "the space you are looking out from". In other words, reverse your attention.

Q2: I'm on my mobile, but there's that book by one of those army guys involved in the Stargate project, and he claims it's sort of like meditation, especially with sensory deprivation. That if you let your mind drift and focus on this thing, and start just writing or describing exactly what's going through your mind without censoring yourself, that that's how it worked for him when he was able to accurately see things.

without censoring yourself

That's a really good phrasing for it.

Q3: I call that a memory echo. To me, Its a type of memory echo in which you are accessing a very specific piece of information that you don't know yet, but can know. It requires a trigger. By approaching a subject that you know (past present or future) and seeking a response or more information "now", you can get the answer from yourself since you 'technically' already know it. In this situation, the trigger was your ex boyfriend. If it's anything like what I experience on whats basically a daily basis, it's like an overwhelming feeling, and a sudden clarity driving you directly to an answer that is extremely vivid. You can feel this connection with you body and awareness, but it ends as quickly as it started. Now, this particular kind of memory echo leaves me feeling... empty is the wrong word, but kinda like discovering a secret compartment in a box, taking a single object out, and then without warning the compartment closes even if you didn't want it to, but you still have the object. This leaves me very mixed emotion wise. I'm usually prone to experiencing a strong emotion directly afterwards, especially if there is an emotion related to whatever I am accessing. I recently did this in the reverse. Someone asked me directions in a city I don't live in, or explore, so I really don't know my way around and get lost often. I had actually just asked someone if the path i was taking was correct to get to my destination. Seeing this person, and trying to access the information that I didn't have, I had a very strong sensation take me, and my mind felt 'sharp' all of a sudden. I "felt" the information and just started talking. I gave exact directions, including street names. I've never even walked near these streets before, or even seen them in a map. There is literally no way I can find that that I could have known this internally. When I finished, the "sharp" feeling stopped. I knew I just told her how to get to where she was going, but even afterwards, I still can't remember the street names. She thanked me so much, and went on her way. Something of note is that it is a lot more common for me to experience a memory echo involving people or objects, rather than text. I've "felt" entire conversations before they happened. I can actually react to this knowledge... and have done so many times over the past 2 years. What may have happened with the directions, is that it felt like I was feeling the conversation, and the resulting consequences all simultaneously for an instant, and then had access to that for the time it took me to share the information, and then it closed. It's very important to believe it will work, for it to actually work. If you feel like it isn't going to work, it absolutely will not, as that means there is no trigger present.

An alternative interpretation of this, is that it's simply the case that we can "ask for experiences" and, if we do so with conviction and get out of the way for the resulting "movement", they will happen:

• Ask for "the experience of telling this woman the correct directions", the experience arises.
• Ask for "the experience of knowing this piece of information", the experience arises.

It doesn't matter how we frame it to ourselves (as looking into the future, reading the other person's mind, or having lived it before), the essential observable is: you have an experience. Any explanation for "what happened" that we come up with afterwards is just a made-up story we create in our imagination. In fact, it operates by the same rules: we seek a plausible-ish story, and we experience coming up with one, even "knowing" it if we sought certainty...

Hmm. "Ask and receive", eh?

This does of course mean there is no "solid, spatially-extended world" beyond your immediate sensory experience - just maybe a gloop of "dimensionless facts" which are accessible (and subject to change).

...

Also: The experience you had this time seemed to be different - your experience of "the conscious open space" - and be for the first time. That addition makes it seem more "special".

POST: It was never plugged in

[POST]

So today I just bought a new alarm clock and I wanted to test it out. So I have one outlet that I know of that is behind my bed with my old alarm clock (which doubles as a radio) and my phone charger. I have a lamp next to my bed that I always use before I go to bed or when I wake up in the night because the main light switch is on the other side of the room.
Anyway I decide I am going to find the outlet that the lamp is plugged into to use that one. Now I used that lamp last night and I know I used it for the past few months. I look down at the base of the lamp and I follow the cable. When I get to the end I find a dust covered cable with no outlet around it and it is just laying out on the floor. I mean the nearest outlet that isn't directly behind my bed is further then the cable would reach. Now I know I used that light but the amount of dust on it looks to be weeks worth like it hasn't been touched or moved. Something so little hasn't freaked me out this much in a long time.

[END OF POST]

Q1: This incident supports the notion in quantum physics that a potential state does not actually come into effect until it is observed. One hypothesis is that the act of observation projects our expectation onto any given phenomenon happening. In other words, at the quantum level, if we expect something to happen, then it will. If you extrapolate this to our world, there are millions of assumptions that we make about the nature of reality on a daily basis that are so ingrained that we don't even question them. What may have happened in this case is that your assumption that the lamp was plugged in was so strong, that you actually willed it into being. In other words, your expectation made it happen. Just a thought.

This is probably more of a philosophical argument than a scientific one (although the QBism interpretation does promote a sort of subjective view based on expectations). It's really the question: In what sense does an object "happen" if nobody is experiencing it? Or, does an object exist as an object when it is not being observed?

Which I guess leads to:

• Although our story about the light is that it comes from the lamp, and the lamp receives electricity from the socket, in what sense is this actually required for us to experience the light? If only the observation "happens"?
• Stories surely don't cause things to happen. So what does cause the light to happen?
• Also: Do stories "happen" in any sense other than when we are thinking about them?

Q2: I don't see how it's philosophical. In an objective reality, an effect observed at the quantum level should logically apply to all scales. Unless reality is subjective. To say that a physical property only applies to particles of which everything is comprised, but not to the amalgamation of said particles doesn't make sense.

My thinking behind that is - When it comes to experiments targeted at the quantum level, we have no insight as to the nature of the effect, only that we get results which correspond to those predicted by a mathematical theory. And without having a particular interpretation (one that can be confirmed by experiment) it's not really possible to logically scale it to other situations; there is literally no framework in which to think of it. However, we can still take on board the notion that our observations define the state of what is being observed - we just can't really talk about what is "happening" between observations. We have no theory for it and there's no way to test it scientifically. That's why I say it's more of a philosophical question.

Meanwhile - I'd say that "objective reality" is a pretty tricky concept here. When we start looking at things like the QBism (see link earlier) interpretation of quantum mechanics, it gets a little like philosophical idealism (all that exists is within mind). Rather than being a "place", the so-called objective world becomes more like a "resource", an infinite gloop of possible experiential patterns that our observations select from, thus "fixing" an aspect of our subjective world from that point onwards. (I think of this as Observation Accumulation, and the resulting persistence of prior observations as leading to a Law of Coherence.)

So we're dealing with a subjective reality (or "private copy") that is experienced, which corresponds to a subset of an objective reality (or "possibility space") which can never be experienced.

Again, since we're talking about an objective reality which by definition cannot be experienced other than by subjective observation, and therefore cannot even be thought about (since it is "before" the experience of time and space), I see it as philosophy rather than science. EDIT: Although at this level we are revealing them to be much the same thing: science = philosophy + observations.

TL;DR: We can't assume an objective reality that is of the same form as our subjective observations.

EDIT: Oops, that turned into a full manifesto. Perils of typing away in a small textbox while guzzling a caffeinated beverage. Added headings for clarity.

Logic Within Imagination

The best we can do is logically deduce the most likely reasons behind why things seem to be happening.

I think it's better to say, we deduce the most elegant description which fits in with the concepts we have developed so far - rather than being the "reason" or being "likely". This may seem pedantic, but it reminds us that we are creating connective fictions to link observations, rather than discovering "what really happens". Bearing this in mind makes it easier to remain detached and revise our models; it also keeps us mindful of the metaphorical nature of our explanations. We are dealing with "applied mental imagery" here, not reality.

Not VR. Not Probability. Not.

But the basic idea (which we haven't had the ability to comprehend until computers were invented) is that we are living in a 'virtual' reality.

This is slightly the problem, I'd say? It's the problem with our current attitude to theories in general - specifically, their reification into being their own "facts". We are not living in a "virtual reality". Nor are we living in a world governed by "probability waves". And so on. These are stories. It's not that we have been living in a virtual reality but we didn't have the ability to comprehend it until now. Rather, it's that until now we could not employ the metaphor of virtual realities when thinking about our world, because we didn't have computers and simulators. Basically, it's the modern version of universe-as-clockwork, or universe-as-geometry. (And no, the brain isn't a computer, either.)

Recent Minds, Closed Minds

I think the last 30 years of science has been the most impoverished and close-minded so far. Some of this was perhaps due to the funding crisis of the 1970s where to get finance it was very much required to "take a view" on things which were not actually verifiable (hence the rise of many-worlds and so on). This was okay, but coupled with the "gee-whiz" approach of popular science publications, scientists became more like technologists than practical philosophers, and a whole generation has grown up fighting about being right about reality, rather than being elegant about describing it. George Ellis recently made the point that "attempts to exempt speculative theories of the Universe from experimental verification undermine science", while Neils Bohr said: "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature." I tend to agree.

Fun Is Not Fact

None of this need be a problem necessarily, if we view our descriptions as useful or elegant or even just fun, rather than objectively true. (I'd put the simulation hypothesis and many-worlds in the "fun" category.) I think this is going to be particularly important as we are forced to discard the idea of a literal "objective world" and readmit the idea of "intersubjective agreement", something already happening in interpretations of quantum mechanics. Nitpicking? Perhaps it might seem so. But I see having the right mindset in place as essential to the healthy development of science, and even the freedom of the individual against the potential tyranny of the favoured theory of the day.

Note - this doesn't stop us enjoying playing with "the cool ideas" and seeing our lives through those lenses, but really: if you can't experience it with your senses, then it is imaginary, even though imagining such things does tend to feed back and "pattern" your experience, in a self-confirming loop of "rightitude".

TL;DR: We are not living in a virtual reality. But neither are we living in a world made of matter and energy. Supporting observations establish a particular description as being useful, not as being true.

Additional - This brief article on QM interpretations might be of interest. My own view is in line with the comments by users Romain and Anthony: "Until there is some experiment (or theory) that can distinguish between these interpretations, the question is one purely of taste, and not of scientific merit."

Your assertion that "we are not living in a virtual reality" is just as close-minded as anything else.

I mean it in a different way, though. I'm not saying that it's not a virtual reality and that it's something else. I'm saying that all content-based descriptions are "wrong" in the sense that they are relative, not fundamental. You might well be able to have experiences "as if" you are in a virtual reality, but those would be no more fundamental than having experience "as if" you were in a material world made from atoms. The fundamental truth is the nature of the experiencing itself, rather than the content of any experience or set of experiences.

Also there are subjective experiments that can be done in order to verify the true nature of reality.

Right, this is actually where I'm coming from with this...

In the end the way fundamental reality is percieved is different based upon which metaphors best make sense to us.

I certainly agree with that - although I'm wary of saying "perceived", because perception is content. I do think that most religions were attempts to present, in metaphor and parable form, the way in which the world works - no, is - on a fundamental level, beyond the specifics. Science has been more focused on the content, which is as it should be; science can't say anything about what Nature is, only what it does.

Most are just using different metaphors to describe the same thing. There is only one truth.

Agreed - a truth that can only be experienced, and cannot be put into words.

"Virtual reality" is just today's metaphor to say the same thing: that our sensory experience, now, does not correspond to how the world is actually "stored". It's like Berkeley's "mind of God", or Kant's "noumenal", or Blake's "bright sculptures of Los's Halls", or my own "Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments". Each is a metaphor for The Absolute, which is eternal and unchanging and contains all of creation. The same thing comes up in the Yogic view of consciousness (worth a read, that, for its accessible coverage of van der Leeuw and Taimni). If reality is a blanket of material, and the folds in it are our experiences (which includes thoughts) - then all these metaphors are folds which are trying to point to the material they are made from. We are the blanket, so no fold can ever encapsulate us. However, it might be able to symbolise the truth, but this symbol would only make sense as a pointer to a direct experience; it makes no relative sense.

Alternative metaphor: in a sandbox, you can only make sand-shapes which accurately represent, by duplication, other sand-shapes. You cannot make a sand-shape which accurately represents either the sandbox or sand itself.

POST: [META] Has anyone got visual evidence of their glitch story? Or have you come across a pass post with evidence supporting their glitch?

A glitch tends behave as if the world has suddenly shifted state. From that point onwards, all subsequent observations are consistent with the new state. All that remains of the previous state of the world, is the observer's own memories; there is no evidence in the world to corroborate them. (If the observer's memories had shifted state along with the rest of the world, then there would of course be no glitch.)

If you ponder it for a moment, you'll realise that even observations that are apparently "about" the past, actually arise in the present, from the current state of the world. So in a way, you could define a glitch as an incomplete shift in the world - where the whole world changes state but for some reason the observer's memory didn't, so "external" parts of experience and "internal" patterns of experience no longer correspond. This inherently means there will never be a physical record of a glitch. However, there might be a physical record of stories that were initially thought to be a glitch, and then later discovered to be something else (via that physical evidence).

POST: Potential Time Paradox

[POST]

So, just to begin, this haunts me- greatly. I am haunted by the current understanding that I could still be within this paradox and just not know it given the state of it. The experience is that of not knowing if you are coma-bound currently, and it's extremely horrid.
It all started when I was with my girlfriend at the time, I started to feel that time was passing excruciatingly slowly, comparable to that of having been set in a doctors room for so long you have no new stimulus to scan over and begin to scan over everything repeatedly for hour upon hour. These minutes felt like hours. I told her something was up, my visual snow, static of my vision, was showing very complex symmetric geometric shapes with each flash of the camera she took. I recall about 80 individual pictures being taken; flash and then no flash was the pattern. When I made note to her that time felt slow it slowly hit me that I was in a paradox... I stumbled on my own words, each time I let out the sound of the first syllable I halted myself knowing her response and went on to say the next first syllable, I was expressing each attempt with hand motions, body language, I appeared to twitch back and forth like a stereotypical robot... She got me to focus on her to say, "Everything is okay. It's all okay." I failed to believe this entirely and got up walking for the door, fear stricken remembering, "Where are you going?"
"Uh... To get water..."
"I'm coming with you."
"No it's okay." Fear swept over me knowing:
She grabbed my arm softly, "Come lay down, get some rest. We can talk about it." Walking back trying to explain the severity of the situation I stumbled on my own words, each time I let out the sound of the first syllable I halted myself knowing her response and went on to say the next first syllable, I was expressing each attempt with hand motions, body language, I appeared to twitch back and forth like a stereotypical robot... She got me to focus on her to say, "Everything is okay. It's all okay." I failed to believe this entirely...
"Everything is okay..." I said hopeful.
"It's all okay," she repeated.
"No... No!" and got up walking for the door.
Fear stricken remembering, "Where are you going?" "Uh... To get water..."
"I'm coming with you."
"No it's okay." Fear swept over me knowing:
She grabbed my arm softly, "Come lay down, get some rest. We can talk about it." Walking back trying to explain the severity of the situation I stumbled on my own words, each time I let out the sound of the first syllable I halted myself knowing her response and went on to say the next first syllable, I was expressing each attempt with hand motions, body language, I appeared to twitch back and forth like a stereotypical robot... She got me to focus on her to say, "Everything is okay. It's all okay." This slightly eased my worrying.
"Everything is okay," I repeated.
"It's all okay," she said.
"It's all okay," I repeated, calming down slightly.
"Better?"
"No... No!" I got up walking for the door.
Fear stricken remembering, "Where are you going?"
"Uh... To get water..."
"I'm coming with you."
I paused. "Okay." I opened the door and she followed, I remember the extreme feeling of relief that had swept over me as I had opened the door and time felt it wasn't flowing in slow motion.
As the story is very repetitive, I'll summarize by saying, I left the room got stuck in a loop outside of the room, reentered the room 3 times or so to get stuck in a larger loop, I even ran outside of the house just to get stuck in a loop of walking past the same cars repeatedly while only walking one lap, I remember walking directions I hadn't walked and what happened when I had walked certain directions. I got back, said the lines to a movie we watched that I had never seen before, word-for-word, which she said had never happened. We watched the movie when I realized that focusing on new stimulus and watching a digital clock halted the looping... Oh, and those pictures at the start of the story, she had only taken two and kept them all.
The following is how this effects me now, and not the story:
Presently it's all very stressful, and if I get paranoid enough I am in a loop symptoms start to show. The room I was in feels very unique, and lately I've become paranoid that I am still standing within the walls of that room simply dreaming this all. To explain, my current idea is that my brain was acting as fast as to imagine alternative timelines from within mere seconds or milliseconds, getting stuck in a loop, thus explaining the sense of time slowing down, as with boredom time seems to pass slower. I have escaped the looping thoughts and am doomed to continue on in my imagination not knowing what is real until I learn how to control it, escape, or achieve assurance I am free. My original idea was simply that I encountered too many dead-ends, remembering things that hadn't happened yet had caused me to do impossible things that caused me to loop backwards or this was sparked by similar means of my sensory not being delayed enough.
I'll try to go into further detail in comments if desired, as there is a lot more to it than this.
Delay in sensory: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2542583/Scientists-record-fastest-time-human-image-takes-just-13-milliseconds.html]
Slowing Sensory: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10697529/Prisoners-could-serve-1000-year-sentence-in-eight-hours.html]

[END OF POST]

Sounds a bit like temporal lobe epilepsy, in which people sometimes experience odd time loops and so on, and a different sense of 'reality'. Here are some excerpts from a related blog entry on Anthony Peake's site (Peake has a theory about reality based on anecdotes of this sort of thing, which I don't agree with, but it's still interesting to ponder):

EDIT: You can read about Anthony Peake's model inspired by TLE, here [http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/cheating-the-ferryman-a-new-paradigm-of-existence].

I have had Temporal Lobe Epilepsy since the age of 16 (I'm now 30). I underwent an operation back in November 2006 to have part of my left temporal lobe removed. I have been use in the past to a lot of things that where mentioned on your youtube video. For example when I have an petit-mal absence (which can last hours) I am literally taken over by some other part of me that has, in the past, shown knowledge and performed actions without my involvement. I also experienced exactly the same kind of time slowing down as you describe in your lecture happened to 'Margaret'. . . .
When I awoke from the operation my first words were not my own, something in me said to the doctor "What am I doing alive?". I have subsequently felt that something strange happened on that operating table. In one universe I died but in this one, and for some strange reason, I survived. . . .
I feel that the reality I see around me is an illusion - just like the Jim Carrey character discovers in the movie "The Truman Show". I had always felt this but it is even stronger since my operation. My deja vu sensations prove this to me. Last week I was watching the Everton game on TV with a group of friends. I had a weird deja vu like feeling and I told them that Everton would be beaten 2-0. It may have been coincidence (which I know it was not) but that was the correct score. . . .
feel as though I'm re-living life again but this time making the opposite decision to what I would of made in the previous life to see the outcome. All the time I keep changing the future for myself but another me follows the other path. The weird thing is I know that even if I committed suicide I would wake up again as if nothing had happened. . . .
-- Temporal Lobe Epilepsy , Deja Vu & The Daemon (Personal Experience)

Also, have you seen the "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker's TV series?

Q1: Thank you very much for that information. Now, oddly enough, I did feel a pressure in my brain, just within my Parietal Lobe, right hemisphere. It felt like an above moderate headache relatable to that of what I imagine having a tumor suddenly grow and apply pressure to the surrounding areas of that set location would feel like. I haven't seen either of those, sorry. However, if you are familiar with the time paradox set of episodes of The Meloncholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, it is highly relatable to that.

"On his first day of high school, Kyon meets an eccentric girl named Haruhi Suzumiya, who announces to the class that she is interested only in meeting aliens, time travelers, and espers."

She sounds like my kinda girl! Not familiar with that; sounds interesting. So, a common response to glitches here used be shouts of "seizure!" as the explanation, but in a way that's exactly what the experience you describe sounds like. I dunno, although I don't think much of Peake's theory, you might find the descriptions of experiences in his material of interest.

POST: From last week to today, work changed

If there is no physical evidence, and no one remembers either... chances are you had a very vivid dream.

Although that's also the very definition of glitch. The world shifts, all that remains is your memory. Tricky.

A glitch in the matrix is a jump or lapse in time....This one isn't really a glitch. If he had done the work and no one remembered, glitch. If someone said he did the work, but he didn't think he had yet, glitch. But someone thinking they did something they didn't do isn't a glitch.

It sounds like the guy had the full experience of it happening, and now no trace. Hmm. How do you differentiate between someone actually doing the work and the world discontinuously shifting, and them "thinking they did something they didn't do"?

The two examples you give would also be susceptible to a "dreamed it / memory problem" explanation, just in different ways?

My two examples have one verifiable aspect.

Do they? Verifiable how? In the first example he might have hallucinated/dreamed being asked to so the work, then did it. In the second example again he might just have a memory glitch where he forgot what he'd done last week. They differ from OP's example only in the extent. All three amount to: "Things aren't how I remember them to be."

Most glitches only experienced by one person can simply be attributed to memory lapse.

I'd disagree with this. We can't prove a memory lapse either, because we have no actual evidence for it. It's a non-explanation. I'd say that such glitches just can't be resolved. They are like micro Mandela Effects. We can always say "absence seizure!", but it doesn't really contribute anything.

Q1: Verifiable by ASKING colleagues and boss, as well as checking computer records. Was that not obvious to you? This particular story isn't a glitch. This is not like other stories. I know most everyone here wants to make every little thing out to be some crazy thing, but this particular story doesn't fit "glitch in the matrix". This "glitch" can be easily explained. By computer records, colleagues etc. He didn't enter some other realm here. Again, a glitch in the matrix DOES NOT simply mean "things aren't how I remembered them".

But asking colleagues and bosses doesn't verify anything in your examples.

Note - I'm not saying that OP's story means there is some sort of error in reality. His story is of the "apparently none of that happened now" type which you can't really investigate further. OP himself seems pretty convinced. Could be a minor brain twitch or anything though. Basically, we'll never know. But the same would be said of your examples:

• "If he had done the work and no one remembered, glitch.": So, the guy wakes up on Monday morning. He remembers being asked to do some work, exchanging emails, and doing the work. He goes into work and... He boots up the computer and all his project work is there. Great. He checks his emails but they aren't there. He talks to his boss and his boss knows nothing about the work. Explanation: He had a dream/hallucination sometime the previous week and imagined being asked to do the work and then did it. Not a glitch.
• "If someone said he did the work, but he didn't think he had yet, glitch": So, the guy wakes up on Monday morning. He remembers being asked to do some work, exchanging emails, but not getting around to doing it. He goes into work and... He boots up the computer and all his project work is there! What? He checks his emails and they're there. He talks to his boss and his boss is really pleased with the work he did. Explanation: He had a dream/hallucination sometime over the weekend and imagined being asked to do the work but then not getting around to it. False memory created. Not a glitch.

In all cases we're left with OP waking up on Monday with a set of memories in his head, then going into work and finding the situation doesn't match those memories. There is no evidence that could explain things at that point. Either the world shifted, or his mind shifted, or they are the same thing - it makes no difference. Define a glitch for me.

Both of your explanations ended with "not a glitch". I thought you were arguing on the "was a glitch" side?

No, I'm just pointing out that we can always explain these things away by saying it's a hallucination, false memory, and so on - but those aren't really explanations because there's no physical evidence for them either. (Unless OP goes and gets a scan or something, but that wouldn't show anything). Glitches, I'd say, are "everyday-mode experiences that OP can't account for" and that nobody here can offer a good explanation that can be backed up by evidence. It doesn't necessarily mean that "the objective broke", although from OP's perspective his reality has glitched. How would you define them?

As far as not contributing, it contributes a heck of a lot more than "wow man crazy glitch". Asking obvious questions to determine if it was a glitch is a contribution. This story has holes all through it that asking simple questions (if answered) proves it's not an actual glitch. Sorry to burst your bubble on this one.

Sorry, to be clear: I wasn't saying that you weren't contributing (the more ideas the better). I'm suggesting that when an explanation can't be linked to evidence, we might as well just leave things open. There was a while on this sub where every story had a response of the sort "absence seizure". Which is just the same as saying "glitch". Which is to say, it isn't an explanation at all, it's just a way of saying "don't know". It's fun to think stuff up though.

POST: I was wearing a different shirt when I left the house.

Autocomplete in action!

In your absent-minded, daydreaming, distracted moment in the office, you lost track of your world and half-imagined or filled-in the usual sensation of feeling a tag at the back of your neck. But of course that sensation couldn't be there if you were wearing the black t-shirt, from which you'd removed the tag. Now, for a coherent world, current experiences must be as consistent with previous experiences as possible, otherwise the world wouldn't make logical sense. Since the most recent "observations" of reality take precedence, your "fake" observation of a tag now became the foundation of all future observations. Logically, you couldn't now be wearing the black t-shirt if you were currently experiencing having a tag. So the world had to choose between the lesser of two evils: either the t-shirt changes, or the tag suddenly vanishes while you are actually feeling it, which would be more obvious and less plausible than "maybe being confused about your t-shirt". The world basically autocompleted your tag observation into the subsequent experience of the grey, tag-possessing t-shirt. From that point on, this became the new fact-of-the-world and everything afterwards would be in alignment with it.