TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 12)

POST: Impossible does happen."impossible" is a metaphor,why haven't redditors realized this by now?

Q1: Isn't it interesting that if you make impossible two sperate words, you get Im possible -I'm possible - I am possible. If you believe that the I in you creates the reality that is, then the impossible is always possible.
Just find that rather fascinating.

Q2: I hope you're not serious.

[QUOTE]

Equivocation:
Equivocation ("to call by the same name") is classified as an informal logical fallacy. It is the misleading use of a term with more than one meaning or sense (by glossing over which meaning is intended at a particular time). It generally occurs with polysemic words (words with multiple meanings).
It is often confused with amphiboly; the difference is that equivocation arises from an ambiguous definition of a word, while amphiboly refers to ambiguous sentence structure due to punctuation or syntax.

[END OF QUOTE]

Sounds great. How does that work though? How do I go about creating the 'reality that is'?

Q1: That's a great question. How, to me, is highly subjective. Much like reality itself. We see a lot of universal ascepts to reality that encompasses both you and I. Beyond the framework of reality itself comes the uniquely individual ascept that is you. Or me.
This you is the distinction that seperates our how's, if that makes sense. We are both apart of a larger reality in which our ways of living denote what is possible and equally impossible. I may never come into contact with a glitch that directly affects you, yet I would still believe that the glitch you experienced is equally possible for me -- that glitch is how you and I are related to reality, the framework which gives us both possible and impossible.
I tend to think in terms of duality and ultimately believe in a source from which dualism derives. Think of a river and as it flows, part of the stream gets seperated by a boulder and decides to traverse a different path and near the end finds its way back to the larger whole, that is the river. The entire time, while seperated, it was always still apart of the river, because that is its source from which it came. Reality acts the same way. Impossible and possible are the same, but both are distinct paths of reality and yet are still connected and derived from reality.
Reality is the collective sphere of both possible and impossible and what seems impossible to someone may in fact be possible to another and vice versa.
Hope that all makes sense. I'm not even sure I understood where I was going with that till the very end. So thanks for making me explain.
TL;DR:: How you create reality is how you define reality.

Interesting. Alternatively, we are both whirlpools in the same stream, temporary patterns made of the same water. Sure, if our attention is on the whirling, we seem separate, but if you reach down below... there is no separation.

Our own pools have their own structure: reality seems a certain way for each of us, but it actually we are experiencing our own being and structure. We can change shape in order to change this for ourselves; different people have different shapes, therefore possibilities.

The shape of the whirlpool that we are evolves and changes, which we experience as the passage of time. But really, no time passes, and there is no real existence of before-after, cause-effect, doer-done, except as trace memories in the structure of the pool - just like the wake of a ship is the "past" left by the ongoing "present" of the changing location of the ship itself.

TL;DR: Reality is our experience of ourselves. If we change ourselves, we change our possibilities.

I like it. And totally agree. Like an equation, whatever changes on one side, directly changes x or any unknown on the other! Though there are moments where x may equal itself, this is reality finding congruence with itself. Finding oneness throughout the formula.

Another component is that messages and changes travel without adherence to time or space...

If you have a glass of water and add more water to it, the water level doesn't end up higher at one side than the other; the water level as a whole rises. In this way, the 'height' of the water evolves all at once. So it is with the universe. 'Messages' apply to the whole, changes are available to everyone / become part of everyone.

All good fun. But, how to use practically?

POST: Missing Time

[POST]

I personally feel that missing time is very much NOT a Glitch. It is some thing else entirely but I go through it from time to time...
Colorado, about 2 years ago... Back story: Ever since I was a kid, I'd go outside every night and look at the Moon, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and the Constellation Orion. Of coarse not all are visible all year round and they are in the sky at different time. So when ever I go outside, depending on time and time of the year, I look at those that are present in the sky if its clear enough.
I went outside to have a cigarette at about 11:00pm. I walk out to my car, look up at the Moon, Jupiter, and Orion. I look down and my car door, open the door, and look back up at the sky. Jupiter and the Moon have completely set and only a portion of Orion is now visible! I go through the standard "Holy Shit! What the fuck!?" stage and just stand there completely disoriented and a little dizzy. (How long does it take to open a car door? 3 seconds? 5 seconds?) I bend down and crab my cigs off the seat and light one. Still completely disoriented and dizzy I say to myself "It happened again..." I smoke my cig and go back inside and it's 1:48am. Almost 3 hours are gone and they went by like it was just 3-5 seconds...
Stuff like this used to happen regularly, like multiple times per month from Feb 2008 to September 2011. I've taken showers that I could swear was only 10 minutes but 1.5 hours have gone by and my brother is passed out on the couch (which he never does). Once I was gone for an entire day. I went to bed one night at about 10pm and woke up at about 2am the next night so it was about 28 hours! And on that instance I had my brother ask me where the hell I've been. I sleep with my door cracked open so the AC can come in and my bed is visible from looking through the crack. He asked something to the tune of... "Where the hell have you been!? Your car was here the whole time but you've been gone! And when the hell did you get home!?" I answered "What the hell are you talking about? I just took a nap, it's 2am." He said "Ya you went to sleep WEDNESDAY NIGHT, it's FRIDAY MORNING! Where the f**k have you been!?" I replied "Oh shit..." When stuff like that happens, I tell him the same thing. Either "I don't know, but it's best not to ask.." or just "Don't ask!"

[END OF POST]

A combination of "absence seizure!" plus "reduced activity invisibility" [https://realityshifters.com/pages/yourstories110.html]:

I don't know if this is a reality shift but it is weird. My wife is invisible to me at times. It happens frequently. I'll go through the house looking for her then call out and she'll be right there sitting on the couch. She'll think I'm nuts that I didn't see her. I've already been in a room with friends and I'll be talking about her as if she wasn't there and people look at me like I'm nuts and then look at her and suddenly I see her sitting right there in front of me. I think she can relax her mind and go to a real quiet space. It's like she wants to be alone and undisturbed at times. It seems like people in general ignore her or act like she's not there.

POST: Glitches and Chaos Theory

The difficulty with all this is, if we can't directly experience it, then effectively we're still here, just imagining it. Branches and branching are just ways of thinking about possibilities in visual/diagram form and possibilities are themselves just imaginary, if we never experience other branches or the 'branching process'. We only ever experience what actually happens. In fact, we only experience this; what 'happened' is out of reach too. :-/

But it's fun to think about, and maybe in a 'non-material' all-at-once universe we can do something with it.

If we did jump time streams - not to escape death, just to jump to another possibility - what happens to the body we jump out of? Does it continue as a 'zombie' on automatic without our consciousness looking through its eyes? When you walk down the street today, look at the other people, and consider how many of them might be 'dead inside' with their 'viewport occupants' having jumped to nicer alternatives!

Other possibilities:

We each experience our own dream-world, with cross-dream interaction when things 'match'.
The universe 'takes everything into account' from the start. If we make a decision, it is re-factored in from the beginning across the whole timeline, all at once.

For the second option:

Imagine being on a particular hill (location and point in time) on a landscape built up from sedimentary layers (time passing). You make a decision that the hill over there should be a different shape. The landscape instantly alters from the lowest sedimentary layer upwards such that this is true. Both your present experience and evidence of the past match your request; you may or may not remember the request.

The whole landscape adjusts such that The universe as a whole is always self-consistent, with memories being consistent and so on, unless a person knowingly make a change, in which case they might retain old-vs-new memories.

I guess it depends on how significant our experiences really are. Are we as important as we think? Experiences only matter because we attach significance to them. I mean ... What makes something that happened 20 years ago any different from something that may happen in the distant future?
Well... The answer is that something 20 years ago may affect the future. But still, it's as distant (and probably as unknown) as something from the future. But still, the past and future are both intangible concepts. That's my point. Both are equal, but one is a speculation and the other is a foggy fact.
People say the future can't influence the present, but who knows if it can or not. We don't even know how things work. We don't even know what we are. Are the past and the future really that different? What's more "important?" Endless future probabilities or a past set in stone? As humans we like to attach value to everything. "This is real and this isn't." "This means something and this doesn't." Heh...
I guess all of us wonder if other people are even real. I like the idea that everyone is the same consciousness in the end. Every human soul is the universe expressing itself in a different form, tied together. When you think about it, it's quite logical... We're all made from the same stuff, driven by the same forces, experiencing similar desires with overlapping dreams. People feel the need to make a distinction and stress their individualism, for obvious reasons. But I bet there's a way for separate souls to communicate far beyond speech. Wouldn't it be odd if in the end we were all the same consciousness?

I like the same-consciousness idea: waves in the sea, whirlpools in the stream, all the same water, and so on. We place importance on our own experience because it's the only one we have directly really, but there's nothing necessarily stopping us 'reaching down' into the connecting, timeless water beneath the temporary pattern that constitutes ourselves.

For the past, present, future - well, if they're all part of the same thing (the universe, whatever), then the fact we experience moments in sequence is just that, our experience. Actually they all arose at the same instant, and you can imagine that they will be part of the same pattern. Past may not influence future may not influence past, but the whole pattern would be coherent or self-consistent, which would look the same as each taking account of the other.

Perhaps all that really matters is: is reality responsive to our intentions and desires? Does it listen, does it speak to us? If it is made of us and us of it (the whirlpool and the stream), then there is no boundary and our deepest intentions will surely be in line with everyone else's and the flow of the universe overall.

...

Q1: I would like to take a shot at answering your question. Assuming you die in your original timeline and switch what happens to the version of yourself that's already living in that time line?
Let's imagine consciousness as a river ever flowing. When it branches off in to different areas is it the same water is the water connected still? It's the same with consciousness and time. Time split somewhere down the river but it is still connected to the original stream.
If that is the case then when you die in this timeline then you "wake up in the other it's still you there was never a different consciousness. It was always the same one. There is no other version of you that was replaced it was you.
You are infinite in your "being", there are infinite numbers of you experiencing different things at the same time, but it is all being experienced by the same you the same consciousness.
I hope that makes as much since as it did in my head.
TL;DR: Nothing happen to the other version it was you all along.

Okay, I am 'infinite in my being', but I still seem to be looking through one particular "viewport". Are the other versions of me just 'zombies', acting automatically but without anything 'looking out' through their eyes? When I look around, how many of these other people are 'zombies' too? How can i tell the difference?

(I tried to explore this in a post a while back, with the idea of "extended persons" and "parallel experiences", but it's pretty hard to connect the parts persuasively into a coherent picture.)

I like to think of it like information sent over the internet. Take email for example, when you write it, it is whole. After you send that email it is broken down in to packets which then are sent but don't all take the same path. If one packet of information is intercepted in transit then you can read a small piece of information.
Think of these paths as time and the email as "You" when you began you were whole then time split and each line got a different packet of you with information as to "What/who" you are. Like the email when it gets to its destination it becomes whole again. If there are a finite number of time streams in which you exist then this would explain the N.E.D. people experience sometime.
Edit: Not zombies its just part of the packet experiencing one line of transit to the finial destination. Think of it as one packet of information in the email reaches its end point and jumps to the next packet in line until all packets have reached the end.

By 'zombies' I mean 'philosophical zombies', note.

Interesting idea. From a personal perspective though, there still only ever seems to be one 'me' in one 'place'. However, I guess this is similar to the conception of 'God' where God is all things, or the 'one thing', but fragmented into numerous viewpoints (waves in ocean analogy).

[QUOTE]

Philosophical zombie:
A philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, a philosophical zombie could be poked with a sharp object, and not feel any pain sensation, but yet, behave exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch" and recoil from the stimulus, or tell us that it is in intense pain).
The notion of a philosophical zombie is used mainly in thought experiments intended to support arguments (often called "zombie arguments") against forms of physicalism such as materialism, behaviorism and functionalism. Physicalism is the idea that all aspects of human nature can be explained by physical means: specifically, all aspects of human nature and perception can be explained from a neurobiological standpoint. Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, argue that since a zombie is defined as physiologically indistinguishable from human beings, even its logical possibility would be a sound refutation of physicalism. However, physicalists like Daniel Dennett counter that Chalmers's physiological zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible.

[END OF QUOTE]

I like that idea; waves in an ocean.

Yeah, it's a current favourite of mine.

If you ever feel appropriately motivated, I've just been reading this guy's (Bernardo Kastrup) new book on idealism (that everything is made from mind; there's no 'stuff' separating us). His main metaphor: we are like whirlpools in the water, made of the same stuff, connected, and yet individual too. Like the answer to the question: if we were in The Matrix, what would 'The Matrix' be made from'? Quite accessible, as these books go; check it out.

That and the cheesy story from the start of Illusions by Richard Bach about letting go:

"The Master answered and said "Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river... continued [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Bach#Illusions_:The_Adventures_of_a_Reluctant_Messiah.281977.29]"

Consciousness can't be created or destroyed because of conservation of energy. It's all linked to the source of consciousness and goes on somewhere else. Whether it be at the source once again or in a new life or reality depending upon what the consciousness has decided to do. Sort of like dying in WoW you can choose to restart or begin again or create a new character with better talents etc. That's what I think.

Respawn! Nice. I'm looking forward to that then. Only, if I am consciousness having a 'TriumphantGeorge' experience, when I die, I won't be 'me' anymore I suppose? My 'character' will be gone, as I think of it.

Q2: My take would be that there are not parallel worlds of all possibilities, but potential possibilities. That being said, we need to remember that time is not linear as we experience it. So, maybe if you wake up in another world, that world hasnt been fully actualized with you until you are in it. i am probably not making sense. I would say a tree does NOT make noise falling if no one is around to hear it

So, each of us is effectively having a 'personal dream-world' type experience?

Q2: In a basic sense, ya

So, time is linear as we remember it - because we only have one set of personal memories. If I 'jump worlds', really all that has happened is that there is a discontinuity: that my most recent memory and my current experience are at odds.

We might say that we 'branched off', but really we never see a branch, we just see that our present moment has changed quite a bit. We might think of there being a 'dead me or another me on the branch I left', but really that's just us imagining things - a way of explaining making choices to ourselves.

(It's more plausible that we're dealing with a shared dream where all choices have been taken into account...)

POST: I vaguely recall Verne Troyer dying a few years ago. I thought about it and realized it was Gary Coleman, even though i was pretty sure both did. Instead of saying i "switched universes" or some shit like that, I accepted that I probably remembered wrong. A lot of you need to do the same.

I always thought of this sub as a tongue-in-cheek way of presenting weird experiences. I didn't think people were actually taking the idea seriously that we are transferring between universes.

A lot of the "fun" of the thread is that it has a slightly jokey banter - hey check this weird experience and the responses. However, lots of people do seem to have real jumps that occur to them that go beyond this, and most people seem fairly sincere when they post.

"Seizure!" or forgetfulness or distraction or confusion is probably the usual explanation, but you can rarely prove this - and the real point is that the experience is personally meaningful in a way that seems beyond likelihood.

The main problem here is that there are too many trigger-happy submissions to this forum; the quality bar is becoming pretty low! Over at the your stories section of Reality Shifters, stories are added more slowly, and I'd say about a quarter of them are worth thinking further about. (i.e. Even if we assume no 'paranormal/parallel' aspect, there is something interesting going on, and there is enough detail that the usual explain-awayers can't be applied.) A much lower number applies here!

Q1: A lot of people on here actually believe their life has "glitched" at some point. For a large part yes most things are just major coincidences or brain fuck-ups but alternate reality theory (or whatever its called, multiverse) is actually something that people believe and its not that crazy. (I don't really, i just like the stories).

Q2: It's not that I find alternate realities crazy. I am at least familiar enough with quantum mechanics to understand the possibility to be quite within the realm of believability. I just doubt that transitions between them occur that easily or frequently.

Q1: I agree. But it could happen constantly and we'd never know. It's difficult to translate my thoughts to text especially on my phone.
I think we're on the same page though.

I think I get you.

You don't need quantum mechanics, you just need some form of idealism (the idea that what we perceive is fundamental, there is no secret 'solid stuff' hiding behind the scenes, there are no divisions of parts to the universe).

If there are jumps, then these are jumps of the whole universe, at once. If the jumps are self-consistent, then the memories post-jump will corresponds to the details of the post-jump universe - nobody will ever know. There will be no trace of the previous format of the universe, because where would that be stored and how could it be accessed? Could be happening all the time.

If someone were to discover how to cause a jump, they might retain the pre-memory - because they remember the action, the 'doing' - whereas everyone else would be re-aligned to the new version. Perhaps this is what 'magick' is. (And if we're all accidentally doing this, bringing the universe in line with what we want, then we'll all be getting incredible coincidences at least occasionally, not realising we're causing them.)

Q3: Why even come to this sub then? For a lot of people it's interesting to entertain the idea of possibilities like the ones presented on this sub, even if they don't fit into your understanding of reality. What is reality and who are you to define it, anyways? What are your credentials?
Instead, your statement comes off as condescending in a really narrow-minded and immature sort of way, like you're trying too hard to convince us (or probably yourself) how much you've got it all figured out. Why not just lighten up and enjoy the sub for what it is? I mean, did you really expect to find some sort of proof of deeper truths here or something?
Part of what makes things like this sub and the paranormal in general fun is having an imagination -- you might want to try it sometime.

Q2: You couldn't be more wrong. I just want people to think before they post because of the high percentage of shit on here lately. (I unsubscribed about a week ago actually). I love reading about actual strange/unexplainable things that happen to people. Not "i thought x was dead" or "i couldnt find my clothes, but then i found them righy where i left them!" Or just simple coincidences. Or computer glitches.

Super-agreed.

"I couldn't see my eyes, I looked for them all day, and when I eventually found them they were in the other mirror, not the one I last saw them in!"

POST: one way to get whatever i want

Thinking the opposite of something, with intensity, is the same as thinking of something. You can't actually think of an absence: you end up with the thing, plus some modifier like "not" beside it. The Matrix don't listen to no negative bits, it's all 1s no zeros. Agent Smith likes to toy with you, remember.

You might find this thread [POST: What was the most Epic Fail you ever had from a spell that actually worked?] and this thread [Dramatic Effects] interesting. You should post more examples!

POST: The day our two hour drive became a ten minute drive

[POST]

Hello everyone! Here's a weird driving glitch that happened to me and my husband back in 2005.
We were leaving Lubbock, Texas. Our drive home would take 2 hours. We'd driven this many, many times over many years. There are lots of small towns in between and just no way to make the drive any shorter.
We'd called the kids to say that we'd be home around 4:30 P.M. It was now around 2:15 P.M.
After we called the kids, we stopped at a cute little grocery store. We browsed every aisle and picked up some snacks for the road. We were completely content to take our time and enjoy the drive.
We also stopped at about the halfway point to fill up on gas because the prices were so much better than what we knew they were at home.
The drive itself was very peaceful. The day was beautiful and we were content to enjoy each other's company and the road trip and overall everything was very, very pleasant.
(side note: our vehicle was older back then and would show the radio station number when the radio was on. It would show the time if the radio was off. We had the radio on the whole time.)
I remember small chit-chat and eating some of the homemade beef jerky we'd picked up. Otherwise, the drive was uneventful and seemed typical with the usual amount of traffic.
As we pulled into the driveway, I switched the radio off to check the time.
It was 2:25 P.M.
I was very surprised, but also very sure that the car clock had messed up somehow. I asked my husband what time it was.
He looked at his watch, looked at me, looked at the car clock and then back at his watch.
He said it was 2:25 P.M.
We were both in shock, but told each other that somehow his watch and car clock had messed up at the same time.
We went in the house and checked the time. It was now 2:26 P.M.
The kids were surprised to see us so soon, but quickly brushed it off to 'parents being weird'.
My husband and I talked through the whole trip over and over.
We'd spent the day in Lubbock shopping. We'd stopped for lunch around 1 P.M. to miss the bulk of the lunch crowd. We'd headed home after lunch.
We KNEW it was 2:15 P.M. when we started the trip home. We KNEW the drive would take 2 hours. We KNEW we'd stopped TWICE along the way and should have gotten home very close to 4:30 P.M.
We've never come up with explanation.
EDIT: TL;DR: Drive should had taken 2 hours. Hubby and I called the kids to say we were on our way home. We got home 10 minutes later, much to everyone's surprise.

[END OF POST]

Q1: You read 12 as 02 twice. Happens.

Q2: Occam's Razor prevails.

I don't think that's quite how Occam's Razor works... it's to do with choosing between two models with equal explanatory power, and choosing the one with the smaller number of conceptual entities - it's not just "I can dismiss it as you made a mistake". Especially when, as most often is the case, it doesn't address the actual post, instead offering a little parallel story instead.

Which isn't to say it's some sort of time jump either, of course. But "brain went funny" or "saw things wrong" isn't an explanation either; it's a content-free retort.

You make a valid point, but others were leaning towards the possibility of a wormhole as the explanation for this glitch. I figured, since misreading the time is something that sometimes occurs for me, it must have been what happened in this story. Not the totally extraordinary possibility that OP can pseudo-timetravel.

Yeah, there's sometimes a tendency to see everything as falling into one camp or the other here. Either it is presumed that a story is an example of (say) time travel, or it is presumed that not accepting a handwaving reference to (say) "memory is fallible" is a vote for time travel.

The underlying assumptions are that: a) there exists an explanation, and: b) the post contains sufficient information to reach that explanation. Neither are necessarily true.

By the first one I mean that an "explanation" exists as a human construct, a narrative fiction, rather than something out there in the world - and it's not necessarily true that one can be formulated. And if it can't be "tested" - via thinking through the events in these cases - because there's insufficient detail, it's hard to see how it's an explanation at all. When the explanations offered amount to a naming and categorisation (such-and-such a cognitive bias, beyond its applicability), or a broad generalisation (memory is fallible, brains are glitchy), then they're essentially worthless.

So far as they remember from 10 years ago. Without the hard evidence of the receipt from the store, we really don't have anything to work with.

Okay, so the actual answer is surely: we don't know what happened, it's an open verdict? (Note: and by open verdict, I don't mean "keeping it open because it might still be time jump. I just mean we shouldn't confuse explaining away with having an actual explanation.)

Nope, its a pretty clear cut case of an anacdotal story from a false memory. We have multiple options for what happened that don't involve breaking physics, can't say which it is due to the 10 year time gap, but we can be confident it wasn't a time jump.

So... as I said, I wasn't suggesting it was a time jump. However, we can't say it's a false memory either (which has a specific meaning and context), if 'we're going to hold ourselves up to a high standard.

Of course, this depends on what we're after here. If we're trying to scientifically (in the proper sense of the term) "prove a glitch" - and if what we mean by "a glitch" is that the "laws of physics" were broken - then obviously we're going to be out of luck. Life is anecdotes, and the reports on this subreddit have already happened, usually in everyday life, and never in a controlled environment. The gas station receipt could have been explained away also, if it had been part of the original story, it would just have added another layer to our "confusion and coincidences" narrative.

POST: [META] John McAfee plays Russian Roulette

[POST]

I read this article in Wired a while back and since then I've been scratching my head over what it describes... specifically John McAfee's "Russian Roulette" demonstrations. Here's the article:
[http://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-john-mcafees-last-stand/]
Here are some choice quotes:
He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. “I can do this all day long,” he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. “I can do this a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong.”
...
“Let’s do this one more time,” he says, and puts it to his head. Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly, the cylinder rotates, the hammer comes down, and nothing happens. “It is a real gun. It has a real bullet in one chamber,” he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have somehow proven faulty. I’m missing something.
The same is true, he argues, with Carmelita. I’m not seeing the world as he sees it. He opens the door to the bungalow, aims the gun at the sand outside, and pulls the trigger. This time, a gunshot punctures the sound of the wind and waves. “You thought you were creating your reality,” he says. “You were not. I was.”
The way I see it, there are a few possibilities here:

The reporter is outright fabricating these events,
The reporter is exaggerating what happened,
John McAfee used some sort of trick to fool the reporter (maybe he secretly had the safety on?),
Quantum Suicide is real and we happen to live in the universe where John McAfee doesn't blow his brains out,
John McAfee is somehow "creating our reality." (???)
So... I put it to you, good citizens of /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix: what the fuck is going on?

[END OF POST]

John McAfee is somehow "creating our reality."

I quite like this as an interpretation (for fun), because it's reminiscent of a Philip K Dick story style, perhaps Eye in the Sky in particular. Are we in fact all living out our lives in the last few moments of the mind of John McAfee, in the aftermath of a virus scanner error which resulted in a devastating nuclear accident?

See also: Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven and the associated PBS film adaptation.

Maybe he read those too.

POST: A New Dimension of Thought

I'd be a bit cautious of the "computer software" metaphor when it comes to brains and (really what we're talking about) mind, but it's certainly good to indulge in a bit of introspection and to directly attend to experience. Specifically, noting the content and nature of our actual experiences as they arise, and deconstructing the descriptions we tend to use - which often don't correspond to the direct experience very well at all.

For instance, in what sense do you actually experience "your brain" at all? Do you even really experience "remembering" as such? What leads you to think that there are "programs" that are "running in the background"? The background of what, precisely? And when you are introspecting, where and what exactly is the "me" that is doing the observing?

All good fun.

POST: [deleted by user]

Hello! So, I think that what we often really mean by saying that the world is a "dream", is that it has no solid underlying substrate that can ever be experienced - which therefore means it effectively doesn't have one. Calling the world a "simulation" and so on, is really just a currently fashionable way of formulating that older idea, using modern metaphors of "information" and "programs". (And in common with other metaphors, a problem with the simulation metaphor is that it gives the sense that the world is being "run" as a process and is dynamic, in an objective way and dependent on something external. This arises because we assume that the 3D-spatio-temporal formatting of our experience is a property of the world itself. It's perhaps more accurate to say the world is being "explored", and it is logically static but perhaps modifiable.)

Similarly, when we say that we are a "soul", that's a way of trying to articulate the nature of our direct experience, which I'd suggest might be best described as an "open aware perceptual space" in which our experiences arise. If we pause a moment and attend to what we are actually experiencing right now, we can recognise this for ourselves: we discover that it is indeed like we are a "space" in which our bodily sensations float, fading in and out, with a visual image floating in front of us, and sounds floating here and there. There might be a particular "feeling" sensation which we tend to call "me" - typically a small spot somewhere behind the eyes - but that location is inside our overall perception, so it obviously cannot be us. It's just a reference point.

Note that this direct experience is different from how we think about ourselves, which is as "a body walking around in a 3D environment, with an associated personality" - a human inside a world. Our actual experience is of being "that which perceives", within which sensations and perceptions and thoughts arise - a world inside us.

Looping back around to dreams and glitches, then, a "glitch" becomes just a discontinuity in our ongoing experience. The idea that "the world" has shifted is something we infer from our own concepts about the world, via our parallel constructions in thought, just like any other explanation. The nature of experience itself, however, remains a complete mystery, in the sense that it can be known but it can never be understood. Our explanations place no restrictions on what can be experienced. Although we sometimes forget it, our descriptions are merely connective fictions which summarise the observations catalogued so far; they are in no way "what is really going on".

In other words:

Observations dictate the validity of models.
Models do not dictate the validity of observations.
No underlying substrate will ever be experienced.

Although there may be some overlap or feedback here between the models we adopt and the observations we are funnelled towards as a result.. This would have implications in terms of the stability of one's ongoing experience, and the potential to deliberately create a glitch?

...

Don't poke holes in the screen, it took an eternity to get those dimensions all lined up! I dunno, nothing specific on reading material - and it's just one take on it I've got obviously - but maybe George Berkeley's Three Dialogues for some retro thought-provoking stuff?

I do struggle a bit to recommend specific reading, since as is the way of these things, you come to your own view and everything else is "yes, but". And a lot of where you end up is a result of having lots of thoughtful conversations. Most of the reading that got me thinking was more philosophy/science stuff, plus models of memory and perception, mixed in with some more esoteric things. At the end though, you see all that stuff as metaphors, parallel constructions.

Okay, let's see...

The underlying thing, then, is about having a certain direct experience though. When I say "open aware perceptual space" I mean that you literally can experience yourself as that, if you pay attention. And having done so, the relationship between the nature of experience and the content of experience makes sense on a direct, intuitive level.

If you're looking for books which discuss and lead you through that, Rupert Spira's Presence I & II are probably about the best written descriptions. (Ignore the fluffy language on the covers, the actual content is pretty streamlined one you get past the introduction: see sample chapter.)

If you like a science starting point, then N David Mermin's What's bad about this habit essay is worth a read, as is his introduction to QBism.

Also on the science and philosophy front, I'd recommend Julian Barbour's The End of Time and David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Also, more in terms of the thinking about thinking, Paul Feyerabend's Against Method and Farewell to Reason are great but a bit dense - his unfinished Conquest of Abundance is more accessible and gives a flavour though. (And if that all sounds too grim, I still recommend his autobiography, Killing Time.)

...

A1: I believe this too. And we're not the only ones.
"To live is to sleep, to die is to awaken"
And,
My grandmother used to recite this rhyme:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

A2: It is not true, it is not true
That we come on this earth to live
We come only to sleep, only to dream
-old Aztec poem

POST: Question for those who have gone through near death experiences

[COMMENT]

I have had a near death experience. I was in a head-on collision going 65-75 mph down a two lane road. The other car hit us on my side (passenger side) and the car was totaled. Looking at the photos I don't know how I lived. Somehow I walked away with whiplash and a broken toe.
But moments before the accident, I saw a large yellow and green glow in front of us. I even said "hey what's going on up there" but my bf that was driving didn't see anything. It was just this feeling like the site of the crash had energy already there. Coincidentally (or not?) we were listening to the Jack Johnson song Country Road, about a "head on collision on a two lane country road" at the time and the song was the last thing I remember before I blacked out.
My bf remembers everything, hitting the car, the noise it made, even the spinning of the car after we hit. But I didn't become conscious again until after the the airbags deployed and I "woke up" to the voice of the on star woman. My bf was completely ok but I was so disoriented. I went to the hospital and got everything checked out but somehow I felt that I had died. I have this vague memory of dying and then looking at my life and choosing to go back. Like I felt I had more to do here and wasn't ready to leave. I can even remember conversations with other beings about whether I should go back. The memories seems to fit into the timeline of my blackout, but it doesn't really make sense that way because what I had experienced had no time, at least how like I know it here.
I have always been intuitive and had seen many apparitions, "glitches", deja vu and other paranormal experiences when I was a kid. And since have been fascinated with clairvoyance and the like. Studied energy healing, etc. This near death experience only validated my belief in a spiritual reality outside of our limited perspective. If you are experiencing these things, I wonder if you also had made a decision to come back but just with more awareness. Do you remember anything like this?

[END OF COMMENT]

Q1: This is incredible, thank you for sharing! I think you're absolutely right about me consciously deciding to come back with more awareness. You hit the nail on the head. After I was hit the only thing I remember is everything going black and having the thought of "I'm really hurt right now but I'm here, I'm alive, everything's going to be okay." I never had any moments where I connected with other beings or had any vivid images, it was just black, but I did receive some kind of message saying that I would be fine. When I was young I didn't have any paranormal experiences, except I do have a vague memory of seeing the number 11 a lot when I was going through puberty (around the age of 12). The appearance of the number 11 came back in full force after my accident, and has been a guide post for my life journey if that makes any sense at all. Thanks for sharing your story and allowing me to gain some insight into mine!

Q2: 1's, and specifically 11:11 is most closely associated with a forthcoming positive awakening. A blossoming, if you will. It makes sense that you'd be surrounded by it at a time of your coming into physical maturity and now your coming into spiritual maturity.
This is a bit of synchronicity for me, too. I was just reading about the significance of 1's this morning. I've learned to understand these things as road signs that you're on the right track and everything is okay.

Although - sometimes having an 11:11 pattern sounds like a real pain.

Personally, I do not think such "pattern overlays" have any inherent meaning other than the fact there is a patterning effect - plus whatever meaningful associations you gain from them yourself. Some unfortunate people get obsessed a pattern and it begins to dominate their life to a scary extent (the patterns needn't necessarily be numbers, they can also be full-on scenarios), and end up having a very tough time. See this interview with Kirby Surprise, for examples [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-iMw9KA93U].

POST: 11:11 -the numbers in my life for over 25 years

[POST]

I want to preface this by saying I have heard every established theory on this from "you are subconsciously prompting yourself to look at a clock" to "it is the gateway opening of the age of Aquarius and we must dress in white robes and do a dance in Ireland." Nothing fits, nothing helps. I am very much a skeptic and although I always keep an open mind, I also first seek the most rational explanation to anything. If you can accept I don't take these things lightly, read on.
It started very simply. I saw 11:11 on the clock and thought something about seemed interesting. I don't know what. A mirror of 2 numbers? Four towers? I can't say, but everyone has bombarded me with these explanations. All I know is, I noticed it and something felt odd about it.
And then I saw it again.
And again. and again. Eventually, it was happening with such frequency that I can honestly say I started to think it was alarming. Why was I seeing this? Well, I shrugged it off nonetheless. After a year of this, I made a new friend who is still the closest friend I have to this day. We go beyond friends, beyond family. One day she timidly asked me if I had ever heard of anyone seeing 11:11 on the clock repeatedly. Needless to say, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
Over the course of I'd say 5 years, we both saw it with alarming regularity. But we both came to the same conclusion; it doesn't mean anything at all but rather we are very aware of time and we are subconsciously prompting ourselves to look when it's 11:11. That makes a lot of sense, really, because many times when I set me alarm to wake up early, I will wake up a minute or two before the alarm goes off. Subconsciously, we all have an internal clock, so it makes sense that we were just making ourselves see it. That explanation satisfied us for many years.
And then it got harder to deny.
Several years later, after life took us in separate directions, I was living on the whole other end of the state. A few years in, I was rummaging around in my closet and found a wristwatch of mine I had misplaced months before. It had wound down and was not running any more. I squinted to look in surprise. It had stopped at 11:11:11. Precisely. I also lived alone, and was not in the habit of telling anyone about what I saw, so I don't see that anyone else could have done such a thing. The only person who knew was many miles away and had been since before I bought the watch. But, I still shrugged it off.
I was driving down the street one night and the local bank had a digital sign that displayed the time. This night, it read 11:11. I chuckled and then my eyes darted to the clock on my car. It was 8:24. I can totally see the clock breaking. It could even blink 12:00 like an old VCR after a power outage. But 11:11? Why?
About 8 years ago I sat with a dear friend in Denny's at the wee hours of the morning. The place was empty except for us and the staff. I told him all my stories about 11:11 as we were swapping strange life experiences. He was dubious, of course, and offered the "subconscious prompting" explanation as most people do but I explained too many instances were piling up that I had no power to influence. He chuckled and shrugged it off. Well, sadly he has passed on since then. He had a variety of illnesses, not the least of which was ketoacidosus which finally claimed his life. As a result of his illnesses, he always had to rush to the restroom after meals and this time was no different. I had already paid the check so I said I'd go with him. On the way, I stopped dead in my tracks and grabbed his shirt. "Look at THAT" I said. There, on the wall, the wall we were both looking at from our tables, the wall NO ONE had gone near while we were in there, was a wall full of grafitti all saying the same thing. 11:11, 11:11, 11:11. "Did I subconsciously write that with my mind or did I subconsciously prompt us to visit the only place in the area with this on the wall," I teased. That was the first time he took it seriously.
A couple of years ago or so I had the experience that frightened me. I had moved a bunch of stuff out of my office when I moved out of it and frankly left some of it lingering around the back of my car for about a year. Lazy, sure, but that doesnt matter. What matters is I had a large digital clock in there that had been on my desk. One day I opened the trunk and saw it. It was face down. I laughed inwardly. "You know if you turn it over what it will say, right?" I teased myself. I really didn't believe it, though. And then I picked it up. To my relief, it was blinking 12:00 like any good clock should when it's not properly set. I heaved a sigh of relief. And with that, the alarm on it suddenly rang and the numbers changed to 11:11 11:11 11:11. And then -it powered off, dead, never to work again.
Let me say, with all of the grace and dignity I can muster, that I nearly shit my pants. That's not something I can prompt. That's not something I influenced. It was here, in my hands, happening independently of me.
a bit over 3 years ago, my mother fell terribly ill. Turned out to be a massive tumor outside her brain in the netting that holds the brain in place, called the Meninges. (The cancer is called a Meningioma). The surgery went awry, and after an emergency second surgery to relieve an infection, she has been left an invalid, barely able to form sentences. It's very sad, let's not go there. But the reason I bring this is up is because a few weeks ago I was visiting her and she kept repeating "one." "one." "one." "one." I asked her nurse what this was all about and she smiled. "Oh, she must have seen the clock. She has this thing where she keeps seeing 11:11 on the clock." Mom smiled and managed a "yes!" And of course my blood ran cold. I had never told her about this.
So what conclusion can I draw? I saw it earlier today and I saw it again last night. Is the universe trying to tell me something? Maybe, but if so, it really, really sucks at it and if the universe has this capability it might just resort to words as that would be a lot more expressive. But this is all I get. 11:11.
I'd say about maybe around 2003-ish, I had decided to poke around on the net and see if anyone else had ever seen this. To my shock, I found millions of people had. Alas, they had no better explanation than I. "It means it's time to make a wish!" Hogwash. "It means the angels are with you." Preposterous. My favorite has to be on a website called Solara the Nvisible which talked about elaborate druidic dances called "master cylinders" (isnt that a car part lol?) and all of this aerie faerie stuff. Not a shred of hope of answers from that lot. And obviously I completely reject the subconscious prompting notion to say nothing of the pure coincidence idea. No way I can have this many coincidences over this many years.
But that clock in my car. It made me think. I drove on my way and mulled it over. I cannot have affected that clock in any way that could produce that effect upon lifting it. This was external to myself. I cannot have used the psychic powers I dont have -I dont believe anyone has them, it's just wishful thinking. So how do I explain it?
The unavoidable answer is that nothing is real. That somehow an external force can affect reality and is doing it for others and for me. Well, what the fuck does THAT mean? I don't believe in gods. I cannot say I completely disbelieve in psychics, I suppose, only because I myself have had too many experiences where I have known the unknowable right before it happened -but that is another glitch report. But no matter what else I've experienced, I am certainly not going to believe someone was using mind-powers to do this to me. Not rational. It was a glitch in the matrix. A sign that the impossible was possible because that should never have been able to happen -but it did, just the same.
Now, mind you, I don't go around thinking "nothing is real and we're in the matrix." What I mean to say is that I can think of no better explanation to fit the facts -but I still reject it. There has to be a better theory but no amount of "you're doing it yourself" or "dance the master cylinder" is going to work for me either. At this time I have to say I have no theory I firmly believe but will always, always be looking for one. I'm not prone to hallucinating, most of these have been corroborated by other witnesses, and I certainly didn't dream it all. And the examples I have given here are a drop in the bucket for a nearly 30 year long experience.
All I really can say is I don't know what it is -but it's something and it doesn't happen for no reason. I am just unwilling to give a pat answer just to satisfy myself. I will keep wondering and looking and thinking. And no doubt, I will keep seeing it.

[END OF POST]

Self-reinforcing synchronicity. The more it happens, the more you decide to attend to it, the deeper the impression, the more you are mind-formatting your reality. There's no inherent meaning; but it does reveal something interesting about the nature of experience eh.

POST: Serious question, do you believe any of the stories here?

It's helpful to keep in mind that the topic of the subreddit isn't that we are literally living in a computer simulation - the posts aren't meant to be evidence to support that theory in particular (nor any other). Rather, they are reports of experiences which made a person reconsider their idea of how reality is, because it broke their expectations of it, as a starting point for discussion.

From the sidebar:

"A personal, everyday-mode experience for which you have no explanation."

So, in each case, we should be careful to separate out the experience itself from any proposed explanation for the experience. Generally, then, I think I'd tend towards "believing" that the poster had an experienced as described (in terms of sensory unfolding), but its nature is something that is open for debate. The subreddit is not for fictional stories - there are other places for that - so if a post seems suspect, readers should hit that report button to alert the mods.

...

Q1: A lot of people apply Occam's razor to this stuff, and the "normal" explanation makes more sense. But taken as a whole, that starts to fall apart. What's more believable, every person who posts in here is insane, delusional, or making shit up to get imaginary internet points, or that maybe my perception of reality isn't all inclusive?

Q2: Besides, I like the counterquote to the little understood and much overused Occam's Razor. I believe it goes something like "Any model of the universe which isn't strange is likely also not accurate". It's a freaking weird world, whatever's really going on.

Occam's Razor has a specific meaning other than "the simplest explanation is the best", which is loosely:

"Given two models with the same explanatory power, it is usually better to choose the one which introduces the least number of conceptual entities."

It doesn't say anything about one being inherently "more true", or that the world itself follows some sort of "simplicity rule". In fact, there are many reasons to choose a more complex model: sometimes because it provides an "understandable" model rather than one which simply predicts results but is opaque; sometimes because the more complex model shares a form with other models in other areas, and allows the use of calculation or reasoning approaches which have already been established elsewhere. (Mathematics, for example, is full of areas where something is transformed into a certain format for "no reason" - other than it allows a certain approach to be used.)

We've also got the additional thing where the "explanations" being proposed basically have no explanatory power at all. If there's no way to test a description in terms of predictive power or by applying it to a dataset, then it's not really an explanation at all. It's not that saying something is a "false memory" or "confirmation bias" or "brain seizure" is wrong as such; it's that it is meaningless in the sense that it is non-scientific. It's just a hand-waving "plausible story".

Of course, pretty much all of our ideas for what happened in these reports is hand-waving story-making - but that's actually part of what makes it good: an exercise in flexing our powers of imagination and reasoning, and spotting the assumptions we use in everyday life without perhaps recognising they are assumptions.

POST: My glitch

Coincidences like this are actually the rule; reality is very "clumpy" that way. You are just overthinking them, because you are actually overthinking everything in your current state.

Now, there are "just coincidences" and there are also /r/synchronicities where the coincidence is more deeply personally meaningful, and the universe does seem to 'send us messages' from time to time (or we 'send ourselves messages', depending on your viewpoint). But these are far more significant and present themselves as opportunities rather than just curious details.

Personal example: I was in a bit of a spot a couple of years ago. While in a cafe pondering this, the two guys at the table next to me started talking about a friend who was in my exact situation and the advice the guys came up with was exactly applicable and useful to me. The details of the situation were very specific, and I really was stuck. This was more than just the usual low-level coincidence, which is the norm.

The things you describe in your post, though, seem more like coincidences of the everyday sort but because you are in 'hyper vigilance mode' and are basically scanning the world continuously for meaning, you are over-interpreting them.

Let them go, and let the idea go. Useful things will still happen, but give up looking for them and analysing them. Try and commit to stop thinking so much.

POST: Everytime I hear some word, suddenly everyone uses this word

Welcome to the wonderful world of the Baader Meinhof phenomenon. https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/

Although, the "Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon" isn't really an explanation of anything - more a naming or categorisation of an experience, accompanied by some vague "the brain did it" handwaving. We're essentially just saying this is the "Having A Recurring Experience phenomenon - because that's how experiences work". As with some uses of "Confirmation Bias" as a diagnosis, it can often be essentially a contentless general statement that feels conclusive, but doesn't really say anything.

For example, calling "Confirmation Bias" really requires that there be a fixed pre-existing reference dataset that is known and being surveyed, and then being selectively perceived. However, in daily life it is not clear that there is such a dataset, or at least we must recognise that this is an assumption. If we are to take "glitch" type experiences seriously - seriously as experiences, anyway - we can't necessarily take such things at face value. To assume that the world is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'" in our responses to experiences whose content is as if that is not so, is circular or redundant; it doesn't truly respond to the report on its own terms, unless we at least make explicit that assumption and any others.

POST: Meta-switching realities

To bring this into a coherent worldview, you really need to examine your underlying assumptions about what it is to be having an experience, what you actually are, what is the nature of time, and so on. Or we can jump straight to an alternative model.

Let me try:

Imagine a vast grid extending in all directions.
Imagine that each square in the grid is a particular experience, a particular static moment, as seen through the eyes of a particular person.
Imagine that the grid isn't just 2-dimensional, or 3-dimensional; imagine that it contains all possible moments, all possible experiences.
Imagine that your life is experienced as a traversal across this grid, moment by moment.
Imagine that remembering the past is also a moment, a moment with a thought overlaid upon the experience.
Imagine that generally the sequence of moments a person encounters do not differ substantially between each step, and that the trajectory is in line with your expectations and intentions.
However, there is nothing preventing there being a discontinuity, a jump from one moment to another one that isn't consistent with the facts of the previous moment. That would be a 'glitch'. Doing this deliberately would be 'magick'.

In this model:

From a 1st person perspective 'what you are' is a consciousness that is looking through the "viewport" of a certain square on the grid. There is no solidity to the experience, it is a dream-like experience. Everyone is having the experience of looking through a certain "viewport" at a certain time.
From a 3rd person perspective, everyone is essentially an "extended person", since they appear as characters the experiences of many moments.

In other words, when you make a 'jump' what you are doing is subjectively 'tuning into' a new grid position. There is no physical jump involved. You do not so much change solid reality as have a discontinuity in your experience. It is possible that only you will remember how things were previously, although at other times you may elect to bring another character through the change with you.

(An alternative take is to get rid of the grid metaphor, and just see all possibilities as being "enfolded" into the space you are experiencing right now, as if it were a dream emerging from your consciousness. Each moment "unfolds" into experience, then "folds" back into the space around you. The grid of all possible moments is embedded internally into your experience, rather than external and you select it.)

...

I'm not being argumentative or anything like that.It's just.....I can't seem to believe in it.

I'm not necessarily saying it's true, I'm saying it's a fun way to look at it. :-) Actually, it's quite a good way to look at the world without believing in glitches, because it also allows for moving into a moment where your memory has changed to be inconsistent.

I still don't really believe in reality jumping.It seems mythical, somehow.It almost seems like the person changed their own perspective in their own mind,but stayed in the same reality.

Some of them it's hard to tell the difference - see reality shifters too, here. But you are right, even if jumps are 'real' then what they are is a person chaining their own perspective - but the meaning of reality has to become more extended than just 'this shared world'. Even if you assume a shared world with defined people, we are all having our own mini-dream experiences of that world; we assume an 'external' world but never experience it.

Classic thought experiment: Hold up your hand in front of your face. Now, point to your real hand. Where is it? It can't be that vision in front of you. If your answer is "in my head", then point to your real head. Where is that? You are "living the dream", one way or another. :-)

Extra bit:

Do look at how many of the comments these days say "absence seizure!"; a lot of the major shifts do seem to have that trait. However, if someone did jump and report a change, then a corresponding explanation would be provided once sought out.

For instance, this post has the comment:

If you tell your friends, the world will change to make the event mundane. It will turn out that someone left the pad in some sort of diagnostics mode or there will be a software bug that allows 10% of random codes to work or something like that.

So there's no getting around it; your world will strive to remain 'self consistent'! ;-)

Q: That is a fun way to look at it,yes. :)
Actually,people who immediately post medical explanations(like absence seizure) is a pet peeve of mine.Not that it isn't possible,I just don't think it should be assumed right away.
I do prefer it when people look into the more mundane explanation,and consider it,instead of instantly thinking they jumped realities.But I always accept the mundane explanation. i.e.Did I a.I misplaced a hammer.Or b.I misplaced a hammer,I've jumped to an alternate reality. I misplaced a hammer.This is reality.
If the hammer comes back wearing a ballerina skirt,then I'll consider glitchiness,not before.
There's an example of people keeping it together and not immediately stating they shifted here: [https://old.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/26fdyv/chartreuse_its_not_red/]

Yes, that's a good example of a proper discussion. It does sound red. It's when we get to the idea that every decision involves a splitting of reality and a new universe, it gets a bit tiring. Thing is, most of the most "Matrixy" stories are probably seizure-like: favourites here [https://old.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/1qu3b6/the_day_the_worldshifted/] - here [https://old.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/1zq56z/but_i_did_own_the_car/] - here [https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1xyn79/what_is_the_creepiest_glitch_in_the_matrix_youve/cffvytf/]. However, how would you tell the difference? Are seizures just what glitches look like from an external point of view? :-)

But there are enough quirky stories here of a smaller scale that do indicate that things aren't as "solid and reliable" as we might normally assume.

Q: I sometimes find when people post that it is probably an absence seizure,or other medical explanations,some of them have a tendency to ignore other things the poster is saying,and jump right to the medical explanation,not considering anything else the poster is saying.For instance,somebody comes on and says they have a green car and it suddenly turned red yesterday.They have a friend,and the friend remembers it being green,too.Somebody then replies it was some kind of seizure of some sort,go to the doctor,get checked out,etc,etc,while completely ignoring the part of the post that a friend remembers it as green.It just isn't logical to ignore parts of what the OP posted so it fits into something the commenter is comfortable with.
Funnily enough,when I see the quirky stories that don't mention reality jumps,I don't question them nearly as much.So that's my own prejudice,I guess. :D

Yes, quite a lot of them have some implicit corroboration. In some sorts of stories it's as if people have "fallen in to a dream" together (more reality shifters site than here). But then, perhaps everyone has "fallen into a dream". Thing is, even the ones we dismiss easily seem to have an ongoing life. The Berenstein/stain Bears debate is still raging even right now this month, over on this site.

There is something going on, and the chief barrier to sussing it out is that it questions what it means to be a person having a shared experience with another person. If you and a friend both remember a car as being green, but now it's red and your family remembers it as always having been red - are those still your original family members??

Q:I actually remembered it as Berenstein.But I accept this explanation as very plausible and likely:
AnonymousAugust 23, 2012 at 3:44 PM
I normally don't comment on blogs about our family name but yours was so unusual and imaginative that I thought it only appropriate to add my thoughts. "Berenstain" according to our family lore was an attempt by an unknown imigration officer sometime in the late 1800s to reproduce phonetically a highly accented version of the tradtional Jewish name "Bernstein" as pronounced by my Father's grandparents when they came to America from the Ukraine. In that linguistic region, the name tended to come out sounding something like, "Ber'nsheytn". Since that's how the name was originally documented, it has always been spelled that way by our family and it has always been misread and mispronounced by nearly everyone. It has always been "The BerenstAin Bears". Your parallel reality theory is very resourceful but, unfortunately, by applying Occam's razor, we arrive at the explanation that most people have just misread the name. Mike Berenstain (Son of Stan and Jan) Reply
If you and a friend both remember a car as being green, but now it's red and your family remembers it as always having been red - are those still your original family members??
Yeah,that would be disconcerting.

I saw that too. If you read further down, there is some doubt (in the minds of other posters) about its authenticity, because people are so convinced, but I'm inclined to go with that as the best 'everyday world' explanation.

However, if there was a 'jump' then of course the son of the authors would have the -stain spelling and would have an explanation. Part of the jump is that the resulting universe is self-consistent! :-)

Q: Yes,that's true. It's tough,with berenstain bears there aren't really any downsides,other than a bunch of people are annoyed with you because you don't believe they're from a berenstein bears reality,and then the people who don't believe it are annoyed with them for not realizing they probably just remembered it wrong. It's a bit more serious in a case like this,though: [http://beforeitsnews.com/beyond-science/2012/01/redux-terrified-woman-from-another-universe-wakes-up-here-1575265.html] If she actually did jump,they she might be treated for a medical illness or mental condition she doesn't have.If she didn't jump,well then if the jump is accepted by herself and others,she might not go get treatment for an illness(mental or medical) that likely might be kind of serious.

I think that one is probably just a story, but it's actually not too dissimilar to the ones I referenced in an earlier comment. Someone replies into a post of that story, though:

I went to sleep one night and a similar thing happened to me. I was a totally different person(body) when I woke, living in a different part of the country with a completely different family, friends, job, and home. I was still "me" on the inside. it was very difficult at first, taking me a long time to adjust to my "new reality". I stayed to myself about the "shift", in fear if being locked up for insanity. I was able to fool those around me. the years past and I grew happy, forgetting my original life, deciding it was just a dream, rationalizing. I worked, loved, played, slept and dreamed as this "other" person. I was this "other" person. then four years later I woke up again in my "original life" without any missing time. it was the next morning that should have been on that fateful night four years before. I was very confused. I kept thinking I would wake up in the "other life" again. it took a while to get back into my "original(?) life". I had to remember who I was. its been decades now and the memory of the "other years" are faded from my mind. I wrote them down years ago, so I could not forget. I found the "other", he still lives where I had lived as him. I will never make contact. who are we really? there is far more to reality than we know. why was I used for this mission? where was this "other" person while I was in their body? how could I have no missing time in "this" life? talk about a mind f--k. I must conclude we live in a vast multiverse that can somehow become entangled on a quantum level.

Someone else says:

I don't believe her, she has no proof but her words.

Which, well, is always going to be true for this sort of thing. Meanwhile, another explanation here (also offered on these forums for other victims):

What I think is most likely here is that Ms. Garcia is a victim of something akin to the Capgras delusion, about which I have written before (read my original post here [dead link]). While this isn't classic Capgras -- the most common manifestation of which is a sudden conviction that everyone has been replaced by perfect duplicates -- the similarities are apparent. And she certainly has what is the most striking thing about Capgras and other delusional disorders, which is that while the sufferer is exhibiting symptoms of serious impairment, at the same time (s)he is absolutely convinced that (s)he is entirely sane.

I think this is stretching the Capgras definition too much though; it's about non-recognition rather than things changing. Also, there's no reason it's not real of course, in the sense that things might look the same and yet you 'know' something isn't quite right...

Cheesy list of stories here [dead link] includes that main one.

Q:Yes,I agree.That does seem to stretch the Capgras definition too much.Confabulation does seem like it could possibly fit some(not all,but some) of the posts on here that involve reality shifting.A lot of times,the poster presents remembering things differently,and then the reality jumping is presented to them,or they seem to accept it,because it's the thing that makes sense to them: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation] It says it's rare,but can sometimes occur in normal individuals: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation#Among_normal_subjects] Not suggesting all or any of them are due to exactly that,I think people should be diagnosed by professionals,and most definitely not be diagnosed by me,I'm not qualified to. This one would fit that,except it's hard to explain how they knew how to ride the bike(not picking on them,it's just one of the most recent I recall reading): [http://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/2gis9e/a_illusory_road_trip/] Though again,with the non-proof of jumping realities,then somebody who feels they jumped realities could disregard that. It's quite interesting.

I read that too. 'Confabulation' is a pretty interesting idea. Again, though, the evidence would be identical either way. But for individual's stories, it works; for shared memories or when there is a 'skill' in evidence, perhaps not.

However, there are cases of people suddenly becoming great guitar plays or being able to speak foreign languages fluently after head injuries. Example here [dead link], but there are better ones. Good musical one here. Meanwhile, there's cases of people with higher-then-normal IQ who have almost no brain tissue. In other words, things are generally stranger than we might imagine anyway. Is it possible to "access" bike riding skills without having actually learned them?

A further thought is: To what extent are our memories actual our lived history? If I were to 'snap awake' right now, it's hard to tell if my remembered past occurred or not. Mostly, I am unlikely to examine it for discrepancies - discrepancies might be arising all the time, but people are oblivious because it's rare they notice a 'clash'.

Q: Oh,I read a couple similar stories quite a while back.There's another story about a guy that started hearing music in his head and started playing the piano after he was struck by lightning: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/23/a-bolt-from-the-blue]
The girl who speaks german after her head injury is really freaky,I wonder what caused that?
Sure.I might remember having a grey mug a few years ago,and then it got broken.What are the chances that somebody will mention the mug,and inform me it was really green?And if nobody brings it up,I'd never realize I remembered it wrong.It probably happens a lot more than we realize. :)

Amazing stuff.

I guess one point is: We create our memories - or at least we 'assemble' them from something - we do not recall them. Where we create/assemble them from is debatable.

Of course, people do try to make these things happen intentionally. Randomly here:

...the persons present shift their point of view from the Universe that they were in, to another parallel universe that they have now arrived in. This 'jump' is spoken of repeatedly in the Dialogs."
Ebony liked to describe the phenomenon of the 'jump' as a movement into a parallel timestream, but it can also be seen as a re-alignment of the same universe, with all the paradoxes that either description entails. The experience is the same in either case. The limits of the universe seem to collapse into the space of the working. Over several minutes or hours, depending on the strength of the working, one's sense of outside reality begins to re-solidify. Often details of the new universe are discovered to be different from that of the old.

POST: [THEORY] Scientists able to make the present determine the past.

Yes, it's a nice experiment, thanks for posting! Some thoughts:

I'd suggest the particle-or-wave isn't a wave or a particle prior to conducting an observation - rather, "particles" and "waves" are observations. Here's a nice snappy article from Nature magazine which offers a nice view on this:

The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things.
-- The Mental Universe, Richard Conn Henry, Nature, 7th July 2005

To continue:

Talking about things "being this" and "being that" independent of them being observed is an error. Extending this, it does not make sense to talk about "something happening" when it is not being observed. This is because the facts-of-the-world do not exist in the same form as we experience them within the senses. Our habit of using our minds to "imagine how things are" and "imagine what happened" is just that - imagination. It amounts to making up little "sensory stories" about the world as if they were playing out.

Philosophers like Immanuel Kant had the notion that time and space were, effectively, "basic sensory formatting" of the mind just like shapes, tones, and so on. The world itself, world-as-it-is, is not spatially or temporally organised. It is an "infinite gloop" of dimensionless facts - not even! - which doesn't correspond to our conceptualisation, because conceptualisation itself is formatting.[1]

This means that you live in a mode of constant experiencing which is only organised "as if" there is time and space. Cause and effect don't mean anything:

The only rule is that the apparent world remains self-consistent as an entire pattern.
This means that all observations will be coherent, without regard to apparent distances in time and space.
Time and space are part of observing, not inherent divisions of the world.

More broadly:

Things that you aren't observing don't "happen" in a way that corresponds to sensory experiencing.
Observations are the only things that "happen".

Potential relevance to glitches:

If a change is made to the (implied) world-pattern, the whole pattern will shift to ensure self-consistency.
There will be no trace of the previous state of the world-pattern after the shift.
This may not include the observer's memory, which will contain memories of experiences of the former state.
The observer's memory may therefore fall out of step with the world-pattern.
Glitches involving a world-pattern shift will leave no physical evidence other than the memory of it.

Final thoughts:

Therefore in a way what we are truly experiencing is the "formatting" of our own minds.
We might view this "formatting" as the memories of previous observations + their implications.
Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences...

[1] There's an easy-reading article on Kant here [https://web.archive.org/web/20130516095302/http://philosophynow.org/issues/95/Kant_at_the_Bar_Transcendental_Idealism_in_Daily_Life], although it gets it slightly wrong in later parts in my opinion.

EDIT1: Made some changes for increased... coherence and self-consistency. Added some glitch-based musings.
EDIT2: Added some concluding remarks which, interestingly, connect to a previous comment about synchronicity.

...

Thanks, U-Chairs, nice post.
You might also look at it from a simulation standpoint where rules dictate the outcome of a given physical setup, and these rules are running in "realtime". So while the helium atom is not being scattered, the particle rules are employed. But as soon as that second "grating" is added, wave rules are now used. Thus when the atom hits the detector, the pattern is calculated as wave interference. Hmm, I wonder if they could turn off the second laser grating right before it hits the detector (but after the atom supposedly went through it). This would be a delayed-choice-oops-I-changed-my-mind-again experiment. [Modeled after some dates I have been on.]
Has anyone done this?

You can't fool it. No matter what you do, the result remains self-consistent. Lots of variations have been tried.

It's as if once an observation is made, the larger "implied pattern" of which that observation is a part, becomes fact. It doesn't matter which part of that pattern you trigger or when - once you've done so, the larger "fact" becomes the situation.

So by making part of the pattern "concrete" or realizing it, all the other parts of the pattern must necessarily come into reality, in order for reality to remain consistent.
I was thinking of the uncertainty principle the other day and how interesting it is that reality doesn't seem to want to be pinned down to a single set of physical parameters. It's as if there always needs to be a bit of wiggle room. I wonder if these phenomena are related to this apparent spontaneous creation of "reality".
There's always a little room to fudge the data, so that stuff agrees with what we see.

Extra bit:

One might wonder - are there methods to artificially give ourselves the experience of "something being true", such that subsequent observations are consistent with that experience...?

Perhaps placebos are more than mind over matter. Maybe they are mind over reality?

Nice idea! There have been experiments like that before. In fact, there have been lots of pretty thorough "psi" type studies but they don't get any traction. Interestingly, enthusiasm seems to play a large role - beating the statistics towards the beginning and end of sessions (getting bored in the middle). Random list.

I would take this a step further though. "Fooling ourself" seems like a weak version of such an effect - especially belief isn't causal, but rather a filtering of what you might attempt to do. (i.e. It's intention which brings about change, and believing something simply means you are more likely to go all-out with intending it.)

Instead, it would be more interesting to see if we could "assert new facts" deliberately. Perhaps mind = reality, and so all cases of cause and effect are, in effect, expectation or habit (i.e. residual intention) by someone, singly or collectively...?

(Aside: And we might ponder what "collectively" would actually mean. If there were contrasting intentions, would we be competing or would we simply have divergent experiences.)

[EDIT: Added headings to avoid wall-of-textness!]

Consistent Patterned Reality

So by making part of the pattern "concrete" or realizing it, all the other parts of the pattern must necessarily come into reality, in order for reality to remain consistent.

Right, but it's completely automatic, like autocomplete.

It's like we accumulate facts and those facts act as a filter or formatting for what can be experience subsequently. A new fact narrows the possible future facts. It's a bit like exploring memories by association (as we've said before). You recall a memory pattern and then you are restricted as to what you can remember from there. The rule is that the next pattern must always "make sense". It must always be thinkable from where you have got to so far.

If you are in a "moment" where observe that a particle is in a certain state, then you can only move to "next-moments" which make sense, which correspond to a coherent world. For as long as there is ambiguity, though, your "next-moments" are less restricted. So long as you don't know, you have more flexibility.

The facts-of-the-world are being fixed in real time.

That's why it's good to focus on actual experience. What you imagine about something just doesn't count. (Unless perhaps you imagine it really, really intensely...)

Uncertainty and Unpindownability

I was thinking of the uncertainty principle the other day and how interesting it is that reality doesn't seem to want to be pinned down to a single set of physical parameters.

When two things are the same thing but divided across formatting structures - e.g. it has aspects in time and aspects in space, like position and momentum - then we have a problem.

It's like trying to see both sides of a coin at the same time. The coin is a single pattern, but because our experiencing is formatted "spatially" then we can't experience both sides at once. It our experiencing had been formatted "spectrally" then perhaps we would be unable to see different colours at once.

We make this mistake again and again: seeing "two things" when it is just aspects of "one thing". In the limit, of course, we realise that the universe itself is just "one thing" and the only divisions which exist are the formatting of our minds.

Those psi experiments are cool, but to me they always seemed too experimentally "soft" for the mainstream to take them seriously.

Yeah. Actually, it works the other way than you might think: anything that isn't "soft" is very hard to get a mainstream study going in. You're right: the telepathic vs reality effect is difficult, as is the causing vs predicting thing in general.

I'm not very interested in psi research work actually, of this type. Just experimenting with generating synchronicity and so on, it is easy enough to prove to yourself that there is a flexible aspect. The official recognition that "stuff goes on" is nice. But there are also inherent limits maybe, due to the way experiences are formed.

If we want to assert new facts, it seems like these are the two inhibitors that need to be overcome.

I think those two things are very present. Children often are intention machines actually - environment responds to their moods; strange experiences. Some stories also indicate a problem...

And that problem is that the "world-sharing" model doesn't appear to be a simple one. If you have an "extreme intention" it may just be that you stop sharing your environment with those who would not want to experience the results. I don't mean by that that people disappear, more that you are sharing your reality experience with the versions of "extended people" that overlap with your own formatting.

Make a dramatic change, and you've shifted the "world-pattern" to what you want, but only you have a memory of the previous state.

Btw, I was thinking that maybe that's how "magick" works.

Yes, I think it exactly works via plausible mechanism. There is no actual mechanism, but adopting a "second cause" (an apparent technique or method, combined with a shared worldview for confidence) allows an "as if" mechanism. More precisely, I think that magick and indeed the everyday world works by what we might call "Active Metaphors". That the conceptual model you have adopted = the formatting of your mind = the formatting of your experience. Change your formatting, change your experience.

Common metaphors = common, shared, everyday experience. Unusual metaphors = unusual experience. Deliberately utilising this would be the deliberate practice of magick. I've actually played with this quite a lot. It comes as a direct offshoot of contemplating the structuring of the mind really. Synchronicity, imagination, direct intention, willing. Variations on the theme of perception.

Want to try it?

What do you have "in mind"? :-)

Just this Saturday, I tried to "intentionally" find a frisbee to play frisbee golf at the park.

Yeah, that's how it kind of works mostly. I don't think it's restricted to that though. The takeaway from the OP experiment is: "The only rule is that the world-pattern must remain consistent overall".

However in this area we push into new territory: About how observations may arise, and if observations have to be permanently "true", and what keeps prior observations being apparently "true". If all that's required is that the world-pattern remains consistent, we can make potentially make any changes we like so long as the world continues to "make sense".

And surely "making sense" is a property of the mind, not of an external universe. In other words, if an observation is a sensory experience and there is no "solid world" behind them, perhaps the only making that observation continue to be "true" and have an effect on future observations, is us...

I'm just wondering how far this goes. People often talk of Steve Jobs as having had a "reality distortion field". Maybe he did in fact have one.

Steve Jobs exactly was into this sort of thing. If you read his biography, his history is along those sort of lines. Not "magickal" but more a muddle of Zen and intention. However, I also think he never really understood it, it was based more on a sort of narcissistic arrogance, self-delusion and lack of awareness. He sometimes believed rather than knew. He did after all die of thinking he could cure pancreatic cancer via a diet (a diet which he'd been on, and is linked with pancreatic troubles). In other words, sometimes he use "force of will", but other times he resorted to "second cause".

Was that history in the Walter Isaacson bio?

Yes. It's surprisingly not very fawning at all, as it goes, considering it's official. To Jobs' credit, he encouraged him to write what he thought, to be accurate.

(I mean, Jobs had all sorts of issues, denying his own daughter for 20 years, weird emotional things with people and not understanding them as people, having family meetings about choosing a washing machine. I think he was pretty 'internal', probably mildly autistic or aspergers or whatever. He definitely had problems with feeling-out, both in the 'empathy' and in the 'deciding' sense. This classic picture said it all.)

Do you know about the 5-Hour Energy founder, Manoj Bhargava?

No, that's interesting. He probably found that the mystics had been buzzing on a local lucozade for years.

Actually, now that I think about it, the possibility of this stuff does scare me somewhat. I'm not really sure why...

Perhaps it's because, if you can change anything, and anything includes your experience of being-a-person, then you realise there is nowhere to stand that is stable (it seems) - and you can only be the background context in which experiences arise.

If it's true that the only rule is "the world-pattern must remain coherent overall", then you can completely remake the world right now. Just declare prior observations arbitrary, and being again with a fresh observation this moment. But what does that mean for all that you have (apparently) been and experienced thus far?

Perhaps the experience of Narada can cast some light upon the matter:

Narada, Vishnu and Maya
In Devi Bhagwata Purana, it is mentioned that once Narada asked Vishnu about the secret nature of Maya (Illusion).
“What is Maya?” asked Narada.
“The world is my Maya. He who accepts this, realizes me,” said Vishnu.
“Before I explain, will you fetch me some water?” requested the Lord pointing to a river.
Narada did as he was told. But on his way back, he saw a beautiful woman. Smitten by her beauty, he begged the woman to marry him. She agreed.
Narada built a house for his wife on the banks of the river. She bore him many children. Loved by his wife, adored by his sons and daughters, Narada forgot all about his mission to fetch water for Vishnu.
In time, Narada’s children had children of their own. Surrounded by his grandchildren, Narada felt happy and secure. Nothing could go wrong.
Suddenly, dark clouds enveloped the sky. There was thunder, lightning, and rain. The river overflowed, broke its banks and washed away Narada’s house, drowning everyone he loved, everything he possessed. Narada himself was swept away by the river.
“Help, help. Somebody please help me,” he cried. Vishnu immediately stretched out his hand and pulled Narada out of the water.
Back in Vaikuntha, Vishnu asked, “Where is my water?”
“How can you be so remorseless? How can you ask me for water when I have lost my entire family?”
Vishnu smiled. “Calm down, Narada. Tell me, where did your family come from? From Me. I am the only reality, the only entity in the cosmos that is eternal and unchanging. Everything else is an illusion – a mirage, constantly slipping out of one’s grasp.”
“You, my greatest devotee, knew that. Yet, enchanted by the pleasures of worldly life, you forgot all about me. You deluded yourself into believing that your world and your life were all that mattered and nothing else was of any consequence. As per your perspective, the material world was infallible, invulnerable, perfect. That is Maya.”
Thus Vishnu dispelled Narada’s illusion, bringing him back to the realm of reality and making him comprehend the power of Maya over man.

Thought experiment: What if your girlfriend (or whatever) had blonde hair and you'd prefer brunette. What if you could just intend and change that "fact" now. Would you? If not why not?

Okay, what if instead you could intend and then events would unfold such that she changed her hair colour (spontaneously deciding to dye it). Would you? If so, why would that be better? Just because there's a little "story" between what you did and how the result seemed to happen?

Interesting things to ponder, and examine your actual response.

EDIT: Extra sentences about Steve Jobs, added a thought experiment.

When a death event occurs, if our awareness is so opposed to death at that moment...

Yes. I think there is always a next-moment. That next-moment might be that the crash didn't happen, or that you survived miraculously, or maybe you experience "dying and leaving your body and going somewhere else", or even just losing all memory and being reborn. But... there's always more dream no matter what.

So, the next-moment as defined by a mix of plausibility and pattern momentum, perhaps?

Talking about altering facts, it could be possible that some larger scale fact-altering experiment has already been conducted...

Could be. There does seem to be a lot of fluctuating. I think it's a mix of there being shared updates, and there not being a single shared world really. Something more like multiple personal dreams with overlaps which come and go.

In other words, the "consciousness" that is experiencing being-Scroon and the "consciousness" that is experiencing being-George overlap (are both looking out into the same space) so long as we are aligned. We share some "trajectory" together. Our dream-space becomes common and entangled for a while.

However, if I intend something that is completely contrary to your intentions, our worlds may disentangle, and the "Scroon" in my experience won't have "you" looking through it anymore.

If we really go crazy with reality manipulation, perhaps we end up completely alone in our world - with nobody else sharing the experiencing, nobody else looking through the perspective of the other people. The more "God-like" I try to become, the more that might be the case, since nobody else would want to have the experience of being the other people in my life...

Deity is a dirty, lonely business!

EDIT: Bad internet made the posts multiply per revision, so deleted 'em except this one.

Hey, perhaps that's part of the fear of taking over the world through intention. It's a subconscious knowledge that you can manipulate other people, but then they cease to be awarenesses and function simply as behvioral automatons.

It is part of it - but remember that unless (and even if) you directly manipulate them, they are not automatons, they are completely human and going along their own trajectory as characters in your dream. And even then...

This is the case anyway. Even if you're not doing it consciously, the aspect of other people you are experiencing corresponds to the state of your mind. In fact, are the state of your mind - since the content of your mind is your experiences, and that takes in perceptions, sensations, thoughts: all experiential objects and events.

You are exploring the state of your own mind whether you like it or not. Deliberately changing the state of your mind is just you unfolding consciously rather than accidentally. Until now, you just didn't know what you were doing anyway...

Changing this "external" stuff by willing is no different to moving your arms and legs. It's all you. And as you wouldn't bend your arms the wrong way (them being "you"), you wouldn't bend the people you encounter inappropriately (they are "you" too). So ironically, the potential for "powers" comes with it a realisation which means you are more compassionate to others in your world, rather than less. The nature of power has this baked in because of its nature!

I just had a thought that reality could be like Tinder for patterned experiences.

Tinder: Reality Path Selector Upgrade - great! :-)

Q: means you are more compassionate to others in your world
Love and compassion keep coming up when exploring these things. Who would have thought?
I guess if you keep in mind that perhaps our awareness is part of the awareness of the totality of existence, then the idea of "me" vs. "others" ceases to have meaning.
Yesterday, I was thinking about the nature of individual cells in the body. One cell can alter its environment by expressing signals, yet you wouldn't say that it's necessarily controlling its neighbors. They are all part of the bodily experience, aspects of the same shared system while also in control locally.

Hmm. If you are your neighbours though? Or if your neighbours are your experiences? Because "you" yourself are an experience?

Oh man, now my head hurts. :)

Don't you mean... your experience of a head? :-)

...

If you approach this from a scientific materialism pov- consciousness is caused by the brain- If the universe keeps branching, creating copies of me, and copies of my brain, then I should be conscious of myself in all those universes that I'm still alive in. But I'm not- for some reason, my consciousness chose one of many paths, why? how? If we take a non-materialistic view and consciousness arises from the soul, not the brain- then the soul chose one of those many paths. So then in the rest of the universes I'm soulless, therefore have no consciousness? If not, then what? A different soul enters my body in those worlds? It doesn't matter if you take a materialist or non-materialist approach, the multiworld theory raises some really difficult and profound questions that don't seem to have answers.

In both cases you are assuming consciousness is somehow "in" the world and that the world is an actually spatially-extended place, independent of our experiencing of it.

If you flip it around, and have sensory experience arise within consciousness - and have time and space as the structuring of mind rather than an external structuring, a la Kant and others - you avoid all this. "Many universes" are just "different conscious experiences" aligned to a different set of facts (none of which takes up any space). There are no bodies to be filled: a "body" is just a set of sensations and thoughts, an experience.

Meanwhile, given that time is not something that "passes" but is instead an aspect of experience, all possible viewpoints and experiences are in effect active simultaneously. One consciousness then takes on all experiences at the same "time" - including being-UniversalChairs and being-BlahBlahBlasphemee.

TL;DR: None of these things is an issue, they come from assuming that time and space are properties of the universe independent of conscious experiencing. Actually, there is just one thing. Can't get more Ockam than that... ;-)

This experiment actually involved either adding or taking away the second grating AFTER the atom hit the detector. In different rounds of the experiment, they tried both ways, adding the grate or taking it away. In every case, changing the experiment after the atom hit the detector changed the behavior that the atom exhibited in the past when it passed the detector. That's what's so remarkable about this. It is a delayed-choice-oops-I-changed-my-mind-again experiment.

But it's important to say that it didn't change the behaviour that the atom exhibited, right? That atom didn't have any behaviour at the grating/non-grating, because we didn't observe it there at the time it passed. It's important here to distinguish between inferred behaviour due to a model or expectation, and observed behaviour. The only behaviour observed was at the detector.

The real takeaway is that our little stories about "particles going on a journey" are just imagination?

Yes, that's a good point. The information gained is necessarily after the fact. So when speaking of behavior, it must be "inferred behavior".

Right. "Behaviour" is a sensory thing, it is the name of an observation. There is no such thing as unobserved behaviour. Imagining something in your mind is not the same as it happening. Imagining that "something happened" but is unknown, is still not the same anything happening. It's not that we don't know what happened. It's that nothing happened. Because "happening" is an experience.

Q: There is no such thing as unobserved behaviour.
Yup. That's basically what this experiment proves. Even though we have this perspective of a linear flow of time, and we would expect that the particle hit the detector at a certain moment in time, that's not the case at all. Nothing happened until we observed it happening, in which case what we think of as "the past" seems to have been impossibly been altered by the future. In reality, if such a thing as an atom and a temporal dimension exist in any fundamental way, they're not bound by linear time.

It is a dream-world - one that we are dreaming into being, moment-by-moment!

Really, I suppose all of this is saying what a clear-minded focus would reveal. If you never fantasised (thought-about things) ever again, your experience of the world would be accurate. There is obviously no such thing as a past or future. There is obviously no such thing as an object or event you have not seen. Those are just "sensory shadows", mere imaginings, overlaid on our actual experience...

Of course, if you didn't think, then you wouldn't be able to enjoy that realisation...

The detector did record some state at the moment that the atom passed it.

No, it didn't record anything at the time. The detector wasn't in any state until it was observed. Nothing "happened" at all until an observation was made. There was no fact-of-the-matter until then.

The real takeaway here is that information in the past that is unknown in the present is actually not determined at all until an action in the present decides what happened in the past; at which point the past that we get is one consistent with our present.

The essential is right, but you are still describing an unfolding of unobserved events in time surely? The past in this account only exists in the imagination, remember. The connective story is about the past, but nothing happened in the past. If you imagine being the scientist, looking through his eyes, moment by moment - while avoiding imagining anything else going on from a "god's eye" perspective - then those are the only facts-of-the-matter.

Q: No, it didn't record anything at the time.
Well, yeah, you're right. It's more accurate to say that if our expectations of linear time held true, then the detector would have recorded some state at this moment. But because the state is able to be determined at a point in time after the point that the atom should have been at the detector, this seems to show that indeed nothing happened until the outcome was determined and the observation was made.

Right! It's our story-making that is in error, with our assumption that the world is inherently spatially-extended and temporally-sequenced, rather than just our experience.

I'm really pleased this experiment has been revisited. The original versions lead to the same conclusions, but they have become lost in time (excuse!) such that discussing them seems like 1950's philosophical curios rather than genuinely serious.

I've always been drawn to that idea for as long as I've known about the 2 gate test.

Quite! That and David Bohm's approach - the implicate order and so on - pretty much got me on this. In effect, we are dealing with a situation where - although only a small part of it is unfolded into the senses - the entire timeline of world is always present and available for revision, limited only by the restriction that it must "make sense" as a whole.

Which leads us to ask: isn't that restriction just something that we impose?

Literally I've been building a very stable theory on how everything is governed and this just confirmed a big part of my theory.
A simple, but extremely plausible example I'll put out is let's say everyone on June 1st had a great day, or close to everyone. There's a chance that a related event (spawned from a simple thought that "snowballed" into existent) can be created that took place 1 year ago to 50 years ago. I definitely have started discovering my profound fascination in our life right now

Because... there is no "50 years ago"? There is just a self-consistent present experience?

If a new "fact" was somehow created now that implied an event had occurred 50 years ago, then subsequently all observations would be consistent with that event having occurred 50 years ago. There is no actual history, there is just observation, observation, observation... sometimes an observation is "about" a past event, but there is no actual persistent past event. Only a coherent experience now.

We don't know what time is, or isn't.

Perhaps the answer is: there isn't.

Actually that comment should have had some "consider this" type question marks, since it was indeed written as speculation rather than declaration - duly added! However, I'll stand by the idea that "all time is now", that the "past" is embedded into "now", which in effect means time is an aspect of the observation, not of the universe. (Following on from OP.)

Maybe. But, at this point, it's purely personal guesswork... Theres very little conclusive evidence, either way.

I think in matters of time and space, it comes down to personal experimentation. Time and space are the "fundamental formatting" of perception. This is different to the representation of time and space in descriptive schemes.

Which gives us a problem in terms of studying it "objectively": you can't. Observation and modelling rely on reality being "made of parts" before you can begin, and time and space is what lets experience be made of parts (spatial partitioning: objects, temporal partitioning: events).

It's basically the same thing as trying to study consciousness.

Time and space necessarily existed long before consciousness came on the scene...

I disagree. I definitely don't see how they existed "before consciousness". Particularly since they are concepts derived from subjective experience.

...experience exists within an objective framework that is space and time

I'd say that experience might be "formatted" in terms of space and time, but I don't see how experience exists within an "objective" anything. It's important to distinguish between our stories about our experience - stories which of course exist only within conscious experience - and the actual nature of experience itself. We can only ever really examine the formatting of our own minds: Our thoughts about our minds, are of course within our minds and therefore subject to its formatting.

We imagine space and time to be pre-existing only because our thoughts are inherently structured as "shadow sensory experiences", and so pre-formatted by space and time. We cannot perceive or think our way beyond that formatting, so we incorrectly assume it is inherent to the universe. (Except for the occasional mystical experience, of course.)

The experiment described in OP point exactly in this direction (and it's an old idea in philosophy too: Berkeley, Kant, etc).

Okay, I'll accept the only thing we can ever know is our own perception, and we cannot know to what extent that is wrong.

And even: wrong compared to what, exactly? We can only compare one experience with another.

So, when I refer to the universe, I'm simply talking about the apparent one.

Me too. The universe of human experiences.

That apparent universe is composed of quarks, which themselves may be composed of something else.

Well, strictly speaking - and what is at the core of the experiment described in OP - is that the universe isn't composed of quarks as such. Quarks are ideas in effect, just like atoms. They are connective concepts between observations. What you have described - quarks, particles, and so on - is a connective story, a fictional framework. One that operates very nicely in terms of linking particular observations together. It's not "how it really is" though. As any good physicist would tell you: physics is about models which predict observations within their remit, not about truth.

[the story...] if indeed, anything can be said to that affect at all.

That's probably about right. Nothing much can be said about that. All we can do is come up with a conceptual framework which matches present observations.

it follows consciousness is an emergent property of space and time, and not the other way around.

Well, it doesn't follow at all. Our scientific work starts from observations as a conscious being. That is the primary fact. The whole idea of emergence of consciousness from matter is extremely problematic, and not supported by evidence.

Which is why even neuroscientists such as Christof Koch are referring philosophical ideas like panpsychism, and cognitive scientists such as Donald Hoffman theorising about interface theories and conscious realism. Both take consciousness to be a fundamental property of "whatever it is that the universe is made from".

In fact, the work of Wheeler (the designer of the OP experiment) leads very much to conclusions of this sort as a solution to the "hard problem of consciousness", as described by David Chalmers:

Wheeler (1990) has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this "it from bit" doctrine, the laws of physics can be cast in terms of information, postulating different states that give rise to different effects without actually saying what those states are. It is only their position in an information space that counts. If so, then information is a natural candidate to also play a role in a fundamental theory of consciousness. We are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental, and on which it has two basic aspects, corresponding to the physical and the phenomenal features of the world.
--Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers

To continue...

However, that isn't apparent from observation, so we must proceed, especially when dealing with each other, with what is apparent.

We must proceed from what is apparent, but we must bear in mind that what we mean is: "what is apparent to us". Without this, results such as the OP experiment become intractable.

It is apparent space and time are not only prerequisites for conscious perception, but that they don't require it and certainly existed long before it.

It is more accurate to say that "nothing can be said" about this. I don't think we can say that time and space are prerequisites for experience. All we can say is that they are aspects of experience. Of our experience.

When a physics experiment (as above) is obviously operating outwith that formatting, we can say with certainty that it is not a fundamental division in the world-as-it-is, it is only a division in the-world-as-experienced.

If we don't make the distinction, we cannot model these observations.

Maybe that isn't true, but maybe the universe is an aliens pre-school project... It doesn't matter, since both are equally likely to be the case, along with an infinite number of other arbitrary assertions.

Hmm. It's only you that is making arbitrary assertions beyond what can be observed. I am strictly within what is observable and making no assertions that go beyond sensory experience and thought - to the extent that I am not willing to confuse the structure of experience with the structure of the universe. Which is just as well - because if I had done so, the Wheeler Delayed Choice experiment would be not a fascinating reveal of our assumptions, but the breakdown of the universe itself.

EDIT: Not exactly sure where you were going with the flying, simulation and aliens stuff? Just because there's no solid world beyond conscious observation (as indicated), doesn't mean there is no structure to experience.

After all, that is what we are truly studying: the regularities of the human experience.

POST: How to produce a glitch in the matrix (part 1)

...another way that I might frustrate it would be by acting without a goal.

That's actually an interesting line of experimentation. There is a difference between performing an action with a purpose in mind, and simply performing an action. A different experience results, even though in a basic sense the behaviour is apparently identical.

A mundane example would be, while sat down: to move your muscles in a way that corresponds to standing up, versus intending to stand up and allowing movement. The former amounts to "intending my muscles to move" whereas the latter is "intending to stand up". You have to actually do the experiment to get the difference. (I think that, in this case, most people typically move using a muddle of the two.) You can then extend this to target outcomes which are not so "local" in terms of timeframe or location.

As for the rest of it - it sounds very much like you were becoming aware of your own patterning, and observing that making changes to this can have quite unexpected side-effects for our perception of more than just ourselves. Although we tend to conceive of ourselves as both perceiving an external world directly, and also making conscious behavioural choices on a moment-by-moment basis, a brief period of observation shows that this isn't the case. In the first case, all sorts of quirks reveal this not to be true, and in the second we discover our ongoing life is more like a "spontaneous multi-sensory happening" that we only occasionally redirect intentionally. Even the feeling of "doing" can turn out to be more like a habitual experience of muscular tension, than actual choice-making and controlling.

I'd suggest not getting overly focused on theories relating to "simulations" and so on - a lot of that stuff is just today's cultural metaphor of the moment; it's best to stay grounded by paying attention to what you actually experience, rather than getting swallowed up by a narrative about what's happening in an imaginary "behind-the-scenes" that you will never observe.

Aside: If you leave a blank line (hit return twice) in your text, that'll create some more paragraphs. It would make reading your post much easier - thanks. Meanwhile, your pattern-breaking counter-action idea reminded me a little of The Dice Man.

POST: Do any of you really believe that life really is a computer program?

It's a fun thing to think about philosophically, but the actual notion of "a computer program" being used ends up being so abstract as to be pretty much meaningless. It ends up being just another version of the older idea that the-world-as-it-is is not of the same format as our sensory experience of it. In other words, that its basic structure is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", and that apparent division, multiplicity and change are aspects of experience rather than inherent properties of the world itself.

A related point would be that our descriptions about the world are "parallel constructions in thought" and actually say nothing about the world itself. We never "think the world", we only think our thoughts. Noticing that some of the content of our experience deviates from the usual narrative, and that some aspects of it are of the same structure as the "computer programs" story, doesn't necessarily mean much. Typically we are just comparing one conceptual framework to another. It just highlights that our descriptions are generally very basic, and that we are good at noticing partial pattern matches in two strands of experience (where strand 0 = ongoing sensory experience; strand 1 = our thoughts about sensory experience; strand 2 = our thoughts about computers).

TL;DR: The world is not "a computer program". Also, though, the world is not "a world".

POST: Sudden realization about the universe's nature before falling asleep

[POST]

Well, last 27/march i had this unexpected information "download" right before falling asleep, i had almost forgot that. So i'll register this here because i think it somehow fits this subreddit.
I laid in my bed and i haven't though about anything that dense for the whole day, but suddenly i became this internal monologue that just flood through like i was listening to a podcast, but also was myself. It was like that:
-What is time?
-Every single moment is like a sheet of a book. They are really thin slices, and everything is right here, right now: past, present and future, in the whole universe this is the same.
-So i'm existing at the same time everyone else in the whole history far back and far in the future?
-I am
-But the planet is moving in the space, we won't be even in the same spot
-The planet and everything else is simultaneously all the same places it was and it will ever be, these are just different sheets of the book
-but how does the book move forward?
-the universe is expanding like a wavelength, and the different lengths are the different pages in the book
-So its possible to travel through time
-You just have to syntonize the right wavelenght. you might sintonize to a bad place like the outer space, though, because earth could be somewhere else by that point.
-so better get a space suit to do this, right.
It seems shallow and a little pseudoscientific, but there were some other times i just "had information". When i was younger, like 4 or 5 years old, i had a friend of my age complaining about bug bites. He started kid's shenanigans like making up things. The dialogue was something like this:
-Bugs bite us because bugs are bad!
-They aren't bad, that's just something they have to do.
-No, they're evil! they likes to hurt us.
-They only do this because they have to, it makes no sense they would get so close just to be annoying!
-I heard they poop under our skin and put nasty things in there!
-They could just poop anywhere, they wouldn't risk getting slapped just to poop under our skins
-Why would they do this, then?
-To feed on our blood and put eggs and their little bugs would feed on us until they could get out.
Since when he first said that "bugs were bad" i just knew the whole thing, and at the same time i made these affirmations, inside i was like "how do i know this? why can i be so sure?".
Whatever. Note that all of these was in another language.
Tr;Dr: sleepy me knew shit about time, 5 yo me knew shit about arthropods biology.

[END OF POST]

A1: I had something somewhat-similar happen in middle school.
I was in 8th grade, and for some reason that I still do not understand, I suddenly developed an interest in time travel. I did in-depth research and study for over 3 weeks. Keep in mind, I was only 14 years old and had no understanding of quantum physics. Yet, here I was reading fucking Michio Kaku and soaking it all up like some kind of guru. I spent every hour I could on the internet looking up reports and theories, and the rest of the time I'd be highlighting lines in material I'd printed out, taking notes, and drawing detailed diagrams. I understood it all, and more than that, I expanded on these theories and developed my own. I had done what no scientist had done before - I not only figured out how time travel could be accomplished, I declared reality itself to be another dimension that can actually be traversed, and I also discovered a new law of nature that explains that paradoxes are avoided by the automatic creation of a new universe to counteract it - thus, paradoxes are both unavoidable and impossible at the same time.
Or, as I wrote in my 8-page report:
"For every paradox, there is another universe created to balance it."
Long story short: What you came up with in your epiphany is absolutely correct. If anyone wants more information, I still have the full text of my report with diagrams and all.
I sent it to a former science teacher I knew who used to be a physics professor, and he said it all sounds plausible and does not contradict any known laws or fundamentals that he's aware of - in other words, everything I came up with in this random unexplained period of advanced interest... is scientifically accurate. Since then, the multiverse theory has gained more widespread acceptance, and more theories come out all the time that fall exactly in line with mine! It's freaky, I really think I'm on to something here, and I think you are too!
EDIT: Addendum: When you refer to the universe as a "book" and the different points in time as the "pages", my theory would say that this "book" is one volume of an ever-expanding series. Turning the page is fourth-dimensional travel (Einstein said that time is the fourth dimension, no different than the others in that out consciousness travels along it), that's the linear past-to-present-to-future progression that we are familiar with. Fourth dimensional travel is merely what we interpret as the passing of time. To "time travel" requires fifth-dimensional travel, that is, actually exiting the book and going to another book in the series.

I like that. Now, it's probably not best termed "science" since it can never be tested intersubjectively (this applies to "multiverse" and also "eternal" descriptions more generally; this is not a criticism), but those sorts of extended space metaphors - which provide a wider context for time - do come up in philosophy and fiction quite a bit, and I think they can be very helpful.

Examples include JW Dunne's The Serial Universe and An Experiment With Time, which take a similar route; Julian Barbour's The End of Time describes a "Platonia" where all moments exist simultaneously. The writings of Jorge Luis Borges are full of these sorts of things - see The Library of Babel and The Garden of Forking Paths, for instance.

What they help us do is free ourselves of the hidden assumption that the world-as-it-is, is of the same format as our ongoing experience - that is, that the world is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Reconfiguring it as a simultaneous and persistent set of "frames" that can be traversed - an "infinite grid of all possible moments", for example - can be quite powerful. In particular, it can encourage us to reconsider what "we" are, as observers relative to the content of our experience (and maybe make connections between time and perception in philosophical idealism and so on).

Meanwhile, I think the common assumptions about what someone who is "only 14 years old" can come up with are often widely off base. My own interest in things like reality, perception mind kicked off around the same time, and in much the same depth. Curiosity is the most important thing - when you're focused on something and put the hours in, very few things are that difficult, if you have imagination.

POST: 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:

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.

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

==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.

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.
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.
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.
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.

You should have posted this as a question in r/askscience.
But do try placing three pencil leads together and creating an interference patten using your laser. That'll get you into theoretical physics and hopefully not in to psuedoscientific woo/ eastern mysticism mixed with perversion of quantum physics...
[http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-perform-Interference-and-Diffranction-at-Ho/]

To be fair to OP, though, I don't think he was in much danger of mangling mysticism and optics. It's really refreshing when people pursue their own explorations into phenomena like this - engaging in structured investigations, being wary of assumptions - since hopefully that critical eye spills over into thinking about glitches, maybe life more generally. And who knows, perhaps it might even inspire metaphors/models that are more useful than the ones that are currently predominant?

POST: [X-Post r/MandelaEffect] Myers-Briggs Personality Types

If there were a correlation, I suppose it might also be that only the more introspective people actually pay attention to, contemplate further, any odd experiences they have - or have an interest in this stuff as a topic. The subscribers to the subreddits might be disproportionately introspective, then, but that could just be a case of those types being more interested in such "fantastical" concepts as part of their richer inner life - and also a general bias in the reddit community overall.

POST: [META] What is the logic behind reality?

The word "real" causes a lot of problems for this stuff, I guess. Most people interpret "real" as meaning "out there independent of me", even though they never experience such a thing. What they actually mean is that the experience corresponds to a particular narrative, fits with a particular conceptual framework (specifically: the "container concept" that is "the objective world").

So concentrating on just the experience for the moment: neither Dad is false in and of themselves, the "falseness" is just a thought of "falseness" we have as subsequent "sensory frames" of experience render the "real Dad" narrative unworkable. Similar, perhaps, to the way "a dream" is really a "having woken up". Until you woke up, you weren't actually dreaming - because "dreaming" as an explanation is the choosing of the "I was dreaming" narrative; it is not part of the experience.

Really, we have to make a distinction between "ongoing sensory content" and thoughts 'about' that content. They are both strands of experience, though; they are both content within awareness. We could view them as being two streams of thought - it's just that one of them is a "bright 3D-immersive" thought ("reality" or "the world") and the other is a weaker diminished thought ("thoughts 'about' the world").

The mistake we often make is to confuse the latter as being identical with the former. However, there is no mechanism-based causal relationship between the two, and there's no reason to assume that the "given" strand is patterned in the same way as the "constructed" strand. Just as there is no reason to assume that the world-as-it-is is formatted in the same way as our human perception - that is, the world is not necessarily a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", which is the assumption most of our narratives are based upon.

So I suppose the crux of this is the idea of "aboutness", and how this can lead to confusion when it comes to the relationship between different aspects of experience.

POST: [META] Collecting common glitch report themes?

Having played with this a little myself (I am a mod here), it's actually really hard to group them in a way that makes sense; going through them, you find that whatever the "underlying" of the glitches is, it's not mapped very well to object-based categories.

At best, one might map them to groupings like: "object location", "temporal location", "object form", "abstract facts" and so on, but they are so broad as to become fairly meaningless. Very quickly you realise they all resolve to something like "a discontinuity in the formatting or content of subjective experience".

Of course, that conclusion, and the difficulty of categorising glitches, is itself is a pointer to the nature of glitches.

POST: Oranges.

[POST]

I haven't eaten an orange for over a year maybe. Used to eat them all the time they were around, but stopped for some reason. Today I decided "hey, I should eat some oranges". So a couple of hours ago I bought oranges and brought them to the house, but haven't eaten one yet. Instead, I started reading a book that's been sitting on my hard drive for a month. I wanted to read it for some time, but only started today for some reason. Guess what the author wants me to do? This:
...imagine that you’ve just arrived from another planet and have never encountered an orange before. Now take a few minutes to experience a piece of fruit in a fresh new way
Oh, and the book is about meditation.

[END OF POST]

It's called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

And... how does that work, exactly?

If it's just a name or category for experiencing a clustering of a certain pattern, then great, but I'm not sure it adds much in terms of being an explanation (if that's what was intended). It's surely the start of a conversation, rather than a conclusion.

For example, if the model is that the thought of "hey, I should eat some oranges" caused him to "notice" more instances of oranges, even though the background population of instances was unchanged, that's an interesting idea. However, we have no access to an untainted dataset independent of a subject's "noticing". We can't differentiate between "the thought caused him to notice what was already there" and "the thought actually increased the number of subsequent instances of oranges".

Although your theory might be plausible in terms of the usual narrative of the human-world experience, it is unfortunately non-scientific, since it is impossible to test.

Even if we had someone else as a "control" prior to and during a test subject's exposure to an orange reference and their observation of subsequent instances, we couldn't discount the possibility that the control's instances were being modified by their orange-focused intention.

you are spot on, as usual ;-)

Wait - are you sure it's not just that you witnessed me being spot on once, and now confirmation bias is leading you to see me being spot on all the time? ;-)

...

Well then, that's that.

Well, someone's given it a name now, which means there's nothing more to discuss.

Did you know that the reason unsupported objects drop to the ground is because of "Falling Down Phenomenon"? People used to spend lots of money investigating ideas like "gravitational waves", until one day they realised there was a much simpler three-word explanation for what was happening, and that everyone could just go home.

We named it gravity. And yet we're just as clueless as we have always been.

Yeah. Well, at least we went a bit further in terms of constructing a useful narrative, rather than just calling it a name and stopping there. Although "gravity", as you are implying, is really the name of the narrative, and not something in "the world as it is". It's not very fashionable to draw a distinction between our descriptive fictions and "how things really are" at the moment, though.

Really, my reply was more directed at the commenter than you - and not necessarily intended to start discussion. So feel free to ignore. :-)

Every report of this type gets a few people stating the names of a couple of psychological phenomena as if it is an explanation, often out of context, without actually connecting it to the post. The implication is that there's nothing further to discuss, and that there'd be no point in people sharing similar experiences because they "are just" <insert-name-here>.

I disagree.

It's okay! I came here from /r/findareddit where I asked about a sub where I could share such experiences and read about others who had them, without all the explanations. I love science and build my worldview around it, but I'm tired of people waving away any genuine human experience just by mentioning some XYZ effect.

Well, you are in the right place I think! Generally speaking, this is a pretty welcoming sub that is indeed mostly about gathering and sharing accounts of unusual experiences.

Beyond that, yes, it encourages discussion based on standard or more esoteric ideas - to let the thoughts go where they may, mainly for the fun of it, but definitely not in order to dismiss the experience. Unfortunately, a small subset people are a bit too keen to "explain away" things based on a concept they read in a popular science article, for example, without really offering an account how exactly it explains OP's story. This tends to be a bit of a conversation-stopper, hence my picking up on it (as a moderator). You can just not engage with that. :-)

Did you read the linked article? It more than names the phenomenon:
From the article's summary of Stanford linguistic professor Arnold Zwiky's attempt at an explanation or "useful narrative": It’s caused, he wrote, by two psychological processes. The first, selective attention, kicks in when you’re struck by a new word, thing, or idea; after that, you unconsciously keep an eye out for it, and as a result find it surprisingly often. The second process, confirmation bias, reassures you that each sighting is further proof of your impression that the thing has gained overnight omnipresence.
Not trying to be a dick but there is an explanation in the article, more than just a name.
Edit: fixed typo

Not very convincing, is it? It's really just a restatement of the assumption! How can we differentiate between this and there actually being more oranges?

Also, what does it mean to "unconsciously keep an eye out" for something? Isn't that saying we don't detect doing something but we are assuming a process for narrative convenience? For confirmation bias: again, isn't this meaningless unless we have a raw "environment dataset" and an "observed dataset"? Is BM not just an empty pseudo-science story with no solid foundation?

Which isn't to say I'm promoting an alternative account, only that there's not much reason to support this one vs leaving it as an open verdict.

Not trying to be a dick either - just pushing things along a bit! :-)

POST: [Theory] Why do we only hear "quantum immortality" stories from the "immortal" person's point of view? Why do we never hear "my loved one had a brush with death and now they insist that Thing used to be way X when it's always been way Y"?

I have a difficulty with quantum immortality, as it has been told to me:
If I jump into another reality when I come close to death, then in that other reality people may see me as dead, right? But in the new reality, what was going on with me for the duration that I was in the old reality? Did I just take over someone else's experience and life? Did I kill them? Even if you want to say they are both me, and I'm just switching camera views or something, it still stands that the person in the new reality was having conscious experiences before I took them over, and now they are not.
Unless you want to say that we are both sharing conscious experiences, but without knowledge of the other one sharing them. So which conscious experience is controlling the action? And if that body in the new reality has a near death experience, then it must jump to a new reality, and now you have 3 conscious experiences of 1 bodily experience and none have a right to control that experience. This could happen over and over again, with more and more consciousnesses occupying one body.
If you want to say that the new reality doesn't exist until you jump into it, then you must assume that nothing in your experience is really there, and be a solipsist.
Anyways, I just don't think it makes any sense. :/

A way out of this is to stop assuming that the format of the world is of a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time".

If instead, we are dealing with a pre-existing collection of "all possible sensory moments" across which we scan our attention, then we no longer have the problem of new and old realities and taking over people's lives. There are no people, as such, only that-which-experiencess. And there is nothing "happening" other than experiencing-of-moments.

Other realities aren't places, they are static moments. They don't "happen" when you are not experiencing them.

This is solipsism is the sense that "only mind exists and all possible experiences are within it", but it is not the same as saying only me-as-person exists, and so is less problematic I think.[1] In fact, it ties up nicely with your actual direct experience: all that you ever experience of the so-called "external world" arises within your "open aware mind-space"; this includes all your thoughts about the "external world"; you never experience any boundary to your mind-space.

So, the evidence supports this view in terms of the context of experience. The content of experience is actually irrelevant in a way, since in this view it becomes a sort of "3-dimensional sensory theatre" drawn from an eternal record, which can't tell you anything about "how things are really" (the context).

Finally, there is therefore no fundamental reason why an experiencer can't skip to a set of moments whose content conflicts with previously experienced moment. Integrity with respect to history is at best a habit of moment-selection, not a rule attached to a "universe" as such. And this may even mean having experiences of commenting on subreddits about how our experiences conflict...

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[1] There could be any number of "experiencers" in theory. However, it makes no sense to talk of experiences happening at "the same time and place", since "times" and "places" are aspects of an experience, and are meaningless outside of an experience. Also, all experiencers would be identical really - all just an open experiencing-awareness - so there would be only one of them in effect, since experiencing-awareness would be "before" division, contrast and multiplicity. Hence an alternative phrasing: you will "eventually" have all possible experiences and everyone is effectively you, although not at the same time. Although also: kinda at the same time.

EDIT: Slightly long-winded, but I wasn't quite sure exactly which aspect you were picking up on. Solution: type a lot.

it is because time and location are aspects of experience that it makes perfect sense to speak of them in relation to experience, especially if you want to make argument s about how experience could shift between worlds.

Doesn't this separate "the world" from "experience", however? Note: I'm not saying that discussing things in terms of time and space is pointless, only that it is not meaningful to talk of time and space "between experiences". Actually, it's probably beneficial if we rename "time and space" as "change and division" when referring to experience itself. To have an experience of something, those are requirements. And so to have an experience of a "world", the content of our experience must be so-formatted. What we tend to call "time and space" is really something we infer from the experience of "change and division".

Anyway, the footnote is emphasising two things: First, that some of the difficulties people encounter when thinking of solipsism arise due to thinking about the context as if it were content. Second, that it is not meaningful to talk of shifting worlds using the language of worlds themselves. For as long as we are thinking of a world as a "place" that is "out there", treating that as the fundamental truth, then we will misunderstand the nature of experience and so of world-shifting. It may be relative truth (you have an experience "as if" such-and-such was the case), but the fundamental truth is unchanged (of an aware-experiencer who is having an experience of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person).

For example, say the house next door is painted red and the guy who owns it is called "Robert" (and everyone calls him by his full name because he hates contractions). One day, I wake up and see that the house is blue. I notice that everyone calls the owner "Bobby". Everyone claims that these two facts have always been the "new way" and only I remember differently. It is "as if" I have switched universes!

But what does that actually mean?

Well, what I actually experienced was a discontinuity in the content of by experience. I didn't actually experience "switching universes", that's just something I infer from a conceptual framework I have. In fact, the notion that I am even "in a world" is also something I infer from a conceptual framework. The notion that the room next door is "over there" assumes that the world is formatted like - is a continuation of the formatting of - my ongoing experience. And even then, only a part of my ongoing experience (since it is relatively easy to have spaceless-timeless experiences).

What are the implications of that?

It simply means that it is meaningless (but not pointless) to talk of time and space between worlds, or of worlds being "located" in any way - because a "world" is a concept inferred from a collection of similarly-structured moments, rather than a place.

In truth, if I pay attention, my actual experience is of being an "open aware space" with a constantly changing "3D multi-sensory image" floating in it, one aspect of which I've fallen into the habit of calling "me", and the rest "my body" and "the world". Anything beyond that involves thinking in terms of "the view from nowhere", which immediately means I am "already wrong" since that objective view can never be experienced; it does not exist. It is a connective fiction, an abstraction. Again, that doesn't mean it isn't useful - but for structuring purposes rather than finding the truth of the situation.

I'd say it's not that there can''t be a discussion about it - it's just a matter of being honest with ourselves about the nature of our descriptions?

I don't think we benefit from viewing our abstractions as actually true rather than being fitting narratives. It can even lead to us defending things which are essentially fictions, after they have outlived their usefulness. When talking about this stuff, I think we reach the limit of the fiction of the "objective world" container, and we have to adjust our approach accordingly.

As you indicate, if we insist that our narrative about "what is going on" must be in terms of "time and locational and individual experience" - even though we will never be able to make a direct observation to confirm this - then we might be effectively preventing ourselves from creating a useful narrative. We may even be making some experiences completely unexplainable in terms of our ability to create a model. It's like only looking for your lost keys under the streetlight, even though you have no idea where you dropped them!

I think 'glitch' experiences and 'quantum immortality' models are very vulnerable to this - hence all these "what happens to the people in the other timeline?" questions and similar. Those questions aren't actually questions based on experiences, they are questions based on a certain conceptual diagram (the timeline) or two (the cartesian co-ordinate system) which has been conflated with individual experience. It's the assumptions of the model that is creating the problem, and in this case those happen to correspond to unexamined assumptions about the nature of experience itself...

So, where does that leave us?

Actually it probably leaves us with more possibilities for coming up with explanations that connect to direct experience than ever before. Because we:

Treat the unchanging context of experience as fundamental (our "open aware perceptual space").
Treat the changing content of experience as primary (the 3D-sensory experience that arises within perception).
Recognise that everything beyond this is a connective fiction with a certain number of observational touch-points.

Freed from treating our abstractions as actually true, we are also freed from requiring that the nature of experience and the structure of experience must correspond to the format of the content of experience. (Avoiding the reification of abstractions, basically [http://www.ehu.eus/aitor/irakas/mes/Reference/mermin.pdf].)

POST: [Meta]Sight/Vision is just a mental hallucination

Can we talk about how basically everything we see is in our brains?

Well, if we're doing that we should probably talk about how even our brains are in our "brains". Where do we draw our philosophical boundary? All our evidence about the world arises in our mind, that is certain, and we never experience any "outside" to our mind. This includes our ideas about the world too. In that sense, everything is in our "brains". This might lead us to ask...

Even things like the television use three basic colors to create the illusion of multiple colors, distance, depth and movement when none of those things exists in that medium.

...is the world itself just an illusion in much the same way? Perhaps none of the things we perceive around us "exists in that medium" either. Are we exploring the formatting of our own minds, rather than the formatting of a world? The world itself, as it is, might be largely unstructured, to a greater or lesser degree. But to what degree?

Are we not influencing it as well?

The degree to which we can influence the world, would depend upon where the boundary lies that divides "formatting of your mind" and "formatting of the world". There would be no way to discern this, though, other than by experimenting with trying to make changes. Simply observing the world via mundane interactions, as we do in most science, would only tell you how things are right now; it would not reveal the limits of how it could be, surely?

So, what experiments can we do to discover the position of the "boundary of influence"?

Related: Darkroom Vision

POST: Did the matrix help me get out of my driving lesson? There's no such thing as a coincidence if you ask me.

What you need to look out for are those occasions where things don't work out in your favour...

One potential problem might be, if the looking-out-for itself shapes our experience, then there's just no way to win - and that doesn't even required the act of looking to be "causal", just "filtering". To expand:

Although we might imagine that there is an external world out there, an independent stable dataset, and our cognitive biases mislead us, we never have access to that external world. We only ever have access to our cognitive biases. In effect, our cognitive biases are our experiences of the world - our patterning is the world.

So, if OP starts passively noting goods days, or bad days, or every day, the experience that they have will always be "coincidental" in a sense, since there's always going to be a presupposition involved, from this point onwards. There is no way for them to be "objective" about this.

The only way they might test this, I suppose, is to actively explore the possibility - by booking a strip of weekly driving lessons, and then each week "wish something would happen so I didn't have to do this lesson". If the results are consistent, then there might be "something" to it. (Although of course we'd have no idea as to the nature of that "something", but that's not required initially - just the observation of a consistent repeatable effect.)

All down to OP now.

POST: Hold your horses.

If this actually is a case of quantum immortality, how would you have noticed it? Everything you remember is stored in your brain, which, if parallel universes exist, is separate in each universe as well. If you die in one universe, your consciousness might move to another universe, as that's not something physical; nobody knows what that is. But your memories of the previous universe wouldn't move; that would require the information stored in your brain, which is physical, to spontaneously change as a result of something happening in another universe. That wouldn't be a "change" from your perspective, but within that one universe (which is what the laws of physics are bound to) it would be. So if this were to happen, you'd simply forget everything from the previous universe and remember everything from the new one, as if that's how it had always been. (And yes, this means it might have happened several times in your life without you knowing.)
Besides, if that were possible, wouldn't you see it happening with other physical objects that store information as well, not just brains? If your computer's hard drive is destroyed in a parallel universe, would the data on the drive platters spontaneously change in this universe to match the data from the other one? I know your computer isn't conscious (actually, come to think of it, I don't; as far as we know anything could be) but if it was, why would that suddenly enable the data on its hard drive to change through non-physical means? The same principle applies with your brain.
I think what most likely happened is that your wife suddenly remembered a repressed memory or something. The near-accident might seem like it was related due to the timing and significance of the event, but correlation does not equal causation. The human brain can do some very weird things, especially when psychological trauma is involved. Do you have any records of previous conversations involving the expression "hold your horses" that you can show her? Like voice/video recordings, or text messages?

I guess the assumption you are making is that these universes are "spatially-extended places unfolding in time" - or more specifically, you are making the assumption that because your sensory experience is formatted as a "3D space with stuff in it", that this is the form of the world itself. This might not be the case. The images you see do not necessarily arise from a "behind the scenes" place that is of the same form.

One of the follow-ons from this is that the "brains" are part of our experience, not necessarily the world as such - which means they are not causal, because the world we see is not causal either. Our apparent world is sensations, one after the other. We make the assumption that the brains we see correspond to brains "behind the scenes", but it is an assumption (arising from the other assumptions). The image of a brain wouldn't store anything, of course. The only real storage would be in "that which experiences". But what is that?

Actually, if we pause and attend to our experience, we discover that our direct experience is not actually of being a body in the world, rather it is more like we are an "open aware perceptual space" in which our experiences arise - consisting of sensations, perceptions, and thoughts. In other words, although for convenience we treat the world as being external but directly accessed, all we ever really experience are sensory forms arising in this "mind-space" of ours. We might have thoughts about an "external" world - laid out in space, in which we see brains - but those thoughts also arise in that mind-space. We never get outside of it. "Outside" is just an idea we have inside. It is then not at all clear that the mind-space itself is anywhere, since it has no perceivable boundary, and therefore can have no location.

So taking all of this into account, if we "jump universes" then we wouldn't be going anywhere. What would be changing is the content of our experience; we would be "selecting" a new set of sensory images to explore, for and from and as the "inside". Whether you would still have access to your old memories, ones that would now be inconsistent with the upcoming experiences, is debatable - but it would not have anything to do with "brains", as such.

POST: 'New' house on my old block.

Q1: I've said it once, and I'll say it again. The Berenstein theory comes because The Simpsons showed it the way people always remember it, when referring to it, rather than the way it is actually spelled. Edit: Huh. And now the image that said Berenstein from the Simpsons, when I looked at it a couple months ago now shows Berenstain on google.

The episode of The Simpsons with this in it is "The Fat and the Furriest". At 09:10 onwards in this video of it you can see it says "The Berenstain Bears". The still images you see online with "Berenstein" are just people having some photoshop amusement with themselves, because of this very thing.

Q2: You can find it both ways if its the image I'm thinking of...
[https://img.4plebs.org/boards/x/image/1402/60/1402602476521.png]
:edit: spelling

Q3: there are 2 images that exist online but which one was in the show? ain?

At 09:10 onwards in this video [Dead link] of it you can see it says "The Berenstain Bears".

yeh, I figured someone probably p-shopped the "ein" image lol

Yeah. Hence the endless stream of posts where people claim to have "solved" the bears thing after discovering a "misspelled" image via Google. Like nobody thought of googling for this before!

I think a lot of people who are just barely stumbling upon this whole thing don't yet grasp the concept that even if it WAS "ein" for them.. that RIGHT NOW.. every instance will be "ain".

True. At first they're just "everyone knows memories are fallible, you guys are crazy", because they are assuming that people are just talking about something they "just kinda thought it was this way", rather than had direct contact with.

I eventually wrote a definition for the Mandela Effect sub, to try and emphasise the "direct personal experience" nature of it (regardless of any particular proposed explanation) and that it is "as if" a fact of the world has changed from underneath you:

DEFINITION
"The phenomenon where a group of people discover that a global fact - one they feel they know to be true and have specific personal memories for - has apparently changed in the world around them."

But people don't really get it until they have an actual experience themselves, and suddenly it changes for them: "I came here to mock you guys but then came across <insert example> and had my mind blown", is typically how it goes down.

Still, that's quite interesting all by itself, I suppose.

POST: I think God may have finally reached out to me.

Stepping back for a moment, it might be worthwhile separating out the experience from the explanation. Obviously there's the "it's just a coincidence" explanation, but let's ignore that for the moment...

Putting that aside, what definitely happened is that you requested an experience of "knowing that someone is out there looking for you", and then subsequently had such an experience. That's the content of the experience. The nature of that experience, is still up for grabs.

You can interpret this as an "Entity God" or something else listening to you and sending you a message - but equally you could interpret it as an an intention (from the desire to experience knowing something) followed by a result (the experience of knowing). If you'd asked for the experience of knowing that the devil was taunting you, or knowing that the NSA was hunting you, the corresponding evidence for those might have arisen, as requested. On the one hand that might seem a bit disheartening - on the other hand it means you have deliberately created a glitch-like experience for yourself, via intention!

Playfulness aside though, you should just go with whatever explanation feels most useful to you (you can always change your mind later). In lonely and lost times, little glimmers of inspiration can make all the difference, and you should let them work their magic when they appear. Glitch or God, who cares so long as it's helpful?

TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 12)

POST: Impossible does happen."impossible" is a metaphor,why haven't redditors realized this by now?

POST: Missing Time

POST: Glitches and Chaos Theory

POST: I vaguely recall Verne Troyer dying a few years ago. I thought about it and realized it was Gary Coleman, even though i was pretty sure both did. Instead of saying i "switched universes" or some shit like that, I accepted that I probably remembered wrong. A lot of you need to do the same.

POST: one way to get whatever i want

POST: The day our two hour drive became a ten minute drive

POST: [META] John McAfee plays Russian Roulette

POST: A New Dimension of Thought

POST: [deleted by user]

POST: Question for those who have gone through near death experiences

POST: 11:11 -the numbers in my life for over 25 years

POST: Serious question, do you believe any of the stories here?

POST: My glitch

POST: Everytime I hear some word, suddenly everyone uses this word

POST: Meta-switching realities

POST: [THEORY] Scientists able to make the present determine the past.

POST: How to produce a glitch in the matrix (part 1)

POST: Do any of you really believe that life really is a computer program?

POST: Sudden realization about the universe's nature before falling asleep

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

POST: [X-Post r/MandelaEffect] Myers-Briggs Personality Types

POST: [META] What is the logic behind reality?

POST: [META] Collecting common glitch report themes?

POST: Oranges.

POST: [Theory] Why do we only hear "quantum immortality" stories from the "immortal" person's point of view? Why do we never hear "my loved one had a brush with death and now they insist that Thing used to be way X when it's always been way Y"?

POST: [Meta]Sight/Vision is just a mental hallucination

POST: Did the matrix help me get out of my driving lesson? There's no such thing as a coincidence if you ask me.

POST: Hold your horses.

POST: 'New' house on my old block.

POST: I think God may have finally reached out to me.

Warning