TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 21)

POST: My brother and I witnessed an event that couldn't be explained involving my wife and two other guys that couldn't possibly have been there

Q1: The whole point of parallel realities stemming from the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics is that they are parallel, meaning we can't affect or observe it and they can't affect or observe ours. So that wasn't it.
If the universal waveform split in such a way that that happened, you would never know.
My take as a physics guy.

Q2: But Isn't the entire point of this sub the possibility of "glitches" overcoming the divisions between worlds?

Q1: Possibly. But, to me, the most interesting stories are ones that can't be solved by seemingly any logical explanation. Tossing out the idea that a person experienced such an event that it literally rewrote our entire idea of modern physics seems too far-fetched to me.
Same problem I have with "wormholes" and such.
Could I be wrong? Sure. This is just how I feel as a skeptic and science person.

Q2: Could I be wrong? Sure. This is just how I feel as a skeptic and science person.
I can respect that. Just keep in mind that "our entire idea of modern physics," like any scientific field, is nothing more than the model that best explains our observations. And physics is one field where new observations are being made every day that are getting harder and harder to explain with the model we've been working with.

Q1: Actually, most of our models are doing a bang-up job of explaining everything. The one we need most is quantum gravity and it would solve most of our current observational problems.

Oh, and something for consciousness eh?

The thing with glitches is, they are not repeatable. Physics, naturally, is about accounting for regularity; most of life (lived, experiential life) is not regular on a macro scale, it's a series of one-offs, so the best ones are always going to be unexplainable, even just because you can't get sufficient info. But you never know...

Remember when ball lightning used to be dismissed as people imagining things?

Q3: Not that person, but your ball lightning question reminded me of something I learned recently. The crackling/sizzling sound heard when a meteor is visible does not come from the meteor. Rather, it is produced by objects around you receiving radio waves from the meteor. When people first started to study meteors, the sound was dismissed as imaginary because it was known that sound would not be able to travel from the meteor to the observers in time to be experienced simultaneously.

That's a great little fact - thanks.

Q4: Ya, what you are saying makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. You agree that there might be 'Many Worlds', and that they are parallel, which simply put says that they exist concurrent to are own, like its 3:57am here where I am at, and in the parallel reality it is exactly the same time. So why exactly couldn't something strange, that science simply hasn't seen or heard of yet, have happened that day for a brief moment, like a rift opened up and they were able to observe, and maybe even effect had they gotten out of the car. In that sense, they may have gotten trapped in it. Now before you start spewing sciencey facts at me, let me remind you of something I think even the most brillant people forget about. The Earth itself is moving at over 1,000,000 km/h through the universe. Are you telling me that it isn't possible the our little blue planet doesn't simply 'smash' into dark matter or other strange unknow things that cause peoples 'glitches'. It's actually amazing that it doesn't happen more often if you think about it.

Q1: You agree that there might be 'Many Worlds'
It's an accurate quantum formalism.
which simply put says that they exist concurrent to are own
No, it doesn't. The MWI says that each quantum decision creates it's own branch in the universal waveform, separating the new realities forever. It doesn't mean "concurrent."
like a rift opened up and they were able to observe,
Because causality doesn't work like that and "rifts" of that sort are not backed by any physics or mathematics we know of. It's little more than religious sci-fi.
Are you telling me that it isn't possible the our little blue planet doesn't simply 'smash' into dark matter or other strange unknow things
Dark matter is just some kind of matter that interacts gravitationally but not with electromagnetic fields. Is it possible? Sure. It's also possible there's a duck called Billy that keeps the sun glowing and that nuclear fusion is just his farts. Doesn't mean it's likely.

Multiple Worlds isn't a very persuasive idea either. I'd go as far to say the interpretation isn't very scientific. Where's the benefit between Copenhagen wavefunction collapse or Bohm's deterministic quantum potential?

Dark matter is nonsense too. :-)

The problem with the OP story is there's just no way why it can't happen, but in way to explain if it did. Any "explanation" - rift, shared hallucination, reset - is just another fun bit of storytelling. The answer is always really: don't know.

Q1: It's persuasive in that it's a complete quantum formalism that yields the proper empirical results.
Dark Matter is hardly nonsense. we observe aberrational rotation curves in the arms of our galaxy. There is some gravitational influence.

So is active information, say, if some sort of determinism is what you're secretly after. Really, though, multiple worlds so that all possibilities occur? This problem only arises because discomfort with the original 'collapse' interpretation. The maths is the maths and works anyway (Bohr says: it can't be understood, it just works); trying to make it more palatable and picturable with what really amounts to pseudo-science-fiction tropes is embarrassing.

Dark Matter: The observation is the observation, of course, but whether it is gravitational "influence" or a sign of our present clumsy formulation of gravitation is another matter (excuse the pun). Inventing a brand new type of matter that has not / cannot be observed is fine as a placeholder, of course, but that it is taken so seriously as a possible final solution is a bit poor. What's more likely: an incomplete understanding of gravitation that turns out not to scale well or misses a rotational characteristic, or a mystery hack-job type of matter there's never been any sign of?

(Having a bit of fun here, obviously.)

Until we can empirically separate the formalisms, they are all equal with only metaphysical differences.

Quite so. It's all about which adjective you add to each formulation: "embarrassing", "infinite-speed", "spooky". Fields were "spooky action at a distance". The problem here is that you get the same results, so currently it's a matter of personal preference, of what sits best with your own biases. To me, waveform collapse is story-making, a results of viewing things as "parts" and "steps" and a slight "personification" of the phenomena.

It's a bit more than a placeholder at this point.

It's about inaccessible scales, though, isn't it?

Anyway, we'll see. The boundless enthusiasm everyone has for their 'the end of history' solution is always interesting. I feel that the final (temporarily final, of course) formulation for this will be something else. It just feels "hack-job" and "faith" at the moment. But the fun is in the unfolding of it all.

We know that galaxies cluster along tendrils of invisible heavy mass.

We don't know this at all. We know that galaxies cluster, we don't know about heavy mass. And so on...

POST: The only glitch I've ever experienced; Exactly what happened to me? Did I die?

[POST]

Disclaimer: This might be a long read for some of you, and for that I'm very sorry. I've never told anyone about this and it's been a truly cathartic experience for me, finally being able to let everything out. Once I get home I will probably go back and edit out some of the more unnecessary details just for readability's sake.
When I was a child, I discovered a cool eye-trick that kept me occupied when I was bored. I found out I could bring things into and out of focus by shifting my field of vision from looking 'at' to looking 'through'. To clarify, if I was staring at something like a cereal box, I could 'blur' the text and images until they were unintelligible, then snap everything back into clear focus.
I would practice my secret ability growing up by staring at something and seeing how many consecutive times I could repeat this cycle of blurring and un-blurring before breaking. Over the years, I realized my eyes had developed a sort of unconscious tic where they would lose focus automatically and seemingly vibrate back and forth rapidly. Whenever this happened everything would go blurry for a quick second before returning to normal. I've never been able to catch myself in a mirror and see what it actually looks like, but that's what it feels like. If I were to describe it more, I would say it feels like my eyes are going "bzzt", sort of what you would imagine Jerry the Cat's eyes to look like after having been smacked in the head with an over-sized mallet.
While this tic was worrying the first few times it happened, it was never followed up by a seizure or heart-attack so I never really felt the need to disclose this oddity with anyone.
Fast forward to the ripe age of 22; I had graduated with my B.S. in Comp. Sci and moved back home with my parents until I could hopefully find a job or a paid internship. The year I graduated was my sloth-period. I would wake up at noon, halfheartedly look for start-ups, work on some personal projects I finally had time for, and mostly play all the games my heart desired.
The incident occurred some time in early-mid May of 2007, because I remember the grisly VTech incident had recently happened. I'm not one to pay attention to everyday mundaneness, but I remember this day with crystal clarity, thanks to years of mind-wracking analysis and post-speculation.
One Friday in May I awoke to find, instead of food on the dining table, $30 tucked under a coaster. I checked my phone and my mom had texted me, saying that her and dad had gone to one of their warehouses in Arizona to take care of some urgent business and would be back by Sunday. I checked the fridge, saw hot-pockets, and decided I wanted to eat out. It was at this point I should've realized something was off- what kind of person says no to hot-pockets?!
I made my way, bleary-eyed, to the garage and unlocked my car. Once I got in, I started the ignition, started playing my favorite album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and pulled out of the driveway. Drumming my fingers to the beat of the song, I made my way down to the main road while pondering what to eat (I lived in a small residential community in a low-mountainous area, and it takes 8-10 minutes down a stretch of mostly empty road to get to the first main intersection). I settled on a Double Western Bacon from Carl's Jr so once I got to the first main intersection I got in the left-most lane, flicked on my signal ticker, and waited for the signal to turn yellow.
Then my eyes buzzed.
What I can only describe as a very vague, vignette-effect sort of haze seemed to layer my vision. The light blinked from green to yellow. I shook my head, and blinked hard to clear my vision. The light was going to turn red, so I pivoted and started turning.
I heard what sounded like a boat-horn pierce the air, and what appeared to be, and indeed was a Hummer H2 bearing down on me like a full-powered steam locomotive. Time did not slow down, nor did my life flash in front of my eyes. I only had time to experience what felt like the world's steepest roller-coaster in the pit of my stomach, and think to myself "Oh shit", before the SUV crashed into the side of my compact full force and I felt my body perform a twisted, gruesome marionette-like dance.
Then, as cliché as this may sound, I experienced what I can only describe as a kind of 'intense vibration' start from my head and envelop my body, accompanied by a rushing blindness and a feeling of instantaneous displacement. I blinked- metaphorically I suppose, since I should probably be dead at this point.
I was in my car again, foot planted to the brake and hands on the wheel, fingers mid-drum.
My eyes buzzed.
At that moment a rush of electricity surged through me; at the same time, I was utterly paralyzed. The music started sounding tinny, like it had been submerged in water.
The light turned yellow.
My hands gripped the steering wheel, as a bead of proverbial sweat rolled down my temple.
What the fuck just happened?
The light turned red. What the FUCK is going on? I instinctively closed my eyes as the H2 roared past the intersection, whipping a gust of wind through the open window. The music came back, flooding the deathly quiet intersection.
There were no cars behind me or around me, so I spent a good few minutes at that intersection, foot firmly rooted to the brake and hands still gripping the wheel. I was finally able to un-lock my body enough to shakily finish the journey to the Carl's Jr. parking lot, where I chain smoked until my nerves cooled.
It's been over 7 years since the incident, and I've spent a lot of time thinking on it, wondering exactly what had happened back there.
Was it just a premonition, or did I somehow go back in time?
I so vividly recall the moment of impact and the feeling of being thrown about by a giant, invisible hand- it felt so real to me that I still get goosebumps. I still have no idea what my eye-blurring ability had to do with anything. To this day my eyes still do the involuntary buzzing, but no more "premonitions" or anything of that sort. This was the first and only glitchy occurrence I've experienced.

[END OF POST]

Q: What if we never die? What if, when we die, our consciousness or spirit or whatever is transported to an alternate universe that is identical in every way except for the split between our death? That universe in which we died exists, and we will be mourned, but our consciousness no longer exists in that universe - it now exists in the alternate universe where our death never occurred. What if this happens every time we 'die'?

What if that happens every time we make a decision? What if we are 'extended people' across all possibilities, but we only look through the "viewport" of one possibility at a time. For the other worlds, we are 'philosophical zombies', operating on automatic. We only have free will and influence over our "viewport" world.

This would certainly be quite probably in a many-worlds universe in which me in World A does THIS whereas me in World B does THAT.
What I'm curious to know then is, would all my other "me's" lead drastically different lives, if there is always a "me" that takes an alternate route from me? Shouldn't that make sense?

Imagine that, right now, what you see before you is in fact an image on a screen, depicting this current world-moment. Now imagine that you stand back, and realise that image is actually in a grid of images that stretch infinitely in all directions, containing all possibilities.

Every time you make a choice, you are essentially traversing that grid moment by moment, traversing this 'possibility space'.

It's not quite right to think of there being many of "you". You are not your body; your body is a part of the environment. What "you" are is the conscious awareness that "looks out through" the body, of a particular moment/possibility.

== Wow, that idea will stick with me for probably the rest of my life. As will that visualization of stepping back and seeing a grid of possible lives.==

Yeah, it's my favourite image for this.

If you find that useful, you might be interested in the comments in this post and an attempt to explore the idea in the guise of 'pseudo-time-travel' as a thought experiment here/ (Although the second one is a bit convoluted and mixed into the comments, since it was an attempt to bring out the details via a dialogue.)

Mixed that up with the idea of waking life being a bit like lucid dreaming, and it's quite a powerful idea.

I've entertained the idea that life itself was a mere lucid dream or a simulation perhaps. I don't think that very much anymore, it's an interesting thought but I just get hung up on how vast our universe is with such intricacies, it seems to real to be fake.

Have you had many lucid dreams? They are often more "real" than this experience.

The universe isn't vast, except in your thoughts (neither is it small, though). Your actual daily experience probably covers a few miles at most. And even then, in what sense do you actually move through those miles? Do you go to them, or do they come to you...?

You have to watch and not confuse what you think-about something with what you actually experience of it directly.

It is important to realise that, if you investigate, there is no "underneath" to your experience that you can detect; you are basically dreaming all the time. What you see is what there is, to you. Whether you then think your dream is "inspired by the senses and an external world" or not, your experience would be the same. You can't tell the difference!

This doesn't mean it is "fake"; it just means it (literally) isn't what you think it is.

...

Q1: Thank you for sharing your story. Of course, I have no idea what might have happened! But the "eyes" thing made me think of EMDR, a technique psychiatrists use with PTSD patients and others. In some cases, the eye movement therapy seems to prompt them to go - in their own consciousness (but how else would one "go"?) - into another dimension. You might find it interesting to read about it!

Q2: Thank you for reading! I will look into eye movement therapy and see if I can unearth anything.

The idea is that it helps break the link between traumatic states and certain stimulus. But in a way, that's quite interesting for this too.

...

[QUOTE]

Quantum suicide and immortality:
In quantum mechanics, quantum suicide is a thought experiment, originally published independently by Hans Moravec in 1987 and Bruno Marchal in 1988, and independently developed further by Max Tegmark in 1998. It attempts to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Everett many-worlds interpretation by means of a variation of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, from the cat's point of view. Quantum immortality refers to the subjective experience of surviving quantum suicide regardless of the odds.

[END OF QUOTE]

POST: Déjà Vu: Is it really a thing?

Or, maybe Déjà Vu is a real thing but is wrongly used by the majority of those who use it, and it is much rarer but it does happen...

I think this. People say 'deja vu' when they really mean "that's familiar but I can't quite place it". The experience is stronger than that. It's pretty hard to investigate experimentally or prove though, because it's not a controlled experience: it happens as "part of life". Unless you happen to have written down a dream or prediction, or happen to put aside your surprise to tell your friend "this is about to happen", you can't. And even then, the actual event won't be recorded except as an anecdote. (Plenty of those on 'glitch' I think, if you search.)

Maybe when people start wearing Go-Pro/Google Glass all the time, we'll be able to get some evidence. :-)

Q: Maybe we're all just a part of the Twilight Zone
Jokes aside, it is a real phenomena in our brains. There are theories which explain this physiological reaction. I say that stress causes it in the brain would which results in inability to distinguish different memories and their timelines.. So an old memory overlaps and you may feel like you don't know which is happening.

Sure, there are theories to 'explain it away', for instance:

The psychologist Edward B. Titchener in his book A Textbook of Psychology (1928), explained déjà vu as caused by a person having a brief glimpse of an object or situation, before the brain has completed "constructing" a full conscious perception of the experience. Such a "partial perception" then results in a false sense of familiarity.[1] Scientific approaches reject the explanation of déjà vu as "precognition" or "prophecy", but rather explain it as an anomaly of memory, which creates a distinct impression that an experience is "being recalled".[2][3] This explanation is supported by the fact that the sense of "recollection" at the time is strong in most cases, but that the circumstances of the "previous" experience (when, where, and how the earlier experience occurred) are uncertain or believed to be impossible.

But with no actual research, this is just story-making, rather than a scientific investigation. Plenty of deja-vu reports have the author remembering the source, or being able to anticipate events in advance as it unfolds - beyond simply 'feeling familiar'. A pretty hard thing to do research on, mind.

POST: clear plastic lunchbox like thingy through which you can see stuff

[POST]

Hi, I am new to reddit and not sure where to post but this place seems suitable enough. Years ago when I was around 6, there were two sisters in my school bus who always had this clear plastic lunchbox like thingy through which you can see stuff. If you held the lid of that box in front of you, you could see a 'film' being played. Not like on a television, but as if you are watching through a lightly tinted glass. The lid had to be held in different angles, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I only looked through it a few times but remember two films very clearly. Once there was a man who was sitting in his office writing on a paper. There were grey blinds in the backdrop, a pencil holder and a woman standing beside him. After a while, (seconds?) the man turned to talk to the female (no audio). The other time it was just a flower swaying in the wind. I saw more but I can't recall. They were always videos/films, never a mere image. Also, the films were always different. I remember asking my parents to buy me one of those boxes (they had no idea what it was). At that time, I didn't think much if it. We moved and I eventually forgot about it. Maybe it is a toy or something which I am not aware of but I never came across anything like it again. I Googled too but to no avail. I thought I'd post here to see if you guys have any idea. Thanks.

[END OF POST]

Are they lenticular images? The surface shows a different image depending on the angle you view it at. Changing the angle makes the picture "move" as you go through the images.

See quick video on lenticular images on bookmarks, for instance [deleted]. Used to get them on rulers, lunch boxes, stickers, mousepads, etc.

[QUOTE]

Lenticular printing:
Lenticular printing is a technology in which lenticular lenses (a technology that is also used for 3D displays) are used to produce printed images with an illusion of depth, or the ability to change or move as the image is viewed from different angles.
Examples of lenticular printing include flip and animation effects such as winking eyes, and modern advertising graphics that change their message depending on the viewing angle. This technology was created in the 1940s but has evolved in recent years to show more motion and increased depth. Originally used mostly in novelty items and commonly called "flicker pictures" or "wiggle pictures," lenticular prints are now being used as a marketing tool to show products in motion. Recent advances in large-format presses have allowed for oversized lenses to be used in lithographic lenticular printing.

Image i - Close-up of the surface of a lenticular print.

[END OF QUOTE]

No, it wasn't a lenticular image. The plastic lid played short clips without any interruption, they weren't pictures. The clips were very clear unlike lenticular images, just a little tinged. Thank you for replying though.

Interesting. Definitely my best effort. So, you didn't have to move the box while the 'video' was playing? Only to get the best angle for viewing?

How long ago was this?

Yes, just the right angle would do. Maybe something to do with the light? It was mid 90s. I know it is very long ago but I remember both the scenes like it was yesterday. It really bugs me not knowing what the heck it was. :|

Hmm, annoying. It can't be really a 'video clip', technology-wise. Maybe it is lenticular-related, but it "played" in some way. I really want to know now. I was a bit beyond "lunchbox age" at the time though. Going to have to ask about!

POST: Knocked unconscious, mysteriously moved way further than was possible from fall

[POST]

First time post, been reading lots of stories on here and finally I remembered my very own Glitch in the Matrix I experienced when I was younger but didn't care to think much of it at the time. It happened during recess in the 4th Grade. There's a jungle gym located right around a corner of the school, there's doors close to the corner that lead right out to a large blacktop area that extended the length of a football field, like a big square, with basketball courts and tetherball courts. The jungle gym around the corner is to the right 40 feet if you walk out the doors. And there's a much BIGGER jungle gym with swing sets that are located on the FAR side of it. This bigger jungle gym's perimeter begins 40 ft. to the left of the doors. So my friends and I were playing tag across the entire playground, it made the game more challenging and fun with this much space to run around, more places to escape to, run around, and lots of kids you could easily hide yourself amongst. I was hiding out in the playground around the corner at the very top, looking out for potential 'taggers.' Suddenly one of friends who is "it" spots me just as I'm about to climb down. I scurry down the ladder, run around the jungle gym, and make it out onto the blacktop. My friend is hot on my trail, and I corner it and begin heading to the larger jungle gym. I'm not half way across the width of this last basketball court when I see a girl from my class out of the corner of my eye. This girl has anger issues, everyone thought she was annoying, always asking dumb questions that were already explained, acted like a dog in class, just plain weird, (personally I think she had some form of autism, but we were kids, didn't really care.) But she's running at me in a pursuit angle with her arms out in front of her. I saw it coming, but I didn't stop sprinting because my friend was behind me. BAM! (She was a lot bigger than me.) I remember going airborne for what seems a split second, I see the world upside down, feel gravity take hold, then instant black. I had hit my head on the concrete on what couldn't have been less than 10 feet away from the edge of the jungle gym where the woodchips began... I emerge from the blackness dazed at first. I'm on my back sprawled out ALL the way on the woodchips on the FAR side of the jungle gym right in front of the middle of the swing set. I could have maybe believed waking up on the woodchips toward the edge of the jungle gym, but I was over by the swings... Unless I had flown over the entire jungle gym, there was no way I could have rolled unconsciously all the way through a large, connected jungle gym that has all the walkways, several slides, stair cases, tunnels, the whole shebang... I had hit my head on the concrete which must've been 180 feet away from where I awoke. It had seemed really strange to awaken at that spot, but I quickly overlooked the fact as I asked the kids who surrounded me what happened. I asked how long I was out and a kid said, "I dunno like 30 seconds..." He was just staring at me with caution as I had just been knocked out. Other kids attested to his account. I asked "What happened?" (Just to be sure what I remember from before waking up was true.) The kids told me that I had hit my head on the concrete and blacked out. But I never asked how it was possible that I had moved that far from the place where I simply hit my head on the concrete, and how I moved that far in that amount of time. I grabbed my friend, sat down at a table and continued to gather my thoughts, the small throng of kids had broken up, and no teachers had noticed the incident. (Which is really weird because there is usually a few teachers out on the blacktop watching kids, they surely would've noticed a kid lying unconscious on the blacktop or near the edge of it.) My friend asked me if I'm alright, I tell him I'm fine then decide to grab a teacher just to be safe. I tell the teacher I had been pushed down on the blacktop then had awoken over by the swing set. All she did was ask about who did it, what was going on, and she checked my pupils. But I was born with different sized pupils so she couldn't really tell if I was concussed I guess. So, all the while in the back of my head I keep thinking that's just weird how I got all the way over to the swing set lying stretched out on my back, in under 30 seconds unconsciously, surrounded by like 15 kids who had been eagerly waiting for me to come to. I couldn't have been knocked out too long or else someone would've gotten a teacher. And no one mentioned that girl who had pushed me. No one mentioned how my rag doll of a body came to be over by the swing set. But I figured that's not the important information right now. So my teacher and I go find the girl that pushed me, she's blushing with guilt. She doesn't fess up but instead starts trying to back herself up. She gets taken to the principals office by a teacher, but I couldn't help but feel bad for whatever reason... I mean I wasn't in any pain (yet), I felt pretty okay, and honestly thought it was kind of cool, it was my first ever knock out (except given to me by a girl.) Maybe it was cause I thought she didn't "know better," but I ended up having a grudge for the sprained ankle I'd get and the crutches is have to be on. I end up going to the hospital, get scans, they determine I have a concussion, and I sprained an ankle from the incident. All I remember was being upside down hitting my head, and my ankle didn't hurt until later that day. But still the question lingers in my mind, how did I just seem to "transport" across a jungle gym. I doubt that girl would've been able to pick me up, carry me across the jungle gym (in under what must've been 30 seconds) without getting weird looks from teachers and kids. I mean that playground is filled with the entire 4th grade of the school. It doesn't really bother me since it happened 8 years ago, it's just one of those unexplained glitches of the Matrix I guess... no logical answer other than a glitch or "jump" in the system. Does kind of bother me know that I'm thinking about it a lot though. I KNOW I shouldn't have landed that far away from where I hit my head but I never asked for my "tagger" friends account of it even though I felt I should've, something made me think otherwise... I blame my young mind for not really caring for all the logical details, but maybe it was the Matrix making me think otherwise. I don't know. Won't be explained, just wanted to share my unconscious teleportation glitch.

[END OF POST]

But I was born with different sized pupils so she couldn't really tell if I was concussed I guess.

Basically, you were born concussed:

In a few decades' time, you are going to suddenly 'snap' back to being lying there on the concrete, all those years having been an instant dream.

Or, in a few hours' time, you are going to suddenly 'snap' and you will find yourself aged 35, lying in bed with your arms around "that girl with anger issues", having been awoken by the gentle crying of your new-born son in the adjacent room, then telling her you had the craziest dream starting from back when you two first got together, when you collided at the gym that day.

POST: I found this interesting.

[POST]

I am sorry if this has been posted before. I found a video in Youtube from 1977 about glitches in the matrix. [http://youtu.be/jXeVgEs4sOo]

[END OF POST]

I love that.

People might also enjoy his essay How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later - available here [http://yin.arts.uci.edu/%7Estudio/readings/dick/index.html] - which is very glitchy after the halfway mark when it mentions his book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said with an interpretation similar to that referenced in the video.

Meanwhile, the transcript for that conference session is available here [https://ia601907.us.archive.org/16/items/PhilipKDickSpeechExcerpts/PhilipKDick_Speech.txt].

Q1: Thanks for that link.
In the latter part of that video he ad-libs some bits that don't show up in the transcript:
"We live in a computer-programmed reality and thre only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs we would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present perhaps in precisely the same way hearing the same words saying the same words and I submit that these impressions are valid and significant and I will even say this: such an impression is a clue that at some past time point a variable was changed -- reprogrammed, as it were -- and that, because of this, an alternative world branched off... " - Phillip K Dick

Well spotted! That ties the two together nicely.

Q2: I've read this guys books Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (aka Blade Runner ) and Valis. He has some very interesting literature and I strongly implore you to read it. Maybe not Valis though, that was just weird and it was known the main character is supposed to be him. He had a lot of LSD. But still, so did Alan Watts and he was a very lucid person. In fact, he claims LSD was a shortcut to nirvana for some people and allowed them to see beyond the limitations of the confinement of their minds.
I am yet to try LSD...

Q3: While I'm not opposed to hallucinogens, there is no shortcut to nirvana. And there is a much, much more severe chance of psychological distortion with drugs than most other paths to nirvana, or whatever that word means to you.
Alan Watts had many amazing things to say, but he drank himself to death. This is not what a person free from suffering and clinging does.

Hmm. I was looking into that (gurus, enlightenment, simulations and the like). Info dump:

Alan Watts was a funny one. He was great to read and listen to, and he did say he was a "philosophical entertainer" rather than an actual philosopher or Zen buddhist. A guy who knew him wrote this [https://web.archive.org/web/20120513200444/https://leroywatson4.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/alan-watts-scoundrel-or-spiritual-entertainer/], which seems like an honest assessment, excess wives and booze and all!

Thing is though, enlightenment itself doesn't necessarily change your character [https://paidtoexist.com/enlightenment-is-overrated/], apparently (see fallacies [https://web.archive.org/web/20140325044045/http://lovebliss.eu/fallacies-about-enlightenment.html]). Nisargadatta Maharaj, of I Am That fame, ran a tobacco shop for a living and died of throat cancer. Similarly others. See here [https://www.facebook.com/JoanTollifson/posts/434342306638108].

All enlightenment is, is seeing that how you think about the world is a fiction, and perceiving that directly. You can do the Douglas Harding experiments in ten minutes and see it for yourself. It won't make you a better person instantly or less grumpy even necessarily, although you might have greater compassion because 'everything seems to be part of you', and it will change your perspective, literally.

This stuff is all fun to think about, and weird experiences are cool, but in the end I think it doesn't matter much. This might all be a dream/simulation, but we're in it and are bound to its rules. We can stop identifying with our "simulation character" though, then treat it as an "experience machine" and revel in it.

(To any "seekers" I'd say: Do the Harding experiments, use the new perspective to stay relaxed and alert during your day and get on with your life, making the most of opportunities that arise for new experiences. If you still feel the urge, read Presence by Rupert Spira or The Direct Path by Greg Goode or Douglas Harding's own Head Off Stress - then resume. Still dissatisfied and want something more kooky? Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners, to help things along.)

. . . enlightenment without understanding its coincidence with personal change is like . . . This perception is enlightening, but not enlightenment.

It's a matter of definition though. You can truly understand and experience the nature of the world, but it doesn't necessarily improve your character. That's something you have to work at, perhaps. These are two different things, as I see it.

You might be better to call it 'realisation' (seeing clearly how things are) and then something like 'integration' (where you dissolve the boundaries).

You can 'realise' and still have very much a person-based experience, but now within a new context. Changing that experience is something you can focus on through self (small 's') examination, although I'd say that change does happen by itself gradually as identification loosens somewhat. Increased connection and so compassion, etc. But it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be all "pure living", I'd suggest?

I just came across this which had interest, maybe [https://web.archive.org/web/20140818031838/https://oeith.co.uk/2014/08/05/on-retreat-with-alan-chapman/].

(1) Awakening ≥ (2) Liberation ≥ (3) Enlightenment

Where "awakening" would correspond to what I termed "enlightenment" in my post. Achieving a non-dual perspective is not equivalent to 'freedom of the personal self', fair enough.

...

This is exactly true. I want out.

But those steaks are just so damn tasty...

Thing is, when you get out you might find you are... Dwayne [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVupRsbx8UM] - Dibbley [deleted]...

POST: glitch

[POST]

This happens like once a month for me but occasionally, I'll be going about my day and for whatever reason, I'll need my mother and she is normally in her room. When the time comes to go find her, she is nowhere to be found. Both cars are always in the garage, I now make sure to check all the bathrooms (despite the fact that the lights are always off), and she isn't in any room in the house. But then I always return to the kitchen, call her, and she comes out of her room asking what I need, claiming she was in her room watching tv the whole time, and my dad normally agrees. Not as intense as a lot of these stories but this as happened to me too many times for me to not post it on here. When I told my mom about this happening, she just laughs it off. I told one of my internet friends and he thinks I can travel to different dimensions, but it's out of my control...

[END OF POST]

If she was quietly reading/watching TV, etc, it might be that she's just "gone quiet", like in this story. People have practiced this technique to be invisible (really: be less noticeable), apparently.

Your mother is therefore a ninja.

But most of the time, the tv won't even be on..

Then all the quieter...!

Unless you mean she says she was watching TV and it wasn't on. Is that what you were getting at?

Yeah like after I'm done looking and she says she's in her room, I'll go to her room and she'll be lying down watching tv like she was there the whole time. But when I look in her room, before calling for her, the tv will be off unless my dad is watching something.

Very interesting! So it's more like she's off somewhere else completely. Bizarre!

(Which, of course, is the point of this subreddit.)

There are quite a few "people going invisible" glitches though, suggesting that maybe there is more of a something-going-on rather than just the usual randomness.

POST: The I Ching Becomes Opposite

Q1: There's a theory that when this happens it's because we accidentally switched universes to one that's almost the same but slightly different. Our memories of the old universe remain but through our experience we notice the differences.
However that's just a casual jokey theory to explain this.
What it is more likely to be is that our memory isn't as set in stone as we like to think it is. It can be very malleable and we can be completely convinced that we're right even when we're completely wrong. Look up false memories.
I think one of the reasons this happens is that we experience things linearly but our memories related to an experienced event are affected by memories and experiences from our past and the future.
[http://www.unisci.com/stories/20012/0613011.htm]

Q2: Yes, this could be true, that's the entire nature of a glitch though, because of this we never have proof, we never have enough evidence even if pictures were taken, something would happen to where the pictures would disappear, or the camera would, or the SD card would, etc etc and on and on, in the end this is why it's always happened this way. If a glitch left a trace of evidence, we'd have the answer we so desperately need, and it won't be a glitch any longer, it'd be explained fully and no longer a mystery. Then there'd be no need for this reddit.

Indeed. The principle of 'self-consistency' means that the changes are always coherent with the rest of the experience. The only thing retained is your memory of the previous way, and if your lucky you share that with another person.

Of course, it's probably happening constantly with nobody having the previous memory.

At each moment, the world is re-created from scratch, taking everything into account over all time and space. Which is nice. But how to harness this?

I wish I knew

Intentionally switching universes.

I wonder if people have glitch stories where they are aware of some 'cause' rather than it just happening. The website realityshifters.com has stories that are basically glitches, but some of them imply someone doing things deliberately. But then it's like 'magick'.

Q3: Which is nice. But how to harness this?
Keep checking those lottery tickets even if you know that you lost?

Surely the other way around:

• Step 1: "Know" that you won.
• Step 2: Check those lottery tickets.

Q3: not if we're talking about glitches in the matrix. The OP knew from experience that how to read the i ching the right way. But hen the universe changed and it became the wrong way.
So the op might've bought lotto tickets and lost. Then later the universe might've changed and the same lotto ticket's numbers might now be the winning combination.

I follow you. Of course. The whole point is that your 'knowledge' has stayed the same before you discover that the 'world' has changed.

POST: [deleted by user]

These things can "just happen", apparently [https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/oct/12/experience-head-injury-musical-prodigy]. Perhaps knowledge is "accessed" rather than acquired, and the "learning process' is actually just one of relaxation and acceptance of one's innate talent.

Rupert Sheldrake's "morphic responance" theory holds it that once something is learned by a group of people, it becomes easier for others to learn it. As if the universe operates according to "acquired habits" with persistence. (He references rats negotiating a maze in one part of the world making it easier for others elsewhere. Also, scientists trying to grow a particular crystal structure, very difficult. But once one lab succeeds, other labs find it much easier suddenly.)

I guess it's just amazing the way the brain works, I know I'll never fully understand it hahaha

hahaha, indeed!

POST: What are shared hallucinations? [x-post /r/Psychonaut]

[POST]

I kicked meth over a year ago, but something has puzzled me about my experiences back in those days. Back then I would tweak with a group of friends, and we would play this game. When amphetamine psychosis set in, when the hallucinations really started getting interesting, I would write down on a piece of paper what I was seeing, point to the spot, and have my friends tell me what they saw. Then I'd show them the paper. 90% of the time it was, detail for fucking detail, the exact same things. Whenever something startling would happen, say a grotesque meth monster appeared out of nowhere, we would all jump at the same time because we all were exploring this alternate reality together!
How could these be hallucinations?
We came up with a theory. Perhaps the brain functions as a radio receiver of sorts, and our perception of reality is the station we're tuned into most of the time. Something about the combination of sleep deprivation and dopamine/serotonin receptor over-stimulation must allow us to "tune into" other stations (dimensions) and allow us to glimpse into them without leaving our own. Edit: Kind of like an oldschool knob-turn radio halfway between two stations, receiving parts of both transmissions.
I dunno. It all sounds stupid now that I type it out. But I have no other way of explaining my experiences back then. Help?

[END OF POST]

A1: If it's a shared experience, it's not a hallucination, because hallucinations are entirely subjective. As such, there can be no such thing as a mass-hallucination either.
When you mess around with brain chemistry, you can get all sorts of weird sensory effects. Just look at the Erowid Experience Vaults. There are a lot of similar observations made when using the same substance, like the famous DMT elves.
That's not to say that people cannot be suggestible, we are, and many of us will lie about things to fit into a group; from laughing at a joke you don't get or claiming to see the same religious figure floating mid-air; because we often don't want to be excluded. And while it can be difficult to detect when intoxicated, when sober its easier to notice a longer delay (or suspicious lack of one) in response time.

Shared experience - that's better. Basically, it's like having a shared dream, as a bubble in your waking world.

...

Oops, looks like our guy sapped out. I was going to reply:

"Depends on the level of detail. But I agree that people can fall "into synch". The level of the "synch" though, is fascinating itself. If everyone really does hallucinate the same monster, with the same face, and the same everything, then that's amazing and more than just "predictability" that could be accounted for by a shared history leading up to that moment."

POST: Eerily accurate prediction on /x/

[POST]

==Sorry about this post being "ripped from the headlines" of the annoying world of internet drama, but it was just too bizarre and creepy not to share. This is not a post about the ongoing online drama itself, that's just the backdrop to something strange I noticed.
To start with, I'm shamelessly addicted to watching pointless internet drama unfold, so naturally I've been following the gamergate/4chan/fappening fiascos from start to finish. To me, the recent situation with Emma Watson and 4chan was especially interesting. Here's a quick rundown for those who are unfamiliar, and pay close attention to the dates that everything happened. I provided links for proof of these dates:

• 9/21/2014: Emma Watson's UN Feminism speech is posted on youtube here. It goes viral.
• 9/21/2014: EmmaYouAreNext.com is created (supposedly by 4chan) threatening to reveal Emma Watson's nudes. A site called FoxWeekly is the first website to post a story about it.
• 9/23/2014: The mainstream media starts running stories about 4chan's horrible EmmaYouAreNext website.
• 9/24/2014: Evidence surfaces on 4chan that EmmaYouAreNext.com was actually created by a company called Rantic Marketing.
• 9/25/2014: Shortly after the evidence is posted, EmmaYouAreNext.com re-directs to Rantic Marketing's home page with this message calling for the shut down of 4chan
  Still with me? Good. This is the weird part I can't really explain. I'll use links to archive.4plebs, a website that automatically archives posts with their original time stamps.
  On Tuesday, I was browsing /x/, 4chan's paranormal board. Mostly it's a bunch of people posting creepypasta and spooky pictures. I noticed a post called "Looking for Anon?" that said the following:
  "Well this is more than a long shot but an Anon on here months maybe even a year ago was supposedly predicting the future.
  He said that he seen the End of 4Chan. This is the only bit of info I remember unfortunately. But he said he remembered the very last picture ever posted on 4Chan and drew it. Was a very badly drawn reaction face.
  Few weeks later I seen the real picture, was a reaction image of Emma Watson making a face wearing yellow but the /x/ thread was gone.
  He predicted a bunch of fucked up shit I completely forget. But with all this Gamergate, and Fappening2 shit happening at the same time. Keep an eye out for Emma Watson if we get shut down.
  Cause then you'll know /x/ is real."
  Once more for emphasis- "Keep an eye out for Emma Watson if we get shut down"
  One anon found the thread the OP was referencing in the 4plebs archive here. It was posted almost a year ago, on 11/9/2013. It's about a guy who claimed his computer was glitching out and showing him brief glimpses of future webpages and news sites. He said he'd seen "the last posts that will ever happen on 4chan". When asked about the last post on 4chan, he said that it was a reaction image posted under a message from moot (the site owner) about the site shutting down. He tried to draw what he remembered of the reaction image here. Posters said it looked like one of these two reaction images, both of which are of Emma Watson.
  Here's where things get weird, so please verify all of these timestamps so you know I'm not making this up. The post I first stumbled upon titled "Looking for Anon?" was posted on Saturday 9/20/2014, the day before Emma Watson's video was even posted. You can view the archived post with the timestamp here. What are the odds the someone would link Emma Watson directly to the attempted shutdown of 4chan the day before her initial Feminism video was even posted? Know about the fake website devoted to her the day before it went up? That in 2 days, the mainstream media would take the story and run with it? That in 5 days, the whole scheme would be revealed as a self-admitted undercover plan using Emma Watson to shut down 4chan? All of this, based on a vague, year-old post?
  Could this really be a coincidence? Or could it be something more...==

[END OF POST]

A Google search-by-image on that image -

• there's nothing older than a day available. Is the image you linked to meant to be a new "recalled image" or is it meant to be the original attempt?

EDIT: This is one of the first things to appear on /r/glitch that could potentially be proved by third parties. How exciting eh? I don't see why Rantic would bother. I'd say it's a glitch already in the sense that the overall idea appeared a year ago, and this has played out in the Rantic campaign. It doesn't correspond exactly, but sufficiently. But, y'know, I need to see the image as posted a year ago eh... ;-)

That's the original 2013 poster's recreation of what he remembered the last 4chan post was. He supposedly recreated it from memory. This [https://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/13693414/#13693509] is the direct link to that archived post.

Ah, right, I wasn't clear from the wording. She's one purty laydee, such golden hair! I like a girl where you can never tell what she's thinking - or where she's looking!

So, as in, his recreation in 2013 of the image.

POST: Phone glitch

[POST]

I was at a cousins house messing around in his recording 'studio' (just his bedroom with sound proofing material).
I was recording random bits of my voice and using effects, I was alone in the house as he went to get food so it was completely quiet.
I hear my iPhone ringtone but think to myself 'that can't be mine it's on silent and vibration is off'
I decide to check and I had a missed call, I missed it by seconds.
There's no way it could have been anyone else, no other house around for miles and I was alone, did I somehow 'know' I had a call?

[END OF POST]

I have this too. Moment's before I get a new message on whatsapp, I sense it and look at the screen of my phone.

You're just picking up the high-pitched electronic noise. Your phone has received the message before it updates the screen / makes the alert. (Like knowing a TV is on in the house, etc.)

Holy shit man, reality is collapsible.

Reality is just one big origami project, everyone knows that, simply pick a colour and a number...

POST: Looking for actual tiny glitches to determine if we live in a Matrix

[POST]

FermiLab is running an experiment to determine if we live in a holographic universe. As I read it, they are essentially looking for glitches at the tiniest scale possible.

[END OF POST]

Q1: Something tells me consciousness is the glitch

See philosophical zombies and solipsism, but it's not necessarily both. If we each experience a 'dream world' where everyone is a character, then we too in that world are a 'dream character' - we are actually the dreamer and the dream, and "I" and its body is dreamt also.

With this approach, everyone is a 'zombie' including you, it's just that you are also the dream viewpoint, through the main 'viewport'.

Alternatively, this is shared dream, with most of the people being 'aspects of you' but some of them being viewports for other consciousnesses. This means many dreams, with sometimes only one viewport character - meaning everyone's desired experiences can be accommodated.

Note that here we are not just dealing with "your mind" but "the mind", the mind associated with the dream world, or "ideational space", to borrow a lucid dreaming term.

(Re: "Brains" are just images that you see in the dream. Nobody really has, or is run by, a "brain" - only mind/consciousness, which is fundamental.)

[QUOTE]

Solipsism:
Solipsism (i/ˈsɒlɨpsɪzəm/; from Latin solus, meaning "alone", and ipse, meaning "self") is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist.

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've been thinking about this since I was 9...

You must be exhausted by now! Move on to something else?

Q2: The way I like seeing it. We're all the main characters in our own movies. To others we're nothing but the creepy extra staring out the window watching the bus stop.

u/torilikefood: I like making guest appearances in other people's nights, but I don't like to be the center of attention. Let them have their light.

Do all your dreams start with "Previously on torilikefood..." ?

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.

See also The Patterning of Experience.

You clearly only skimmed what I wrote. But thank you for proposing the same tired theory Ive heard for decades that has no bearing on the evidence I submitted. I sort of expected this.

No, you clearly only skimmed. What I describe isn't Bader-Meinhoff or the like. By "formatting your mind" I don't mean you are pattern-searching. You are not filtering experience from what is there; you are filtering experience from all possibilities. Read it properly before moping or thinking you're special. ;-)

I adjusted the link phrasing a little to make that clearer.

I'm neither moping nor special. in fact, bringing up a theory someone has heard a thousand times before makes you the one who thinks they've hit on something special and original! It doesnt fit my experiences. But thanks for the suggestion. Again.

Really, so what is the theory I'm proposing? You definitely didn't read those links. I'm suggesting that you have accidentally selected your future events according to a pattern, formatted your own future path, to an extreme degree. There is no power outside of you making it happen. The more you encounter a pattern, the more you notice a pattern, the stronger the selection is. The pattern affects things 4-dimensionally, even though you only encounter it one moment at a time. You end up looking around just at the exact moment a pattern is there. Reading material and conversations are centred around the pattern. Actually are centred around the pattern - it's not just a case of you noticing. Numbers are the easily recognised one, but any pattern or relationship behaves the same way, once you get into it.

The implication? That your experiences and thoughts actually select your later experiences. The inevitable conclusion is that you to some extent live in your own private universe - a subjective idealist reality - which is effectively an extension to your own mind. And the more you focus, the more you end up in situations which give you more of the same. You might find this interview with Kirby Surprise (great name) interesting. His book Synchronicity is probably the only one worth reading on the topic.

EDIT: Seriously, I don't mean to be snippy. What you are experiencing is what genuine full-effect synchronicity looks like. I've been generating it deliberately lately. It's like cutting a whole in your reality filter and suddenly new sets of events, new parts of the universe, manage to leak through.

Look, when I tell you I know these theories already, I'm not putting it lightly. I don't believe in the synchronicity thing and I see no rational evidence anywhere that I have any ability to influence future events. This requires an almost supernatural belief in things that can't be proven. I do appreciate the attempt, believe me, but it doesnt work for me.

Well, synchronicity is maybe not a great term for it, given its misuse these days, but there's not really a better term I'm aware of. By synchronicity I mean "collections of experiences arising over time which are of the same pattern". And it's not an explanation, it's an observation of a pattern.

Look, I've tried everything in this area too and after experimenting with it, and as far as I can see any useable model requires that we introduce some temporal landscape concept. Although we experience things moment-by-moment, that's not how it's laid out behind the scenes.

I know:

• It's not hallucination.
• If you deliberately attempt to create synchronicity, you can.
• It seems like pattern-selection in a 4D environment.

It's not supernatural. It's not God. It's not other beings. It's not a simulation. It's not "you" in the sense of making deliberate choices. It's not influencing future events as such. It's more like simple, mechanical, automatic perceptual pattern filtering across space-time.

I'm not downvoting. Never do. And I see you took this personally.

To me it's just an interesting phenomenon that most people have to some extent, and it seems we can deliberately increase its occurrence (and I've been getting people to do that). I guess it's been a bit more meaningful in your life than that - so perhaps I seemed offhand and disrespectful. Apologies if so (sincerely).

Ok, show me the scientific evidence that this sentence is true.

As you'll have noticed, there is no way to measure this objectively other than through the experiences of people, so designing a study is problematic (I've considered doing this). At the moment it's restricted to personal investigation. But, why don't you (by which I mean "everyone") do your own experimentation? It's easy to do. Choose a particular pattern, get really absorbed in it, notice how it appears in ways that can't be explained by just noticing stuff, notice how it is self-reinforcing. The best fit so far that fits the experience and isn't "the matrix did it" is there is some filtering process going on. Others (Dr Surprise) have proposed that a model based on string theory might be able to account for it in principle because it can take in the higher dimensional component. I find it a bit of a stretch, personally.

I'm not ignoring you, I have to dash out for awhile. I will adress further posts of yours later. Look, I dont want to make an enemy of you and I have no wish to fight or have it devolve into insults as happens too often on reddit. I just see it differently. I can get that you can make a self-fulfilling prophecy. The man who is convinced he is going to die will find a way to make it happen. Look at Jim Carey. Wrote himself a check for a million or something and kept it in his wallet, believing one day it would be real, one day he'd have a success big enough to match it. And then he did. He claims it was synchronicity. I say he gave himself the confidence and that confidence made the difference. But that's totally different than affecting electronic devices or graffiti on walls. Anyway, Im open to talk, but when I return.

Yeah, that's why "synchronicity" has become a difficult word for this, it's got all these connotations. What I'm using it to describe is just the basic observation:

Similar patterns arise repeatedly over time, in both thought and senses, in ways that seem unconnected except that they have the same pattern. The "matrix" explanation does have the idea we need, which is: That behind the moment-by-moment sensory experience we have, there's a larger world. This doesn't need to be some supernatural or computer based thing, though. Philosophers have previously suggested views that offer the same essential idea (Immanuel Kant, to an extent George Berkeley, etc). The basic idea being:

• There is the world as it really is.
• There is our experience of the world.
• The form of our experience isn't necessarily the same as the world as it truly is.

In Kant's description (here's an okay summary here [https://web.archive.org/web/20130516095302/http://philosophynow.org/issues/95/Kant_at_the_Bar_Transcendental_Idealism_in_Daily_Life]), things like space and time are part of the senses. It is the mind that formats the world into "spaces" and "moments". The world as it is, is all-at-once and everything-everywhere. Just a load of "facts" dissolved into the background.

From Wikipedia:

The salient element here is that space and time, rather than being real things-in-themselves or empirically mediated appearances (German: Erscheinungen), are the very forms of intuition (German: Anschauung) by which we must perceive objects. They are hence neither to be considered properties that we may attribute to objects in perceiving them, nor substantial entities of themselves. They are in that sense subjective, yet necessary, preconditions of any given object insofar as this object is an appearance and not a thing-in-itself. Humans necessarily perceive objects as located in space and in time. This condition of experience is part of what it means for a human to cognize an object, to perceive and understand it as something both spatial and temporal. . .
. . .Kant's view is better characterized as a two-aspect theory, where noumena [world as it is] and phenomena [world as sensed] refer to complementary ways of considering an object.
-- Transcendental Idealism, Wikipedia

This opens the possibility that just as patterns arise across a spatial environment and our mind picks them out (that's what seeing objects really is), so patterns can appear across time and our mind picks them out (that's what events are). Most of the assumptions we make about our perception being direct are obviously wrong but we never really notice. It's only when "crazy things" seem to happen that we realise there must be more going on. That applies to spatial environments - can the same be true of the 'temporal environment'?

Are we effectively pre-filtering "moments of experience" that correspond to patterns? We don't do this deliberately though, it's just an automatic thing. The more you are exposed to a pattern, the more your "perceptual filter" lets that in. The illusion of time passing makes us think that it's a miracle. In a way, saying "it's the matrix" isn't all that bad if what we're really saying is: The universe is actually made from dimensionless information, and we navigate it by pattern searching. We don't cause the future, it's just a natural filtering mechanism that makes it seem to line up.

EDIT: Just to add, the idea behind this subreddit is to "explore together" to find interesting and useful explanations for odd things, whether based on current knowledge or left-field thinking. Very few people are here just to be "right". Most are just here to be interested/ing.

If that were possible, I could have altered reality hundreds of times in my favor.

Yeah, I'm with you there.

You can filter your experiences that correspond to your thoughts (it seems) - and unlikely examples might then take place - but that's not the same as creating them. You are just filtering what's already there. I've played quite a lot with trying to make things happen. You can make your life appear to fit patterns, but that's different to summoning a nice new Ferrari out of thin air. I do see owls everywhere though.

...

I got really beat up for making this post and I just assumed it was more of the same.

Actually, I think everyone loved the post. They just didn't like your approach towards their discussion.

For glitches, by definition, there is no scientific theory yet, perhaps because we need some new concepts, perhaps because they're hard to study in a controlled environment. Sometimes all we have is 'rational philosophy' (which is what physics came from, after all). Everyone in this subreddit is just exploring possible ideas, bouncing ideas off each other. It's not "all about OP".

In my case, you mistook a rational metaphysical idea (which has roots in established philosophy) as being a non-rational spiritual one, and then gave it some major attitude. You don't have to like an idea, but the point here is to discuss it ("that doesn't work for me because..." or "what about this?") and make some progress. Maybe this subject was just too emotional for you to explore like this, understandably.

This place is normally much more easy-going, honestly - I hope you'll stick around. Grounded skeptics are needed to balance out the science-category-recyclers and the philosopher-theorists!

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A1: You aren't moping you just come across like you reject anything you've "heard" before so you dismiss it entirely

Q: I think most people dismiss things they have investigated before and come up with a dead end from. If you want to color that as moping, that's on you. Not me.

Well, given my first comment was a kinda enthusiastic one (basically I was saying "you too!", check this out) and I basically agreed with you, your response was kinda crap - especially since you obviously don't really get the idea behind it. The fact that you seem to have concluded that something external to yourself causes it is... a sign that you really haven't experimented properly with it and got to grips with the subtleties. It doesn't take much work to prove that's not the case.

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Prometheus Rising
By: Robert Anton Wilson

Man, I read that so long ago. Is that the one with "reality tunnels"?

Yes, a big part of the book talks about reality-tunnels. Your comment reminded me of an exercise from chapter one where you focus on a quarter until you find one in your environment. It's not every day that I get to link to RAW so I felt compelled to throw it in there.

Right! I remember that now! There's a hundred different ways to say the same thing, I suppose, but each way needs to be said for someone.

I don't think I ever did the exercise. I guess the "owls" are the new "quarters". I think there was another book, Quantum Psychology, which had a language which omitted "I". E-Prime. Quite a thought-provoking read too.

You're right, excellent read! Although I believe E-Prime was meant to omit "is" rather than "I". You mentioned a book called Synchronicity which I keep hearing about randomly but have yet to check out. I suppose now is the time. Thanks!

Right, it was to omit the "is" of identity!

Synchronicity / Kirby Surprise: I initially found the book a bit self-contradictory, but actually it's more that it's intellectually honest and aims to explore possible angles rather than claim a solution. Check out the interview first and you get a pretty thorough idea. Watch out for owls.

...

I just thought of something before going to sleep. Maybe your mom is influencing the other person's thoughts when winning those arm wrestles. I've been looking at some reddit posts recently about energies that we can transmit. I'll link them later. You may have seen some of them because I saw a post about it on this subreddit.
This also makes me remember how I finally talked with a friend who also acknowledged the ability to visualize (while concentrating really really hard) what the opponent in a RPS game will do. And then win. Oddly, I have always visualized what hand will be needed to lose, so I have to quickly reverse the idea to make my decision and win. My friend would visualize the winning move. We did not test this on each other because I was too tired during that time period.
Jeez, and I might as well share this too. I was playing CS:GO with a friend and some other players I was sort of friends with. I've played Counter Strike for thousands of hours previously, so I had a really good idea of how people move around in the map. So I ended up predicting perfectly where the opposite team would be going every single round, for almost all 15 rounds, until I realized that my microphone was off. I was shouting to my teammates where the enemy team was going, but we always ended up going somewhere else. My friend was impressed lol...but we would have won way more easily if my team had heard my directions. In this particular map, there are at least 10 places the enemy could be heading towards to defend (they were Counter-terrorists), and many other paths they could take to get to these places. A lot of choices. Basically, it wasn't chance. To reiterate, I accurately predicted the enemy's exact movements, which I know because there are points on the map where it becomes obvious where you and the enemy may have intersected or not intersected as the game goes on. So either I predicted accurately due to my extensive skill in understanding the enemy and knowing what choices they make based on previous map gameplay decisions and turnouts, or I used the method of asserting facts, and the enemy team followed my facts. Just as a note, I'm generally really good at identifying human patterns and conditions once I take a long time to learn them, so it's not impossible that I predicted their movements simply based off of our round wins/losses, and the previous choices in movement that the enemy and my team had made in the other rounds, as well as available money and weapons, which affect future game play choices.
I've included this story because it combines mental gymnastics with asserting facts. Both are ideas you included in your comments.

Hey, good stuff!

I think it's not about her influencing other thoughts, although that's how someone could imagine that it was happening (and then the limits that implies would apply). It's more straightforward than that: she is simply deciding that something is going to happen and, remaining in a relaxed state, she is then allowing that to unfold (without re-deciding or preventing it happening).

Possible interpretations in general (pushing it out a bit here):

I say: We can't tell the difference between experiencing something we caused, something we influenced and experiencing something we predicted, because it amounts to the same thing:

• Although we encounter time in a "moment by moment" sequence, it is actually laid out like a landscape - always there even though you are only "looking" at a certain part.
• If we predict something, we are "reading" the landscape before getting to a location.
• If we assert something, we are "writing" the landscape before getting to a location.
• When we get to the location, it is whatever it is. We can't then tell whether reading/writing occurred specifically, or whether reading/writing occurred indirectly. For instance, by "asking for information" you might be implicitly "asking for information that corresponds to your desire", which involves making the information correspond to your desire. The background intention or assumption behind the act makes a difference.

Basically, it's like you dream your world. It unfolds spontaneously according to the current "facts"; you have the ability to modify "facts" whether the evidence corresponding to those facts is present within the senses at that moment or not; subsequent experience will be in alignment with those facts. As suggested earlier: once we've made a decision about what's going to happen, though, we have to then not "re-decide' and thereby re-pattern events again, undoing our good work. That's why you need to be non-attached and allowing.

From elsewhere:

"However you imagine that it works, That's how it works. - TG"

That's one take on it anyway: What you are sensorily experiencing arises as a 'transparent mirage' from the facts-of-the-world in the background. All intention operates indirectly, via adjusting the facts-of-the-world. We never actually interact with our sensory experience. We never actually "do" anything directly, instead we just experience things.

EDIT: Inserted earlier paragraph which I'd omitted.

Ever since I read your post there have been bloody owls everywhere!! I even bought a T-shirt the other day with an owl on it and realised after I left the shop!! You and your bloody owls! I mean, it could be worse I suppose, but it could have been better dammit! I have had to route out your comment again just to tell you about the curse you have bestowed upon me. Its no hoot I'll tell you that much, aw God damn it.

Haha, a hoot indeed! :-) Thanks for sharing.

You've got off fairly lightly: people who've done it more deliberately suddenly find that, apparently, they've been amassing owl-related objects for years without noticing...

Still, if it works for summoning The Owls Of Eternity, perhaps it might work for other, less beaky items eh?

The Owls are a good way for people to explore the idea, I think, because it can't cause any damage. Well, bar a few sleepless nights from nocturnal noise, perhaps. (8>)=

A nice way to think of this is, you are "recalling" an idea or thought-pattern into your experience from the background memory of the world (summary here with deeper links). Objects are like ideas overlaid onto experience - and more interestingly, aren't situations a bit like momentarily-present, environment-sized objects?

Worth experimenting with anyway, I would imagine (excuse pun)...

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.

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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".