TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 29

POST: What would you do if you could go back in time? (/r/timetravel)

Well, this post is a bit /r/hailcorporate (ish), but it's always a good question. :-)

Aside - Your pitch video is interesting as a concept, but for me it doesn't give a coherent "feel" (plus for me the voiceover and the acting is too self-consciously "performed", but that can be personal taste). Of course, I'm assuming the series is meant to be somewhat serious in tone? If I were doing this, what comes to mind is, I'd be going for something like the propaganda videos in the film Children of Men, and the in-film advertising material that the Foreign Office put together for it. How far along are you with the series?

Resuming the question - The devil would be in the details. But here's a quick sketch of what form my approach would take: If we're assuming here that I have to come back to the present in some way - i.e. it's not a case of resuming life from a past point, it's about making changes, jumping forward, and seeing them reflected now - there's not much point in going back and saving anyone. The time gap between "then" and "now" will likely put you in another situation with similar problems. You cannot "solve" history because it is not a problem, it is an interconnected pattern. So the trick is to minimise that gap, so that "then" is a fully managed lead-in to "now". Knowing in advance that I would be going back in time with the show (e.g. I get selected to participate and the winner travels in time one month from now), I would spend the month paying very close attention to events global, local and personal, gathering as much information as I could about all spheres. Then I win the show, go back in time one month into the past - and do not enter the show. I spend the time creating the maximum beneficial version of that month financially, personally, and so on. If I were making your show, I would have one episode where a contestant does something along these lines, in such a way as the existence of the show itself was threatened by "prior deletion". Maintaining the existence of the show despite adjustments in time would be one of the ongoing challenges the show-runenrs face, actually.

POST: Time Travel!! Post what you think or know about the subject.... (/r/timetravel)

Perhaps you could kick off the discussion by telling us what you "think or know" about the subject?

Q1: well actually im a student pursuing physics in college and my area of focus is space time mostly, we've been using 3d software to create artificial wormholes (well thats mostly animation through autodesk maya) . time travel is the ability to travel in time from one point in time to another point in time. future time travel is more possible than past is . well thats because you cant go beyond the date the time machine was built , so every extra day that is required to build a time machine is one extra added day that we are moving further away from our own history. time travel is mostly into existence (the topic) because it is used with context to the speed of light c (also called causality in some very specific cases). 3x108m/s is the rounded off speed of light and we three dimensional beings cannot travel higher than this speed. even reaching these speeds is a biological problem as our body's are not designed to withstand the heat that would be generated when our human bodies are accelerated . small particle accelerators are used to help small particles attain these speeds and in some cases it was noted that a particles normal lifetime would be say x seconds (the seconds assumption only to make the discussion simpler) . when accelerated in a particles accelerator , the life of this particle would be increased by say x / 2 seconds as a result of which x + x/2 would be the new life . well i could go on and on , but ill get back on this. this is a start i guess. cheers!

That's better! So the obvious question for you is: What do you think is the connection between experiential time (the changing of forms arising within the senses or "perceptual space") and conceptual time (the abstract notion of time used in the equations and diagrams of physics)?

Q2: This is actually a pretty good question. It got me thinking about what we actually use to define time/seconds/etc. Which seems like an obvious answer: observe something that changes at a steady pace and then count it. Which is more or less what we do:
It is quantitatively defined in terms of a certain number of periods – about 9 billion – of a certain frequency of radiation from the caesium atom: a so-called atomic clock.
But then why base all of our physics around a certain number f periods of a certain frequency of radiation from the caesium atom? And if relativity changes this (the twins paradox), then how can we really have reliable math on this?
Doing some further digging, it appears that we didn't simply 'measure' the speed of light, but instead calculated it based on this 'second standard' along with the meter which is based on the speed of light:
Its precise value is 299792458 metres per second (approximately 3.00×108 m/s), since the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time
Huh. Interesting stuff.

Well, I wouldn't ask a rubbish question, surely? :-)

Right. So we never really get to experiential time, rather we bootstrap an abstraction called "time" and then reference it in a circular manner. Which is fine, because all conceptual frameworks are essentially "castles in the sky" in this way, but it's interesting to actually focus on it, because we usually handwavingly assume that our concepts cleanly map to "real things", when it's not really that straightforward.

Q1: well i believe that time in itself is an abstract concept based on its relativity to people.staring at a beautiful girl , an hour seems like a second. sitting on a hot pan , 3 seconds seem like 3 years. when somebody asked us to keep track of time , we all reference to it based on our relativities even though the end values for each one of us turns out to be the same (say when comparing 10 18year olds.) . maybe we 3 dimensional beings cannot understand time in its entirety.

In what way can an hour seem like a second? What, exactly, is the actual experience of "an hour" or "a second"? Einstein's cute-joke answer doesn't really examine that (nor was it intended to, of course). It was basically a way of suggesting that a description of a state change itself does not provide a description of the changing between states. But does this not make a nonsense of the whole idea of time travel, then? One cannot journey experientially along a diagram. If time is purely an abstraction, and is therefore never actually experienced other than as mental imagery, then what a "time traveller" is truly seeking is something else: a discontinuity in the content of experience. And following from our discussion here, that is something that happens "before" time.

POST: If time travel to the past is possible, you can't change the past. (/r/timetravel)

[POST]

This is how I tend to look at time travel to the past. Since the past has already happened, you cannot change it. If a time machine allowed me to travel to the past, and I conspired to stop a murder, it would be impossible. Something would prevent me from stopping it. If I wanted to go back in time and tell myself not to buy that junk car when I was 20, something would prevent me from doing it. I never saw my older self. I DID buy the car. Therefore, even if I tried to do this, I wouldn't be able to.

[END OF POST]

How exactly would "something" stop you from doing it though?

Q1: No idea. It's not like there would be some "force" prohibiting you from doing it. It just wouldn't be possible. There are an infinite amount of possibilities for your future. So there are an infinite amount of possibilities of how you would be prohibited from changing the past. It has already occurred. If you attempted to go back in time to kill Hitler in the year 1900, you could attempt it an indefinite amount of times, and you would fail. You would just fail. How you would fail is impossible to predict. There are endless possibilities. The past is still the past, even if--on your personal timeline--it's your future.

See, that's a problem - no proposed mechanism. And if there was a mechanism, then there's no reason I can see why it isn't controlling you right now. Perhaps your entire life is predetermined, such that everything fits together logically. You never get to change anything. What applies to The Now applies whether it is attached to "the present" or "the past". The alternative: The Now always permits changes, but making a change results on collateral shifts such that overall logical coherence is maintained. Not due to a force, of course - more like tugging on one fold in a blanket of material, and other folds being reshaped as a result due to it being a single landscape. Some of those "folds" might be your personal memories...

The reason why everything is predetermined is not in spite of our choices, but because of them.

This is almost there, I'd say.

So, what is free will? Free will is the ability to reshape information. However, this must inevitably occur either outside of the information landscape and by "operating" upon it, or by being the information landscape and "changing shape". Now, this is obviously getting us into "consciousness" type territory, but we can maybe put that aside and ask ourselves the question: Is it possible that past-as-information is here right now just was much as present-as-information is? And it's just that present-as-information is currently unfolded into the senses as a "moment of experience", whereas other "moments" are dissolved into the background?

If this were so, then free will could operate on any part of the information landscape at any time. This gives us a mix of determinism and freedom: the landscape is deterministic, yes, but it is only deterministic between updates.

This gives us:

• If the information landscape is deterministic.
• If the information landscape contains all moments.
• If the information landscape is always coherent.
• And if the information landscape is changed by our free will, updated to a new deterministic form.

Then we can indeed have the experience of "going into the past and changing it". What we would be doing is temporarily unfolding another ("past") moment, updating it with our free will thus shifting the landscape to a new deterministic state, and then unfolding our present moment again. The coherence rule would mean that logical sense would take care of itself. However, it might also mean we don't retain memories of the change.

Q1: First, I believe we disagree on the definition of free will. Reconciling that would be difficult, and its discussion would be extremely tangential. I don't see free will and determinism as mutually exclusive. I don't think they are competing forces. I believe that a choice made is a choice free, even if that choice was is predetermined. All choices are free choices, even under compulsion. We can speak further on this, but I just want to let you know that this could potentially open up Pandora's box. On another note, your unfolding of histories approach is very interesting. However, it seems to me that each separate deterministic state put together creates one massively determined multiverse. I know that seems like a logical fallacy (a parts-to-whole composition fallacy), but wouldn't each separate deterministic state have to be self-consistent, so that when you attempt to understand the whole of all the deterministic states, they are altogether predetermined?

Let's leave the free will issue floating for now because, as you say, it's going to get pretty tangled pretty quick, and I think we may find a way around doing that if we continue along the other path - because we will perhaps connect "information radius" (what falls within your perspective) to free will and "first cause". Anyway...

So, we might shortcut the histories part and just propose the following:

1. That there is an eternal structure which contains all possible self-consistent states. In this sense, it is fully-determined, since it is unchanging. It is a sort of "infinite static gloop" of all patterns.
2. That a conscious observer selects out a world-state from that structure, in way analogous to an observer scanning their 2D attention across a 3D room. That world-state is a fully determined 4D structure.
3. That a conscious observer's apparent unfolding experience is equivalent to them scanning their 3D attention across that 4D structure.

In this way, time travel would be a discontinuous shift of the observer's 3D attention to another part of the 4D world-state structure. However, they wouldn't be able to change anything in terms of content, they would just be shifting their experience. In order to change anything, they need to shift state. (There are issues regarding identity and memory here, but they are best put aside initially since we're moving away from what we usually think "we" as an observer are.)

You can probably see where this goes: at first it seems that to gain the required degrees of freedom, the observer has to be 3D then 4D then 5D... but eventually the observer becomes dimensionless and unconstrained, and becomes the "first cause", whose power of attention or selection ends up being the freedom to change the relative intensities of states within its experience. That becomes the essence of what we might call "true free will" - but it is "outside of" or "before" any structure, just as consciousness is "before" any experiential content (or rather, it ends up: that which structure is "made from").

*Q1: It does seem that we are pretty close, only that I think that we are only a part of one dimension. I do agree, though, that if there are multiple dimensions, as you purport, there has to be some sort memory loss. I do have one more question on this: would you say that someone is only exercising free will when they are shifting into another world-state structure, when they become the "first cause?"

I think that as part of one dimension, we are wholly and entirely free. While, at any moment, I can make any choice imaginable (perhaps one that would create a "first cause" event), but I will only choose the alternative that I would choose. It seems to me that multiple dimensions would create multiple versions of "me."
If I time traveled and did something that created another dimension (one where that action happened, and one where it didn't), you would have two separate individuals in different dimensions who are completely alike, minus the fact that in that one very specific instance, one individual would make one decision, and one would make another. They live in alternate realities, one where the decision was made, and one where it wasn't. One with one version of me who is willing to do that one action, and one who is not. But as an individual, I would only make one of those decisions.
It follows that the alternate dimension version of me is someone different than me. Therefore, that version of me isn't actually me, for I only make choices that I am willing to make. An alternative dimension of me is not me at all. Why would I make a decision that would make me different than myself?
We can probably agree to disagree at this point, because we are both quite close yet very far away from one another. I have sympathies to the view I outlined above, but I tend to lean to the single dimension view with one consistent history.*

We really aren't so far apart at all. The way you might get around those issues, I suggest, is to reconsider what you mean by "me". The starting point is to recognise that you are not in a dimension or world-state, you are experiencing a world-state.

To just jump straight to this -

I suggest that your actual situation is of being an "open aware perceptual space" in which sensory experiences arise. And by "sensory experiences" I mean this full "3D scene", including the room, your body sensations, and so on. This flips things around. You are then no longer "in" a dimension or a state, rather all possible states are "dissolved" within your perceptual space and are available to you. Right now, you have adopted or "taken on the shape of" a particular world-state, such that the corresponding sensory experiences arise as you unfold the "moments" of that state. So here is only one you-as-consciousness, which is the context of all experiences. Meanwhile you-as-body-in-a-world is actually the content of a particular moment of experience. There are any number of those, but they are like frames in a movie - they are "dead" unless an observer gives them life by experiencing them. So just as we wouldn't say that Star Wars contains 100,000 Harrison Fords or Mark Hamills (one per frame in which they appear), it doesn't make much sense to talk of multiple "you"s, except as "moments of experience".

Note - We can directly observe that we are this "open aware space" easily by attending to our current experience in the present. It even makes logical sense from the common notion of how the senses work, although very quickly the philosophical implications destroy the notion of an "external world" as we usually assume it to be.

Q1: It's the experiential part that I don't really hold to.

Could you clarify what you mean by that?

I don't separate experience and body. They are irrevocably linked. You have one body and one experience. Even if your experiential self and your bodily self are separated, there is still one of each.

Okay. So, what would you say is the relationship between the experiential self and the body? And what form does the body take in experience?

The reason I think that's worth exploring is, we have to be really careful about conceptualising things using the "view from nowhere". If our thinking about something involves doing so from a 3rd-person view, then we have to be cautious because if that can never be observed (directly or indirectly) then it can't be confirmed or denied. For example, we might conceive of time travel as "traveling back along a time- line" or "transferring oneself amongst many parallel worlds", but if we pause and actually notice how exactly we are imagining this, we realise we are basically viewing a mental diagram, from a vantage point that can never exist, of something that doesn't exist (in that form anyway). We have to be sure to tie our ideas back to what can actually be experienced directly, or at least recognise our mental fictions for what they are. Otherwise we might as well become string theorists! :-)

It's in this spirit - given that it's fundamental to the idea of "traveling in time" and the notion of "being in the past" - that I feel we really have to pin down the relationship between experiencing and the body (which is really "the world", I suggest).

POST: Meditation and visualization are the key! (see comments) (/r/timetravel)

Usual link: "persistent realms". Basically, entering into an experience (let's not categorise it beyond this) by implying that it already exists and shifting one's attention to it. What you are trying to do, it seems, is to trigger that and then not return to this experience. What I wonder, though, is: given that you could have any experience at all, any apparent world or time, why focus on the "farmer's wife in the 1800s" scenario in particular?

I really envy those who can access persistent realms...

It's not that hard. Start lucid dreaming. Perhaps get Robert Waggoner's book for ideas and inspiration (it's by far the best book on the subject). There are various techniques one can try, but fundamentally what actually works is just firmly deciding that you will have a lucid dream. Donald DeGracia's DO_OBE guide is also worth a look, since it offers a free guide on what amounts to direct-entry lucid dreaming of apparently pre-existing environments.

EDIT - Note to other readers: The rest of this conversation is off-topic for physical time travel, but discusses the sorts of ideas that might form a foundation for mental time travel.

Mmm, it's more that I have mental blocks. I'm dealing with a pretty severe depression right now, and I have little faith or confidence in my powers to do... well, anything, really. It makes doing things like lucid dreaming pretty hard.

Grrr, depression is such a grim slog. Do remember, though, that for these things depression affects what you think you can do, not what you can actually do. For sure, that means it's harder to continue to intend, which can be a big hurdle. (EDIT: Which sounded patronising, but wasn't meant to be. I'm trying to say that you've still got the capability, but you might need to find another angle of attack.)

So, you might find it easier to play with "dreaming in real life" to get you started. There are some interesting exercises in chapter four of Lenard Petit's The Michael Chekhov Technique: For The Actor, for instance. (You can download an excerpt of that chapter: here.) Something you might want to experiment with specifically: "feeling out" into the space above you, in front of you, behind you, including more and more of it into your sense of "presence", and then adding the "volume of space your body occupies" also.

Q1: Thank you. I'll give the chapter a read.
(Musing to myself a little bit)
It seems to me like our lives can be understood as a person swimming in the ocean. If we just allow ourselves to float, we will drift along with the current, going wherever it leads us. If we choose to swim, we can direct ourselves, be it with or against the current. Sometimes the waters rage and sometimes they are still, which changes how effective our options are. Depression, however, is not the water, but the swimmer. When we are depressed, it is as though our muscles are tired and weak, and even when the ocean is calm, we spend what little energy we have simply trying to keep our heads above water. The thought of actively swimming seems like a non-starter. For those of us with tired muscles, it seems like we need to find a way to leave the ocean entirely in order to get some rest. But how can we leave the ocean when it is all we know how to experience? I suppose that's why I want to travel somewhere else for a while.
Oh, I know. Nobody asked - but getting my thoughts out there, in public, is helpful for me. Thanks for indulging me and thanks again for the chapter.

Thanks for sharing that.

In the spirit of musings, a further thought might be that in effect we are the ocean also, but having forgot that, we exhaust ourselves trying to direct one part of ourselves - "the swimmer" - against the flow of the rest of ourselves - "the current". Thinking that we are the swimmer only, we intend and intend and intend the action of swimming towards our goal regardless of the orientation of the current. If we are fortunate, the current so-happens to be in roughly the direction that we want to swim in. If we are unfortunate, the two are at odds, and we become exhausted, constricted, depressed, and hopeless - but with no option other than to keep fighting or to sink, or so we think. Realising that we are the ocean also, however, a new possibility opens up: to intend the current, not the swimmer. Such an approach would be daunting initially, since it would require a large amount of trust - perhaps only at the point of absolute despair would one surrender to it. For to intend the current and benefit from its momentum, one would have to cease intending the swimmer, and allow him to be moved by the water's flow, trusting that it was taking him in the intended direction, without knowing the details of the route, prior to the destination being reached. Practically speaking, what would this mean? It would mean to cease micromanaging the movements of the body and mind, to allow them to move spontaneously and unbidden, releasing one's resistive grip completely after firmly deciding one's target. How to get to that stage? In exploratory steps, through experimentation on a small scale, with unimportant things, until a confidence emerged - likely bolstered by the pleasant lightness that accompanied such an approach.

Q1: Though they're all fictions and "not true" to an extent, I find that, intellectually, I agree most with nondual views, and therefore I agree with your assessment. The problem I suffer from is that I don't know it, emotionally and intuitively, so during troubled times, I'm prone to regress to more dualistic thinking.
I agree that is very daunting to "intend the current". When I think about doing it, I am already in trouble, because there is no doing it. There is only allowing it. Alas, I am a control freak. I'm always trying to "do". "Allowing" is scary and intimidating. I have always been dominated by my intellectual side. A major factor of this depression is that my emotional and creative side was brought to the surface and forced into the spotlight, and I am having a very hard time coping. I do think I understand to an extent, however. When I "change my personality," I notice the way I "naturally" respond to the environment changes, without any effort on my part. This seems to be in line with what I am reading in The Michael Chekhov Handbook. My issue, as stated, is having my emotions and identity stuck in dualism, so when it comes to "changing my environment," I find myself unable to affect similar changes.
Sorry, this is a little unclear. I seem unable to coherently express myself at the moment. I hope you can understand what I'm trying to say.

Yes, it's very difficult to put this stuff into language. The problem is, I'd say, that our conceptual thoughts are themselves basically "shadow-sensory" experiences, which of course are formatted spatially and temporally, but we're trying to talk about something which is "before" division, "before" multiplicity - in fact, we are trying to use thoughts and language to discuss the thing that thoughts and language are "made from". It's like trying to build a sandcastle that is a sculpture of "sand".

However, this is also the clue as to what we must (non-)do...

So, have a play with those exercises (and do treat them as playful), but maybe keep this in mind too: the idea of the "unbounded thought" as being what an intention actually is. By this I mean, a thought which has no edge, that is not an object, that is the abstract thought of something being true. Doing this, would be to simply bring into prominence a pattern corresponding to a particular fact, across and dissolved into entire "open perceptual space" that you actually are, such that it is incorporated into all subsequent experiences. (The basis here: your direct experience of yourself is of an "open aware perceptual space" in which your experiences arise, as sensations, perceptions and thoughts. It is in this sense that you are both the swimmer and the ocean; they both arise within this same space.)

As we've been saying, this can't really be described, and attempts to do so make it seem complicated when actually it is super simple: it is the assertion of a fact as being true, while not suppressing the shift in experience which results. Now, you might call that second part "allowing", but I would phrase it as: no long engaging in the bad habit of asserting your current position all the time. To me, this second part is a key to breaking free from depression, although I understand that it can be daunting, because it means no longer suppressing the movement of that emotional and creative side.

A final metaphor can be: think of yourself as a shape-shifter who changes the shape of their own perceptual space, by simply intensifying the contribution of one pattern or another, via asserting or intending or unbounded-thinking a particular fact. Once you have become the new shape, the world within you, arising as sensory experiences, will naturally be of a corresponding form. That's probably not particularly clear either.

Q1: I'll give it a try. I'm having no success at all with any of these exercises, but I'll try to avoid taking them too seriously. (One of my issues is that I grow frustrated very quickly when I am new to something. Once I establish a beachhead, I have confidence to learn without stress, but establishing that beachhead is very frustrating to me). I suspect that getting too emotional about failing would just be counterproductive (more than usual, I mean).

It's understandable, but remember that there's nothing to "get right" here. If you think about the context in which these exercises are used (which is in actor training over an extended length of time; they just so-happen to be instructive for pointing out that you are an "open perceptual space"), then you'll realise they are "exploratory". Literally, it's about imagining that things are true and allowing the imagination to take over, and seeing what it's like to let that happen. If you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with that at present, that's fine, it just means it'll take a while for you to feel your way into it. That "feeling out" time is not wasted: it actually is the progression you are seeking, towards your goal.

As an aside, I really would emphasise that probably the most valuable thing we can learn is the attitude of "being okay with whatever happens". If you need a reason for this, it's that you cannot know in advance what the experience of getting what you want will be like, particularly if there's an extended period of time over which it emerges. You have to accept that you can't know what you haven't yet encountered, and be okay with not getting what you incorrectly assume is the right result, right now. So don't be disheartened, actually embrace with curiosity the experience you do get, and that includes the odd feeling that comes with the frustration of apparent non-experiences.

Q1: I've been giving it a little more time, and it feels like nothing is happening. My (physical) arms don't move at all with the first exercise. I feel none of the energy in the second exercise. Trying to look with "new eyes" feels like I'm just trying to imagine what's behind me. I know you said to try not to be disheartened, but it's really difficult. It's hard to fight the emotions that tell you that you are so unhappy and never will be happy ever again, and that even trying is not worth your time, because you have no power to do anything.
Bah, I'm being so gloomy.

Hey, gloomster! ;-) It's only one day since you first read the exercise! However, it's very possible that you are very narrowly focused right now (in terms of spatial attention) and what you are doing is "trying" to do this from "over here". And it's rather hard to describe openness to you. That might not make sense yet. But...

Firstly, did you try the "feeling out into space" exercise I suggested? That's where to start. Give that a go first. Try that now. Secondly, depression is often "located" in the body volume somewhere. You can find it and sit with it. So, pause for a moment. If I asked you, "CC, your depression is situated in a specific location right now, where is that?", how would you reply?

This is probably the wrong answer.

There can't be a wrong answer, because there's no right answer! To emphasise: you can't be right or wrong when exploring the content of your experience, you can only be more informed. On the "feeling out into space" one, forget the book's version, and for now, and don't try to obtain any particular effect. You are seeing what's there, you are not trying to make anything in particular happen in this case. So, try this: as you are reading these words, your attention is somewhat direct towards this screen. Now, pause, and direct your attention to "the place you are looking out from". What do you experience in that direction? What's there? Say what you actually experience, don't "work out the answer" or think it out.

On the depression location, what can happen is that it's diffuse, and then after scanning, it often seems to "condense" into a location. Doing that is a bit more involved, but I thought I'd just see whether there's a particular place that was noticeable to you. Have you ever explored lying down on the floor and totally giving up all control - for, say, 10 minutes - to see what happens?

Q1: Now, pause, and direct your attention to "the place you are looking out from". What do you experience in that direction? What's there? Say what you actually experience, don't "work out the answer" or think it out.
I felt... addled. I couldn't do it for long before my intellect started inserting concepts, but it was a peculiar, unsettling feeling.
Have you ever explored lying down on the floor and totally giving up all control - for, say, 10 minutes - to see what happens?
I've tried this in the past in bed. Perhaps I'll give it another go.

Good stuff. Okay, here's my suggestion for you. Do these two things, as described below, for a week. There's nothing to achieve in doing these two things, and there's no right or wrong way to do them or to experience them. There is nothing to work out, nothing to conclude. This is not for anything. Simply doing them is sufficient. Here they are:

• Two-Way Looking: Whenever it occurs to you to do so, perhaps while walking, or traveling, or just sitting around, or watching TV, or reading, or talking with someone. Whenever it happens to occur to you, while noticing that your attention is on whatever you are engaging with, also direct it towards the "place where you are looking out from". In other words, you are still doing whatever you are doing, but just become aware of that "place" too.
• Daily Releasing Exercise: Every day, for 10 minutes, lie down on the floor in the constructive rest position: feet flat, knees up, hands resting on abdomen, a couple of books under the head so that it feels supported. Lie down in this position and give up, play dead. Give yourself to gravity, the universe, whatever. Let go of your body, your mind and - particularly - let go of controlling your attention. Allow your body and mind and attentional focus to shift and move however they want. And if you happen to notice yourself "holding on" again, gripping anything, just let go once more. Now, sometimes you might find that your attention narrows on a particular sensation, which then intensifies, peaks, then releases, after which your attention opens out again. That is fine. Just let that happen. Let anything happen, for those 10 minutes.

So, I'm recommending you do those things, and I'm telling you that they are inherently good, even though you shouldn't expect any results from doing them. Regardless, you should do them. And not bother thinking about them at all.

How important is the position when I'm lying on the floor? The first time I did it, I was in more of a starfish position. The constructive rest position feels a little less comfortable to me.

Yeah, it's likely to be less comfortable initially, because your body is stuck in a non-optimal habitual shape due to accumulated tension and thinking ("stuck thoughts and incomplete movements"). The constructive rest position corresponds to the "ideal rest position", such that any deviation from it is hard to hold against gravity, and this encourages a release towards a state of zero excess effort over time. That's why we do it on the floor rather than on a sofa or a bed, which would tend to mould to, and therefore maintain and persist, our existing bad habits, rather than lead to a relaxation of them. In particular, lying on the floor like this puts your lower back in the correct relative orientation, which is something hard to do "deliberately".

So: definitely stick with that position. It will become comfortable in time, and you'll start to notice that everyday movement becomes more comfortable in step with that. If you are having trouble because your knees want to fall to the side, consider using a tie or belt to hold them together for now.

Will do. Thanks for your continued advice.

You're welcome.....Screw others' judgement, that doesn't help one way or the other! You'd be surprised at how little anyone gives a crap anyway. And if they did, so what? :-)

I'm having a very hard time "releasing."

So, remember, you are not actually meant to be doing any releasing. You are also not trying to get rid of any thoughts. This is not meditation; there is no skill involved here and nothing to get "better" at. Literally, you are lying down and "giving up" for 10 minutes - and, when you notice you have become focused on something, giving up again. There's is nothing more to it.

Therefore, to motivate myself to do things I want, I need to engage with what makes me upset.

You can't keep going like that. It'll destroy you.

If my mood is fine, I tend to waste all my time being distracted with pointless crap which is out of sync with my desires.

Then perhaps they are not really your desires at all; they are things you have taken on as obligations or should-wants. Surely your primary desire would be to become capable of feeling relaxed and good in every moment? Otherwise what is life for? A life full of feeling miserable but "achieving" things that you will never enjoy? So it would be silly to postpone feeling good, for the sake of achievements. One of your targets should be: to achieve feeling good while working towards achievements! ;-)

I'm just spilling my guts wherever. Hope you don't find it weird.

That is not a problem! It's how we should be, when the opportunity comes up.

Now that I've experienced real, proper, strong emotions, I feel empty when they're not present, even though the emotions are negative.

Eventually that emptiness will turn into a fullness. You've probably had quite narrow attentional focus for a long time, which excludes most of your body space, so you only notice your surface feelings. As your release into your larger space, at first it might feel sort of open-empty, but eventually it will feel full-alive. There's nothing you can do about this; it's something that you open up to allow to happen by itself. For now, refrain from any inclination you might have to slightly manufacture situations that give you strong feelings to "make you feel alive"; refrain from tinkering with things other than doing the couple of things.

The first relates to comfort - once I've been lying there for 12+ minutes, it starts to get somewhat painful.

The solution: just do it for 10 minutes, as it says in the description. :-) But the pain is to be expected - see later.

I'll try to release that sensation, but it doesn't really seem to work.

Just to emphasise: you are not meant to be releasing anything, you are not meant to be doing any releasing. Your job is simply to lie there, and let whatever's going to happen, happen or not - by itself. You cannot force progress here by effort - because "effortful forcing" is exactly how you develop a bad mental-postural state in the first place. Basically, it comes from the long-term approach of intending, say, muscle tension in your body (tensing your leg muscles to push yourself up from a chair) rather than intending a result (intending to be-stood-up and letting it happen). Doing the releasing exercise will gradually return you to the correct, open state - with increasing freedom of easy in movement, thinking and perception. All by you doing nothing at all!

To what extent does adding some amount of padding work against the exercise?

Don't use padding - it's just supporting your current posture. It is natural to feel sore after a while, because the accumulated tension in your body is leading it to try to hold parts of itself in mid air, against the force of gravity. Gradually, those muscular habits will give out - release, in other words - and finally that position will become the most comfortable one ever. In other words, occasional pain is fine, it's another example of where you just let things rise and fall in experience. Example - You're feeling fine, then a pain appears, it intensifies, your attention narrows on it, it gets stronger, peaks, then releases, and your attention opens out again. All of this happens by itself, so long as you don't react and obstruct it or attempt to control it. It happens differently for different things - there is no "right way" - so you can't control it because you can't know what is "meant" to happen. You are a mystery to yourself! :-)

Remember: This 10 minutes is about giving up control and being okay with whatever happens.

Also, should I do it when there are fewer distractions (such as a television on upstairs), or do they help the experience?

It's probably nice to do it when it's quiet and you feel you won't be interrupted. However, if there are background noises, that's just another thing where, should you find your attention narrowed on them, its a remind to let go of attentional control again, allowing it to open out. To emphasise here: You should not treat the releasing and the two-way looking as things that have specific results or targets to be achieved. You do them simply to do them, and in fact they are a non-doing, since whatever you do effortfully blocks them - like trying to make a pool of water clearer by brushing the ripples away with your hand!

...So, your creative side has burst open, and is aching to play, but that means the chasm between your current circumstance, and where you want to be now, is laid bare. Okay.

I do agree that it all reduces, more or less, to "maximize positive emotions and minimize negative emotions."

Yeah, perhaps, but it's not something you do deliberately as such. Really, for the releasing exercise, just treat it as a habit you do every day, without expectation. It's only 10 minutes, which you can treat as your daily time to "let the engine cool off", like when the metal chassis of a car going "ping! ping!" as it settles back into shape - or whatever metaphor you want. The side effect is that gradually your sense of space will expand into your body volume, and beyond. You will be more in touch with feelings and the felt-sense of intuition and your creative sense. But you can't "do" this, you just have to let it happen. All you need to do, is do the daily exercise and get better at not micro-controlling yourself and the world, if you find you have a tendency to do that.

I want to learn writing and other artistic pursuits.

Related Top Tip - If you centre your attention in your lower abdomen, that's where that "global summary" sense is, and is where you "rest" with your attention when you want to understand something in a general way, or when you want to explore things creatively. You can't make it do anything, but you can sort of "ask and receive" in that area. (Which sounds a bit vague, but it's hard to describe because you do this by just "feeling out".)

Yet, I've always had an inner desire to draw, to write, to make music, to dance, to act, etc.

Have you begun doing that now?

Any moment you're not doing other stuff, and time you sitting feeling miserable, redirect yourself toward an artistic project. Mood is posture, to an extent - you can't work your way through misery, it can't be solved; you just have to "shift state". So: think up a project. Or pick an artistic area and ask me to invent a suggestion for you.

Books some people find useful:

• On Not Being Able To Paint, Marion Milner
• Constructive Living, David K Reynolds
• Stop Thinking, Start Living, Richard Carlston
• What is Zen?, Alan Watts

I have a very hard time with failure and being unable to do things.

You want certainty in advance. To know what's going to happen, before you experience it happening. It's a pretty normal tendency but, as you note, it doesn't work. It actually doesn't work very well for technical subjects either; it's just that since they have a greater level of "knowledge retrieval" than the arts, it can seem like you are solving things by trying hard, when really you are obstructing by doing that. So, that was an interesting article, and I think I went through something of that sort myself. As you've already realised - it is now way to live your life. Even just because it's based on a lie: the lie that you can deliberately control creativity, and that the "intellect" is a cold hard serious mechanical thing. But a moment's thought shows that this cannot be true: it would require you to be able to "pre-think" your thoughts. In actual fact we feel our way through problems. And even more importantly, we rely on an autocomplete function.

Specifically, the way to solve a problem is to assert or declare that there is a solution - this is like creating a sort of placeholder or reserved space for it - and then your mind will autocomplete the path from the current situation to the solution. This is a creative act, a "letting-happen". And this is always how problems actually gets solved: after all that mucking around and thinking and worrying, the answer appears. This means that "we" do not solve the problem. We set an intention, and let "creativity" fill in the gaps. Obviously, this is rather contrary to the notion of being a clever person who uses their intellectual power to solve things, and is in control. Fundamentally, it involves the realisation that one cannot take credit for being clever at all. You-as-person are not clever, you simply have the ability to "allow cleverness to arise". It pre-exists, you just clear a space for it.

I'll admit, I'm not very good at centring or focusing attention.

Well, it'll clarify over time. It's not really about spatially focusing your attention in a narrow way; you might think of it as "including" that part of your experience and allowing yourself to "rest" there, to be slightly more there than you are in your head area.

as I'm working, some negative emotions pop up and I feel an overwhelming urge to go lie on my bed and "be miserable," or something.

You need to not do that. However, there is something to this: there's the idea that a ripple in a glass is a big deal, but a drop of water in the ocean is no great shakes. What you want to be is "an ocean" rather than "a glass". By doing your daily releasing exercise and, eventually, allowing your attention to open out and expand into the background space, you'll find that those feelings and urges are a smaller part (spatially speaking) of your experience. Which leads to a couple of things:

• When such feeling come up, do you focus down on them? Don't do that. Allow them to be there and instead try to include the sense of the space in the room around you.
• As a general exercise, it is good to occasionally pause and expand your sense of "presence" into the room around you, in all directions, and beyond. This makes you "an ocean" rather than "a glass". (I've mentioned this before, but it's a really powerful exercise.)

That feeling that you have no power...

If you have become localised, attentionally-speaking, in your head area, you will feel powerless. Do try to expand your "presence" (your inclusive attention) into that abdomen area, and maybe work on "moving from" there. For example, if I was going to get up out of my seat now, rather than messing with my muscles, or reaching my attention out to where I want to be, I would instead: keep my attention rested in my lower abdomen area, and move that area to where I want to be, allowing the rest of my body to follow by itself. Try it; it's nice. (The "expand into the room" exercise also makes people feel more powerful, often.)

One thing to perhaps check: Are you trying to do things from inside your head? For example, if you move your arm, do you try and do it from your head area, rather than being "in your arm" and moving that? Some people who intellectualise a lot end up in that situation, because they have absorbed the idea that the "brain" is the control centre where they are. But of course, that isn't the case. The "arm move the arm", the "leg moves the leg". There is simply "arm movement"; there is no "something" that moves the arm. Explore this.

Thanks for your continued patience with me. It should be clear by now that excessive intellectualizing, as well as the whole "not doing" thing, is a serious stumbling block for me.

Seem to me you're making good progress, simply by being self-aware and contemplating these things. It's hard to describe this level of experience in language, but we can feel our way into it. You just have to guard against not being able to accept that things aren't immediately solved - because that's not how life works. You have to be okay with how things are, and allow them to unfold by themselves. There are no "problems" and "solutions" as such, there's just an ongoing evolving experience, where one turns into the other. If you are okay with the tension of anticipation, if you can accept the mystery aspect of life (that you can't know what you will experience prior to experiencing it), then the tension will drop away. This does take a level of "trust" or whatever - but you can build that up.

That's why I suggest it's good to start working with the body and being aware of that. First with the releasing exercise (which performs a good in all areas), and then pursuing the idea of "intending" solutions or outcomes and then "allowing" them to unfold by themselves. This can be applied to standing up from a chair, taking an amazing photograph, or solving a physics equation.

A thought: You can't "solve" life, because it is not a problem - it is an experiential landscape.

...All-nighters, grim stuff, I've done my share, not overall fun, I sympathise!

It's as if it is given to me, and it is my duty to record it.

That's a very eloquent way to put it. Excellent. Yes, that's exactly what this is all about - and for not just thought, or when we pause deliberately, but for physical movement too, and more generally, as part of a flowing unfolding.

Second, I still do have some lingering skepticism about all of this.

Well, that's just fine and appropriate. These things aren't to be "believed", they are to be explored and experimented with. All that's required is curiosity, a sort of "what if" frame of mind, and just an interest in discovery and creativity. And it's the perfect thing to do in conjunction with artistic projects: the two things will dance together nicely.

I've yet to experience any sort of "expanding beyond my body." Still trying too hard, maybe.

Well, I wouldn't worry about that. Initially, it might not even make sense about the "not doing it from here to over there" thing. You can't really think about it actually - but over time your attention will loosen up and open anyway. Just maybe occasionally keep in mind the idea of: "what would it be like to feel as if I were the entire space of this room?" - but then don't try to answer it.

I'm still very much not sure exactly how this would feel if it were achieved.

That's fine. Being sure of this would be like having the experience of it before you've had the experience of it! Remember that by "the presence" I mean "you". So, if you are finding that you are focusing that "you-attention" somewhere, okay, go with that: then play with making that sphere of attention larger in diameter, even if it's "over there" at the time, until it expands up and includes "over here" too. Again, not to worry: just something to play with, and it'll come in time.

When I move my arms or legs, they just... move. The "commands" to move don't feel like they're coming from anywhere. The "commands" don't even appear to exist. I'll try to explore it further... somehow.

You've nailed it here. The "commands" aren't anywhere and don't seem to exist. And yet you know that you do the movement, don't you?

It's like you are shape-shifting, you change state from "arm being in this position" to "arm being in that position", by simply becoming the latter, by simply "deciding". But there is no sensory aspect to that deciding.

Problem is that there are a hell of a lot of cliffs and rocks and dangerous beasts on my landscape.

They will gradually unfold into the sunny field! But you have to transition from this state to that state - the problem solves itself, but the transformation still arises as an experience. Every time you allow the you-and-the-world to move by itself, such as in your daily releasing, that resolution continues, and gathers pace.

*Q1: All-nighters, grim stuff, I've done my share, not overall fun, I sympathise!

It had some odd effects on me. When I was lying in bed around the 35th or so hour, I closed my eyes and the black you see when your eyes are closed started to move. It wobbled back and forth before it began to rotate like a cube. I could make out distinct "edges" and "faces" (as in the face of a shape), even though it was all still just black. I've never seen something like that before, and I'm have no idea what it actually was. I was reading some more of DO_OBE, and he talks about the "ideoretinal light" being something you really, actually see, and not just something in your mind's eye. I wonder if what I saw had to do with this. The other effect it had on me was that it completely drained my emotions. When I finally got asleep, I slept for a good 11 hours, but my emotions didn't really come back. I haven't been flat out miserable like I was before; I've just had this passive, low level sadness that leaves me feeling very empty and unmotivated. In a way, it's actually worse, because when I was extremely sad, I at least had some motivation to try to do things to resolve my sadness. Now I'm not motivated to do even that. I've decided to go back to reading about lucid dreams and astral projections, but when I come across passages like this:
There are two things you are doing here. First, you are admitting to yourself that astral projection is a real thing. This is very important because any skepticism you have will only prevent you from projecting. By telling yourself that astral projecting is possible and that you will do it, you are opening up the possibility in your mind. Like anything else, you have to believe a thing is possible to do it. ... I hate to say it, but you just won't be able to astral project if you have a half-ass attitude about it. Astral projecting is not achieved by the half-hearted or the casual. Along with practicing the right exercises and developing the right attitudes and understanding, you have to really want to achieve the experience.
...I just feel discouraged. My experiences have led to me developing almost a sort of anti-confidence (where I genuinely believe that anything that makes me happy will just hurt me in the end, and that thinking I can actually achieve what I want is vanity), so reading something like that makes it hard to even try. I won't give up, though...
Just maybe occasionally keep in mind the idea of: "what would it be like to feel as if I were the entire space of this room?" - but then don't try to answer it.
Alright. I've found "exploratory thoughts" like these helpful. Do you have a list of more?
Much of this seems to come down to "keep exploring and the resolutions will come." As I said, I have very little faith that that's true... but I'll keep trying. It's not like I have anything better to do.*

Your after-all-nighter experiences sound like hypnogogic imagery. Typically, as you drift into that intermediate zone, the black space behind your eyelids becomes 3-dimensional, and sparkles turn to fragments turn to images. If you stick with it, you get a scene which then wraps round to become an environment - and, hey, you're in a lucid dream. So, don't worry about the "belief" thing. I think it's a very misused word anyway. The way in which beliefs (believing that something is possible) affects things isn't in a causal way. What it does is, limit the extent to which you will commit yourself to something, and the extent to which you will trust in something and so not interfere with it happening.

To ponder: If you have never done something before, what is it that makes you commit to it until you achieve it? Nobody can have your experiences for you; the only option is to pursue them through your own dedication. More exploratory thoughts. Perhaps also ask yourself these questions and see what comes up, unprompted. If there were no limits, in terms of the "flavour" of your experiences:

• How do you want your life to be?
• How do you want your world to work?

Allow fantastical types of answers to appear, if they want to, and don't resist any feelings that come with the answers - allow things to take root if the want. It is for you to receive this, not to mange or shape it, or intellectualise it.

...Why "thinking and worrying"? You'd be surprised to the extent you can skip-to-the-end when it comes to known problems. For multi-step unknown problems, of the type that often arises in mathematics, computing and physics, we have to draw a distinction between intending to have a solution and then "experiencing solving the problem" (fine), and haltingly intending each step (less so). You don't "do" the solving - rather, you sit with the solving experience, when drawn to do so, as a result of having intended the solving. (Yeah, it gets a bit tortuous in the phrasing here.)

I guess we get into difficulties here with what counts as "doing" something. It might be better phrased as: while you don't "do" the solving, you certainly have to provide space or in some way "allow" the experience of solving to arise unobstructed (and in particular: not reset it by re-asserting the problem state again).

...

Q1: Alright, I tried it. I'm not sure quite how long I spent on the ground. For the first few minutes (I'm guessing at the time here), it didn't seem like much was happening. My shirt was buttoned up a bit too tight around my throat, so "I" undid the top button. "I" is in quotations because the locus of control felt... different. Not sure how to word it. After a little while longer, my eyes became very heavy. I let them droop and continued to just lie there. At one point, my head tilted back slightly and my shoulders squared up a bit. I have bad posture, so the position my body moved itself to felt foreign to me. This was probably the most "automatic" thing I felt. Aside from that... it was just little involuntary muscle spasms and thoughts. Near the end, my hands and feet started getting quite cold.
Is this a typical experience?

Sounds interesting. :-)

So, do that every day. In my other comment I've suggested committing to it for a week just to get you going with it, but really you should just keep doing it forever. You'll want to anyway. Note that there's nothing special about the exact amount of time, but 10 minutes is all you need for a session, and there's no problem with doing it more than once a day if you like, or before performing some task, or whatever. I figured you might have bad posture. Don't worry about that. Your body will take care of that for you eventually, in its own time. Other changes will occur. They will all be good. Again, don't bother thinking about any of this.

Q1: Alright, I'll try to remember. I'm pretty bad at forming habits, but we'll see how this works out. Thanks.

That's okay too. No need to even try. For both things, just do them when you remember to. If you forget for a while, that's fine, no problem. Just whenever it occurs to you. But do do them then. As I say, there's no pressure here because there's nothing specific, it just about whatever it turns out to be about. However, it will be interesting, and it will make a difference. ;-)

...

Well, I suppose we're going to drift off topic here, but let's explore, since it's still pertinent to the subject of why people want to time travel even by more "traditional" methods. Firstly, what makes you say that? And then: do you believe in reincarnation of some sort? (Not necessarily in terms of religion, just in the sense of a "continuing experience" or similar.)

...Not intended to be loaded really, since I have no specific opinion on it, just interested. "Just knowing" is as good a reason for something as any - in fact, probably better than some logicked-out, post-hoc intellectual justification. After all, when we desire something, it isn't really "because" of anything; we just do. My thinking on the "reincarnation" part was: if we go on forever, if experiencing just continues, then any type of life we have is temporary, and that perhaps makes a mockery of "belonging" somewhere. If I switch into the experience of (say) being a filmmaker in the 1970s, that might be a lot of fun, but it'll pass. That's no reason not to do it, though: the point is that there's an experience I desire that is not available in my current context. But the idea that I would inherently belong in one context rather than another, is hard for me to imagine, since I feel myself to be independent of the particular experience or time.

I suppose it's both simple and extremly complicated.

Yeah, everything seems to be like that! :-) There's someone else who has been experimenting with the same idea - maybe check out his posts, see here. Probably he saw Somewhere in Time too. Just remember to empty the coins from your pockets.

POST: Perception, reality, time travel and temporal dysphoria (/r/timetravel)

So, when you have that experience, are you "you-you" but in that time period? Or are you adopting the perspective of someone else who pre-exists in that time period?..... So, if you had "snapped in" to that experience - basically, detached from this experience completely and hadn't come back - how do you think things would have continued from that point?....What I was wondering is: If you appear as "you" in that environment, do you expect that you will have a plausible history for being there? In other words, a /u/woowho-vintage in those circumstances would already be there and you'll just be picking up that perspective experientially from a certain point? Or do you think you will have just appeared from nowhere?.....Of course, it may be optional. So, given the choice you would prefer to have the equivalent of a memory wipe? But then surely you wouldn't appreciate your escape, so to speak?.....See, I think I'd want to know. Definitely. The memories that are painful now, say, or rather the life that was painful now, would not be painful afterwards. The knowledge would enhance the experience, and one wouldn't take the new circumstances for granted, even which they were relatively hard (due to relative lack of comforts as it would be perceived by today's society in general, and so on).

......Well, my comment wasn't meant to be for or against modern society, more that having the knowledge that you were no longer in an era that didn't agree with you, might be good knowledge to have. (You would "know you were born", so to speak.)

Well, screw logic in these cases. If it can be made to happen, then the logic will come after. Nobody knows how this all works, because anyone who had the experience of doing it probably chose to have their memory wiped, it seems! ;-)

I quite like the metaphor of Lines of Thought for describing our ongoing experience. If a person did have a discontinuity in experience, a change that stuck, then one way to conceive of it would be as one line of thought (this one you are experiencing now as your surroundings) fading into the background while another one (the sensory surroundings of your target experience) brightens and becomes "3D-immersive", filling their perceptual space.

POST: TUTORIAL: How to travel through time (/r/timetravel)

[POST]

1. Exist
2. Don't not exist
   With my proven steps, you'll be traveling through time in no time!

[END OF POST]

Q1: Joke? Either way, it brings up a good discussion: subjectively we're observing the world at 1 second per second. Our physical bodies aren't actually traveling through time, we're just observing the continuity between two states that are similar. But does that actually count as time travel? If not, does 'mental' time travel count? Does traveling slower/faster through time due to relativity count as time travel?

Q2: Kind of a joke, but yeah, it had meaning
I feel like existing as time goes on counts. You're right that our physical bodies are just observing everything transfer from one state to a different one and then again and again and again. It's stuff like this that convinces me that time travel won't ever exist other than the fail-proof method in the OP. Time is kind of a silly man-made concept to explain something very complicated.
So, yeah, the post was a little jab at the idea of time travel.

Or, a silly man-made concept to explain something very simple. Your main paragraph implies that "our physical bodies" are somehow independent of the states? I suppose they might be, in the sense that "physical bodies" are a concept rather than something we ever experience, but probably we'd need to be explicit about this. There's also the hidden assumption that "sensory experience = state", with every passing moment being a state change - rather than a state being a fully-defined deterministic path, for example, with "time passing" being a static pattern that is a part of that. This doesn't seem particularly useful. In other words, it might make more sense to have "states" be at the granularity of "timelines" rather than "moments".

POST: Theory on changing the past (/r/timetravel)

What if everything has already happened - but I really mean everything has already happened? A vast sea or grid of eternally existing moments? Absolutely everything? And the "timeline" you talk about doesn't belong to "time"; rather, it belongs to you, where what "you" are whatever it is that experiences those sequences of moments?

In this scheme, the only restriction would be that, between jumps, the sequence of moments you traverse must "make logical sense". Beyond that, though, there are no causal implications whatsoever. "Time travel" then becomes about creating a discontinuity, a shift in the location you are focused on in on the grid of moments.

Q1: If I'm understanding you correctly then that would mean that every possible moment in time is happening at the same time in a parallel universe like area. If that's true than time travelling would not actually be going back in time but instead travelling to a different dimension almost identical to the past where changing anything in that reality could actually result in a drastic change there but not in this universe. It's definitely an interesting theory

Although, we probably shouldn't use the word "happening" for the moments themselves. In this approach, the only thing that would be "happening" would be the movement of your own attentional perimeter passing across static moments (or rather, unfolding and expanding those moments into perception). Similarly, the past would be within you, as part of your selection pattern for moments, rather than in the moments themselves, which would have no particular order. Moments would be like "3D sensory frames" which appear within your "perspective" when unfolded or focused upon. (And your "perspective" would be something like an "open aware space"; you would not be a "person" so much as something aware, which was having a series of person-formatted experiences.)

Q2: This is similar (almost) to my view too. There are infinite ways to get from point A to point B. However our personal grid of moments cannot be infinite. If I'm in Barcelona at a certain moment, there is a real constraint as to how soon I can be at my apartment in Seattle. Therefore our experience has a well defined shape that depends on many factors, but the possibilities of existence may well be infinite for all intents and purposes.

Yes. So, we might consider the "raw" state of experience to be like an "infinite gloop" which contains all possibilities and patterns, all at once. However, as soon as we start adding structure to ourselves - base formatting such as "spatial extent" and "unfolding change", "colours" and "texture" - then we are working with a subset of what can experienced at a basic level. Then, later, when we have "a world", there is a further filtering of the "logically available" next-moments from any given this-moment. Now, these aren't inherent limitations - they belong to the perceiver, while the world-as-it-is has no deep limit because there is no solid substrate backing it. But the deep patterning that constitutes "the world" ensures that any normal everyday intentional act will be like a pattern overlaid upon what is already selected, and so unfold in a "plausible" way - at best, there may be the occasional unlikely coincidence.

For time travel, then, we would be talking about a discontinuity in experience; a sudden shift from this 3D sensory moment to that 3D sensory moment. Our intentional act would need to address the perceiver's "world-pattern" directly, to either soften it to place that act in the realm of the "plausible", or temporarily suspend its logical continuity. This would be possible according to this description - after all, the world has no actual substance as usually thought of; it's a subset of imagery - but it wouldn't be probable due to the strength of patterning, so the intensity of the act required would be formidable.

POST: Tell us what you didn't like about the ME Sub (/r/Retconned/)

Just to interject:

It's probably worth including a link to the thread where that comment came from, just for context, since it also contains a few other thoughts that might be of interest to this subreddit. (Which I'm fairly supportive of overall, I might add, regarding its idea of providing a place who want to adopt a particular perspective and run with it.)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/4sr6s0/wheres_new_sub_post/d5bswdx?context=3]

Note that while it's true that I don't share a belief that MEs/REs are "necessarily dimension hopping", the reasons for that are more subtle than one might assume, in that I think it might be missing the point, rather than be wrong. After all, I also moderate other non-mainstream subreddits which encourage pushing at the limits of our assumptions, so it's not like I'm exactly a major promoter of the default story when it comes to unusual experiences!

Are you the guy who started the mandelaeffect sub? Because I remember a thread by the guy who started it...

No, I joined as a moderator quite late on. Was asked to help out when the subscriber count exploded and things got totally out of hand due to mentions in the media and in the default subs. (I did a redesign, wrote a proper sidebar, set up filtering, helped do a troll purge, that sort of thing.)

Was there a reason given as to why you specifically were asked to help moderate, notably above many other much more active contributors?

As I remember it, I'd just done a tidy up for /r/glitch_in_the_matrix and in a comment thread I made some suggestions for getting the place under control along the same lines. So that involved a new sidebar and definition and rules, making /r/MetaMandela as a place where all the nonsense could go, and so on, and then doing a purge of all the trolls that had invaded from elsewhere. Following that, I've not had a whole lot to do with ongoing moderation other than keeping the tech side up to date, sharing thoughts occasionally. I wrote the current experience-focused definition to try and have the subreddit be "explanation agnostic" - in any direction. I can't really speak to its enforcement though, except in cases where I've picked up on reported posts myself or whatever. But I have to say: it's not an easy subreddit to moderate without it having an official view and having 10K subscribers. Which is why this might fare better for those who share a perspective. In particular, it'll maybe have less of an issue keeping it on topic (reports of experiences, suggestions for models and mechanisms) and avoiding it descending into a constant "us vs them battle for truth" narrative where people just fight from a group perspective rather have a discussion. I think the sub gets messages from all "sides" complaining that they are being penalised for defending themselves (the answer being, perhaps: if it's got to that stage, the thread is pretty much already ruined and off topic). Again, I can't speak to your own experience really.

Interesting that you are fairly supportive of our effort at providing a place for those who are taking a particular perspective (that this is not false memory). But there is at least one mod over there who is not taking that stance. I have been banned from commenting, and it seems like the only reason is that I created this sub.

The way I see it is that the /r/MandelaEffect is a general subreddit about the effect - the experiences, the theories, the thoughts about it - but it is not specifically for those who have experienced it or who take a particular view. It's a bit like a forum about "God" where people of all religions, plus atheists and also philosophers who challenge the very meaning of the concept, get to participate. And so sometimes that gets heated because people are speaking from emotionally-charged positions which are sometimes polar opposites. Not always conducive to collaborative discussion! These subreddits, on the other hand, would be more like a "support group" model (loosely speaking). However, you have to be realistic here: the moderators of the main/original subreddit quite reasonably aren't that keen to have people posting to the effect of "this subreddit's shit, come over to our subreddit instead". When the idea was of a private subreddit for deeper discussion, that wasn't a problem so much. When it became a public one also, then naturally people advertising it without selling it as a fully distinct topic is going to be less well-received - it's seen as spam. (One thread fine, perhaps, but the number of "meta" posts was generally getting out of hand, as I understand it, with constant "us vs them battle for truth" narrative posts getting reported.)

It might have been beneficial to almost do away with a reference to the Mandela Effect and the other subreddit altogether - the term comes with so much baggage now anyway - and just go all out for a variant of the "glitch in the matrix experiences involving memory and world facts" definition.

If I ran a subreddit for people managing a disease, say cancer...

Hmm, if cancer was something that you could only know for sure existed when you yourself had it, maybe. The core issue, the thing that causes all the trouble, is that if you've not had an ME experience then there are no other signs for you that the ME actually exists. Perhaps a better comparison would be "enlightenment" or, until relatively recently, lucid dreaming?

But overall the concept is right: that's why I said that this was like a "support group" model - for people who have been through a "trauma" (not quite) that only other people who've had similar experiences can truly understand.

Also, I wouldn't expect the cancer subreddit to feel any need to tell the cancer-denier subreddit what it is up to. Respect needs to be mutual, no?

That is where my suggestion of avoiding linking this too much with the Mandela Effect (the term, not the subreddit) comes from. Then we have two distinct forums exploring "memory-related phenomenon" in their own way. The subreddits themselves stay friendly, and those interested in such things have two distinct venues: a general argumentative "about" one with some baggage (old subreddit), and a specific more "personal" one with a fresh take (this subreddit). This would be greatly helped by not having them link one another, thus tempting one view to "educate" the other? (Speaking off the top of my head there, really.)

The ME sub really has been overtaken by people who have no valid arguments...

I have to say, though, that problem with posts from all perspectives is a lack of detail and solid thinking. That applies to people describing their experiences (they usually don't actually do this, they just announce that something is different), and people attributing to "memory error" or "reality shift" (they don't say how, exactly, it accounts for the details of specific examples). This is one reason why people who haven't had an experience wonder what all the fuss is about: rarely does someone explain it from a personal experience perspective, usually there is an argument in the abstract, which may, eventually result in indignant resort to specific details (by which time it's buried deep in the exchange).

Any intelligent discourse is downvoted and ridiculed. It's pretty disgusting actually. But, it sounds like y'all are fine with it and that works for me...

Well, that's not quite fair...

Downvoting is outside of everyone's control, unfortunately. It might be disgusting, but literally the entire internet can casually downvote any post, unless you go private. It's not okay, but it's also not solvable. The ridicule is not okay either and we try to weed it out - but...

As you might discover here eventually if you're unlucky, if you've got 10K subscribers and mainstream exposure, you end up with tens or hundreds of casual one-off visitors who engage in one snarky exchange. Unless you literally pre-filter every comment, there's always an element of it gets through before someone reports it, or it gets cleaned up. Which leads to...

We will have to continue linking the RetCon name to ME though, not necessarily on your sub, but it's an important part of making people aware of the bigger picture.

For sure - the point I was making was that the term "Mandela Effect" is somewhat tarnished, and that, in fact, is what leads to the bulk of our casual trolls I think. Its baggage also attracts people who have a very specific and heartfelt view of what the explanation is - not false memories, but definitely this-exact-thing - and sometimes that can present an issue too. So I was suggesting that you might relieve yourself of some of the pain the other subreddit endures if you avoid making yourself seem like an "ME subreddit", but rather more like a "glitch" subreddit of which the ME is one possible example (which is the approach the actual glitch subreddit takes, really). So, to finish up on that, you might well find that running a public subreddit is a bit trickier in the details than you might imagine: downvoting can't be prevented, casual trolling can't be prevented in advance, the "us vs them" setup usually isn't as clear cut as it first appears, and unless everyone completely agrees on the details of a subject you usually find that emotionally-charged exchanges to happen and it's often not obvious where the cut-off point should be. (And if everyone does agree, it's often not very intellectually productive of course.)

Basically I'm saying, unless you stay niche, you'll likely find it "ain't as easy as it looks". How would you cope if all the /r/MandelaEffect audience started checking out this place, or if it got the high profile (mentions in the media, mentions in default subreddits) that produces the waves of passing trade that /r/MandelaEffect suffers from? It's worth considering. So: you might want to deliberately make decisions that help keep you low-profile.

I get the feeling you are playing good cop since their bad cop routine didn't work.

Eh?

My point about detail wasn't about your own posts particularly - several posters do take the time to be more in-depth - just an observation that generally speaking people posting experiences rarely take the time to emphasise the actual experience and the specific personal memories involved , and people posting theories (including "false memory" or "confirmation bias" type theories) tend to present a categorisation rather than an actual description or model. For example, if someone has the experience of a map changing, then it's important to say why they think that is so - what they experience of noticing is like, and why they are certain that there is something going on. Like, if you were a geography fan from childhood and had a wall map in your bedroom, used to memorise all the places, always planned to go trips and so on, then one day years later you see a TV programme and the map looks different - hmm! - you look at other maps and they are "wrong" too, then you check out your childhood map and it is "wrong" too. This is not confusion due to different projections and so on!

And most importantly: the detailed description underlines that this is not an example of a "kinda maybe sorta thought it was probably always 'that' way" memory vagueness; you have specific personal memories of events which involve the fact. You get the idea. Meanwhile, do you really think (and I'm not necessarily doubting it, I just want to hear why, if so) that there is some deliberate push to suppress discussion of this sort of thing, for some sort of purpose? As opposed to just the usual contempt people have for things which conflict with their worldview or personal identity, and people on a mission to "defend science" (which is a ridiculous notion, of course)?

For instance, the "guerilla skeptics" which organise themselves to ensure Wikipedia stays "correct" (see her talk here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FuJT9mp0jw], interview here [https://dataskeptic.com/epnotes/ep012.php]). There would be a difference between this and an effort to "suppress the truth", because the latter suggest there is a truth that people know and are trying to keep quiet, whereas these people don't believe there's anything to it they are just extremely focused on pushing "science" and "rational thought" in sort of abstract way.

Thank you so much for taking the time to engage in a dialogue about your sub. I'm sure some of our readers will find the information helpful. But, as you said, helping to moderate a public sub takes a lot of attention and that's really what I should be focusing on right now. Thanks again and good luck.

No problem, was happy to respond to your points and clarify as appropriate. All the best.

...

Personally, I have never sworn or spoken that detrimentally about the ME sub. I was banned for creating an alternative. And we have moved away from the Mandela name for just that reason. [https://retconeffect.wordpress.com/home]

No, I'm quite sure you haven't (I don't know the background to that, unfortunately). What I meant was, I think it might have been better to not pitch it as an "alternative" at all, and just as a new thing, when announcing it on that subreddit (after messaging the mods of course). It's a bit late now, but I would have happily helped tweak the wording to avoid conflict - beneficial for everyone. It also might have helped save you from the troll/downvoting influx that comes with this. (You should get your AutoModerator up and running sooner rather than later.)

Anyway, what's done is done. I've always quite liked the "retcon" concept in media, and it evokes the idea of "revision" which is used in other contexts, so that's a good choice to build something new upon I think.

POST: Did the Two Cups Intention Method from /r/DimensionalJumping Last Night... and Woke Up Today Filled With Negative Emotions and Hostility (/r/Retconned/)

(Oops, you deleted your post in the other subreddit just as I was replying, so I'll put my response here in case you find it useful.)

You're overthinking this, I'd say. And "spiritual contracts" and "negative vibrations" have nothing to do with this - or, at least, you should very carefully consider what those concepts have to offer in terms of a useful accounting of your experiences, rather than simply accept such ideas at face value. If you've performed the two glasses exercise, then the only result that matters is whether, at some later time, the intended result arises within your experience (or not). It is problematic to attempt to attribute any other experience to the exercise: it can quickly lead to all sorts of superstitious type thinking, since any reasons you come up with are inevitably going to be completely ungrounded in actual experience. That is, you'll probably just be free-wheeling all sorts of vague ideas based on whatever you have previously read, but never actually experienced personally. For instance, do not assume that this exercise is based upon occult ideas or multiverses and the like.

My suggestion: follow the last instruction, let it go, and deal with any specific outcomes as they arise, and not before.

POST: Ever heard of r/DimensionalJumping? (/r/threekings/)

Q1: The interesting thing about it is that if you read their methods, they are just standard magick to get you the things you want. That raises questions: are they interpreting simple magick working as "dimension jumping"? Does all magick work through dimension jumping and we don't realize it? Are they both doing normal magick AND dimension jumping in addition to that because that is the intent?
I'm leaning toward the lasst one, because I've never experienced other abnormalities (things being "different" after a ritual/spell), other than the purpose of the ritual/spell coming to fruition. Then again, I wasn't looking for them, so I don't know.

The underlying concept of that subreddit was, in fact, partly to encourage an exploration into whether the idea of "methods" (and related notions) was valid at all. And, from there, to seek to unpack the nature of "experiences" and the nature of descriptions about experiences.

Making a distinction between those two "natures" - and investigating the relationship between them - tends to highlight that taking concepts like "dimensional jumping" and "magick" or whatever as literal independent things might be an error. And so talking about "dimensional jumping" being a version (or not) of a "simple magick working" can be a bit meaningless, if all that is truly meant by "magick" is just a way of talking conceptually about certain sorts of experiences. The basic assumption that there is anything "behind" experiences, and the descriptions can somehow capture that "behind", might be... unsupported.

Which isn't to say that those descriptions aren't useful - for discussion and planning and designing and so on. But they are not "what is happening" (itself possibly a dubious idea). After all, the basic common everyday description of being a person-object located within a world-place (where "the world" is taken to be a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time' that is made from 'parts'") is certainly useful. But it is perhaps not really true as a direct experience, when we check.

That "checking" was really what the metaphor (?) of "dimension jumping" was intended to promote, as presented in the subreddit anyway. Note that "metaphor" doesn't mean you can't have experiences that are patterned exactly "as if" something is true; it's just that it is not fundamentally true. Descriptions might not capture experiences, but they might have utility in structuring them. And so on.

Q2: I'm just curious. Why make the subreddit a read only archive? It was an interesting sub until it closed down. The new r/DimensionJumping isn't that active.

That "new" subreddit isn't really even the new subreddit (it's not a continuation).

The thinking behind making it a read-only archive:

The original idea that developed was that the subreddit would be fairly unmoderated in terms of posts, but we'd bash things out in the comments section, via dialogue. So it was basically "moderation by contribution" (of moderators and regular participants who'd been around for a while). This worked well when there was only a few active contributors, slowly increasing. I personally spent a lot of time engaging in quite detailed conversations (in the sense of leading an investigation, not dictating conclusions) and so did many others.

However, eventually (as often happens for niche topics) the subreddit got swamped with users - often via indirect links - who didn't read any previous discussions or the intro material before posting, leading to repeated questions and/or a naive idea of the subreddit based just on its name. The volume meant that the old model just didn't work anymore. That number of pseudo-one-on-one couldn't happen in parallel.

The reason for "archiving" the subreddit rather than letting it just continue, is that letting it run on would dilute the material that had arisen within the subreddit. It would continue its march into a general sort of "new-agey/LOA/magick" hybrid and the residual value would be gone. Better, it was thought, to lock that down, and others could continue their more literal idea of "dimensional jumping" elsewhere - and, eventually, we'd continue the core thread in another forum, with a different approach to moderation and contribution.

POST: 2 cups method question (/r/DimensionShifting/)

If I recall correctly:

Given that the "two cups method" (originally: two glasses exercise) was intended as a demonstration exercise targeting the nature of experience and the nature of ideas about experience, the thinking behind suggesting that one should not do it too often would be that it's best to leave some space to more easily, more accurately, observe whether performing it has a link with subsequent changes in experience -- or not.

That's why it was an "exercise" rather than a "method": it can't really be a "method" until it's been proven to actually cause change. And if it does actually cause change (a view that may or may not be arrived at via repeated, distinct experiments) then there are probably more interesting conclusions to draw other than "let's pour more glasses of water to change the world" or similar. :-)

Q1: I don't think it was u/triumphantgeorge as they have a specific idea about dimension jumping that was more based on the importance of discussion not the reality or fixation on the dimension jumping. I don't recall the post you are mentioning, though I am sure someone wrote something along those lines.
Everyday you choose to do something different you are making a jump. Dimension jumping is just another tool. Action of one kind or another is required for you to grow, but the universe always responds to our action.

Yep, pretty much.

Q2: Now that I make you back into Reddit or maybe I just intentionally shifted to a version where you are already back, I wanted to ask you about this exercise of yours. Did you invented this exercise or you take it from somewhere else and explain it with your own words?

I made it up. It was originally written as a quick response in a GITM thread, later slightly tidied up for the DJ subreddit when I fully took that over. It's just an example of pattern-linking really, but it has the benefit of being easily performed plus extremely mundane -- and that's quite an effective combination in an exercise designed for exploring this area.

Q2: Ok, did you still keep that gitm thread, it will be nice to see how it was born, on other note is it connected to Wicca spells. Also I'm curious from what standpoint you are viewing this exercise, from scientific-skeptic approach or from Occultic one or maybe from New age one, I'm pretty much asking, are you believer or not, because you put the label "exercise" and not "technique/method".

Here it is [POST: [EXPERIMENT] Glitch Generation Test, I Need Your Creative Ideas!].

The notion underpinning the DJ subreddit was that it was an environment for facilitating the exploration (experimentation, conceptualisation, discussion) of (1) the nature of experience and (2) the nature of thoughts about experience. No assumptions were offered or encouraged. What is there to "believe" without actually having an experience and drawing conclusions yourself? (Is the idea.)

Also, it's worth noting that the nature of "believing" is another issue all on its own. It's a pretty loose term anyway, but when it is referring to something along the lines of "an idea which I think is true", then the nature nature of ideas comes into play. In particular, the extent to which ideas are (or the thinking of them is) somewhat like a parallel-simultaneous experience relative to the "main strand"; they don't "get behind" our experience or "explain" it in the sense of revealing the underpinnings of it.

Of course, the term "believing" might also, or instead, be used as a word to describe something along the lines of having "adopted a perspective" or "adopted a mental/experiential posture". In that case, one might wonder whether this is something that might be more intertwined with the main strand of experience; perhaps it might constitute a "patterning" of it?

However, these things must be considered and explored; they cannot just be taken for granted because they sound appealing, or because it would be nice if they were true.

(Again, this is the thinking behind the DJ subreddit, and therefore the viewpoint taken in any discussions with "TriumphantGeorge". And it was the underlying approach to the discussion of "glitches" back when I was the prominent moderator and participant of GITM, after having resurrected it from neglect and a lack of "philosophy". It's mostly reverted back to the old ways now I think, unfortunately. But inevitably: it's a lot of work to maintain or even articulate a consistent "perspective" in these subreddits.)

Q2: Hi, I wanted to ask you are labels really needed? Are they just for strengthening your intention or they have a special role in the ritual? Can I just hold the first cup and describe my current situation and for the second cup, hold and set my intention for the change in my mind, then just pour the water? I saw the original post finally and as I see it the original intention was this to be a 'glitch in the matrix generator' and you also said that you have other exercises under your sleeve, did you post them eventually?

For the purposes of this exercise, I would do everything as described. After all, it's only an exercise, not a method, until proven otherwise. If it so happens that you get some sort of interesting results that can be repeated, then you could experiment with changing aspects of it and see what matters and what doesn't. (If you get no results at all, then there's not much point in tinkering with it, no basis for making decisions on what to tinker with.)

Loosely, though, the metaphor to use when considering the relationships between the various parts is: "patterning".

Q3: Great to see you back man. You changed my whole perspective on things at a time when I was very set in my ways. Can't thank you enough!

You're very welcome -- glad I was helpful!

Q4: hey I wanted to ask you something. Is the dimension shifting stuff actually all real? I used to follow the original sub years ago and read all the things you wrote and was a hardcore believer.
After years with no results, I eventually stopped believing and thought the entire thing was a hoax and I still do but every now and then I wonder if it is actually real, were you telling the truth?

Not a hoax, but presented as an exploration rather than a declaration of things being a certain way. Which is to say, "dimensions" should not be taken as literal, but rather as one metaphor among many that could be used to explore "the nature of experience, and the nature of descriptions about experience".

The idea was that by experimenting directly you would find out for yourself; you weren't meant to "believe" anything one way or the other. Unpacking things through philosophical-type discussion would then work in tandem with that. (This was clearer if you followed the in-comments discussions, which is where the actual meat of the subreddit took place. Two Glasses was intended to be a "blank slate" starting point from which this investigatory-type approach could progress.)

The closest approximation to that approach now is probably /r/NevilleGoddard: taking a reference concept or text (in that case taking the stories in the Bible as metaphors about reality) and using it as inspiration for a very direct, active, experimental approach.

Q4: I always thought experiencing the "effortless movement" would be what helps with exploration, to show there is something to all this beyond a reasonable doubt. The most I ever got was moving my arm, it happened years ago and I've never been able to replicate it since. Any tips for getting effortless movement, how long should I stick with it before expecting results?
Also one time I did the two glasses on a situation and that very night it appeared to work which shocked me because the situation was unlikely to fix itself. Then I found out a few weeks later it actually didn't work. But then a few months later it ended up fixing itself and working. But all the other times I did the two glasses, it never worked.
But it is experiences like that which make me wonder if there is something to all this. But if most of the two glasses fail and one of them works, that just seems like coincidence.

On the first point, don't attempt to manipulate or interact with your arm at all. Instead, bring to mind the idea of your arm being in the raised position (it's fine if you need to use a phrase or an in-place image as a lead-in to this) while having ceased to hold onto your experience of the body (simply: leave your muscles and attention alone).

For the glasses exercise, having it "work" or not is perhaps not the right perspective, since it is more meant to indicate whether there is "something worth looking into, nor not". It's deliberately called an "exercise" rather than a "method" (the whole idea of "methods" is tricky; they are essentially experiences after all rather than causes, mostly anyway).

That it might "make me wonder whether there is something to all this" . . . was exactly the point. The only way to combat "coincidence" is to do something repeatedly and in different contexts. However, it's also worth contemplating what exactly is meant when we use words like "coincidence" or "explanation" or "reason" or "cause", and so on.

Or, indeed, what is meant by "me" and "doing", etc.

POST: I had an 8-hour panic attack, quit my job and I couldn't be happier. (/r/Buddhism/)

Q1: that agrees with the contemporary Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness
The whatterwut???
Reads Wiki article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory]
::head asplodes::
Any umm... more accessible explanations of that would be lovely.

Q2: I would love to find a good, accessible explanation of this theory. The stuff I've encountered so far is really dry, but I slug through it because I'd really like to better understand it. I hope as this theory gains traction, we'll start to see good, short YouTube videos on this stuff from, maybe, the PBS Digital Studios (I adore their Crash Course and Space Time channels). The theory, more or less, agrees with the Buddhist notion that consciousness isn't an isolated event. Abhidharma asserts that consciousness always arises with other mental events like seeing, hearing, thinking, et cetera. Consciousness as a seemless experience that flows from one event to another is kind of like a movie which is a bunch of single, still frames, that are shown in rapid succession and so it appears to be a moving picture. Consciounsess is the same - it occurs because several things are happening all at the same time and, together, they create an illusory experience of consciousness being a real, unfolding event (if that makes any sense). The IIT says that consciousness arises when information is integrated together in a system. This has a very interesting implication: Namely that if this is what any system does, then consciousness is a function of the universe (not a fluke of biology). This means that even a nebula or star system could have a form of consciousness. Granted, human beings have a very specialized form of consciousness so it's not like you could have a conversation with an exploding star. A feature of consciousness that's important is that it is self-referential. Meaning that consciousness can change itself, by itself. You can think about things that make you happy, and feel happy - without any external thing helping you out. This is important because people can do all kinds of things while not being conscious of it - like sleep driving, sleep eating, et cetera. You can be "aware" or "paying attention" and attending to complex tasks such as these, but you're not conscious of them. In this way, you're acting as an input-output device. Consciousness is something else; it is more than this. There's even a pretty good idea about why and how consciousness happens in our brains. There's a set of cells in our brains which appears to consolidate all of our brain activity - this integration of all the brain's activity creates a generalized experience and this is where the appearance of consciousness arises. Imagine you have a bunch of rides at a circus. Each ride is its own closed system, its own activity and process that operates as it does. If you were to create or provide for a place in the circus where all the rides intersect and integrate a portion of themselves, in that jumble of inter-being, you would have a consciousness arise. This is also important for the future of Artificial Intelligence because it means we can't simulate a brain in a computer and have that brain be conscious. A simulation cannot have consciousness because it's not a complex collection of interacting systems. You would have to physically build and artificial brain that "talks" to itself. ... sorry to blah blah blah at you about this, but it's a really interesting topic and the idea that consciousness is a function of the cosmos is both really, really relieving and also really wonderful. It fills me with awe and appreciation. It also suggests that Buddhist ideas about the formless aggregates may be factually true.

It's an interesting model, but I do think it conflates "consciousness" and "consciousness-of" a little, as do most emergent theories - i.e. it doesn't tackle the hard problem. Although if you begin by asserting that consciousness is the background in which everything else arises, that the property of "awareness" is fundamental, then you can dodge that problem perhaps. Then, having pre-answered "what is information made from?", you're free to progress, whether you prefer panpsychism or a more idealist or non-dual approach.

Q2: I found that to a be potential problem, too ("consciousness" and "consciousness of"). I found it fascinating that this theory does, in a small part, look at this problem. It addresses how attention isn't consciousness ("being conscious of something doesn't equate consciousness), citing how you can perform a task without being conscious of it (sleep walking) - so merely attending to an activity ("conscious of") isn't something that can qualify as consciousness itself. I think this theory hasn't quite reached the subtlety of Abhidharma which points out that consciousness arises alongside with other senses, but I have confidence that it will. At present, the IIT assumes "consciousness" is an ambient, background experience - the field in which experience takes place. I expect that as this theory gains traction and is looked into more, we'll start to see it come to similar conclusions as what we find in the Abhidharma. Curiously: Physics has undergone a similar shift. For a long time, it was considered to be the case that the universe played out in the field of space-time but, as it turns out, space-time is just another thing that happens in the universe alongside mass and gravity. It's an idea that's gathering attention: spacetime is not real.

I must say I'm not a big fan of IIT overall, because it still persists in a view that the world is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", and I don't think that's viable. There's also the inherent problem with describing a world objectively when no such world is ever experienced - "objective reality" remains a conceptual container to which a subset of subjective experience and thinking is attached. This is okay for general model-making, but when you are talking about consciousness, then it stops making sense pretty quickly, because you end up trying to give it spatial and temporal qualities, when it is actually "before" those. But anyway. If you haven't looked into Donald Hoffman's interface theory stuff, you might be interested in that. His TED talk and a couple of others are on youtube, and there's his Conscious Realism paper which is worth a read [https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf]. On spacetime not being real (to be honest, I don't think any actual physicists, at least the original set who participated in those discussions, thought it was "real" rather than a model, but popular science media tends to flag-wave), you might find these interesting:

• Physics: QBism puts the scientist back into science
• What's bad about this habit (on the reification of abstraction)

It's quite a good time for serious thought in these areas, I reckon.

Q2: Thank you for these links! You've given me a lot to think about, too. I didn't get the impression that IIT holds that view of spacetime, but it's likely that I haven't come across that element yet and, in which case, I would agree with you. Even physics would agree with you, there. I watched a PBS Digital Studios summary of this topic which suggested the only thing we could consider to be real is causality. I'm not sure what to make of that or how it might related to the buddha-dharma (if at all - it doesn't need to, it's just neat when/if it does). You're right about what physicists consider to be "real" ... their use of the word "real" has a very specific meaning which can be compared and contrasted with our colloquial use of the word. Since I seem to have some time on my hands, I can explore those links you provided. Thank you!

It's been a while since I've read about IIT, so perhaps I'm wrong, but I think that was at least the implied position when I was reading Christof Koch's take on it. He used it as the jumping off point to a panpsychism that implied objects as being formed of consciousness, rather than experiences arising in consciousness (which is an important difference). Hmm, so, I'd rather say patterning than causality. I don't think one event can cause another, any more than one thought can cause another. Reusing a metaphor: If there are two folds in a blanket, and I pull on one fold and the other is moved also, did fold-1 cause the movement of fold-2, or is it just part of a larger movement or landscape?

You make a very good point: the specific use that science makes of colloquial terms can be a real problem. The prime example being people interpreting "laws" as meaning "rules which govern the universe" rather than "inferred regularities used as generalised descriptions". Anyway, hope you find the links thought-provoking!

POST: [Theory] Operation Berenstain (/r/MandelaEffect/)

Q1: The whole point of a "true ME" is that there is no "residue", everything changed. What is commonly called "residue" is called that to escape the fact that it's evidence of something not being a Mandela Effect.

From the sidebar:

Note - Given nature of the effect, 'evidence' inevitably takes the form of shared personal memories; physical evidence of the previously remembered state is unavailable. If such evidence is discovered, that's proof of an alternative explanation.

Q1: I sort of disagree with the way that's worded. If no residue ever existed, then we could have likely written this off as a result of confirmation bias awhile ago because people would trust that they were just having false memories instead of real memories that changed. I just feel like that is a double standard of skeptics. People refuse to believe that a change occurred in the first place, then when a piece of residue surfaces showing that it more than likely did, that's proof that it did change, but it's explainable. The problem I have with that is that I would say it's pretty much 50/50 with the percentage of residue that makes the ME 100% rationally explainable for me.

The wording tries to not be too specific, because it's trying to avoid saying that, for example, instances of a misspelling count as "physical evidence". It's more about, say, it being discovered that there were in fact multiple editions of the film 1408 with different endings, so remembering one and then seeing another isn't a Mandela Effect, things like that. On residues, though: If a change occurs, though, why would there be a "residue"? What is the mechanism for that? If a world fact has shifted, then the entire pattern of the world would shift in accordance with that, surely?

For example, all instances of "Berenstein" would shift to "Berenstain" - all experiences of the-fact-of-that-name would now be "Berenstain". This doesn't mean that instances of misspellings can't exist, of course, just as there would if there had been no shift - the content of the "fact of a misspelling" would just be different (a misspelling would now be "Berenstein" not "Berenstain"). I don't see how instances of "the old way" prove anything at all? I don't find this notion of a "residue" very compelling really; it's doesn't add anything to the "fact-shifting" model of the Mandela Effect. It seems like a science fiction narrative added on top, and for no great benefit?

I think to say so for certain would be underestimating the complexity of said quantum forces at play.

I definitely agree that we have to be cautious here, but I'm inclined to suggest that - in the absence of a specific detailed model - we should keep things reasonably simple. Introducing concepts like "residue" presupposes that a certain type of event lies behind it. At this early stage, we should be aiming to uncover assumptions about the nature of our experience, and not unwittingly introduce new ones. Even in your sentence above, the idea that what is responsible for the Mandela Effect is "complex quantum forces" seems to me to be us jumping ahead a bit, maybe using the language of physics a little loosely and (it may turn out) inappropriately. The effect might turn out to be best described at a stage "before" those sorts of descriptions; it might precede the "quantum forces" descriptive framework. But you do imply something that I think is a key consideration: if we're interpreting the Mandela Effect as being a sign of a "shift" of the "world pattern", then on what basis can we elevate one fact compared with another? It becomes effectively meaningless to label one fact as a "residue" simply because it corresponds to our current memory - the whole pattern is "now" rather than in history, and its current state is essentially arbitrary; it could change at any time to a different distribution of facts (potentially).

Q1: OK, "quantum forces" may have been to glitzy of a term, but I was more just referring to your comment about "if it is a shift in world facts" rather than the alternative, being collective false memories or whatever. And yeah, your last paragraph was precisely what I was getting at. Taking that into consideration, I do see the benefits of keeping things "reasonably simple" because of how confusing things can get attempting to interpret what we are experiencing. There does need to be a mathematical approach of sorts in the way we observe and process this information, it's just hard to know if our "math" is right.

So, I think (and this is why the sidebar defines the effect in the way it does) that if we always keep in mind that the primary thing is "the experience of world facts having changed" - where that sentence is intended to make no comment at all on what is "behind" that experience - then we're okay. We can then play with different possible descriptions without ever committing to them as being "what really happens", and therefore we're free to change our ideas and even hold multiple explanations simultaneously without having to decide on one being "the truth". At all times, we remember that explanations are "parallel constructions in thought" rather than "how things actually are". (It could be argued that "how things actually are" is really just "the sensory experience you are having", and that explanations are always just stories, made of different "stuff" - concepts - than experiences are.)

This even means we can use ideas like "quantum forces" if it is useful to do so, because we are being careful not to make the mistake of "reification of abstractions" ["What’s bad about this habit" by N. David Mermin] (that is, confusing our ideas about things with actual external causes of things). I'm personally inclined to go for something one step back from that, though - something based on a structuring of subjective perspectives. But even then I never really need to fully commit to that, to the exclusion of other ideas or otherwise, because of the approach above.

You probably have the most well-rounded perspective on this issue out of anyone here. That link was actually interesting; thanks for that.

Yes, it's a nice snappy little article. If you like that, you might also find George Ellis's Nature piece on the scientific method, as regards string theory and multiverses, interesting. Although not explicitly stated, it's part of that same line of thought.

POST: [Theory] What if time travel, ISN'T what we think it is? What if it's just shifting through universes? (/r/MandelaEffect/)

The Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments.

Q1: Yes! I call them "decision points", but "possible moments" works too :) And in my visualization, certain points are fixed, like a hub. Singularity decision points, you could say, that connect across all possible timelines. I believe it's easier to change position under the influence of a singularity decision point, but with enough whatever works this it could be possible at any divergence.

Ah, but we're maybe differing here. The "possible moments" are more like 3D-sensory-immersive "frames" of experience. Each moment is as good as another, and is in no particular order. Although in a way that means that every moment is a "decision point", like walking across a big chess board and you are stood on one square, choosing the next square. The secret sauce? That although we assume we step from square to square, we are in fact teleporting - and all squares are possible from every other square, not just the adjacent ones. Of course, how exactly this is done - and how this relates to the concepts of timelines and hubs - is up for debate!

Q1: I do think we're still getting at the same end along different routes. What I would call a decision point is not so much an A leads to B leads to C with splits leading off of each one. They are instances of opportunity, like playing some sort of cosmic tabletop game (only you experience that game as an immersive "reality"). Some of those instances allow only minor variation and after changing instances you might only notice that "damnation" is spelled differently. In others, you discover that Iceland has relocated. I think these are side effects of shifts, and I think the size of the shift correlates to the size of the change. I think that a large shift to an opposite square rather than an adjacent one is possible, but the whiplash of such a drastic change would have a lower probability of survival.

So, let's agree: that from any this-moment on The Grid, absolutely any next-moment is available in theory. However, practically speaking our trajectory-so-far limits the likely next-moment set. I say that every moment is a moment of infinite opportunity, however the apparent barriers may vary from moment to moment. And I suggest this is because we traverse the grid using associative traversal. Which means, that we traverse the grid according to the next-moments that are conceivable to us. Without getting too out there, if your now-moment was 1970s America, you would be unlikely to have a next-moment with an iMac and a black president. Such a moment would exist, but you would be unable to conceive of such a thing, you would be literally (almost) unable to experience that.

POST: The woman who sued McDonald's after she spilled coffee in her lap used to be regarded as a frivolous lawsuit. But now... (/r/MandelaEffect/)

Concept: A Mandela Effect Scale

Okay, let's maybe see if we can establish a scale that might allow for a more intuitive way of thinking about what different groups are calling 'Mandela Effects'. (Remember that the original website description really does invoke multiple worlds. In contrast, we're not going to define the levels by explanation, only by directness of experience.)

The current definition is:

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

What I'm trying to come up with is what would constitute the hypothetical 'pure' Mandela Effect from which different variations might be scaled. The 'pure' version would be where you have a direct experience of something which is generally true (e.g. seeing a map of Japan) and then later have another direct experience of the same thing (seeing that same map), only to discover that it is different now (Japan has shifted on the map). And there's no evidence of the previous state. Beyond this, the experiential fact (positions on that map) and the thing the experience is "about" (positions on maps) become more remote. So in our example, the key "fact" that changes here is the content of the particular map itself, not actually the location of Japan. So let's start with that as the primary version and work out from there:

• Level 1: A particular map doesn't now correspond to your memory of that specific map. (All other maps are consistent with this.)
• Level 2: Other maps now don't correspond to your memory of that specific map. (You don't have access to the specific map anymore to check that.)
• Level 3: No specific maps involved but current maps in general now don't correspond to what you think they should show.
• Level 4: What people say about the geographical location of Japan today differs from what you remember them saying in the past.

Only ME1 is "Mandela Gold" and as direct as it gets, ME2 is secondary and contains a direct element, ME3 indirect and is what most posts seem to contain, ME4 is completely detached. Things to do with consensus views and propaganda would be an ME4; your post would be an example of that. The further up the scale we get, towards ME1, the more difficult it becomes to construct a standard explanation other than "memory glitch".

Yes! This is why I posted this. I think it's possible that this very type of thing could be behind some other Mandela Effects as well! But mods like /u/TriumphantGeorge want to suppress that idea and only allow for metaphysical and paranormal beliefs.

It's not about beliefs, surely, it's about the directness of the experience. There's a difference between, say:

• The evolution of the presentation in the media about a situation or event - the facts of the world as mediated. The consensus has moved, but evidence of the old consensus can still be found in historical records.
• The evolution of your direct experience - the facts of the world as encountered. You have an experience is evidence of a fact. Later, things appear to be different, and you cannot find a record of the original evidence, or it has changed.

The evidence is the fact, rather than the content as such.

So if I understand you correctly, in order for it to be considered a Mandela Effect, there must be no evidence of the old consensus, right?

I made no mention of evidence of the consensus. Rather, it's evidence of the experience or encounter that matters. I would say that the "effect" rather the evidential aspect of a Mandela Effect would refer to the direct "personal" encounter rather than the inferences drawn from it. Taking some classic examples:

• You encounter an article in a newspaper. It says a famous person has died. Subsequently, you see them on television. You are amazed: you read about their death. You try previous articles you remember (you feel: know) you read announcing that death. You cannot find any.
• You spent 6 months studying geography with a particular in interest in Japan. Two years later, you are looking at a guidebook; Japan is in a different place to how you remember (you feel: know) it to be. You look at your old maps: they show the same 'new' location. You cannot find a map which corresponds to your memory of where Japan "used to be".

Neither of these cases is about your personal encounter with "the consensus"; they represent a change in the apparent physical fact of the world, en route to an conceptual fact of the world. Certainly there are possible explanations one could come up with, re: memories and exposure, but the experience is direct, rather than of second-hand experiencing of a shift in general opinion. Meanwhile...

As with a "glitch", a "Mandela Effect" is what is left when all other explanations are taken away. In most example this is not possible, right? So what we are left with is open cases, with it being judged on personal judgements of what one considers "plausible". Inherently, if we were to, say, post something for which we already had an explanation - there's not much to unravel or explore. We'd just be holding it up as an example of "hey if I hadn't thought this through, I might have thought this was a world-shift", a way of indirectly suggesting this was the source of other examples, without just directly proposing it. It would be a little disingenuous.

Q1: So what sort of expected responses are permissible? Because when someone says "Guise, srsly! Japan is in a different place!", there's only so much discussion that can happen that doesn't at some point turn into "Memory is notoriously unreliable."
I've had a couple of instances where I thought I'd heard a celebrity had died. One was Don Ho who I swore I'd heard on the news around 1979 or so that he had died, and one was Gene Hackman who I swore I'd heard had died around 2005. Obviously I was mistaken in both instances, but to me that's what the Mandela Effect is: someone was mistaken. There are plenty of reasons someone could claim they believe they weren't mistaken, but as far as I can tell those can all be linked to mental illness, drugs, or Dunning-Kruger. Like, /u/Roril who believes he switched dimensions; okay, fine, he believes that, but at that point what's left to discuss?

Well, any suggestion of an explanation is permissible, right?

You're correct, though: since these are basically experiences that people have that have already happened, in general it's not likely you'll ever get to the bottom of it. To do that, we'd need to have a detailed model that we could then test with a replication of the conditions. I think that expecting to reach a conclusion for every example that everyone accepts is "true", would be a bit of a hopeful thing for us to do. But...

We can present our different ideas, discuss how they would work in that specific case, and others can go with it or not. The discussion is in the detailing, and sometimes a bit of research might actually explain away a particular example convincingly. Apart from that though, it's handwaving. For instance, "memory is notoriously reliable" isn't really an explanation for a particular event, it's just a statement of a broad and non-specific consensus. Concluding yourself to be "mistaken" or not, again it's down to interpretation: things don't match, so I'm concluding my memory went awry. It certainly fits our generally accepted view of the world better than "switching universes", although it's no more provable. That got meandering. So, what I was getting at:

• All we can do is lay out the description we personally prefer, as clearly as possible, and engage in discussion arising from it.
• Others might prod them to explore their coherence, but we cannot establish their truth.
• In the absence of being able to suggest a mechanism which describes how, exactly, something could have happened, most proposals are going to be fuzzy and going one way or the other will be about personal preference.
• In reality, all reports probably remain "open cases". Like the rest of life that happens outside the laboratory, there are no answers, only choices.

The problem with the entire effect is that the personal experience is inherently that - personal. We have no way to prove (nor, should I say, disprove) as yet, as an external, ambivalent, neutral observer, the hypothesis that certain people have "shifted" between two discrete and discernible realities.

It's the ultimate subjective topic - and if nothing else, it emphasises to us that all experience is subjective, and the objective frame is just a concept we have to describe the language-shared commonalities. Personally, I think that as soon as we move away from direct experiencing, we are entering the realm of conceptualisation. And that is fine, but it means we need to treat all of our explanations with a little detachment - we literally make them up in our minds, whether that is "timeline jumping" or "false memories". Regardless, there's lots to play with in terms of understanding perception and our world better. For as long as we don't understand what and where memories are, exactly, and we don't have a description for perception is, fully, we're never going to be able to come up with the equivalent of a "theory of gravity" for our ongoing experience (if even we can).

• Example: Darkroom Vision experiences.

One explanation: "hallucination". But how does that work, exactly? Without that, it's just nonscientific handwaving, no better than no explanation at all. I'm inclined to think that better accounts of ME/etc are to be found be deeper investigation into those sorts of perceptual anomalies. However, they are very hard to study because they are not very predictable and controllable.

For the sort of noticeable changes you're seeing, you'd have to go some way into the past to find the moment that switched between one set of circumstances and another,

Why would we have to go into the past for the explanation? If things truly can "shift", then why wouldn't they be free to shift to any new state, including an implied history within that state, so long as the overall structure was self-consistent?

POST: [META] Why do so many scoffers talk about confirmation bias as if it debunks the ME? (/r/MandelaEffect/)

Q1: I'll try my best here. In science one needs to lose all preconceived ideas before interpreting evidence or data. As far as the Mandela Effect, if you already believe what is happening is because of the shifting universes then anytime your presented with new data you interpret it as evidence of the ME rather than the possibility that it could be unrelated. For instance, a person who is mentally sick or simply misremembering, these things happen and are unrelated to the ME but people with confirmation bias interpret as it is related. That doesn't mean that it necessarily "debunks" it but rather keeps the proposed "evidence" as nothing more than assertions. Another problem is that there can be little to no evidence for shifting universes, by the very nature of it...

What you say is true. I think a lot of posts misuse the term re: Mandela Effect though. I think OP was trying to say that if you don't know about ME and one day you suddenly notice that something has changed, later discovering others have noticed the same thing - then it can't be confirmation bias, since you had no theory-of-the-world you were applying when you made the observation. Loosely, I'm thinking...

Confirmation applies to your interpretation of your observations - the analysis of the dataset - not the observations themselves. The same applies to the frequency illusion. The frequency illusion suggests that, given a particular dataset, you will make more observations of a particular type. It doesn't mean that each observation is itself invalid. Neither of them affect the fact that you are observing, case by case, that part of the world does not match your memory of it. It doesn't matter what you call it (confirmation bias) or how often you notice if (frequency illusion). This is what I'd say the Mandela Effect actually is. Everything beyond that is interpretation.

Yes you have it correct. Most people learning of a ME that affects them had no reason to believe in any of the crazy ideas that try to explain it, they aren't being affected by confirmation bias in the least, they just had a weird experience.

I do think one of the problems is that the term "Mandela Effect" on this subreddit has become conflated with a particular interpretation of it. A similar thing happened with "glitches" becoming confused with the idea that we actually live in as simulation. We have to emphasise that the "glitch" itself is the experience of something unusual for which you do not have a ready explanation. The possible explanations you come up with are separate from this. I feel this is a larger problem that has developed generally: that we treat our invented abstractions about the world as being "more real" than our direct experience of it. People are quick to jump straight to "parallel realities are merging" rather than saying "I experienced a tree being in my garden when there wasn't one before" - or whatever.

Yes, that does seem like a pretty big problem. I don't believe in the parallel universes, and collapsing universes, and the scoffers act as if every time someone talks about a ME, that's what they're claiming happened. Sometimes a ME report is just a ME report and not claiming to know why.

I think that's exactly why people scoff. But they scoff so much, that they don't realise that it's not what is being said by most people. It works the other way around too. In the last few days, the sub has tried to reflect that in the sidebar and in the mod posts - defining ME as noticing that a "global fact" that you have "specific personal memories" for now seems to be different - emphasising that there is no particular interpretation inherent in this. A lot of people seem to really want this to be parallel universes; a lot of people really want it to be false memories. Passionately. I don't know whether that's because of this tendency to jump straight to the interpretation, rather than leave things as an "open verdict" and explore its nature more thoroughly before making a decision (if at all). It can not be parallel universes and also not be a psychological artefact. Top rules, I think:

• Just because you read about something in a popular science magazine, doesn't mean it's applicable in this specific context.
• If you have not tested your theory in the specific context, then it's just a fun idea - it may not apply.
• If you cannot test your theory in the specific context, then it is philosophy or metaphysics - and that's okay.
• Naming or categorising something isn't the same as understanding and explaining it.

I'm guilty of using the term "Mandela Effect" to mean "interpretations of ME" and I apologize for that. I thought that we were discussing the interpretations when talking about debunking it. I'm on the same page now.

Well, it's natural really - people first go to Glitch because "reality is a simulation" and they first come here because "universes are colliding", and the sidebar wasn't very clear before. Plus: too many subscribers, not enough moderation.

If we think of it as an investigation into reports of a particular phenomenon, then I think we can't go wrong:

1. Record instances where people report memories =/= world facts.
2. Come up with possible explanations on a case by case basis.

Sometimes there will be an obvious explanation. Sometimes there won't. Standard and esoteric suggestions are fine. Mostly, due to the nature of the phenomenon, we'll have an "open verdict".

*Q2: I think OP was trying to say that if you don't know about ME and one day you suddenly notice that something has changed, later discovering others have noticed the same thing - then it can't be confirmation bias, since you had no theory-of-the-world you were applying when you made the observation.

To use an example, how many people write out the word "dilemma" on a daily basis? To be honest, hardly ever. I never even knew "dilemna" was a common misspelling of it until this subreddit. How many chances do you have to get called on it?

I've seen lots of other misspellings; "definitely" is often misspelled "definately" or "defiantly". I have to spell my last name all the time on the phone or in person, as people evidently mishear it as "Goodman". It doesn't matter what the fact is; the spelling of a word, the date of someone's death, the location of a place. If you think it changed? For whatever reason, you were wrong before. If, when shown evidence of the correct fact, you double down on being wrong and claim you're right and all the evidence in the world is wrong, I'm sorry, but I don't know what to tell you. You were wrong about Berenstain. You were wrong about dilemma. You were wrong about the date Nelson Mandela died, about the location of New Zealand or Japan. And -- so what? I don't really care, except that people here keep talking about it. Me, when I find something that I've been wrong about -- and I have! -- I shrug my shoulders, go "Oh, I was wrong about that, sorry!", mentally file away the correct version, and go on with my life. I don't get why other people can't do that.*

And that is why the sidebar now emphasises:

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

The point being, there are some posts here which are of the form "I always kinda thought this, but I see it's that". There is no specific memory attached to it. Others, though - the people who are persistent on this topic - are reporting a different sort of experience. The actually remember the direct experience which led them to think one way, and so were later shocked to discover it was another way. They have a specific memory rather than just a vague notion. Otherwise, yeah, you're right: they'd just go "ha, silly me, I was wrong about that". I mean: people have better things to do. The reason that they are so focused on it - behaving so weirdly about what looks to be a mistake - is because they aren't in the situation you're assuming they are in (from their perspective). The problem is that two things are getting muddled up, and the posts on this subreddit obviously reflect that. For example, let's take two versions of one thing (exaggerating for effect):

1. A person one day reads an article about "dilemma" and goes, hey, crazy, I always thought it was spelled it "dilemna", that's mental!
2. A person who used to write spellchecker software for IBM, then gave up computing to teach English, before doing a psychology dissertation specifically on "situations in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives", suddenly notices one while typing an email on day that, rather unusually, one of the words is underlined red: "dilemna". He pauses. He clicks "OK" to correct spelling. It changes to "dilemma". The spelling he has been using for that last 20 years never works again.

You get the idea.

Q2: Others, though - the people who are persistent on this topic - are reporting a different sort of experience. The actually remember the direct experience which led them to think one way, and so were later shocked to discover it was another way. They have a specific memory rather than just a vague notion.
I absolutely doubt their claims to direct experience. I doubt their claims to whatever expert knowledge they claim. They got it wrong. I've been in enough discussions with those people over the years, and gone to the sources and seen that they were wrong. They won't look in the sources again. They're like Roddy Piper's friend in They Live; they're so sure they're right they'd rather spend fifteen minutes in a fistfight with their friend than just put on the damn glasses. If they can show whatever source they went to, and it's wrong, then yeah, I'll put on the damn glasses. If they're sure that whatever source they looked in has changed... Occam's Razor. They were wrong before. I'm sorry, no matter how sure you were, you got it wrong.

I think you're conflating two groups of people here. (Note that I'm not advocating any specific explanation for any of this. I'm just emphasising what it is that needs explained, vs what does not.)

There is a difference between:

1. People who are going looking for esoteric aspects to experience, for whatever reason, and
2. Those who have had an experience they can't explain, and then go looking for an explanation.

For the first set, those who go looking, then all the usual things potentially apply: confirmation bias, frequency illusion, whatever (although not necessarily). But that's all on the interpretation side. It's silly to argue with someone on the basis of an adopted worldview. The second set are the interesting ones. Sure you can say "they're wrong", but that's not saying anything new: they are obviously wrong now - what they thought they knew now doesn't match how the world is! What's interesting is how (from their perspective) they one day changed from "being right". In that case you are seeking to explain an experience, an event. The problem is: there are no sources you can go to. The whole point is that they can find no evidence of "how things were before". That's why they find it so disturbing and can't let it go! Repeatedly telling them "you are wrong, look: here's a dictionary and it says 'dilemma" is meaningless. If someone has had an specific and unusual experience, denying the experience doesn't accomplish anything. They obviously did have an experience (of some sort). Now, you can just not know what the nature of that experience was - and that's fine. But if you do offer an explanation at all, you have to be able to say how exactly it explains it. (This is where "psychology study buzzword bingo" falls down - just as badly as "quantum multi-worlds".)

Q2: The second set are the interesting ones. Sure you can say "they're wrong", but that's not saying anything new: they are obviously wrong now - what they thought they knew now doesn't match how the world is! What's interesting is how (from their perspective) they one day changed from "being right". In that case you are seeking to explain an experience, an event.
True enough. I'm reminded of, over on Glitch, a few months back when a guy posted about his grandmother moving in with his family, them installing a wheelchair ramp for her, and then moving her into hospice care a short time later and removing the wheelchair ramp, only to discover later that the grandmother never lived with them nor was a wheelchair ramp ever installed -- and there was no physical evidence that one was. Or the woman a year or two ago who had bought a car, driven it around for at least a year, then suddenly it disappeared -- but her family didn't remember it and there was no evidence that she ever owned the car. In that context, I can see how someone wouldn't be "just wrong". There are some possible explanations for those kinds of things, though they do tend to be psychiatric in nature. On the "just wrong" side, I can't tell you how many times I've looked in the dictionary to figure out if a word is spelled xy or yx, then forgotten which it was between the dictionary and the paper. Or checked to make sure I locked the door on my way out, or checked my zipper before leaving the restroom, and immediately after forgetting the result and having to check again. So I can easily see wondering, is it "vacuum" or "vaccuum" (sorry!), checking the dictionary, coming away with the wrong spelling, and filing it mentally as the right one. (And while I did win spelling contests as a kid -- citywide, with prizes and trophies and everything -- there has been a word or two that I've done that with.)

Right, this is exactly the distinction I'm seeking to make. Without that distinction, we are muddling up (for instance) someone for whom the spelling of a word just stopped working as they were typing it, versus someone who just kinda always thought it was spelled that way. Obviously, that might mean spellings of words aren't the best example to investigating this, exactly due to that categorisation confusion. The definition in the sidebar (>>>) now focuses on the experience rather than the interpretation, and the submission guidelines encourage posters to be more detailed in terms of the actual personal context associated with their story. In effect, it seeks to take a more "glitch-like" approach to the subject (which I hope will mean discussion can be based on curiosity about a phenomenon, rather than fighting to defend worldviews). I'd say there's certainly something going on, and that "changes do happen". Science and psychiatry are "too late" in terms of being useful for the study of it, because this affects the actual tool one uses to perform those sorts of projects (it's already happened and there's no trace other than in the memory). I suspect it's related to some assumptions we make about our ongoing sensory experience being of the same "format" as the world beyond it. Regardless, collecting more detailed anecdotal reports might suggest common threads, and new directions. The ultimate aim being, I suppose: deliberate creation of an ME and thereby proving its nature.

Q3: Except, I would say most people who learn about a ME have no interest in parallel universes, usually to the lay-person they would think of time travel first, or just get really confused and ignore it, or play it off as faulty memory which most people do. I would say many people who believe in the ME do not believe in multiple universes, and although there are a couple people here who do, most of the time when I see it mentioned, it's mentioned by people who don't believe in the MEs.

Can we summarise this as:

• ME = the fact of the observation = noticing that your memory and the world are now different.

This cannot be debunked by saying:

• You are interpreting them a certain way (confirmation bias), or:
• You are just noticing them more (frequency illusion).

Because:

• The interpretation of the observations and the number of observations does not affect the fact that you are observing the disparity.

Everything beyond this is theorising.

Q4: Skeptics Guidebook; Page 2; Section 1; Paragraph 1-A: On dealing with the utterly preposterous concept of the Mandela Effect/Reality Glitches: If proclaiming "confirmation bias" doesn't work then emergency parameters dictate to fall back on "What a terrible memory you've got!" Works like a charm.

[COMMENT]

Q2: What's more likely, that someone has been spelling the word "dilemma" wrong all their life, or that any of the following is correct:

• They were taught the wrong spelling
• The spelling changed and somehow everyone "got the memo" except them, and oh by the way there's no evidence of the previous spelling
• They've somehow moved from a universe where it's spelled differently to this one
  It's possible but unlikely that someone was taught the wrong spelling in fourth grade or whenever, and that it was never caught by any subsequent teacher.
  It's impossible that the spelling changed and all evidence of the previous spelling was hidden. I'm going to call the universe-moving thing impossible, but if someone believes that, I've got no more way to disprove it than they have to prove it. Of these explanations, the most likely one is that the person was wrong about the spelling. Someone who insists that they were right and that one of the other options has to be correct... I feel sad for them that they can't accept that they might be wrong, and at some point their continued insistence that they're not becomes ridiculous. It may not be nice to ridicule them, and ridiculing them might even get someone banned from the subreddit, but at some point it's just not possible to take them seriously any longer.
  For reference: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect]

[END OF COMMENT]

[QUOTE]

Dunning–Kruger effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. The term may also describe the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills. It was first described by the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is sometimes misunderstood as claiming that people with low intelligence are generally overconfident, instead of describing the specific overconfidence of people unskilled at particular areas.

[END OF QUOTE]

Or, I suppose: none of the above options. Dunning–Kruger is fun and all but it's a fancy way of trying to attach authority to the unproven assertion "this person is ignorant and doesn't know it", and then seeking to explain things away based on that assertion. Which is amusing in its own way, because it was basically a joke study that got momentum. It's not bad as a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, though, and it did win the Ig Nobel Prize. Personally, I've never experienced any spelling or geographically-related changes vs my memory - but a lot of people do seem to report them, and some of those people seem to be from backgrounds where it seems "likely" that they would have had the relevant knowledge. Which is why it's interesting. Something I do wonder:

As soon as spell checkers came commonplace (in the 1990s?) everyone should have been alerted to their errors - if they were making them, as they were making them. That's now 20 years of standardised, automatic dictionary checking, and for half of that it wasn't usually autocorrecting, it underlined and you confirmed the change. Which makes me think: how, exactly, does that happen?

It could work either way: it might actually create the problem. But the explanation has to be specific rather than just "people didn't pay attention anymore". (Some people have reported that "one day it changed" and suddenly they are getting spellcheck errors. Those things need explained also.)

The sub is making a centralized post for "spelling vs spelling" soon. It'd be interesting if we could think up a way to use the power of the subreddit (ahem) to do something beyond just swapping "science-y ideas I read once" vs "psychology-ish ideas I read once". The spelling thing seems one of the easiest to do that for.

Q3: I just want to point out, I've never had a word auto correct on me except my old phone, which I turned off because it was never right. Though there may be children out there who are now lazy spellers (and didn't learn how to spell by looking at letters but instead learned by looking at words), and there may be children out there who don't care about the spelling (because teachers don't check for it as much anymore), and there may be children out there who have their words auto-corrected (because all these do is text or use tablets), that is not the normal group of people we have writing about MEs. The most people who experience MEs are in their 20s or older, people who actually grew up taking care to spell by letter, and had to be right because there was no spell-checkers, and when there were, they got annoyed at seeing those red-lines so they would learn how to spell it correctly so it wouldn't happen next time. This is another one of those things people like to blame to act as if ME misspellings don't happen, but when you look at the generations of people who are having these issues, this isn't much of an argument against MEs.

Right, so that's why things need to be more detailed than "Hey, I thought it was spelled that way too!" and other one-liner posts. See, the discussions here rarely go properly in depth and explore these aspects, I'd say - or at least no momentum gets built and no knowledge accumulates. They don't get beyond "you're mistaken" and "no, it changed". It rarely moves away from groups wanting to be right or other to be wrong. But where it gets interesting is when we try and pin down exactly what people are saying they experienced: actual moments. With the spelling ones, we're at a nice time to investigate: we probably have a range of people with different backgrounds (pre-common computing, during the change, and now with them everywhere, all with different spelling-related tech and teaching approaches throughout), and perhaps different people reporting the same ME despite that. Or not. That's where it gets interesting. I don't think there's much point in arguing against MEs as such, since that's:

• "My memory of how things were now does not match the facts of the world."

If you have that experience, you have that experience, no matter what its explanation. You can't argue against the observation; you can only get into it in a more detailed way, and remain agnostic about explanations until you've got all the elements in place. So what you can discuss is what underlies that. But if we don't actually investigate, then (as I said earlier), all that's happening is people are swapping their levels of ignorance via rhetorical techniques in an attempt to win.

Q1: I think the issue here is that you're assuming everybody here falls on the "idiot" end of the spectrum, when in reality there are plenty of average people and likely a few geniuses floating around as well. The thing about the Dunning-Kruger effect is that those geniuses can accurately assess their abilities, they simply assume their abilities are nothing special. When a genius believes strongly that they're remembering something correctly, unlike the idiot they're likely to be correct. So what would you say about the intelligent people with good memory who share the same false memories? Would you move the goalposts and chalk it up to human nature, or would you concede that deeper investigation is warranted?

I must admit, that if the DK effect applies, it often seems to be those (on either side of the debate) who place undue confidence in their limited knowledge of science and psychology or of philsophy and metaphysics. An explanation that "feels right" due to familiarity or simply being self-consistent, is often logically flawed when you actually explore it in detail in the context of what you're applying it to. It often amounts to applying a sort of buzzword-based common sense. So many cases arise of people saying: "hey, maps have different projections you know", "it was always like this, you just remembered wrong", but these amount to a misunderstanding of what people are trying to say. Although if you've not had the experience, it's dismissiveness might be the default. But then, why get involved?

Q1: My guess is they feel compelled to get involved in order to protect their world view. Personally when the dam broke and I realized all these things I remembered incorrectly, I actually remembered noticing it in the past more than once and dismissing it each time because it was too weird/uncomfortable. I just subconsciously avoided anything to do with it, and it took being forced to face it for my mind to even allow the possibility.

Subconscious avoidance of things which "don't fit" is definitely a thing. I think that intuitively, people recognise that pursuing these thoughts leads somewhere uncomfortable. We are forced to realise that we typically assume a directness of experience that is not necessarily there. For starters, it underlines that basic things such as 3D-space and the passage of time are part of experiences, they are part of your senses. The world beyond, such as it is, is not necessarily in the same "format" as the room you are seeing now. The room next door is not actually "over there". And once you get familiar with that, you realise that you have to completely reassess what you thought "you" were. Which turns out to be something more like an "open perceptual space" (your mind!) in which experiences appear. That stuff isn't even esoteric. It follows directly from even the standard sensory model of "world > body > brain > experiences". It's just that people never really think about the implications very deeply. Now, we might retort "brain in a vat, that's unfalsifiable!" but it misses the point. Our experiences are always unfalsifiable; they just are. But we can notice what we cannot claim - and that tends to open out what we can entertain. The "world as it really is" is inaccessible, and both our experiences (sensory images), and our experiences of thinking about experiences (shadow-sensory imagination), are all internal - and there is no certainty beyond this. That can be quite a disconcerting thought. Obviously, this is philosophy rather than science, since you cannot 'objectively' test the underlying of your own experience; but you can certainly explore its properties directly. (And none of this is new: George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Zen Buddhism, have all adopted similar views.)

POST: Quantum mechanics for the other parts of you and the rest of the universe (/r/MandelaEffect/)

[POST]

So quantum mechanics basically says that everything atom A does atom B will have an equal and opposite reaction. So everything in the(know) universe has these atoms. These atoms are randomly spaced through out space and time. If we can find two atoms that have that strange attraction state, we can essentially create a third state. A state between off and on. They are constantly running and processing all kinds of information butt is not in either an on or off state. Now when atoms are smashed in the collider, the are very random and sporadic. It's common knowledge that these atoms are very unstable, seems reasonable that when they are smashed, that the ballistics would be very random and uneven. Yes well that is true, but the strange thing is that all the time atoms disappear and re-appear. We have no clue where they go or how long they will actually be gone. Maybe it's because that there is such a violent reaction the atoms will call to each and they combine to becomes atoms of that third state. When they inevitably fall apart the atoms will separate. Sometimes the event is the smallest margins of time or maybe there are some that take a million, dare I say a billion years to happen. But anyways when they are in the calling process they cross multiple time lines and pick up and transfer tons of information along the way. These time lines are infinite, so maybe through the first 500,000,000 million the changes are insignificant. Your shirt was a different color or a plant had 7 leaves instead of six. When the atom is returning, two things can happen, 1. The atom goes back to its original timeline and no change happens. 2. As I stated earlier atoms act randomly, instead of the original atom returning to its own timeline, one of the infinite copies is instead placed there, creating a different sequence of events. This would explain why we notice small changes in something that we think wasn't there before. We essentially have a particle from an alternate timeline. If we can figure out how atom A is connected to atom B, find both of the atoms. The possibilities are endless, we will be able to do anything. Time travel being the big one. This theory might also explain why we have a spiritual connection to the universe. We are experiencing the infinite copies of ourselves. All of the copies reacting with each other. People have believed in a god since the beginning of time, feeling a connection to something they can't explain(God), but it is the atoms constantly changing and updating information with the infinite copies. Deja-vu a pretty common phenomenon, can be explained by atoms of an alternate time line experiencing an event that already happened in the alternate atoms timeline, before it skewed from its original. So next time you experience a change in something you don't find correct, it just might be a quantum event changing the timeline for whatever reason.

[END OF POST]

*Q1: As a particle physics major, this has nothing to do with QM. Sorry, you need to study the subject a bit before launching into random conjectures based on incorrect axioms.
1)Classical physics is where you find equal and opposite reactions, not QM.

2. I have no idea what you're talking about with a strange attraction state, not off or on; perhaps you're talking about superstate? Quantum computers use such information but I suspect that's not what you mean since it doesn't have anything to do with the way they interface with reality, like you mention.
3. I have no idea what you're talking about with violent reactions forcing atoms into third states. This seems random and has nothing to do with reality, since smashing atoms has nothing to do with them being in any kind of "on" or "off" state.
4. Atoms traveling through some alternate dimension (as you suggest) isn't rooted in science, extraspacial dimensions (so far as string theory predicts) are much smaller than atoms. Even if it were possible to trave through and back to our open spacial dimensions, they wouldn't "contain" the information of alternate universes where your shirts are a different color, like suggested. Ludicrous and bizarre imo
   The Mandela Effect is possible because you have an imperfect brain that through cognitive association and an imperfect hippocampus can create false memories that you are just "so sure" about. C'mon man.*

While I agree that OP's description, while a fun read, has pretty much nothing to do with physics, I'm not sure your "cognitive association' and "imperfect hippocampus" are much better. "Scienciness" rather than science, surely? ;-)

Just look up implanted memories

I have (really, I've been through all of this stuff). When you get into the specifics of cases, rather than the general notion that exposure to imagery while referencing a context can associatively integrate that imagery into the context, and that this may be an approach to exploring some "me too!" people (although I don't see how), it doesn't really explain the actual experience as described, nor its broad coverage. Although there's some churn here ("what about this?" and "me too!"), the actual Mandela Effect is the unprompted recognition of a discontinuity, where there are specific personal memories (rather than abstract facts) and a specific moment of recognition of the change. It doesn't correspond to well to fear-response experiments (which is not really "memory" in the sense we are talking here, although the authors of those studies do tend to make grand claims for the future, but we've been doing that about memory for many decades, and we still don't know where or what they are) or false memory creation as depicted in psychological studies. Any decent explanation of the Mandela Effect, if it wants to be scientific, is going to have to say how exactly it applies in specific cases, then imply a particular model that can be tested. Even the first part would be a great step, but it's been lacking. (An additional problem is that ME is probably not one "effect"; which is why the sidebar now tries to narrow it down to specifics for better reporting.)

Otherwise, we can end up with the pseudo-neurosciencist equivalent of the pseudo-quantum physicist.

POST: (Meta) Concern (/r/MandelaEffect/)

I am concerned that these phenomena are leading [people] to conclude [that others] are less real.

I don't think any of the commonly given interpretations should lead that way. If it's interpreted as a psychological thing of some sort, then it certainly doesn't. But - even if someone likes the "many-worlds" type view (you are "switching realities") then you don't get to be more important than anyone else, more "real"; you are simply appearing in differently-configured worlds, with other people as real as you. In fact, someone who has shifted more, unintentionally, would probably be at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, if you took the "dissolved state" view that everything occurs within your consciousness, and the changes amounted to your own copy of the world transforming, then "you-as-person" is no more or less real than any other "person" - you are all aspects of a larger whole. (In fact this would mean everyone is a part of you, and you would be treating everyone with greater respect.)

So I think everything's fine. People can continue to be as arrogant or as insecure as they always were anyway. ;-)

Note: We should distinguish between the Mandela Effect experience ("my memories now don't match the world") versus any particular theory about its nature.

Simulation Theory easily encompasses all observed phenomenon in the Mandela Effect experience.

That's because it's a theory with no parameters, within which you can incorporate pretty much any conclusion; it's the equivalent of saying "it's all a dream". It's really a narrative rather than an explanation. Which is fine of course, it just means that it's not a predictive model and it can't be falsified. If the world is a "dream/simulation", then any old story will do, because the world can behave "as if" anything is true. There is no fundamental structure; all interpretations are arbitrary patterns.

There is a difference between being able to incorporate things into the narrative, and explaining them. The key to this is the separation between observations and models. The rules are (being very broad for the moment):

• Observations dictate the permitted models.
• Models do not dictate the permitted observations.
• Models are "connective fictions" which we use to link together our observations.
• Aspects of a model which cannot be observed exist only as conceptual abstractions in thought.

So, I would suggest that your ideas of "CPU time" and "Brain-Control Interface command syntax" are conceptual abstractions which you never observe. You are arbitrarily stopping at that level and declaring those abstractions to be "real", whereas you view the ones built upon it as being "simulated'. In fact, if you follow through properly, "CPU" and "BCI" will also be considered as empty. Don't you agree?

In my view, you are making the mistake of assuming there needs to be some sort of solid foundation which maintains or operates structures and processes, and that such things also "happen" or need to be "done" in some sense. What you need to do next is incorporate the idea that:

• "There is no substrate."

[Well, these are interesting topics, and discussions should be an exploration of ideas, not a defence of identity. Even when there's disagreement, it's enjoyable to encounter people who have spent some time thinking about something.]

...

Would an NPC even be able to respond? How would an NPC be able to perform the inner contemplation necessary to come to its conclusions? (Surely an NPC has no inner life - it is a "philosophical zombie".)

Q2: Philosophical zombies have internal thoughts, too, you know. It's just their's is a carefully constrained path, based LARGELY upon our interactions with them. More involved AIs have more CPU and RAM dedicated to them, and also seemingly get software updates allowing more creativity and self-expression, to the poin tthat if we really get in their lives, they can and do fool us. Example: Compare a wild dog to a domesticated one that is loved and given lots of attention. The loved dog will have software much more similar to humans than wild dogs. Same with loved apes who learn sign language. You release them out into the wild and what happens? Same thing that happened to guys like me in the 1500s: Unable to communicate with their unevolved kin and frequently killed by the mob. I motion that because of their continued interaction with humans, the animals received firmware upgrades that allow them to do this. ANd I motion the same basic process happens when an Avatar interacts with NPCs. There could be NPCs far far away from the observation of Avatars that are mere probabilities in a deep cache, what Quantum Physics refers to as "the uncollapsed wave state".

I guess what I'm saying is: the distinction you are making is effectively meaningless, in practical terms. Taking just one element: how can you tell whether you are on a constrained path or not? (Also, I wouldn't get too fanciful on the quantum physics angle; it really doesn't have anything to say about this stuff, not scientifically speaking anyway. You can use the concept of "states" in your philosophy but, like the computer software metaphor, I'd be wary of taking these things literally.)

I'm affecting thousands of people on the way to...

In what sense? And how are you judging whether or not you are simply patterning your own experience with a structured but arbitrary narrative?

I launched a billion dollar idea last week in a developing country that's going to sweep an entire continent, two or three in the next 5 years. Something for the Middle 20-50% of humanity. Since when have you heard of a startup doing something like that?

Sounds like programmed behaviour to me, part of an extended pre-structured narrative. How can you distinguish between doing these things and merely experiencing the situations arising? In other words, that your "affecting thousands" is not simply a grandiose story being played to you.

Q2: WEll, I admit. It is an assumption that great people like George Washington and Thomas Paine, and Hitler, etc. aren't NPCs. I'm assuming that NPCs have different qualia than legit humans, and one of the observabe / testable phenomenon is that Avatars can, and have, changed the world, even massively, while no NPC has, at least on purpose. Because I don't think they have life purposes except to make the simulation more realistic, which means "more of the same", more or less.

Okay, what I think we need to do right now, to progress, is to:

• Define precisely what the difference between a "legit human" and an "NPC" is, and:
• Lay out precisely what observations lead you to conclude there are such things.

Note: You cannot beg the question when you answer this - i.e. you cannot use the conclusion as the foundation of your answer.

POST: Does anyone else remember the users on this subreddit NOT being such negative nancy pricks? (/r/MandelaEffect/)

Q1: I think some of you guys have this thing twisted. Let me use a computer analogy here. You have ROM and you have RAM. RAM is something that might get corrupted, you might forget to brush your teeth, etc. But ROM is the stuff that is permanently burned into our being. I KNOW that my ROM does not reflect the current reality. And personally if you want to choose ignorance, I'm perfectly fine with it. For my heart knows the truth and the truth reigns supreme.

Just to get clear: in that analogy, what is the ROM and what is the RAM? And then, what is "the world"?

Q1: sorry for the late response. ROM = long term permanent memory. RAM = short term memory meant to be accessed and written over repeatedly. the "world" is the physical plane, much like our flesh and matter. our consciousness is the logical plane... they are inter-related in my opinion. without the logical plane the physical plane does not exist.

I know what ROM/RAM are, it was more which was what in your metaphor! So I guess it was ROM=world/physical RAM=consciousness/logical. I think they differ only in their depth of habituation; they are not different in type. In other words, it's like a landscape which consists only of its contours - no substrate - and world vs logical is a matter of pattern amplitude.

Q1: both ROM and RAM are mainly functions of the logical plane and I agree they are similar. the physical plane (matter) can be thought of as the hardware. the metaphor is obviously not perfect as ROM and RAM are hardware as well and like I said there is inter-relation and they are both simply platforms of expression if you will for the logical plane, a temporary platform and the physical plane is an extension of the logical plane. It's just incredibly hard to grasp but I feel like I have some of it down at the very least. again this is my personal interpretation.

I say: there is no hardware. We never experience hardware, we only encounter experiential patterns arising in perception, so why not jettison it completely from our metaphor? It doesn't add anything; all the information we need to account for is in the ROM/RAM patterning, with their varying degrees of persistence or inertia.

Q1: I like that and I like how you think. Really I only used the hardware analogy as an explanation.

Fair enough, it was a good starting point, but then we whittle it down!

So the next step is you blend ROM/RAM together and just say: there are patterns, those patterns are of different relative intensities (or depths or levels), and the relative intensity distribution of patterns is what dictates your ongoing experience. To make this more intuitive, we might consider these patterns to be the current "facts" of our world, although some of those "facts" would be quite abstract, and more like "formatting" - e.g. "sensory experience is formatted as 3D-space"

Q1: when I set out with trying to explain what I was thinking about this it was more an idea to keep everything as simple as possible so it could be readily interpreted, hopefully. It was tough trying to put it into words but you have expounded and found a way to word it very elegantly. I appreciate that.

Well, it's a topic I've played with for a while actually, in terms of trying to find flexible but intuitive ways to describe experience and self-direction, which can hopefully be applied practically. See for instance: The Patterning of Experience, although without any background context that might seem a bit stark.

...You're in my queue. So, you need to add a [META] tag and not have all the shouty capitals. Also, looking at it, you really should say how exactly "God" relates to the Mandela Effect, and what your definition of God is.

I get the feeling you are saying something along the lines of: "consciousness" is fundamental and eternal, experiencing never ends, there are numerous world-states all existing simultaneously. However, it does come across very clearly (to people who haven't thought along those lines before). Most people interpret "God" as referring to an entity god, with all the religious connotations of that. It's going to seem off-topic.

So, maybe do a new draft and create a new post?

Yeah, it's an emotive topic - it's the foundation of our very existence, after all! I quite understand. However, it's important I think to view posts this way: think of them as the starting point for an expression and discussion. This means laying out your thinking, not as fact or declaration, but as a proposal, in a way that allows people to follow your reasoning and engage intelligently. Then everyone benefits: others get a new view, and you gets to see your own ideas through the eyes of others via their responses (just as happened here with our little exchange). The most important thing, though, is to make sure it's clear how, exactly, it relates to the Mandela Effect, so that everyone understands the context, and starts from the same place. Cheers!

POST: [Theory] The Mandela Effect Is A Test Of Mass Microwave Brainwashing (/r/MandelaEffect/)

If changing realities is not the answer, and we don't want to go "full satellite", could it be that we never really experience an external world anyway as such; we wander about in a dream with occasional corrections?

[QUOTE]

When I got in the darkroom, I realized that I could very faintly see the big table in the middle of the room with all its individual tubs of developer, stop, and fixer. This disturbed me, since a darkroom is supposed to be absolutely dark. I reached for the corner of the table, and when my hand reached it, there was nothing there. The table immediately vanished from my sight. I fumbled around a bit, found the table by feel, and instantly it popped back into view in a new, and "correct" location. Though this image was faint, it was definitely a visual image, indistinguishable from what I would have seen had there been a very dim light in the room that was just barely above the threshold of perception. But, given the disappearing and reappearing act the table put on, it was also clearly coming from inside my mind, not from any "objective physical reality."
-- Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams

[END OF QUOTE]

What constitutes a "correction" and how that comes about would, in this case, be up for debate. And also pretty much impossible to answer, since there would be no way of perceiving such a process "from the outside" - a problem shared by all the proposed explanations of the Mandela Effect.

I see in dark rooms. A little. When I wave my hand or something moves, I DEFIITELY see it. I thought that was by design. You're saying that's not possible for normal humans???

If you subscribe to the pure "we see directly with our eyes" assumption, then in a completely dark room you should see nothing at all. If you go with something like "we perceive all experiences within our minds, as a 'perceptual space' filled with sensations and perceptions and thoughts and objects", then it's less of a problem, since all information will contribute to the final experience, including the knowledge that you are waving your arm. The information will autocomplete into a complete world. This makes more sense anyway really. After all, you don't really "see visuals" - rather, you "experience objects/meaning". If there's a mug of coffee on the desk, you perceive "a mug of coffee", rather than a collection of coloured shapes. If you closed your eyes and held the handle of that mug, you would perceive "my hand holding a a mug of coffee" rather than just an abstract sensation of "shaped solidity" floating in space.

POST: [THEORY]Possible psychological explanations for the Mandela Theory? (/r/MandelaEffect/)

Q1: To this point yes, but eventually things may be explainable. For example, Cluster Illusion is a similar phenomena with a set psychological explanation. So is Placebo. And yeah, I do agree with you. Though I do think categorizing things can be benefitial, since not knowing exactly what something is or what causes it can cause people great distress at times.

Does placebo have an explanation - or clustering illusion for that matter? Rather than being a naming for an observation, or a type of experience. For example, if "placebo" is the term for "getting a result despite having taken no active ingredient" then that is not an explanation, it's an observation. If "clustering illusion" is "seeing a pattern in what is actually a random sequence of numbers or events" then it is also a naming, and specifically only for when you have an independent observation of the data "actually" being random. If you've bought a red car and then see lots of red cars everywhere, you might have had an experience of "clustering", but without an independent reference (pre-known dataset) we couldn't say it was a "clustering illusion", and if we did then it still wouldn't be an explanation. You get the idea: naming and categorisation is not explanation. This is a big problem when it comes to extrapolating the conclusions of, say, small psychological studies conducted in specific conditions, as if they constituted broadly applicable models, when there is no proposed model usually (or not one a physicist or neuroscientist or even philosopher would recognise as such). I think this is a hurdle for getting anywhere with the Mandela Effect, because we can say "because brains" or "because fallibility" for anything - but it's worthless unless we can describe how, exactly, it explains a specific instance of an ME. It's really the objective-subjective boundary problem again, in the limit.

POST: [THEORY] The Wonders of Language Processing & Cognitive Distortions (/r/MandelaEffect/)

who missed the correct answer...

And really, it kind of destroys the idea of there being a "correct answer" at all, as opposed to a consensus answer. And it highlights how quickly we adopt a "fact" based on very few observations, forever-after referring to our thought version of something rather than our sensory version. But even that is problematic - because as you point out, our so-called sensory version (better to call it our perceptual version perhaps?) often just is our thought version. It's fascinating to see "correction" in action. If you reading a book and misread a word, if you are attentive and read with an open focus attention (taking in more of the page rather than focusing too much on single words), you can actually see your misread word shift to the "right" version. You really did see the wrong word before the context forced you to revise it to the right word. This makes words like "see" misleading, because in everyday conversation we tend to adopt a naive model of vision (that we are literally and directly apprehending a world). Better perhaps to say we are "experiencing" - experiencing the conclusions about our surroundings based on all possible information, sensory and conceptual, appearing as a results in our "perceptual mind-space". How this connects to the Mandela Effect, and even our concepts of an "objective world", is probably not easily examined and articulated. What it does do, is highlight that we have very poor models when it comes to perception and memory. Actually, I think we have pretty much no genuine models at all.

This explains everything! Shut down the subreddit...

Is that phrase set up as a macro? ;-) It doesn't explain everything, or perhaps even anything, but it raises interesting avenues for thought and discussion, especially if we read between the lines a little.

Well, the mods are siding with those that say it's all in our head now so I guess I'm done here.

No... the mods aren't taking "sides" at all. Rather, if someone spends time laying out their theory in a non-dismissive way like OP has, then it's an opportunity to dig deeper and either find ideas in it to use, or to point out the problems with the suggestion - describing why you think it's not a good explanation, and perhaps outlining a better alternative if possible. For sure, there are times when someone says "hey everyone knows brains are forgetful" without saying how exactly it accounts for things, then a bit of snark is understandable. (Note: if someone says "hey it's obviously many-worlds" without any detail, the same would apply surely?) But when someone is genuinely trying to put together a theory, then it's an opportunity to work through some ideas. There's nothing wrong with being sincerely wrong, if that's what it turns out to be, and getting an informative response outlining why. If people aren't willing to do that, to put together a proper response, then there's not much point - and it wouldn't be a surprise if nobody took this stuff seriously. (It's already a struggle to get people to describe their experiences in more detail than "I remember it different", and their theories in more detail than "it's false memories" or "it's timelines".)

POST: [THEORY] Could the Mandela Effect be the job of our powerful and underestimated mind (sub conscious)? (/r/MandelaEffect/)

So... What is a "subconscious mind", exactly? Where is it, what is it made from, and how does it work? Or is it just a sort of magic "black box" that explains away anything that we put in it?

Q1: Really? If you don't know, just search.
[http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150217-how-smart-is-your-subconscious]

That's sort of my point - it's not an answer, or a thing, it's a concept. Note that I'm not offering a particular explanation for Mandela Effects or the examples you list, I'm just pointing out that "the subconscious" is not an explanation for anything, since it amounts to literally just a category. It's a black box concept to which we assign activities which we infer must occur prior to our conscious experience. At best it's a placeholder for current ignorance, at worse it smuggles in baseless assumptions about how the mind works. Basically, it amounts to saying: "the brain does it... somehow".

Q1: It is a thing. Some stuff don't go in our conscious, it goes straight to the sub-conscious, without knowledge, stuff that you're afraid or that our mind thought that we couldn't handle / understand. I understand what you meant, but the sub-conscious can be a REAL explanation, why not? Due the way it works, or like the scientists and psychologists said how it would work, it should explain pretty well. But i get your point, that's why i posted as a theory.

My point is, it's not even a theory, because it has no content, no mechanism - it can't describe anything in terms of cause-effect relationships and it can't make any predictions. I get what you are trying to say, which is: why contemplate more unusual explanations when it is possible that the brain is responsible somehow? Why keep pondering?

I'd say:

• Because it's fun and interesting. :-)
• Because until there's a detailed model of mind, perception and memory that can be tied to subjective experience, then "the brain did it" is not an explanation at all - it's just an avenue of investigation.
• We currently have no understanding of what perception and memory actually are, or any concept of the form a theory of consciousness would take. So even in that area, we wouldn't stop thinking about the possibilities just because we think it's brain-related.
• Because science is about cataloguing experiences and then coming up with concepts and models to describe them. The experiences dictate the possible models; the current models do not dictate the possible experiences.
• Models are not "what is really happening" and they do not cause phenomena; they are parallel descriptions of certain elements of phenomena. Who knows? Perhaps something based on the concept of "parallel universes" might turn out to the the more useful description, one that can be tested.

Anyway, you get the idea. You have, quite rightly, said "hey maybe this is all the brain doing stuff in the background", as many people have said before you. It's a good starting point for one line of investigation...

Next up: Describing how exactly it explains specific instances of the Mandela Effect experience. For example, a librarian who spent her days reading Berenstein Bears books and then one day she finds it's changed to Berenstain (prior to ever hearing of "the effect"). If it's the brain spontaneously doing something, then what was that and what was the mechanism? Why did she one day experience it apparently changing? Why does she have memories of the encountering "-stein" spelling at all? And so on. It's going into the details that's interesting.

Kinda like dark matter is a thing but we don't understand or know exactly what it is

To some extent, yes: in the sense that dark matter isn't really a thing, it's an absence, a lack of an observation. The name for a gap rather than the name of an actual structure, while implying that the content of the gap will be of a certain type. Like the planet Vulcan presumed the content of its gap was going to be in the form of a planet. However, the proposal of dark matter ties to fairly specific anomalies in measurement, whereas "the subconscious" is much broader and doesn't' tie to measurements as such. It's the equivalent of invoking a God (of which "computer operating system" is just a modern metaphor) to explain where a vast array of unexplained things come from. Note: I mean "unexplained" in the sense of nobody having invented a well-structured "parallel story" about what's happening, which aligns with observations. In matters of description, it's all about the number of "observational touch-points" that connect the story to what is happening. In that sense - having no internal touch-points - "the subconscious mind" is very much like dark matter.

POST: Another Bible ME Matthew 7:1 Judge not... (/r/MandelaEffect/)

Something to be careful of: There isn't just one Bible, of course, there are hundreds of versions and translations, in many editions. It wasn't originally written in English, after all. Unless it is the same Bible that has changed - same version and edition definitely, referring to the same physical book ideally - then you are quite possibly not talking about an ME here. For Matthew 7:1, for example, we have:

• King James Bible: Judge not, that ye be not judged.
• English Standard Version: Judge not, that you be not judged.
• Berean Literal Bible: Do not judge, lest you should be judged.
• Aramaic Bible in Plain English: You shall not judge, lest you be judged.

And many more. Also, are you sure you mean "least" rather than "lest" in your original quotation? The meaning is quite different, and it would be an easy error to make (most of us being unfamiliar with "lest" when we first encounter the passage). Anyway, I'd say the Bible is definitely an example where, there not being a single definitive reference version, we can be susceptible to the "kinda always sorta remembered it that way" thing if we don't have "specific personal memories" associated with our encounter with a passage. It's at least something to consider.

Who regularly reads a Berean Literal Bible or Aramaic Bible in Plain English?

True enough. They're just examples, though, selected from the larger collection to show the two main versions of the phrase, and how there are also minor differences within each main version. If you click the link [https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-1.htm], there are about 25 versions of the passage from different sources. It really doesn't much matter who reads this or that version if the poster doesn't have a particular memory of where they first knew the phrase from, and where they encountered the "different" phrase. This is even worse if they didn't actually see it in an actual Bible either time, and just encountered it as an isolated textual or verbal quotation with no other context. That's why the sidebar defines a Mandela Effect as an experience where "a global fact - one they feel they know to be true and have specific personal memories for - has apparently changed". As in: ideally, you can recall the details of where and how you personally experienced the "fact". Otherwise it might just be a "kinda sorta remember" impression you had, and only recently paid proper attention to for the first time.

POST: This needs to stop NOW (/r/MandelaEffect/)

Occum's razor doesn't uses "simple" to mean "most likely" or based on the fewest assumptions

Yeah. It's definitely worth thinking more deeply about what Occam's Razor actually entails, rather than the one-liner retort it has often become. Reproducing a previous comment:

[What Occam says:] It's not really that "the simplest explanation is the best" or inherently superior, it's more like:

• "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", nor is there a restriction on assumptions or new concepts. In fact, if an explanation isn't really a model - as in, it has predictive power - then the rule is meaningless. Otherwise Occam would dictate that the best explanation for everything is simply that we are a "consciousness space" which "takes on the shape of" a subjective sensory experience, with no "world" behind it at all!

Of course, beyond that, 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.)

Really, many "explanations" being proposed here over at the glitch subreddit 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. It's not that saying something is "parallel universes" or "virtual realities" or 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, and maybe just having fun playfully exploring ideas collaboratively (rather than in combat, hopefully). Plausible stories done in a detailed rigorous way, gives you philosophy.

Using Occam's razor to prove a scientific theory makes me lol. Hahaha. I don't understand complex unknowns!!! If I can't explain what's going on, it's not real!!! Nothing scientific about that "phrase" if you're going to use a phrase to back your theories up, you better be able to use imagination and deduction to back Mandela effect up. Get outta here with your time wasting Occam's razor - has no place in a forum where people are theorizing about wild scientific theories

Again, I'm not sure whether you are agreeing with me, or not. Or if you actually read the comment. Still, I'll choose "agreement" again, since that's more agreeable to me!

POST: People seriously believe this? (/r/MandelaEffect/)

To be clear, though: It's important that any explanation for the experience - be that "remembered it wrong" or "parallel universes", say, neither of which are actually explanations in any case - should be kept apart from the experience itself. People do have the experience; the nature of that experience is up for grabs. (And happens to present major problems for proper investigation.)

"Bad memories" with some generalised references to psychological effects (usually taken out of context) isn't actually a mechanism; "multiverses" that can't be observed don't cut it either for that purpose. If an explanation can't be tested - actually tested, rather than just supposed as "likely" based on common assumptions, many of which are rather recent and quite possibility transitory - then it doesn't count for much as a scientific account, or indeed any account at all. For example, as per your example, it's rather getting ahead of ourselves to say that "the universe changed". In fact, we never actually observe a universe as such. Rather, we experience a series of sensory moments arising within perception, for which the notion of a "world" as some sort of "place", with ourselves as an object located within it, has merely become the dominant narrative.

POST: Scientists believe Parallel Universes ARE interacting. Is this the cause of the 'Mandela Effect'? (/r/MandelaEffect/)

Sorry for the late reply, your comment was stuck in the spam filter until I happened to look back at this thread! Excuse any slight repetition due to vague recall. I agree with your comment about "what if" contemplation. As per Paul Feyerabend, I tend to think physics (for example) proceeds by a somewhat "anything goes" process in reality, with post-hoc justifications afterwards to clean up the story. And that is just fine. However, this makes it doubly important to adopt a "meta" perspective on the activity itself. Specifically, as I said above, the nature of descriptions themselves. I think the idea that our connecting concepts are "true" is somewhat recent, and has become prominent as philosophy has receded as a component in our scientific outlooks. (Even though the view that our descriptions are true is itself a hidden philosophical position.)

This is ultimately what George Ellis is pointing out in his essay, and why Stephen Hawking makes seemingly foolish grandiose statements occasionally, and why N David Mermin makes his comment about the "reification of abstraction". Not long ago, this wouldn't have need to be stated! The idea that the world was really made from "atoms" (rather that "the world", a concept, being constructed from "atoms", another concept); or that light really was a wave or a particle (two concepts) and that it having aspects of both ideas was a problem; or that "gravity" (loosely speaking, the name of a description) is what really causes things to fall down, would have seemed ridiculous. But that is how we talk, mostly, and it's at the root of a lot of the threads we see here and in more "scientific" publications: this weird muddle of the idea of what is "true" or "real" because there is no firm platform upon which the discussion is occurring. Ideas, then, I'd suggest, are about being "effective": are they useful as a thinking tool, or as a predictive tool. Either is fine. Arguments (1) and (2) are both permitted, provided descriptions are viewed in this light, put in their proper context relative to our direct experience. That is, a blend of (1) a conceptual framework which acts as a useful template of relationships in order to facilitate thinking and (2) an abstraction and codification of repeatable observations, with a greater or lesser number of "observational touch-points" for direct experience, but still never getting "behind" direct experience.