TriumphantGeorge Compedium (Part 11)

POST: 'New' house on my old block.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: [THEORY] Theory of everything

Some thoughts on solipsism-

Yeah, it's definitely solipsism in the broader sense, in that all that can be directly known is "your mind" (avoiding the word "self" here, which has become muddled in use). But that doesn't necessarily mean we're talking about a personal mind, one that belongs to a person, because "being a person" is something you have an experience of, it's not something you are.

It's saying that all you can ever know fundamentally is:

• That you exist.
• That you are having experiences.

And really these are the same thing: that "you are experiencing". Any thoughts you have about experiencing, are also experiences. There is no "outside" to experiencing. It is meaningless to talk about what you "are", other than that you are that-which-has-experiences.

However, beyond this fundamental truth (the nature of experiencing, the context), which cannot be conceptualised and so there's not much to say about it, we can talk about relative truth (the shape of experiences, the content) and the conceptual frameworks we construct in parallel to describe them. We can investigate the content and make up stories about it, but those are all "connective fictions". And with a (semi-)solipsistic view at the context, we won't be in danger of confusing our descriptions for the actual context.

This is recognising the error in assuming we can have an experience about the structure of experiences. Even the concept of it having a "structure" is incorrect, because structure is an experience, and whatever it is, is "before" that. It's like trying to make a sandcastle which accurately models "sand" (or more accurately perhaps: that tries to model the colour "sand-yellow"). You can be sand, taking on different shapes of sandcastle, but you cannot take on the shape of sand. You can be sand-yellow but you cannot take on the shape of that colour.

This immediately dispenses with the 'simulation' hypothesis, the 'objective world', and all other notions of an external solid substrate that arranged in space that underpins experiencing, as anything more than fun "what if?" ideas that can never be proven. Although there might be an extent to which experiences might be have "as if" such things were true, the things themselves can never be examined, as contexts.

But what about "everything depends on your beliefs"? -

Well, there is no inherent structural reason why this couldn't be the case - the bunch of models or narratives we have are just our own fictions, they are descriptive rather than causal, they arise from a small subset of our observations-to-date, and do not really forbid anything. The only way you could know for sure is to adopt different beliefs and see how that affected the content of your subsequent experiences. Perform experiments.

Having said that, it would seem like a good idea to have some sort of definition for what a "belief" is. Is it "thinking that something is true"? We are surely talking about something more than an opinion here. The literal formatting of one's mind by a "fact-pattern"? Could there be such a thing as "intensity" of belief or an "adopted fact"? How would one adjust the intensity of such a pattern, and explore its effects, if any?

Life may be a reflection of our beliefs, or a combination of our beliefs and some other substrate or belief system. We have to be cautious with what we assume, but liberal with what we accept as possible.

That's very nicely phrased.

One metaphor I enjoy is viewing our experience like a stack of patterns laid on top of one another, like moire fringes. Think of each pattern as a "fact of the world" that formats the open perceptual space within which all our experiences arise. Some of those facts are quite high level ("the sky is blue") some of it is more like formatting (the organisation of our senses) and some even more abstract ("spatial extent and location" is a fact; "time passing" is a fact. Taken together, we have a static pattern which is the basis of the apparently unfolding content of experience.

Actually, we might think of all possible fact-patterns always being present in the stack, but just differing in their level of intensity or contribution. The distribution of intensities would be our current state, or the state of the world - the list of active facts and their relative dominance.

Now, this means there is no inherent restriction to what can be true in experience. However, since the current state is a single continuous pattern, it must always be logically coherent. It must always "make sense". This simply follows from its nature.

And so we have that: Yes, it may be possible to fly. However, it might not be possible to fly without changing state. It may not be possible to fly while your experience is human-formatted and you are living in a world like this, because to update that fact will involve quite dramatic changes as "collateral shifts" - like changing the shape of one fold in a blanket of material, and that act necessarily involving pulling on the rest of the blanket, and the shifting of the other folds.

Further musings -

What does this mean for beliefs?

Well, perhaps beliefs correspond to pattern-facts, and if we truly increased the "contributing intensity" of a fact it would indeed become truth in experience. Perhaps simply by sitting down and asserting vigorously a fact, once could increase it's dominance. However, practically speaking that might mean you are trying to shift the state of the entire world - unless you can find some way to isolate that pattern from a general fact.

And if this could be done, then the "open perceptual space" that you are might no longer be aligned with others' lists of facts, and you would cease to overlap with them. So, you would be experiencing flying around the clouds with your friends... while simultaneously they would be experiencing having a beer and a BBQ with you in the garden, firmly grounded.

TL;DR: I like it. But it is as hard to pin down as the belief in any god or the simulation theory, etc. Which means we aren't any closer to resolving the issue than we were before (but it might be a useful theory in the future).

Perhaps the problem amounts to: how can you confirm the nature of experiencing? And the answer is pretty much: you cannot. Or at least, not in the positive, not by performing an act.

So initially anyway, this is a negative description of experience. It suggests what is not true - by which I mean not fundamentally true - and it highlights what is meaningless to pursue. What it does do, is provide you with a boundary-free way of conceiving of experience. It says: there is no "how it is really" at all in terms of content. From there, though, we can push forward...

Recapping, we have something like this from a subjective perspective:

• What you truly seem to be is an "open aware space" in which experiences arise. (This is directly knowable.)
• All possible fact-patterns are "dissolved" into this space. (Metaphor.)
• The relative "intensities" of these fact-patterns correspond to the static state of you-and-the-world. (The current "list of active facts".)
• Your ongoing sensory ("the world") and shadow-sensory ("thought") experiences arise from that current state. (To modify the state would be to modify the experience.)

The way to confirm this setup would be:

• To satisfy yourself by direct observation that you are an in fact an "open aware space".
• To deliberately change state and observe that the subsequent content of experience corresponds to that modified state.

The first, I suggest, is easily done. The second requires a bit more pondering. So, how do we change state? Can we change state? If we were follow up OP's ideas, then our first port of call would surely be to identify how "beliefs" fit into this model, how they are related to "facts", and how exactly we might modify beliefs to see if it results in observable changes in experience. (Additional concept we might choose to introduce along the way: intention.)

==So, some interesting observations:

1. When I am in a bad mood, it colors how I see everyone else behaving around me. They become more sinister, more reflecting of my mood. This is evidence that belief can effect perception.
2. When LDing, it can become easier to confuse reality and dreams in small instances. Dream verification checks can counter this, but the feeling of living the dream re-enforces the idea that life may be like a dream. One of these individuals may truly believe they can fly like they do in their dreams (much like some drug users may believe they can fly). However, they are not observed to fly in the physical reality, and confrontation has shown they will readily admit they can't fly, but believed they could.
   This seems to counter the idea that belief changes physical reality, but not the idea that belief colors perception of reality.==

They could both be a reflection of the (potential) fact that your belief changes reality.

First, let us consider that "reality" is a concept - by which I mean, the notion that there is a "baseline" and that your perceptions are a modification or filter of that (even though you will never experience the baseline). What we are talking about here, is depth of change. Our general assumption is that "reality" is pretty much world-shaped, and that perception is a small adjustment of this. What if "reality" was of no shape at all, basically an "infinite gloop", and that perception was the entirety of the selection or shaping component? This leads us to...

Returning to our idea of the "relative intensities of facts", in your dream the relative intensities are close to each other. The highs and the lows are not very far apart, and hence easily adjusted. Turning no-fly into yes-fly is a minimal adjustment from peak to trough.

Meanwhile, in waking life the peak-to-trough is much greater - facts are "more intense" - so a much greater adjustment of the intensity of no-fly is needed. A simple decision or an "I can fly!" thought makes minimal difference. However, fact-patterns that are more shallow and whose alteration is less world-breaking are much more susceptible: your bad mood and the "everyone is evil" thought is hardly a change at all, and is easilywithin the fuzzy adjustability zone of "plausibility".

For the sake of argument, if we say thoughts are basically "intensifying a fact-pattern" and intentions are a type of thought consisting of strong "assertions of fact", then the extent to which our experience will be modified will depend upon how much our state is shifted relatively speaking, which in turn depends on how intense the fact or counter-fact already is.

So then we should be able to measure these peak to trough sizes for a variety of situations for a quantity of people. Perhaps using hypnotism?
What we are really measuring, then, is the discrepancy between physical and mental, or how much mental influences physical.
In my first scenario, mental is only influencing mental.
If I build an airplane, physical is influencing physical directly, and mental is influencing the ordering of the physical (another non-physical trait, since that organization is only assumed organized by the mind).
What we want is for the mental to directly influence the physical.
We have a map where we think the mental is represented in the physical (the mind holds the mental, or at least translates it into the physical and the physical into mental).
Perhaps there is something in our bodies we can examine to discover the separation and connection between physical and mental? If we know their differences, we can probably also find how they effect each other, and how to improve or hinder that effect to accomplish something.

One of the issues with that approach, is that the model says that the mental/physical division is not meaningful. They are both just experiences arising inside the "open perceptual space", which itself has no outside. One might say that the experience of the physical world is like a particularly bright strand of thought, one that is quite 3D-expansive and unusually stable - but it still occupies the same space as any other thought you have. Mental and physical differ only in stability, brightness and 3D-immersiveness - not in kind.

So we can't really measure the "intensity of facts" objectively, because the notion of "objective" isn't meaningful here. And if we hypnotise other people, for example, what we are doing is creating an "experience of hypnotising someone" within our own experience - which of course is shaped by our own beliefs. No matter what we do, we are in effect dreaming. Any action-based experiments you perform within a dream-world on a dream-world, are dream-experiments, and yield dream-results. We might think of ourselves as the "dream space" here.

But what we can do is experiment with ourselves. Not via actions perhaps, because all our action-experiences will arise from the current state, and will be consistent with it, when what we are trying to do is change that state. Could we instead proceed via intentions...?

This is ignoring the observational evidence of a separation between mental and physical.
Though the theory claims there is no real division aside from intensity, physical reality shows some sort of division. Whether that division is merely the difference between a system that watches 5 Volt fluctuations versus 500 Volt fluctuations (just an example of a system type that can depend on fluctuations of intensity), we still need to discover what the mechanism of that separation is.
Once we know HOW these two observable levels of interaction are separated, then we can learn the mechanism to span that separation.
The division of mental / physical is meaningful because it is observable, not because it is an accurate representation of the underlying forces. We are trying to discover the underlying forces, but we only have the observable to work from, so we use what we have.

I'm not so sure about this. What exactly is the observational evidence of a separation between mental and physical? Can you expand on that?

Imagine a house. How big is it? No matter the size, how much space did it take up in physical reality? It didn't take up any perceivable space, therefore it must not have been a physical creation (for this physical reality, anyway).
Next, try to move an object with your mind. Imagine it moving, or do any number of things you can think of to move the object using your thoughts.
If the thoughts don't have a physical component (you spoke to someone, you moved your body, you used a special device that monitors electrical impulses in your brain to move a robotic arm), it seems, at this juncture, that you cannot move the object.
That is the visible separation we see.
The mental can create vast images and experiences, but they don't last, and often have poor resolution and/or dissolve when examined or ignored. They also take up no physical space (from what we can tell).
The physical can move things and mimic things, but doesn't seem to be able to produce spontaneously (like visualization), though it is quite resilient to observation, scrutiny, and being ignored.

So, we're distinguishing between the two based on apparent properties, not necessarily by nature (since both appear in the same perceptual space, even if apparently in different "parallel-simultaneous" places sometimes).

If we return to the idea of different strands of thought arising in the same space, with one (which we label "physical reality") being more persistent and intense than others (the other thoughts we have) - would we necessarily expect a "parallel" strand of thought to affect the main one?

When I move my arm, do I not "intend" its motion? Is that not the same as modifying the main strand of thought, by basically thinking the "arm movement" pattern into that strand? If I just think about moving my arm, it doesn't have the same effect, because the thought about it is in a separate strand.

Meanwhile, does a "physical" house really take up any space? How much space is the room next to this one occupying right now? Is it not the case that spatial extent is part of an experience, and that we just assume that the rest of the world is laid out in space in the same way as our experiences are formatted?

Looping this back to belief: Is the problem with effecting large changes perhaps due to a mix of: a) the relative intensity problem noted earlier, and: b) that we often don't "think-intend" into the stand of thought we are wanting to change, and instead we start a new strand about the change.

Okay, for the first part -

Let us reintroduce that old standard: lucid dreams.

When lucid dreaming, although often lucid dreams are vague and unstable, it is actually possible to apparently create or go to a pre-existing (via creation by implication) environment that is stable and persists and can be revisited (for optional reading, someone did a nice write-up about this: "Persistent realms and other lucid dreaming techniques I use"). In all respects, it is another "physical world" and is recognised as a dream perhaps because when there I have memories of being here, but when here I do not have memories of an experience which precedes this one.

Going with this, then we have a set of experiences which are all of the same "kind", but differ in stability: thought dream lucid dream persistent realm physical reality, with the last two being fairly indistinguishable except in terms of their content in context.

It seems that the difference is only in stability. Therefore we might ask, what is it that makes one stand of experience more stable than another? Is it just that relative intensity thing, the amplitude of facts?

Intending change in the "physical" strand -

How do you "think-intend" an object to move, rather than just think about it moving?

How does the dream intention differ from the physical intention?

There are two ways one does this in a dream: one directly "asserts the fact" of the movement, or one asserts an intermediary. It tends to be much easier to do the latter - for example, to "reach out" with one's feeling and grab it (avoiding here the more extravagant imaginings). However, since the whole dream is us, they are really equivalent, and I am just misdirecting myself from noticing I am actually still asserting directly - the "reach out" - because my assertion logically implies my result and makes it seem reasonable.

In both those cases, I am intending as the dream rather than creating a separate thought bubble, as it were. In waking life, the default would be to consider the body-space as "you" and the rest of experience as "other". Is the first step to identify with the whole experience, and so take it on as one's "extended body"?

The problem here is that there can be no "how" to do this, you just have to become it. But the intermediary approach in the dream scenario gives us a hint: expanding our "feeling-presence" to fill out the (apparent) room, and beyond.

The further we try to describe this, the vaguer and more abstract it becomes again, it seems.

Yes, this could be an issue needing both intensity and properly placed intention. Can we devise a test that can divide the two? A test where the level of intensity can be measured without worrying about the intent?

A first step might be to not try and alter any facts, but simply to recognise ourselves fully as the background of this strand of experience - fully assert that we are the "open aware perceptual space" in which experiences arise. This would be like a "null intention": no changing of facts but an establishing of context.

I do think an attempt at a "null intention" that is open and receptive is great for observation. But I think manipulation is what we are trying to achieve.

We might think of it as an initial "disentangling" of ourselves (or identification) from the content of experience, redefining our relationship to it into something clearer and cleaner, and in some ways allowing it to "settle" because we are no longer thrashing it.

So first we attempt to build a receptive, null state. When we get good at that, then we attempt to assert our intention upon part of what we receive?

Right. Now, we are always the entirety of the space and what arises within it, but having reshaped experience to be basically "I am the container + the content arises within me", the assertion would be more straightforward.

A further step would be to release the division between container and content and just identify with the entirety, but that shouldn't be necessary if one already recognises the truth of the situation. Also, if you do that you'll probably lose interest in changing anything!

So the general idea: first use assertion to reshape ourselves into an arrangement which promotes non-attachment to unfolding content, and then utilise that because this better allows subsequent assertions of fact.

so what am I doing wrong?

I suppose that would depend on what exactly you are doing! :-)

well everything always comes back to the same set of things so it seems like there is an inevitability of some sort
but practically, now, i have a recurring ear blockage that seems to resolve with the associated thoughts
so my desire is to resolve the ear blockage - by having the correct thoughts?
nothing i do can resolve it - (as in the past) only having the correct mindset leads to the resolution, and the fact of its recurrence implies that there is something i am not grasping which leads to its reoccurring

For the sake of argument: if everything is part of a single landscape, then your ear and its condition is part of an extended pattern, and its blockage will be part of a larger structure. So the question becomes: how to get access this structure and allow it to shift? Which thoughts and/or physical elements are in play here, what is dominating?

Well, the nice thing about a continuous pattern is that there is no particular starting point as such. Rather than sloshing about looking for the thing which triggers it and work towards the problem, you could go to the "ear blockage" part of the pattern and work your way out.

How exactly would one do this? Well, just rest your attention lightly on the sensory aspect of the pattern (the feeling of your ear being blocked, located in your perceptual space) and sit with it, and mentally ask or intend to know what the extended pattern is of which the blockage is a part. I mean this literally.

Q: the answer I have is
sense of reality
what kind of things would the extended pattern be? if I have a general idea of metaphorically not hearing reality and it manifesting in my perceptual space as a blockage, I must have to arrive at the realisation of what is presently unrealised:
Which thoughts and/or physical elements are in play here
this goes deeper into the realm of controlling the environment and the perennial wish to teleport/change state. I have an idea of mushrooms facilitating that and finally mushrooms are growing. but again - what is the blockage...
having done this there is a slight alleviation but my other ear has been profoundly 'blocked' (deaf) for a long time
idealistically I'd like something like this whilst something like this occurs

There's not much point asking what things "are" - because the answer is: they "are" your experience of them, which is itself made from your awareness of it. You blockage might be said to be: the perceptual experience of having a blockage plus all its associations. If you "sit with it", with your attention on your ear and the sense of blockage or absence of sound there, you will likely after a while start having associations arise with it, as additional sensory experience or thoughts and impressions.

if all the associations with the blockages are to compel me to not remain in duality then the discomfort remains
focusing on the problem leads to the recognition of the entirety of the duality
the experience I want to have is the realisation that the control of the blockage is mine and then it will unblock
so the only way to overcome it is to overcome it
edit:
and I can say with certainty that mushrooms enable me to relieve pressure, stiffness and blockages

You're overthinking this.

Q: If you "sit with it", with your attention on your ear and the sense of blockage or absence of sound there, you will likely after a while start having associations arise with it, as additional sensory experience or thoughts and impressions.

Yep - attending to, not thinking about or manipulation of. That's my practical advice. (Within the context of this discussion, that is.)

Q: if I wanted to have the experience of being in another place, I can get that experience but am limited to conventional travel. and as you said,
And if this could be done, then the "open perceptual space" that you are might no longer be aligned with others' lists of facts, and you would cease to overlap with them. So, you would be experiencing flying around the clouds with your friends... while simultaneously they would be experiencing having a beer and a BBQ with you in the garden, firmly grounded.
this is the problem I have: what i 'see' has effect in mind but not reality. like the future-possibility is evident now but not for others unless I force it upon them, but to do that would require an actual changing of the world.
so if I want the experience of being somewhere else, I can get that experience, but only within the bounds of the current reality. and if I want to just have the experience without the necessary goings-to, I find myself lacking. like 'to do this I must do that' instead of just having the experience.

So, probably you should define what you mean by "reality" here? You seem to be separating out what is "in mind" and what is "in reality", somehow?

well... reality is like the result of my past actions and the difference between what i want and what already has happened. altering it is done by conscious or unconscious actions but it is always there. reality both impresses and is impressed by me...

Suggestion: Reality is an eternal landscape whose contours are adjusted by intention.

then where do thoughts come into it? they are possibly ways to contemplate adjusting reality but thinking is an intermediary step that is not necessary
relating everything into experience, i can say for example, "i want to have mushroom" placed in the future but then experience it in the present
(imagined possibility of a global mycelium network)

I'd suggest that context is the difference.

So, if I simply think "mushroom" (but non-verbally), then I am intensifying the unbounded extended pattern of "mushroom" and it will contribute more to my ongoing experience from that point onwards. If I narrow this with spatial, temporal, additional context, then that activation becomes more specific.

The landscape should be conceived of as "all possible fact-patterns as a distribution of relative intensities, hence at different levels of contribution to ongoing experience", which is "dissolved into the background" of the open aware perceptual space that you are.

Note that pre-existing patterns would be things like "spatial extent is a thing" and "temporal arrangement is a thing" and "time passing is a thing". Basically, if you can understand it, if you can think it at all, then it pre-exists and its level of contribution is adjustable.

Passing thoughts are just part of the current landscape. Intentional thoughts are deformations of that landscape; intensifications of that pattern. You are literally reshaping yourself-as-the-world when you deliberately think. . However, there is a further consideration: whether when thinking you are thinking in a separate "strand of thought" or in the same stand as the main 3D-immersive experience strand.

Meanwhile, emphasising: there is only The Now, even though certain experience may seem to be "about" the past, the future, the present.

...

Q: Well, there is no inherent structural reason why this couldn't be the case - the bunch of models or narratives we have are just our own fictions, they are descriptive rather than causal, they arise from a small subset of our observations-to-date, and do not really forbid anything. The only way you could know for sure is to adopt different beliefs and see how that affected the content of your subsequent experiences. Perform experiments.
Having said that, it would seem like a good idea to have some sort of definition for what a "belief" is. Is it "thinking that something is true"? We are surely talking about something more than an opinion here. The literal formatting of one's mind by a "fact-pattern"? Could there be such a thing as "intensity" of belief or an "adopted fact"? How would one adjust the intensity of such a pattern, and explore its effects, if any?
The placebo effect is exactly our beliefs in action. Of course this is something different than 'everything depending on beliefs'. For a fact it is showing the causal powers of belief. Similar influence on our biological system have been shown during meditation. We now commonly accept these things as falling within the realm of neuroplasticity, in order to have a place for it within current paradigm.
Despite this being a commonly accepted fact. We know jack-shit about it and there has been very little research into this direction. Mostly because there is no funding for it, not because of lack of interest. The research direction of psychokinesis (because that is basically what this is) falls outside current paradigms and is met with great hostility by self-proclaimed 'skeptics' and the ideology of 'scientism'.

Agreed on the placebo effect. That's one of the reasons why I think there's maybe a better word than "belief", though, since believing (in the sense of having a committed conscious view that something is the case) is not necessarily required for a placebo response. However, a certain sort of "patterning of mind" might be.

Again, when it comes to research we hit the problem that although "observations dictate the possible models; models do not dictate the possible observations", we behave as though to stray beyond the vague outline of our current concepts is indeed forbidden and non-scientific.

In recent times (probably post-WW2) our default view is that the world is now basically understood and is not mysterious to us - it's just a case of detailing it out. This, even though our models are completely lacking in explanatory power for most things, especially when it comes to the brain and consciousness. Vague 'placeholder' ideas or conceptual containers are not explanations, quite apart from being restrictions, but we behave as though they are, and that they define boundaries beyond which things are not "real". (Irony: declaring things to be unreal based on conclusions drawn from narrative fictions.)

Related post I enjoyed recently: Dirty Rant About the Human Brain Project [https://mathbabe.org/2015/10/20/guest-post-dirty-rant-about-the-human-brain-project/]

Could not agree more, please read The science delusion by Sheldrake. In it he outlines the philosophies leading up to our current paradigm and it is an interesting read. Chomsky has also said interesting things in this regard, read for example this [https://chomsky.info/201401__/]. The mechanical nature of the universe, you'll find, is a common theme. I'll pull out one quote:
It is commonly believed that Newton showed that the world is a machine, following mechanical principles, and that we can therefore dismiss “the ghost in the machine,” the mind, with appropriate ridicule. The facts are the opposite: Newton exorcised the machine, leaving the ghost intact. The mind-body problem in its scientific form did indeed vanish as unformulable, because one of its terms, body, does not exist in any intelligible form. Newton knew this very well, and so did his great contemporaries.
I think that whatever 'better word' you want for belief, we can still agree that it is part of the subjective and as such of consciousness. That, when we talk about belief, 'the ghost' is implied.
I think that I better understand what you mean by patterning of mind now. To me it sounds like what you want is the idealism that is currently being pushed by Bernardo Kastrup, for example here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDW2V-fH6SY].

Thanks for the Chomsky link - that's a new article for me, and a good quote, so will read. So, it seems we are coming from similar places.

I've read Bernardo's stuff and he's a good writer, but I'm not quite in alignment with it, perhaps because his metaphors stray towards trying to present things as objective-but-really-subjective, even though he himself doesn't entirely hold that view, it seems to be. I think some of that comes from a fear of advocating solipsism in any form, and also to keep things professionally presentable (both are fair enough). I suppose I'm proposing something that is a blend of philosophical idealism and non-dualism: staying pinned to direct experience, plus a baseline metaphor of "patterning" which allows conceptualising, but in the most flexible way, and in a way that could not be confused for being "how it is really".

POST: [THEORY] Many worlds/frames

I concur. At the end of the day though I think God made this very thing you described for us to enjoy. So do!
:edit: oops it looks like I got downvoted again for mentioning the word God. OH NOES!
God bless you viewer, whether you downvote or not, I hope your day is filled with peace and fulfillment. :)

While it's not very meaningful to talk about "God" without defining what we mean - some interpret it as an "entity god" others are more "the nature of existence" - I guess I can still pose this question: Is creation already done, in your view, and therefore we do not call upon God to achieve things, so much as use what has already been created, and that might include accidentally triggering "glitches"?

POST: Question, is anyone investigating this for real?

Well, people have pondered it as an idea, but the problem would be: is there a test you can perform that would conclusively prove that you are in a simulation? I'd suggest not. Therefore it is not science [http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-defend-the-integrity-of-physics-1.16535]; it is philosophy. And arguments like Nick Bostrum's [https://simulation-argument.com/], while fun, don't really amount to much.

Although, of course, it matters what exactly you mean by the term "a simulation". If you simply mean that objects do not fundamentally exist in the same format we perceive them (spatially-extended in space, unfolding in time), then that's an older philosophical idea, which is really just being dressed up in "we're in a computer" type terminology in an attempt to provide a modern twist on the question: "then what is the true form of things, beyond our experience of them?"

However, since we can never experience anything beyond our experience of them, we can never answer that question. All we can do is, observe that our experiences are consistent or not consistent with certain "connective fictions" we create about the world, and choose the ones that are most useful or elegant.

POST: Interesting report suggests reality only exists when we are looking at it

[POST]

I don't know if this has already been posted before as it was online in May, but I saw an interesting report stating that 'reality does not exist until it is measured'.
Thought it could explain a few things in this sub!
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150527103110.htm]

[END OF POST]

Q1: More people getting the definition of "observe" wrong when discussing quantum physics, you see, in this context "observe" or "measure" simply means to interact with, the ground observes your foot as you walk on it, for example.

It's a philosophical point though, really. Practically speaking, the only way a system is confirmed as being in one state or another is when it is consciously observed - although not necessarily directly. Only then is one version or another of the "story of the system" confirmed (where in QM, the potential stories are the list of possible states that a particular situation can be in, with one of them being subsequently confirmed)

Q3:
when it is consciously observed
Nope. This is not quantum physics. There's a lot of other things that use the word "quantum" that might state something like this.. but quantum physics doesn't.
Remember that when we "observe" something it means we are seeing something, i.e. an object reflects light and the light is captured by our eyes. This "kind" of "observing" doesn't really work when we're trying to "observe" subatomic particles moving at lightspeed..
"Observing" such particles means putting a detector such that the particle must interact with the detector.
No "consciousness" involved.

You're missing the point by... pointing it out:

"Observing" such particles means putting a detector such that the particle must interact with the detector.

I said that practically speaking, the way a system is confirmed to be in a state is by conscious observation. In fact, the detector is part of the system that is being measured. The recording of a detector is itself indeterminate until it is examined. If you had a camera pointing at the detector, then it would be indeterminate until someone looked at the camera monitor, and so on.

Note: this isn't saying anything magic about "consciousness". If we liked, we could call our eyes or our brains the "final detector". If this final stage doesn't happen, then nothing can be said about the actual state of the experiment, and it remains simply a description, a list of potential outcomes. (The delayed choice experiment is exactly about this issue.)

Putting the word "physics" in bold doesn't change this.

Q3: The recording of a detector is itself indeterminate until it is examined. If you had a camera pointing at the detector, then it would be indeterminate until someone looked at the camera monitor, and so on.
Well, quantum physics doesn't say that :)
nothing can be said about the actual state of the experiment
But then it's "unknown" rather than "indeterminate".. don't you agree?
Putting the word "physics" in bold doesn't change this.
It's not meant to change anything. Just explaining that the sentiment/conclusion is not based on science.

To be precise...

Quantum physics itself is a mathematical theory only which, given a well-defined context, provides a list of possible states and their relative "intensity" (I shy away from saying "probability" because that's already an interpretation, but you could use that). If you want to stick to "quantum physics" then you can say nothing more than this. Anything between that list and the observation is philosophy. This includes all of the common interpretations [http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/], and any interpretation you might have of what constitutes a measurement falls into that category too.

Which is why I say "practically speaking", because in truth there is always an implicit interpretation taking place, and the line you draw between observed/observer is basically arbitrary. A detector that nobody ever looked at could not be said to define an outcome.

Some interpretations - especially, QBism [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150604-quantum-bayesianism-qbism/] - do indeed take the view that the subjective observer is the one who defines the state from a set of possible outcomes. If we were to follow that interpretation, then a statement saying that the measurement == the conscious observation would be correct.

But then it's "unknown" rather than "indeterminate".. don't you agree?

Well, no. Indeterminate means "not exactly known, established, or defined". It is the more accurate term here, because the set of potential outcomes is known, however the system is not precisely defined. ("Indeterminacy" is in fact the commonly used term [https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/experiments/schrodingerscat/].)

It's not meant to change anything. Just explaining that the sentiment/conclusion is not based on science.

It is, insofar as any of the interpretations of quantum physics are. However, I would agree that these really fall into the realm of philosophy, since one cannot distinguish between them via experiment - and this includes "collapsing wavefunctions" and all the other common representations of the measurement process. (Luckily that means "many-worlds" also gets put into the same bucket.)

EDIT: Hope that doesn't read as being too "direct" - just thought it helpful to clarify where I'm coming from here!

Q4: That's a very interesting article (on QBism) - thank you for linking it. First time I've read about it, but it really syncs up well with some of the thoughts I've been having lately regarding modern culture and what we've done with/to ourselves by locking ourselves into an incredibly unimaginative, scientifically-oriented state of being:
It’s said that in earlier civilizations, people didn’t quite know how to distinguish between objective and subjective. But once the idea of separating the two gained a toehold, we were told that we have to do this, and that science is about the objective. And now that it’s done, it’s hard to turn back. I think the biggest fear people have of QBism is precisely this: that it’s anthropocentric. The feeling is, we got over that with Copernicus, and this has got to be a step backwards. But I think if we really want a universe that’s rife with possibility with no ultimate limits on it, this is exactly where you’ve got to go.
I wonder if we could ever successfully disentangle (no pun intended) ourselves from the current mass mindset that predominates our interpretation of the universe without the "aid" of some kind of apocalyptic-scale disaster, though.
There are some aspects of QBism that I'm not sure I can wrap my brain around - namely that if each of us is carrying our own version of the collapsing wave function around, how do differences resolve themselves (perhaps this is responsible for "glitches")? At any rate, I'm going to save the info on there for later perusal. I'm particularly interested in going through Fuchs' more comprehensive writings.

It's not so much that being scientifically-orientated is a problem, it's that we are binding ourselves to a certain set of models as being "true" (which is not really the intention of science). There are hidden assumptions in our approach to thinking about experiencing, which this hard-line belief (rather than relative use) prevents us examining. (Specifically for me: the notion that the world is "happening" in the same manner and format that our observations "happen", and that therefore so-formatted descriptions are "what is really occurring" between those observations.)

Recent articles by the likes of George Ellis have highlighted this trend, which is basically towards a sort of "scienciness" (compare with: truthiness [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness]), which I think flag-wavers of science, meaning the readers of enthusiastic popular science magazines plus undergraduates, tend to embrace and assume as an identity more than actual scientists do. (I linked to the Mermin article critiquing the "reification of abstractions" before.)

I'm pretty hopeful that a new set of metaphors (which is what scientific and philosophical descriptions really are, although we are sometimes inclined to forget it) can take hold which will give us new insights for prediction, but also applicable to "flexible living". I've certainly had quite a lot of discussion in that direction, anyway.

In terms of "how to differences resolve themselves", the answer is - they don't need to. There may be a preference to imagine that our individual worlds overlap (see the Nature article by Mermin on QBism), but it is not a necessity - not in the sense of sharing a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time".

Strictly speaking, you are not carrying your own copy of the world, rather you (whatever "you" truly are) has taken on the shape of a particular version of the world, and is having an experience you might call being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person. This is where philosophical idealism or non-dualism, and physics, might overlap.

Anyway, it's all fascinating to do a bit of freestyle thinking about, and it opens the possibility of connecting these descriptions to direct experience in a way we haven't been able to before.

Aside - The full Fuchs writings are pretty fascinating, but also a sizeable slog. Definitely worth a browse though.

What's so special about the human mind that makes it the only thing capable of brining things into existence?

Who's suggesting that?

Although... I suppose strictly speaking it's meaningless to talk of anything as existing beyond your mind, since both your experiences and your descriptions of it are within the mind. Everything in the form that you experience it, is brought into existence by your mind. The idea that there's a world beyond it which is formatted in the same way as your experience - even in terms of it being arranged in space - is nonscientific, since it cannot be tested. After all, "objective reality" is a conceptual container really, rather than an actual thing. But all that, it's philosophy really.

All science can do is examine what can be observed, and what can be conceived, and what can be communicated - within and by the subjective human mind.

...

Q2: Which is really the only thing that makes sense. The idea that something exists without something else causing it to exist is kind of silly.

Really? How can one thing cause another thing to exist?

Q2: Magnetism is a manifestation of the magnetic field, for example. Magnetism only exists when a field causes it to exist.
But, in a similar vein, just about every aspect of human society exists because someone had an idea, then put those ideas to action, causing the thing to be made. Television, cell phones, planes, trains, automobiles, books, and not just physical things, but abstract concepts as well, such as the number five, the spoken word, or the concept of "meaning."
Those ideas were caused to exist by other processes (perhaps of metaphysical origin, or perhaps of biological origin). Those processes themselves were caused to come into being by everything that has allowed humans to exist, everything that has allowed the earth to exist, and even everything that has caused Time and Space themselves to come into being.
Everything has an origin point (albeit, not necessarily identifiable to us). Even if you go up and up the chain, until you get to the Total Set (The set of all Things, Events, and Manifestations (that which takes place outside of space or time, but is still an equally real portion of existence)), everything has a genesis.
The Total Set, on the other hand, seems to have manifested itself.
I'm not sure I understand your question, but I hope I answered it. If not, please clarify, and I'll give it another go. :)

The Total Set, on the other hand, seems to have manifested itself.

Right. I guess the issue is with the word "exist", and we probably have to take care to make a distinction between "creation" and "cause" (since creation has already happened, not intending to sound Biblical here). "Bringing into existence" tends to imply "creation".

This means that it's probably better not to say that something causes another thing to exist, because everything is on the same level. Does one thought cause the next thought? 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?

It's a matter of perspective, of the "radius of observation". In a sense, looking out the window apparently causes the landscape to exist for you; boiling the kettle apparently causes hot water to exist for you. In both cases, something like "brings into sensory experience" is probably a more accurate phrase?

EDIT: There's also the additional point in cases such as magnetism: in what sense does a magnetic field "exist"? It's really a concept, an abstraction we used to describe and calculate the "what if?" scenario of a certain arrangement of materials.

Q2: Right. From the highest perspective (the Total Set) No independent subset caused any other independent subset, the Total Set manifests itself (and is therefore responsible for everything else).
I don't believe that the mere observation of a thing causes it to spontaneously pop into existence - I believe everything has always existed.
Like you say, when something enters our radius of observation (I prefer "point of reference," or "Sphere of influence", myself), it can impact us personally.
I have observed that we, as a society, tend to take the nature of reality very personally. That is, we do not value all of our experiences equally. If we did, there wouldn't be so many people on this subreddit posting things like "I know it's impossible, but...". Impossible things can't be experienced, but we tend to place great value on the experiences we understand, and shy away from believing those experiences which we do not. (Though, I will say, that those who frequent this subreddit are among the most open-minded individuals I've encountered in all my human experience, and greatly enjoy the generally pleasant community here).
Someone who values An Understanding of Reality over a True Understanding of Reality, will only ever have the former, and can never have the latter. As long as someone believes that something is impossible, for them, at least, they will always be right.

We seem to be in agreement.

There's definitely a problem which has become worse over the last decade or so, and that's the tendency to confuse abstractions with actualities, and models with hard limits. The true situation is:

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

However, everyday folk and ironically science geeks (rather than actual scientists), have adopted the approach that conceptual frameworks are more "real" than their own direct experiences, and that if something doesn't fit in with their general model, then it can't be "true". What's irritating is, it only takes a little bit of experimentation to demonstrate this is in error - because if one adopts an alternative theory, one quickly encounters evidence to support it, even evidence directly contrary to the theory you held the previous week.

Q2:
Observations dictate the possible models.
Models do not dictate the possible observations.
I love this! I suppose all we can do is to continue to be the voice of open-minded reason, celebrate when we and others make new discoveries, and respect when others refuse to make their own.

That is a fine manifesto, I would say.

...

An infinite, looping set of systems. The biggest question I can see there being, is how did it begin? But that's only relevant if you're a three dimensional being like ourselves. The big bang theory falls flat on its ass if you think of time as the dimension that it is, rather than something that had to move along in a line. We never ask, how did the first or second or third dimensions come to be? It's all a weird inherent self causation. You are caused by everything else, but you also cause those things, and in turn, yourself.

I think you pretty much have to go with a static configuration space - an eternal landscape - to make sense of it. (Julian Barbour, etc.)

POST: Schrödinger's Cat

[POST]

This post isn't a story but a theory of quantum mechanics that I thought might intrigue readers of this forum.
"Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e., a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive ordead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other."

[END OF POST]

Should really have a [META] or [THEORY] tag at the front of the title.

My favoured approach:

Quantum mechanics, being a mathematical theory, says nothing about what states are or what happens prior to or at the point of observation. Interpreting them as "real" is a philosophical choice, but it says nothing scientifically about what actually happens, since it cannot be observed (because that would be the point of observation). None of the objective interpretations of QM can say anything about this, because no test could ever distinguish between them.

The more honest approach is to take it for what it is: given a specific situation, quantum mechanics provides you with a list of possible outcomes, one of which you will observe. Those possible outcomes are not "real", they simply constitute the narrowest list you can generate based on the information available to you. Superpositions and states are abstractions and so they never end, and nothing collapses into possibilities, because they don't exist in the first place. (See QBism for a theory based on this approach.)

When you go to the grocery store, does your shopping list of potential purchases "collapse" into a specific basket full of groceries?

The truth is that we have tended to make the assumption that when we are not measuring things, the universe still "happens" in the same format that our observations "happen". Experiments such as the double slit and delayed choice experiments suggests that this is an assumption too far - and that the only thing that ever "happens" is observations, and nothing is "going on" between them.

POST: Serious question: Why do the stupidest most mundane posts get upvoted on this sub but actual glitches such as DeJavu or Double Slit experiments get downvoted?

A couple of thoughts:

• Deja Vu reports which say "hey I thought I'd seen it before" without more detail, aren't glitches.
• Double slit experiments aren't glitches, and they're not typically personally experienced.
• What's mundane to you, isn't necessarily mundane to someone who had the "personal, everyday-mode experience for which you have no explanation."

Deja Vu reports are not "hey I thought I seen that before". We still do not fully understand them and in fact in some cases they believe it to be psychological while in others they think it is more physiological and could be triggered by epilepsy. But in reality we still do not know. And BTW I am not at all suggesting Deja Vu is a glitch, I am simply suggesting that this phenomenon to me getting downvoted while someone losing their cheese sandwich getting upvoted is crazy but then again this is Reddit.
Regarding the double slit, I am not going to get into because without being rude I really think you might not be understanding it fully and in relation to what we understand about reality as it is with physics and quantum physics but also the study and understanding of consciousness.
Regarding the mundane, what you have said is simply describing anecdotal evidence.
I suggest you do some further reading, happy to recommend a few things for you. Just PM me.

I agree we don't know about deja vu - most of the theories are handwaving and unpersuasive (brain memory echoes and so on). I think many of the deja vu reports tend to get down voted because they don't contain any new information - and there are a lot of them. (Most of the reports are "I had this feeling I'd seen it before". This is different from any explanation, note.)

Do tell me what I don't understand about quantum physics and the double slit experiment! ;-) Tell me in what way it counts as a glitch, briefly.

Of course glitch reports are anecdotal - that's the point, surely, by the very definition? They are personal events which led the experiencer to doubt their ideas about how reality works. What the nature of that experience is, that's the next step.

EDIT:

I'm an ex-physicist. For sure, quantum physics and the slits experiment certainly reveals a lot about our assumptions regarding our own abstractions, and the delayed choice experiment reveals even more about this - that our assumption that things "happen" between observations in the same form as we experience them is basically incorrect. It's thought-provoking for sure. And I think QBism [https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/] is quite a nice attempt at producing a "single-user theory" that avoids all those crap many-worlds type interpretations.

But, there's no way to scientifically study the meaning behind the maths of quantum physics - and it is a mathematical theory. It's only ever going to be philosophy or metaphysics. So as regards glitches... the double slits is merely a fact, which reveals that we don't have a coherent narrative for those situations. It's on the list of "things to make better explanations for"... and there's not much new to say about it. It doesn't really provide any help for glitch experiences, other than emphasising the old philosophical problem, that we cannot tell what the form of the world is beyond the formatting of our sensory experience - assuming there is a beyond - and it remains an "infinite gloop" which cannot be interrogated.

Look i'm not a scientist and I can only explain this idea from a basic level. Here goes.
Matrix Glitch reports being anecdotal means they cannot be matrix glitches.
Firstly we are discussing a topic that is fringe, so you have to leave that governing part of your brain at home if you want to step on this ride.
Most people in this sub are discussing paranormal phenomena, psychic experiences, psychological issues, memory loss, hallucinations etc. By their definition they cannot be glitches. Because;
The term glitch is clearly defined and as we all know was popularized in the Matrix films which I personally think did a pretty good job of explaining not only the matrix but the way glitches might work, only it's still Hollywood at the end of the day so they take these pretty big concepts and break them down into bite sized chunks the public can understand and when you do that you lose some of the essence and quality of the idea.
A Glitch is a part of the matrix in that it is a flaw of the matrix. These other things people are posting relate to their experience within the matrix, because of the very rules of the matrix. They are not flaws, they might be perceived that way because of many various reasons, subjectivity, feelings, emotions whatever. They may even seem chaotic but they are not glitches.
So, with that said I believe the double slit phenomenon truly is a glitch in our reality.
Being a physicist you understand our quantum world does not behave like our regular world. So in a way you could say these are two different sets of programs. We understand one really well and we are beginning to barely scratch the surface of the other.
Then you have consciousness which science does not understand - now here is the funny thing. What we know about consciousness and what we experience tells us we can be aware of both of these programs at the same time and I personally think this is where the glitch is.
So essentially we have light acting as a wave and as a single particle but observe it and it switches, no rhyme, no reason. The very act of observing this process forces it to switch. Like a rule. It behaves how its told to behave.
So what is telling it to behave this way?
The glitch is. But not by intention. It'd non-intended.
And if you don't care to entertain this idea, i'll gladly give you my email and you can email me in 30 years and I guarantee you, they will be no closer to figuring it out because there is nothing to figure out. It is a glitch.
Back to our matrix theory.
If we can all agree that our reality is programmed and there is now actually a little bit of science behind this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp4NkItgf0E & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6w0K5FIgsU]
So if we can agree that our reality might be a giant piece of code ( I believe it is) than can we also agree that code can contain errors even on the grandest of scales? I think it can and I actually believe the glitch reveals an unintended insight which is beautiful in a sense just like the imperfections in a rose bush or an animals colours or a fancy piece of wooden furniture.
And the glitch is not what you think it is. It's got to do with consciousness and not the behaviour of the particles but the problem is we don't even fully understand the way the particles operate.
The problem with our understanding in this experiment is its being looked at by scientists in a non computer model way. But if you look at it like a computer program model you can see clearly, blatantly it is a glitch.
This glitch is forcing us to think about our consciousness and how it behaves and effects other things is it not? Look at the effect it is having and reflect on it.
My 2 cents and to make it fun, i'll bet a bottle of fine liquor on it that unless they begin looking at this problem like a computer program they wont figure it out ever.
:)

Ha, fun.

[Aside - The subreddit specifically avoids "glitch=simulation", it sticks to the idea of the experiential event which makes you question things, and does not presume the explanation. Just thought I'd get that out of the way first.]

So, there is a problem with the simulation/program metaphor. I suggest that it takes an old philosophical idea, and then sprinkles inappropriate computer metaphors on top.

Let's play with this...

The philosophical idea is that the universe is not of the same form as our experiences. Specifically, that space and the passage of time are part of experiences, the formatting of our senses, rather than the formatting of the universe itself. The universe itself, in fact, just cannot be described, because it is "before" division and "before" change. We might refer to it as an "infinite gloop". What we actually experience, then, is the patterning of our own minds. And what are minds made of? Consciousness.

The universe is therefore a particular distribution of patterns (or "facts") at different levels of contribution; a landscape across which our attentional focus apparently shifts. There is no substrate to this patterning, no underlying solidity. There is no "hardware" to this "software". Furthermore, the landscape is static, so there is no sense in which the "software" is "run"; there is no processing. Or rather, the only processing is consciousness taking on the shape of different patterns, which happens "before" the experience of time.

So, that's like a blend of George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, non-dualism, and some other stuff: philosophical idealism.

What about quantum mechanics then?

Well, what experiments with quantum mechanics reveal to us, is that we hit a limit as to what can be conceptualised. We are stuck, in thought, with imagining in terms of "parts" and their relationship in space, unfolding in time. However, the world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", it is a superposition of patterns basically "dissolved" into subjective consciousness. This doesn't matter usually, and we imagine that when we're not looking, the world is still "happening" behind the scenes - but that is not the case. In fact:

• The only thing that ever "happens", is observations.
• All descriptions we create to explain observations are connective fictions and never actually happen.
• At small scales we are forced to confront the statically patterned nature of the world.

Speaking very broadly here, just to get the general point across. But you maybe get the idea.

And glitches?

Glitches correspond to a shift of the "world-pattern" of a particular conscious perspective, where the "world-pattern" is defined as the particular distribution of patterns contributing to the ongoing experience; the static landscape that corresponds to the current state of the world within a subjective conscious viewpoint. Which is why I'd separate out QM and glitches:

• The double slit observation is an artefact of the "granularity" of a space and time based landscape or "world-pattern".
• A glitch is a shift in that world-pattern which leaves only a memory within the subjective consciousness, with no observable trace in the world-pattern itself.

TL;DR: Stuff about philosophy, consciousness, patterns, granularity and shifts!

Responses & Reasons

How can a glitch be a shift in patterns when the pattern is intended to shift and there are trillions of simulations and options that you are not aware of?

That's called "begging the question", I'd say! :-)

Have you ever had an experience other than your own? Have you ever seen "other simulations"? You have only ever experienced the content of your own subjective viewpoint. To understand the nature of experiencing, and from there understand the content of experience, you need to refocus on the subjective, in my view.

And the very fabric of this Universe, the canvas and the rules that govern it is in fact the Matrix.

You don't need that extra metaphorical layer for your explanation, though. In fact, it makes "the Matrix" kind of meaningless - it's equivalent to saying "stuff is made from stuff" and still leaves the area of consciousness unanswerable.

But it exists, how else do you think you are able to walk in the 3rd dimension . . . it is because of the rules.

This flips things around incorrectly, I think. In fact it flips science around badly too. "The rules" don't cause anything, just as "the laws of physics" don't cause anything. What you are talking about is "regularities in experience", from which you might make up a connective fiction about "rules" - but there's no need to. If experience is inherently patterned, then the natural state is not chaos, the natural state is the formation of habits.

I've seen those videos before. They amount to seeing patterns in experience. It's a nice demonstration, but it's not the demonstration of what he thinks it is. The universe is not a computer system. Our experiences are patterned certainly, and that pattern is you, I suggest. Which is in effect what Quantum Bayesianism takes as an approach.

QBism & The Now

Here's the more accessible article on QBism (the first one), plus an article that may or may not be useful to you about reification of abstractions by the same author:

• Physics: QBism puts the scientist back into science, N David Mermin [http://www.nature.com/news/physics-qbism-puts-the-scientist-back-into-science-1.14912]
• What’s bad about this habit, N David Mermin [http://www.ehu.eus/aitor/irakas/mes/Reference/mermin.pdf]

It's quite a good read, the QBism one, especially on the subject of The Now, although you'll notice he chickens out at one point. Specifically here

"When you and I are communicating face-to-face I cannot imagine that a live encounter for me could be only a memory for you, or vice versa."

I can imagine this, and in fact it's the only reasonable account of how subjective perspectives interact: they don't, as such.

Consolidation & Content

Cutting to it, why am I being so dismissive of the "simulation hypothesis"? Because it's yet another metaphorical abstraction. It's completely fine as that, but it should not be confused with "how things really are", which is much simpler: patterns in the mind.

Simulations, objective universes, the material world, all those things are inventions to try and counter the fact that there is no outside to experience, and all potential experiences are dissolved within it, essentially. For example, the room next door is not "over there".

These all old ideas, of course, with Zen buddhism, philosophical idealism, having covered the same ground repeatedly. The metaphor I find useful is this one:

• The Imagination Room

It's a neat way of realising that you are an "open aware conscious space" which takes on the shape of experiences, including the experience of having a 3D viewpoint, of being-a-person-in-a-world. It is the patterning of that experiencing space, rather than an inherent structure in an extended externally-defined universe, that is responsible for the regularities you see around you.

Basically: you are living as your own theory at all times. Why do you think all these different theories are promoted by people with such dedication? Why are they so convinced they are right? It's worth pondering. For you, that theory is "we're in a simulation". For me, it's "I am an open space of awareness". For some people, it's "god is talking to me personally and I'm being chased by government spies". The fun thing is, you can very quickly change your patterning so that another theory seems to be true. By this time next month, I could have you convinced that owls are running the universe! ;-)

Aside - Actually, you might find Kirby Suprise's book on Synchronicity interesting on this front. I don't totally agree with his model (but he is upfront in saying it's just a descriptive fiction, so that's okay), but as a clinical psychologist who has experimented with people's tendency to literally experience their own theories as true, it's worth a read. Most of his points are described in this radio interview, if you're interested.

Thanks for the interesting conversation, by the way - TG

POST: I Got My Cat Back, But at What Cost?

It does not seem to work like that. More than likely, you died, and your consciousness shifted to a nearby reality where you did not die, much as Alvin did not die. You might note quite a bit of minor discrepancies. Certainly. no-one around you is going to remember you mourning for Alvin since Alvin never died. The reality shift may not have happened as a result of you dying, either. Pocket realities are in the process of being lined up and merging in order for them to stabilize. This is a merged reality, rather than an entirely different one.

This seems awfully complicated...

How exactly do we know that there are various realities, and that they are merging and so on, when we can't get "outside" of them to see this happen? Isn't that just the unfalsifiable many-worlds hypothesis all over again?

Assuming people's stories are correct, all we know is that their ongoing experience of the world suddenly shifted vs their memory of it. Everything beyond that is just imagination and conjecture, right?

I disagree, but a great many of my five-dimensional selves have integrated across numerous collapses of formerly possible pasts and various iterations of timestreams. Those are my cumulative experiences. For me, it is not conjecture; it is understanding.
How do I know that various realities are merging? I am experiencing them, and I have dealt with enough reality shifts to have a great idea about not only what is going on but why it is going on. How would you know? You would only know if some of your experiences with such shifts and collapses were somewhat similar in nature and volume to mine (more or less). Without that kind of direct experience, it certainly looks like imagination or conjecture.
I am certainly no evangelist. There is no need for you to accept or reject the explanation. It is there for what it is worth. The space-time continuum is healing/being fixed. It is a simple truth which sheds a whole lot of light on many Glitches in the Matrix along with Mandela Effects.

What I am - well, not disputing exactly, but exploring - is your interpretation of experiences. "Timestreams", "realities", even "space-time continuums" and suchlike are abstract concepts which are not experienced as such. What is experienced is something not being as you expect it: a situation not being how you remember, or, occasionally, witnessing a change. Everything after that is, surely, philosophy and metaphysics? Nothing wrong with that; but such things are conceptual frameworks which are not true; they are useful.

The very idea that a "space-time continuum" is "healing/being fixed" seems to me to be an interpretation from nowhere. It might "explain" but only in the sense of being a description; it's is not a truth. I've never seen a space-time continuum, but assuming there is such a thing, I don't see why it would need healed for or by anyone.

Do you see where I"m coming from?

Broadly, I'd suggest: the only thing that is true is our direct observation. Everything beyond that is a connective fiction, a narrative. The further we move from being able to tie our narrative to an observation, the more we drift into ungrounded interpretation - as in, one of many interpretations, selected on preference rather than accuracy.

Because we simply don't know what is true, it may be best to keep all ideas on the table until they can be proven incorrect.

That's actually what I was getting at.

Basically, given the actual observed content of experiencing such a "shift", there are always multiple ways of describing it - several different conceptual frameworks we could use to construct an interpretation. We build a description from ideas, but any ideas which can never actually be experienced, are just that: mental constructs.

It's perhaps similar to the situation we have with the common interpretations of quantum mechanics [https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/]: there's nothing really to choose between them except individual preference - because they all predict the same observations. "Many-worlds", for instance, is really just a fanciful imagining of what lies behind a mathematical theory, a theory which only makes a prediction of an outcome, and doesn't actually say what happens to produce that outcome.

So - when we talk of "time-streams" and "merging realities" of multiple worlds, we're engaging in philosophy. We might equally formulate a description in terms of the instability of patterns in extended minds, and have it match the observations identically. There'd be nothing to choose between the two, except personal preference. So I was curious about /u/alanwescoat's certainty in his description. Was it simply that it's easier to speak as if your current favourite framework is how it really is (I do exactly the same thing; it makes discussion simpler), or does he actually think that is what is definitely happening? And if so, what's led him to choose that particular interpretation over another?

Good questions TG. I too am curious about his thoughts, observations and interpretation. Thanks for taking the time to read my very long post! Hopefully I didn't come off as one-sided since I actually think you both have bits of truth here.

It was interesting and well thought-out; thanks for writing. And this topic gets right to the heart of the whole glitches thing, I think. As for "truth", I generally split it into two categories at the moment:

• There's Conceptual Truth, which is having a description which is self-consistent and matches the observations. This doesn't mean it was "what is really happening", but it provides a way to connect different experiences together and think about them.
• There's Direct Truth, which is the actual sensory content of an observation, before it's been abstracted. (Note, a thought is itself also a direct experience, but only of a thought, as a "shadow-sensory" observation, not of something outside of that which it is "about".)

The hardness of the floor under your feet is directly true, for instance. Meanwhile, you might develop a theory about "hardness" based on your observations. There are probably thousands of ways you could put together that theory - so none of them would be "the" truth, they would just be relatively true within themselves. Only the direct experience of the floor would be fundamentally true.

So for glitches: the actual weird experience = direct truth. The description or interpretation of that experience = conceptual truth.

There's some overlap of course, because your experiences are to some extent "patterned" by concepts which arise with it, but it's quite a useful division for checking what percentage of your worldview is imagined fantasy.

Let's see if our reality-blending friend has any thoughts on the matter...

...

Many-worlds and friends is definitely a nice "thinking framework" and - although it is not scientific in my opinion (I'm full of opinions aren't I?) - I think it can help people a lot, because it's a way of having people realise an important philosophical point: that the form of the universe (whatever that is) is not necessarily of the same as the form of your everyday perception.

In other words, 3D-space and time are part of your experience, they are not the format of how things are "happening" when you aren't experiencing them. The world is maybe more like a dimensionless gloop of facts which can be called up. The room next door is not actually "over there"; it is actually sort of "dissolved" into the background right here and now.

Once you've got a feel for that concept, and have recognised the hidden assumption you have been making, then your perspective on an awful lot of things can change quite dramatically.

POST: [THEORY] Everything that is true and can't be accounted for in this sub, explained

Some thoughts...

So if the fabric of reality is information

But, what is information made from? And what are our five senses made from? What are "we", in fact?

Does the simulation need to actually exist at all - as a thing that is "run" or calculated or rendered? Or can it just be, say, a static informational landscape of higher dimension - or even an "infinite gloop" containing all possible experiential moments - which we traverse with our attention?

I suppose the short version of what you are saying is: there are no fundamental rules.

I would suggest that even in the standard view there aren't any fundamental rules either. Rather, we observe certain regularities in our subjective experiences, confer with others to see if they are shared, and then summarise those observations as "rules". That's science in action. We might call these rules "laws", but they are laws in the sense of being a concise and broadly-applicable description; they are not "who the world works". Thinking that is so, is where sometimes we have gone wrong.

What information theory and its like free is from, then, is the incorrect notion that our inferred concepts are what is actually behind the universe - somehow separate from us and dictating our world - rather than just connective fictions we've made up based on the things we've seen. We have tended to elevate our abstract ideas above the content of our direct experience, and subordinate ourselves to them instead of only making use of it.

The potential problem with the information perspective is perhaps that it doesn't go far enough: it might dissolve the idea of definite external rules, but it still asserts that there is a define external structure which provides a substrate for our experiences, even though we will never actually experience this final abstraction.

With thanks to N David Mermin.

Information is defined as a difference that makes a difference. An on/off switch, binary is the most basic way to express something. There is either 0 or 1.

For sure, but what is that 0 or 1 "made from"? What is the construction of the "switches"?

Or is it completely dimensionlessly abstracted and inaccessible? Which is fine: it harks back to Kant and his transcendental idealism and other philosophies which propose that space (extent) and time (change) are part of experiences rather than fundamental to the universe (which itself becomes simply a concept). It's something to be clear about though.

As intangible as it is, they are all ramifications of infinity. One divine paradox, resulting in no such thing as nothing and only gradation between the everything; no two things allowed to be the same. 0 and 1 are simply the simplest or smallest memes to describe the gradation. Chain-asking "but what is ____ made of?" Inevitably lands on "infinity," which can only be answered by "a paradox. The first and only paradox." It caused itself. It's f'ed up!

Well, the simpler way might be to simply state that there are patterns or forms, but there is no substrate. Since we have dispensed with space and time, other than as modes of experiences, we could say that they are made from "existence".

Meanwhile, 1 and 0 are statements of relativity, existence and non-existence - and infinity would really just be a word for "non-distinction".

From my limited understanding, when you play the "what is ___ made of" game, you get to the point where you are looking at energy and potential. Which is why this tread is blowing my mind, because at the bottom of it all it seems like everything we interact with is just information not particularly ment for us to see.

And "energy"and "potential" are both self-referential concepts. Energy is a measurement rather than a "thing"; it's a bookkeeping quantity without a quality. So pretty much it's the equivalent of saying that "length" is the fundamental property of the universe. Not the length of anything - just "length".

Which is the same as saying "amount", but not an amount of anything in particular. Which I suppose again leads us back to saying that the fundamental quality of the universe is "existence".

* * *

TG Comments: /r/philosophy/

POST: Can we formulate panpsychism such that it doesn't sound completely ridiculous?

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

Thanks for the thought-provoking post.

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

Conscousness/of/self

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

From there, we have:

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

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

The Blanket Metaphor

For this overall picture, I quite like the metaphor of a blanket of material whose only property is awareness. Laid out flat, the blanket would only experience being-aware. It wouldn't experience being aware of anything; it would just be "consciousness". It would have no perceivable boundary; it would have no characteristics at all.

Until, that is, folds or ripples were made in the blanket. At this point, the blanket would be "conscious of" those patterns. Those folds and ripples would be its "world", as far as it was concerned.

Patterns would change and shift and over "time" (measured as one shift relative to another) the world would become different. However, perhaps one part of the pattern would remain reasonably consistent or change very slowly. As the only consistent thing in its world, the blanket might incorrectly identify that part of the pattern as "itself" - confusing its knowing of being unchangingly simply being-aware with the persistence of one of the experiences, the content of its awareness. This would be "self-consciousness".

Worlds, Ripples and Nonlocality

I'd say the bit that comes after this, though, is the form in which facts-of-the-world are then present. The notion of a literal extended-in-space world that is "external" to localised peaks of consciousness starts to seem dubious. The world as experienced may be better described as a shaping or enfolded patterning of consciousness within that area.

This would mean that the enfolded topology of a region of consciousness would be identical with its experience of the world (and basically would be the world, for that region). Furthermore, one's mode of thinking would deform the topology as much as sensory experiences would - one would to an extent literally experience one's beliefs.

Referring to the blanket metaphor: In a sense, the "blanket" is simultaneously everywhere, only the "patterns" are located. The "blanket" is non-spatial and non-temporal; the whole world is therefore within it at every point. (Obviously this is trickier to imagine, because the picture we have of a blanket is spatially extended - however, we can see that it is all "blanket" and that "blanket" is everywhere and nowhere.)

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

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

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

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

Good stuff.

Working from direct experience onwards is definitely a key approach. Everything you experience exists as experience, and if you imagine turning off your senses, you find there is an open unstructured background to it. (I had a fun play with this in a post elsewhere. ["Why did the devs implement dreams?" /r/outside]) If you shift your perspective to this background (and it can be done, simply by deciding) then that sense of the world passing through you becomes prominent, and the nature of objects becomes clearer.

You have to be careful when pondering this to stay 1st-person and not drift into 3rd-person thinking-about mode. That way you realise when you are supposing "external things as the source of experience" and so on. It's important to realise that we never have an experience outside this perspective, no matter what clever conceptual frameworks we come up with.

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

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

If "awareness" is the fundamental property, and everything is patterns of that, then all reality has an experience of being-aware, of being itself. Sufficient complexity is what allows one part of a pattern to reflect upon itself, using patterns within itself.

Meaning chairs and brains are indeed the same, fundamentally. Complexity doesn't change the nature of things, but it does allow more degrees of freedom.

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

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

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

Steps Along the Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whirlpools Reviewed

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

I believe we can join the two together, and solve most of the problems you pose. We've already done it, in fact, we just haven't realised it.

The whirlpools metaphor is great, but it has the difficulty of being "spatial" so it only goes halfway. (The blanket metaphor is identical in this respect. The whirlpools really correspond to localised little circular folds within the blanket metaphor.)

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

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

The answer is to reconfigure the metaphor a little.

Perspectives and the Enfolded

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

Metaphors:

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

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

You are not a person, you are a perspective. An area of awareness, made of awareness, but unbounded (because it is non-spatial and non-temporal). Within every perspective is everything, enfolded. Because everything is enfolded everywhere.

Your present moment sensory experience is an unfolded aspect or pattern of the complete enfolded universe. Your felt-sense is your experience of that everywhere. If you think of yourself like this, as a "perspective" that is *tuned-into" a particular part of the overall pattern, then you can solve the other problems.

If you release a hold on your present attention, you will find you relax and deepen as the unfolded aspect dissolves into the background of experience. The waves settle and you identify as the colour-that-is-everywhere, or the entire-sky (with both its stars = universe of all patterns, and its sun = present moment experience). Your present moment becomes unformatted, dimensionless, timeless.

The Overall Picture

The implications of this could be summarised thus:

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

Phew. That's my best attempt for now.

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

Thanks, I think we can get somewhere here.

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

The distinction is surely arbitrary and is simply convention:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right!

For as long as you try to do this while holding onto a point of view you won't be able to. If you do release your hold on that point of view, however, this means when you re-adopt the perspective of Jonluw, you perhaps won't have the memory.

If you let go of the Jonluw experience absolutely completely then you may reattach to another perspective. If you release too far, you may cease to be a partition at all?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's something else to cover here:

Fundamentally, there is only the property of being-aware. Within that, patterns appear.

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

There are no limits on the form those patterns, although we cannot think of this. And there are no rules, inherently. Only temporary regularities. To describe a particular arrangement requires a language that corresponds to it for the duration that it persists.

Our physics codifies a certain subset of patterns (patterns of perception which exist as regularities in mind, persisting in memory, tied together within conceptual framework which also exists as regularities mind, persisting in memory, in a mutually-reinforcing relationship). Because it involves a shaping of mind and perception, it seems obviously true that we are describing an external, dependable world.

But we are not. The world is not external, it is internal.

However, the shifts in language required to describe one aspect of experience deny us the ability to describe - and even have - alternative experiences. We need to kill one point of view to shift to another.

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

What is it like to be a human arm?

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

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

Fucking electrons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: David Chalmers' TED talk on "How do you explain consciousness?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The quick way to suggest this would be:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely that's not your actual experience though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I cannot isolate the location of the soul...

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

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

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

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

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

conscious awareness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this not different?

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

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

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

An approach to thinking of this:

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

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

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

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

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

do you perhaps believe in the immaterial soul ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chakras

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

The etheric feild interacts with the soul...

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

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

What are the implications of that?

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

Aerokinesis is a great word. :-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

etheric space

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

the ultimate purpose of existence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Guy?

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

Hmm, I say:

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

Whats On Tele? vs The Dissolved World

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

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

-- Allow me to ramble a little...

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

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

And there is only First Cause.

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

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

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

-- Okay, ramble over...

He Sure Can Move!

I can literally move shit with my mind!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are the order. And behind order: nothing.

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

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

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

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

Ah-ha!

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

I don't understand or condone this form of thinking

In what way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's my best edited version anyway.

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

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

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

The source as in, practically?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: [Deleted]

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

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

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

POST: What is consciousness for? — Consciousness is a life-transforming illusion [Keith Frankish]

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

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

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

The third is more problematic:

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

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

POST: The Simulation Argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Brains" is perhaps problematic though, depending on the context? Unless we are just using it in the loose sense of "the place where my thoughts appear", but I think that can be confusing when exploring certain areas.

We never actually experience "brains" ourselves - only sensations, perceptions and thoughts arising in mind (where by "mind" I mean something like "awareness" rather than just "the place where thoughts hang out"). Maybe there is another term with less baggage that can be used for referring to "the context of experience".