TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 21

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

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

Q3: Or he's mentally ill

Or "worse".

Q4: worse being...?

Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The essence of it:

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

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

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

So, hopefully that helps in some way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

...Did the hair stay disappeared?

Yes, Ernie was forever bald after that.

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

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

[POST]

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

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

[END OF POST]

From the article:

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

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

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

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

Thought Experiment:

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also, why did you bring up undergrad physics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is kinda out of my range of knowledge.

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

Some thoughts to agree or disagree with:

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

How do we do this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or pray about things, perhaps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glad to hear it! :-)

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

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

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

A dimension in physics is a well established thing.

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

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

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

"World-line", okay similar.

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

The only rule of the world-pattern is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In what way is it false?

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

Why is that not a cause to use terminology correctly?

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

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

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

So something like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consciousness As Material

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

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

This image has a couple of implications:

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

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

The World-Sharing Model

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

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

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

God Of The Private View

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

The next question:

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

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

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

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

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely not!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relevance?

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

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

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

...

[COMMENT]

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

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

[END OF COMMENT]

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

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

without censoring yourself

That's a really good phrasing for it.

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

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

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

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

Hmm. "Ask and receive", eh?

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

...

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

POST: It was never plugged in

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

Which I guess leads to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Logic Within Imagination

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

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

Not VR. Not Probability. Not.

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

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

Recent Minds, Closed Minds

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

Fun Is Not Fact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Potential Time Paradox

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: From last week to today, work changed

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

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

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

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

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

My two examples have one verifiable aspect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autocomplete in action!

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

POST: [THEORY] The Brain is a Radio

[POST]

Hello, fine people of Glitch In The Matrix! I've been stalking this sub for quite some time now. Almost two years already, in fact. One of my biggest frustrations so far is that there's no single simple unifying theory as to why all these glitches happen to all of us that satisfies me, aside from The Simulation Hypothesis. But the Simulation Hypothesis is boring, and takes on a very bleak view of the universe, and I prefer a different approach. So I present to you my theory, for which I have yet found a suitable name. Instead, let me call this writeup The Brain is a Radio.

Intro

First, a little about me. I'm a software developer by profession. In college, my focus was Computer Science so I have a general understanding of how computer systems work. Specifically, the interesting part for which my theory draws a bit of inspiration is machine intelligence (or AI). In a nutshell, machine intelligence systems work by mimicking the human brain: that is, by creating a complex network of neurons. Neurons are basically just statistical machines, which rely on numbers and statistics to produce a certain output or decision. The AI decides which action to take by weighing the individual cost (or score) of a number of actions, and choosing one which yields a preferable outcome. Then, after the action is performed, the machine "learns" if the result was productive and adjusts the action's score (minus, if the the outcome was not favorable, or positive if the outcome was good). This process is called machine learning, and the system of neurons is called an artificial neural network. Interesting jargons. With me so far?

Alright, let's take this example: the AI is tasked to learn how to cross a busy intersection and is programmed to consider two things: first, the color of the stoplight, and second, if there are any incoming vehicles. Let's say that the perfect score (100) is when the light is green, and there are no crossing vehicles; mid-score (75) if the light isn't green but there are no vehicles, same score if there is a vehicle but the light is green; and lowest score (50) if the light isn't green and there are incoming vehicles. Obviously, the AI will pick the first case, which yields the best score. If, theoretically, the AI crosses the street given that condition AND suddenly gets hit by a vehicle which it didn't see during the decision-making, it would then lower the score for that choice to say, 90. Obviously, it will still pick this one next round, and so on, until it sees a better choice. Now why is this relevant and why is this interesting? Artificial neural networks are patterned after actual neurons, that is, the fundamental units of our brain. Scientists believe that the brain works on a similar process, choosing an action for every decision and evaluating a score based on its outcome. This is how the brain experiences things, and knows whether to do something or not. This is the same fundamental reason why you don't touch a hot object, because you know that it will hurt you -- your brain has given a low score for that action.

Classical View: "The Brain is a CPU"

Any good, self-respecting scientist or neurologist would tell you that we still don't understand how the brain really works. Sure, in the past decades we've been able to identify its basic parts and we have a firmer sense of how it probably works than ever before, but no one could tell you exactly how all the pieces fit together and what all the electrical signals that the brain produces mean and where they go, or how they get processed. But, it is colloquially agreed upon that the brain acts as the central processing unit of the body -- receiving sensory information, processing and storing, and then sending out appropriate nervous responses. It is also accepted that the brain is responsible for regulating bodily functions and making sure that all the tiny bits and pieces work as they are expected, including things that you have no conscious control over (like your heartbeat, respiration, and digestion). For an even in-depth look at how we understand the brain to work, its wikipedia page is a good read. Classical science tells us that the universe works on a fixed set of laws (of which the current most accepted one is the Standard Model), and everything that we ever experience in the universe manifests through a chain of much smaller physical phenomena. This perspective tells us that we are but mere observers of these physical phenomena, that things such as time and all other sensory experiences occur at a relatively constant rate and enter our brains based on a definite set of rules. That said, why do these glitches happen and how do we experience them? After all, if the universe does work on a fixed immutable set of rules then it must be 100% certain that everybody experiences everything in the exact same fashion; but logic breaks this assumption and disproves it because of all these reported glitches (and other weird "out-of-this-world" phenomena). This very sub (and its less active sibling) is a proof of that fact. And, more importantly, why do drugs, hallucinogens, and "brain damage" cause us to experience the world in a much more different manner? Sure, doctors will tell you that these things alter the way the brain works but they can't tell you how so: and this is because of the simple yet blinding fact that we don't really understand how the brain works. History tells us that all over the world, different cultures practice using different types of drugs to induce "supernatural" effects, with shamanic tribes using herbs to alter one's personality or even show images that are supposedly impossible to be seen. How do these things occur?

My Theory: "The Brain is a Radio"

I don't claim to be an expert in quantum physics or neurobiology, in fact, I only know as much about those topics as anyone in this sub. But I've read and experienced a lot of things and have seen numerous literature that have convinced me that we are all missing something that classical science can't explain and even modern physics has not yet accounted for. This theory poses a lot of what ifs and relies on a lot of (currently) improvable assumptions, but if you give it five minutes and consider the possibilities, then you might possibly find yourself inclined to agree.

First, let's consider what quantum physics already tells us: there is an infinite number of universes out there, parallel to our own. However, our understanding of science forces us to accept that there is currently no conceivable way of accessing those alternate realities. For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume that our "alternate realities" are the Level 3 Parallel Universes detailed in the linked article. Second, let's consider the fact that our brain has a part which has been baffling scientists for so long. Right now we understand that this part secretes hormones responsible for regulating our sleep cycle in humans and most mammals, but it also exists in some other non-mammalian species containing components resembling photoelectric detectors similar to those of the eye. Weird, considering that this part is buried deep within the brain. It's interesting then to note that countless other cultures and notable men of history (including Rene Descartes) believe that this very part is the third eye, and is responsible for making us see things we know we shouldn't be seeing. Enter the Pineal Gland: "principal seat of the soul". For centuries, different civilizations have erected structures shaped after the pine cone (or as some suggest, the pineal gland itself): the Angkor Wat in Cambodia for example, exhibit pine cone-shaped rooftops, the Roman Bronze Sculpture "Pigna" is (obviously) in the shape of a pine cone, and the staff of the Egyptian Pharaoh-god Osiris bears a pine cone. For a longer writeup about some occult symbols pertaining the pine cone, you might want to take a look at this article. Of course as with anything, take it with a grain of salt, but I'm sure you'll agree that the very fact that this symbol appears all over the world, is eerie. Finally, let's try to marry those two points together. What if the brain, like a radio to a radio station, is actually just a receiver to a certain reality? And that everything that we collectively experience together in this realm is explained by the fact that our brains are tuned in to the same "frequency", if you will? If the pineal gland is actually the "antenna" or "TV aerial" of the brain, then that would explain why ancient civilizations have honored this part of the brain to be the key in unlocking the secrets of the universe and higher intelligence.

Here are some of the potential implications of that:

• Instead of thinking that drugs and other psychedelics change the way that our brains function, what if it causes the "tuning" of our brain to be offset to some other infinitesimally close frequency? That LSD, for example, does not cause us to "imagine things" but instead cause us to "see things outside our own reality."
• Glitches where people claim to have experienced an alternate reality may have unconsciously changed their brain's frequency due to stress or other physical condition. Distorted memories and "I've lived a different life" type experiences can then easily be attributed to the experiencer being in the wrong frequency.
• People "seeing" things that others can't see might be unconsciously experiencing things from other realities bleeding through, perhaps again, due to their tuning being changed.
• Essentially, if we can gain conscious control of how our brain are tuned, then we can gain access to any reality that we wish. A more direct interpretation of this is that it is possible to experience any reality at will. Bending the universe to your favor is merely changing the frequency that your brain is attuned to -- because, after all, if there is an infinite number of possibilities then anything is real. Passage of time; past, future, and present are but concepts of this current reality.

So far, we've only explored the possibilities of the brain being a one-way radio. But what about a two-way radio (or a walkie-talkie)? Our brains listening and broadcasting to a single frequency? If that's the case, then this will easily explain why some people claim to have telepathic experiences and why large groups of people seem to share a collective mind.

Some Final Thoughts

This theory may answer some questions unanswerable by classical science, but still fails to address one very important question: what is consciousness? Or even what is and is there a soul?

If this is true -- that the brain is just a radio -- then is there any truth to ancient rituals and practices? That there are higher dimensions right within our grasp if only we can learn how to tune our brains to listen to the right frequencies?

Footnotes

Again, I am no expert, nor do I hold any paper for any special degree. Everything I've written is just the summary of an interpretation of the universe which I think might be possible. If you're asking me for any scientific basis, then we are misunderstanding each other. :)

If there's anything that I wasn't able to cover in my brief writeup, then feel free to ask me and I'll try my best to respond using the theory I've written. Let's discuss!

[END OF POST]

Excellent write-up. The only problem is that the "brain" you hang this on is itself part of the experience being tuned into. If I tune into the experience of being an arctic explorer, and then into being a librarian, or the same librarian in a slightly different universe, each time going to see a doctor for an MRI, I'd get different results, since I'd be (apparently) in a different body. So...

Whatever it is that does the "tuning in" must itself be beyond that which is experienced, while still being an environment in which experiences are perceived...

Something which does not itself have qualities or structure or form, but which can "take on the shape of" these things...

In other words, if you were to swap "brain" for "consciousness" and say that what happens is:

• What you truly are is an "open space of consciousness", and
• This consciousness "tunes into" or "takes on the shape of" different experiences.

Then you'd be pretty much there. And even better, you can take this beyond mere theorising: you can fairly easily prove to yourself that your actual experience right now is like an "open space" in which sensations, perceptions and thoughts arise, simply by directly attending to it. By flipping things around in this way ("the world appears within you"), the consciousness/soul problem immediately stops being an issue. Of course, the world itself now becomes essentially imaginary, distinguished from other thoughts by only its relative intensity and apparent stability.

EDIT: This got long so I've added some headings. This is a great post by the way, for starting discussion. Really pleased to have this sort of thing appearing in the sub.

To be clear, I do not think that reality is consciousness shaped within our brains. I'm saying that "consciousness" is the very stuff everything is made from. Brains are things we experience sometimes; they don't "cause" anything or shape anything.

Brains, Stations, Storage

In addition to reality, I believe that there's another station at which the brain is attuned into: a station where the brain actually stores its data including memories, knowledge, and information.

Just to ask again: where exactly is this brain? It can't be the body-brains we see. It can't even be within space and time, surely?

On stations: You don't need this extra invention if you have consciousness being fundamental. All there is, is patterns that are "dissolved in" the space of consciousness. Your ongoing experience is then more akin to recalling those patterns in the same way as you recall a memory. You are associatively exploring the world in the same manner that you explore a strand of thought. Since all possible experiences and information are available, things like past lives and others thoughts stop being a problem. It's all there, all the time. What you are calling a "tuning into a station" is just remembering - associatively triggering particular patterns such that they become brighter in consciousness, via "autocomplete". They are always there.

EDIT: In the same way as you can simultaneously experience the room you are "in" and also think about something, it would theoretically be possible to end up with two parallel experiences. This might lead to apparent mental health issues. Or maybe teleportation. ;-)

World As Imaginary

This is because this essentially tells you that everything around you is a product of your own consciousness, an effect of your own thinking.

The assumption you are making here is that it is "your" consciousness. Actually, consciousness is impersonal and it just happens to be having the experience of "thinking about being frankz0509 in a world".

Which means that since everything is real within your consciousness, nothing is.

This is essentially the position of many traditions - but again, with the change that it is not "your" consciousness. Nothing "is" in the sense that there is no external, inaccessible world that somehow "causes" our experiences. You are consciousness "taking on the shape of" frankz0509-in-the-world-in-this-situation.

You As Imaginary

Essentially, you are alone in the universe and everything around you is imaginary.

And you are imaginary too! ;-)

This isn't a problem really. Saying that "everything is consciousness taking on the form of experience" is no different to saying that "everything is made from atoms and brains". In fact, the former allows you to have agency and intelligence (awareness, intention, free will) whereas the latter doesn't.

EDIT: You are alone in the universe in the sense that you have your own "private view" experience, however you are not alone because you are intimately connected with all possible experience, and during your experiences you are the entire universe (effectively). The "world-sharing model" for this isn't simple to describe, because inherently it is not formatted in terms to time and space (which are aspects of experiencing and are not fundamental outside of that).

We need to be careful with the word "imaginary". It's come to be interpreted as "unimportant" or "without meaning" but really it says the opposite: everything is fundamentally meaningful. The meaning of things is actually more primary than the shape, colour, texture, etc! What we actually end up with is that instead of being alone, the experience of "being you" and everything else is intimately connected, part of one undivided conscious "material" which is "taking on the shape of" different experiences...

Direct Exploration

For this approach, you really need to go back to your actual experience without any preconceptions - e.g. George Berkeley and his Three Dialogues or in more modern times: Rupert Spira's direct attending or Douglas Harding's funny little experiments. Conscious experience becomes primary. It always is, of course, it's just that we've got in the habit of imagining it isn't, starting with a fictional picture of us being "in the world" and proceeding from there. We don't lose any of our scientific discoveries and so on by disgarding this, but we do end up with a reorientation of what it means to "make observations". This switch-around is, I think, what most historical traditions are pointing at. Even things like the Biblical parables make better sense when re-interpretated as descriptions of our true relationship to experience.

TL;DR: There is no "solid underlying" to the world; experiencing is like recalling memories; imaginary = meaningful.

Q1: Blew my mind here. Seriously awesome post. Berkeley is a good recommendation, for sure! If you're unfamiliar with Eastern philosophy, I'd also recommend some of the philosophers from Advaita Vedanta, who have been positing ideas quite similar to this for a long, long time (though somewhat in reverse from an epistemological perspective - rather than a field of consciousness experiencing itself in various discrete beings and events, they talk about the perspective of one of these particular beings trying to remember that it IS that field of consciousness!)

Cheers!

Yes, I've delved into that side too. The same story has been retold and updated forever, it seems! And I agree with that "way round" actually, or more specifically I think they are the same thing: A conscious field shapes itself into the experience of "being a person in a world", forgets its true nature, spends a lot of time wandering around space rediscovering it is not a person but a field of consciousness - and that there is no time and space. :-)

...

Is it possible for consciousness to be hacked into...

Not sure I follow you. All experience occurs within consciousness; there is no outside. It's all arising as sensory experience within this "perceptual space". In lucid dreaming, you can have a dream about taking drugs and having all sorts of corresponding experiences. Where are the "drugs" and the "brain" in this case? What is difference between the waking version and the dreaming version of that situation?

What would be the purpose of consciousness observing itself other than to create a fictitious or faulty experience.

What purpose does there have to be? Simply enjoyment and curiosity, which is what drives most of your life (except for fear, or course). "Fictitious" and "faulty" relative to what? If there's no "outside" to experience, then there's nothing to compare it to. It's like saying something that happens on Planet Earth is "faulty". Relative to what? Relative only to a preconceived idea we might have about it.

...

Q1: In accordance to the multiverse theory, what I'm trying to propose is that the brain is tuned to a specific frequency or reality (universe). I still haven't found where the consciousness actually fits into, but that's also a good idea to explore: that the consciousness itself is the radio station. What I mean by the brain being tuned to this universe: Since there is an infinite number of universes out there, us being in this universe is merely the effect of our brains being set to listen to this universe. If for example, one day I suddenly experience seeing things that are not supposed to be; or I remember memories I have no recollection of having, then I'm suggesting that perhaps my brain has somehow been bumped into a different frequency. I'd like to believe than more than just the universe, the brain is also connected to a vastly invisible field that connects all humans and that perhaps this is where all our memories and data is stored..

Q2: Right, but if it's the brain tuning into the universe, which universe is the brain located in?

Bingo.

Q1: The brain -- the physical mass attached to body -- is attached to whatever university it is in. However the mind, or the ethereal chunk of consciousness that exists outside space-time, isn't located anywhere and is everywhere at the same time. Think of it this way: you have 1,000 radios each tuned to their own frequencies. Each radio station plays only the songs of a certain artist. Now you, the person listening, has the choice of moving around and going near whatever radio you want to listen to. All's well and good, right? Now, say I tweak one radio (re-tune it) so that it listens to a different radio station instead, and it all goes chaotic because it's not meant to listen to that frequency. You, the person in this picture = mind; radio = brain; radio station = universe. Seems pretty clear to me.

Right! I see where we differ. So to clarify, you are saying:

• person = mind = listener
• brain = radio
• universe = station

I'm suggesting the "brain=radio" bit isn't required, that it's an extra step which exists only for the analogy and can never actually be observed. We never actually experience having a brain that tunes into things. The having-a-brain thing would be part of the experience of a universe, not an intermediary. What we are left with is:

• person = mind = consciousness (an open aware space)
• consciousness "tunes into" particular experiences (forming itself into a "dream perspective")[1]

Skipping the intermediate step, this matches with our direct experience (a conscious "space" which seems to "take on the shape" of the experience of being-a-person-in-a-world). The urge we have to fill the gap between the two steps perhaps comes from wanting to imagine a mechanism by which consciousness/mind "connects to" a universe - but that's not needed. After all, outside of experiencing it, there is no time of space, and so no mechanism or connection or material by which such a thing could be formed. The mind being unbounded and unlocated, it's actually the other way around: all possible experiences are "dissolved into" consciousness itself. All time and space is available now. Selecting an experience/universe is akin to "remembering" or "intensifying" an image from a holographic space. (A bit like an 'Imagination Room'.) What a person is, is that holographic space.

[1] The "dream perspective" is always a 1st-person perspective, consisting of sensations, perceptions and thoughts. It cannot be accurately represented using a 3rd-person perspective model; it has no "outside".

POST: I'm still a little shaken from it. Still trying to believe it happened.

Aren't fairies and the like potentially just our own personification of the unknown, randomised mystery aspect of experience?

Q1: That's a very thought-provoking view. I'll have to mull it over a bit. Thanks.
However, does it actually change our interactions with said Others?

In terms of interactions, it would depend on how far you want to push fully into the implications. If you explored it more deeply you might recognise it/them as a part of yourself and also reappraise "yourself" as being only a part of yourself - seeing both as arising as a sort of patterning of the mind, overlaid upon experience - and manage your relationship accordingly. (More deeply still, you'd perhaps see that this patterning was experience, not really overlaid upon anything.)

I've always quite liked the idea that, say, the Norse gods did for all intents and purposes literally exist. In the sense that people's experience corresponded exactly to how it would be "as if" they were actual, if that makes sense.

POST: Waking up in new realities

[POST]
I used to just chalk this up to lack of sleep and many weekends drinking past my normal limit during college. However, I cannot shake this feeling that I have woken up into similar realities that only slightly vary visually, and I dream/hallucinate of past realities. The few times this happened to me I felt as though I knew I was out of place and other people knew I was out of place.
I would talk to people I had known for ages and they would barely remember me, even though we would regularly hang out during a quarter/year. People would have varying facial features from day to day. It almost feels as if there was some sort of upgrade in facial recognition. It would weird me out that their nose could shift in centimeter increments up and down, but I wouldn't say anything because it seemed rude and crazy. Other facial features would slightly change, but it would be hard to pinpoint what had changed exactly. Eyes would change drastically though, shrinking or growing daily.
Honestly it felt like a bad drug trip everyday during this time period. And at my peak of "waking up in different realities," time would not be constant. I would be conversing with someone and suddenly the conversation would go too fast, and I would have said things I had no recollection of saying. Days would feel like hours and minutes could feel like years.
I started having vivid dreams of a world where I was unconscious in a bed being talked to by family members who have passed away and old friends I haven't seen since high school. They were semi-lucid, not in that I had control over them, but that the people in them would change back to the way in which I would remember them. They would be yelling or screaming at me about something I did or didn't do. Sounds of glass shattering, warning sirens, voices telling me to remember something. I know I am being quite vague, but it is genuinely hard to recall, especially since I didn't really think anything of it at the time.
I used to laugh it off and tell people that I thought I was in some weird purgatory, or that time was fleeting. And every time I would make the joke they would ask me to explain, even if I had explained my experiences in detail to them before. So I just sort of stopped talking or joking about it.
I tried to keep a journal of the changes I saw, but pages seemed to always be missing. Then the journal seemed to disappear altogether one day. I would keep it table side next to my bed, but I must have just misplaced it or something.

[END OF POST]

I can't find it at the moment, but there's a short report on this subreddit where someone was pointing out that people's faces and appearance were changing quite regularly - he and a couple of his colleagues had noticed that everyone else was "shifting" periodically.

Q2: I am interested in finding people with similar experiences... But I don't know if I will even talk to them if I find them. Kind of a strange thing to bond over.
I'd definitely like to read the post, if you can find it.

It was very short. Basically: "faces change in my workplace, me and two other colleagues are noticing this". Unfortunately the relevant search terms aren't very good for narrowing onto it. Will see if I can dig it out later.

Q1: I have noticed that I experience glitches far more often after a night of intense, vivid, memorable dreams. I wonder if what happens in the dream state is similar to what is theorized to happen with quantum immortality. If our consciousness spans all dimensions and realities and can slide to another string of reality if we die, then perhaps this can happen while we dream. And if so, could lucid dreaming be used to influence the reality we wake up to? After all no one really knows where we go when we die or when we're dreaming...

And if so, could lucid dreaming be used to influence the reality we wake up to?

People have experimented with this. /u/Ian_a_wilson has written up his experiences with precognitive lucid dreams and making changes in them (see his write-up here and check out his AMA). Others have taken a more symbolic approach to creating change (assignment of meaning to dream objects then manipulating them).

Q2: We have always been searching for a meaning behind dreams. I wouldn't read too much into it, but it is strange that we can manipulate dreams. It certainly goes against dreams being "random" firings of the brain that is generally accepted nowadays. There is something completely non-random about dreaming. At least on an evolutionary level, there has to be some reason we dream.

Well, the particular examples in that post are of having a dream of something, deliberately changing an aspect of it, and that scenario subsequently happening in real life, with the change. Personally, I quite like the idea that our experiences can be described as A Line of Thought. The only difference between thinking about something and experiencing it, is that the experience is brighter, more stable, and 3D-immersive in comparison to a passing thought. Dreaming, then, is a switch of context - letting this strand of thought recede, and another become prominent. In that view, all thoughts and experiences would be thoughts about a large, continuous pattern which exists eternally and consists of all possible facts and experiences. Metaphorically, we could describe this as an Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments. In a precognitive dream, we would be looking at "moments" which are on our current deterministic trajectory (deterministic if we do not deliberately make a change, that is). If we alter the content of that dream, we are restructuring our trajectory accordingly.

Just some thoughts. So to speak.

Q2: Well, the brain is pretty good at making predictions, especially about its own actions. So I don't think it is too far fetched to think that a dream could be some sort of combination of predictions, wish fulfillment, and "neurogarbage."

For sure. The great thing about dreams is, really, nobody has a clue. As one sleep researcher said, after 30 years of studying it, the only thing we really know is that "dreaming is what happens when you fall asleep".

For myself, as someone interested in the nature of perception and also as a lucid dreamer, I've never encountered a persuasive and testable theory of dreams, memory or consciousness - and those things need to be solved together I think. Handwaving metaphors involving computer imagery, magical emergence, or directed evolution don't count. The question that needs answered is: how, exactly, does it account for our experience?

The reason I brought up the deliberate changing thing was because of this account, which by linking a dream directly to a future event, and the changing of the dream to the changing of the event, at least makes for an interestingly unlikely coincidence, if not more:

In 1998, one such event took place that proved the theory and, from my perspective, set in stone that the potential to actively change a precognitive dream was the next step in the logical progression of precognitive dream research and active change is achievable.
The dream offered no more than about a 5 minute window of opportunity where, when recognizing the location as a place of work (a movie theater) and a person known to work there at the time, being fully awake and aware that the current setting was in fact a dream, I targeted a co-worker -- only out of opportunity -- and caused a triangle to appear on his forehead over a distance of 6 feet.
He was behind the concession counter and I was an usher taking tickets.
At the time when I awoke, I had no idea if this lucid dream that I had mapped was in fact precognitive. The only way to know was to wait and observe if it should chronologically happen in the future.
It did.
On May 13th, 1998, while working at the movie theater, the same opportunity observed in the dream synchronized with a strong déjà vu aura. Going through the motions of the dream at this point, the triangle did form as observed in the dream on the forehead of a co-worker. He was not privileged to this personal research and exploration that I was conducting. However, he felt something and was also able to observe the triangle mark. It was visible enough to be recorded with photographs and I will present the two pictures of the mark.
-- Theory of Precognitive Dreams, Ian A Wilson

Q2: I used to think something similar. I wouldn't really chalk it up to quantum physics or anything, but how much do we really know about how our consciousness is expressed? Probably not a whole lot. If something like multiple universe hypothesis is true-- would there be a real way in which similar consciousnesses (that evolve the same consciousness) can communicate or share. I am no expert-- and this may be a bad analogy-- but what if our conscious "selves" were somehow entangled with each other. It would certainly save a lot of computing power. Maybe sleeping is a way to "sync up." I dunno. I am getting a little too creative here. I think I will leave it at that. If what I am describing is truly a "glitch in the matrix," I have absolutely no way to know how to trigger it, so it is all pure speculation. I should say that my theories and analogies are somewhat weak as I am no expert in how the human brain expresses consciousness. I am keeping this short so that I don't put my foot in my mouth too far haha.

Marcus Arvan's P2P Hypothesis covers similar ground - as does the QBism interpretation of quantum mechanics - in terms of having "private views' of the world, which may (or may not) be synced up at some point. If we continue to think of the world as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" which we wander about it, then we are stuck with some form of synchronisation or direct sharing. But if we instead view the world more like a "shared resource" of possible patterns, then it's possible to see it as a toy box of potential experiences, and sharing and synchronisation don't really matter. Then, time and space arise as part of the experience, and make no sense outside of it. We are each having an independent experience with no larger context in time or space. Like sending and receiving pre-written messages via an eternal inbox.

(This and the "strands of thought" concept can be linked up quite nicely.)

Q2: Yeah, I have no idea. I think that if I am in a new reality, not much has changed. There are minor things every now and again that I notice, but my brain is wired to either fix memories to fit reality or to ignore things that don't follow the general narrative of this reality. That is why I called sleep "syncing." If I have woken up in a different reality, I think my brain is wired to keep my conscious self from noticing. And eventually conforming to any new rules or paradigms needed to survive wherever I am. That may sound heavy, but it is an alternate explanation as to why I eventually lost the ability to sense any difference between now and any other reality I have been in. This is, again, pure speculation. But it is how I rationalize it.

Another option is to forget about brains for a minute (I always find the idea that our brains are thinking separately from us and choosing to do things a bit philosophically strange, because what is "us" and what is "it"). We might simply say that the ongoing experience you are having tends to self-reinforce, and so the current state is going to become dominant and the previous state is going to recede as time goes on. As with a Necker Cube, it is very hard to hold two contrary perspectives in the mind at once. the more prominent one configuration of the "world-pattern" becomes, the harder it becomes to perceive, recall, or even think in terms of the other configuration. It's increasingly difficult to hold onto an alternative view when all inbound sensory evidence is to the contrary. I like the idea of "sleep syncing". And what is sleep, if not a release upon your hold of the world for a while? When you wake up the next day, the fading patterns of the now-incongruous perspective have slipped from your grasp completely, and you are fully aligned to your "new reality".

POST: Asked a question. The universe delivered

[POST]

It was a grand summers eve, around 2003. Me, a friend, his wife and kid were sitting in a beer garden discussing different species of fish. He mentioned a fish I was, at present, unaware of, the bullhead. He described it meticulously, but the fish escaped my knowledge. Myself and my friend, while still discussing said fish, went indoors to refresh our glasses. On our return my friends wife looked quite shocked and pointed to this oily looking dark mass on the floor, not two feet from our table. Initially wondering what it was, she went on to explain that it had just fallen from the sky. On closer inspection my friend looked equally shocked. I looked at the thing and quickly realised it was a fish. He looked right at me and said; "Oh my good god, that is a bullhead!". There was a pond nearby, and we surmised a bird had caught the fish and happened to drop it on its flyby. I was stunned, and quite frankly still am. Even when telling this experience now, I still wonder if people believe me.
Coincidence, Synchronicity, Glitch? Either way, it was weird.

[END OF POST]

Q1: Some say thoughts can attract real life events to you. I've experienced it on a small scale many times. Who knows.

...That's not really confirmation bias though for most people, is it? I imagine very few people are really living from the hypothesis that thoughts attract real life events.

"In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors."

For most reports, it's probably better described as the general tendency to notice details which are meaningful within your current context. Basically: experiencing synchronicity. Not that you can really test for that (or confirmation bias or the frequency illusion) in everyday life, so the topic will always stay open. Not suggesting that thoughts do attract real life events (mental causation), or even that thoughts tend to arise "near" to similarly-shaped events in some way (event clustering), but scientifically speaking it's not a question that can be investigated one way or the other.

Q2: It's not confirmation bias it's apophenia comorbid wishful thinking.

Well, if you are just noticing that things seem to cluster for you, then that isn't wishful thinking. That's just observation. It's how you interpret that observation that matters. (e.g. "Therefore I Am God Of All Things And You Should Beware My Fiery Power", for instance, is probably not the appropriate conclusion.)

Unless of course you meant that literally: "Wishful thinking" as in, the sort of thinking that makes wishes come true, and you are speaking from personal experience. In which case I will immediately bow down in worship of your great wisdom, in order to avert a sudden charcoal outcome.

EDIT: Responding to your update to include "apophenia", I'm not sure how you're going to separate out actual meaningful data from "seeing patterns in meaningless date". Surely all "life data" is meaningless, other than in the context of the experiencer and their history. (And in fact, the whole idea of applying this concept to everyday life assumes some sort of objective level that has inherent value prior to, and independent of, an experiencer. Personally, I've never encountered anything that I haven't been an observer of.)

Q2: If I could think wishes true, it wouldn't make me wise, it would make me god.

Indeed. Although you could always wish to be wise...

Q2: Which is circular reasoning.

...which is allowed for a god: he is after all pretty much the definition of a bootstrap paradox.

POST: I saw the whole world. I think

[POST]

Hey there reader. I'm tired. Bored. Have been meaning to share this story. Hopefully I'm in the right place. Hopefully my story is worthy. I'll keep it short but descriptive.
This happened when I was 15. I was walking through the apartment complex I lived close to with my boyfriend at the time. He turned the corner to walk into the open laundry room to buy a soda from the machine and right as I was about to turn the corner I shot out of my body so fast I didn't even have a chance to really even notice. I was suddenly floating in space. I can't tell you if I felt my body or if I was just looking but I was there, floating, looking at earth and the stars and our universe. It was all so vivid and huge and in front of me. Then before I knew it I was back in my body walking. I nearly fell over and just had to hold the wall and ground myself for a moment.
I had no words for what happened. And after my so got his soda and came out I just leaned back up and continued walking with him. I didn't tell anyone, and still haven't. I always felt like it just didn't make sense and people would brush it off as my imagination being super vivid or something if the sorts.
I'd like to add that I never experienced anything like that again. And also about a year later I was in and out of the hospital having neurological things checked out (optical neuritis if you must know) and there was nothing wrong (but the neuritis heh). So I have no explanation. I've thought about it so much. Every which way. Was I out of breath? No. Was I on drugs? Haha no.
Thanks for reading a little sliver of my life.

[END OF POST]

I don't suppose you maybe stepped on something like this?

Heh, did you like Tomorrowland?

I was anticipating really not liking it but, despite a few missteps such as the handling of the robot agents and a bit of overexplaining, I really enjoyed it for what it was. They could have done more with that concept though.

...

Q1: You do realize why it's hard to believe right?

Why is it hard to believe? He's not saying he was literally, physically in space. It sounds like he had a temporary "blip", like a mini-lucid dream or OBE-type experience. The interpretation is up for grabs, but the actual experience seems pretty plausible.

I think he's a she. Unless...

...unless this glitch was more dramatic than we thought?

POST: Duplicated objects

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting there would be some big adventure involved, but for instance:

• What were the circumstances of discovering the duplicate? Was there just suddenly two pairs in the drawer, or was it a case of opening the drawer, there are some shorts, but - wait - aren't my shorts in my bag?
• Was there any anything noteworthy about the discovery? Like, you were in a rush and needed your shorts for gym, can't find them, suddenly you find a pair, only later you notice the duplication... etc.
• Is the duplicate an exact copy of the original?

Even if it's just "there are two of those now", there's a way in which there are two now. Otherwise there's nothing much to discuss, and you might get a whole lot of one-line replies saying: "I recently had one pair of sunglasses, now I have two", "I recently had one watch, now I have two", with no further info. The idea is that you're kicking off a discussion, right?

Tried to add some more details. It's happened a couple of times with different things, pens, lighters, shirts, shorts.

Great, that's exactly what I meant. Someone finding two identical pens in a drawer they haven't looked in for five years, it's curious, but nothing special. Lots of explanations possible. An item of clothing duplicating itself in a matter of moments while you were actually sorting through them, that's something else!

Yeah, the lighters and pens you kind of expect to vanish and reappear, or even double sometimes but this happened with shorts, and two shirts so that's a little much.

Here's something to ponder: During that activity, leading up to the moment of discovery, were you a bit spaced at all, distracted and dreamy, and was the moment of noticing the duplicate the thing that brought you out of it?

No, not at all it was a very boring moment, other than the duplicated shorts. Maybe it was just so bad that God Himself got bored and decided to create entertainment with my laundry. I guess it was nothing otherwise out of the ordinary.

Yeah, well they do call him The Creator I suppose. Everyone thinks that's because he was responsible for the world and all that's in it, Biblical-style. Actually, though, it's a nickname his deity pals gave him, because he's always (literally) making stuff up.

Including shorts apparently.

You should take it as a compliment. He duplicated your shorts and shirt just as they were, rather than choosing some other style to create. Basically, your fashion choices have been officially approved by The Lord Himself. And being all-knowing and all-seeing, you'd imagine he knows his stuff.

It happened with a shirt once before too, is there a "holy shirt" joke in there somewhere?

I think there definitely is, yes. And if you start getting food duplicates, there might be the possibility of a "god offal" joke too - especially if you start getting tripe-licates.

...might be in bad taste.

Haha, very good! Nice one to finish on. Cheers :-)

...

Uh-huh, and I love how you really brought the story to life; it's almost as if we are there with you.

Sarcastic mod is sarcastic.

The genetic burden of being British. I'd get it treated, but there's a danger my ability to do funny walks will be affected. (You have to admit it's slightly taking the piss, though. I still re-approved the post anyway.)

POST: Dimension shift? Timeline jump?

I think I would be wary of interpreting every small unexplained event as a "dimensional shift" or "timeline jump". Technology is always glitching, in the more literal sense. Now, if when she checked her phone she noticed it and changed from an iPhone into an old Ericsson and that's why there was no long SMS in it, then that would have been a "glitch in the matrix".

Collateral shifts.

A couple of points perhaps to bear in mind: a) the world maybe just isn't that stable anyway, facts are "blurry"; b) technology definitely isn't very stable, it's full of bugs. What it really comes down to is: it's not possible to work out the cause unless you are having experiences that you can tie back to an intentional act. A minor blip could be anything. It's about levels of plausibility, really. If there were lots of odd shifts happening and a dramatic change, perhaps it would be a worthwhile interpretation to explore, but one-off computer file disappearances (which is basically what this is), isn't something to get too hung up on. A failed send message function, and there might be no trace of a message - never made it to "outbox", doesn't get broadcast, doesn't get saved in "sent" either.

Not saying you can't have fun thinking about it; it's just that I wouldn't get overly fixated on this as evidence of anything to do with a "shifting reality".

POST: [THEORY] What if our reality were a computer simulation?

Nick Bostrom is really your go-to-guy for the simulation argument. But really, this is all just a new coat of paint on an old philosophical idea...

The idea that the universe doesn't exist in the same 'format' as our sensory experience - that 3D-space and the passage of time are part of our experiences rather than fundamental - goes back a long way. Following this, we end up with the notion that behind the scenes it's more like an "infinite gloop" which has been patterned in some way, and so our ongoing experiences amount to a series of selected 3D-slices of that patterned gloop. The simulation view, and similar angles, are just the application of the computer metaphor to this idea. One major problem with the simulation metaphor is that it implies that the world in some way is "run" like a software program, which implies a processor of some sort, or some framework operating in time. But this runs counter to the core idea of that philosophical point, which is: the world doesn't actually "happen" at all when it is not being observed, only observations "happen" - because happening (the apparent unfolding of events) is part of experiencing. The world doesn't unfold, only experiences do.

But so long as it's just taken as a "thinking framework" rather than literally true, then it's quite a fun worldview to adopt. (No metaphor can capture the nature of the world beyond experiencing, of course. Experiencing has no "outside". If there was an outside, we could never experience it, and so in effect it doesn't exist. All we can ever do is make up "connective fictions" to link our observations together into a useful narrative.)

Q1: Can it be summarized by stating that it doesn't really matter whether there is a computer running the universe algorithm? That's how I see it: The reality as a computer simulation, with no need for a tangible computer to "run" it. It's like a mathematical series. You don't need to compute infinitely everything to know and state that it does exist.

Right. It's a mathematical landscape, you might say - which is really just a way of saying it has a structure or shape but it has no substrate. It's not "made from" anything (except, in some readings, "consciousness itself" or awareness or whatever you want to call that raw property of being). Nothing runs it, it's a dumb pattern. If anything happens at all, it is us as observers. Experiences happen, the world does not. The intelligence of the universe is our intelligence, as the selectors of experiences from the landscape of all possible moments. And nothing ever happens except for selection ("bringing a moment into sensory awareness").

Q2: It most likely is, my question is, if we can't tell the difference, what does it matter?

If you "can't tell the difference", my question is, how do you conclude that "it most likely is"? ;-)

Q3: The idea works like this. If it's possible to create a simulation that perfectly mimics a real world one of two things will happen when we are able to. Either we'll decide never to do it or we will create at least one, probably more. In the simulations at least some people will likely figure out how to create their own simulation and decide to do it. And so on down the line. That would mean that there is one 'real' universe and who knows how many simulations in that one. There are also simulations within simulations the same way. Leading to untold numbers of simulations and one universe that isn't. So if there are simulations then it's staggeringly unlikely that we are the 'real' universe. It's just a matter of numbers.

Yeah, that's the simulation argument for sure. I don't find it very persuasive though, apart from as a bit of fun; it stinks of "whatiffery". So...

• We can never know if a simulation we create is actually having an experience like we are.
• If we create a world in Sims 4 and the characters within that apparently create a Sims 42 and so on, to the Sims 4n, would that mean it was likely that we are living in a Sims one level above? Surely not.
• Actually, no matter how many simulations we create, it does not necessarily follow that we are in a simulation, because of the issues of 'type' - quite apart from external access. There is really no way of calculating that "likelihood".

Q3: The whole idea is predicated on the ability to create a perfect simulation. One that exactly replicates reality. If that is possible then any people in the simulation would necessarily experience their world exactly how we do. As would anyone in any simulations they create. And so on.
From there it's just a numbers game. Odds are we are somewhere in the middle of that chain of simulations, rather than at the top.
I don't know if it's true or not, but logically it works.

The problem (which I could have said more clearly!) is that you can't tell whether you've created the perfect simulation, because - putting aside the issue of checking for correspondence - confirming this would involve having an experience from inside of it, as a creation of it. The way out of that is to propose that there is a base level where all the "conscious beings" are, all with goggles on, experiencing different simulations. But then you don't really have simulations within simulations; you have one real level with one actual simulation with multiple simulated-environments.

EDIT: Hmm, actually that is pretty close to a philosophical idealist view I quite like, although in that case the possible experiential patterns are "dissolved into" the conscious beings themselves. (See related exercise here [POST: Why did the devs implement dreams?].)

Q2: That's not my conclusion... that's my opening statement. My conclusion is it does not matter.

As an opening statement, it isn't really a statement of fact. However, I agree with your conclusion.

POST: My friend's dead brother

Q1: To get to the bottom of it, you'd have to ask him. It will probably be awkward, but just tell him what you thought he said about a year ago to you.
Maybe he just thought his brother succeeded in suicide when in reality it was just attempted suicide. If they have to contact over the phone or email it's possible he mentally shut down when he heard the term suicide. It can be a stressful situation.
But I will say that's pretty damn weird. Is it possible that instead of being direct with you, he is indirectly implying that he was wrong about his brothers death? Some people don't like admitting they're wrong. I'd kind of be embarrased if I were incorrect about something that serious. That or I wouldn't really want to talk about it directly, you know?

Q2: I see your point. Also when he said he had to leave because he "had to bury his brother" (his actual words) he was more or less addressing several group members. It was almost an announcement. Maybe I did misinterpret the situation or didn't know everything. I find that it would be quite difficult and awkward to ask him about this. But to get to the bottom of it, I suppose I'll have to ask him.

Could it have been meant metaphorically and with in-the-moment emotional exaggeration?

As in, he gets called up and there's trouble at home with mom not treating the brother well and the brother sounding suicidal, and it's almost just a way of phrasing the desperation of the situation - i.e. "I need to go home, my brother is basically in ruins and as good as dead because of what my mom is doing".

Q3: A. This should be in the Mandela Effect B. Does he have more than one brother?

The lines can blur but... It's not a Mandela Effect unless it's a global fact. If it's only him that remembers it and it's a personal event, it's here.

Q2: I am 98% certain he has only ever had one brother. Also I thought Mandela Effect referred only to things that were relevant to an entire culture, so i posted this in glitch. Sorry if I was wrong about that.

To confirm: this is indeed the correct subreddit for your post.

POST: Requested: My Experience of Dreaming of another Realm. Nearly 4 dream years in 3 nights of time.

Q1: Once at a place I worked, I found myself staring at a cupboard door in the cafeteria wondering why it was a different colour. It had always been white. I could see it was still white, but yet it was also a bluish colour at the same time.
I was experiencing an involuntary sort of cognitive dissonance. It was two contradictory things at once.
Then my perception shifted. The walls of the room were a different colour - they had been painted pink since I was last there. I had been implicitly assuming that the walls were still their original off-white colour, leading to my other assumption that it must have been the cupboard doors.
The doors were now their non-confusing original shade of white, and the walls were pink.
This occurred when I was 19 or so.
TL;DR Now imagine you're a little kid who's always seen this patch of grass as green. Your eyes telling you one thing (brown), your brain telling you that this grass is green. You feel weird.
Your perspective shifts to what your eyes see. The grass seems to change colour in your perception. Whoa. "Daddy!..."

Perhaps we really don't "see" much at all; actually, we are constantly using our "darkroom vision" with only minor updates from the senses (whatever they are). Who knows what is actually "out there"? Maybe it's just a bunch of slightly self-contradictory ideas or patterns, and our minds just try and make a world out of them as best they can.

POST: Requested: My Experience of Dreaming of another Realm. Nearly 4 dream years in 3 nights of time.

[POST]

I originally wasn't going to post this, because of the personal nature of the story, but I received so much encouragement from this community that I decided to post. Because it is so personal, there are a few details I'll be keeping to myself, but feel free to ask questions.
-=-=- Dream 1 -=-=-
About a year ago, I fell asleep one unremarkable night and dreamt roughly three and a half years of time. At the beginning of the dream, I was in 10th grade, apparently at a boarding school, or something similar. At the beginning of the dream, I was at school, and another student (who we'll call Dan), and who was only in my chemistry class, asked if I wanted to hang out that weekend. I said that that would be great, and that we'd meet up that Friday after classes. It was to be the first time that we were going to hang out, and I was looking forward to it. We went to his dorm and talked about a few things that he asked me to keep in confidence (and I'll honor that), but it had to do with his relationship with his parents.
I felt bad for him, but I didn't let him see that (as far as I know). We had a great night playing board games, and chatting. (Video games didn't seem to exist, now that I'm thinking about it).
Time went by like it usually would in reality - it didn't feel like a dream at all. It felt like waking up, showering, going to classes, studying for exams, writing essays, eating food, using the facilities, hanging out with friends, celebrating holidays. Everything normal.
As time went by, Dan and I would hang out basically every day. By the time the summer rolled around, we were inseparable. I spent almost every day with him at his house. (He lived with his parents who were extremely wealthy. The house was so large, I'm not even sure they noticed I was around half the time. Or him, for that matter. I helped him cope with the issues with his parents, and he helped me cope with the other students that, for some reason, were very angry at our friendship, and took it out on me. I grew to love him as a brother. (I was an only child, in the dream).
Two more years go by this way. he lived at my place (with my folks), the summer between 11th and 12th grade. By 12th grade, things were basically as great as they could be. The anger at us seemed to have died down, and we were participating in all kinds of school events. We had great marks in all of our classes, (I'd've called them grades, but that's not what they were called in the dream) and Dan and I were both in the top 10 of our graduating class. A few months before we were to graduate, on a wholly unremarkable Wednesday .... I woke up.
-=-=-
It really felt that the previous day was years and years ago. I've since had two other dreams that took place in that setting.
-=-=- Dream 2 -=-=-
A few months after the previous dream, I had another. This second dream only lasted a few days (Short, in comparison to the other). I was closer to the age I am now (about 25ish), and Danny and I were planning to go for a weekend trip to another city. It was Tuesday, when the dream started, and we were getting everything ready for the trip. Dan came over to my apartment that day and greeted me with a big hug, which was our norm. He told me he was really excited for Thursday, because he was going to go out on a second date with a girl he really liked (I can't remember her name, but I do remember that she was blonde). We spent a few hours chatting, and Dan went home, and I went to bed. Wednesday was an ordinary Wednesday, but I spent a little time getting things packed for the trip. Thursday came, and I wished Danny well on the date, and expected to hear good things tomorrow (Friday). I remember hoping things went well also because I didn't want to have to cancel our trip if I had to pick up the pieces of things going south. Friday afternoon comes, and we're about to leave for the trip. Dan arrives at my place, and as he begins to tell me how things went the night before ... I wake up.
-=-=-
It was less jarring than the previous time (I imagine because it only lasted a few days), but it still felt real. Not like one of my usual dreams. The most recent dream in this setting (A few months ago) lasted several months, and, interestingly, took place out of sequence.
-=-=- Dream 3 -=-=-
I wake up at my parents' house, and am a little nervous, because it's move-in day for 9th graders. Everything's already packed, and it's time to go. I find my dorm, meet my roommate, and get everything settled in. Orientation classes, class schedules, maps of the building, rules, and everything that happens the first few days, as expected. None of this is skipped in the dream, but neither you nor I would get much benefit out of that description, lol. My first few weeks of classes go as would be expected. I made a few friends, who I shared almost all of my classes with, and who were decently smart. We'd help each other study, and remind each other of homework, and stuff like that. We weren't super close, but we talked to each other, and made fun of the other people who weren't in our clique. It was typical high-school stuff.
A few months later (still dreaming every waking moment. I even had dreams while I slept, in the dream), I was walking between classes on a Monday, and as I'm passing a side hallway, I saw a student on the ground with a bloody nose, and another kid about to punch him in the face. I run over and push the other kid off of him and stand between him and the student on the floor. I yell "What the hell is your problem!?" And he's about to respond by bloodying my nose, but a door opens and a teacher pops out. He starts running, but doesn't get far. We all go to the disciplinarian and tell the story. I'm sure you're expecting this, but I find out that his name is(n't) Dan (but that's what we're calling him here).
There's an absolutely no-violence policy at this school. I'm totally expecting him to get expelled. It turns out that his parents donate stupid amounts of money to the school every year, and somehow his discipline issues melted away.
The dream continues as usual. Wake up, get ready for class, eat breakfast, go to classes, eat lunch, more classes, study for exams, eat dinner, write essays, spend time with friends, go to bed. Weeks and weeks. In those weeks, Dan made it a particular point to make my life as miserable as he could. He would spread rumors about things I'd done - one of which almost got ME expelled, and nearly threw me into a nervous breakdown. On a totally normal Tuesday, about a month before the end of the school year .... I wake up. I haven't been back since.
-=-=- Final Thoughts -=-=-
I'm not sure what happened between 9th and 10th grade that caused things to change so much. After the third dream, I realized that it was my 9th grade friends that turned on me for befriending Dan. It was they who Dan eventually had to defend me against, when they considered me a traitor.
Dan was an asshat, but something changed in him, somewhere along the line. After the third dream, I did a lot of thinking. I've determined that if Dream-Me could forgive him for being a completely unbearable person in whatever intervening time there was between dreams 3 and 1, then I could, too. Since then, Non-Dream-Me has a greater respect for Dream-Dan - knowing what he had to deal with, and how far he's come.
I still love him like a brother. Every month or so, my Fiancee will ask me how he's doing, and I'll respond "No more dreams, but I'm sure he's just fine". When he does come to mind, I wish him well. I miss him like I miss any other of my friends I've lost to one reason or another.
People might say that none of it was real, and I don't mind. Believe whatever you like. If even for just a moment (years and years), it was real for me. And for me, that's good enough.
Thanks for reading. :)
Edit: Minor edits for clarification.

[END OF POST]

Q1: You said it didn't feel like a dream at all... do you feel like you had really been transported into another realm/reality? Were there current events? Like stuff happening in the news? Were they the same events as ours (gulf war, 911, etc)? What about celebrities and movies? Were they the same? Who was president? What about malls and brands? Commercials? Cars? iPhones (which version)?? (Sorry, just trying to pinpoint if it was a full * true * other-life, or if things were glossed over/excluded as they are in dreams.)

Q2: I'm not sure what you mean about being "transported to another realm/reality."
As to the real-ness of it, in terms of life-feel, it was exactly as robust as this life experience. Sleeping, waking, eating food, showering, pooping: everything that a typical human life includes. There were real events that happened, but it was different. I'm not sure I had ever actually heard of 9/11 in the dream. Or even New York. There were radio celebrities. Technology was just different. There were no personal cell phones, or phones of any kind, and within the dream, I didn't expect that there should be.
If we're comparing it to present consensus reality, I'm not sure the dreams I had fall along this timeline at all. Some things were more advanced, like the ability to convert matter to energy in a more reliable way than even fission, but there didn't seem to be the same push for the same kind of technology we have here. Radio and newspapers were the good stuff.
I'd be happy to answer a more specific question. :)

Q1: Okay, I'm kind of getting it now... that's very interesting :)
What I meant by being transported to another reality is... well, when you woke you said it didn't feel like a dream, correct? So then was it like you had been * whisked * away? Planted into another you's body? Placed in another REAL life, existing dimension/reality somewhere? Like did you feel as if you had traveled or been transported to another life or place?? Or like, given the opportunity to live in another one of your timeline's and experience the other-you's life for a short period of time? As opposed to just sleeping and having a long complicated dream and waking up.. Hope that makes sense.. I'm trying to differentiate whether they were dreams or if you had really gone somewhere/been in another real life, somewhere.

Q2: It felt real enough for me to miss my friend from that place, if that answers your question. I count it no less real than anything else I've experienced. As to whether that existence persists? I believe it does. From Dan's perspective, and Dream-Me's perspective (who have no knowledge of this-me), I'm sure everything's continuing as it had before, with no change. I don't think of the experience in terms of "Travel" or "Movement." It doesn't make sense for me to say that I "Went" anywhere, but you can think about it that way, if it helps. From my perspective, I had a lengthy experience in the intervening time of sleeping and waking, three times over the course of a year. We typically call sleep-time-experiences dreams, so that's what they are. It felt just as real as this reality, so I have no cause to believe it wasn't.
Of course they were dreams: But why should that mean that I didn't also experience another real life?
These are good questions. :)

Although there might be a sense in which everything is "continuing as it had before", it seems more like everything had already happened - because you dreamed them out of time order? (i.e. you dream-lived the 10th grade and then later dream-lived the 9th grade.)

It's as if you were exploring a pre-existing and already-complete memory block containing the experiences of another life. Which would mean that, in a way, the events don't really "happen" other than when they are being experienced by you.

Q2: I agree! And I feel that the same is actually the case with our own present lives. Happening-ness, it seems, requires a perspective. In a sense, we're all just pre-existing, already-complete memory-blocks which, from our individual perspectives, unfold one moment at a time. :)
I really enjoy this thought. Thank you for this!

It's a thought-provoking view and I think you're right about our "present" lives being interpreted this way. (It kind of changes the meaning of that word "present" though, doesn't it?)

So perhaps in this view, rather than the world being a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", it becomes more like a "resource" - a toy box of all possible sensory experiences from which we can select the content of our lives. This means our lives are like a strand of thought, albeit a very bright, stable, and 3D-immersive one.

Copy-pasting a metaphor from elsewhere, in case you find it interesting:

The Hall of Records

Imagine that you are a conscious being exploring a Hall of Records for this world. You are connecting to a vast memory bank containing all the possible events, from all the possible perspectives, that might have happened in a world like this. Like navigating through an experiential library. Each "experience" is a 3D sensory moment, from the perspective of being-a-person, in a particular situation. And there may be any number of customers perusing the records. So this is not solipsism: Time being meaningless in such a structure, we might say that "eventually" all records will be looked-through, and so there is always consciousness experiencing the other perspectives in a scene.

At the same time, this allows for a complex world-sharing model where influence is permitted, because "influencing events" simply means navigating from one 3D sensory record to another, in alignment with one's intention. This process of navigation could be called remembering. Practically, this would involve summoning part of a record in consciousness and having it auto-complete by association. This would be called recall. You can observe something like this "patterned unfolding" occurring in your direct conscious experience right now. You are not even the person you are experiencing, you are simply looking at this particular series of event-memories, from this particular perspective. "Dreaming" means to recall a memory that is not directly connected to this one.

Q2: Indeed! I have believed this way for quite some time. I find it rather freeing, actually. It kind of takes off some of the pressure, to know that this is just one segment of the entire reality, rather than the fullness of reality itself. :)

Nicely put!

POST: [THEORY] Two-fold glitch?

Rather than all these different copies of "you" swapping physical places with each other, why don't we just go with "everyone lives in/as their own copy of the world", and therefore glitches are simply shifts in the current "list of facts" of that copy. In this view, the world isn't a "place" so much as "world-pattern" or landscape, and your sensory experience of being "in" the world is an illusion, due to all your senses being implicitly formatted as "3D-spaces". Roaming around the world is actually you shifting your attention across this landscape, experiencing different "3D-sensory-slices" of what amounts to a heavily patterned "infinite gloop", rather than actually being a person walking around in an environment.

Summary - The world isn't a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", it is more like a "resource" or toy box of possible experiential patterns, and we each have our own world assembled up from the same potential facts, just at different levels of contribution. We never truly go anywhere, and sometimes our "world-pattern" shifts from under us.

POST: I randomly skipped forward a year but I remember things from the "skipped" year.

Q1: Man, I'm 19 and my memories from 1st grade are VERY few and far between. And because memories are rewritten whenever we recall them, maybe that impression of "Wow, didn't this happen a week ago?" wasn't organic, didn't actually occur at the time. You seem to remember it strongly though so it could easily not be the case.

It does seem, though, as though he is recalling his reaction at the time, with follow-up questioning of his Dad, also at the time - like it was a stand out event then, rather than something reasoned out subsequently and completely "story-fied" due to repetition. It sounds a little bit like a fugue state - that he 'zoned out' or dissociated shortly after the first Super Bowl viewing, then was triggered out of it by the second Super Bowl. So he still has the memories of that year, because physically he did live it - but not as that particular personality.

POST: 11:11

This guy went pretty far down the 11:11 rabbit hole [POST: 11:11 -the numbers in my life for over 25 years]. The more you focus on it, the more it'll seem to show up in your life.

This applies to any pattern though, there's nothing particularly special or meaningful about "11:11", except that these things seem to be self-reinforcing. This also works for more complex ideas than just number patterns - including associations between numbers and types of events, or even larger ideas about how the world works. Whatever your theory of the day is, if you stick with it, you'll start finding evidence for it. You can experiment with this deliberatley and get 'interesting' results. A clinical psychologist called Kirby Surprise (appropriate name!) wrote a book called Synchronicity which tried to provide a way of thinking about these sorts of occurrences, and included specific examples of people getting lost in the pattens, only to realise they were indirectly doing it to themselves. Worth checking out. This radio interview pretty much covers it all, to save your reading the book.

Q1: This is really interesting, i guess since i associate 11:11 to big things maybe thats why it happens. The thing that freaked me out the most though was that last night it happened AT Discovery channel, i mean, i was not looking at the clock, it was at the TV, like, a show was going on and then it went black screen with 11:11 big on it. I thought (still think) that is some kind of show they are about to do but i havent heard anything about it.

That's a pretty good one!

Definitely check out that Kirby Surprise interview if you haven't already. Although it sounds like an esoteric topic, he's actually a straightforward guy who had noticed his patients getting obsessed with synchronicity (interpreting them as "messages", which is the worst thing you can do), and had them experiment with it to help them get out of the feedback loops that can arise. If you start paying attention, you really start to notice this sort of patterning in your everyday life. And you also begin to recognise the outlandishness of some of your everyday encounters (I find). It's like you are living as an imagination room within which you can create some owls (if you want to be playful about it).

POST: [THEORY] Theory of Convergence

Why do the universes need to be "running"?

Could you not instead have a static set of patterns, and it is you experiencing them that "runs" the content, which "happens" the happening, so to speak? Universes then become different states rather than different places - different distributions or sets of contributions of potential "facts".

Q1: 'Running' as it time passing at a uniform rate in both universes. I kinda see what you're getting at, but the universe I believe is dynamic, rather than static. Any event can change everything, and can either cause a divergence, or, as I suspect, a convergence.

Given that we never actually experience a divergence or a convergence - we only experience changes within our own perceptual space - is it not simpler to envisage this as a set of possible states which we attach to or unfold within ourselves? Like the configuration space described in Julian Barbour's The End of Time combined with David Bohm's implicate and explicate orders - or an Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments. Basically, I'm questioning the assumption that the world is of the same format as our experience; suggesting that spatial extent and temporal change are artefacts of experience itself. So, experiencing is dynamic, meaning that the universe doesn't have to be; it just has to contain all possible (coherent) states.

Q1: Hmm, interesting, a little beyond where I was going, but interesting. What is your take on parallel universes and the like, in relation to what you say above? That what we might think are parallel universes and weird events are more glitches in personal perception?

Or "changes in state", perhaps.

(I'm not sure I'd call it personal perception as such, maybe subjective though. Although once you've done that, the notion of "subjective" changes, I'd say.)

I think our confusion about "glitches" and our resorting to things like "many-worlds" - nonscientific but with the feel of "scienceiness" - arises from confusing our thoughts about things, our abstractions, with their actual nature. So long as we realise they are metaphors, then that's not a problem, but we do tend to treat them as literally true. You will never see a parallel universe. You will never even see yourself, in fact. If, in glitches, we are talking about something which appears to be a fundamental shift, then it makes sense to return to the fundamentals of our experience in order to examine it, rather than stop at a sort of halfway point. (The halfway point being: to continue to view the world to be as it appears in sensory experience, and building out from there, rather than digging into he nature of that experiencing.)

Returning to experience, then what we call "a parallel universe" is really a discontinuity of experience which we explain to ourselves using the fiction or metaphor of "parallel universes". Parallel universe are the abstract description, not the reality. So, taking experience as our starting point, we might end up with the following "scale of explanation", in terms of how it seems to us based on the level of discontinuity:

• conf. bias => coincidence => synchronicity => "manifestation" => world shifting => "jumping universes"

Q2: I am saving this, you are fucking brilliant but don't let me give you a big head. I try so damn hard to get this concept out in different ways all the time. The words coming out of my mouth are not the ideas I try to convey, I am speaking metaphors about my understanding. That is what words and communications are, metaphors of comprehension s.

Glad you find it useful! As you are noticing, problem is that the true situation is literally unthinkable - because our thoughts themselves arise as 'space and time' experiences, whilst the fundamental situation is "before" division and change. Where is space and time before we "run" an experience of space and time? But if we take a step back and keep things abstract, knowing that we are using metaphors, then we can make something workable that isn't misleading.

Q1: We all gotsta understand that words are relative to the actual ideas we wish to convey folks

Well, I meant more that: it ain't even an idea. (The point wasn't intended to be the patronising, obvious one.)

Look at it two ways. There's either a collective overworked interpretation of data and experience... or the world is a magical place where weird shit happens.

Or why not look at it both those ways at once? :-)

We are not so far apart as you might imagine. It's all about where we think the "magic" is. Usually in our descriptions we are inclined to place the magic at certain levels of the content of experience. I suggest that the magic is actually the foundational level - and by recognising its place there then we get all the benefits!

All the metaphors people use are different attempts to describe the relationship between the objective and the subjective. Hence the computer or simulation metaphor's "data + processor", and all the other versions of "landscape + doer". This tends to make one aspect alive and the rest not; the generalised version is "dead + alive". But the proper approach is one which recognises there is no division, that the doer takes on the shape of the landscape. For example:

The Blanket Metaphor

Imagine that there is blanket of material. The only property of this blanket is "awareness". When flat, the experience of this blanket is "existence". Now, the blanket shape-shifts itself into a pattern of folds. The experience of the blanket is now the experience of itself "being-this-shape". The blanket may even come to identify itself with some of those folds and not others, perhaps because they change more slowly than the rest and seem consistent, calling them "me". So we have that the content of experience is the folds in the blanket (this includes the "formatting" of experience: spatial extent, sensory streams, and so on), but the nature of experience is the blanket itself. The set of folds can be described by metaphors (patterns, states and so on), however the blanket or the property of "awareness" cannot, since it is fundamental.

This is why structural metaphorical descriptions seem so "dead" even though they are the most flexible and nearer to the truth: our notion of "aliveness" is associated with complex content, movement basically. In fact, however, the "magic" is baked in at ground level, which is why even the background quiet of a peaceful moment is filled with "aliveness". It is "awareness" that breathes fire into the patterns of potential experience which are dissolved within it.

You should run this idea through some of the physics subreddits and see where they can take it.

Well, the point is that this is before scientific observation: it is philosophy and metaphysics. As indeed the many-worlds interpretation is. There's nothing scientific about it - but that's not a dismissal, it just means it's not intersubjectively verifiable as a model. You can do things to explore it subjectively, however. Which is where...

(Yeah, it's great that story, isn't it?)

...it can indeed explain that story, but you have to go to the full patterning model to do it. I'm pushed for time right now, but here's a limited description: The Patterning of Experience. The most important notion is to recognise that the world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" and is more like a toy box of potential experiential patterns "dissolved" into the background. In other words, the full picture is a little more subtle that the convenient "moment" divisions that the Infinite Grid metaphor outlines, and more like a complete set of patterns or "facts" or "formatting", with different levels of contribution.

Okay - can pick this up later if you like, I've enjoyed the discussion.