TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 17)

[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: 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: 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.

Q: [Deleted]

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.

POST: The town that wasn't ever really a town turns off.

[POST]

First time poster here so I do apologize if anything is out of order. When I was about 8 years old my Mom and I moved from Colorado to North Carolina. We didn't have much money at the time so we packed up everything that we could fit into her 1990 Pontiac Sunbird convertible (even our massively overweight cat was among the tetris packed tiny car) If I remember correctly we had planned on the trip to take about 2-3 days including hotel stays because my Mom had a couple of bad experiences with crashing out at rest stops in her car but that's not a story for this sub.
Everything went fine for the first day/night. Day two began completely normal, we ate our breakfast and got back onto the road. We had been driving for about 6-7 hours (this is based on my Moms memory) and decided that we would start to look for an exit to grab a bite to eat and find another hotel/motel (no money for a holiday inn) and took the first exit that we saw. (I know that my Mom is still freaked out that the exit number was seemingly instantly deleted from her memory) We drove down this exit for what seemed like an eternity and even at my young age I thought it was weird that we hadn't seen any other cars or even any streetlights for a few minutes. And then like somebody fucking just flipped on a switch THERE WAS AN ENTIRE TOWN ABSOLUTELY COVERED WITH WHITE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS ON EVERY FUCKING INCH OF EVERY BUILDING!
This was in the middle of Summer when we were making our move 2. The lights seemed to just turn on as soon as we entered the "town", it was pitch black before and the only light was from my Moms headlights. We didn't come around a curve or over a hill, we just kind of popped up right in front of it.3. There WAS NOT a single person walking around, no cars parked on the streets, no lights on in any of the buildings (besides the millions of Christmas lights everywhere) At first my Mom thought this place looked cool and drove around the tiny(ish) town looking for a hotel. After about 10 solid minutes she said that it looked like everything was shut down for the night and we should go find another exit to take and get to sleep.
So we begin going back the way we came, we pass all of the empty but mega bright buildings and drive down the deserted road back to the highway. I was looking behind/to the left of me watching this strange place fade out of sight and then IT HAPPENED AGAIN!!! LIKE SOMEONE JUST TURNED THE SWITCH TO THIS ENTIRE TOWN OFF. It was gone, just blackness. I told my Mom that it turned off and she said it was probably just behind a hill or a mountain or whatever. But I know I saw this place instantly vanish, right in front of me. We get back on the Highway and find another exit with a hotel and what not. We go to this shabby little gas station and I got a few snacks and a drink while my Mom talked to the cashier. We went to our hotel and a day later arrived In North Carolina. (that place is hell don't go there.)
I hadn't even thought about that event in years (I'm 25 now) until I began reading this sub. Now let's rewind to about an hour ago. The memory of the creepy town of lights hit me like a ton of bricks. I messaged my Mom on FB about it and she had only this to say. "I didn't want to tell you what that cashier said to me at that store. I had asked her about the weird place with all of the Christmas lights a couple of miles down the road and she gave me a really strange look." What my mom said next was when I knew that this shit was real. She said the cashier told her that in the late 70's there was an attraction town for the Christmas holiday, it was pretty much supposed to be like santas workshop I guess. But the thing is that they tore it down and moved it completely across state (this was in Tennessee by the way) So we went back in time? But even so why weren't there people/cars? Did we see the ghost of something happy? I never had a bad feeling or felt like it was a place we sholdn't be but.....WTF was that?
Hope this all made sense. And again,sorry if this was out of place or had mistakes. EDIT-Corrected the huge chunk of text to paragraphs (sorry about that) and spelling.

[END OF POST]

Q1: This sounds like that particular type of glitch that I like to call the "no_players_map". Other people have reported a similar scenario, with many variants, where the common thing seems to be that the ones who experience it temporarily stray in a location, whether previously known or unknown, where there is absolutely no one at all. If reality is a simulation, whoever runs it seems to be testing out new maps and props without "players on the server" first... except that some players do manage to stray in one of the maps accidentally from time to time.

Maps can be flexible, perhaps, in a useful way. Here's a story from the realityshifters.com story section:

A Miraculous Journey
Jo - Bournemouth, Dorset, UK
Some years ago, when I used to do onsite massage work in the corporate world, I remember that on one particular occasion, I had a very remarkable journey. That day, I had a contract to work in a large office in Docklands, London. At the time, I lived in Loughton, Essex. As I got ready to leave my flat that morning, I got out my large A to Z map so I could plan the route. I was fairly relaxed about this, since I thought to myself, “OK, this contract is in Walthamstow, and I know that well enough, so finding this place should be easy”.
Well, of course, I got the location wrong! On checking the venue’s address, I panicked as I realised it was a further distance away than I thought, and in a very unfamiliar area for me. I wondered how on earth I could arrive there on time. I was suddenly stressed and embarrassed at the thought of letting down the other massage team members as well as the event’s organiser. I also knew that if I didn’t show up, I’d never get another contract with this group again. Somehow I had to get there on time! There was no time to call a taxi or even plan the route.
So I made a decision, crazy though it sounds, to just surrender, let go and hand over to ‘Spirit’. I trusted that a higher wisdom already knew the way to this place and was perfectly capable of taking me there. I got in my car, and without even looking at the map, I prayed to be taken to the car park right by the offices I was to work in that day. I asked to be taken there safely and with enough time to spare so I could set up my massage table and get myself ready to see the full schedule of clients that had already been booked in to see me for the day. I remember driving off in the right direction and then praying with such an intensity and sense of trust. I handed over. I drove. I went down streets and found myself in areas I’d never been in before.
One road in particular had a very strange quality about it. It was narrow, very long, eerily quiet and strangely devoid of other cars! I just kept driving and praying. After a while, I had a feeling sense that my journey was coming to an end. Then I somehow ‘knew’ I had to stop very soon, since I was close to my destination. I looked around for a place to park.
The area was very busy with cars, but as I approached a roundabout, I noticed there was a petrol station just by it. I decided to stop there, just to discover where I was! I pulled over and parked. I went into the shop. I asked a man by the counter if he knew where the venue was, showing him my paper with the address written on it. He said, “it’s over there”, as he pointed to a large building just the other side of the roundabout. It was easily visible from where I was standing. He told me I could also park there, right outside the building in the large car park provided for employees there.
I was astonished, but I don’t think I let it show. I thanked him and quickly got back into the car. I knew I had to keep focused as my journey wasn’t over yet. As I pulled into the car park and parked in a slot just a few feet away from the entrance, I noticed I was 20 minutes early! I went into reception, and had my visitor pass organised. I got to the event room and set up my table. I had time to get ready and then began work.
The day went very well. When it was time to go home, I had a long journey back. I was often stuck in traffic and it all seemed like a busy, noisy and normal journey across London- very different to the 'other worldly' one that I had had that morning.
To this day, I still have questions in my mind about how it was even possible. The times didn’t fit- I should have been late. The odd street I went down- I don’t think it was in ‘this world’. And I can’t prove a thing and I’m careful who I tell this story to. But for me, it’s an example of how anything is possible with Spirit, if I can just get myself out of the way. My miraculous journey was dream like but it was a specific event with many other people involved and not a dream (as I understand it!) The most amazing thing for me is that I got there at all and without a map or sat nav. Normally, I have no sense of direction whatsoever.

Q1: Interesting story. However, there is an element of intention here, the deliberate decision to 'hand over' and the request to be 'taken there'; this element makes me think that this beautiful story has more to do with the so called 'Law of Attraction', rather than a 'reality malfunction'. The coincidence of this happening when it was requested gives it away.

For sure, this seemed like a knowing intentional shift - but I'm not sure that OP's tale is necessarily of a different type fundamentally. Intention needn't be (and seems not to be) an "effortful" thing; perhaps the monotonous rhythm of the car lulled them into a hypnotic state, making it easier for a passing thought pattern to become triggered into a full experience (for example).

Q1: Sure. I don't forget that we are dealing with theories on something the reality of which still baffles us completely, so... one theory is as good as another. So far, it is really just a matter of personal preference on this or that theory.

Of course. This is philosophy, not science, and that's how it'll stay. All "explanations" here have an implicit "isn't it fun or useful to think of it this way..." in front of them. Although some theories maybe cover more ground than others, are more coherent or whatever.

POST: [THEORY ] The Christian explanation. Time anomalies. Supernatural realm stuff

I dunno - if you want to go along that path, I think other traditions do it better, compared with what most people would see as the Christian view (apart from the Gnostics perhaps). For example, the Christian view as described in that article, mocks "pseudo-explanations" (fine) but then still holds onto the notion of "demonic entities" as real (less fine). The article even brings up sleep paralysis as evidence of them, which is rather circular. Basically, it begs the question: it assumes the Christian view as fact, and from that position dismisses the other views as fantasy, despite its own view appearing as fantasy from the opposing platform.

The solution perhaps? All of it is fantasy.

The Story of Narada
Amongst Brahma’s many sons was one Narada. Narada refused to marry. He did not want anything to do with the material world. Like Suka, he preferred the realm of Narayana, when time and space do not exist, where Maya casts no spells. He went a step further; he encouraged Brahma’s other sons to stay celibate like him. He did not see the point of engaging with Prakriti. He did not understand the point of constructing Brahmanda.
Many of Brahma’s sons agreed with Narada. They also refused to marry. This happened several times, until an enraged Brahma cursed Narada, ‘you will stay trapped in the material world until you appreciate the value of Maya.’
Narada went to Vishnu and asked him the meaning of Maya. In response, Vishnu said, ‘i will explain after you quench my thirst. Go fetch me some water.’
Narada went to a river to fetch water. But as he was collecting the water, he saw a beautiful girl. He was so drawn to her that he followed her to her village and asked her father for her hand in marriage. The father agreed and the two got married. Before long, Narada was a father and then grandfather and then great grandfather. Narada felt content. Suddenly one day, it rained. And the rains refused to stop. The river swelled and broke its banks. Water rushed into Narada’s house, and to his horror, swept away his wife, his children, his grandchildren and his great grandchildren. He screamed and shouted for help as the water dragged him under. Suddenly he was pulled up and found himself in Vaikuntha (Vishnu’s abode) before Vishnu.
‘Narada,’ said Vishnu, ‘where is my water? I am still thirsty.’ Narada did not understand. Where was his family, his wife’s village, the river?
‘Where does this pain and suffering come from, Narada?’ asked Vishnu with a smile. ‘I thought you had full knowledge of Maya before you set out to fetch water for me.’
Narada bowed his head in realization. He knew Maya but had never experienced Maya. Brahma was encouraging his sons to marry so that they experience Maya. Knowledge of Maya is not experience of Maya. Unless one experiences Maya, one will not be able to empathize with those who are trapped in it.
Said Vishnu, ‘you knew all about measuring scales and subjective realities. Yet you forgot all about them as soon as you experienced the material world – home, family, children, and village. Your understanding of Maya and Brahmanda could have helped you in the tumult of pleasure and pain, but it did not. Such is the spell of Maya. Now that you have experienced Maya, i want you to go and meet people, shake up their measuring scales, challenge their subjective realities, until they realize that the only way out of Maya is seeking answers out of material reality. I want you to provoke them into following the spiritual path.’

...is to say that there is no reality?

No, not to say "no reality", it just means that the true nature of reality (of "experiencing" really) is not its specific content, but rather the awareness of which it is formed - like folds in a blanket of pure consciousness (which you might call "God", unless you are bound to the notion of an "entity god"). The demonic explanation is not okay (by which I mean unreal and non-explanatory), because "demons" are of the same form as all the other pseudo-explanations listed. The Christian explanation provided there, is a content fiction in exactly the same way as the others it's arguing against (which actually it doesn't really argue against). It's just that you are more comfortable or accepting of the "reality" of those ideas. But they're just ideas. It's all Maya.

Note: I actually think that article is a misrepresentation of the Christian interpretation of reality.

POST: My Boyfriend is Now Left Handed

Hmm...

I think you are probably misrepresenting both atheism and science here?

science has never proven that a Creator doesn't exist.

Science doesn't prove anything and is not intended to - is catalogues observations and creates conceptual frameworks with descriptive and predictive power. Science examines the content of experience, it does not examine the nature of experience. You argument that it "has never proven that a Creator doesn't exist" is meaningless in those terms, but also because one can't prove something doesn't exist, only that it is logically inconsistent with what has been observed thus far.

"... cannot hear the music of the spheres.” -Albert Einstein

Many physicists in history (lots of those early 20th century guys) have studied what you might call "mystical traditions" - but the God they refer to is not the "entity god" that common non-philosophical interpretations of religion tend to, but something more like "raw existence", whose properties are the "oms" (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent) but not in an anthropomorphic way. As this does not refer to a deity, it can be compatible with atheism, since really it's just a recognition that "consciousness exists".

a Creator doesn't exist

If you pursue this line of reasoning, it leads to the conclusion that a creator as such does not exist, since nothing can be created - only creation exists. Consciousness would be "before" division and multiplicity and time and so could never create anything.

Both sides allegedly have no proof then why not err on the side of caution then?

That means I could raise any unfalsifiable claim where the penalty in not believing it was unpleasant - and you'd have to go along with it "just in case". It's really not a good line of reasoning to follow. You'll be spending your days with paper plates on your head in case the spaghetti monster rains down his pasta apocalypse - etc. ;-)

Meanwhile, the Mandela Effect doesn't prove multiple worlds/timelines - it can equally be used as evidence for, say, the philosophy of subjective idealism and that idea that patterns of the mind are unstable. You have to separate out the experience from the potential descriptions for that experience. Since we can't test our descriptions, basically it's a narrative fiction we're engaging in - there is no provable truth of the matter.

This is what is referred to as "scientific proof."

We have to be a little careful here. For instance, there is no such thing as a photon really as such - it's an abstraction. Scientific proof doesn't not prove the existence of anything; rather it is a confirmation of the self-consistency of a description. Beware the reification of abstractions, and all that. Science could never prove there is a creator or disprove it - it can certainly disprove a hypothesis by making an observation whose content is inconsistent with that hypothesis. If a falsifiable hypothesis is not made - i.e. a prediction is made that can be confirmed or not - then science can say nothing about it. Science doesn't deal in truth.

And about the mandela effect. Your point would only be valid on an individual basis. When thousands of people are reporting the same accounts, it is clear that it is much more than "subjective idealism."

Well, subjective idealism asserts that all experience is in mind and that there is only one mind, so there would be no "thousands of people". Actually, it would be the ideal explanation for Mandela Effects, if you're willing to give up the notion of an external objective universe and take a "private view" of reality - which even some recent interpretations of quantum physics are doing these days, actually. How exactly does the Mandela Effect suggest that timelines (which are really just diagrams we use for conceptual thinking, after all; they have never been real things) exist, or that God exists?

From what I gather you are basically making some sort of philosophical argument.

Well, physics is basically: observations + philosophy.

It's "course-corrected philosophy" and optimisation of abstractions. And it's important to remember which way round things are: observations are primary, connective fictions are secondary. The reason I bring it up, which does sound nitpicking but really is not, is that when we are talking of things like "timelines" or "many-worlds", we are talking only about the philosophical aspect because the observational aspect cannot distinguish between the interpretations. "Many-worlds", of instance, is inherently non-scientific. And neither is the (better, in my view) suggestion that world is not formatted in the same way as our spatial sensory experience, and we might put together an attentional or pattern-selection description of the unusual experiences instead.

Clearly there is not "one mind" as all the accounts would line up to reflect one mind.

You have a dream one night - it's a dream about a board meeting, where you are going to decide once and for all what the definitive map of the world should be. However, each of the dream characters at the meeting offers a different suggestion for the relative locations of continents, backing it up with stories of their experiences. But wait... surely they are all in one mind - yours? How can they report different experiences?

Anyway, let's not get too off topic!

Coming back to my questions (which are to seed discussion, they are not a challenge):

• How exactly does the Mandela Effect suggest that timelines exist?
• How exactly does the Mandela Effect suggest that God exists?

Science and Philosophy

Physics is not observations + philosophy.

I think it's a pretty snappy summary, myself! Oh well. I'm with George Ellis and N David Mermin on this stuff, mostly. As I'm sure you know, Schrodinger's thought experiment was intended to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the Copenhagen interpretation. Quantum mechanics is a mathematical theory - literally, given a defined situation it gives you a list of potential outcomes along with an "intensity" for each (which some interpret as a "probability"). When you make the measurement, one of those outcomes will be observed. Everything else (including "wave function collapse") is interpretation. Which is fine - - - but if there is no way to distinguish between the various interpretations by observation, then we are in the realm of pure philosophy, not science. That doesn't mean it's not valuable or useful - it doesn't devalue it at all - it's just being clear about the type of knowledge and investigation we are dealing with.

Dream Analogy

The dream analogy you used is not applicable. We are not talking about dreams. I've also had the capability to fly in a dream and fought off a monster with 10 heads, how is that applicable to reality?

The applicability is that you are assuming that because you have experiences of other people reporting similar or dissimilar experiences to you, that this means that they cannot all be arising in one mind, as per the view in subjective idealism. I'm not pushing the point really - just indicating that "seeing people say different things" doesn't contradict this. Flying or monsters in dreams is neither here nor there - I've had plenty of dreams which correspond to his mundane experience now. In terms of the nature of experience, waking and dreaming are indistinguishable. They differ only in their content (although often not really) and that we have experienced "waking up" and apparently have memories. I mean, it is undeniable at this moment that your entire experience is arising within your mind, right? And that you have no access to anything outside of your mind, yes?

Mandela Effect Theorising

A better question to your question would be how does the mandela effect suggest that different timelines DO NOT exist.

It's not a better question at all! I could simply retort: "how does the Mandela Effect suggest that subjective idealism is not the true nature of your experience?"

If we start with the actual observation, what do we have?

1. One day you had an experience (say, encountering a Wiki article about real animals called narwhals) which contradicted a specific memory of the world (reading a book about mythical creatures called narwhals).
2. Subsequently, searching for physical evidence to support your prior memory, you can find only thing which support narwhals as being real, and none which support the mythical status.
3. In conversation in person and online, although most people say they knew about narwhals being real, a substantial number of people also say that they thought narwhals were mythical, and are surprised to discover they are real animals.

From here, you are suggesting that what happened is you moved somehow from a "dimension" where narwhals were fictional, to a dimension where narwhals are real.

So we have some questions:

• What further evidence supports the dimension-jumping hypothesis? Did you actually experience this happening?
• Have you ever seen a timeline or a dimension? Or is all of your evidence of the form: "certain of my memories and the world do not correspond anymore"?
• What exactly would be the transfer mechanism? Are physical bodies moving between places? What form does a "dimension" take?

Note - I am actually sympathetic to idea of the "effect" and so on; I am just seeking a full exploration and justification for a particular view. I'm not convinced that timelines are the best approach.

The Blink of an Eye

So unless all of that was created with a blink of an eye...

Well, there's the thing. That is only a problem because you are viewing the world (or "dimensions") as persistent places - seeing the world as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". This is not necessarily the case. What you actually experience, is observation then observation then observation, always in the present moment. Even if you have an observation "about" the past, such as finding an old book about narwhal expeditions, it occurs in The Now. The only reason the world seems to be a persistent "place" is because, generally, our observations tend to arise consistently with previous observations - the implied facts of what we have seen before, seem to form the foundations of subsequent experience. However, this is not necessarily a hard rule. The world is not necessarily "happening" outside of our observations; only observations "happen". (This is one of the possible interpretations of the Delayed Choice Experiment: a reminder that our story of what happens between observations, doesn't actually happen, it is a connective fiction.)

So this leads us to the possibility of the Mandela Effect being a result of a state change, a shift from one coherent self-consistent state to another, with all subsequent observations being in alignment with the resulting state, except for personal memory. You don't go anywhere; it is actually the patterning of your own mind that shifts.

POST: [Question] A question about Quantum Immortality

Q1: Quantum immortality is what happens when you combine someone who fails their second year of undergrad physics but got through enough to completely misunderstand quantum mechanics. It's fine if people believe in something like quantum immortality, but please stop acting like it's based on science. It's as scientifically founded as religion is.

Q2: The way you wrote that, it suggests that quantum immortality is obviously impossible to anyone who passed a second year of undergrad physics. Can you explain why? I have a lot more physics background than that, and it still seems reasonable to me- it is an obvious consequence of the Many Worlds Interpretation. It hasn't been proven, but that hardly makes it unique among modern physics concepts. MWI makes a lot of physicists uncomfortable but it's hardly pseudoscience- it is seriously researched by some really good physicists- Max Tegmark, Julian Barbour, etc.

I think it's probably better to treat that stuff as philosophy. That's really what MWI is (along with all the other interpretations). Doing that avoids this whole science/pseudoscience debate, and the tendencies of pop-science magazine enthusiasts who love "scienciness" rather than science - i.e. people who conflate science itself (cataloguing repeatable observations and creating conceptual frameworks to link them), and concepts which are used in science at present. It's part of that larger thing of separating the experience from the explanation, and remembering that our explanations are really connective fictions built from useful abstractions, rather than "how it really is". That way, we are free to tackle everything (including the nature of experiencing itself), rather than being hobbled by treating some concepts as "actual" whilst others as fictional.

Q2: Calling it philosophy ignores the importance of this type of thinking as the core process that advances physics itself. Nearly every major physics discovery started as an abstract philosophical idea, and only after it was developed more did people think of experiments and applications. For example, relativity wasn't an attempt to explain repeatable observations but philosophizing about "how the universe should work." Einstein thought it was a reasonable idea even though at the time it seemed to contradict some experimental observations that later proved wrong. Eliezer_Yudkowsky's essay "Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality" talks about this- that people that don't follow the rules of "how science is supposed to work" are often the ones that are responsible for the biggest advancements: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/qb/science_doesnt_trust_your_rationality/ and http://lesswrong.com/lw/qj/einsteins_speed/]

Calling it philosophy doesn't ignore any importance at all. It is not meant as a derogatory term - it simply differentiates between ideas which are observationally distinguishable using the "objective world" concept, versus those which are not. I'd actually say that physics is philosophy, with an integrated observational component. What varies is the number of "observational touch-points" that a given conceptual framework incorporates. We are probably seeking the same end, from different directions - i.e. the freeing of thinking from pre-judgement due to categorisation. I'd definitely concur with the idea that science does not in fact work according to "how science works"; possibly to the extent that, really, there is no such thing as "science" as commonly depicted; that's mostly PR and retconning. Broadly, I'm with Paul Feyerabend's angle on this. There's an ongoing swirl of "contrary gloop" and "coherent solidification" and how you think science works depends on which era you happen to be living through.

Q2: I had never heard of Feyerabend, but his work looks fascinating. Could you recommend something of his to read that talks about what you are getting at?

Yeah, he was fascinating guy in terms of work and as a personality, I think. You'll probably find yourself agreeing, disagreeing, re-agreeing again, and so on as you read him, which is the point I think: he targets things that, if one thinks them, one should be sure one really thinks them.

So, his book Against Method is the main thrust of it, and the final edition of that is the one to check out - every edition was like a new book really - with Farewell to Reason's collected essays and subsequent works expanding his ideas into other areas. With Against Method he was being quite deliberately provocative. You can get a feel for the style by reading this introduction to the fourth edition by Ian Hacking [http://thehangedman.com/teaching-files/hps/hacking-feyerabend.pdf]. Basically: Feyerabend's overall conclusion is that we should avoid there being one accepted vision of the world. Unfortunately, Feyerabend died before he could bring it all together in his final book, Conquest of Abundance, so it was released as a half-book draft plus a selection of essays. It's still got good stuff, and it can be an easier read than his previous works, so actually perhaps a good way to start. Ian Hacking did a review for London Review of Books, which is unfortunately only partly available free online.

But anyway - even if it doesn't look your kind of thing, he was a very interesting character, and his autobiography, Killing Time, is a good read while also giving a bare bones indication of his philosophy, if that's all you're after.

BTW, based on your posts I think you would really like the fiction book Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It's about a group of scientists that are more or less ostracized from society for dimensional jumping.

I've read some of Stephenson's earlier stuff, up to Cryptonomicon, but I never caught up with Anathem - thanks for the tip! EDIT: Just looked it up, interesting that it's based on Julian Barbour, configuration spaces, etc.

I was reading it and Barbour's "The End of Time" at the same time because different people had recommended them, without realizing they were related at first- It was quite strange.

Ah, nice, it's fun when these things match up. When I read The End of Time I was flipping between that and David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, which made for a nice mix. (Recommended if you haven't read it.)

POST: Things happening out of order. Retrocausality glitch?

People with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy often experience time-distortion type effects, in terms of time speeding and slowing, and also "out of time" type experiences (see this book chapter for background). Has there been any history of epilepsy in your family, or have you had any other sort of seizure or zone-out before?

Which wouldn't necessarily explain the content (particularly, that your eventual internal history matches the facts even though it doesn't match other accounts), but it's a possible link to explore.

Do you really think it's more likely that the universe glitches out than that a few people misremembered things?

I don't know how you'd work out "likeliness" either way, really. You'd have to construct a model of "likeliness", including a definition of what a "universe glitch" is. Of course, it can not be memory thing and also not be "universe glitches". After all, we could "explain" any experience at all with "brains are prone to error" and "memory is faulty" and go no further. We can especially do this if we ignore the details of the post and don't engage with them. Isn't the interesting thing to explain how exactly an explanation applies to the story? Otherwise it's not really an explanation at all - at best, it's a categorisation. If we just say "brains" or "memory" and nothing else, we're really saying just nothing, since we don't know how either of those things work. Not even just not in detail - we really don't know what memories "are", we've just got some crap computer processing metaphors that we paste on top of some shoddy brain blood flow mapping.

Having said all that, OP didn't seem to be actually trying to convince anyone (even himself) that the universe had glitched - just that he'd had a curious experience and was interested in discussing it. Rather than, say, being dismissed in a fairly content-free manner that didn't make any effort to connect with the account.

No history of seizures or epilepsy in myself or my family. I'm a busy software engineer by day and a really busy father of an energetic toddler by night - any seizures or zoning out would be promptly noticed by those around me (and would be no excuse for shirking my responsibilities).

All the more interesting, then.

POST: debit card expiration date changed

And what about the children? ;-)

Of course it can be not poor memory and also not universes splitting or time travel (or whatever - people drop that those references for a bit of fun I think). It seems unlikely that OP's experience is best described by "poor memory". How, exactly, would that work? It's a bit of a non-explanation. It'd be interesting if someone came up with a nice model, though, which described a mechanism whereby a memory-shift updated our "world image" in a self-consistent way. OP should have a look for some old receipts though, as you suggest, maybe look at the dates of their previous card, in case there is some trail that would explain it. I'd go with the "wife put new card in wallet" description, but you usually get more than a one-year extension when you get a new card.

Yep, I'm aware!

The problem is the lack of a model with a mechanism for networked memories - and that, as with confirmation bias, false memory tends to get name-checked as an explanation for things which fall outside of its narrow applicability. Which isn't to say that many glitches aren't memory related, just that we don't have a decent description to get there. Our real issue is, we lack an understanding of memory (even what memories are, never mind where they are) beyond some fairly hand-waving metaphors invoking computing analogies, which don't really stack up. (All part of the fun, though.)

Interconnected with an underlying fact - implicit or explicit - rather than simply the memory of an event, or an abstract notion of a fact.

So - and this isn't the best example but let's go with it - if you'd spent five years typing the same ID number on a weekly basis, then you have both the memory of the act, bound to the fact. Your memory isn't of the fact in the abstract, or of a single particular event. When one day the number is apparently different, it's not as if you have been reviewing the previous occasions in your mind, or contemplating the fact independently - you have performed an act and the implied fact is no longer supported. You experience a dissonance, and then recall instances of the old fact as experiential content. It doesn't fit the revision-of-memory model - or imaginative creation model - of false memories. (We could probably come up with some sort of "world schema" model that would fit, but I can't see how it could be tested in any meaningful way, so it'd be yet another bit of handwaving psychology to add to the stack.)

Of course, it truth it's kinda pointless and unscientific, this process of trying to account for apparent glitches of this sort, since there's no way to observe the situation. Although we might say something is "more likely" (we'd need have a model of "likeliness" to do that) or "more plausible" (corresponds to our everyday experience, which doesn't necessarily mean much), really it's pretty much just some philosophical fun.

POST: Found out where all of our missing objects are going

The source paper is Teleportation Physics Study by Eric W Davis, and the quotes come from page 56. The report abstract states:
ABSTRACT
This study was tasked with the purpose of collecting information describing the teleportation of material objects, providing a description of teleportation as it occurs in physics, its theoretical and experimental status, and a projection of potential applications. The study also consisted of a search for teleportation phenomena occurring naturally or under laboratory conditions that can be assembled into a model describing the conditions required to accomplish the transfer of objects. This included a review and documentation of quantum teleportation, its theoretical basis, technological development, and its potential applications. The characteristics of teleportation were defined and physical theories were evaluated in terms of their ability to completely describe the phenomena. Contemporary physics, as well as theories that presently challenge the current physics paradigm were investigated. The author identified and proposed two unique physics models for teleportation that are based on the manipulation of either the general relativistic spacetime metric or the spacetime vacuum electromagnetic (zero-point fluctuations) parameters. Naturally occurring anomalous teleportation phenomena that were previously studied by the United States and foreign governments were also documented in the study and are reviewed in the report. The author proposes an additional model for teleportation that is based on a combination of the experimental results from the previous government studies and advanced physics concepts. Numerous recommendations outlining proposals for further theoretical and experimental studies are given in the report. The report also includes an extensive teleportation bibliography.
August 2004 Special Report
AIR FORCE RESEARCH LABORATORY
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE CA 93524-7048

You can find out more about Eric Davis here [http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/team/eric-davis/]:

Eric is currently employed as a Senior Research Physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin. He is also the CEO/Chief Scientist of Warp Drive Metrics, and has provided contract services to the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. He was also a technical contributor and consultant to the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program.

His non-theory theory is on page 60 of the report. Essentially he "explains" it as (my emphasis):

...a human consciousness phenomenon that somehow acts to move or rotate test specimens through a 4th spatial dimension, so that the specimens are able to penetrate the solid walls/barriers of their containers without physically breaching them.

It provides some nice imagery though:

Another property of higher dimensional geometry (Reichenbach, 1957; Rucker, 1977, 1984) is that one can move through solid three-dimensional obstacles without penetrating them by passing in the direction of the 4th (spatial) dimension. The 4th dimension is perpendicular to all of our normal three-dimensional space directions, and so our three-dimensional enclosures have no walls against this direction.

So the idea is that (somehow!) you take an object that's in a particular location, you diffuse it across 4D (time), before then refocussing it back into 3D in another location.

That's what I understand as well, but why does he specifically say "in the direction of the 4th (spatial) dimension"?

You mean, why does he say "spatial"? Because that's how it is conceived of in terms of unfolding experience [misleading vs the paper, see EDIT later for clarification]. How I might imagine this:

Life as 4D Environment

Our experience is like that of sitting in a 4-dimensional room, but only looking at one region or '3D slice' at a time. Our attention is gradually scanning from one end of the room to the other. To us it seems as though objects appear, change, disappear, but really we are seeing cross-sections of static objects laid out across the room. (e.g. A cone would appear as a dot which expands into wider and wider circles before disappearing completely.)

Teleportation is an experience you have when an object you've already seen is moved along the direction of scanning - so that you encounter it again in time. A bit like how Nathan Fillion appears in multiple places at once in this silly scene from Firefly.

Teleportation as Unfolding Experience

So, the experience of teleportation isn't spatial really. It's about locations in time rather than locations in space. As an unfolding of experience as moments from your 1st person perspective, looking through your own eyes:

Moment 1: Seeing an object on the table
Moment 2: Seeing an empty table
Moment 3: Seeing a door getting closer
Moment 4: Seeing the doorframe pass
Moment 5: Seeing another room envelop me
Moment 6: Seeing another table, with the object on it

The object was moved in time such that later on our "scanning of the 4D environment" encountered it again.

[EDIT for clarity: In other words, the teleporter is instantaneously creating a pattern across 4-dimensional space. The observers subsequently encounter that pattern as an unfolding experience in time.]

Implications?

If teleportation was possible in this way, then it would suggest something interesting. It would suggest that all our actions are 4-dimensional, and it's just our sensory experience that is constrained to 3-dimensions (scanning the 4th). Whether that constraint is a genuine limitation or simply a matter of habit, is something that could then be debated.

Time is not a spatial dimension.

Really? What makes you think that? It's a matter of perspective, surely.

There is nothing inherent to a fourth dimension that makes it a temporal dimension.

Right. I don't think you are actually disagreeing with me. It's a matter of perspective. Any dynamic pattern described by [x spatial dimensions + time] can be described from a higher perspective as a static pattern of [x+1 spatial dimensions].

In the metaphor, I stick to 4 dimensions because that's all we ever directly experience (any others are diagrammatic conveniences):

• From the perspective of the observers, the situation is experienced as [3D pattern + time]. In other words, 3D moments unfolding as time passes.
• From the perspective of the teleporter's action, the situation is experienced as an updating of [4D static pattern]. In other words, 3D moments all laid out.
• The 4th dimension is temporal from the perspective of an observer, it is spatial from the higher perspective of the teleportation act. Teleportation changes the "4D pattern" which we call an object "out of time" (or if you prefer, in time as viewed from a higher dimension, because "change" occurs at that higher level - 5th dimension.)

In other words, I am suggesting that our ongoing experience is like that of your attention scanning across a 4D static object, which a teleporter can update from the next level up.

TL;DR: One perspective's temporal dimension is another perspective's spatial dimension.

Q1: "The universe is 11 dimensional. 1 time dimensiob, 3 large spatial dimensions and 6 rolled up dimensions."; Is that new math?

Q2: No, it's string theory. And he used 'spatial' to show that he was explicitly NOT talking about time.

Actually, that's a good point to emphasise.

I included "(time)" to make it easier to understand - because 4D traversal is time for humans - but strictly speaking time is change and so isn't associated with a particular dimension independent of an observer.

It's probably more accurate still to say that the universe itself is non-dimensional - it's just a bunch of "facts". However, our perception and therefore our conceptualisation organises them into dimensions (depending a little on your philosophical preferences).

The salient element here is that space and time, rather than being real things-in-themselves or empirically mediated appearances (German: Erscheinungen), are the very forms of intuition (German: Anschauung) by which we must perceive objects.
-- Wikipedia entry on Immanuel Kant's Transcendental Idealism

No, you seem be misunderstanding. When physicists talk about dimensions, it is common to distinguish spatial and temporal dimensions, regardless of their number. This paper is speculating about rotation through a 4th spatial dimension. Time simply has nothing to do with this discussion, regardless of your conception of it.

Yeah, I do understand. But I was trying to provide an intuitive connection between the description of the action and the world as we subsequently experience it, perhaps confusingly.

[EDIT: Note, I'm talking about "p-Teleportation" here, which is performed on an object by a person unaided. I think we can't talk about that without connecting the act to the experience as it appears to unfold in time. My attempt below is probably isn't very clear, alas.]

What he's saying is that teleportation can in effect be described as a translation/diffusion across a higher-dimensional configuration space such that (x1, y1, z1) becomes (x2, y2, x2). It's not really an explanation yet though, since it doesn't connect to action or observation. In particular, I'm not sure it accounts for examples where the object disappeared for a while, and then materialised some time later, without additional action from the teleporter. This suggests that the teleport action might be better described as defining a sequence of events - in the form of a pattern, created at that moment, across 4D space - which the observers subsequently encounter. It's in this sense that I'm equating the 4D used for the action (the "direction" that the pattern was created along in configuration space) and the 4D of time (the subsequent experiences of the human observers in time).

wait, what? Chinese children have been stealing my socks and bread ties via teleportation?!?

Yes. They need the bread ties to help keep those big socks up.

...

Good summary of how it's described in the paper! I think it doesn't really work as an explanation for the effect, just as you suggest. Moving something 3D, "outside" 3D?

That's why I was thinking it makes more sense to say that an object isn't a thing, but is instead a higher-dimensional extended pattern. We can then think of an object as a pattern spread out across a spacetime 4D landscape, which you and I experience one 3D 'slice' per moment. This means the teleporter doesn't really move the object through walls at all, they modify its pattern across that 4D landscape. In this explanation the 4th dimension corresponds to a spatial dimension (for the pattern) which is also a temporal dimension (experienced by humans as "time"). It ties together the change made by the teleporter and our subsequent experience of the object being in a different place. That's what I tried to describe in my comments earlier, but I think I may have confused more than illuminated.

EDIT: The reason for this approach perhaps being appealing is that it could also be used for describing other PK effects. Even just having a "patterns across a time landscape" concept is very helpful.

I should say that I think string theory is a complete hack job in its introduction and handling of arbitrary "dimensions", so I'm sticking to the four subjectively perceivable ones. In the end, I suspect it is our minds which have dimensional formatting, not the universe. (See George Ellis's good Nature article from last year on string theory & friends.)

I think string theory is not well understood by everyone outside of it...

Agreed on string theory. My issue with it is that it brings to mind 'serial universe' theories of the early 20th century. They are really mathematical-philosophical constructs rather than scientific, testable theories. There are useful ways of thinking though, but their connection to actual observations becomes pretty remote.

What I would like to see is how the objects are moved from one place to the other.

Yes, this is an important area. It's not necessarily true that the change can't happen semi-instantly, though - if it's happening from a higher-dimensional perspective, then it's not our time that it's unfolding in. Even the word "happening" might not be a very good description. But it depends on the nature of the change, which isn't clear at all from the experiment.

All in all, I still think something's fishy in this experiment.

Yes, maybe. There may be a difference between moving an apple (like levitating it) and changing its location (teleporting it). The latter might more be like updating the co-ordinates from (x1, y1, z1) to (x2, y2, z2) by focusing on the target location. Again, it depends on the nature of the change. How were the teleporters going about this, as perceived in their own minds? Were they "moving the object" or were they "editing facts of the universe"?

Unless their explanation is that we only see the 3D projection of the object and the telekinesis happens because people are able to influence higher dimensions and not the ''regular'' ones. But this is really far-fetched.

It might be the most efficient explanation. Simply because we only experience a 3D sensory environment, doesn't mean our intentions don't apply 4-dimensionally, say. In fact, if we decide to raise our arm, might that be described as created a pattern across 4-dimensions which we subsequently experience in 3D 'sensory slices'?

The problem with this area is that we inevitably get into philosophy and metaphysics - where it becomes about painting a picture that joins the dots, but which can never be tested in its details. This is basically what string theory does. I think the phrase "far-fetched" has to be put aside when discussing this sort of thing! :-)

And I agree, this is more meta-physics/phylosophical than true science so I prefer to refrain from judging it because I don't think I'm qualified to do so.

I don't think anyone is. :-) All we can really do is come up with different ways of thinking about it, which might turn out to be useful, and be open to taking ideas from here and there. The way I think of it, all scientific theories are "applied metaphors". What varies is the number of "contact points" there are between the metaphor and easily-shared subjective observation.

• If there are lots of contact points and they're easily accessed, it becomes a proven scientific theory, an objective fact.
• If there are very few contact points but they're easily accessed, it might become an established philosophical position, a useful "way of thinking".
• If there are very few contact points and they're not easily accessed, it becomes a metaphysical view or it becomes a hand-waving description without details. (EDIT: 'Mystical' or religious knowledge falls in to this maybe?)
• Below that and there's no theory, just subjective experience and anecdotes. (EDIT: Glitches, mostly, so far.)

Science deals best with "easily observed regularities" which are very simply connected with sensory experience (because we think in "shadow experiences"). This stuff is difficult (assuming the reports are correct). You can't observe what someone is doing in this case and you can't observe what is happening. Any theory here is going to be a metaphor which is big on description, small on contact points!

Anyway, interesting to explore this stuff regardless.

lol i cant tell if you're serious or not

It's from a genuine paper by the US Air Force Research Laboratory. Whether you believe the Chinese accounts is another thing, but the US survey paper does exist (see my other comment). Even if it's nonsense, it's interesting/amusing that they took the time to investigate the nonsense and theorise about it, "just in case".