TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 21)

POST: When I wasn't looking for it, I was surrounded by Synchronicity. Now that I'm looking, it's nowhere to be found. (Kind of a long read.)

I've been playing with this a bit recently. I say: Don't look for "messages" via synchronicity. Synchronicity is basically you experiencing the state of your own mind, via the senses. You might think of it a bit like a mirror - or better, that your mind is a perceptual filter. The filter dictates what subset of the extended dimensionless reality will appear in your ongoing 3D sensory moment. So, if you spend 20 minutes today imagining owls, as vividly as you can, as if they were in the room with you... you'll spend the next week encountering lots of owls. It's as if you have created an "owl-shaped hole" in your perceptual filter, and the "infinite light of creation" (or whatever) now shines through it, giving you owl-shaped experiences. The summary:

• Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences. (Leave shapes on your "perceptual filter".)
• Thoughts also leave traces, as in-form-ation, affecting subsequent experiences. (You can use this deliberately.)
• Synchronicity is the name for the experiential patterns which result.

So, not much good for messages since you'll just be seeing what you've been thinking and experiencing, as residual indentations on your filter (although you might get some insight into things you are thinking in the background that you're not aware of). Better to use the technique deliberately. You might not be into owls, but you are probably into something, something that would make you happier? Deliberately spend some time vividly imagining that, so that you are more likely to encounter/notice it. (It's a kinda magical approach, I suppose.)

EDIT: Note that you can think about more general "facts" rather than just images. Also, sorry to hear about your situation. Hope things turn around. Watch out for those owls. They can be sexy.

Nice. This is really interesting. So by imagining owls, we're sort of summoning owls out of the "infinite dimensions" of creation into our current reality. Have you played around with this in practice?

Yes, it's much simpler than the other ways I was looking at things.

My poor old Mum is great to experiment on with this stuff (I've already taught her how to win any arm wrestle without effort, and to find hidden chocolate via intuition - yeah, she'll be great at Extreme Easter Sports) and I gave her this metaphor to explain it and get her using it (excuse length, but perhaps others will find it useful):

The Imagination Room

There is a vast room. The floor is transparent, and through it an infinitely bright light shines, completely filling the room with unchanging, unbounded white light. Suddenly, patterns start to appear on the floor. These patterns filter the light. The patterns accumulate, layer upon layer intertwined, until instead of homogenous light filling the room, the light seems to be holographically redirected by the patterns into the shape of experiences, arranged in space, unfolding over time. Experiences which consist of sensations, perceptions and thoughts.

At the centre of the room there are bodily sensations, which you recognise as... you, your body. You decide to centre yourself in the upper part of that region, as if you were "looking out from" there, "being" that bodily experience.

At the moment you are simply experiencing, not doing anything. However you notice that every experience that arises slightly deepens the pattern corresponding to it, making it more stable, and more likely to appear again as the light is funnelled into that shape.

Now, you notice something else. If you create a thought, then the image will appear floating in the room - as an experience. Again, the corresponding pattern is deepened. Only this time, you are creating the experience and in effect creating a new habit in your world!

Even saying a word or a phrase triggers the corresponding associations, so it is not just the simple thought that leaves a deeper pattern, but the whole context of that thought, its history and relationships.

Now, as you walk around today, you will feel the ground beneath your feet - but you will know that under what appears to be the ground is actually the floor of the room, through which the light is shining, being shaped into the experience around you. And every thought or experience you have is shifting the pattern...

Asserting Facts

You can also use it to "assert" new facts-of-the-world. I leave it to readers to experiment and take this further - but instead of picturing owls, what if you asserted a fact?

You do this by "feeling it to be true" rather than picturing it, to allow for a more general pattern. For example, "people are always bumping into me on the street". I'm sure you could think of better "facts"...

Those were other examples, pre-room metaphor, but the same basic principle applies. Here's how they work:

• For the arm-wrestling, withdraw your "presence" from your arm so you're not tempted to try to make it happen. "Decide" that you are going to win, feeling the winning position - get out of the way and just wait for it to happen.
• For the chocolate-finding, think of your body like a "shell". Withdraw from it, letting it move as it wants. Command it, "body, go and retrieve the object", and get out of the way. Let your body go as it pleases.

In both cases, you are essentially declaring that something is going to happen - that it really already has happened, a "fact" on your timeline - and then staying in a state of "open allowing" to let circumstances unfold without interference.

Huh, this is really interesting.

And something you can easily experiment with! Particularly the first one.

Your body actually always works like this, it's just that you've got into the habit of constantly intending a "posture/position" for it, effectively asserting it stay in a fixed position - so in daily life you have to overcome that to move. Stop asserting the position, and it's instantly much easier (that's why we "withdraw our presence": this stops us re-activating the "staying still" habit).

...or just watch myself do it?

This.

And how hard is it to let go?

Have you any idea how ridiculous that sounds? ;-) It's better to phrase it as something you stop doing: stop interfering, or "absolute allowing". In terms of what it feels like, it feels like you are stopping holding on to your focus of attention, and it opens out in response. Meanwhile you adopt that attitude that you are okay with whatever happens, including nothing happening.

Don't overthink it. In fact, one problem is you can't conceptualise non-doing, and you can't experience intending - you can only experience results.

If you want a little exercise to practice (which I steal slightly from this great Missy Vineyard book which takes the Alexander Technique and discovers some of these ideas along the way, although not quite so extended), do this one:

• Lie down on the floor. Couple of books to support your head. Feet flat on the floor, knees up.
• Give up to gravity completely. Let go absolutely, of your mind, body and attention. Let them do whatever they will. Give up to "God" or whatever; abandon yourself. Release yourself into the space in the room around you; become that background space. (These are just different ways of saying "let yourself be".)
• "Decide" that you are going to roll over onto your side, but do absolutely nothing about it.
• Wait until your body moves by itself.

Eventually, it will. It'll feel like magic. Then realise that this is how it always is; it's just that you have developed the habit of tensing up your muscles, tensing up the universe, to hold it in position, or to "feel yourself doing something".

The feeling of "doing something" that you normally have is actually the feeling of resistance of your bad habit, which you have to push through.

Once you've got the "happens by itself" vibe, experiment with leaving your body functioning that way. Just "decide" things, and let them happen by themselves. One way of conceiving of this is to think of it as "allowing yourself to experience..." something; releasing in a direction, rather than moving in a direction.

The experience is already there, you are just "letting it in". Letting it "shine through".

I've got a lot of time tomorrow; I'll post results if you want

Do it! Remember, you've spent a lifetime doing the opposite, so it might take a little while for the "moves by itself" exercise to kick in. But this is because you are still resisting a little. You might even feel a bit uncomfortable when it first happens, but stick with it.

Do you think this can help me find stuff I've lost, like my Gameboy from a few years ago?

Give it a shot. "Just decide" that the Gameboy is going to come back into your possession, and maybe feel excited about this. Then, see what happens.

Something to note: Sometimes the gap between the deciding and the result can take a little while. For instance, if the object is not local, it may take a while before the sequence of actions you feel "inclined" to do (even unwittingly) eventually leads you there. But it's pretty reliable. Fear not, something is happening - remember, you can't feel intention at work, only the 3D sensory experience that results from it.

(You've set the pattern on the floor; you're waiting for the image to appear in the room.)

Q: [Deleted]

No problem - have fun with it! :-)

I try as hard as I can, but I can't seem to really "let go".

Yes, it's not to so easy to let go if you try to do it. You're not trying to lose attention, or manipulate yourself into a particular state - you're just aiming to stop interfering and accept whatever experiences come up. You are not meant to be using effort at all. You are giving up direct control.

For immediate things, like "find the chocolate that's in the house somewhere", you feel an urge to go somewhere. But if it was in the car, say, you might later that day feel the intuition to fix a shelf, which means you go into the garage, and then you suddenly think "I'll just look in the car door sidepocket".

That's why, after you "ask", you need to let go and be okay with anything that happens. When it's time to take action, you'll feel the feel.

Also, this doesn't reach into occult stuff, does it?

Not really, just your extended memory or intuition, which you don't have direct access to, but you can allow to lead you. In effect it's not different to the arm-wrestling or being good at catching (technique: centre your attention behind your forehead, let your body move by itself). You're just trusting your nervous system to operate spontaneously and correctly, rather than trying to control things manually.

There's no danger of "possession" - that's just people being scared that if they loosen control, their own impulses and urges will take them over. Letting go can feel a bit scary though, because it feels like you are lowering your defences and becoming completely open. But you are only lowering your defences against your own self! :-)

Q: [Deleted]

No problem. Remember, the larger picture is basically telling yourself you want something, and then getting out of the way, forgetting about it.

The biggest impact is the just the simple one of stress-free living without tensing your body. The "imagination patterns" is then extra icing on top.

Very good explanation.

Thanks. Always trying to come up with good ways to describe this, even thought it's slightly not-describable!

Interesting, your stretching idea. Wanna share?

My general feel is that you can't harm your body so long as you aren't forcing it. If you switch you attention to the "open background space" of your awareness, then "just decide" what you are going to do in broad terms, your body will get the job done.

Micro-manage it though, you can't.

What my teachers always taught and tried to convince everyone, is that muscle reflexes that you would normally only be able to control yourself, like raising your hand, absolutely cannot be autonomic (visceral).

If you have got into the habit of "holding onto" yourself then you will indeed get in the way of things like automatic arm raising - because you are constantly asserting yourself into your current posture. If you do that, you then have to "fight past it" to get anything done. This is why people feel they are putting effort into movement and activity, rather than experiencing it "happening to them", as they should.

...

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

Hey, good stuff!

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

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

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

• Although we encounter time in a "moment by moment" sequence, it is actually laid out like a landscape - always there even though you are only "looking" at a certain part.
• If we predict something, we are "reading" the landscape before getting to a location.
• If we assert something, we are "writing" the landscape before getting to a location.
• When we get to the location, it is whatever it is. We can't then tell whether reading/writing occurred specifically, or whether reading/writing occurred indirectly.

For instance, by "asking for information" you might be implicitly "asking for information that corresponds to your desire", which involves making the information correspond to your desire. The background intention or assumption behind the act makes a difference.

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

From elsewhere:

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

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

EDIT: Inserted earlier paragraph which I'd omitted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Discovered this sub and have two things I can't understand

A few of those "crash didn't happen" stories on the sub. Did you notice anything else different about the world afterwards? Randomly:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/ofqic/escaping_a_crash_by_flipping_through_the/]

This happened to both my friend, Steve, and his father. Steve's son was accidentally shot by another family member. Steve remembers seeing his son die in front of him, but suddenly his son was fine and had only been hit in a non-vital area. His father and 3 friends accidentally drove off a cliff, but suddenly were all back on the road. All 4 remember this very vividly!

So, basically these are Ctrl-Z events.

POST: A Hiccup In Time

[POST]

My husband and I just got home from my parents house. I have to take the interstate to get home. Well, we had just passed the tall buildings downtown and were coming around the curb on the interstate that's right before our exit when we heard a train blow it's horn not far from us. I laughed and said it sounded like a crash symbol and that it scared me, it was so loud. Then when the train stopped blaring it's horn, I suddenly had no idea where we were at. Neither did my husband. After about 30 seconds of silence we realized we were about to pass the downtown area AGAIN. Everything happened is less than a minute and we both witnessed it.

[END OF POST]

Q: That's trippy as shit! I've had some... eh... interesting things happen to me while driving, as well. I recounted one in another thread; the only one I recall in enough detail to actually talk about. I started driving with a dash cam about 2 years ago, though, and such events have utterly and completely ceased since then. The system, it seems, doesn't like to change things there is a provable record of; probably because there would then be concrete proof of the glitch and not just the ramblings of a handful be people who may well by psychotic (yes, I'm including myself in that group).
Of note in your story is that you say the train horn sounded like a crash symbol. That's not at all what a train's horn sounds like, but clearly it sounded like a horn at the onset, as you were able to identify it. Did it seem to morph into the crash symbol sound after it started? Was there any type of electrical buzz or harmonic sound to it that would have been atypical of either a train's horn or a crash symbol?
If you want to dig deeper into the "reality is a simulation" concept, google "Tom Campbell Calgary". There are 3 talks by him on YouTube, all given over the same weekend, each a little over 2hr long. The first 2 cover much of the same material, but it's important to watch both before watching the 3rd, since there are some different bits in them; anything he repeats, he's repeating for a reason. Pay really close attention from 21:35 to 29:11 of the first talk, though, if you're at all skeptical. In fact, watch that first to decide if it's something you even want to get into.

Funnily enough, I've not long finished reading My Big TOE. It's a bit of a slog, and I don't quite agree with it, but it's full of interesting reality-as-simulation stuff and pertinent to this sub. (I agree with him on the potential flexibility, but I think he overdoes the "digital reality" stuff.)

Probably easier to watch the vids - good call!

Q: Yeah, if my glitch experiences tell me anything, we're in an analog simulation; definitely not digital. But, then, he does talk about everything he says being a metaphor, and we do generally have a better understanding of digital computers than we do analog, so it's possible that's just another metaphor, as well.

Yes, he does emphasise it's a metaphor - I just feel he's a little enamoured with that one beyond its usefulness. It means he ends up talking about defined 'rulesets' when in fact I'd say that something more like 'established habits' would be appropriate.

At that level, everything gets metaphorical because the "basic stuff" isn't really an object anymore... it's the "non-material material" that objects are made from.

POST: [EXPERIMENT] Glitch Generation Test, I Need Your Creative Ideas!

I've got a couple of silly tricks that are good to try, which benefit from randomisation. I'll stick with the more obscure but easier to perform one for now. It'll sound odd, and it's not exactly an obvious glitch generator, but there's method in the apparent madness. Here goes:

• Choose a situation that you want to change, but one that you don't necessarily have much influence over.
• Decide clearly what the current situation is, and what the desired replacement situation is.
• Get two glasses.
• Get two bits of paper or labels.
• Fill one of the glasses with water.
• On the first label, write a word that summarises the current situation, and stick it to the filled glass.
• On the second label, write a word that summarises the desired situation, and stick it to the empty glass.
• With the two glasses in front of you, pause for a moment, and contemplate how your life is currently filled with the first situation, and empty of the desired situation.
• Then, when you're ready, pour the water from the first glass (the current situation) into the second glass (the desired situation), while really noticing the sounds and feeling and shifting of the water from one to the other.
• Sit back and see the glasses in their new state; allow yourself to take deep breath and feel relieved.
• Take off the labels, put away the glasses, carry on with your life.

The audience should feel free to try this one at home.

POST: What happens if you get stuck in an alternative universe?

Q1: it's a sad thing that /r/DimensionalJumping/ is closed. It was the best sub to explore this idea. According to the leading contributers of this sub, everyone experiences such timeline changes all the time but mosts are unaware of it, because of a mix of conditioning, brain automatic filtering, and our own memory limits.
Also timeline changes are controlled by our unconscious mind. It's hard to control this part of our mind, but there are methods to tricking your mind that such or such thing is true when it's not (yet). It looks more or less like a metaphysical prey and its associated rites. According to the sub, by following these non-religious rites, you'll trigger successive timeline jumps in the direction of your wanted reality.

Q2: Is there a reason this sub was closed?

Q3: It has been said the sub had been started from the wrong basis (with a bad name to begin with) and it lead to confusion for newcomers. For example, the sub attracted perturbed people who got anxious about jumping into a bad time-line. My opinion is that the growing popularity of both the sub and u/triumphantGeorge started to turn the whole experiment into something a bit dangerous.

One version of the answer [POST: Ever heard of r/DimensionalJumping?]. Essentially, it became unwieldy to operate the subreddit as it was designed and keep it on track - as a dialogue-based subreddit where moderation would be via participation (the content would be in the comments, with everyone unpacking people's ideas and experiences, based on previous insights).

POST: Raining on me inside

UC, you insist on taking all the magic away... ;-)

...Understandable. Shitty stuff abounds. :-/

You can't escape from anything though, escaping implies existence and perpetuates things (in my experience). The rule turns out to be: no-one ever wins a fight, you have to turn away and forgive (=forget without trace). Very Biblical. All we can do is assert a new experience and open up to it.

Today the Owls Of Eternity, tomorrow the world! ;-)

On eyesight - now this is for something different but maybe it could help a bit indirectly - after years of mucking around with exercises and the Bates method and so on for variable short-sightedness, I realised that if I instead "sat back" in my head and "let the world come to me" suddenly my vision (or actually perception) was transformed. Can't find the original article, but there's a paper by the same person copied here: Seeing from the Core [http://www.reptilianagenda.com/brain/br121804d.shtml].

POST: Wrote a 'prison escape via tunneling' story featuring a 'Dave.' Five hours prior, a 'Dave' actually tunneled out of prison.

MuayThaiJudo: Write a story about a redditor named /u/MuayThaiJudo winning $10,000,000 just days before Adriana Lima slip, fell and landed vagina first on his dick.

Q2: This is the most practical response.

Yesterday I wrote a story about a reddit user who wrote a story about how they wrote some dialogue about a prison break and then discovered that a reporter wrote a story about an actual prison break which followed the same scheme as the story they wrote. So everyone better watch be careful what they reply to this, if they value their tomorrows - I've still got my Word document open and the Cursor Of Synchronistic Doom is blinking...

Q1: Write a story about a redditor writing a story about /u/imalurkerwhocomments curing cancer while he wins $10,000,000 on the lottery and moments later he actually does

I've gone one better and outsourced it: I've written a story about someone else who writes that story, thereby saving me writing the story but still, in effect, writing the story.

Q3: Things like this happened all the time when i was working on my science fiction novel, except it was with technology and scientific discoveries. Maybe I should start writing again.

Got any personal examples to share?

My favourite well known one is Philip K Dick's tale in How to Build a Universe... where his novel Flow My Tears the Policeman Said is later reflected in real life and a Bible passage he hadn't read. Whatever's on your mind does seem to get reflected in "external" events. We've covered mind-formatting & synchronicity before but the reality of it - your insides appearing on the outside - is never not freaky.

Q3: 2007: I start working on the story and set it in 2008. Some of the characters have PDA's to share information over long distances. A week later, Apple announces the first Iphone and Ipad.
A few months down the line I've wound the story backwards in order to flesh out the story. I come up with a space plane to make the space portions of the story to work. I came up with a "Revolver" type aircraft engine which starts off like a normal jet engine and transitions into a hypersonic engine and eventually a rocket engine for sub orbital / low orbit travel.
Skylon was announced 3 days later, and it turns out i'd described the XB70 without realising it.
An as yet unwritten portion of the story takes place on Mars, and so I was working out how to keep the astronauts safe from cosmic rays and other nastiness, so I got to thinking about magnetic shielding. The next day a scientist releases a paper saying pretty much the same thing. One of the setttings for my story involves a highly implausible setting of a gas giant between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud for some aliens to hide and repair their ship. According the Phil Plait of "Bad Astronomy" something like that may actually exist. I describe at the start of my story a spaceship full of dials and gauges which makes it to low orbit, and I was informed it sounds like an early Apollo mockup. I invented a mega corporation for my story, which I know call the "Foundation for Peace and Brotherhood" the back story being they started in Italy after the black death as a way for neighbours to help each other out, and over time it spread and gained influence etc etc. The original name was "The Medici Foundation" as I knew a little about history and thought it would be a good name to use. But guess what?
There's other small things as well, like the "Lunar Ion Freighter" from 1959, which i thought at the time I would have had to defend to the death, but it seems that could have existed. Those are a few things, sorry for the wall of text.

Those are a few things, sorry for the wall of text.

Thanks, that's exactly the sort of thing I was interested in. There's something about writing fiction in particular which makes this phenomenon more apparent. Perhaps because it's a process where you are inherently more aware of what you are imagining. It's always hard to tell the difference between these ideas being part of a "larger movement" or whether our thoughts "pattern" our subsequent experience. I've been experimenting a little with (so-called) synchronicity and generating it deliberately. Lots of fun to be had.

...

Did he affect the ancient past with his powerful ability to visualize?

Thinking about this, it's not necessarily "the past" that gets affected, it's that subsequent observations take the form of previous ones. Even if a discovery is "about the past" it is really an observation of something in the present. So, Hancock "has the experience of" writing about about red-haired Neanderthals. Later, he "has the experience of" reading about an archeological exploration which finds red-haired Neanderthals. The "past" is nowhere to be found in this description except as "the experience of" thinking about the "past", in his imagination. All three experiences occur in the present, one after the other. Once Hancock has invented the "fact" of red-haired Neanderthals, all subsequent observations will be consistent with this new "fact" (even though he made it up).

Q4: Thinking about this, it's not necessarily "the past" that gets affected, it's that subsequent observations take the form of previous ones. Even if a discovery is "about the past" it is really an observation of something in the present.
Yeah.. yeah.. yeah.. that make sense. I'll have to ponder some more on this. It's hard to talk about in lots of ways. There is some connection between observer and creation of "reality."

One way to approach this is to just keep it simple: [1]

Pay attention to the actual forms that arise, and not your explanations about them. Those explanations are just stories you invent to connect different observations. Also, don't separate out inside or outside: If you are experiencing anything, then it's a pattern arising in your "perceptual space" - it's all in the same "place". Looked at this way, it's like Hancock created a pattern in his "perceptual space" which then persisted, intermingling with and superimposed upon the other patterns that were going on - one of which was "reading about archeology". (Like mentioned in the link I posted above.)

He then ascribes meaning to this (via concepts of "the past" and "a world") but really there are no such things. Only patterns swirling around and unfolding in his perceptions. Of course, this brings up issues of identity and how the world is "shared" between us, if patterns in Hancock's experience result in patterns in our experience. This is solved if: there is no difference, there is no Hancock, or you, only perceptual patterns in one conscious space.

[1] Okay, so I guess that's simple in the sense of "there are only patterns" but not very simple to describe and think about! :-)

POST: Forbidden knowledge erased

[POST]

Has anyone ever felt like they've had a thought that gives you a deep answer or key to life, only to forget it seconds later? I've had this happen a few times recently. It's like a thought will enter my head, or rather be "pushed" into my head, that leaves me in awe. Then, it just disappears from my head and I can't even remember what it was, or a trace of it, no matter how hard I try. All I'm left with is the feeling of awe, like I saw behind a veil to something incredible and someone whisked me away before I was able to fully see it. Anyone else?

[END OF POST]

It could be that the "thought" is actually the experience of the gap between thoughts - the raw openness - and so you can't re-member it. You can't remember it, because it can't be conceived of, and it leaves no trace because it's a lack of sensory content.

So a taste of death?

Hard to say. Some stories here and elsewhere would suggest that experiencing of some sort continues after experiencing "dying". Perhaps it's better to say something like: it's a taste of not-being-a-person.

...

"How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?" :-)

So - it's probably more accurate to say that there are light-as-wave observations and there are light-as-particle observations - but beyond this "light" doesn't exist in any particular state, other than as a concept in a fictional narrative, a story we use to connect the gaps between observations. Light doesn't "happen" except for the observing of it.

A1: Aha! So if this goes for light, this should go for everything else too, right? Nothing happens except for the observing of it? So the observing, done by an observer, creates(?) (renders?) everything as it's being observed/experienced? So there is no world except for the observer and what he observes - and how do you separate the two? Is it even possible to separate the two?

Yes, it goes for everything! So there is no separation between the observer and the observed. We might think of "the observer" as being an open aware space in which his experiences arise - we could say that an observer takes on the shape of their observations. This does leave us with a couple of questions though, which I'll have a stab at:

• How is it that the world appears to-have-happened though?: It does seem like things have been going on while my attention was elsewhere, hwo can this be? This might be explained by "creation-by-implication". When we direct our attention in a particular direction, an experience is triggered which is plausible given the observations thus far.
• If the world isn't out there then in what sense does it exist?: Maybe it exists only in the sense that all possible experiences are simultaneously available - like all the individual frames of all possible movies being stacked in the projector at once - and all that changes is the "brightness" of them, varying in their relative contributions to our current moment.

It only seems like there's a world happening "out there" because we've got into the habit of selecting our next-moment based on the contents of the now-moment plus our history. Except when we slip up and things seem to shift discontinuously and break the rules - a "glitch"!

A1: I think you nailed it right on the head! I would even take it a bit 'further'.
When we direct our attention in a particular direction, an experience is triggered which is plausible probable given the observations thus far.
My theory is that our experience of now is just a collapsed point of several probability lines. The past is a 'written' line, the now is the current focus, and the future is a string of probablity lines that are always in flux until you reach the next 'iteration of time' (aka. next delta-T) where it collapses and manifests as the most probable function. Each line of probability is continously moved towards or away from the collapse point (now) according to how previous collapse points have occured. In this model everything that can happen is possible, but everything that can happen has a different degree of probability of happening.

Yes, you can certainly describe it that way!

I've been trying not to use "probable" because (of course) we never actually experience probability - it's a tool, an abstraction, but some groups have taken to be objectively true lately. "Plausible" makes it sound more like what it is: a story we make up and make a judgement on. But "probability" is as good a metaphor as any!

Now the fun stuff. Given that all possible experiences are available, and it's our previous observations that define the contribution of possibilities (your "probabilities") towards future observations - is it possible to influence this?

All possible observations are "here, now" - even unlikely ones. Is there a way to make an unlikely one take priority? How can we force a glitch or discontinuous change?

A1: Well, learning from established physics and quantum mechanics, isn't it now a common understanding that whatever is observed becomes affected simply by being observed? So how to influence the possibilities could maybe be, at least first, to observe the possibilities in some way?
How to observe probabilities/possibilities when all you are is "aware space" or "consciousness"? Imagination!! Until we get a machine that is able to calculate and/or discern future possible probabilities, I think that is as close as we're gonna get to manipulate the outcomes. But merely observing something and therefore changing/affecting it is one thing - if we assume it is possible to at least influence the possibilities in this way, can we assume it is possible to influence the possibilities in a controlled way? In a directed way? In a way that intends one possibility to become manifest instead of another? Or as you said, is there a way to make an unlikely possibility take priority over a more likely one?
Here we would need experimental testing, re-testing and triple-testing. Let's set up the premises we would need:

• 1: Probabilities can be affected by observation
• 2: Imagination is a form of observation
• 3: Probabilities can therefore be affected by imagination
• 4: Imagination can be controlled
• Inference from previous premises: Probabilities can therefore be affected and controlled by imagination
  Then do rigorous testing to try to disprove any of these premises. First and most obvious flaw in this experimental setup is it would rely almost entirely on subjective reporting (but then again, as we've already covered, there can't be observation without observer - it's impossible to get around the subject). But maybe that wouldn't matter, because in any case we could set up imagined possibilities, then have a subject attempt to control the imagined possibilities into a certain desired 'state', then observe if the 'outside Universe' conformed to the controlled imagined possibility or not, or if it did so to any discernable degree.

An excellent summary and I completely agree. The only area I would pick at would be the idea of an "outside universe", since such a thing can never be experienced. Earlier we established that there is no observer-observed separation. This means that we don't affect things by observing them, we bring them into fact by doing so. This means that the world is our accumulated observations, and that includes the observations of (apparent) other people. So, we hit a problem. Although we have ignored the situation for 2000 years, we are forced to admit (to re-admit) that the world is subjective and we each have a "private copy" or view of it. And this means that the experience of "observing someone use imagination to influence the world" is also a part of the private copy.

In other words, we cannot prove this to someone else, because that proof is always really to ourselves and within ourselves!

A1: Absolutely! And that's why I wrote 'outside Universe' with apostrophes ;P
Formulating it as "bringing them into fact" is as succinctly as it can be put, I think, because as words are limiting at best, this description says a lot about the apparent mechanics of this process. And yes, finally, it's impossible to prove anything, and even to ourselves that proof would be dubious. Our private copy of existence is like a self-referential loop, or a mirror placed in front of a mirror, creating an endless fractal of self-referential data. Oh, and even if we can't get out of our own private copy and therefore never know anything about any fictitious/non-existant 'outside' world, for practical purposes, the experiment could still be attempted in the subject-in-object reality view that today's science use, and would likely produce entertaining data no matter what the results were :) It would actually be interesting to test, if only on a very small scale!

Sorry, mere apostrophes just weren't sufficient there - it needed to have full quotation marks! ;-)

Because the looping/mirroring metaphor can get a bit tangled and implies two parts where there is really only one - I find it easier to describe in terms of the activating of already-existing patterns. This lets us dodge infinite regression and maintain the idea of an ongoing "now" - but different metaphors are good for different contexts anyway. As you indicate, we can't get out of our own private copy, because we aren't actually in it. Rather, the private copy is within us and it includes our bodies as part of the world! Even the latest interpretations of QM (such as QBism) are giving up on objective interconnected aspects, although they hand-wavingly say that maybe some sort of objective explanation might come in the future. (Nope!)

However, if for fun we at least allow there to be multiple "perspectives", then there's still value in doing the experiment. We can think of the world as being a shared set of patterns (rather than a shared environment). By contributing new connections or activations from our private copy, we are making those available to other copies - albeit indirectly - thus spreading the magic for everyone else! :-)

A1: Hehe. Yep. And on that note we conclude this circle jerk ;)
PS. Even "within us" brings up a separation problem, but all words would eventually be insufficient to describe anything. They work like approximations, always beating around the bush, indicating or pointing to that which it is beating around :P
PPS. This has been a riveting discourse to have after being awake for more than 36 hours!

Well done us for solving reality! ;-)

PS. Yeah, true, there's really no way to say it because all words and metaphors imply separation into parts and then a relationship in space.

PPS. Haha, well, I have a sneaking suspicion that lack of sleep helps rather than hinders these sorts of conversations.

Catch you next time!

* * *

TG Comments: /r/philosophy/

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

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

Thanks for the thought-provoking post.

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

Conscousness/of/self

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

From there, we have:

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

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

The Blanket Metaphor

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

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

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

Worlds, Ripples and Nonlocality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steps Along the Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whirlpools Reviewed

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

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

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

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

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

The answer is to reconfigure the metaphor a little.

Perspectives and the Enfolded

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

Metaphors:

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

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

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

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

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

The Overall Picture

The implications of this could be summarised thus:

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

Phew. That's my best attempt for now.

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

Thanks, I think we can get somewhere here.

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

The distinction is surely arbitrary and is simply convention:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's something else to cover here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

What is it like to be a human arm?

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

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

Fucking electrons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The quick way to suggest this would be:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely that's not your actual experience though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I cannot isolate the location of the soul...

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

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

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

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

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

conscious awareness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this not different?

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

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

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

An approach to thinking of this:

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

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

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

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

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

do you perhaps believe in the immaterial soul ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chakras

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

The etheric feild interacts with the soul...

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

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

What are the implications of that?

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

Aerokinesis is a great word. :-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

etheric space

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

the ultimate purpose of existence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Guy?

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

Hmm, I say:

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

Whats On Tele? vs The Dissolved World

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

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

-- Allow me to ramble a little...

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

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

And there is only First Cause.

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

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

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

-- Okay, ramble over...

He Sure Can Move!

I can literally move shit with my mind!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are the order. And behind order: nothing.

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

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

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

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

Ah-ha!

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

I don't understand or condone this form of thinking

In what way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's my best edited version anyway.

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

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

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

The source as in, practically?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: [Deleted]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The third is more problematic:

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

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

POST: The Simulation Argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

TG Comments: /r/timetravel

POST: If i ever got time traveling powers

Q1: What if time operated on the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle? That is, all alterations to the timeline have already been incorporated, so you can change nothing about the perceived past. In the example in that article, it basically states that while you can't prevent the Titanic from sinking, you can allow it to happen, save the people who would die, and replace their bodies with perfect imitations. This way, nothing in the perceived past has changed. This interpretation of time would mean that if you did go back in time with the purpose of stopping the Titanic from sinking, you are doomed to failure because we know that it did sink. I like this view of time because it elegantly avoids so many of the paradoxes that naturally arise from time travel.

[QUOTE]

Novikov self-consistency principle
The Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture and Larry Niven's law of conservation of history, is a principle developed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the mid-1980s. Novikov intended it to solve the problem of paradoxes in time travel, which is theoretically permitted in certain solutions of general relativity that contain what are known as closed timelike curves. The principle asserts that if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes.

[END OF QUOTE]

We only know that it did sink now. If you go back and change the Titanic sinking, it will not have sunk anymore, and we will all know it never sank. The whole landscape of facts gets updated. The sequence of events, if I go time-travelling from 2016:

Global Memory Landscape Version 1:

• In 1912 it was true that the Titanic sank in 1912
• In 2015 it was true that the Titanic sank in 1912

In 2016 I travel back to 1912 and prevent the sinking of the Titanic, at which point:

Global Memory Landscape Version 2:

• In 1912 it was true that the Titanic did not sink in 1912.
• In 2015 it was true that the Titanic did not sink in 1912.

Personal Memory Landscape:

• In 1912 it was true that the Titanic sank in 1912.
• In 2015 it was true that the Titanic sank in 1912.
• (I travel back in time and tweak then return.)
• In 2016 it was true that the Titanic did not sink in 1912.

Everyone else's memories would be updated to the not-sink version; only I would recall it being different. Consistency is preserved at all times.

Q1: The problem with this is that it would have to affect yourself before you ever went into the time machine. At the point where you travel back in time, you separate your own timeline. You have pre-travel you, and post-travel you. If you go back and change the timeline, then only post-travel you would retain the memories of the Titanic sinking. Otherwise, you would have to be born with an alternate set of memories. The paradox arises from this- how does pre-travel you ever become post travel you? Pre-travel you never has a reason to travel back in time because, in his memory, the Titanic never sank. This leaves a post-travel you without an origin, so you are an effect without a cause.

You're right ... yes ... that this amounts to a personal timeline perspective: my end-point is not actually the same square on the "grid of all possible moments" that I left from. In fact, as soon as I jump to 1912 it is not the 1912 of my history, simply due to my presence. This side-steps the assumption that time is sort of always running (constant cause and effect). It avoids the paradox, but it means that I didn't truly change the present moment that I left - which remains self-consistent but now without me - I instead went to a different moment where my actions are its history (guy suddenly appeared; ship was saved).

What I've really done then is more like dimension jumping - jumped from Global Landscape 1 to Global Landscape 2 - rather than time travel, although it will seem like time travel ito me. Unless we allow Primer-style multiple instances of me, without a "causal catch-up". In short, a constantly overwriting time loop. But then I can never get to the Titanic anyway; I can only go back to the moment of the availability of time travel.

Right. So self-consistency must be preserved, and that can be done without having "causal catchup", but it means either revise-able timelines or an additional dimension. Phew!

POST: New to the sub, and have found this link quite interesting.

[POST]

In theory, is this possible? With the we are all one? I think I read something about the infinite grid? As us just traveling a grid which is "time line". If this is possibly true, then wouldn't reddit be just one big load of conversations with myself?

[END OF POST]

The Infinite Grid.

Basically: what we actually are is "perspectives of consciousness" which are having a being-a-person-in-a-world experience. Nothing is really happening, and time never passes, it's just that we scan our attention across a subset (or "trajectory") of all the possible experiential moments. You could call this a "time line", although it is completely personal. All the moments already exist. We could think of a trajectory as a "strand of thought" that is appearing in our conscious aware space. It's just that this particular thought is very bright and 3D-surround and fully immersive, so we assume we are "there" somehow. We are all "one" because consciousness itself has no properties. The consciousness you are cannot be distinguished from the consciousness I am. You can even get a feel for this directly:

• Currently, you are looking at this screen with your attention. Now, turn your attention towards "the place you are looking out from". What do you find there? Can you describe it?

These leads to relevant-to-link questions like: who or what are the other people we encounter? What happens when we get to a position where there is no plausible next-moment? And so on.

Could you lead me in the direction to learn more about this theory? I find it very plausible.
Once you become aware of the infinite grid and your tragectory, is it possible to change it? Or is everything already predetermined?

Well, I made it up! The notion of a configuration space of possible states is nothing new of course (see Julian Barbour's The End of Time, for instance), although this formulation and the connection to subjective experience is probably fairly novel. It's what I call an "active metaphor" and is based on the notion that there is no actual underlying structure to experience. This means we are able to choose a conceptual framework we like and format ourselves with it. So we get to pick one like this which has "enabling" properties...

The grid itself is basically an unsorted set of all moments; your trajectory is an ordered subset of those moments defined by your current state. The trajectory is deterministic in the sense that for as long as your state remains the same, the path is defined. However, if you can change your state, you can change the path to a new determined state!

This is doable because the entire grid is actually dissolved in the background of your conscious perceptual space at all times, and the subset (or "world-pattern", or definition) is simply the moments which are being associatively triggered into prominence by your mental patterning. Changing that patterning = changing the world-pattern = changing the trajectory. A potentially useful way to envisage this "dissolved" aspect: The Imagination Room

Sssh... play along like we are all separate. There is plenty of time to stop playing after you die.

Speak for yourself! I mean, myself. Oh, we are so confusing...

POST: What would you do if you could go back in time?

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

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

How far along are you with the series?

Resuming the question - The devil would be in the details. But here's a quick sketch of what form my approach would take:

If we're assuming here that I have to come back to the present in some way - i.e. it's not a case of resuming life from a past point, it's about making changes, jumping forward, and seeing them reflected now - there's not much point in going back and saving anyone. The time gap between "then" and "now" will likely put you in another situation with similar problems. You cannot "solve" history because it is not a problem, it is an interconnected pattern. So the trick is to minimise that gap, so that "then" is a fully managed lead-in to "now". Knowing in advance that I would be going back in time with the show (e.g. I get selected to participate and the winner travels in time one month from now), I would spend the month paying very close attention to events global, local and personal, gathering as much information as I could about all spheres. Then I win the show, go back in time one month into the past - and do not enter the show. I spend the time creating the maximum beneficial version of that month financially, personally, and so on.

If I were making your show, I would have one episode where a contestant does something along these lines, in such a way as the existence of the show itself was threatened by "prior deletion". Maintaining the existence of the show despite adjustments in time would be one of the ongoing challenges the show-runenrs face, actually.

POST: Time Travel!! Post what you think or know about the subject....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: If time travel to the past is possible, you can't change the past.

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

This is almost there, I'd say.

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

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

This gives us:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To just jump straight to this -

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

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

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

Could you clarify what you mean by that?

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

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

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

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