TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 13)

POST: 11:11 -the numbers in my life for over 25 years

[POST]

I want to preface this by saying I have heard every established theory on this from "you are subconsciously prompting yourself to look at a clock" to "it is the gateway opening of the age of Aquarius and we must dress in white robes and do a dance in Ireland." Nothing fits, nothing helps. I am very much a skeptic and although I always keep an open mind, I also first seek the most rational explanation to anything. If you can accept I don't take these things lightly, read on.
It started very simply. I saw 11:11 on the clock and thought something about seemed interesting. I don't know what. A mirror of 2 numbers? Four towers? I can't say, but everyone has bombarded me with these explanations. All I know is, I noticed it and something felt odd about it.
And then I saw it again.
And again. and again. Eventually, it was happening with such frequency that I can honestly say I started to think it was alarming. Why was I seeing this? Well, I shrugged it off nonetheless. After a year of this, I made a new friend who is still the closest friend I have to this day. We go beyond friends, beyond family. One day she timidly asked me if I had ever heard of anyone seeing 11:11 on the clock repeatedly. Needless to say, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
Over the course of I'd say 5 years, we both saw it with alarming regularity. But we both came to the same conclusion; it doesn't mean anything at all but rather we are very aware of time and we are subconsciously prompting ourselves to look when it's 11:11. That makes a lot of sense, really, because many times when I set me alarm to wake up early, I will wake up a minute or two before the alarm goes off. Subconsciously, we all have an internal clock, so it makes sense that we were just making ourselves see it. That explanation satisfied us for many years.
And then it got harder to deny.
Several years later, after life took us in separate directions, I was living on the whole other end of the state. A few years in, I was rummaging around in my closet and found a wristwatch of mine I had misplaced months before. It had wound down and was not running any more. I squinted to look in surprise. It had stopped at 11:11:11. Precisely. I also lived alone, and was not in the habit of telling anyone about what I saw, so I don't see that anyone else could have done such a thing. The only person who knew was many miles away and had been since before I bought the watch. But, I still shrugged it off.
I was driving down the street one night and the local bank had a digital sign that displayed the time. This night, it read 11:11. I chuckled and then my eyes darted to the clock on my car. It was 8:24. I can totally see the clock breaking. It could even blink 12:00 like an old VCR after a power outage. But 11:11? Why?
About 8 years ago I sat with a dear friend in Denny's at the wee hours of the morning. The place was empty except for us and the staff. I told him all my stories about 11:11 as we were swapping strange life experiences. He was dubious, of course, and offered the "subconscious prompting" explanation as most people do but I explained too many instances were piling up that I had no power to influence. He chuckled and shrugged it off. Well, sadly he has passed on since then. He had a variety of illnesses, not the least of which was ketoacidosus which finally claimed his life. As a result of his illnesses, he always had to rush to the restroom after meals and this time was no different. I had already paid the check so I said I'd go with him. On the way, I stopped dead in my tracks and grabbed his shirt. "Look at THAT" I said. There, on the wall, the wall we were both looking at from our tables, the wall NO ONE had gone near while we were in there, was a wall full of grafitti all saying the same thing. 11:11, 11:11, 11:11. "Did I subconsciously write that with my mind or did I subconsciously prompt us to visit the only place in the area with this on the wall," I teased. That was the first time he took it seriously.
A couple of years ago or so I had the experience that frightened me. I had moved a bunch of stuff out of my office when I moved out of it and frankly left some of it lingering around the back of my car for about a year. Lazy, sure, but that doesnt matter. What matters is I had a large digital clock in there that had been on my desk. One day I opened the trunk and saw it. It was face down. I laughed inwardly. "You know if you turn it over what it will say, right?" I teased myself. I really didn't believe it, though. And then I picked it up. To my relief, it was blinking 12:00 like any good clock should when it's not properly set. I heaved a sigh of relief. And with that, the alarm on it suddenly rang and the numbers changed to 11:11 11:11 11:11. And then -it powered off, dead, never to work again.
Let me say, with all of the grace and dignity I can muster, that I nearly shit my pants. That's not something I can prompt. That's not something I influenced. It was here, in my hands, happening independently of me.
a bit over 3 years ago, my mother fell terribly ill. Turned out to be a massive tumor outside her brain in the netting that holds the brain in place, called the Meninges. (The cancer is called a Meningioma). The surgery went awry, and after an emergency second surgery to relieve an infection, she has been left an invalid, barely able to form sentences. It's very sad, let's not go there. But the reason I bring this is up is because a few weeks ago I was visiting her and she kept repeating "one." "one." "one." "one." I asked her nurse what this was all about and she smiled. "Oh, she must have seen the clock. She has this thing where she keeps seeing 11:11 on the clock." Mom smiled and managed a "yes!" And of course my blood ran cold. I had never told her about this.
So what conclusion can I draw? I saw it earlier today and I saw it again last night. Is the universe trying to tell me something? Maybe, but if so, it really, really sucks at it and if the universe has this capability it might just resort to words as that would be a lot more expressive. But this is all I get. 11:11.
I'd say about maybe around 2003-ish, I had decided to poke around on the net and see if anyone else had ever seen this. To my shock, I found millions of people had. Alas, they had no better explanation than I. "It means it's time to make a wish!" Hogwash. "It means the angels are with you." Preposterous. My favorite has to be on a website called Solara the Nvisible which talked about elaborate druidic dances called "master cylinders" (isnt that a car part lol?) and all of this aerie faerie stuff. Not a shred of hope of answers from that lot. And obviously I completely reject the subconscious prompting notion to say nothing of the pure coincidence idea. No way I can have this many coincidences over this many years.
But that clock in my car. It made me think. I drove on my way and mulled it over. I cannot have affected that clock in any way that could produce that effect upon lifting it. This was external to myself. I cannot have used the psychic powers I dont have -I dont believe anyone has them, it's just wishful thinking. So how do I explain it?
The unavoidable answer is that nothing is real. That somehow an external force can affect reality and is doing it for others and for me. Well, what the fuck does THAT mean? I don't believe in gods. I cannot say I completely disbelieve in psychics, I suppose, only because I myself have had too many experiences where I have known the unknowable right before it happened -but that is another glitch report. But no matter what else I've experienced, I am certainly not going to believe someone was using mind-powers to do this to me. Not rational. It was a glitch in the matrix. A sign that the impossible was possible because that should never have been able to happen -but it did, just the same.
Now, mind you, I don't go around thinking "nothing is real and we're in the matrix." What I mean to say is that I can think of no better explanation to fit the facts -but I still reject it. There has to be a better theory but no amount of "you're doing it yourself" or "dance the master cylinder" is going to work for me either. At this time I have to say I have no theory I firmly believe but will always, always be looking for one. I'm not prone to hallucinating, most of these have been corroborated by other witnesses, and I certainly didn't dream it all. And the examples I have given here are a drop in the bucket for a nearly 30 year long experience.
All I really can say is I don't know what it is -but it's something and it doesn't happen for no reason. I am just unwilling to give a pat answer just to satisfy myself. I will keep wondering and looking and thinking. And no doubt, I will keep seeing it.

[END OF POST]

Self-reinforcing synchronicity. The more it happens, the more you decide to attend to it, the deeper the impression, the more you are mind-formatting your reality. There's no inherent meaning; but it does reveal something interesting about the nature of experience eh.

POST: Serious question, do you believe any of the stories here?

It's helpful to keep in mind that the topic of the subreddit isn't that we are literally living in a computer simulation - the posts aren't meant to be evidence to support that theory in particular (nor any other). Rather, they are reports of experiences which made a person reconsider their idea of how reality is, because it broke their expectations of it, as a starting point for discussion.

From the sidebar:

"A personal, everyday-mode experience for which you have no explanation."

So, in each case, we should be careful to separate out the experience itself from any proposed explanation for the experience. Generally, then, I think I'd tend towards "believing" that the poster had an experienced as described (in terms of sensory unfolding), but its nature is something that is open for debate. The subreddit is not for fictional stories - there are other places for that - so if a post seems suspect, readers should hit that report button to alert the mods.

...

Q1: A lot of people apply Occam's razor to this stuff, and the "normal" explanation makes more sense. But taken as a whole, that starts to fall apart. What's more believable, every person who posts in here is insane, delusional, or making shit up to get imaginary internet points, or that maybe my perception of reality isn't all inclusive?

Q2: Besides, I like the counterquote to the little understood and much overused Occam's Razor. I believe it goes something like "Any model of the universe which isn't strange is likely also not accurate". It's a freaking weird world, whatever's really going on.

Occam's Razor has a specific meaning other than "the simplest explanation is the best", which is loosely:

"Given two models with the same explanatory power, it is usually better to choose the one which introduces the least number of conceptual entities."

It doesn't say anything about one being inherently "more true", or that the world itself follows some sort of "simplicity rule". In fact, there are many reasons to choose a more complex model: sometimes because it provides an "understandable" model rather than one which simply predicts results but is opaque; sometimes because the more complex model shares a form with other models in other areas, and allows the use of calculation or reasoning approaches which have already been established elsewhere. (Mathematics, for example, is full of areas where something is transformed into a certain format for "no reason" - other than it allows a certain approach to be used.)

We've also got the additional thing where the "explanations" being proposed basically have no explanatory power at all. If there's no way to test a description in terms of predictive power or by applying it to a dataset, then it's not really an explanation at all. It's not that saying something is a "false memory" or "confirmation bias" or "brain seizure" is wrong as such; it's that it is meaningless in the sense that it is non-scientific. It's just a hand-waving "plausible story".

Of course, pretty much all of our ideas for what happened in these reports is hand-waving story-making - but that's actually part of what makes it good: an exercise in flexing our powers of imagination and reasoning, and spotting the assumptions we use in everyday life without perhaps recognising they are assumptions.

POST: My glitch

Coincidences like this are actually the rule; reality is very "clumpy" that way. You are just overthinking them, because you are actually overthinking everything in your current state.

Now, there are "just coincidences" and there are also /r/synchronicities where the coincidence is more deeply personally meaningful, and the universe does seem to 'send us messages' from time to time (or we 'send ourselves messages', depending on your viewpoint). But these are far more significant and present themselves as opportunities rather than just curious details.

Personal example: I was in a bit of a spot a couple of years ago. While in a cafe pondering this, the two guys at the table next to me started talking about a friend who was in my exact situation and the advice the guys came up with was exactly applicable and useful to me. The details of the situation were very specific, and I really was stuck. This was more than just the usual low-level coincidence, which is the norm.

The things you describe in your post, though, seem more like coincidences of the everyday sort but because you are in 'hyper vigilance mode' and are basically scanning the world continuously for meaning, you are over-interpreting them.

Let them go, and let the idea go. Useful things will still happen, but give up looking for them and analysing them. Try and commit to stop thinking so much.

POST: Everytime I hear some word, suddenly everyone uses this word

Welcome to the wonderful world of the Baader Meinhof phenomenon. https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/

Although, the "Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon" isn't really an explanation of anything - more a naming or categorisation of an experience, accompanied by some vague "the brain did it" handwaving. We're essentially just saying this is the "Having A Recurring Experience phenomenon - because that's how experiences work". As with some uses of "Confirmation Bias" as a diagnosis, it can often be essentially a contentless general statement that feels conclusive, but doesn't really say anything.

For example, calling "Confirmation Bias" really requires that there be a fixed pre-existing reference dataset that is known and being surveyed, and then being selectively perceived. However, in daily life it is not clear that there is such a dataset, or at least we must recognise that this is an assumption. If we are to take "glitch" type experiences seriously - seriously as experiences, anyway - we can't necessarily take such things at face value. To assume that the world is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'" in our responses to experiences whose content is as if that is not so, is circular or redundant; it doesn't truly respond to the report on its own terms, unless we at least make explicit that assumption and any others.

POST: Meta-switching realities

To bring this into a coherent worldview, you really need to examine your underlying assumptions about what it is to be having an experience, what you actually are, what is the nature of time, and so on. Or we can jump straight to an alternative model.

Let me try:

Imagine a vast grid extending in all directions.
Imagine that each square in the grid is a particular experience, a particular static moment, as seen through the eyes of a particular person.
Imagine that the grid isn't just 2-dimensional, or 3-dimensional; imagine that it contains all possible moments, all possible experiences.
Imagine that your life is experienced as a traversal across this grid, moment by moment.
Imagine that remembering the past is also a moment, a moment with a thought overlaid upon the experience.
Imagine that generally the sequence of moments a person encounters do not differ substantially between each step, and that the trajectory is in line with your expectations and intentions.
However, there is nothing preventing there being a discontinuity, a jump from one moment to another one that isn't consistent with the facts of the previous moment. That would be a 'glitch'. Doing this deliberately would be 'magick'.

In this model:

From a 1st person perspective 'what you are' is a consciousness that is looking through the "viewport" of a certain square on the grid. There is no solidity to the experience, it is a dream-like experience. Everyone is having the experience of looking through a certain "viewport" at a certain time.
From a 3rd person perspective, everyone is essentially an "extended person", since they appear as characters the experiences of many moments.

In other words, when you make a 'jump' what you are doing is subjectively 'tuning into' a new grid position. There is no physical jump involved. You do not so much change solid reality as have a discontinuity in your experience. It is possible that only you will remember how things were previously, although at other times you may elect to bring another character through the change with you.

(An alternative take is to get rid of the grid metaphor, and just see all possibilities as being "enfolded" into the space you are experiencing right now, as if it were a dream emerging from your consciousness. Each moment "unfolds" into experience, then "folds" back into the space around you. The grid of all possible moments is embedded internally into your experience, rather than external and you select it.)

...

I'm not being argumentative or anything like that.It's just.....I can't seem to believe in it.

I'm not necessarily saying it's true, I'm saying it's a fun way to look at it. :-) Actually, it's quite a good way to look at the world without believing in glitches, because it also allows for moving into a moment where your memory has changed to be inconsistent.

I still don't really believe in reality jumping.It seems mythical, somehow.It almost seems like the person changed their own perspective in their own mind,but stayed in the same reality.

Some of them it's hard to tell the difference - see reality shifters too, here. But you are right, even if jumps are 'real' then what they are is a person chaining their own perspective - but the meaning of reality has to become more extended than just 'this shared world'. Even if you assume a shared world with defined people, we are all having our own mini-dream experiences of that world; we assume an 'external' world but never experience it.

Classic thought experiment: Hold up your hand in front of your face. Now, point to your real hand. Where is it? It can't be that vision in front of you. If your answer is "in my head", then point to your real head. Where is that? You are "living the dream", one way or another. :-)

Extra bit:

Do look at how many of the comments these days say "absence seizure!"; a lot of the major shifts do seem to have that trait. However, if someone did jump and report a change, then a corresponding explanation would be provided once sought out.

For instance, this post has the comment:

If you tell your friends, the world will change to make the event mundane. It will turn out that someone left the pad in some sort of diagnostics mode or there will be a software bug that allows 10% of random codes to work or something like that.

So there's no getting around it; your world will strive to remain 'self consistent'! ;-)

Q: That is a fun way to look at it,yes. :)
Actually,people who immediately post medical explanations(like absence seizure) is a pet peeve of mine.Not that it isn't possible,I just don't think it should be assumed right away.
I do prefer it when people look into the more mundane explanation,and consider it,instead of instantly thinking they jumped realities.But I always accept the mundane explanation. i.e.Did I a.I misplaced a hammer.Or b.I misplaced a hammer,I've jumped to an alternate reality. I misplaced a hammer.This is reality.
If the hammer comes back wearing a ballerina skirt,then I'll consider glitchiness,not before.
There's an example of people keeping it together and not immediately stating they shifted here: [https://old.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/26fdyv/chartreuse_its_not_red/]

Yes, that's a good example of a proper discussion. It does sound red. It's when we get to the idea that every decision involves a splitting of reality and a new universe, it gets a bit tiring. Thing is, most of the most "Matrixy" stories are probably seizure-like: favourites here [https://old.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/1qu3b6/the_day_the_worldshifted/] - here [https://old.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/1zq56z/but_i_did_own_the_car/] - here [https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1xyn79/what_is_the_creepiest_glitch_in_the_matrix_youve/cffvytf/]. However, how would you tell the difference? Are seizures just what glitches look like from an external point of view? :-)

But there are enough quirky stories here of a smaller scale that do indicate that things aren't as "solid and reliable" as we might normally assume.

Q: I sometimes find when people post that it is probably an absence seizure,or other medical explanations,some of them have a tendency to ignore other things the poster is saying,and jump right to the medical explanation,not considering anything else the poster is saying.For instance,somebody comes on and says they have a green car and it suddenly turned red yesterday.They have a friend,and the friend remembers it being green,too.Somebody then replies it was some kind of seizure of some sort,go to the doctor,get checked out,etc,etc,while completely ignoring the part of the post that a friend remembers it as green.It just isn't logical to ignore parts of what the OP posted so it fits into something the commenter is comfortable with.
Funnily enough,when I see the quirky stories that don't mention reality jumps,I don't question them nearly as much.So that's my own prejudice,I guess. :D

Yes, quite a lot of them have some implicit corroboration. In some sorts of stories it's as if people have "fallen in to a dream" together (more reality shifters site than here). But then, perhaps everyone has "fallen into a dream". Thing is, even the ones we dismiss easily seem to have an ongoing life. The Berenstein/stain Bears debate is still raging even right now this month, over on this site.

There is something going on, and the chief barrier to sussing it out is that it questions what it means to be a person having a shared experience with another person. If you and a friend both remember a car as being green, but now it's red and your family remembers it as always having been red - are those still your original family members??

Q:I actually remembered it as Berenstein.But I accept this explanation as very plausible and likely:
AnonymousAugust 23, 2012 at 3:44 PM
I normally don't comment on blogs about our family name but yours was so unusual and imaginative that I thought it only appropriate to add my thoughts. "Berenstain" according to our family lore was an attempt by an unknown imigration officer sometime in the late 1800s to reproduce phonetically a highly accented version of the tradtional Jewish name "Bernstein" as pronounced by my Father's grandparents when they came to America from the Ukraine. In that linguistic region, the name tended to come out sounding something like, "Ber'nsheytn". Since that's how the name was originally documented, it has always been spelled that way by our family and it has always been misread and mispronounced by nearly everyone. It has always been "The BerenstAin Bears". Your parallel reality theory is very resourceful but, unfortunately, by applying Occam's razor, we arrive at the explanation that most people have just misread the name. Mike Berenstain (Son of Stan and Jan) Reply
If you and a friend both remember a car as being green, but now it's red and your family remembers it as always having been red - are those still your original family members??
Yeah,that would be disconcerting.

I saw that too. If you read further down, there is some doubt (in the minds of other posters) about its authenticity, because people are so convinced, but I'm inclined to go with that as the best 'everyday world' explanation.

However, if there was a 'jump' then of course the son of the authors would have the -stain spelling and would have an explanation. Part of the jump is that the resulting universe is self-consistent! :-)

Q: Yes,that's true. It's tough,with berenstain bears there aren't really any downsides,other than a bunch of people are annoyed with you because you don't believe they're from a berenstein bears reality,and then the people who don't believe it are annoyed with them for not realizing they probably just remembered it wrong. It's a bit more serious in a case like this,though: [http://beforeitsnews.com/beyond-science/2012/01/redux-terrified-woman-from-another-universe-wakes-up-here-1575265.html] If she actually did jump,they she might be treated for a medical illness or mental condition she doesn't have.If she didn't jump,well then if the jump is accepted by herself and others,she might not go get treatment for an illness(mental or medical) that likely might be kind of serious.

I think that one is probably just a story, but it's actually not too dissimilar to the ones I referenced in an earlier comment. Someone replies into a post of that story, though:

I went to sleep one night and a similar thing happened to me. I was a totally different person(body) when I woke, living in a different part of the country with a completely different family, friends, job, and home. I was still "me" on the inside. it was very difficult at first, taking me a long time to adjust to my "new reality". I stayed to myself about the "shift", in fear if being locked up for insanity. I was able to fool those around me. the years past and I grew happy, forgetting my original life, deciding it was just a dream, rationalizing. I worked, loved, played, slept and dreamed as this "other" person. I was this "other" person. then four years later I woke up again in my "original life" without any missing time. it was the next morning that should have been on that fateful night four years before. I was very confused. I kept thinking I would wake up in the "other life" again. it took a while to get back into my "original(?) life". I had to remember who I was. its been decades now and the memory of the "other years" are faded from my mind. I wrote them down years ago, so I could not forget. I found the "other", he still lives where I had lived as him. I will never make contact. who are we really? there is far more to reality than we know. why was I used for this mission? where was this "other" person while I was in their body? how could I have no missing time in "this" life? talk about a mind f--k. I must conclude we live in a vast multiverse that can somehow become entangled on a quantum level.

Someone else says:

I don't believe her, she has no proof but her words.

Which, well, is always going to be true for this sort of thing. Meanwhile, another explanation here (also offered on these forums for other victims):

What I think is most likely here is that Ms. Garcia is a victim of something akin to the Capgras delusion, about which I have written before (read my original post here [dead link]). While this isn't classic Capgras -- the most common manifestation of which is a sudden conviction that everyone has been replaced by perfect duplicates -- the similarities are apparent. And she certainly has what is the most striking thing about Capgras and other delusional disorders, which is that while the sufferer is exhibiting symptoms of serious impairment, at the same time (s)he is absolutely convinced that (s)he is entirely sane.

I think this is stretching the Capgras definition too much though; it's about non-recognition rather than things changing. Also, there's no reason it's not real of course, in the sense that things might look the same and yet you 'know' something isn't quite right...

Cheesy list of stories here [dead link] includes that main one.

Q:Yes,I agree.That does seem to stretch the Capgras definition too much.Confabulation does seem like it could possibly fit some(not all,but some) of the posts on here that involve reality shifting.A lot of times,the poster presents remembering things differently,and then the reality jumping is presented to them,or they seem to accept it,because it's the thing that makes sense to them: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation] It says it's rare,but can sometimes occur in normal individuals: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation#Among_normal_subjects] Not suggesting all or any of them are due to exactly that,I think people should be diagnosed by professionals,and most definitely not be diagnosed by me,I'm not qualified to. This one would fit that,except it's hard to explain how they knew how to ride the bike(not picking on them,it's just one of the most recent I recall reading): [http://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/2gis9e/a_illusory_road_trip/] Though again,with the non-proof of jumping realities,then somebody who feels they jumped realities could disregard that. It's quite interesting.

I read that too. 'Confabulation' is a pretty interesting idea. Again, though, the evidence would be identical either way. But for individual's stories, it works; for shared memories or when there is a 'skill' in evidence, perhaps not.

However, there are cases of people suddenly becoming great guitar plays or being able to speak foreign languages fluently after head injuries. Example here [dead link], but there are better ones. Good musical one here. Meanwhile, there's cases of people with higher-then-normal IQ who have almost no brain tissue. In other words, things are generally stranger than we might imagine anyway. Is it possible to "access" bike riding skills without having actually learned them?

A further thought is: To what extent are our memories actual our lived history? If I were to 'snap awake' right now, it's hard to tell if my remembered past occurred or not. Mostly, I am unlikely to examine it for discrepancies - discrepancies might be arising all the time, but people are oblivious because it's rare they notice a 'clash'.

Q: Oh,I read a couple similar stories quite a while back.There's another story about a guy that started hearing music in his head and started playing the piano after he was struck by lightning: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/23/a-bolt-from-the-blue]
The girl who speaks german after her head injury is really freaky,I wonder what caused that?
Sure.I might remember having a grey mug a few years ago,and then it got broken.What are the chances that somebody will mention the mug,and inform me it was really green?And if nobody brings it up,I'd never realize I remembered it wrong.It probably happens a lot more than we realize. :)

Amazing stuff.

I guess one point is: We create our memories - or at least we 'assemble' them from something - we do not recall them. Where we create/assemble them from is debatable.

Of course, people do try to make these things happen intentionally. Randomly here:

...the persons present shift their point of view from the Universe that they were in, to another parallel universe that they have now arrived in. This 'jump' is spoken of repeatedly in the Dialogs."
Ebony liked to describe the phenomenon of the 'jump' as a movement into a parallel timestream, but it can also be seen as a re-alignment of the same universe, with all the paradoxes that either description entails. The experience is the same in either case. The limits of the universe seem to collapse into the space of the working. Over several minutes or hours, depending on the strength of the working, one's sense of outside reality begins to re-solidify. Often details of the new universe are discovered to be different from that of the old.

POST: [THEORY] Scientists able to make the present determine the past.

Yes, it's a nice experiment, thanks for posting! Some thoughts:

I'd suggest the particle-or-wave isn't a wave or a particle prior to conducting an observation - rather, "particles" and "waves" are observations. Here's a nice snappy article from Nature magazine which offers a nice view on this:

The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things.
-- The Mental Universe, Richard Conn Henry, Nature, 7th July 2005

To continue:

Talking about things "being this" and "being that" independent of them being observed is an error. Extending this, it does not make sense to talk about "something happening" when it is not being observed. This is because the facts-of-the-world do not exist in the same form as we experience them within the senses. Our habit of using our minds to "imagine how things are" and "imagine what happened" is just that - imagination. It amounts to making up little "sensory stories" about the world as if they were playing out.

Philosophers like Immanuel Kant had the notion that time and space were, effectively, "basic sensory formatting" of the mind just like shapes, tones, and so on. The world itself, world-as-it-is, is not spatially or temporally organised. It is an "infinite gloop" of dimensionless facts - not even! - which doesn't correspond to our conceptualisation, because conceptualisation itself is formatting.[1]

This means that you live in a mode of constant experiencing which is only organised "as if" there is time and space. Cause and effect don't mean anything:

The only rule is that the apparent world remains self-consistent as an entire pattern.
This means that all observations will be coherent, without regard to apparent distances in time and space.
Time and space are part of observing, not inherent divisions of the world.

More broadly:

Things that you aren't observing don't "happen" in a way that corresponds to sensory experiencing.
Observations are the only things that "happen".

Potential relevance to glitches:

If a change is made to the (implied) world-pattern, the whole pattern will shift to ensure self-consistency.
There will be no trace of the previous state of the world-pattern after the shift.
This may not include the observer's memory, which will contain memories of experiences of the former state.
The observer's memory may therefore fall out of step with the world-pattern.
Glitches involving a world-pattern shift will leave no physical evidence other than the memory of it.

Final thoughts:

Therefore in a way what we are truly experiencing is the "formatting" of our own minds.
We might view this "formatting" as the memories of previous observations + their implications.
Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences...

[1] There's an easy-reading article on Kant here [https://web.archive.org/web/20130516095302/http://philosophynow.org/issues/95/Kant_at_the_Bar_Transcendental_Idealism_in_Daily_Life], although it gets it slightly wrong in later parts in my opinion.

EDIT1: Made some changes for increased... coherence and self-consistency. Added some glitch-based musings.
EDIT2: Added some concluding remarks which, interestingly, connect to a previous comment about synchronicity.

...

Thanks, U-Chairs, nice post.
You might also look at it from a simulation standpoint where rules dictate the outcome of a given physical setup, and these rules are running in "realtime". So while the helium atom is not being scattered, the particle rules are employed. But as soon as that second "grating" is added, wave rules are now used. Thus when the atom hits the detector, the pattern is calculated as wave interference. Hmm, I wonder if they could turn off the second laser grating right before it hits the detector (but after the atom supposedly went through it). This would be a delayed-choice-oops-I-changed-my-mind-again experiment. [Modeled after some dates I have been on.]
Has anyone done this?

You can't fool it. No matter what you do, the result remains self-consistent. Lots of variations have been tried.

It's as if once an observation is made, the larger "implied pattern" of which that observation is a part, becomes fact. It doesn't matter which part of that pattern you trigger or when - once you've done so, the larger "fact" becomes the situation.

So by making part of the pattern "concrete" or realizing it, all the other parts of the pattern must necessarily come into reality, in order for reality to remain consistent.
I was thinking of the uncertainty principle the other day and how interesting it is that reality doesn't seem to want to be pinned down to a single set of physical parameters. It's as if there always needs to be a bit of wiggle room. I wonder if these phenomena are related to this apparent spontaneous creation of "reality".
There's always a little room to fudge the data, so that stuff agrees with what we see.

Extra bit:

One might wonder - are there methods to artificially give ourselves the experience of "something being true", such that subsequent observations are consistent with that experience...?

Perhaps placebos are more than mind over matter. Maybe they are mind over reality?

Nice idea! There have been experiments like that before. In fact, there have been lots of pretty thorough "psi" type studies but they don't get any traction. Interestingly, enthusiasm seems to play a large role - beating the statistics towards the beginning and end of sessions (getting bored in the middle). Random list.

I would take this a step further though. "Fooling ourself" seems like a weak version of such an effect - especially belief isn't causal, but rather a filtering of what you might attempt to do. (i.e. It's intention which brings about change, and believing something simply means you are more likely to go all-out with intending it.)

Instead, it would be more interesting to see if we could "assert new facts" deliberately. Perhaps mind = reality, and so all cases of cause and effect are, in effect, expectation or habit (i.e. residual intention) by someone, singly or collectively...?

(Aside: And we might ponder what "collectively" would actually mean. If there were contrasting intentions, would we be competing or would we simply have divergent experiences.)

[EDIT: Added headings to avoid wall-of-textness!]

Consistent Patterned Reality

So by making part of the pattern "concrete" or realizing it, all the other parts of the pattern must necessarily come into reality, in order for reality to remain consistent.

Right, but it's completely automatic, like autocomplete.

It's like we accumulate facts and those facts act as a filter or formatting for what can be experience subsequently. A new fact narrows the possible future facts. It's a bit like exploring memories by association (as we've said before). You recall a memory pattern and then you are restricted as to what you can remember from there. The rule is that the next pattern must always "make sense". It must always be thinkable from where you have got to so far.

If you are in a "moment" where observe that a particle is in a certain state, then you can only move to "next-moments" which make sense, which correspond to a coherent world. For as long as there is ambiguity, though, your "next-moments" are less restricted. So long as you don't know, you have more flexibility.

The facts-of-the-world are being fixed in real time.

That's why it's good to focus on actual experience. What you imagine about something just doesn't count. (Unless perhaps you imagine it really, really intensely...)

Uncertainty and Unpindownability

I was thinking of the uncertainty principle the other day and how interesting it is that reality doesn't seem to want to be pinned down to a single set of physical parameters.

When two things are the same thing but divided across formatting structures - e.g. it has aspects in time and aspects in space, like position and momentum - then we have a problem.

It's like trying to see both sides of a coin at the same time. The coin is a single pattern, but because our experiencing is formatted "spatially" then we can't experience both sides at once. It our experiencing had been formatted "spectrally" then perhaps we would be unable to see different colours at once.

We make this mistake again and again: seeing "two things" when it is just aspects of "one thing". In the limit, of course, we realise that the universe itself is just "one thing" and the only divisions which exist are the formatting of our minds.

Those psi experiments are cool, but to me they always seemed too experimentally "soft" for the mainstream to take them seriously.

Yeah. Actually, it works the other way than you might think: anything that isn't "soft" is very hard to get a mainstream study going in. You're right: the telepathic vs reality effect is difficult, as is the causing vs predicting thing in general.

I'm not very interested in psi research work actually, of this type. Just experimenting with generating synchronicity and so on, it is easy enough to prove to yourself that there is a flexible aspect. The official recognition that "stuff goes on" is nice. But there are also inherent limits maybe, due to the way experiences are formed.

If we want to assert new facts, it seems like these are the two inhibitors that need to be overcome.

I think those two things are very present. Children often are intention machines actually - environment responds to their moods; strange experiences. Some stories also indicate a problem...

And that problem is that the "world-sharing" model doesn't appear to be a simple one. If you have an "extreme intention" it may just be that you stop sharing your environment with those who would not want to experience the results. I don't mean by that that people disappear, more that you are sharing your reality experience with the versions of "extended people" that overlap with your own formatting.

Make a dramatic change, and you've shifted the "world-pattern" to what you want, but only you have a memory of the previous state.

Btw, I was thinking that maybe that's how "magick" works.

Yes, I think it exactly works via plausible mechanism. There is no actual mechanism, but adopting a "second cause" (an apparent technique or method, combined with a shared worldview for confidence) allows an "as if" mechanism. More precisely, I think that magick and indeed the everyday world works by what we might call "Active Metaphors". That the conceptual model you have adopted = the formatting of your mind = the formatting of your experience. Change your formatting, change your experience.

Common metaphors = common, shared, everyday experience. Unusual metaphors = unusual experience. Deliberately utilising this would be the deliberate practice of magick. I've actually played with this quite a lot. It comes as a direct offshoot of contemplating the structuring of the mind really. Synchronicity, imagination, direct intention, willing. Variations on the theme of perception.

Want to try it?

What do you have "in mind"? :-)

Just this Saturday, I tried to "intentionally" find a frisbee to play frisbee golf at the park.

Yeah, that's how it kind of works mostly. I don't think it's restricted to that though. The takeaway from the OP experiment is: "The only rule is that the world-pattern must remain consistent overall".

However in this area we push into new territory: About how observations may arise, and if observations have to be permanently "true", and what keeps prior observations being apparently "true". If all that's required is that the world-pattern remains consistent, we can make potentially make any changes we like so long as the world continues to "make sense".

And surely "making sense" is a property of the mind, not of an external universe. In other words, if an observation is a sensory experience and there is no "solid world" behind them, perhaps the only making that observation continue to be "true" and have an effect on future observations, is us...

I'm just wondering how far this goes. People often talk of Steve Jobs as having had a "reality distortion field". Maybe he did in fact have one.

Steve Jobs exactly was into this sort of thing. If you read his biography, his history is along those sort of lines. Not "magickal" but more a muddle of Zen and intention. However, I also think he never really understood it, it was based more on a sort of narcissistic arrogance, self-delusion and lack of awareness. He sometimes believed rather than knew. He did after all die of thinking he could cure pancreatic cancer via a diet (a diet which he'd been on, and is linked with pancreatic troubles). In other words, sometimes he use "force of will", but other times he resorted to "second cause".

Was that history in the Walter Isaacson bio?

Yes. It's surprisingly not very fawning at all, as it goes, considering it's official. To Jobs' credit, he encouraged him to write what he thought, to be accurate.

(I mean, Jobs had all sorts of issues, denying his own daughter for 20 years, weird emotional things with people and not understanding them as people, having family meetings about choosing a washing machine. I think he was pretty 'internal', probably mildly autistic or aspergers or whatever. He definitely had problems with feeling-out, both in the 'empathy' and in the 'deciding' sense. This classic picture said it all.)

Do you know about the 5-Hour Energy founder, Manoj Bhargava?

No, that's interesting. He probably found that the mystics had been buzzing on a local lucozade for years.

Actually, now that I think about it, the possibility of this stuff does scare me somewhat. I'm not really sure why...

Perhaps it's because, if you can change anything, and anything includes your experience of being-a-person, then you realise there is nowhere to stand that is stable (it seems) - and you can only be the background context in which experiences arise.

If it's true that the only rule is "the world-pattern must remain coherent overall", then you can completely remake the world right now. Just declare prior observations arbitrary, and being again with a fresh observation this moment. But what does that mean for all that you have (apparently) been and experienced thus far?

Perhaps the experience of Narada can cast some light upon the matter:

Narada, Vishnu and Maya
In Devi Bhagwata Purana, it is mentioned that once Narada asked Vishnu about the secret nature of Maya (Illusion).
“What is Maya?” asked Narada.
“The world is my Maya. He who accepts this, realizes me,” said Vishnu.
“Before I explain, will you fetch me some water?” requested the Lord pointing to a river.
Narada did as he was told. But on his way back, he saw a beautiful woman. Smitten by her beauty, he begged the woman to marry him. She agreed.
Narada built a house for his wife on the banks of the river. She bore him many children. Loved by his wife, adored by his sons and daughters, Narada forgot all about his mission to fetch water for Vishnu.
In time, Narada’s children had children of their own. Surrounded by his grandchildren, Narada felt happy and secure. Nothing could go wrong.
Suddenly, dark clouds enveloped the sky. There was thunder, lightning, and rain. The river overflowed, broke its banks and washed away Narada’s house, drowning everyone he loved, everything he possessed. Narada himself was swept away by the river.
“Help, help. Somebody please help me,” he cried. Vishnu immediately stretched out his hand and pulled Narada out of the water.
Back in Vaikuntha, Vishnu asked, “Where is my water?”
“How can you be so remorseless? How can you ask me for water when I have lost my entire family?”
Vishnu smiled. “Calm down, Narada. Tell me, where did your family come from? From Me. I am the only reality, the only entity in the cosmos that is eternal and unchanging. Everything else is an illusion – a mirage, constantly slipping out of one’s grasp.”
“You, my greatest devotee, knew that. Yet, enchanted by the pleasures of worldly life, you forgot all about me. You deluded yourself into believing that your world and your life were all that mattered and nothing else was of any consequence. As per your perspective, the material world was infallible, invulnerable, perfect. That is Maya.”
Thus Vishnu dispelled Narada’s illusion, bringing him back to the realm of reality and making him comprehend the power of Maya over man.

Thought experiment: What if your girlfriend (or whatever) had blonde hair and you'd prefer brunette. What if you could just intend and change that "fact" now. Would you? If not why not?

Okay, what if instead you could intend and then events would unfold such that she changed her hair colour (spontaneously deciding to dye it). Would you? If so, why would that be better? Just because there's a little "story" between what you did and how the result seemed to happen?

Interesting things to ponder, and examine your actual response.

EDIT: Extra sentences about Steve Jobs, added a thought experiment.

When a death event occurs, if our awareness is so opposed to death at that moment...

Yes. I think there is always a next-moment. That next-moment might be that the crash didn't happen, or that you survived miraculously, or maybe you experience "dying and leaving your body and going somewhere else", or even just losing all memory and being reborn. But... there's always more dream no matter what.

So, the next-moment as defined by a mix of plausibility and pattern momentum, perhaps?

Talking about altering facts, it could be possible that some larger scale fact-altering experiment has already been conducted...

Could be. There does seem to be a lot of fluctuating. I think it's a mix of there being shared updates, and there not being a single shared world really. Something more like multiple personal dreams with overlaps which come and go.

In other words, the "consciousness" that is experiencing being-Scroon and the "consciousness" that is experiencing being-George overlap (are both looking out into the same space) so long as we are aligned. We share some "trajectory" together. Our dream-space becomes common and entangled for a while.

However, if I intend something that is completely contrary to your intentions, our worlds may disentangle, and the "Scroon" in my experience won't have "you" looking through it anymore.

If we really go crazy with reality manipulation, perhaps we end up completely alone in our world - with nobody else sharing the experiencing, nobody else looking through the perspective of the other people. The more "God-like" I try to become, the more that might be the case, since nobody else would want to have the experience of being the other people in my life...

Deity is a dirty, lonely business!

EDIT: Bad internet made the posts multiply per revision, so deleted 'em except this one.

Hey, perhaps that's part of the fear of taking over the world through intention. It's a subconscious knowledge that you can manipulate other people, but then they cease to be awarenesses and function simply as behvioral automatons.

It is part of it - but remember that unless (and even if) you directly manipulate them, they are not automatons, they are completely human and going along their own trajectory as characters in your dream. And even then...

This is the case anyway. Even if you're not doing it consciously, the aspect of other people you are experiencing corresponds to the state of your mind. In fact, are the state of your mind - since the content of your mind is your experiences, and that takes in perceptions, sensations, thoughts: all experiential objects and events.

You are exploring the state of your own mind whether you like it or not. Deliberately changing the state of your mind is just you unfolding consciously rather than accidentally. Until now, you just didn't know what you were doing anyway...

Changing this "external" stuff by willing is no different to moving your arms and legs. It's all you. And as you wouldn't bend your arms the wrong way (them being "you"), you wouldn't bend the people you encounter inappropriately (they are "you" too). So ironically, the potential for "powers" comes with it a realisation which means you are more compassionate to others in your world, rather than less. The nature of power has this baked in because of its nature!

I just had a thought that reality could be like Tinder for patterned experiences.

Tinder: Reality Path Selector Upgrade - great! :-)

Q: means you are more compassionate to others in your world
Love and compassion keep coming up when exploring these things. Who would have thought?
I guess if you keep in mind that perhaps our awareness is part of the awareness of the totality of existence, then the idea of "me" vs. "others" ceases to have meaning.
Yesterday, I was thinking about the nature of individual cells in the body. One cell can alter its environment by expressing signals, yet you wouldn't say that it's necessarily controlling its neighbors. They are all part of the bodily experience, aspects of the same shared system while also in control locally.

Hmm. If you are your neighbours though? Or if your neighbours are your experiences? Because "you" yourself are an experience?

Oh man, now my head hurts. :)

Don't you mean... your experience of a head? :-)

...

If you approach this from a scientific materialism pov- consciousness is caused by the brain- If the universe keeps branching, creating copies of me, and copies of my brain, then I should be conscious of myself in all those universes that I'm still alive in. But I'm not- for some reason, my consciousness chose one of many paths, why? how? If we take a non-materialistic view and consciousness arises from the soul, not the brain- then the soul chose one of those many paths. So then in the rest of the universes I'm soulless, therefore have no consciousness? If not, then what? A different soul enters my body in those worlds? It doesn't matter if you take a materialist or non-materialist approach, the multiworld theory raises some really difficult and profound questions that don't seem to have answers.

In both cases you are assuming consciousness is somehow "in" the world and that the world is an actually spatially-extended place, independent of our experiencing of it.

If you flip it around, and have sensory experience arise within consciousness - and have time and space as the structuring of mind rather than an external structuring, a la Kant and others - you avoid all this. "Many universes" are just "different conscious experiences" aligned to a different set of facts (none of which takes up any space). There are no bodies to be filled: a "body" is just a set of sensations and thoughts, an experience.

Meanwhile, given that time is not something that "passes" but is instead an aspect of experience, all possible viewpoints and experiences are in effect active simultaneously. One consciousness then takes on all experiences at the same "time" - including being-UniversalChairs and being-BlahBlahBlasphemee.

TL;DR: None of these things is an issue, they come from assuming that time and space are properties of the universe independent of conscious experiencing. Actually, there is just one thing. Can't get more Ockam than that... ;-)

This experiment actually involved either adding or taking away the second grating AFTER the atom hit the detector. In different rounds of the experiment, they tried both ways, adding the grate or taking it away. In every case, changing the experiment after the atom hit the detector changed the behavior that the atom exhibited in the past when it passed the detector. That's what's so remarkable about this. It is a delayed-choice-oops-I-changed-my-mind-again experiment.

But it's important to say that it didn't change the behaviour that the atom exhibited, right? That atom didn't have any behaviour at the grating/non-grating, because we didn't observe it there at the time it passed. It's important here to distinguish between inferred behaviour due to a model or expectation, and observed behaviour. The only behaviour observed was at the detector.

The real takeaway is that our little stories about "particles going on a journey" are just imagination?

Yes, that's a good point. The information gained is necessarily after the fact. So when speaking of behavior, it must be "inferred behavior".

Right. "Behaviour" is a sensory thing, it is the name of an observation. There is no such thing as unobserved behaviour. Imagining something in your mind is not the same as it happening. Imagining that "something happened" but is unknown, is still not the same anything happening. It's not that we don't know what happened. It's that nothing happened. Because "happening" is an experience.

Q: There is no such thing as unobserved behaviour.
Yup. That's basically what this experiment proves. Even though we have this perspective of a linear flow of time, and we would expect that the particle hit the detector at a certain moment in time, that's not the case at all. Nothing happened until we observed it happening, in which case what we think of as "the past" seems to have been impossibly been altered by the future. In reality, if such a thing as an atom and a temporal dimension exist in any fundamental way, they're not bound by linear time.

It is a dream-world - one that we are dreaming into being, moment-by-moment!

Really, I suppose all of this is saying what a clear-minded focus would reveal. If you never fantasised (thought-about things) ever again, your experience of the world would be accurate. There is obviously no such thing as a past or future. There is obviously no such thing as an object or event you have not seen. Those are just "sensory shadows", mere imaginings, overlaid on our actual experience...

Of course, if you didn't think, then you wouldn't be able to enjoy that realisation...

The detector did record some state at the moment that the atom passed it.

No, it didn't record anything at the time. The detector wasn't in any state until it was observed. Nothing "happened" at all until an observation was made. There was no fact-of-the-matter until then.

The real takeaway here is that information in the past that is unknown in the present is actually not determined at all until an action in the present decides what happened in the past; at which point the past that we get is one consistent with our present.

The essential is right, but you are still describing an unfolding of unobserved events in time surely? The past in this account only exists in the imagination, remember. The connective story is about the past, but nothing happened in the past. If you imagine being the scientist, looking through his eyes, moment by moment - while avoiding imagining anything else going on from a "god's eye" perspective - then those are the only facts-of-the-matter.

Q: No, it didn't record anything at the time.
Well, yeah, you're right. It's more accurate to say that if our expectations of linear time held true, then the detector would have recorded some state at this moment. But because the state is able to be determined at a point in time after the point that the atom should have been at the detector, this seems to show that indeed nothing happened until the outcome was determined and the observation was made.

Right! It's our story-making that is in error, with our assumption that the world is inherently spatially-extended and temporally-sequenced, rather than just our experience.

I'm really pleased this experiment has been revisited. The original versions lead to the same conclusions, but they have become lost in time (excuse!) such that discussing them seems like 1950's philosophical curios rather than genuinely serious.

I've always been drawn to that idea for as long as I've known about the 2 gate test.

Quite! That and David Bohm's approach - the implicate order and so on - pretty much got me on this. In effect, we are dealing with a situation where - although only a small part of it is unfolded into the senses - the entire timeline of world is always present and available for revision, limited only by the restriction that it must "make sense" as a whole.

Which leads us to ask: isn't that restriction just something that we impose?

Literally I've been building a very stable theory on how everything is governed and this just confirmed a big part of my theory.
A simple, but extremely plausible example I'll put out is let's say everyone on June 1st had a great day, or close to everyone. There's a chance that a related event (spawned from a simple thought that "snowballed" into existent) can be created that took place 1 year ago to 50 years ago. I definitely have started discovering my profound fascination in our life right now

Because... there is no "50 years ago"? There is just a self-consistent present experience?

If a new "fact" was somehow created now that implied an event had occurred 50 years ago, then subsequently all observations would be consistent with that event having occurred 50 years ago. There is no actual history, there is just observation, observation, observation... sometimes an observation is "about" a past event, but there is no actual persistent past event. Only a coherent experience now.

We don't know what time is, or isn't.

Perhaps the answer is: there isn't.

Actually that comment should have had some "consider this" type question marks, since it was indeed written as speculation rather than declaration - duly added! However, I'll stand by the idea that "all time is now", that the "past" is embedded into "now", which in effect means time is an aspect of the observation, not of the universe. (Following on from OP.)

Maybe. But, at this point, it's purely personal guesswork... Theres very little conclusive evidence, either way.

I think in matters of time and space, it comes down to personal experimentation. Time and space are the "fundamental formatting" of perception. This is different to the representation of time and space in descriptive schemes.

Which gives us a problem in terms of studying it "objectively": you can't. Observation and modelling rely on reality being "made of parts" before you can begin, and time and space is what lets experience be made of parts (spatial partitioning: objects, temporal partitioning: events).

It's basically the same thing as trying to study consciousness.

Time and space necessarily existed long before consciousness came on the scene...

I disagree. I definitely don't see how they existed "before consciousness". Particularly since they are concepts derived from subjective experience.

...experience exists within an objective framework that is space and time

I'd say that experience might be "formatted" in terms of space and time, but I don't see how experience exists within an "objective" anything. It's important to distinguish between our stories about our experience - stories which of course exist only within conscious experience - and the actual nature of experience itself. We can only ever really examine the formatting of our own minds: Our thoughts about our minds, are of course within our minds and therefore subject to its formatting.

We imagine space and time to be pre-existing only because our thoughts are inherently structured as "shadow sensory experiences", and so pre-formatted by space and time. We cannot perceive or think our way beyond that formatting, so we incorrectly assume it is inherent to the universe. (Except for the occasional mystical experience, of course.)

The experiment described in OP point exactly in this direction (and it's an old idea in philosophy too: Berkeley, Kant, etc).

Okay, I'll accept the only thing we can ever know is our own perception, and we cannot know to what extent that is wrong.

And even: wrong compared to what, exactly? We can only compare one experience with another.

So, when I refer to the universe, I'm simply talking about the apparent one.

Me too. The universe of human experiences.

That apparent universe is composed of quarks, which themselves may be composed of something else.

Well, strictly speaking - and what is at the core of the experiment described in OP - is that the universe isn't composed of quarks as such. Quarks are ideas in effect, just like atoms. They are connective concepts between observations. What you have described - quarks, particles, and so on - is a connective story, a fictional framework. One that operates very nicely in terms of linking particular observations together. It's not "how it really is" though. As any good physicist would tell you: physics is about models which predict observations within their remit, not about truth.

[the story...] if indeed, anything can be said to that affect at all.

That's probably about right. Nothing much can be said about that. All we can do is come up with a conceptual framework which matches present observations.

it follows consciousness is an emergent property of space and time, and not the other way around.

Well, it doesn't follow at all. Our scientific work starts from observations as a conscious being. That is the primary fact. The whole idea of emergence of consciousness from matter is extremely problematic, and not supported by evidence.

Which is why even neuroscientists such as Christof Koch are referring philosophical ideas like panpsychism, and cognitive scientists such as Donald Hoffman theorising about interface theories and conscious realism. Both take consciousness to be a fundamental property of "whatever it is that the universe is made from".

In fact, the work of Wheeler (the designer of the OP experiment) leads very much to conclusions of this sort as a solution to the "hard problem of consciousness", as described by David Chalmers:

Wheeler (1990) has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this "it from bit" doctrine, the laws of physics can be cast in terms of information, postulating different states that give rise to different effects without actually saying what those states are. It is only their position in an information space that counts. If so, then information is a natural candidate to also play a role in a fundamental theory of consciousness. We are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental, and on which it has two basic aspects, corresponding to the physical and the phenomenal features of the world.
--Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers

To continue...

However, that isn't apparent from observation, so we must proceed, especially when dealing with each other, with what is apparent.

We must proceed from what is apparent, but we must bear in mind that what we mean is: "what is apparent to us". Without this, results such as the OP experiment become intractable.

It is apparent space and time are not only prerequisites for conscious perception, but that they don't require it and certainly existed long before it.

It is more accurate to say that "nothing can be said" about this. I don't think we can say that time and space are prerequisites for experience. All we can say is that they are aspects of experience. Of our experience.

When a physics experiment (as above) is obviously operating outwith that formatting, we can say with certainty that it is not a fundamental division in the world-as-it-is, it is only a division in the-world-as-experienced.

If we don't make the distinction, we cannot model these observations.

Maybe that isn't true, but maybe the universe is an aliens pre-school project... It doesn't matter, since both are equally likely to be the case, along with an infinite number of other arbitrary assertions.

Hmm. It's only you that is making arbitrary assertions beyond what can be observed. I am strictly within what is observable and making no assertions that go beyond sensory experience and thought - to the extent that I am not willing to confuse the structure of experience with the structure of the universe. Which is just as well - because if I had done so, the Wheeler Delayed Choice experiment would be not a fascinating reveal of our assumptions, but the breakdown of the universe itself.

EDIT: Not exactly sure where you were going with the flying, simulation and aliens stuff? Just because there's no solid world beyond conscious observation (as indicated), doesn't mean there is no structure to experience.

After all, that is what we are truly studying: the regularities of the human experience.

POST: How to produce a glitch in the matrix (part 1)

...another way that I might frustrate it would be by acting without a goal.

That's actually an interesting line of experimentation. There is a difference between performing an action with a purpose in mind, and simply performing an action. A different experience results, even though in a basic sense the behaviour is apparently identical.

A mundane example would be, while sat down: to move your muscles in a way that corresponds to standing up, versus intending to stand up and allowing movement. The former amounts to "intending my muscles to move" whereas the latter is "intending to stand up". You have to actually do the experiment to get the difference. (I think that, in this case, most people typically move using a muddle of the two.) You can then extend this to target outcomes which are not so "local" in terms of timeframe or location.

As for the rest of it - it sounds very much like you were becoming aware of your own patterning, and observing that making changes to this can have quite unexpected side-effects for our perception of more than just ourselves. Although we tend to conceive of ourselves as both perceiving an external world directly, and also making conscious behavioural choices on a moment-by-moment basis, a brief period of observation shows that this isn't the case. In the first case, all sorts of quirks reveal this not to be true, and in the second we discover our ongoing life is more like a "spontaneous multi-sensory happening" that we only occasionally redirect intentionally. Even the feeling of "doing" can turn out to be more like a habitual experience of muscular tension, than actual choice-making and controlling.

I'd suggest not getting overly focused on theories relating to "simulations" and so on - a lot of that stuff is just today's cultural metaphor of the moment; it's best to stay grounded by paying attention to what you actually experience, rather than getting swallowed up by a narrative about what's happening in an imaginary "behind-the-scenes" that you will never observe.

Aside: If you leave a blank line (hit return twice) in your text, that'll create some more paragraphs. It would make reading your post much easier - thanks. Meanwhile, your pattern-breaking counter-action idea reminded me a little of The Dice Man.

POST: Do any of you really believe that life really is a computer program?

It's a fun thing to think about philosophically, but the actual notion of "a computer program" being used ends up being so abstract as to be pretty much meaningless. It ends up being just another version of the older idea that the-world-as-it-is is not of the same format as our sensory experience of it. In other words, that its basic structure is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", and that apparent division, multiplicity and change are aspects of experience rather than inherent properties of the world itself.

A related point would be that our descriptions about the world are "parallel constructions in thought" and actually say nothing about the world itself. We never "think the world", we only think our thoughts. Noticing that some of the content of our experience deviates from the usual narrative, and that some aspects of it are of the same structure as the "computer programs" story, doesn't necessarily mean much. Typically we are just comparing one conceptual framework to another. It just highlights that our descriptions are generally very basic, and that we are good at noticing partial pattern matches in two strands of experience (where strand 0 = ongoing sensory experience; strand 1 = our thoughts about sensory experience; strand 2 = our thoughts about computers).

TL;DR: The world is not "a computer program". Also, though, the world is not "a world".

POST: Sudden realization about the universe's nature before falling asleep

[POST]

Well, last 27/march i had this unexpected information "download" right before falling asleep, i had almost forgot that. So i'll register this here because i think it somehow fits this subreddit.
I laid in my bed and i haven't though about anything that dense for the whole day, but suddenly i became this internal monologue that just flood through like i was listening to a podcast, but also was myself. It was like that:
-What is time?
-Every single moment is like a sheet of a book. They are really thin slices, and everything is right here, right now: past, present and future, in the whole universe this is the same.
-So i'm existing at the same time everyone else in the whole history far back and far in the future?
-I am
-But the planet is moving in the space, we won't be even in the same spot
-The planet and everything else is simultaneously all the same places it was and it will ever be, these are just different sheets of the book
-but how does the book move forward?
-the universe is expanding like a wavelength, and the different lengths are the different pages in the book
-So its possible to travel through time
-You just have to syntonize the right wavelenght. you might sintonize to a bad place like the outer space, though, because earth could be somewhere else by that point.
-so better get a space suit to do this, right.
It seems shallow and a little pseudoscientific, but there were some other times i just "had information". When i was younger, like 4 or 5 years old, i had a friend of my age complaining about bug bites. He started kid's shenanigans like making up things. The dialogue was something like this:
-Bugs bite us because bugs are bad!
-They aren't bad, that's just something they have to do.
-No, they're evil! they likes to hurt us.
-They only do this because they have to, it makes no sense they would get so close just to be annoying!
-I heard they poop under our skin and put nasty things in there!
-They could just poop anywhere, they wouldn't risk getting slapped just to poop under our skins
-Why would they do this, then?
-To feed on our blood and put eggs and their little bugs would feed on us until they could get out.
Since when he first said that "bugs were bad" i just knew the whole thing, and at the same time i made these affirmations, inside i was like "how do i know this? why can i be so sure?".
Whatever. Note that all of these was in another language.
Tr;Dr: sleepy me knew shit about time, 5 yo me knew shit about arthropods biology.

[END OF POST]

A1: I had something somewhat-similar happen in middle school.
I was in 8th grade, and for some reason that I still do not understand, I suddenly developed an interest in time travel. I did in-depth research and study for over 3 weeks. Keep in mind, I was only 14 years old and had no understanding of quantum physics. Yet, here I was reading fucking Michio Kaku and soaking it all up like some kind of guru. I spent every hour I could on the internet looking up reports and theories, and the rest of the time I'd be highlighting lines in material I'd printed out, taking notes, and drawing detailed diagrams. I understood it all, and more than that, I expanded on these theories and developed my own. I had done what no scientist had done before - I not only figured out how time travel could be accomplished, I declared reality itself to be another dimension that can actually be traversed, and I also discovered a new law of nature that explains that paradoxes are avoided by the automatic creation of a new universe to counteract it - thus, paradoxes are both unavoidable and impossible at the same time.
Or, as I wrote in my 8-page report:
"For every paradox, there is another universe created to balance it."
Long story short: What you came up with in your epiphany is absolutely correct. If anyone wants more information, I still have the full text of my report with diagrams and all.
I sent it to a former science teacher I knew who used to be a physics professor, and he said it all sounds plausible and does not contradict any known laws or fundamentals that he's aware of - in other words, everything I came up with in this random unexplained period of advanced interest... is scientifically accurate. Since then, the multiverse theory has gained more widespread acceptance, and more theories come out all the time that fall exactly in line with mine! It's freaky, I really think I'm on to something here, and I think you are too!
EDIT: Addendum: When you refer to the universe as a "book" and the different points in time as the "pages", my theory would say that this "book" is one volume of an ever-expanding series. Turning the page is fourth-dimensional travel (Einstein said that time is the fourth dimension, no different than the others in that out consciousness travels along it), that's the linear past-to-present-to-future progression that we are familiar with. Fourth dimensional travel is merely what we interpret as the passing of time. To "time travel" requires fifth-dimensional travel, that is, actually exiting the book and going to another book in the series.

I like that. Now, it's probably not best termed "science" since it can never be tested intersubjectively (this applies to "multiverse" and also "eternal" descriptions more generally; this is not a criticism), but those sorts of extended space metaphors - which provide a wider context for time - do come up in philosophy and fiction quite a bit, and I think they can be very helpful.

Examples include JW Dunne's The Serial Universe and An Experiment With Time, which take a similar route; Julian Barbour's The End of Time describes a "Platonia" where all moments exist simultaneously. The writings of Jorge Luis Borges are full of these sorts of things - see The Library of Babel and The Garden of Forking Paths, for instance.

What they help us do is free ourselves of the hidden assumption that the world-as-it-is, is of the same format as our ongoing experience - that is, that the world is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Reconfiguring it as a simultaneous and persistent set of "frames" that can be traversed - an "infinite grid of all possible moments", for example - can be quite powerful. In particular, it can encourage us to reconsider what "we" are, as observers relative to the content of our experience (and maybe make connections between time and perception in philosophical idealism and so on).

Meanwhile, I think the common assumptions about what someone who is "only 14 years old" can come up with are often widely off base. My own interest in things like reality, perception mind kicked off around the same time, and in much the same depth. Curiosity is the most important thing - when you're focused on something and put the hours in, very few things are that difficult, if you have imagination.

POST: Try it at home! See the matrix in a laser cat toy.

The speckle pattern? Not a glitch as such, but interesting to ponder because it encourages us to revisit assumptions we might have about our experience. From that Wikipedia entry:

A speckle pattern is an intensity pattern produced by the mutual interference of a set of wavefronts.[1] This phenomenon has been investigated by scientists since the time of Newton, but speckles have come into prominence since the invention of the laser and have now found a variety of applications.
Speckle patterns typically occur in diffuse reflections of monochromatic light such as laser light. Such reflections may occur on materials such as paper, white paint, rough surfaces, or in media with a large number of scattering particles in space, such as airborne dust or in cloudy liquids.

There's a nice little summary which corresponds to your own experimentation somewhat, here. Excerpt:

==1) The speckle is not on the surface you are viewing. To prove this, hold a pencil at your near point and focus on it while gazing at the screen. The speckle pattern is still sharp! If you wear glasses, take them off: no difference. Speckle is an interference pattern in space caused by the coherent light of the laser being reflected from the rough surface.

Because the speckle pattern is not located on any particular plane in space, you will have trouble focussing on a laser-illuminated surface; the eye involuntarily tries to focus on the speckle grains. Try reading a printed page by laser light. Try again while moving your head.
The apparent "grain size" of the speckle depends upon your distance from the viewing screen and also the aperture available to your eye. For example, if you hold a variable iris in front of your eye, closing the aperture will increase the coarseness of the speckle pattern; the same thing happens if you step further away from the screen.
The speckle pattern is sharp regardless of your visual acuity. In fact, you can use speckle as a crude eye test: stand about 2m from the illuminated surface, and move your head slowly from side to side. If the speckle pattern appears to move in the same sense as your head motion (i.e., pattern moves left as your head moves left), you are far-sighted. If motion is in the opposite sense, you are nearsighted. If there is no motion of the pattern, you have normal, 20/20 vision. If you wear glasses, try this test with and without your glasses; if you have normal vision, simulate nearsightedness and farsightedness by holding positive and negative lenses in front of your eye.
Speckle is observed only for stationary surfaces. For example, your hand will not display clear speckle, nor will the surface of a glass of milk (use the milk surface, not the glass) -- milk is a colloidal suspension and the Brownian motion of the suspended particles destroys the pattern. This fact can be exploited to detect vibrational motions with amplitude as small as a quarter-wavelength (about 0.15 micron) with the unaided eye.==

So, your final idea that the pattern is "in the universe" is not a bad one - although I would probably phrase it as the pattern being "distributed throughout space" or something like that.

You should have posted this as a question in r/askscience.
But do try placing three pencil leads together and creating an interference patten using your laser. That'll get you into theoretical physics and hopefully not in to psuedoscientific woo/ eastern mysticism mixed with perversion of quantum physics...
[http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-perform-Interference-and-Diffranction-at-Ho/]

To be fair to OP, though, I don't think he was in much danger of mangling mysticism and optics. It's really refreshing when people pursue their own explorations into phenomena like this - engaging in structured investigations, being wary of assumptions - since hopefully that critical eye spills over into thinking about glitches, maybe life more generally. And who knows, perhaps it might even inspire metaphors/models that are more useful than the ones that are currently predominant?

POST: [X-Post r/MandelaEffect] Myers-Briggs Personality Types

If there were a correlation, I suppose it might also be that only the more introspective people actually pay attention to, contemplate further, any odd experiences they have - or have an interest in this stuff as a topic. The subscribers to the subreddits might be disproportionately introspective, then, but that could just be a case of those types being more interested in such "fantastical" concepts as part of their richer inner life - and also a general bias in the reddit community overall.

POST: [META] What is the logic behind reality?

The word "real" causes a lot of problems for this stuff, I guess. Most people interpret "real" as meaning "out there independent of me", even though they never experience such a thing. What they actually mean is that the experience corresponds to a particular narrative, fits with a particular conceptual framework (specifically: the "container concept" that is "the objective world").

So concentrating on just the experience for the moment: neither Dad is false in and of themselves, the "falseness" is just a thought of "falseness" we have as subsequent "sensory frames" of experience render the "real Dad" narrative unworkable. Similar, perhaps, to the way "a dream" is really a "having woken up". Until you woke up, you weren't actually dreaming - because "dreaming" as an explanation is the choosing of the "I was dreaming" narrative; it is not part of the experience.

Really, we have to make a distinction between "ongoing sensory content" and thoughts 'about' that content. They are both strands of experience, though; they are both content within awareness. We could view them as being two streams of thought - it's just that one of them is a "bright 3D-immersive" thought ("reality" or "the world") and the other is a weaker diminished thought ("thoughts 'about' the world").

The mistake we often make is to confuse the latter as being identical with the former. However, there is no mechanism-based causal relationship between the two, and there's no reason to assume that the "given" strand is patterned in the same way as the "constructed" strand. Just as there is no reason to assume that the world-as-it-is is formatted in the same way as our human perception - that is, the world is not necessarily a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", which is the assumption most of our narratives are based upon.

So I suppose the crux of this is the idea of "aboutness", and how this can lead to confusion when it comes to the relationship between different aspects of experience.

POST: [META] Collecting common glitch report themes?

Having played with this a little myself (I am a mod here), it's actually really hard to group them in a way that makes sense; going through them, you find that whatever the "underlying" of the glitches is, it's not mapped very well to object-based categories.

At best, one might map them to groupings like: "object location", "temporal location", "object form", "abstract facts" and so on, but they are so broad as to become fairly meaningless. Very quickly you realise they all resolve to something like "a discontinuity in the formatting or content of subjective experience".

Of course, that conclusion, and the difficulty of categorising glitches, is itself is a pointer to the nature of glitches.

POST: Oranges.

[POST]

I haven't eaten an orange for over a year maybe. Used to eat them all the time they were around, but stopped for some reason. Today I decided "hey, I should eat some oranges". So a couple of hours ago I bought oranges and brought them to the house, but haven't eaten one yet. Instead, I started reading a book that's been sitting on my hard drive for a month. I wanted to read it for some time, but only started today for some reason. Guess what the author wants me to do? This:
...imagine that you’ve just arrived from another planet and have never encountered an orange before. Now take a few minutes to experience a piece of fruit in a fresh new way
Oh, and the book is about meditation.

[END OF POST]

It's called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

And... how does that work, exactly?

If it's just a name or category for experiencing a clustering of a certain pattern, then great, but I'm not sure it adds much in terms of being an explanation (if that's what was intended). It's surely the start of a conversation, rather than a conclusion.

For example, if the model is that the thought of "hey, I should eat some oranges" caused him to "notice" more instances of oranges, even though the background population of instances was unchanged, that's an interesting idea. However, we have no access to an untainted dataset independent of a subject's "noticing". We can't differentiate between "the thought caused him to notice what was already there" and "the thought actually increased the number of subsequent instances of oranges".

Although your theory might be plausible in terms of the usual narrative of the human-world experience, it is unfortunately non-scientific, since it is impossible to test.

Even if we had someone else as a "control" prior to and during a test subject's exposure to an orange reference and their observation of subsequent instances, we couldn't discount the possibility that the control's instances were being modified by their orange-focused intention.

you are spot on, as usual ;-)

Wait - are you sure it's not just that you witnessed me being spot on once, and now confirmation bias is leading you to see me being spot on all the time? ;-)

...

Well then, that's that.

Well, someone's given it a name now, which means there's nothing more to discuss.

Did you know that the reason unsupported objects drop to the ground is because of "Falling Down Phenomenon"? People used to spend lots of money investigating ideas like "gravitational waves", until one day they realised there was a much simpler three-word explanation for what was happening, and that everyone could just go home.

We named it gravity. And yet we're just as clueless as we have always been.

Yeah. Well, at least we went a bit further in terms of constructing a useful narrative, rather than just calling it a name and stopping there. Although "gravity", as you are implying, is really the name of the narrative, and not something in "the world as it is". It's not very fashionable to draw a distinction between our descriptive fictions and "how things really are" at the moment, though.

Really, my reply was more directed at the commenter than you - and not necessarily intended to start discussion. So feel free to ignore. :-)

Every report of this type gets a few people stating the names of a couple of psychological phenomena as if it is an explanation, often out of context, without actually connecting it to the post. The implication is that there's nothing further to discuss, and that there'd be no point in people sharing similar experiences because they "are just" <insert-name-here>.

I disagree.

It's okay! I came here from /r/findareddit where I asked about a sub where I could share such experiences and read about others who had them, without all the explanations. I love science and build my worldview around it, but I'm tired of people waving away any genuine human experience just by mentioning some XYZ effect.

Well, you are in the right place I think! Generally speaking, this is a pretty welcoming sub that is indeed mostly about gathering and sharing accounts of unusual experiences.

Beyond that, yes, it encourages discussion based on standard or more esoteric ideas - to let the thoughts go where they may, mainly for the fun of it, but definitely not in order to dismiss the experience. Unfortunately, a small subset people are a bit too keen to "explain away" things based on a concept they read in a popular science article, for example, without really offering an account how exactly it explains OP's story. This tends to be a bit of a conversation-stopper, hence my picking up on it (as a moderator). You can just not engage with that. :-)

Did you read the linked article? It more than names the phenomenon:
From the article's summary of Stanford linguistic professor Arnold Zwiky's attempt at an explanation or "useful narrative": It’s caused, he wrote, by two psychological processes. The first, selective attention, kicks in when you’re struck by a new word, thing, or idea; after that, you unconsciously keep an eye out for it, and as a result find it surprisingly often. The second process, confirmation bias, reassures you that each sighting is further proof of your impression that the thing has gained overnight omnipresence.
Not trying to be a dick but there is an explanation in the article, more than just a name.
Edit: fixed typo

Not very convincing, is it? It's really just a restatement of the assumption! How can we differentiate between this and there actually being more oranges?

Also, what does it mean to "unconsciously keep an eye out" for something? Isn't that saying we don't detect doing something but we are assuming a process for narrative convenience? For confirmation bias: again, isn't this meaningless unless we have a raw "environment dataset" and an "observed dataset"? Is BM not just an empty pseudo-science story with no solid foundation?

Which isn't to say I'm promoting an alternative account, only that there's not much reason to support this one vs leaving it as an open verdict.

Not trying to be a dick either - just pushing things along a bit! :-)

POST: [Theory] Why do we only hear "quantum immortality" stories from the "immortal" person's point of view? Why do we never hear "my loved one had a brush with death and now they insist that Thing used to be way X when it's always been way Y"?

I have a difficulty with quantum immortality, as it has been told to me:
If I jump into another reality when I come close to death, then in that other reality people may see me as dead, right? But in the new reality, what was going on with me for the duration that I was in the old reality? Did I just take over someone else's experience and life? Did I kill them? Even if you want to say they are both me, and I'm just switching camera views or something, it still stands that the person in the new reality was having conscious experiences before I took them over, and now they are not.
Unless you want to say that we are both sharing conscious experiences, but without knowledge of the other one sharing them. So which conscious experience is controlling the action? And if that body in the new reality has a near death experience, then it must jump to a new reality, and now you have 3 conscious experiences of 1 bodily experience and none have a right to control that experience. This could happen over and over again, with more and more consciousnesses occupying one body.
If you want to say that the new reality doesn't exist until you jump into it, then you must assume that nothing in your experience is really there, and be a solipsist.
Anyways, I just don't think it makes any sense. :/

A way out of this is to stop assuming that the format of the world is of a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time".

If instead, we are dealing with a pre-existing collection of "all possible sensory moments" across which we scan our attention, then we no longer have the problem of new and old realities and taking over people's lives. There are no people, as such, only that-which-experiencess. And there is nothing "happening" other than experiencing-of-moments.

Other realities aren't places, they are static moments. They don't "happen" when you are not experiencing them.

This is solipsism is the sense that "only mind exists and all possible experiences are within it", but it is not the same as saying only me-as-person exists, and so is less problematic I think.[1] In fact, it ties up nicely with your actual direct experience: all that you ever experience of the so-called "external world" arises within your "open aware mind-space"; this includes all your thoughts about the "external world"; you never experience any boundary to your mind-space.

So, the evidence supports this view in terms of the context of experience. The content of experience is actually irrelevant in a way, since in this view it becomes a sort of "3-dimensional sensory theatre" drawn from an eternal record, which can't tell you anything about "how things are really" (the context).

Finally, there is therefore no fundamental reason why an experiencer can't skip to a set of moments whose content conflicts with previously experienced moment. Integrity with respect to history is at best a habit of moment-selection, not a rule attached to a "universe" as such. And this may even mean having experiences of commenting on subreddits about how our experiences conflict...

__
[1] There could be any number of "experiencers" in theory. However, it makes no sense to talk of experiences happening at "the same time and place", since "times" and "places" are aspects of an experience, and are meaningless outside of an experience. Also, all experiencers would be identical really - all just an open experiencing-awareness - so there would be only one of them in effect, since experiencing-awareness would be "before" division, contrast and multiplicity. Hence an alternative phrasing: you will "eventually" have all possible experiences and everyone is effectively you, although not at the same time. Although also: kinda at the same time.

EDIT: Slightly long-winded, but I wasn't quite sure exactly which aspect you were picking up on. Solution: type a lot.

it is because time and location are aspects of experience that it makes perfect sense to speak of them in relation to experience, especially if you want to make argument s about how experience could shift between worlds.

Doesn't this separate "the world" from "experience", however? Note: I'm not saying that discussing things in terms of time and space is pointless, only that it is not meaningful to talk of time and space "between experiences". Actually, it's probably beneficial if we rename "time and space" as "change and division" when referring to experience itself. To have an experience of something, those are requirements. And so to have an experience of a "world", the content of our experience must be so-formatted. What we tend to call "time and space" is really something we infer from the experience of "change and division".

Anyway, the footnote is emphasising two things: First, that some of the difficulties people encounter when thinking of solipsism arise due to thinking about the context as if it were content. Second, that it is not meaningful to talk of shifting worlds using the language of worlds themselves. For as long as we are thinking of a world as a "place" that is "out there", treating that as the fundamental truth, then we will misunderstand the nature of experience and so of world-shifting. It may be relative truth (you have an experience "as if" such-and-such was the case), but the fundamental truth is unchanged (of an aware-experiencer who is having an experience of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person).

For example, say the house next door is painted red and the guy who owns it is called "Robert" (and everyone calls him by his full name because he hates contractions). One day, I wake up and see that the house is blue. I notice that everyone calls the owner "Bobby". Everyone claims that these two facts have always been the "new way" and only I remember differently. It is "as if" I have switched universes!

But what does that actually mean?

Well, what I actually experienced was a discontinuity in the content of by experience. I didn't actually experience "switching universes", that's just something I infer from a conceptual framework I have. In fact, the notion that I am even "in a world" is also something I infer from a conceptual framework. The notion that the room next door is "over there" assumes that the world is formatted like - is a continuation of the formatting of - my ongoing experience. And even then, only a part of my ongoing experience (since it is relatively easy to have spaceless-timeless experiences).

What are the implications of that?

It simply means that it is meaningless (but not pointless) to talk of time and space between worlds, or of worlds being "located" in any way - because a "world" is a concept inferred from a collection of similarly-structured moments, rather than a place.

In truth, if I pay attention, my actual experience is of being an "open aware space" with a constantly changing "3D multi-sensory image" floating in it, one aspect of which I've fallen into the habit of calling "me", and the rest "my body" and "the world". Anything beyond that involves thinking in terms of "the view from nowhere", which immediately means I am "already wrong" since that objective view can never be experienced; it does not exist. It is a connective fiction, an abstraction. Again, that doesn't mean it isn't useful - but for structuring purposes rather than finding the truth of the situation.

I'd say it's not that there can''t be a discussion about it - it's just a matter of being honest with ourselves about the nature of our descriptions?

I don't think we benefit from viewing our abstractions as actually true rather than being fitting narratives. It can even lead to us defending things which are essentially fictions, after they have outlived their usefulness. When talking about this stuff, I think we reach the limit of the fiction of the "objective world" container, and we have to adjust our approach accordingly.

As you indicate, if we insist that our narrative about "what is going on" must be in terms of "time and locational and individual experience" - even though we will never be able to make a direct observation to confirm this - then we might be effectively preventing ourselves from creating a useful narrative. We may even be making some experiences completely unexplainable in terms of our ability to create a model. It's like only looking for your lost keys under the streetlight, even though you have no idea where you dropped them!

I think 'glitch' experiences and 'quantum immortality' models are very vulnerable to this - hence all these "what happens to the people in the other timeline?" questions and similar. Those questions aren't actually questions based on experiences, they are questions based on a certain conceptual diagram (the timeline) or two (the cartesian co-ordinate system) which has been conflated with individual experience. It's the assumptions of the model that is creating the problem, and in this case those happen to correspond to unexamined assumptions about the nature of experience itself...

So, where does that leave us?

Actually it probably leaves us with more possibilities for coming up with explanations that connect to direct experience than ever before. Because we:

Treat the unchanging context of experience as fundamental (our "open aware perceptual space").
Treat the changing content of experience as primary (the 3D-sensory experience that arises within perception).
Recognise that everything beyond this is a connective fiction with a certain number of observational touch-points.

Freed from treating our abstractions as actually true, we are also freed from requiring that the nature of experience and the structure of experience must correspond to the format of the content of experience. (Avoiding the reification of abstractions, basically [http://www.ehu.eus/aitor/irakas/mes/Reference/mermin.pdf].)

POST: [Meta]Sight/Vision is just a mental hallucination

Can we talk about how basically everything we see is in our brains?

Well, if we're doing that we should probably talk about how even our brains are in our "brains". Where do we draw our philosophical boundary? All our evidence about the world arises in our mind, that is certain, and we never experience any "outside" to our mind. This includes our ideas about the world too. In that sense, everything is in our "brains". This might lead us to ask...

Even things like the television use three basic colors to create the illusion of multiple colors, distance, depth and movement when none of those things exists in that medium.

...is the world itself just an illusion in much the same way? Perhaps none of the things we perceive around us "exists in that medium" either. Are we exploring the formatting of our own minds, rather than the formatting of a world? The world itself, as it is, might be largely unstructured, to a greater or lesser degree. But to what degree?

Are we not influencing it as well?

The degree to which we can influence the world, would depend upon where the boundary lies that divides "formatting of your mind" and "formatting of the world". There would be no way to discern this, though, other than by experimenting with trying to make changes. Simply observing the world via mundane interactions, as we do in most science, would only tell you how things are right now; it would not reveal the limits of how it could be, surely?

So, what experiments can we do to discover the position of the "boundary of influence"?

Related: Darkroom Vision

POST: Did the matrix help me get out of my driving lesson? There's no such thing as a coincidence if you ask me.

What you need to look out for are those occasions where things don't work out in your favour...

One potential problem might be, if the looking-out-for itself shapes our experience, then there's just no way to win - and that doesn't even required the act of looking to be "causal", just "filtering". To expand:

Although we might imagine that there is an external world out there, an independent stable dataset, and our cognitive biases mislead us, we never have access to that external world. We only ever have access to our cognitive biases. In effect, our cognitive biases are our experiences of the world - our patterning is the world.

So, if OP starts passively noting goods days, or bad days, or every day, the experience that they have will always be "coincidental" in a sense, since there's always going to be a presupposition involved, from this point onwards. There is no way for them to be "objective" about this.

The only way they might test this, I suppose, is to actively explore the possibility - by booking a strip of weekly driving lessons, and then each week "wish something would happen so I didn't have to do this lesson". If the results are consistent, then there might be "something" to it. (Although of course we'd have no idea as to the nature of that "something", but that's not required initially - just the observation of a consistent repeatable effect.)

All down to OP now.

POST: Hold your horses.

If this actually is a case of quantum immortality, how would you have noticed it? Everything you remember is stored in your brain, which, if parallel universes exist, is separate in each universe as well. If you die in one universe, your consciousness might move to another universe, as that's not something physical; nobody knows what that is. But your memories of the previous universe wouldn't move; that would require the information stored in your brain, which is physical, to spontaneously change as a result of something happening in another universe. That wouldn't be a "change" from your perspective, but within that one universe (which is what the laws of physics are bound to) it would be. So if this were to happen, you'd simply forget everything from the previous universe and remember everything from the new one, as if that's how it had always been. (And yes, this means it might have happened several times in your life without you knowing.)
Besides, if that were possible, wouldn't you see it happening with other physical objects that store information as well, not just brains? If your computer's hard drive is destroyed in a parallel universe, would the data on the drive platters spontaneously change in this universe to match the data from the other one? I know your computer isn't conscious (actually, come to think of it, I don't; as far as we know anything could be) but if it was, why would that suddenly enable the data on its hard drive to change through non-physical means? The same principle applies with your brain.
I think what most likely happened is that your wife suddenly remembered a repressed memory or something. The near-accident might seem like it was related due to the timing and significance of the event, but correlation does not equal causation. The human brain can do some very weird things, especially when psychological trauma is involved. Do you have any records of previous conversations involving the expression "hold your horses" that you can show her? Like voice/video recordings, or text messages?

I guess the assumption you are making is that these universes are "spatially-extended places unfolding in time" - or more specifically, you are making the assumption that because your sensory experience is formatted as a "3D space with stuff in it", that this is the form of the world itself. This might not be the case. The images you see do not necessarily arise from a "behind the scenes" place that is of the same form.

One of the follow-ons from this is that the "brains" are part of our experience, not necessarily the world as such - which means they are not causal, because the world we see is not causal either. Our apparent world is sensations, one after the other. We make the assumption that the brains we see correspond to brains "behind the scenes", but it is an assumption (arising from the other assumptions). The image of a brain wouldn't store anything, of course. The only real storage would be in "that which experiences". But what is that?

Actually, if we pause and attend to our experience, we discover that our direct experience is not actually of being a body in the world, rather it is more like we are an "open aware perceptual space" in which our experiences arise - consisting of sensations, perceptions, and thoughts. In other words, although for convenience we treat the world as being external but directly accessed, all we ever really experience are sensory forms arising in this "mind-space" of ours. We might have thoughts about an "external" world - laid out in space, in which we see brains - but those thoughts also arise in that mind-space. We never get outside of it. "Outside" is just an idea we have inside. It is then not at all clear that the mind-space itself is anywhere, since it has no perceivable boundary, and therefore can have no location.

So taking all of this into account, if we "jump universes" then we wouldn't be going anywhere. What would be changing is the content of our experience; we would be "selecting" a new set of sensory images to explore, for and from and as the "inside". Whether you would still have access to your old memories, ones that would now be inconsistent with the upcoming experiences, is debatable - but it would not have anything to do with "brains", as such.

POST: 'New' house on my old block.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: [THEORY] Theory of everything

Some thoughts on solipsism-

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

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

That you exist.
That you are having experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's very nicely phrased.

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

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

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

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

Further musings -

What does this mean for beliefs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way to confirm this setup would be:

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

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

==So, some interesting observations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, for the first part -

Let us reintroduce that old standard: lucid dreams.

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

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

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

Intending change in the "physical" strand -

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

How does the dream intention differ from the physical intention?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

so what am I doing wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're overthinking this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd suggest that context is the difference.

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: [THEORY] Many worlds/frames

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

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

POST: Question, is anyone investigating this for real?

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

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

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

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

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be precise...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who's suggesting that?

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

This means that it's probably better not to say that something causes another thing to exist, because everything is on the same level. Does one thought cause the next thought? If there are two folds in a blanket, and I pull on one fold and the other is moved also, did fold-1 cause the movement of fold-2, or is it just part of a larger movement?

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

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

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

We seem to be in agreement.

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

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

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

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

That is a fine manifesto, I would say.

...

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

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

POST: Schrödinger's Cat

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

My favoured approach:

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

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

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

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

TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 13)

POST: 11:11 -the numbers in my life for over 25 years

POST: Serious question, do you believe any of the stories here?

POST: My glitch

POST: Everytime I hear some word, suddenly everyone uses this word

POST: Meta-switching realities

POST: [THEORY] Scientists able to make the present determine the past.

POST: How to produce a glitch in the matrix (part 1)

POST: Do any of you really believe that life really is a computer program?

POST: Sudden realization about the universe's nature before falling asleep

POST: Try it at home! See the matrix in a laser cat toy.

POST: [X-Post r/MandelaEffect] Myers-Briggs Personality Types

POST: [META] What is the logic behind reality?

POST: [META] Collecting common glitch report themes?

POST: Oranges.

POST: [Theory] Why do we only hear "quantum immortality" stories from the "immortal" person's point of view? Why do we never hear "my loved one had a brush with death and now they insist that Thing used to be way X when it's always been way Y"?

POST: [Meta]Sight/Vision is just a mental hallucination

POST: Did the matrix help me get out of my driving lesson? There's no such thing as a coincidence if you ask me.

POST: Hold your horses.

POST: 'New' house on my old block.

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

POST: [THEORY] Theory of everything

POST: [THEORY] Many worlds/frames

POST: Question, is anyone investigating this for real?

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

POST: Schrödinger's Cat

Warning