TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 21)

POST: [THEORY] The Brain is a Radio

[POST]

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

Intro

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

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

Classical View: "The Brain is a CPU"

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

My Theory: "The Brain is a Radio"

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

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

Here are some of the potential implications of that:

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

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

Some Final Thoughts

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brains, Stations, Storage

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

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

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

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

World As Imaginary

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

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

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

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

You As Imaginary

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

And you are imaginary too! ;-)

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

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

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

Direct Exploration

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

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

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

Cheers!

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

...

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

Bingo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Waking up in new realities

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just some thoughts. So to speak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Asked a question. The universe delivered

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

Q: [Deleted]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q2: Which is circular reasoning.

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

POST: I saw the whole world. I think

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

Heh, did you like Tomorrowland?

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

...

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

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

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

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

POST: Duplicated objects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Including shorts apparently.

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

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

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

...might be in bad taste.

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

...

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

Sarcastic mod is sarcastic.

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

POST: Dimension shift? Timeline jump?

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

Collateral shifts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: My friend's dead brother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hall of Records

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

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

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

Nicely put!

POST: [THEORY] Two-fold glitch?

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

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

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

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

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

POST: 11:11

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

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

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

That's a pretty good one!

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

POST: [THEORY] Theory of Convergence

Why do the universes need to be "running"?

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

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

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

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

Or "changes in state", perhaps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blanket Metaphor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution perhaps? All of it is fantasy.

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

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

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

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

POST: My Boyfriend is Now Left Handed

Hmm...

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

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

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

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

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

a Creator doesn't exist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, physics is basically: observations + philosophy.

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

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

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

Anyway, let's not get too off topic!

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

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

Science and Philosophy

Physics is not observations + philosophy.

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

Dream Analogy

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

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

Mandela Effect Theorising

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

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

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

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

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

So we have some questions:

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

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

The Blink of an Eye

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

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

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

POST: [Question] A question about Quantum Immortality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Things happening out of order. Retrocausality glitch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the more interesting, then.

POST: debit card expiration date changed

And what about the children? ;-)

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

Yep, I'm aware!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It provides some nice imagery though:

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

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

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

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

Life as 4D Environment

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

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

Teleportation as Unfolding Experience

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

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

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

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

Implications?

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

Time is not a spatial dimension.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, that's a good point to emphasise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, interesting to explore this stuff regardless.

lol i cant tell if you're serious or not

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

POST: [Proposal] Investigate How to Reprogram, Build a Wiki

Ah, you've also reminded me of this from Realityshifters.com. The 'finding lost objects' approach is similar to one I've used for myself (let go of your body, "ask" for it to go and find what you've lost). I think the larger idea, of letting go and asking the world, has many applications. Relevant part of the page:

[QUOTE]

The Matrix Applied/Small Flight With Project Runway
Fighting Shadow - Everett, Washington
This is a summary describing how to do everything you've seen in the film, The Matrix, in what I call Project Runway. A few days ago, on a nice sunny Monday, I went with a friend to test a theory I've had for a while. We went to a local park for a new type of long-jump. Neither of us had been in track or sports for at least a year. We set up some sticks in front of a hill for us to jump over. Our objective was similar to what Morpheus advised Neo in the movie The Matrix, "Let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, disbelief [and love (explained later)]."
We started small, jumped it, then made the jump larger. This went on for 20 minutes before I looked at how far our last successful jump was. I couldn't comprehend it (and had to quit for the day because I started thinking about it). From only jogging (if we ran, we only got half-way), we both successfully jumped 16 size 13 feet! (we had no ruler). As in, take a size 13 shoe, and step 16 times, heel-to-toe. Quite a long way for jogging, huh? I swear we flew for at least a few feet as well, when we did it right, because sometime in mid-air, I felt completely joyful, and closed my eyes. You'll have to try it to find out though...
You try it: Method explained.
My theory involved letting go, as explained above. But first, here's some history. No "finding lost objects" techniques ever worked for me, not even using my awesome "third eye manifestation". So, soon after I started thinking of the body as a "shell", I said "shell, find my book." and it did, instantly. Then my towel, then another book, etc. Later, I remembered it's just energy linked to the mind. So I consider it a function, not even a physical thing (this is important in letting go). Then, sometime after that, I began experimenting more, and learned to stop thinking. Yes, when you don't think, sparring's easier, and so are sports. In order to obtain this state, I decided to use the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. It clears the mind quite well. Remember people telling you "not to think about it so much"? Well, forget that, just don't think. Now, one last thing. I said that you'd have to let go of love as well. I believe this is explained somewhere on realityshifters.com in the Let Go of Wishes article .
The idea is, you can't hold on to love, so just let it go, and it will flow naturally. Love is also the energy to live, fly, etc. (YES! You DON'T need to spend years gathering energy!) What I have learned is something others have also felt and written about. Reading Communion With God and Illusions helps a lot in understanding this. Remember to just let it go, and let it flow. Most importantly (because you have to stop thinking once you start running) is to trust yourself Ready now? Here's how I did it.

1. Set up your sticks/markers. Start out small if you're new.
2. Find a place to start (I started on a small hill).
3. Let go of all fears, doubts, worries, etc.
4. Tell your body to jump the distance.
5. Trust your self, AND your body.
6. Be mindful, and clear your mind.
7. Everything will suddenly just "click", and you'll know it's time to start.
8. Keep a clear mind, free from negative thoughts, and don't force anything. The speed of your run does NOT matter. Trust you will fly.
9. Repeat until you want to stop.
   Tomorrow or the next day, I'm going out to train again with my friend. I know I flew, and I'm gonna do more than just jump far.==

[END OF QUOTE]

...

Ha, I didn't mean the "flying" bit (although you never know, with practice). I meant the letting go and allowing your subconscious mind to guide you to, say, an object you lost but can't remember where it is. It works for problem-solving in general, actually.

Although -

People can not fly. If this was possible you'd see it at the Olympics.

What he describes isn't flying; it's more like being in the zone and letting your body use its natural coordination to jump the distance without you interfering by trying to "make it happen". Which is probably what really good Olympians in fact do.

POST: So, my kitchen light moved. And I'm in an alternate universe apparently.

This means, you realise, that is no longer your wife.

See here:

"The day I posted one particular reality shift story, I had woken up to find my key chain had turned gray. My boyfriend and I always had identical key chains (actually they were the lock devices that came with our Jeep), and they were both black. When one of us picked up a key ring, we had to look not at the black device but at the collection of keys, because we had the same house, similar cars and other things -- so we had to look to make sure that the gold keys to my office were on the key ring or not in order to determine which set of keys was which.
One day, I woke up after a fairl[y] hard night of half sleeping, to discover that my key locking device was now gray. My boyfriend never remembers a time when my key chain wasn't gray, and he insists that a difference in color is the way we always told our otherwise identical key chains apart, which makes me think I also do not have the exact same boyfriend anymore."
-- Changing Keys / Instant Costume Change, Realityshifters.com

You should think yourself lucky, and perhaps not look at that lamp too closely. No matter how strange it might start to seem.

Q1: His other self married her, and he is now that other self. By that standard, she is his wife.

But, he's not that other self - he's the same self, now looking out into another world. She is not the woman he married, in his old world.

Q1: No, but she's not a different person, she's a different version of the same person. He, too, is a different version of the same person she married.

Okay. How different does someone have to become before they are considered a different person? What is the connection between this woman and his wife in the other 'reality'?

(The fact of his knowledge alone means he is substantially different to any other person with his body; her lack of knowledge means the same thing.)

Q1: If he can just randomly appear in the other person's body, in the same home with one subtle difference, the same life, without even an apparent death to explain the switch -- the two are clearly closely linked.

We could think of it as being the same "person" (soul? experiencer?) but looking through the "viewport" of a particular body in a particular environment.

That works for him. But what of her? In fact, is there even necessarily a "person" looking through her eyes? Could she just be a philosophical zombie, operating on automatic with no "experiencer" looking through her as their "viewport"?

(The more extreme possibility is that of "personal dream-worlds" - that we are each living in our own dream but they may/may not overlap with others' dream-worlds. So his change is then just a discontinuity, a shift in his dream-world, perhaps in response to his desire and irritation regarding the light. She is just his dream wife. There may be a wife having a dream-world of her own, but that dream would only interact with his to the extent they have common desires of experience. In this scenario, we are "extended persons" of some sort.)

And what could have caused that be the case? I see no reason for him to have switched to a world -- this world -- where she is just a hollow shell. I see no reason for this universe's version of him having been a hollow shell before this version of him appeared in our universe's body, either.

Well, it might make no difference - most of our actions and responses are automatic, it's just that we experience them. We can, if we choose and if we know how, redirect ourselves and our path though.

There is more to our consciousness than we know. He most likely is one facet of a consciousness with multiple bodies, experiencing a multitude of existences, in different universes. That he cannot consciously connect to the other parts of the consciousness does not mean that they do not exist, or are not linked.

Actually, I do prefer this - what I call "extended persons" - but it's hard to tell the difference between this and the "viewport" version with a single experiencer. A hollow shell can behave exactly the same way, externally, as someone with an experiencer, or as an extended person would. In fact, perhaps his wife's behaviour is dependent upon his expectations, rather than being autonomous herself. With the extended person idea, and infinite worlds in which to express all possibilities, other people actually do correspond to our expectations/beliefs/desires (even if those are detrimental to us). Combining those ideas: Everyone can get their ideal world. You are extended throughout all possibilities, but only need to experience the possibility-version that you want. Extended persons and viewport-like experiencing.

To me it seems just as worthwhile to point at random people on the street and state that they might be hollow. Well, yes, they might be. But how is it relevant to this situation?

It's to do with the mechanics of the change, and what we're really experiencing right now. A "hollow" person needn't be any different to anyone else. Because you are effectively acting as a hollow person most of the time - you are on automatic. Being "hollow" just means not being observed through. It's easier to say that there are infinite universes each with a /u/TriumphantGeorge and a /u/parafact in them, but we "the observing consciousnesses" only look through one at a time. When we interfere, then we jump to looking through one that corresponds to our desire/intention.

We are always experiencing never actually doing. Human bodies are part of the surrounding environment, seamless with them. We are not the bodies, we are just the experiencers of bodies and environments.

I absolutely disagree that we are only looking through one universe at a time. It's just that the part of me that is aware of looking into this universe is only able to be conscious of looking into this one.

It depends on what we mean by "we". Right now, I am only experiencing looking through this universe. I can imagine that other parts of me are looking elsewhere, but if I can't experience it right now, where does that leave me?

I also still do not see the point of contemplating the potential hollowness of OP's wife specifically when, by both your viewpoint and mine, she is equally likely to be hollow in this universe as she was in the last one -- though we disagree on the actual likelihood. Nothing has changed in that regard.

You have exactly the same problem with your "I am looking through all universes" view - it's not testable. You - you right now - only ever experience one universe at a time. If you "jump universes" you will then experience that one, not two at once. Meanwhile, you can't tell if the wife is "hollow" or not, because it makes no difference to her behaviour. However, if you are only experiencing one universe at a time (which all the evidence points to), then we can assume that is the same for her, and that given infinite universes, it is infinitely unlikely that she's looking out of those eyes. However, the universes (personal world-dreams) must overlap in some way. We are all alone, but our worlds are "inspired by" the intentions and choices of all other universes as well as our own.

EDIT: That read as being "shouty". Not meant to be, just quite interested in bashing this out. :-)

The essence of this is, "what is a person" and does it require awareness, a "presence" that is experiencing it? I say no. So why do we need every universe to be "looked-through"? You just pick the one you like best! The rest will roll along by themselves.

Previous attempt to visualise this here [POST: Meta-switching realities].

...

Just decide you are going to notice them. Then you will.

POST: I dream about the future then live it?

[POST]

So this has been driving my completely insane recently and I've decided to share my weird reoccurring glitch. I dream about and relive days of my life. Now I know how crazy this sounds and I've looked all over for an explanation and I assure you it's not me having deja vu mid day and thinking I had a dream. This happens about 4 times every year and is usually started the exact same way, with me having a dream about my life. Now before the incident I'm about to describe I pinned this on stress and told myself I was just making these things up. However this latest occurrence has me 100% sure it was a glitch in the matrix. Now I've gotten use to these rare dreams of mine but the latest one bothered me because it was so vivid. I specifically remember seeing these pile of blocks when I woke up and someone saying "Frank what if we merge our two piles will my green go with your blue?" The other thing I remember was a co-worker of mine named Jennifer saying something about her son and a baseball injury. Due to the vividness of the dreams I kept thinking about them all day mostly the blocks and what such a strange phrase could mean. Later in the afternoon we had a surprise team building exercise with... You guessed it! Blocks. At first I thought nothing of it because I had become preoccupied and was not thinking about my dream at the time. The goal was to build certain structures out of these blocks, it began with basic triangles and then it got more advanced to the point we needed to share blocks but every block had to be used in the construct for the team to pass. I was looking around the table trying to figure out how we could build a tower we needed and I noticed me and my co-worker frank had an extra pile of blocks and blurted out "Frank what if we merge our two piles will my green go with your blue?" As soon as I heard the words come out of my mouth I froze and remained very quite for the rest of the exercise trying to rationalize what just happened. After the exercise is done we all head to the break room for some coffee and bagels. While everyone is chatting I hear Jennifer talking to her friend Cathy, I was very hesitant to ask but I forced myself to do it "By any chance did your son get injured playing baseball recently?" Now I have no outside work Connection to Jennifer so her immediate reaction to me knowing about that injury was to think I was a stalker but I quickly explained to her my dream and convinced her I was not a stalker but she was still pretty sure I was insane. Creepy right? But here is where it gets extremely bothersome and the reason I'm debating putting myself in a mental hospital or some shit. The next day was exactly the same. No dream this time but the day was exactly the same down to little details. The surprise team meeting was held again with the same problems and initial reactions (the confusion and brainstorming were the same right down to the wire) I was even in the same position where I almost asked frank if my greens would go with his blues. As we walked to the break room Jennifer was talking to Cathy but I decided to not ask her about the injury this time. Instead she ended up telling everyone about it herself! How could I dream about something happening if the knowledge of the event caused it to not happen originally!?!?!?!? To this day I still have these episodes randomly but none were as vivid (or maybe I was not as aware) as this one. Please tell me I am not alone in this and other people have also experienced freak time travel combined with dreams of the future.
Edit: please forgive formatting and errors, I am on mobile.

[END OF POST]

Q1: There's no need to be alarmed by this, it's perfectly okay. In fact, many people have access to this ability, but tune it out or try to rationalize it away. The thing is, most of our experiences are lined up days before they actually play out in physical terms. So, more sensitive people can get glimpses of the "blueprint" of the event. This often happens in our dream state, because we are less resistant at that time.
Take care and have fun with it :)

It's all deterministic, unless you actively choose to "re-direct"?

Q1: Determinism would imply someone running you life for you. Rather, we have complete freedom of choice- our expectations shape these blueprints. It just takes some time to assemble the cooperative components for the physical manifestation.

No, determinism would imply that a path just "plays out" via its own momentum. When a rock starts rolling down a hill, it doesn't need gravity to keep pulling it. It will keep going until it is redirected (by a collision, or by a change in the landscape). I think we have free choice to re-point the path, but if we don't then it plays out deterministically. This is why we can tell what is going to happen: the whole future is effectively here, now unless we make an intentional change that affects it at the ground, seed level.

Q1: Ah, I see what you mean.

It's a common point actually. Do we control our actions, moment by moment? Do we constantly intend? No, I'd say we experience ourselves rather than do ourselves - except when we inject a new target into awareness (reshape ourselves). Just as well. I quite like that my blood supply is self-circulating, for instance. :-)

EDIT: Although some people do a constant 'holding back' of themselves. Perhaps most people, even. They don't fully commit to their own flow.

...

Q2: Souuuuuuuurce?

Q3: (It's total garbage, but don't tell anyone I said anything, I'll get downvoted to hell for not believing in supernatural bullshit.)

Q1: Eh, life would be much less fun without the variety of opinions. So we can probably agree they're all valuable. Everyone finds their own little nuggets of truth- who cares, if others agree with them, or not.

Q3: Most of the stuff posted here is 99% batshit insane. There's a few 'actual' glitches that I nor anyone else can explain, but when it's stuff like "I dreamed about the future", I chalk it up to either 1. a brain issue where the person actually thinks they had a dream about that day, or 2. hyperactive awareness in their daily life that allows them to perceive a possible 'future' that just happens, and then they think they are special in some way.
When something posted on this subreddit is only observed by the OP, then the OP should have talked to a doctor to get a brain scan. When it's something like "I have actual proof I jumped into a parallel universe", then I'll be interested. what I'm trying to say, is that for a glitch to be considered real, it should be verified by at least a bystander or a friend, not just by the OP.

Q4: I believe everything follows fundamental laws that we as human beings cannot break. We can't escape from the universe, we can't enter a black hole without being crushed to the size of an atom, and we can't go faster than the speed of light.
As for the question, I believe we have 'free will' in the sense that we can weigh risks vs reward, and make decisions based on that. Unless you have a different definition of free will, I'll stick to that answer.

Of course, nobody's ever tried those things to find out...

As for the question, I believe we have 'free will' in the sense that we can weigh risks vs reward, and make decisions based on that. Unless you have a different definition of free will, I'll stick to that answer.

Isn't that deterministic though? Your preferences are already determined, so your choices are already determined. You might "experience thinking and choosing", but really there's no influence you can have over it. It's all just unfolding, as it always going to be. (And for this reason, nobody has "abilities to see into the future". The future is already there, in a sense. So it's not unreasonable you might end up knowing, but you wouldn't be doing it; the thought would just happen to you.)

Although other views are available [http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/%7Eellis/realworld.pdf].

Q4: It's deterministic if you start from a certain point in time, for one decision. If you start from the very beginning, you're making your own choices (through guidance of parents), and that shapes who you are as a person. Both through nature(genes), and nurture(environment). For instance: I would never eat crickets on a stick. In China, it's a snack you can buy. People love it.

If you start from the very beginning, you're making your own choices (through guidance of parents)...

Is that true, though? I'd have thought the parents and environment were part of the "deterministic" input, so what you've said mean there's really no choice, because you don't choose your nature. You actually never chose not not-eat-crickets-on-a-stick, that choice was pre-made for you by your upbringing.

(Note: I personally believe we do or can have some top-down influence, but it requires a bit of dis-identification with our own body and thought processes.)

Q4: Well it's not like you can be raised by wolves. If you were, and you survived, you would eat meat and berries. You wouldn't know language, and you'd be naked... unless you thought "hmm, fur is warm, I'll skin an animal".

Well, that's determinism in action! No real choices. Wolfy-behaviour all the way.

Q4: You still have choices. "Should I follow this hard rocky road with metal animals?"

Haha. :-) But your options are pre-determined by your upbringing and experiences. In turn, your upbringing led to your nature and preferences, which determine which option you will choose. So it was always going to happen the way it did: loudly squished under the metal animals due to ignorance!

EDIT: Although personally I believe there is the possibility of creativity in the options which appear to us mentally, if we give space for it to occur.

Q4: Okay, then say you get taken away from your parents due to some bullshit. Now you're in a foster home. Your entire life just changed based on that alone. You have free will to hold on to the values your parents instilled, or you can try to get over the trauma of being taken away from your parents, and live out happily with the foster family. Every single person has free will. As a collective, we guide each other.

You have free will to hold on to the values your parents instilled, or you can try to get over the trauma of being taken away from your parents, and live out happily with the foster family.

How do you make the choice? Does the choice you make not come from your 'character'? Did you choose your character? But...

The way out of this is to say: Free will isn't the ability to do just anything, randomly - rather it's to act according to your own nature, given the information available to you. The extra secret sauce is if you discover the technique/ability to "ask for further options" from your creative mind (or whatever). Then, although you will always make a choice based on your nature (determined) you at least have the possibility of a fresh direction (creativity) - which in turn will change your nature. If you don't discover or aren't introduced to the secret sauce, then you'll pretty much unfold deterministically for your whole life. Fortunately, you'll likely be unaware of it. And if you were, you'd respond deterministically anyway...

This whole conversation really boils down to your own definition of what free will is.

Quite probably. Basically, it's a kind of meaningless topic for most people! It doesn't matter if your choices are effectively determined in advance (by upbringing, environment, inherent character, this is a common philosophical argument against free will), so long as they're aligned with your best interests. For most people, that's enough.

Although I'd say that the extra bit: That the options are not necessarily pre-determined, means we have the ability to creatively change our world, rather than simply react to it and be a cog in it.

(Personally, I believe that we can get stuck in a reactive mode, but that we generally do have the ability to live creatively and not deterministically.)

What's your definition?

Q4: My definition of free will is being able to do anything that you desire. If you want to go on a rampage, you can. You will probably get shot, but that's just something that happens. People can snap. They can act any way they want, but they choose to go along with daily life.
An example: I want to uproot my life and move north into a forest. I hate the way society behaves, and I think it's absolutely ridiculous that people feel like this is the way life is (and there's nothing we can do about it). If I chose to go right now, I could. My family would be upset, and my friends would turn on me, but I COULD go. I'm completely free to do so. It is my choice, and my choice alone.
Free will is essentially freedom to act and think the way you want. There's consequences, but that comes with others disagreeing with the way you're acting/thinking.

All good. As Wikipedia says, "The underlying issue is: Do we have some control over our actions, and if so, what sort of control, and to what extent?"

So, you are free to do all those things. But are you free to "want what you want", can you choose your thoughts in advance, are you a victim of your impulses? To what extent are you choosing your actions, to what extent are they happening to you? On what basis are you making the choice that is "my choice, and my choice alone". That's the philosophical dilemma of free will (rather than just "freedom").

In that case, whether you consider you have 'true free will' or not might be about where you draw the line - what you consider as "you" and what you consider as external or "the environment".

"Everyday free will" is just the notion that, based on the information you have, you will make choices in alignment with your own character/nature. I think that's fairly straightforward, and what you're going for?

Q4: Again, you're trying to change the definition of what free will is.
free will: noun 1. the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
Based on this definition, we have free will.

The definition is half the problem, but going with that:

the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion

People could argue - if you examine exactly how decisions and actions come about - that you'll find you are actually entirely subject to "necessity or fate", and that the "discretion" is therefore an illusion, simply an experience you have. Note, I'm not really arguing with you! In practical terms, everyone experiences having free will - they just know they are agents, directly. Logically though, it's hard to prove. But then so is consciousness, which is essentially the same thing (free will being "first cause" if it exists at all). And everyone knows they are conscious, simply by the very knowing itself.

POST: Not sure if this is a glitch or reality

[POST]

I'm going to explain this the best I can then provide several scary examples. I dream EVERY night. They are vivid dreams. I read, write and interact with strangers, family and even go to work. I've heard that it's impossible to read in your dreams ( because that part of your brain isn't active?), but I do with ease. Writing is a bit if a challenge and my handwriting looks like a child's. Anyway, I try to forget these dreams- but they always come back to bite me. The dreams make no sense when I have them. Events are out of order and often I have no idea why I'm somewhere or doing something. If the dream seems important or scares the shit out of me I tell my SO, that way I can point out in the future that we knew it was going to happen. Ok, so these dreams come true. They are impossibly accurate. Every job I've ever had, I've dreamed about months or years in advance. Jobs I could never imagine myself doing ( and I mean never!) and yet, they happen. Before you say the dreams are influencing my choices, no, not the way I dream. Example ( not scary)- I dream I'm sitting at a desk, calculating percentages and gazing out a window. Out the window I see a tree with its leaves blowing in the wind. On the desk I see some sort of statements, stapler, little do-dads , your typical desk. I wake up thinking what a crazy dream, I'd never voluntarily take a desk job. I'm a typical blue collar worker. Low and behold six months later I apply for a bread delivery job( as a second job). It was a few months into the job at the end of a long day. I had to bill each customer for the bread I delivered and discount for the un-purchased bread I removed from the store. There was a desk in the rear of the bakery positioned directly in front of a window ( it wasn't mine but I was allowed to use it). Frustrated from the paperwork I look up to see the tree outside and wish I was done for the day. Then it hits me like a brick, the tree. The desk. The paperwork. The do-dads. It's all there. Next dream - I dream I'm holding the most beautiful baby infant, though it's definitely not mine. I smile and somehow know this baby, but I don't. It was a girl that had blue eyes, and dark black hair. I'm alone in a beautiful Park like setting. I can't see very far in any direction because the sun is absolutely blinding. I wake up it's early morning. I can't go back to sleep so I have a very long day the next day. I lived over 1500 miles away from my family. But the next day I get a call. My sister had had a late term miscarriage. I asked her if it was a little girl with blue eyes and black hair. She wondered how I had known. Somehow I thought it would help comfort her so I told her I knew when her baby died because she came to visit me. My dream occurred at the time she was in the hospital giving birth the night before. Next dream- I dreamed I was in two rooms joined by a doorway there was literally 100 people there. I didn't know any of the people. Somehow they all knew me and were talking to me and touching me. I found this very uncomfortable my eyes search the room for someone I knew. Then I saw my father. I ran to him, opened my mouth to speak then I woke up. Later that year my grandfather died who lives in another state. Not just another state but on the complete opposite coast. I went with my father to his funeral. You guessed it I was at the funeral home standing amongst lots of relatives that I had never met. Somehow, I lost my father in the crowd. I looked around for him and spotted him in another room. I hurriedly went towards him and as I went to speak I realized instantaneously this was that dream. It scared the living shit out of me and I could not speak. The problem I have is my dreams are broken bits and pieces. I cannot pinpoint these events that will take place. I only realize what is going on as it is happening. Have I dreamed about my death? Yes. More than once. I will not elaborate, I have heard that you can influence your surroundings more than you know when you speak out loud/write about incidents and it's possible to make those things happen. I'm not risking it. Apparently this runs in the family- one of my parents also has these predictive type dreams. They can truly be horrifying. I also seem to have weird glitches in this reality. I'm a relatively shy person and I try not to make eye contact unless I must in my daily routines. I've had more incidents than I care to recall of seeing someone who is gone mere seconds later. For instance, I was walking out of a building towards a smoke break area. I was looking down to avoid eye contact with a man that was coming towards me. I passed the man then turned to ask how his day went, the man was gone. He WAS there a few seconds ago. I walked past an office and saw a man sitting in a chair with the lights off. Being familiar with the men who often work there at night I turned around to ask WTF he was doing with the lights off and to have some friendly banter. The was no one there. It's not uncommon for co-workers to nap on night shift, so it didn't strike me as odd. I've never been on drugs, medications, I don't drink except on rare occasions ( maybe once a year). I've never been arrested. I was raised religious, but do not attend church. Does anyone else have similar experiences? Are you able to influence the outcome of reality because of your dreams? Is there a way to shut off my dreams? Anything over the counter? I never feel rested when I wake up. The dreams wear me out physically and mentally. I posted anonymously for obvious reasons. If someone told me this, I'd think they were crazy or on drugs. For once Id like to sleep with no recollection of dreams.

[END OF POST]

The "shy person" glitches are likely due to you not truly looking at your surroundings. Your mind just makes a best-guess based on peripheral vision and so on, and fills in the environment accordingly. When you decide to deliberately look directly at the "person", your mind-model gets updated and the person disappears/becomes a shadow/whatever.

The dreams, though, are fascinating! Well, "all time is at once" it is said, so it's already happened from some perspectives. You should maybe play with trying to deliberately imagine situations you'd like before you go to sleep. Some New Thought people used to say that this worked. Worth a go [http://www.thepowerofawareness.org/], as an experiment... you might be able to improve the usefulness of your dreams by doing it.

No, although I don't look at faces as I pass people I see their bodies( often from the chest down), gender, what they are wearing or holding.

Right, that's a bit clearer. Don't know if you've being trying to do lucid dreaming deliberately, but that's maybe worth a look, /r/luciddreaming and the Robert Waggoner book perhaps. Might let you get better control in the dream of yourself if not the situation, keeping calm, the better to ask questions and so on. They sound quite challenging anyway.

What do you think's happening?

EDIT: Just read your other reply on the dream control thing.

i know this stuff is going to occur.

The certainty is interesting. And I think you're right: you can know and it will happen. But...

You should read the Neville Goddard book, but for one idea: That although our lives are deterministic in the sense that they unfold along a fixed path if we don't interfere - we have a "destiny" - we can re-direct our lives, and re-point that destiny. However, this isn't necessarily by action (because we'll pre-dream our actions), but by changing your momentum in some sense. I dunno, it seems to be the sort of thing he was saying (PDF here). Whatever you think of that, his little exercise might be useful for you (summoning the feeling of the new direction, in your dream or otherwise). In some ways this makes sense: If you always act in character, then even "spontaneous" action would be in-character and therefore inevitable. Only by changing yourself can you change how you might respond to something in the future, and change your fate?

I'm sure you've experimented with trying to change things, but maybe it can't be done the way you've been attempting it so far.

POST: I think I entered another dimension...

[POST]

Something is weird here. I don't exactly know what it is for sure, but I know when it started.
A couple days ago I was walking through one of the dorms on my campus. It's the oldest dorm, built pre-WW2, so there's some weird quirks about it. Also, it's incredibly hard to navigate your first couple times. I was going through it to study some calc and had the hardest time finding the right stairwell to get to the room I needed. I went up one set of stairs and saw a sign pointing me towards the set of rooms I needed to go to. I turned left and followed the hallway. I saw a girl with her door open talking about econ, walked passed some guys heading towards the dining hall, and saw one guy knocking on another person's door. I reached the end of the hallway and the only thing there was another stairwell, not the room I needed, so I went into the stairwell.
I saw a sign saying I was on the floor below where I thought I was, so went up the stairs again, confused. One flight up, I saw the same sign that led me to the left. I passed the same girl talking about econ, same guys going towards the dining hall, and same guy knocking on a door. I was really confused at this point, but saw the room I needed to be in at the end of the hall.
Things are different now though, and nobody is admitting it. Every stranger I see in the street makes weird eye contact with me. It's as if I'm not welcome here. I bring this up to my friends and they just laugh and change the topic really quickly. My friends are acting strange too, as if they need to keep an eye on me at all times. I stood up to go to the bathroom yesterday and my roommate said he'd go with me, which I thought was weird. Even weirder when he just stood there and didn't say a word while I peed. Other friends suddenly want to go out of their way to walk with me to my classes. I don't know what's going on, but I feel like I don't belong here.
EDIT: Just to address some issues that plenty of comments have brought up:
a) I am most certainly did not dream it. I have in my notebook a series of notes I took that night, so unless this is still a dream then I was perfectly awake.
b) I understand that people making eye contact isn't necessarily abnormal, but their eyes are telling me something now. They're looking at me like I don't belong. It's a look of disgust, and "what is he doing here?".
To make things worse, I've been pretty thrown off by this so took the half hour train ride home to visit the family for awhile. Things seemed normal, my parents were fine, but my dog barked at me repeatedly. He's never done this before, not even the times that I've visited home before, and he wouldn't stop. He was angry at me.
EDIT 2: After a relatively normal afternoon and dinner with the family I came back to campus. One comment suggested I go back to the stairwell. I'm not really sure what I expected, but I went back anyways. It's like people didn't want me to go back. More than the weird, hostile looks I'm used to being given, people were bluntly bumping into me as I walked towards the dorm. I get to the stairwell and feel fine, everything seems normal, until I almost shit myself when I heard a guy behind me say "You're not supposed to be here". I walked quickly out of the dorm and made way towards my own hall, and people were much less resistant to me walking back. I don't know guys, maybe your reality isn't my reality.
EDIT 3: Went to the University health services office, as people suggested. They recommended me to a psychiatrist, and I was luckily able to walk in to see him. I explained my problem to him, and he had this grave look on his face while I was talking. Once I finished, he simply explained that it must be all in my head and hurried me out the door. I asked if there was anything I could do about this and he told me I was just imagining things.
Strangers are becoming much more aggressive the longer I stay here. At the dining hall this morning the employee that was swiping student IDs had to ask her manager if I should be let in. The manager gave me a weird look, but acted like he didn't want to make a scene and said sure. I was walking to class with a friend and one guy looked me directly in the eye and just said "leave". People intentionally bumping into me is now the norm. They have a look of disgust in their eyes. I'm starting to think that I really don't belong.
EDIT 4: People have been asking for an update, and I wish I could say things have been getting better. Still the same rude behavior from random strangers; the other day I was asked to leave the library because I was "a disturbance to the other students" when all I was doing was reading my textbook. It's finals week right now, so I haven't gotten the chance to see help outside the University. My friends are still concerned about me, and my family still acts the same. This is all becoming "normal" unfortunately.
FINAL EDIT: I've come back. It was the strangest experience. I was at the dining half with my friends and this girl was looking at me the whole time. But it wasn't a bad look, it was friendly. And something was different about her--she seemed just ever so slightly "off", I was drawn to her. After I ate, I told my friends to go without me (which they hesitated to do, but eventually complied). I went up to the girl and before I knew it I had told her my entire story. Every built up frustration, every tear, every bit of confusion, and she just listened. When I finished, she looked me in the eyes and said "Follow me". I did, and she took me to a bridge over a river that connects two parts of the campus. She held my hand and told me to close my eyes. I felt a strong gust of wind and next thing I know I was on that bridge alone, but things were normal. People no longer make disgusted eye contact with me or are rude to me, my friends are normal again, I belong. I have this overwhelming sense of joy, and I think that whoever this girl was knew that I was in the wrong place and somehow knew how to fix that.

[END OF POST]

So, this is the most interesting glitch in ages.

Any other changes? Minor things, even light switches being the wrong way round, things like that? Some people have tried to make changes deliberately and small glitches result (if one believes this):

. . . I wasn't upset by this, I didn't believe in it anyway, so I went home without expectations or anticipation about how my universe might change.
That night I set to making dinner, but when I turned the knob to light the burner under my pan of water for the pasta, the burner behind it went on instead. I had been living in this apartment for close on five years. The inner knobs had always lit the front burners and the outer knobs had always lit the back burners. I got one of my room-mates to come and see. "But that's the way it's always been.", he said. No one else remembered it the way I did.
Later that night I called Ebony. He laughed, but he seemed impressed, "You must really be doing your will if that's the only change your universe needed to balance it." Considering some of the horror stories I've heard related I'm grateful that a switch of the oven knobs was all it took to convince me of the reality of magick!
-- Some memories of Ebony

The overall vibe of "not being in the same place anymore" reminds me of my favourite story on another website:

Suddenly everything had changed. My buddy was not quite the same guy I had known moments before while sitting peacefully on the trestle, the river I knew so well had changed, my home was different, everyone and everything was different, yet appeared somewhat the same.
Everything looked exactly the same as it did before yet it all had a different feel to it. It's as if everything was replaced with identical stuff. It's like accidentally putting on someone else's coat that looks just like your own, but it just doesn't feel the same and the fit is a bit off. It's like walking into a motel room. It's like driving some else's car which is identical to your own.
The way people are different is also hard to describe. They seem the same, yet they act just a bit off from their usual patterns. They don't send out the same vibes. It's as if you are meeting them for the first time. You know them, yet you don't feel like you know them. They seem to be close copies of how you remember them.
-- Realityshifters.com

Having said all that, you have to be careful and not over-interpret.

If you change or shift for some reason then your world will seem to change and shift. One theory is that, like with shared dreams, we are each in our own dream world but we overlap with others via common "archetypes". If we meet in a restaurant, my Wendy's might be your MacDonald's.

If something glitches - which really means that you hiccup in some sense - then the environment image spawning from the archetype might shift. Our environments are made up in our minds; it's just that we don't notice it. This includes our experiences of other people: they are "filled in" based on very minimal information. You dream most of the details of your experience, spawned from a loose outline, in an ongoing feedback loop of enfolding and unfolding.

You might be experiencing an extreme version of that.

EDIT: Does anybody else remember a story (might be here, /r/occult or /r/psychonaut) where everyone on the street suddenly stopped and turned around to look at this guy, who was sitting in the shadow of a doorway or something? Like he'd been "discovered" by the other characters/figures?

Q1: The second one sounds like Capgrass syndrome. Where due to a mini stroke in the 'familiarity' path of the brain, everything seems to be replaced by copies or 'imposters'.

I'm not sure about 'familiarity paths', but yes it does sound like that. A few glitches here have a variation on it: The guy who 'glitched' in his drive and everything changed (car colour noticed first) and was unfamiliar (not his wife anymore); the guy who didn't have that new car after all seems related too. Of course, "brain problems" might just be the in-world ad-hoc explanation provided for the change when you "jump"... ;-)

...

I am most certainly did not dream it. I have in my notebook a series of notes I took that night, so unless this is still a dream then I was perfectly awake

In a way, this might be true. If you did "get back" would it be a waking up into your previous world, from here?

Q2: late to the party and I hope that it hadn't been said before,but have you though about the fact that somebody could have spread (negative) rumors about you? a crazy ex, a deluded friend...did you have any fight or argument with somebody on the campus? this could explain the strange behavior of your friends (who believe the rumors and are not concerned about you, but more about themselves)..the fact is that often we understand the things subconsciously but we cannot explain it rationally. this could also explain the other students' reaction:can be that in some way this rumor is big and everybody knows "about you" or alternatively, could be just this "bad vibe" that your friends are sending you - and you don't understand rationally- makes you a bit paranoid about everybody else...

So your TL;DR is: "You're not paranoid, they really do hate you" - ?

Q2: this made me smile :) I didn't think it exactly in that way, but yes, I think before talking about alternate universes better discard all the other practical options...

With your help, I think OP may be finding the idea of being irretrievably cast into an unfriendly parallel reality is getting more appealing! :-)

Q3: Your story reminds me a glitch I read once (not here) where a woman shifted in another reality and people there looked at her weirdely , some seemed upset to see her. Most people had a hostile attitude towards her. She sat on a bench in a park and a woman came to tell her: You have nothing to do here, you do not belong to this place. She tried to explain that she did not even know how she endep up there but the woman would not listen. Finally, she walked a little and one person came to meet her to tell her that she had nothing to do there and explained her how to return to her own reality. The only difference with your story is that in her case the place was unknown to her. You should go back to the stairwell and if someone talk to you, don't be shy or afraid , ask him/her questions.

Thing is, we are those other people, right now.

Q4: Anyone else think this is a very clever no sleep? Wher3 everything is real even if it Inst? Otherwise welcome to the other side breather we be got the habit movies hope theywerent any better in your dimension

The individual elements are pretty common in Glitch reports, just not usually together. The "lost track of where I was / the map seems to change or repeat" element (seizure/disorientation type symptoms), the "people aren't who they used to be" thing and the world responding to me a bit differently (Capgrass-type symptoms). But: it's not quite inventive enough to be really absorbing as a fictional story or lead-in.

If I were inventing something, I'd go nick some of the stories from /r/psychonaut, like on this thread [https://old.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/25q6o7/ego_death_from_mushroom_causes_instantaneous/chjt4dd/].

Q4: health context aside I'm starting to blur the lines when I read this sub, most posts are entertaining

I treat 'em all as real for the purposes of commenting, unless they're so obviously fictional prose that it's not even worth the fun.

Thing is, a lot of it is quite reasonable once you've had a couple of experiences yourself - not necessarily dramatic things. Just, say, seeing through your eyelids, dark vision, things shifting before you. Perception isn't as straightforward as you assume. And once you notice it, you see it all the time. You're basically sort of dreaming your environment, based on very minimal cues and updates. (I mean, this whole room looks in focus to me now. But that actually isn't possible if I'm directly seeing with my eyes.)

[COMMENT]

Q5: I just found this post randomly. I had a very similar experience back when I used to party really hard. It was at a point in my life where I was drinking heavily and using cocaine heavily basically everyday and also smoking weed, using shrooms and taking my xanax which was the one thing I was legally prescribed at the time. ANYWAYS... everything was fun for awhile, party all night, sleep during the day, repeat. Then everything got weird, I started getting really paranoid. I remember having a similar thing happen where all of a sudden people seemed like they were either staring at me with evil looks or wouldn't look at me at all. In my delusional state I thought that maybe I was witnessing the end of the world and that people were choosing sides. The good people were the ones that wouldn't look at me because I wasn't on the good side yet and the evil people were the ones staring at me because they wanted me to join the side of evil. It got weirder and weirder and more intense every day. Everything seemed to have a meaning and be a sign from god or the devil and I felt like I was being told that I needed to choose a side either good or evil because it was the end of the world and the final battle between evil and good was going to happen soon. I started seeing things as patterns and thought people on television or strangers were giving me clues. Like I had my car worked on and the mechanic gave me back my bill and to me it seemed like he was trying to give me a clue and he circled the number of the invoice and the number contained my current address. Or I would see a sentence on an ad like on a napkin from a restaurant and I would think the slogan had a deeper significance and was speaking directly to me. Tons of stuff like that. The other similar thing I had happen is the getting lost in places that shouldn't be easy to get lost in. I remember being lost outside of my friends house. I was on my phone talking to him and he was trying to direct me to his place but I couldn't follow his instructions even though I had been over there a million times.
So yeah I was really messed up. I quit drinking and drugs BUT I keep living in this hallucinatory state for about 6 months after I got sober. So yeah there was like 6 months where I was still seeing shit and thinking the tv was talking to me directly, hearing voices of people I knew who weren't there, or who were dead, thinking everything was a sign from god or the devil, etc. etc. when I was stone cold sober and under the supervision of a friend who took me in and was taking care of me and making sure I cleaned up and didn't wander the streets. And one night I actually did roam the streets in the middle of the winter and I was officially sober but yeah my mind was still messed up. I remember walking through the snow in my friends yard and then thinking the lights on the neighbors houses were making a noise that I should follow. I don't even remember how I got back exactly but I remember wandering and following the sounds I was hearing from peoples porch lights, at the time I was searching for a house I thought I was being led to by god. But I couldn't find it and then I went back. My friend was really freaked out and started locking me in the room I stayed in at night so I wouldn't wander out and end up hurting myself or getting arrested or something.
Seeing all these patterns and connections in random data I later found out is called apophenia. I also found out later that extreme cocaine abuse like I was doing can cause stimulant psychosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulant_psychosis#Cocaine . Also I've always been more prone to hallucinate than the average person, sleep deprivation, weed, high fevers have all caused me to have hallucinations. So when I added tons of cocaine and booze and drugs to my natural ability to hallucinate easily I believe it caused drug induced schizophrenia.
Moral of the story is yeah I think something is messing with your brain. I had similar feeling of the weird looks and getting lost and feeling like everything was off and like I was in another dimension or another world. My advice is.
1 try to find a safe place you can stay with a person you trust who can look out for you.
2 if you drink alcohol, coffee, do drugs of any kind stop doing them all now, even coffee, even coca-cola. no drugs, no booze, no caffeine. You don't want unnatural substances messing with your mind while you are in this state.
3 SLEEP. Make sure you are getting sleep, even try to sleep more than usual if possible.

4. try to make sure you eat extremely healthy and are getting regular exercise.
5. if you are completely sober, eating extremely healthy, exercising and sleeping properly and you still are feeling crazy then go get on some anti-psychotic meds. BUT please try the natural ways first since most of those meds are a crap shoot and don't necessarily 'cure' you. sometimes they make you worse, sometimes they just mask your problems by numbing you, oftentimes these meds give you more problems but sometimes they are the only choice you have.
   So yeah you aren't in another dimension, your brain is just malfunctioning. Try the sober, sleep, eat healthy, and exercise stuff first and see if there are any improvements, if not then seek out another psychiatrist or psychologist. I'm surprised the psychiatrist didn't lock you up and drug you up after you told him your story. The shrinks I've dealt with in my life always want to push drugs on me. Good luck dude. I eventually fully recovered but there was a time where my friend who was watching me thought I might just stay in that insane waking dream state forever. My situation was drug induced though so it probably has a different cause than yours but I did experience a very similar distorted reality to the one you describe.

[END OF COMMENT]

Great comment, really fascinating. A bit better than the usual "...seizure!" :-)

There's maybe a fine line between having a looser perception of things (making useful connections and picking up on things) to just seeing the whole world as a pattern. I mean, it is a pattern, and things are often personally meaningful in a synchronistic way, but not always usefully so - it's the obsession with it to the exclusion of everyday living that makes things go a little too far. Caffeine is "connection juice" for me. It's only when you stop that you realise how such an everyday boring stimulant has a strong effect on your "reality". We need an OP update soon.

...

OP?