TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 14)
POST: Serious question: Why do the stupidest most mundane posts get upvoted on this sub but actual glitches such as DeJavu or Double Slit experiments get downvoted?
A couple of thoughts:
- Deja Vu reports which say "hey I thought I'd seen it before" without more detail, aren't glitches.
- Double slit experiments aren't glitches, and they're not typically personally experienced.
- What's mundane to you, isn't necessarily mundane to someone who had the "personal, everyday-mode experience for which you have no explanation."
Deja Vu reports are not "hey I thought I seen that before". We still do not fully understand them and in fact in some cases they believe it to be psychological while in others they think it is more physiological and could be triggered by epilepsy. But in reality we still do not know. And BTW I am not at all suggesting Deja Vu is a glitch, I am simply suggesting that this phenomenon to me getting downvoted while someone losing their cheese sandwich getting upvoted is crazy but then again this is Reddit.
Regarding the double slit, I am not going to get into because without being rude I really think you might not be understanding it fully and in relation to what we understand about reality as it is with physics and quantum physics but also the study and understanding of consciousness.
Regarding the mundane, what you have said is simply describing anecdotal evidence.
I suggest you do some further reading, happy to recommend a few things for you. Just PM me.
I agree we don't know about deja vu - most of the theories are handwaving and unpersuasive (brain memory echoes and so on). I think many of the deja vu reports tend to get down voted because they don't contain any new information - and there are a lot of them. (Most of the reports are "I had this feeling I'd seen it before". This is different from any explanation, note.)
Do tell me what I don't understand about quantum physics and the double slit experiment! ;-) Tell me in what way it counts as a glitch, briefly.
Of course glitch reports are anecdotal - that's the point, surely, by the very definition? They are personal events which led the experiencer to doubt their ideas about how reality works. What the nature of that experience is, that's the next step.
EDIT:
I'm an ex-physicist. For sure, quantum physics and the slits experiment certainly reveals a lot about our assumptions regarding our own abstractions, and the delayed choice experiment reveals even more about this - that our assumption that things "happen" between observations in the same form as we experience them is basically incorrect. It's thought-provoking for sure. And I think QBism [https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/] is quite a nice attempt at producing a "single-user theory" that avoids all those crap many-worlds type interpretations.
But, there's no way to scientifically study the meaning behind the maths of quantum physics - and it is a mathematical theory. It's only ever going to be philosophy or metaphysics. So as regards glitches... the double slits is merely a fact, which reveals that we don't have a coherent narrative for those situations. It's on the list of "things to make better explanations for"... and there's not much new to say about it. It doesn't really provide any help for glitch experiences, other than emphasising the old philosophical problem, that we cannot tell what the form of the world is beyond the formatting of our sensory experience - assuming there is a beyond - and it remains an "infinite gloop" which cannot be interrogated.
Look i'm not a scientist and I can only explain this idea from a basic level. Here goes.
Matrix Glitch reports being anecdotal means they cannot be matrix glitches.
Firstly we are discussing a topic that is fringe, so you have to leave that governing part of your brain at home if you want to step on this ride.
Most people in this sub are discussing paranormal phenomena, psychic experiences, psychological issues, memory loss, hallucinations etc. By their definition they cannot be glitches. Because;
The term glitch is clearly defined and as we all know was popularized in the Matrix films which I personally think did a pretty good job of explaining not only the matrix but the way glitches might work, only it's still Hollywood at the end of the day so they take these pretty big concepts and break them down into bite sized chunks the public can understand and when you do that you lose some of the essence and quality of the idea.
A Glitch is a part of the matrix in that it is a flaw of the matrix. These other things people are posting relate to their experience within the matrix, because of the very rules of the matrix. They are not flaws, they might be perceived that way because of many various reasons, subjectivity, feelings, emotions whatever. They may even seem chaotic but they are not glitches.
So, with that said I believe the double slit phenomenon truly is a glitch in our reality.
Being a physicist you understand our quantum world does not behave like our regular world. So in a way you could say these are two different sets of programs. We understand one really well and we are beginning to barely scratch the surface of the other.
Then you have consciousness which science does not understand - now here is the funny thing. What we know about consciousness and what we experience tells us we can be aware of both of these programs at the same time and I personally think this is where the glitch is.
So essentially we have light acting as a wave and as a single particle but observe it and it switches, no rhyme, no reason. The very act of observing this process forces it to switch. Like a rule. It behaves how its told to behave.
So what is telling it to behave this way?
The glitch is. But not by intention. It'd non-intended.
And if you don't care to entertain this idea, i'll gladly give you my email and you can email me in 30 years and I guarantee you, they will be no closer to figuring it out because there is nothing to figure out. It is a glitch.
Back to our matrix theory.
If we can all agree that our reality is programmed and there is now actually a little bit of science behind this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp4NkItgf0E & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6w0K5FIgsU]
So if we can agree that our reality might be a giant piece of code ( I believe it is) than can we also agree that code can contain errors even on the grandest of scales? I think it can and I actually believe the glitch reveals an unintended insight which is beautiful in a sense just like the imperfections in a rose bush or an animals colours or a fancy piece of wooden furniture.
And the glitch is not what you think it is. It's got to do with consciousness and not the behaviour of the particles but the problem is we don't even fully understand the way the particles operate.
The problem with our understanding in this experiment is its being looked at by scientists in a non computer model way. But if you look at it like a computer program model you can see clearly, blatantly it is a glitch.
This glitch is forcing us to think about our consciousness and how it behaves and effects other things is it not? Look at the effect it is having and reflect on it.
My 2 cents and to make it fun, i'll bet a bottle of fine liquor on it that unless they begin looking at this problem like a computer program they wont figure it out ever.
:)
Ha, fun.
[Aside - The subreddit specifically avoids "glitch=simulation", it sticks to the idea of the experiential event which makes you question things, and does not presume the explanation. Just thought I'd get that out of the way first.]
So, there is a problem with the simulation/program metaphor. I suggest that it takes an old philosophical idea, and then sprinkles inappropriate computer metaphors on top.
Let's play with this...
The philosophical idea is that the universe is not of the same form as our experiences. Specifically, that space and the passage of time are part of experiences, the formatting of our senses, rather than the formatting of the universe itself. The universe itself, in fact, just cannot be described, because it is "before" division and "before" change. We might refer to it as an "infinite gloop". What we actually experience, then, is the patterning of our own minds. And what are minds made of? Consciousness.
The universe is therefore a particular distribution of patterns (or "facts") at different levels of contribution; a landscape across which our attentional focus apparently shifts. There is no substrate to this patterning, no underlying solidity. There is no "hardware" to this "software". Furthermore, the landscape is static, so there is no sense in which the "software" is "run"; there is no processing. Or rather, the only processing is consciousness taking on the shape of different patterns, which happens "before" the experience of time.
So, that's like a blend of George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, non-dualism, and some other stuff: philosophical idealism.
What about quantum mechanics then?
Well, what experiments with quantum mechanics reveal to us, is that we hit a limit as to what can be conceptualised. We are stuck, in thought, with imagining in terms of "parts" and their relationship in space, unfolding in time. However, the world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", it is a superposition of patterns basically "dissolved" into subjective consciousness. This doesn't matter usually, and we imagine that when we're not looking, the world is still "happening" behind the scenes - but that is not the case. In fact:
- The only thing that ever "happens", is observations.
- All descriptions we create to explain observations are connective fictions and never actually happen.
- At small scales we are forced to confront the statically patterned nature of the world.
Speaking very broadly here, just to get the general point across. But you maybe get the idea.
And glitches?
Glitches correspond to a shift of the "world-pattern" of a particular conscious perspective, where the "world-pattern" is defined as the particular distribution of patterns contributing to the ongoing experience; the static landscape that corresponds to the current state of the world within a subjective conscious viewpoint. Which is why I'd separate out QM and glitches:
- The double slit observation is an artefact of the "granularity" of a space and time based landscape or "world-pattern".
- A glitch is a shift in that world-pattern which leaves only a memory within the subjective consciousness, with no observable trace in the world-pattern itself.
TL;DR: Stuff about philosophy, consciousness, patterns, granularity and shifts!
Responses & Reasons
How can a glitch be a shift in patterns when the pattern is intended to shift and there are trillions of simulations and options that you are not aware of?
That's called "begging the question", I'd say! :-)
Have you ever had an experience other than your own? Have you ever seen "other simulations"? You have only ever experienced the content of your own subjective viewpoint. To understand the nature of experiencing, and from there understand the content of experience, you need to refocus on the subjective, in my view.
And the very fabric of this Universe, the canvas and the rules that govern it is in fact the Matrix.
You don't need that extra metaphorical layer for your explanation, though. In fact, it makes "the Matrix" kind of meaningless - it's equivalent to saying "stuff is made from stuff" and still leaves the area of consciousness unanswerable.
But it exists, how else do you think you are able to walk in the 3rd dimension . . . it is because of the rules.
This flips things around incorrectly, I think. In fact it flips science around badly too. "The rules" don't cause anything, just as "the laws of physics" don't cause anything. What you are talking about is "regularities in experience", from which you might make up a connective fiction about "rules" - but there's no need to. If experience is inherently patterned, then the natural state is not chaos, the natural state is the formation of habits.
I've seen those videos before. They amount to seeing patterns in experience. It's a nice demonstration, but it's not the demonstration of what he thinks it is. The universe is not a computer system. Our experiences are patterned certainly, and that pattern is you, I suggest. Which is in effect what Quantum Bayesianism takes as an approach.
QBism & The Now
Here's the more accessible article on QBism (the first one), plus an article that may or may not be useful to you about reification of abstractions by the same author:
- Physics: QBism puts the scientist back into science, N David Mermin [http://www.nature.com/news/physics-qbism-puts-the-scientist-back-into-science-1.14912]
- What’s bad about this habit, N David Mermin [http://www.ehu.eus/aitor/irakas/mes/Reference/mermin.pdf]
It's quite a good read, the QBism one, especially on the subject of The Now, although you'll notice he chickens out at one point. Specifically here
"When you and I are communicating face-to-face I cannot imagine that a live encounter for me could be only a memory for you, or vice versa."
I can imagine this, and in fact it's the only reasonable account of how subjective perspectives interact: they don't, as such.
Consolidation & Content
Cutting to it, why am I being so dismissive of the "simulation hypothesis"? Because it's yet another metaphorical abstraction. It's completely fine as that, but it should not be confused with "how things really are", which is much simpler: patterns in the mind.
Simulations, objective universes, the material world, all those things are inventions to try and counter the fact that there is no outside to experience, and all potential experiences are dissolved within it, essentially. For example, the room next door is not "over there".
These all old ideas, of course, with Zen buddhism, philosophical idealism, having covered the same ground repeatedly. The metaphor I find useful is this one:
- The Imagination Room
It's a neat way of realising that you are an "open aware conscious space" which takes on the shape of experiences, including the experience of having a 3D viewpoint, of being-a-person-in-a-world. It is the patterning of that experiencing space, rather than an inherent structure in an extended externally-defined universe, that is responsible for the regularities you see around you.
Basically: you are living as your own theory at all times. Why do you think all these different theories are promoted by people with such dedication? Why are they so convinced they are right? It's worth pondering. For you, that theory is "we're in a simulation". For me, it's "I am an open space of awareness". For some people, it's "god is talking to me personally and I'm being chased by government spies". The fun thing is, you can very quickly change your patterning so that another theory seems to be true. By this time next month, I could have you convinced that owls are running the universe! ;-)
Aside - Actually, you might find Kirby Suprise's book on Synchronicity interesting on this front. I don't totally agree with his model (but he is upfront in saying it's just a descriptive fiction, so that's okay), but as a clinical psychologist who has experimented with people's tendency to literally experience their own theories as true, it's worth a read. Most of his points are described in this radio interview, if you're interested.
Thanks for the interesting conversation, by the way - TG
POST: I Got My Cat Back, But at What Cost?
It does not seem to work like that. More than likely, you died, and your consciousness shifted to a nearby reality where you did not die, much as Alvin did not die. You might note quite a bit of minor discrepancies. Certainly. no-one around you is going to remember you mourning for Alvin since Alvin never died. The reality shift may not have happened as a result of you dying, either. Pocket realities are in the process of being lined up and merging in order for them to stabilize. This is a merged reality, rather than an entirely different one.
This seems awfully complicated...
How exactly do we know that there are various realities, and that they are merging and so on, when we can't get "outside" of them to see this happen? Isn't that just the unfalsifiable many-worlds hypothesis all over again?
Assuming people's stories are correct, all we know is that their ongoing experience of the world suddenly shifted vs their memory of it. Everything beyond that is just imagination and conjecture, right?
I disagree, but a great many of my five-dimensional selves have integrated across numerous collapses of formerly possible pasts and various iterations of timestreams. Those are my cumulative experiences. For me, it is not conjecture; it is understanding.
How do I know that various realities are merging? I am experiencing them, and I have dealt with enough reality shifts to have a great idea about not only what is going on but why it is going on. How would you know? You would only know if some of your experiences with such shifts and collapses were somewhat similar in nature and volume to mine (more or less). Without that kind of direct experience, it certainly looks like imagination or conjecture.
I am certainly no evangelist. There is no need for you to accept or reject the explanation. It is there for what it is worth. The space-time continuum is healing/being fixed. It is a simple truth which sheds a whole lot of light on many Glitches in the Matrix along with Mandela Effects.
What I am - well, not disputing exactly, but exploring - is your interpretation of experiences. "Timestreams", "realities", even "space-time continuums" and suchlike are abstract concepts which are not experienced as such. What is experienced is something not being as you expect it: a situation not being how you remember, or, occasionally, witnessing a change. Everything after that is, surely, philosophy and metaphysics? Nothing wrong with that; but such things are conceptual frameworks which are not true; they are useful.
The very idea that a "space-time continuum" is "healing/being fixed" seems to me to be an interpretation from nowhere. It might "explain" but only in the sense of being a description; it's is not a truth. I've never seen a space-time continuum, but assuming there is such a thing, I don't see why it would need healed for or by anyone.
Do you see where I"m coming from?
Broadly, I'd suggest: the only thing that is true is our direct observation. Everything beyond that is a connective fiction, a narrative. The further we move from being able to tie our narrative to an observation, the more we drift into ungrounded interpretation - as in, one of many interpretations, selected on preference rather than accuracy.
Because we simply don't know what is true, it may be best to keep all ideas on the table until they can be proven incorrect.
That's actually what I was getting at.
Basically, given the actual observed content of experiencing such a "shift", there are always multiple ways of describing it - several different conceptual frameworks we could use to construct an interpretation. We build a description from ideas, but any ideas which can never actually be experienced, are just that: mental constructs.
It's perhaps similar to the situation we have with the common interpretations of quantum mechanics [https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/]: there's nothing really to choose between them except individual preference - because they all predict the same observations. "Many-worlds", for instance, is really just a fanciful imagining of what lies behind a mathematical theory, a theory which only makes a prediction of an outcome, and doesn't actually say what happens to produce that outcome.
So - when we talk of "time-streams" and "merging realities" of multiple worlds, we're engaging in philosophy. We might equally formulate a description in terms of the instability of patterns in extended minds, and have it match the observations identically. There'd be nothing to choose between the two, except personal preference. So I was curious about /u/alanwescoat's certainty in his description. Was it simply that it's easier to speak as if your current favourite framework is how it really is (I do exactly the same thing; it makes discussion simpler), or does he actually think that is what is definitely happening? And if so, what's led him to choose that particular interpretation over another?
Good questions TG. I too am curious about his thoughts, observations and interpretation. Thanks for taking the time to read my very long post! Hopefully I didn't come off as one-sided since I actually think you both have bits of truth here.
It was interesting and well thought-out; thanks for writing. And this topic gets right to the heart of the whole glitches thing, I think. As for "truth", I generally split it into two categories at the moment:
- There's Conceptual Truth, which is having a description which is self-consistent and matches the observations. This doesn't mean it was "what is really happening", but it provides a way to connect different experiences together and think about them.
- There's Direct Truth, which is the actual sensory content of an observation, before it's been abstracted. (Note, a thought is itself also a direct experience, but only of a thought, as a "shadow-sensory" observation, not of something outside of that which it is "about".)
The hardness of the floor under your feet is directly true, for instance. Meanwhile, you might develop a theory about "hardness" based on your observations. There are probably thousands of ways you could put together that theory - so none of them would be "the" truth, they would just be relatively true within themselves. Only the direct experience of the floor would be fundamentally true.
So for glitches: the actual weird experience = direct truth. The description or interpretation of that experience = conceptual truth.
There's some overlap of course, because your experiences are to some extent "patterned" by concepts which arise with it, but it's quite a useful division for checking what percentage of your worldview is imagined fantasy.
Let's see if our reality-blending friend has any thoughts on the matter...
...
Many-worlds and friends is definitely a nice "thinking framework" and - although it is not scientific in my opinion (I'm full of opinions aren't I?) - I think it can help people a lot, because it's a way of having people realise an important philosophical point: that the form of the universe (whatever that is) is not necessarily of the same as the form of your everyday perception.
In other words, 3D-space and time are part of your experience, they are not the format of how things are "happening" when you aren't experiencing them. The world is maybe more like a dimensionless gloop of facts which can be called up. The room next door is not actually "over there"; it is actually sort of "dissolved" into the background right here and now.
Once you've got a feel for that concept, and have recognised the hidden assumption you have been making, then your perspective on an awful lot of things can change quite dramatically.
POST: [THEORY] Everything that is true and can't be accounted for in this sub, explained
Some thoughts...
So if the fabric of reality is information
But, what is information made from? And what are our five senses made from? What are "we", in fact?
Does the simulation need to actually exist at all - as a thing that is "run" or calculated or rendered? Or can it just be, say, a static informational landscape of higher dimension - or even an "infinite gloop" containing all possible experiential moments - which we traverse with our attention?
I suppose the short version of what you are saying is: there are no fundamental rules.
I would suggest that even in the standard view there aren't any fundamental rules either. Rather, we observe certain regularities in our subjective experiences, confer with others to see if they are shared, and then summarise those observations as "rules". That's science in action. We might call these rules "laws", but they are laws in the sense of being a concise and broadly-applicable description; they are not "who the world works". Thinking that is so, is where sometimes we have gone wrong.
What information theory and its like free is from, then, is the incorrect notion that our inferred concepts are what is actually behind the universe - somehow separate from us and dictating our world - rather than just connective fictions we've made up based on the things we've seen. We have tended to elevate our abstract ideas above the content of our direct experience, and subordinate ourselves to them instead of only making use of it.
The potential problem with the information perspective is perhaps that it doesn't go far enough: it might dissolve the idea of definite external rules, but it still asserts that there is a define external structure which provides a substrate for our experiences, even though we will never actually experience this final abstraction.
With thanks to N David Mermin.
Information is defined as a difference that makes a difference. An on/off switch, binary is the most basic way to express something. There is either 0 or 1.
For sure, but what is that 0 or 1 "made from"? What is the construction of the "switches"?
Or is it completely dimensionlessly abstracted and inaccessible? Which is fine: it harks back to Kant and his transcendental idealism and other philosophies which propose that space (extent) and time (change) are part of experiences rather than fundamental to the universe (which itself becomes simply a concept). It's something to be clear about though.
As intangible as it is, they are all ramifications of infinity. One divine paradox, resulting in no such thing as nothing and only gradation between the everything; no two things allowed to be the same. 0 and 1 are simply the simplest or smallest memes to describe the gradation. Chain-asking "but what is ____ made of?" Inevitably lands on "infinity," which can only be answered by "a paradox. The first and only paradox." It caused itself. It's f'ed up!
Well, the simpler way might be to simply state that there are patterns or forms, but there is no substrate. Since we have dispensed with space and time, other than as modes of experiences, we could say that they are made from "existence".
Meanwhile, 1 and 0 are statements of relativity, existence and non-existence - and infinity would really just be a word for "non-distinction".
From my limited understanding, when you play the "what is ___ made of" game, you get to the point where you are looking at energy and potential. Which is why this tread is blowing my mind, because at the bottom of it all it seems like everything we interact with is just information not particularly ment for us to see.
And "energy"and "potential" are both self-referential concepts. Energy is a measurement rather than a "thing"; it's a bookkeeping quantity without a quality. So pretty much it's the equivalent of saying that "length" is the fundamental property of the universe. Not the length of anything - just "length".
Which is the same as saying "amount", but not an amount of anything in particular. Which I suppose again leads us back to saying that the fundamental quality of the universe is "existence".
POST: Remembering Memories From Other Timelines?
[POST]
I remember waking up one day and not being able to move my legs. I also remember drowning in the pool of my aunt's apartments. No one else involved in these memories remembers them.
1: My dad was trying to wake me up. I was about 8 or so, and told him I couldn't leave the bed because my legs wouldn't move. I tried to move them, but it was like there was a block in between my head and my legs. They wouldn't move. He scooped me up and put me in his truck. We went to a hospital. I'm pretty sure it was Baylor Medical Center in Garland, TX. I recognize the building's unique porch-roof-thing?
Anyway, we were admitted. And I was given a wheelchair to sit in. I remember that in particular because I was having fun figuring out how to turn it by using one wheel and not the other.
Eventually I had x-rays taken of my legs. I remember this very clearly because it was terrifying. The nurse was very kind and my mom was there, but the machinery was very scary. I was cautioned not to move, but since I couldn't move anyway-- That was redundant.
We left the hospital. I spent the rest of the weekend with my dad, and when it was the school week they left me with my grandma. I spent a couple days with her, and then the memory ends.
I'm mentioned this to my mom and my grandma (I no longer speak to my dad and couldn't get in touch with him even if I tried) and neither of them remember this. My mom remembers taking me to the hospital for "something about [my] legs" but can't pin down what happened. It was 17 years ago, though.
2: When I was 12, I was at my aunt's apartment to use her complex's pool (ours didn't have one). My aunt, my mom, and I were all in the pool and we had it to ourselves that day. The pool was made of two rectangles forming a 90 degree angle. One of the rectangles of the pool was slightly smaller than the other. My aunt and mom were in the larger area, talking while floating on those inflatable lounge things. I remember bobbing my head out of the water, trying to get their attention. There was something bothering me, and I was scared but I don't remember what it was. I can't breath enough to yell at them. I mean, looking back I can infer that I was probably drowning. That memory just ends in sort of purple. But, neither my mom nor my aunt remember "that time i nearly drowned."
Theories: I have false memories. I'm remembering things wrong. Or, these things happened to some other version of me, and I have her memories too.
[END OF POST]
Q1: This seems like more of a Mandela Effect sort of thing than a glitch, but it's interesting nonetheless. I'm of the mind that these sorts of memories are the result of the phenomena described by the "quantum immortality" theory. It goes like this: we don't actually experience death. When something happens that kills us, our consciousness shifts into a parallel universe where that thing that killed you didn't happen. This new universe is almost exactly like the other one, it's just that in this one you didn't die.
So using this theory in your case, it would mean that when you were 12 years old you drowned, and died, in your Aunt's pool, but then shifted to the universe you're in now, where this incident never happened, and thus you lived to see another day.
The implication with this theory, though, is that when you shift into the "new" universe where you survive your death, there will be other little things that are different from your "original" universe. Basically, this is because there are no two universes that are exactly the same. In order to "find" a universe where you are still alive, you're consciousness takes the one with a timeline that is most similar to the original. This could explain the other memory inconsistencies of yours. Perhaps in this new universe, where you never drowned and died, there never was an event with your legs; not because this killed you, too, but because that event just isn't included in the timeline where you aren't killed in the swimming pool.
Q2: The theory doesn't allow for the millions of seconds that a lfe can produce these extra forward moving life times (times as in multiplying) the billions of people currently in the world. How can a person create a different life time in a different dimension if that persons lifetime is connected to everyone elses lifetimes. How do we account for that?
Possible answer: We are each of us completely alone in our own private copy of the world.
That's kind of terrifying...
Okay, updated answer: We are each of us an "open consciousness space" which is having an experience of being-a-world-from-a-person-perspective.
Any better?
Not really...
Why not?
Admittedly, it means you aren't a person; you're just having a "person experience". But it also means you are completely at one with the world because it's all "inside you". Surely you can't be lonely if there is no separation? Isn't that better than being "made from atoms", for instance?
It'd mean that all I've ever experienced and everything around me is something only I know, and that no-one else than me is a person the same way as me.
On the other hand I have no problem being made of atoms, yes I'm probably just a lump of conscious atoms, but what's the problem in that? So is everyone else.
I'd much rather have that I'm sharing the world with other people, and that the world is just as much for them as it is for me, than the world being just for me, and only something that I'm experiencing.
I see, so you are saying that the preferable situation is to be completely screwed, so long as everyone else is screwed too? ;-)
Surely there's a better deal than martyrdom in multiplicity!
Actually, the implication isn't, in fact, that the world is something only you know. You as a person, that is. But it's very hard to describe, due to limitations of language. It would be something like this:
- Imagine there is a blanket of material.
- Now, imagine that this blanket has no properties, except for something we'll call "awareness".
- When the blanket is flat, the only experience the blanket has is "existing".
- At this point, we introduce folds into the blanket.
- Now, the blanket is aware of itself relative to itself. In other words, one "fold" can see another "fold".
So we have this situation:
- The blanket is the only thing that exists. That is what you truly are.
- However, the blanket is experiencing itself being all these folds.
- Your current experience of being-a-person corresponds to apparently being a fold, while actually being everything.
- This is true of everyone.
This means that you get to both a person interacting with others, but also the whole world and everyone in it.
The problem with thinking about this is, that not all the folds are happening at the same time. You and I are not sharing the same time and place, exactly. And that is literally unthinkable. There's potentially a way of describing that which makes sense, but it involves flipping things around a bit.
Ah, ok, I get it now. Yeah that's not terrifying. I was thinking more like everyone else was only in my imagination
Yeah, it's more like everyone is in or part of an imagination.
If the world is a continuous and coherent pattern, a blanket of material with folds as facts, then you can't adjust one fact without tugging a little on the rest of the material, impacting the other folds. Although these "collateral shifts" would make sense in terms of the fundamental nature - the blanket - they wouldn't follow the logic of the world's apparent content - the folds.
For instance, your car tumbles off the side of the road but - flash! - suddenly it didn't happen after all. Changing that fact inevitably results in a collateral shift of the world as a whole. But it takes the form of, say, an extra tin of fruit in your kitchen cupboard, a news reporter's hair being parted at the other way, and an acquaintance you've not seen in 10 years now never existed. Those changes are causally linked to, but not logically linked to, the event.
Quite possibly you would never encounter these updated facts. However, the change in your felt-sense of things - that "global summary" sensation that you have - might mean that the world sort of "tastes" different subsequently. You intuitively know that you are no longer in the same place. There's a different "flavour" to your life after the accident somehow.
...
That's a false dilemma.
That's a false interpretation of the thread -- which simply proposes an alternative viewpoint (to the one a couple of levels up) and then explores the implications to see where they lead.
nobody is saying you are "made from atoms"
I'm sure it's literally the case that people are, in fact. What else are you made from, then, in the standard description of things?
Another theory for you: parents forget a lot as they age. My parents have forgotten things I would have expected thought they would remember, and when I prompt them, the best I get is a vague recollection. Often they outright deny things. Luckily I have other family members that are younger and back me up, or else I'd think I was really losing it!
I think what happens is that, when you get older, you realise that life wasn't actually "all about you", and your parents had other things they were interested in other than being "parental" and remembering all about our self-centred escapades.
True, although with my parents, they've forgotten other things that are not just about me. It's a bit sad, actually.
Yeah, being less flippant for a moment: it does happen as you describe too, and there's something a little upsetting about it because it's a loss of part of your relationship, a shared closeness you have, in a way.
...
I realized it must have been a dream.
Out of curiosity: did you actually remember that you had dreamt it, or did you instead infer that it must have been a dream due to the lack of a reasonable alternative explanation?
POST: Update to yesterday. Things are better. Still wrong.
That sounds like a potential mangled reference to The Invisibles, the graphic novel by Grant Morrison which was intended to be a 'hypersigil' and has lots of reality-bending type aspects to it.
For myself, I'm going to recycle a metaphor that was used for the Remembering Memories From Other Timelines post last week, which uses the idea of a blanket to describe how a shift in one aspect of the personal world would have repercussions elsewhere which were hard to connect up logically.
Factual Updates and Collateral Shifts
If the world is a continuous and coherent pattern, a blanket of material with folds as facts, then you can't adjust one fact without tugging a little on the rest of the material, impacting the other folds. Although these "collateral shifts" would make sense in terms of the fundamental nature - the blanket - they wouldn't follow the logic of the world's apparent content - the folds.
For instance, your car tumbles off the side of the road but - flash! - suddenly it didn't happen after all. Changing that fact inevitably results in a collateral shift of the world as a whole. But it takes the form of, say, an extra tin of fruit in your kitchen cupboard, a news reporter's hair being parted at the other way, and an acquaintance you've not seen in 10 years now never existed. Those changes are causally linked to, but not logically linked to, the event.
Quite possibly you would never encounter these updated facts. However, the change in your felt-sense of things - that "global summary" sensation that you have - might mean that the world sort of "tastes" different subsequently. You intuitively know that you are no longer in the same place. There's a different "flavour" to your life after the accident somehow.
So basically, the butterfly effect.
No, because that suggests a domino effect across time, where changes makes sense logically according to a cause-effect process involving sequential events. There is no ongoing time in this description. We're dealing with a static pattern that is always "now", and the impact of shifting one fact is logically unrelated to the side-effects.
One way to view this: imagine there was a big sheet of paper, with a printed list of facts, one after the other, and that this list was the definition of your world. The facts are not in any particular order. By writing on the list with a big maker pen, you can delete or change things. However, the thickness of the marker pen means that crossing something out affects lines above and below. If you cross out the fact "my beer is empty", you might partially cross out "there are no elephants in Iceland" on one side and "my grandmother likes Matt Damon" on the other.
In neither case have you "gone back in time" to change the fullness of your beer, with a resulting ripple effect from that point onwards. You've just updated the fact directly, but because of the underlying structure of reality (the blanket or the list), changing that fact can't be done in isolation, so other facts which are unrelated in space and time and history and causality get amended also.
POST: Depressed about quantum immortality.
Trust me, there's lots more exciting and interesting things to discover, adventures to have, feelings to feel, people to love, even things to fear... followed by realising there was nothing to fear. Despite our occasional assumptions to the contrary, the world turns out to be infinitely deep and amazing.
The world also turns out to be literally unthinkable. In other words, the thoughts you have about the world are always wrong in the long run - but not to worry, if you let that thought go, there will be another better one along soon enough.
Which is a roundabout way of saying -
Getting depressed about the concept of "quantum immortality" is like getting depressed because "everything is made from atoms", or any other idea which doesn't really impact actual living. They're only a problem if you think about them all the time and make those thoughts into your main experience.
In somewhere between 50-500 years from now, the whole idea of both "everything is made from atoms" and "quantum immortality" will be laughed at. We'll be seeing the world a totally different way, a way which we can't anticipate right now. So why waste your time on such passing thought-fads, if you're not enjoying them?
Everything we think right now will turn out to be wrong.
It will just have been "temporarily useful".
But living will still be the same.
So stop thinking, start living.
Speaking of which: Constructive Living and Stop Thinking, Start Living. Non-philosophical books which are good for getting back to life. And if you get stuck in a thought, you might try centring your attention on your lower abdomen and keeping it there - it's a real quick way to get out of your head area and get some relief.
...
Dude is talking about committing suicide and you're nagging him about exams?
It's actually good advice:
Put that suicide stuff aside for now and concentrate on your exams; suicide will still be there afterwards. Although after that, actually, you might want to go out celebrating with your friends, so maybe put on hold a while longer. But then it's summer and the weather's nice, you've met this nice girl/boy, maybe wait a bit longer. But then the quantum suicide thoughts come back later... but you're now 85 years old and you figure, what the hell, there's not much point now, I'll be dying soon enough anyway, I might as well spend more time with my grandchildren, and I can always worry about it next time around.
Actually focusing on his exams might be good for him. Telling him he "needs" to be doing so might not be the best thing to say. Heck, telling a depressed person to stop being depressed is wonderful advice. I mean, it would solve the entire problem. I have, however, never met a depressed person that works like that and you should be careful firing arm chair psychology around like that.
Well, I wasn't telling him really, it was the above commenter - but if he could focus on his exams (or indeed anything else) that's the way out.
In the end the only thing that works for depression is to... stop being depressed. You have to "change state". It's like being sat down. The only way to stop being sat down, is to stand up. Unfortunately, when you're depressed you're much heavier than usual.
Meanwhile, if you're thinking of something that generates bad feelings, you have to stop thinking of that thing. Unfortunately, depressed people have usually ended up with very narrow attentional focus and have lost the ability to redirect themselves.
So telling people things doesn't usually do much; you kinda need to actually budge them sideways. But maybe someone will say something that will trigger a brief flash of insight which will nudge his state and things will start flowing again. You never know. Maybe even a snippet armchair psychology might help! Because really, pretty much nothing else does. No-one can "stand up" for you.
The reason I recommended the book, Constructive Living in my other comment was because it has a nice, straightforward way of laying it out which (from experience) can help shift focus in this way.
...
Q1: Hi. I have a master's degree in physics. Don't be depressed about quantum immortality, it is a crock of shit. Hope this helps.
Q2: Thank you, but could you please clarify why it is a crock of shit? (I am not trying to argue with you, my knowledge of physics is far too limited. I just want to know.)
He's saying (I have a physics background too) that it's meaningless scientifically speaking. It's not something you could ever construct an experiment for. It's a philosophical idea only. There is no reason at all to believe in it. Worrying about that is just like worrying about any of the religious ideas, like karma or reincarnation or heaven. It's got nothing to do with physics.
In fact, whenever you read about "many worlds" or any other popular non-mathematical interpretation of quantum mechanics, you should just treat it as a bit of fun and nothing more serious. (See this comparison of QM interpretations, for an illustration, and the comments.)
To be more straightforward: you should never feel hopeless as a result of any scientific or philosophical idea. Basically, it's all just stuff people made up! None of it is true - it's just useful. If something isn't useful, throw it away. Your focus on the idea of quantum suicide isn't useful.
For an example of a physicist pointing out how our ideas are just useful fictions: see here. It's written with reference to scientific concepts, but the essence is:
"It is a bad habit of physicists to take their most successful abstractions to be real properties of our world."
In other words, we shouldn't confuse our explanations with "what really happens". We certainly shouldn't spend time worrying about them. And if that's true of physics, it's definitely true of this stuff!
POST: Is this what going crazy feels like? (crosspost from Mandela Effect)
There is nothing in quantum physics to explain having memories of a different world, or timeline if you will.
Well, there's nothing in quantum physics to particularly suggest many worlds either, although it's one of a set of unfalsifiable interpretations that are fun. Many-worlds is a philosophical musing; it's not scientific.
However, surely in the "quantum immortality" view, what's happening is that we are shifting "state" - shifting to a state where the "person" we are persists? And since each "state" is basically a complete set of facts of the world, that state must also include our memories. Therefore, such a shift might well result in a different apparent history, and differing memories.
As far as "other observers" go, there's nothing we can say about that. We can only speak from our own subjective experience of an increasingly observation-defined view.
The way I use "shift" is to indicate that the content of our experience changed to a different state. Aren't you assuming here that memories necessarily correspond to prior experiences? Really, there is no history other than that represented in the current state.
Let's try this:
- Let's use the word "configuration" for the total arrangement of the world as held in my consciousness = (x, y, z, m). Where, for illustration, I am using "m" to represent the set of memories "in your brain".
- Each "state" corresponds to a particular configuration. S1 = (x1, y1, z1, m1), S2 = (x2, y2, z2, m2), and so on.
If you are in S1, then S1 includes all the facts of the world, including the memories, m1, in your brain. The memories aren't in the past, they are now but "about" the past.
If my consciousness suddenly becomes attached to (colloquially: shifts to) S2, it is perfectly possible for me to have a set of memories m2=m1. That doesn't necessarily mean that m2 corresponds to experiences I actually had, to the state of the world (x2, y2, z2).
If you choose to believe that, that's fine. But don't call on anything quantum to explain it, because that's utterly wrong. No quantum theory or possible interpretation explains why you would have memories from a different state.
Remember, I am not necessarily promoting such a view, I'm just outlining how it would work.
Personally I think that quantum mechanics as it actually is, has nothing much to say other than highlight the nature of observation vs abstraction. I'd be inclined towards a simpler metaphysical model which deals more directly with experiences arising in consciousness (although the result would be much the same). However...
No quantum theory or possible interpretation explains why you would have memories from a different state.
They are not "from" the different state, they are part of the current state but apparently "about" another state. Sticking to a physicalist model:
- There's nothing special about memories; they are just arrangements of atoms in the brain - B(x, y, z).
- The arrangement of atoms in the brain is not bound in an ongoing way, via a continuous causal link, to other arrangements of atoms in the 'outside' world, W(x, y, z).
- There is no reason why the state of the world cannot change such that the patterns of B(x, y, z) remain the same as in the previous state, while those in W(x, y, z) are different.
One might hypothesise that in a catastrophic circumstance, the total configuration S = B + W, goes through something like this:
- For the continuation of consciousness to "make sense", the configuration of W(x, y, z) changes to a safe situation.
- Meanwhile, since the brain is in effect always being observed, the state of B(x, y, z) is held in its current configuration.
- We end up in a final overall state, S(x, y, z) where the memories accessed from B will no longer be consistent with the subsequent observations of W.
Of course, if B(x, y, z) was not under observation at the time, then it might not be saved from change, and the inconsistency problem won't arise, and nobody would ever know.
EDIT: Obviously, we are assuming quantum immortality is a thing here, and trying to explain stories with it. If we want to go into the validity of interpretations of quantum mechanics, the nature of measurement etc, that's a whole other deal.
If you don't know what observation is in a quantum sense, you're not going to get to a satisfying explanation. It has nothing to do with consciousness at all.
Well, we can chat away about what constitutes a measurement or "fixing", but for us to get anywhere on this topic, we'll have to include consciousness, won't we? (And you already have, implicitly.)
Let's back up a moment and clear something up, which might make the rest of it sort itself out too. So far, we've not specified perspectives, or been clear what we mean by consciousness. And we can't get anywhere with this without switching to a subjective view, I suggest.
To me, it seems that you are visualising things "objectively", as a view from nowhere, with consciousness travelling on some sort of branching trajectory, almost like it is an 'entity' crossing a landscape. What is it doing - hopping from brain to brain? I think this has of problems, not least of which is that it perhaps means our trajectories must be fully deterministic? (See example later.)
So here's how I'm taking it (I'm changing B to M=memories for clarity):
- I am talking from the subjective perspective of a "conscious observer", at all times.
- That observer is in a state, S = M + W, which completely defines the world, and defines (is) its direct experience at that moment.
- The principle of "quantum immortality" says that the observer will always be in a state, and so will always have an experience.
Meanwhile:
- You have asserted that M must always be consistent with W.
- I am suggesting that M needn't necessarily be consistent with W.
I am suggesting that so long as the current state is always coherent as a whole, all is well. And M being consistent with W is not a requirement for this. It's perfectly okay for my memories not to match my surroundings. And this has to be true, surely? It's often true anyway.
Example
Say our friend above is about to die in a swimming accident, but obviously he won't because he's immortal. At what point does he not-die?
He's at the very bottom of the ocean, and gives out his last breath. What happens then? There is no plausible next-state that doesn't involve some sort of discontinuity. The next-state has to be one where it didn't happen at all. This is remarkably improbable, but it is still possible and by "quantum immortality" it is required. And it's more probable than him suddenly becoming a dolphin.
So, perhaps he's suddenly on the beach and didn't go swimming, and has no memory. But in stories on this subreddit, people experience being reset to before their accident, or suddenly being in a safe location, and so on - obviously with memories intact.
And this makes sense, right? Things should unfold until the point where there is no plausible next-moment, otherwise we'd have to be traveling along a fully predetermined path.
Assuming quantum immortality, he will survive in a world where his consciousness still exists.
This is the core of our disagreement. We're going to need to properly consider:
- What is a world? (You seem to be treating it like a "place" rather than a state.)
- What is consciousness? (You seem to be treating it like a "thing" rather than that which experiences a state.)
But let's continue...
Mutiplicity, Forking, Determinism
Assuming quantum immortality, he will survive in a world where his consciousness still exists.
How many of him are there? Surely the only way to avoid multiplicity is to consider that there is one of him (one consciousness) that is in a particular state.
The moment of the last breath won't work because it's extremely unlikely that any event could change the outcome from that point.
My response would be that if quantum immorality is required then that doesn't matter. Probabilities are normalised, likeliness is relative not absolute. There is always a probability, say, that I will suddenly find myself on the beach, discontinuously. And as other options are eliminated, that probability might become 20%, 50%, 70%, later 100%.
The alternatives are that "something" looks ahead and knows in advance, and so those unlikely options never arise - but that means everything is predetermined, which doesn't work surely? - or that they are lots of him and they fall one by one - but that makes screws the whole thing up.
So, we have to look at events that could change to prevent the death.
But if the events have already happened, they can't change? Your next-state might be such that it didn't seem to happen, and you may or may nor retain memories, but it can't "not happen in advance".
In this new world, his consciousness isn't identical. It starts to change at the moment of the fork.
When is this fork though? The fork must happen before the accident, while avoiding the accident is still plausible. What happens to consciousness then? The fork must happen before actual death. What do the other people see in the "world where he dies"; does he act like a zombie until he drowns?
at the point of death in this world, his consciousness would only exist in a world where the dying never happened.
But we've already said that the fork must happen before we get to the death? Unless there are multiple consciousnesses. Actually, how does a fork "know to happen"?
There is no reason to believe that memories of a different world could leak into this one somehow. It just simply doesn't exist.
In the subjective view, there's no 'leakage', because there aren't actually multiple worlds in a physical sense, and memories belong to the subjective perspective.
Objective vs Subjective
All these problems arise because (I suggest) you are imagining this from an objective perspective that doesn't exist: imagining a starting point, with forking happening at certain moments, spawning copies of worlds, and consciousness travelling along "alive" paths only - all as if this structure actually exists independently of an observer.
If you flip it round to a subjective viewpoint, where the conscious observer has what amounts to a "private state", and each next-moment happens on a probabilistic basis, all of these problems go away. You automatically get "quantum immortality" because the conscious observer always exists; only the content or state changes. The world is the state of the observer. (This is the route Christopher Fuch's QBism interpretation takes, for slightly different but still related reasons.)
In this view, there are no rigid rules as regards memory, because all that matters is that at any moment the state itself is coherent as a configuration. And there is no problem with memory states differing from the state of the apparent world, they are not connected by an ongoing link to the past - no state has a past, it is completely self-contained.
This is philosophy, and there's not a lot of right and wrong answers here. I just think that if you believe in dualism, you should not pull in quantum theory to try and prove your point, because by definition, no science can possibly explain anything related to consciousness in that view.
Thanks, so I'm clearer about where you stand - I wasn't sure about how you envisaged consciousness and the multiple worlds. Just to say up front: I'm not a dualist, that kinda takes care of itself. The main thing is: there is no "outside view" to my take on this, which I think dodges quite a few hurdles.
You
So, in your description of quantum immortality, which is imagined from an objective viewpoint (you imagining being "outside" of the system and seeing this stuff happen):
- It doesn't really involve a particular conscious person living forever. It amounts to lots of duplicate persons (more accurately: duplicates at the point of creation, they then instantly differ) each of whom are conscious.
- Since forking happens constantly and started at the very beginning of the universe, we are basically dealing with a finite but enormous infinite number of worlds, each with a copy of our person (at this moment).
- Meanwhile, there is no communication between the worlds, they are sealed. From inside a world, strictly speaking we can say nothing about the other worlds.
- Those worlds are "made from" energy/matter.
- Consciousness is emergent somehow in some regions of that energy/matter but not others.
(This reminds me of why I think many-worlds is so ridiculous! Although it's fun because of it!)
In this view, we are envisaging that the multiple mathematical solutions of an equation are "real" and exist, even though only one solution is actually observed. Now, the problem with this is that it is unfalsifiable - but that's why we're doing philosophy here of course. :-)
The meaning of "quantum suicide" in this version:
- It's not so much that your consciousness persists, it's that one of the many consciousnesses will inevitably correspond to the path of survival.
- Really, this is many worlds, many deaths, single survivor.
Me
In my description of quantum immortality, which is imagined from a subjective viewpoint (from the point of view of an actual conscious observer, basically a person):
- We are only describing the situation of a conscious observer (or mind).
- The conscious observer is in a particular state, and will always been in a state. This is the observer's "private view" of the world.
- The current experience of the observer = that state, obviously.
- Meanwhile, there is no communication between any other observers. From inside a "private view", strictly speaking we can say nothing about other observers.
- These observers are made from whatever it is that states are made from - we could call it energy.
- The conscious observer is conscious by definition, and since the world is his state rather than something separate from him, there is no dualism or emergence to worry about.
In this view, we are envisaging that the multiple mathematical solutions of an equation represent the expectations of the observer based on his state. As more information becomes available, these expectations narrow down to a single value, which is the point of observation. The observation is "real", but the expectations are not. (Fuchs describes this better, of course.) The benefit of this is that it doesn't propose anything that cannot be observed.
The meaning of "quantum suicide" in this version:
- If a person exists, then they by definition survive because a person is a conscious observer (or mind) in a particular state.
- This is single world, no deaths, single survivor.
Joining it up
[EDIT: Apologies, had to rush this bit, so it's not as clear as I would like, hopefully you can discern what I was trying to say. Also: thanks for engaging in this discussion!]
So my problem with your "quantum suicide" - based on many-worlds - is that when you look at it, it's the story of lots of different people, most of whom die. You're having to sacrifice the notion of a single identity. The consciousness you are right now, reading this message, might be the one to die in an accident next month. That will be you, dead. Sure, another copy of you might carry on, but it won't be you.
In my "quantum suicide" - based on QBism and "private views" - I really do survive forever. I am by definition always in the "winning" POV because it's the only one there is - my experience always continues, just by the nature of being a conscious observer.
Now, obviously neither of them can be verified. Technically, if I shoot myself I can prove to myself that I am right. You, on the other hand, can never prove yourself right. However, I think my version potentially allows stories on this subreddit to be explained - such as the resets, the memory shifts, and so on - because memories do not necessarily need to change with everything else, memories are laid down sequentially as observations are made. Memories belong to the observer rather than to the world. (At a push, you could think of M and W, from earlier, as being two parts of a brain. Why would a sudden change in W necessarily cause a change in M?)
As you say, the laws of physics are obeyed, but in a squeezed situation, unlikely changes of state do become more probable relatively speaking. Just as there's a small probability an electron will tunnel through a barrier, so there is always a probability that the world will shift very discontinuously.
Usually the relative likelihood is negligible, of course. But if in my version, I fall off a cliff and my body is destroyed, experience must continue from that moment, so one of the more unlikely outcomes must happen. There are no prior branches; there is only this observer, which is always in some state or other.
Note - The subjective version doesn't mean there is no shared world as such; it's just that the larger world becomes a dimensionless "shared resource" of information equivalent to "all possible states". There is no time or space between observers, in much the same way as there wouldn't be with multiple worlds.
Just quickly -
I like Tegmark a lot, but I'm not with him in his treatment of mathematics as "real", and the whole notion of consciousness being a "thing" that can be duplicated doesn't work for me. We've been round that same ride, with different wording, for hundreds of years. But there is much confusion about "consciousness" (its nature) and "consciousness-of" (its content) anyway, and often people are not disagreeing about the same thing, so to speak.
We can at least say we live in interesting times, what with neuroscientists like Chrisof Koch trying out panpsychism, and others also approaching the property of consciousness (as distinct from "self-consciousness" or intelligence) as fundamental.
Good point on the proof on your version, of course. In either case, having no access outside of your own experience means you can only be proved right, to yourself - or be dead. I'd rather be alive than try to be right, in this case. :-)
Of course, what people really mean here when they say "quantum suicide" is just that in "some way" the notion of many-worlds means that they always live, subjectively. When you get into specifics and try and actually describe that, you're dealing with the problem of quantum interpretations multiplied by the problem of consciousness - i.e. these are matters of taste, not of science. So it can never be more than a bit of fun, although I think you can get quite close to a "pleasing" description.
Anyway - yeah, check out QBism maybe. Why it's interesting is, it begins by admitting that there is no omnipotent view we can refer to, and so tries to avoid including fictional "objective" entities. Instead, it readmits the subjective view and tries to build out from there. I don't really agree with it completely, but it was refreshing in its avoidance of reification of the abstract. (See co-author N. David Mermins's article, if you haven't, for that perspective.)
Cheers for now - - -
...
It's not exactly like that. It's more like if an ant dies, then there are still a lot of ants that didn't die. The other ants will never have experienced dying. They don't suddenly have the memory of some random other ant dying. The only thing is, that since this is a series of universes that hold different possibilities, somebody there is going to look exactly like you with the exact same lifestory, except they didn't die.
So you are not immortal. Your conscious may be, dependent on how that works, but that doesn't mean you get to keep the memories. In that regard it's more like, if you are fast asleep and somebody tickles you but you didn't notice, then you'll never know. Your body will know, because it felt the tickling, but consciously you'll never be aware. Which means that you'll simultaneously be aware and responding and at the same time you'll never ever know. If your body died, your conscious wouldn't know it got tickled one random night, nor would your body hold your memories if your brain stopped functioning. The memories are still separate, even if we imagine one could exist without the other.
Hey, yeah I was just trying to work up a formulation which fits OP's story (follow the thread for the details) and actually does give single-perspective immortality.
As it stands - and as you indicate - that many-worlds description isn't immorality, it's effectively a set of clones (not even!), one for each possible branch and hence outcome. If each clone has its own consciousness, it's not immortality, it's just survival of the luckiest clone. And how does consciousness get created at the branch? Or if there's one consciousness which transfers, then are the other clones empty? There are logical problems with that process. If it's a distributed consciousness but there's a notion of "attention" being on one, then isn't that effectively just a single perspective adopting different states? (Also: what is consciousness? Emergence is a hope, not a theory. Better if we can avoid the issue completely.)
Really, the problems arise from the idea of actual creation of branches in time, which itself comes from imagining an objective view which can never be experienced (the problem with most quantum interpretations).
If instead you switch to a subjective perspective (as some recent interpretations have sought to do), a lot of these problems go away. Instead of multiple worlds being created, never interacting, and struggling to account for the operation of consciousness, we have a "conscious observer" as the starting point. And the "world" is whatever state that observer is currently in, and the observer is always in some state or other. You can have all the same laws of physics, immortality is built in, and consciousness doesn't need to be explained - it's fundamental.
Here, instead of ever-multiplying non-interacting worlds with an observer inside them, you have non-interacting observers each of whom are in a world-state. Multiple observers are not connected in time and space (which are aspects of experiences) so their creation makes no difference, and in fact it makes no sense to talk of their creation since they have no context in terms of time or location.
Anyway, interesting to play with.
I did follow the thread. There is no problem with your theory, it's just not quantum immortality.
Quantum immortality does not mean you have one consciousness that shifts universes. It means you have several consciousnesses, that are all active at the same time.
To simplify, just think about it as having 6 senses at once. In each universe you have 6 senses. That may round up to several thousand times 6 senses, but they'll never interfere with each other. They all exist at once. They are not seperate, they're not clones and you don't "shift" into another universe (that's something else entirely). It's just that, when you die, you lose 6 of those senses. You can no longer sense them, but you still exist in all those universes where you still have 6 senses. Therefore, you'll never experience dying. You'll still be alive. And you already are. But your brain can only process 6 senses in total. So you'll never be aware of the fact that you exist in multiple universes. However, you have several brains as well, all experiencing their own universe. But they're still you in all senses of the word.
The point of the thread was to explore the notion of quantum immortality (in the sense of: a theory of immortality based on the concept of quantum states) as it could be applied to OP's story and to other stories of near death with subsequent changes - i.e. cheating death and having a subsequent discontinuity between memory and experience.
Okay, so let's pursue...
What you've described is the "attentional" model of quantum immortality, but it's fraught with philosophical problems, mostly arising from imagining "objectively" a system that can never actually be observed in any way.
EDIT: Actually, sorry, it's not even the attentional model. These are simply separate consciousnesses or aspects of a single consciousness, which operate independently and are therefore essentially separate.
It means you have several consciousnesses, that are all active at the same time.
I don't see how it can make sense to say that "you" have "several consciousness"? What is this "you" in that case?
In what sense is another consciousness "me" if I'm never aware of it and can never be aware of it? Are all consciousnesses not therefore having an independent experience? Then, in what sense are they not actually separate consciousnesses?
Surely these other "me"s are as much me only in the sense that other people are me. In the sense that "consciousness" can never die - as independent from particular manifestations as "people". I-as-consciousness might be immortal, but my identity is not immortal.
So when you say "still you in all senses of the word", that is not true in the way most people experience and conceive of themselves, which is as an observer with an identity and a history. It's basically a restatement of the mystical approach - i.e. that consciousness is undivided and eternal, although its forms may rise and fall.
Q: The point of the thread was to explore the notion of quantum immortality (in the sense of: a theory of immortality based on the concept of quantum states)
The quantum states are existing in multiple places at once. It is not a switch. It is constantly existing in multiple places at once.
as it could be applied to OP's story and to other stories of near death with subsequent changes - i.e. cheating death and having a subsequent discontinuity between memory and experience.
Which means you're not cheating death. You simply die in this universe, but you can't ever experience that, because death is the end of experiencing. You will only experience being alive, no matter how you look at it. The moments up until your death don't exist in the other states of your existence, and because of that, you would never be able to remember them. Because there is no switch, there's only two possibilities: You died or you lived. Since you can never experience "you died", you will only experience "you lived". And that's why, according to quantum immortality, you could never experience both, and so you'll never be able to remember dying.
What you've described is the "attentional" (separate consciousness) model of quantum immortality, but it's fraught with philosophical problems, mostly arising from imagining "objectively" a system that can never actually be observed in any way.
The consciousnesses are still not separate. You still experience life as progressing linearly. You are constantly dying for one reason or another. As long as there is a possibility that you will survive, that's what you are going to experience. But it's all happening at once, that's where the quantum states come into the picture.
It's not supposed to be observable. There are many theories that could be observable. There's nothing wrong with that. As I've said the entire time. But it's not quantum immortality. Quantum immortality is an unverifiable theory. That's why it can be taken slightly seriously, at least philosophically speaking.
I don't see how it can make sense to say that "you" have "several consciousness"?
You don't have several consciousnesses. You have one consciousnesses, that exists in many places at once.
What is this "you" in that case?
Physically speaking, you is every atom that makes you, it is every electron being fired in your brain, and so on. They all exist in multiple places at once, according to quantum immortality (and they actually do, when you observe them). Philosophically speaking, you would not be the memory of another universe, as once these things that make you you cease to make you you, you can never experience that, nor can you access those memories.
Are all consciousnesses not therefore having an independent experience?
Multiple experiences at once.
Then, in what sense are they not actually separate consciousnesses?
Because the entire essence of quantum immortality, and the string theory, is based on the fact that on a subatomic level, things have the ability to appear in multiple places at once. So it's one consciousness in many places.
It's basically a restatement of the mystical approach - i.e. that consciousness is undivided and eternal, although its forms may rise and fall.
No, it's not. Those two things have nothing to do with each other. For one, quantum immortality is not actual immortality. It's just the fact that stuff can appear in multiple places at once, and as such, if it dies in one place, you can't experience that place, so you won't experience that. But that's only as long as there is a possibility that you may survive, because according to the quantum immortality theory, you will be in all places at once, so when you've run out of possibilities to survive, you'll not be able to experience anything at all.
There's nothing wrong with your theory, it's just not quantum immortality. Quantum immortality means things existing in multiple places at once. Every possibility existing at the same time, but not on top of each other. Just simultaneously.
Good coverage, and mostly agreed. Stripped back to (for simplicity's sake) an omnipotent view of "arrangements of atoms", all is well.
The issue remains, on what we consider as "you" and what we think of as "consciousness". Which are both perhaps philosophical points, hovering at the subjective-objective border, and not really resolvable by thought or external experiment, I suggest. We might assert that these are identical with arrangements of atoms in the brain region, but without a way of connecting across that border, it's not very meaningful to say so; it cannot connect to personal experience.
So, in my (basically) banter on this before was an attempt is to take a subjective viewpoint and follow it through - because in reality there is no other - to see what intuitive notions of "you", "world" and "consciousness" would be, and whether they could be applied to explaining these people's glitch accounts. (Particularly because if we take "conscious observer" as the starting point, we can dodge the consciousness issue.)
Anyway, a question: What do you actually think of string theory, many-worlds? Do you consider them to be more than "a bit of fun"? Are they models to be taken seriously, or are they guilty of taking unobservable mathematical structures as "real things"?
Yeah, with quantum immortality, it's not like you in the original universe somehow magically survived. That person would still be dead. But I still think the two are connected, because it's literally the same material (as far as quantum immortality goes, in reality, I'm not sure if I believe in anything). It's the exact same neurons, just now one less point in which those atoms can experience the world in the sense of being "you". But those atoms still exist, and they're still in multiple places, including those, where they are still observing the universe as a human.
Because of that, I believe the views are all (or would all be) connected. Because they are the same material, all with the same background, only existing in multiple places at once. So while those atoms are still in a universe where they are not experiencing anything, they themselves are still experiencing in all the other universes. They are not aware that they are in multiple universes, but regardless, they are observing. And they all rightfully feel that they are the "right" atom, because they are. So together, they'd form the exact same sense of "you" that you are carrying right now.
Which they are obviously also forming right now. So do you get to experience that? I'd say you already are. You're just not aware of it, because you are limited by a brain. But we know for a fact (or that's bad wording, but presuming the string theory is correct), that your atoms are in multiple places. So they are not limited, only your experience. And that's limited by a brain - that goes on to die. While the sense of you is still alive. I don't believe the "two yous" can be separate, when they are the exact same. Not just physically, but also philosophically in the way that both instances of you, or the particles in both areas, define themselves the exact same way.
And I'd believe (and this is where this stops being quantum immortality for me, too, and becomes speculating on top of it instead) that it's all connected. I don't know what I'd call it. But I think in the sense of quantum immortality, I'd be scientific and say we are just parts of the universe experiencing itself, thus we are the universe. Assuming there is nothing outside of the universe, then that would make sense. We are built from the universe, by the universe, experiencing the universe, like a set of conscious Lego. And so I don't think there is a huge consciousness called The Universe, I believe it's just a way to process what's going on in more complicated terms. Just like one atom knows what to do when it encounters another atom, just in a larger sense: how a cluster of atoms knows what to do when encountering another cluster of atoms called, say, a bear. If that's how it functions, then it all boils down to the fact that we are just like a star or a planet; we are the universe.
But that's just my personal belief.
I wanted to say, but forgot, that I didn't say anything to discredit you, but with your last comment I feel like you realized that already. You obviously thought a lot about this. You're not just blabbering out of the blue and making stuff up as you go. I know you have an idea about what you're talking about. It was purely a terminological thing I was going to argue on. I can respect the rest of it.
Besides, it's just fun to talk about, so I will never turn down an opportunity to write away.
And... This is somewhat out of the blue and maybe I'm just projecting, but I sometimes feel like you may have death anxiety. Does that make sense? Of course if you don't want to talk about it, or I'm way off, that's fine.
I'm just asking because I have death anxiety disorder (or, I'm pretty sure it's just diagnosed as anxiety disorder in many places, including where I'm from), so I know what it feels like and what thoughts it brings with it.
I got it when I was 13, out of the blue, due to many deaths in my immediate family 5-6 years earlier. I never got to process those emotions, as my entire family was in grief, so they didn't have the capacity to talk to me about it. Besides, I just hid my emotions. I was a quiet kid who spent a lot of time by myself and enjoying my own company, so I guess people thought I was fine.
Laid in my bed one night, as many others, and tried to imagine infinity, as I had done many times before. I liked the way you get that sudden moment of clarity when you understand what infinity is, and then swiftly forget as if it's something you're not supposed to know. My mistake was I tried to imagine being dead for infinity. And the moment I grasped it, I scared myself shitless. Of course, I swiftly forgot, so I couldn't tell why it was so scary, but I was terrified. And then I spiraled into depression for the next few years.
Thankfully, it was mostly due to unprocessed emotions, and it took just a few months of therapy and some great tools from educated people to bring me back to normal (roughly speaking, it took a little more than that to get through the depression and everything) but it's how I found this subreddit, for instance. And it's also still a part of me, in the sense that I have never since attempted to imagine infinity, and I'll sometimes still have those thoughts. Only nowadays, I process them quickly and it can usually be undone by getting on my phone a few minutes or thinking of something else.
So yeah, that was just to be open and honest in case you can identify with it. I know what it feels like to find out you're never alone no matter what you're battling with. And if you're not battling with it, then I may look ridiculous now, so please forgive that, haha.
Hey, that was a great comment well thought out, will reply properly tomorrow.
...
The rest of your comment involves a whole bunch of philosophy and scientifically unexplainable beliefs, which is fine, I just don't like it when people abuse well-defined scientific principles to hand-wavily explain their personal beliefs.
To be fair though, quantum physicists do exactly this all the time (and I've known a few), as soon as they stray from the mathematics and very limited experiments. It comes with the territory on this subject. Scientists love their pseudo-science sci-fi (and sometimes take it as seriously) as much as the lay enthusiast, really. Actual science, on the whole, isn't particularly scientific, in the way that those from the outside imagine it to be. (EDIT: In the sense that it is not really a highly-structured endeavour, following a definite method, coupled with controlled logical thinking. Quantum mechanics itself was a total hack job.)
The whole twisting around to interpret the delayed choice experiment as "retroactively" doing anything is irritating though. If the experiment underlines anything, it's simply that our knowledge of the world is defined by accumulated measurements (Observation Accumulation), that new observations will always make logical sense in the terms of previous ones (Law of Coherence), and strictly speaking we can't say more than that. Nothing is "violated" except our fantasies about what state things were in prior to being measured. There is no retroactive component because nothing "happens" other than observation. Before quantum mechanics, we could indulge ourselves in a fantasy that we knew that something and what something was going on between measurements - no more.
To be fair to the general reader also, typically they are learning about "parallel universes" from awful documentaries like the recent BBC Horizon edition, Which Universe Are We In?, which actually features Tegmark prominently (mostly playing with Lego, walking about a bit, saying suspect things about the reality of mathematics). Here's the blurb:
Which Universe Are We In?
Horizon, 2014-2015 Episode 17 of 19
Imagine a world where dinosaurs still walk the earth. A world where the Germans won World War II and you are president of the United States. Imagine a world where the laws of physics no longer apply and where infinite copies of you are playing out every storyline of your life.
It sounds like a plot stolen straight from Hollywood, but far from it. This is the multiverse.
Until very recently the whole idea of the multiverse was dismissed as a fantasy, but now this strangest of ideas is at the cutting edge of science.
And for a growing number of scientists, the multiverse is the only way we will ever truly make sense of the world we are in.
Horizon asks the question: Do multiple universes exist? And if so, which one are we actually in?
It comes over like one of Philomena Cunk's Moments of Wonder episodes.
...
The question is though.. how could the particle at detector 0 have known the random path it's entangled particle was going to take before it took that path?
My suggestion: the detector doesn't "know" anything. Nothing ever "happens" except for observations. In other words, strictly speaking, no paths are taken, because "paths" are a narrative we infer based on the results of the experiments, and don't exist other than this.
POST: Universe doesn't want me to change my name I guess
The more you look, the more you find! Yes, it's a fascinating place, this place (whatever it is).
Actually, "pattern overlay" is meant to describe a mechanism too: that what you hold in mind is literally overlaid upon your environment, and can become entangled with it, creating a persistent observation. It's a fun idea to experiment with, to try and make synchronicities deliberately.
A little thought experiment:
The Owls Of Eternity
Imagine that there is a TV screen, and that the programme that's showing is the programme of your world as you are looking at it. You decide you want to experience more owls in your TV programme. How to do this?
For this, you draw a picture of an owl on your TV screen. From that point, the owl picture always there, but its visibility depends upon the rest of the imagery onscreen. When the dark scenes of the TV show switch to a bright white scene, suddenly the owl "appears" - it is "manifested".
Now we adapt this to daily life. Imagine an owl idea being dissolved "holographically" in the space around you, and replace the notion of dark/white scene with appropriate contexts. Having "drawn" the owl into the space, you go about your day.
Mostly the owl isn't anywhere to be seen, but wherever an appropriate context arises then aspects of the owl idea shine through and are manifest: A man has an owl image on a t-shirt, the woman in the shop has massive eyes and eyebrows like feathers, a friend sends you an email about a lecture at the zoo highlighting the owl enclosure, a newspaper review of Blade Runner talks extensively about the mechanical owl in the interrogation scene, and so on.
Fun eh? For background, the reason they are called "The Owls Of Eternity" is because of how it progresses from "maybe confirmation bias" to obviously not that. As you've noticed, it's not just that you are seeing owls around in the environment, it's also that events start arising which result in owl experiences. The owls start coming for you.
See below for a cut and paste of a follow-up comment that goes with the experiment:
Additional Owl Adventures
The crossover beyond possible confirmation bias to something less easy to dismiss, comes in the following steps:
- The Owls Are Internal - You notice more owl-related stuff in the world around you. It could have always been there, but you are just noticing it more. This could be confirmation bias.
- The Owls Are External - Events occur such that owls appear in your life. A friend messages you with an owl-related joke, a colleague invites to see a band called The Owls, your mother talks about how she has bought a DVD about owls because she's totally into them suddenly. This is coincidence surely, or, okay, maybe synchronicity.
- The Owls Become Eternal - You notice that you actually own owl-related stuff. You have an owl-shaped lampshade in your lounge, your tea-towels all have owls on them, you realise your desktop wallpaper has lots of owls in the background, you find that the label in your favourite t-shirt shows the brand logo has an owl in it. These things must, surely, have been true before you did the exercise, and when you think about it you can summon memories of them and their history, but still it's kinda strange...
Confirmation bias or frequency illusion or similar?
On Confirmation Bias
As in "seeing more red cars because you are thinking of buying a red car and looking out for them". If you experiment, you find it's something more than that. I'd scale it like this:
- conf. bias > coincidence > synchronicity > "manifestation" > shifting > "jumping"
They're all just varying levels of "pattern selection" or activation or overlay, of course. The exact same attentional mechanism that's always happening when we redirect ourselves, just to a greater extent. The thing to consider is, what are you selecting the pattern from?
You might be tempted to say that we select the pattern from the 3D-immersive environment around us, but actually that apparent 3D-immersive environment is the result of pattern selection.
Instead, we might consider pattern selection to be a filtering of the possible experiential images available in a 4D space. We are selecting events or moments from possibilities, rather than just zones from our surroundings.
POST: Telepathy is normal
So I guess saying that any thoughts are "your thoughts" is problematic, perhaps.
EDIT: Rambles and strained metaphors to follow...
Just because a thought appears in your spoken voice, doesn't mean it is "yours"- that it represents your considered view on something or it is "what you think"- any more than a muscle twitch in your leg is. Passing thoughts can then be viewed as merely part of the current state of your subjective world, just like any other sense or body sensation is.
When you see your girlfriend lying next to you, that visual image is an experience arising in your mind, but you wouldn't normally say that it is "your" image of your girlfriend. The thought "I'm going to go" is arising in the exact same space as that image, and yet we tend to label it as "my" thought. Really, it might be more accurate to label such a passing thought as the world's thought.
This leaves us with only intentional thought as being "ours". But following on from the above, perhaps that is really wrong too. The intentional act is ours but the resulting thought is not; intentional thoughts are best described as "the intentional creation of a world thought" perhaps.
It's like we are all sculptors making modifications to a shared "shape". We confuse some parts of the shape with "ourselves" but actually that part is being modified by everyone else too. Telepathy is when we stop hacking at it with our own chisel (so to speak), notice the more subtle changes that are happening anyway, and realise it's not just "our" part after all.
I agree. So if this is common knowledge... why is it not common knowledge?
Do these experiences imply something more than physical existence? Are thoughts possibly metaphysical?
Also, why am I being down voted?
Actually, these experiences imply something less. They imply that both "physical experience" and "thought" are sensations arising in the mind, and that the only difference is in their persistence and intensity.
The physical world becomes just a particularly bright, stable, 3D-immersive strand of thought which arises from a single "world-pattern" that underlies all your experiences (think: the sun obscuring the stars in the daylight sky).
It's not common knowledge because this destroys the notion of an "external" world, and leads to philosophical idealism and eventually non-dualism. It's not easy to grasp conceptually - it changes how you must conceive of "you" - and it's contrary to the dominant narrative that we've been using successfully for the last 50-100 years (although the debate is turning).
The voting is always a bit flaky here initially!
Do you feel that there was an effort to push away from the reality of non-dualism? Is there an effort to keep this suppressed? It seems as though half of the world has known the truth all along, and the other half is slowly waking up. But why? How did we forget in the first place?
There is no conspiracy or effort, other than the effort of people to pursue what they perceive as beneficial to them, and shape the world accordingly. These things naturally fluctuate, ebb and flow. People adopt the narrative that best supports their ambitions, not necessarily the one that is true; ambitions change over time. [1]
The "strong materialism" of the last half-century was really not about "material" so much as the underlying belief by many that our explanatory fictions were "true" - an unfortunate reification of successful abstractions. Prior to this the likes of Neils Bohr suggested that (say) quantum mechanics revealed the subjective nature of observation - harking back to the Greeks before the arbitrary objective/subjective division was introduced for ease of theorising - and recent approaches such as QBism are a return to that.
[1] Of course, this is complicated by the fact that the worldview you adopt becomes the "formatting" of your mind, leading to experiences which support your view, in a pattern-triggering feedback loop. This applies to your thinking about this topic also.
...
It's better if people realize this all on their own or with trusted people who care about them than over the internet.
That's why it's a faux pas to talk about this, why you're being downvoted.
I think that many people who have experiences that they can't explain are not fortunate enough to have the time or resources to "realize this on their own", or have trusted people who can help.
Surely the great thing about the internet is that it can make others' experiences and worldviews available to them, even when those are niche and unusual, whereas before those people would probably... die in ignorance.
Let's face it, most people read such things and dismiss them as a bit of nonsense, while also having a mild intuition that occasionally things happen. They think no more of it! But if they are already thinking about it, then surely it's better that they can come across some discussion before the synchronicity effect gets a hold of them.
Society isn't ever going to be educated in a responsible way about this sort of thing, unless it's by people like the participants on this forum.
Some related thoughts, perhaps they might be useful -
Something to maybe notice: when you are out and about vs at home, how expanded or contracted is your attention? If you were to think of your ongoing experience as a vast imagination room, would your attention be localised around your body or head, or would it be open and full and at the outer reaches?
Expanding your sense of "presence" to fill the entire space of your body, and then the room, and then beyond is a great way to feel alive and open and better (I have found).
And although it may be somewhat daunting at first, it can be enormously helpful to expand this "space" out when you are interacting with other people. It's counter-intuitive (surely you'd want to protect yourself by withdrawing from them?) but including other people, the whole room even, in your "presence" dissolves them within you, makes them part of you and under your experiential control. It means they are not "other" and not a threat, and you pick up full information from them.
I feel a large component of social anxiety eventually arises from the issue of being disconnected from your surroundings. Other people, without realising it, literally "share space" when they interact, and automatically feel each other out in a sort of "direct knowing" (this is the true nature of empathy). To the person who has accidentally withdrawn from that, situations involving other people become confusing - because they have one of their sense turned off.
An additional trick, related to this, is to centre your attention lightly in your lower abdomen area when you are interacting with other people (and even just living life generally actually). This location is where the felt-sense resides, that "global summary" of a situation. This is where people "connect". It also tends to spontaneously open out your attention, make you feel more "spacious" and "here", for free.
I had been analyzing people rather than allowing myself to share the same space as them.
Right. It's the difference between direct-knowing and thinking-about. You know something by literally touching it, rather than conceptualising it. Trying to work things out sans overlap leaves you situationally blind, but unaware of your predicament.
If you reach out and touch the surface of a table, you know it is textured and hard; you don't think about "hardness". You include it in your awareness and witness a direct truth. Really, you interact with something by becoming it - and that understanding leads to interesting places.
You really don't need to think at all, except to choose what "formatting" you want to have overlaying your experience. When you think intentionally, you are literally tugging at the fabric of your "world-pattern". Note that passing thoughts are fine; they are just fragments of your world state briefly revealing a sensory aspect.
"Jumping" - For that stuff, I'd recommend you start simply. You might begin by summoning The Owls Of Eternity and then you might do the Two Glasses Exercise for a situation in your local sphere. Just like the other stuff we're talking about, you only understand it by having the experience, so the first port of call is to give yourself an experience.
I notice my most intelligent moments are ... but rather responding naturally to the given experience I find myself in.
An experience already implies a response, a problem already implies its solution - because this-moment already implies its next-moment. That's why it's good to keep intentions broad rather than niggling at details, I'd say.
You'll notice that I say in the exercise description something like "knowing that it is now done, carry on with your life". This refers to not constantly playing with the world-pattern. It's what is meant by an attitude of non-attachment (being okay with whatever happens), and notions of "faith" and all that stuff.
If you are sitting down and want to shift to a standing state, keeping thinking about "being sat down" would reassert the sitting state and prevent it shifting into standing. You can probably see the relevance...
I'd leave the hair thing for now, but you can certainly come back to it, once you have a feel of things and how it applies to you. For your initial experiments, it's better to choose something that isn't constantly within your attention, since until you are convinced, you will find it harder to trust.
The overall approach is: you do the experiments, draw your own conclusions, your results are the authority.
POST: When I wasn't looking for it, I was surrounded by Synchronicity. Now that I'm looking, it's nowhere to be found. (Kind of a long read.)
I've been playing with this a bit recently. I say:
Don't look for "messages" via synchronicity. Synchronicity is basically you experiencing the state of your own mind, via the senses. You might think of it a bit like a mirror - or better, that your mind is a perceptual filter.
The filter dictates what subset of the extended dimensionless reality will appear in your ongoing 3D sensory moment.
So, if you spend 20 minutes today imagining owls, as vividly as you can, as if they were in the room with you... you'll spend the next week encountering lots of owls. It's as if you have created an "owl-shaped hole" in your perceptual filter, and the "infinite light of creation" (or whatever) now shines through it, giving you owl-shaped experiences.
The summary:
- Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences. (Leave shapes on your "perceptual filter".)
- Thoughts also leave traces, as in-form-ation, affecting subsequent experiences. (You can use this deliberately.)
- Synchronicity is the name for the experiential patterns which result.
So, not much good for messages since you'll just be seeing what you've been thinking and experiencing, as residual indentations on your filter (although you might get some insight into things you are thinking in the background that you're not aware of). Better to use the technique deliberately. You might not be into owls, but you are probably into something, something that would make you happier? Deliberately spend some time vividly imagining that, so that you are more likely to encounter/notice it. (It's a kinda magical approach, I suppose.)
EDIT: Note that you can think about more general "facts" rather than just images. Also, sorry to hear about your situation. Hope things turn around. Watch out for those owls. They can be sexy.
Nice. This is really interesting. So by imagining owls, we're sort of summoning owls out of the "infinite dimensions" of creation into our current reality. Have you played around with this in practice?
Yes, it's much simpler than the other ways I was looking at things.
My poor old Mum is great to experiment on with this stuff (I've already taught her how to win any arm wrestle without effort, and to find hidden chocolate via intuition - yeah, she'll be great at Extreme Easter Sports) and I gave her this metaphor to explain it and get her using it (excuse length, but perhaps others will find it useful):
The Imagination Room
There is a vast room. The floor is transparent, and through it an infinitely bright light shines, completely filling the room with unchanging, unbounded white light. Suddenly, patterns start to appear on the floor. These patterns filter the light. The patterns accumulate, layer upon layer intertwined, until instead of homogenous light filling the room, the light seems to be holographically redirected by the patterns into the shape of experiences, arranged in space, unfolding over time. Experiences which consist of sensations, perceptions and thoughts.
At the centre of the room there are bodily sensations, which you recognise as... you, your body. You decide to centre yourself in the upper part of that region, as if you were "looking out from" there, "being" that bodily experience.
At the moment you are simply experiencing, not doing anything. However you notice that every experience that arises slightly deepens the pattern corresponding to it, making it more stable, and more likely to appear again as the light is funnelled into that shape.
Now, you notice something else. If you create a thought, then the image will appear floating in the room - as an experience. Again, the corresponding pattern is deepened. Only this time, you are creating the experience and in effect creating a new habit in your world!
Even saying a word or a phrase triggers the corresponding associations, so it is not just the simple thought that leaves a deeper pattern, but the whole context of that thought, its history and relationships.
Now, as you walk around today, you will feel the ground beneath your feet - but you will know that under what appears to be the ground is actually the floor of the room, through which the light is shining, being shaped into the experience around you. And every thought or experience you have is shifting the pattern...
Asserting Facts
You can also use it to "assert" new facts-of-the-world. I leave it to readers to experiment and take this further - but instead of picturing owls, what if you asserted a fact?
You do this by "feeling it to be true" rather than picturing it, to allow for a more general pattern. For example, "people are always bumping into me on the street". I'm sure you could think of better "facts"...
Those were other examples, pre-room metaphor, but the same basic principle applies. Here's how they work:
- For the arm-wrestling, withdraw your "presence" from your arm so you're not tempted to try to make it happen. "Decide" that you are going to win, feeling the winning position - get out of the way and just wait for it to happen.
- For the chocolate-finding, think of your body like a "shell". Withdraw from it, letting it move as it wants. Command it, "body, go and retrieve the object", and get out of the way. Let your body go as it pleases.
In both cases, you are essentially declaring that something is going to happen - that it really already has happened, a "fact" on your timeline - and then staying in a state of "open allowing" to let circumstances unfold without interference.
Huh, this is really interesting.
And something you can easily experiment with! Particularly the first one.
Your body actually always works like this, it's just that you've got into the habit of constantly intending a "posture/position" for it, effectively asserting it stay in a fixed position - so in daily life you have to overcome that to move. Stop asserting the position, and it's instantly much easier (that's why we "withdraw our presence": this stops us re-activating the "staying still" habit).
...or just watch myself do it?
This.
And how hard is it to let go?
Have you any idea how ridiculous that sounds? ;-) It's better to phrase it as something you stop doing: stop interfering, or "absolute allowing". In terms of what it feels like, it feels like you are stopping holding on to your focus of attention, and it opens out in response. Meanwhile you adopt that attitude that you are okay with whatever happens, including nothing happening.
Don't overthink it. In fact, one problem is you can't conceptualise non-doing, and you can't experience intending - you can only experience results.
If you want a little exercise to practice (which I steal slightly from this great Missy Vineyard book which takes the Alexander Technique and discovers some of these ideas along the way, although not quite so extended), do this one:
- Lie down on the floor. Couple of books to support your head. Feet flat on the floor, knees up.
- Give up to gravity completely. Let go absolutely, of your mind, body and attention. Let them do whatever they will. Give up to "God" or whatever; abandon yourself. Release yourself into the space in the room around you; become that background space. (These are just different ways of saying "let yourself be".)
- "Decide" that you are going to roll over onto your side, but do absolutely nothing about it.
- Wait until your body moves by itself.
Eventually, it will. It'll feel like magic. Then realise that this is how it always is; it's just that you have developed the habit of tensing up your muscles, tensing up the universe, to hold it in position, or to "feel yourself doing something".
The feeling of "doing something" that you normally have is actually the feeling of resistance of your bad habit, which you have to push through.
Once you've got the "happens by itself" vibe, experiment with leaving your body functioning that way. Just "decide" things, and let them happen by themselves. One way of conceiving of this is to think of it as "allowing yourself to experience..." something; releasing in a direction, rather than moving in a direction.
The experience is already there, you are just "letting it in". Letting it "shine through".
I've got a lot of time tomorrow; I'll post results if you want
Do it! Remember, you've spent a lifetime doing the opposite, so it might take a little while for the "moves by itself" exercise to kick in. But this is because you are still resisting a little. You might even feel a bit uncomfortable when it first happens, but stick with it.
Do you think this can help me find stuff I've lost, like my Gameboy from a few years ago?
Give it a shot. "Just decide" that the Gameboy is going to come back into your possession, and maybe feel excited about this. Then, see what happens.
Something to note: Sometimes the gap between the deciding and the result can take a little while. For instance, if the object is not local, it may take a while before the sequence of actions you feel "inclined" to do (even unwittingly) eventually leads you there. But it's pretty reliable. Fear not, something is happening - remember, you can't feel intention at work, only the 3D sensory experience that results from it.
(You've set the pattern on the floor; you're waiting for the image to appear in the room.)
Q: [Deleted]
No problem - have fun with it! :-)
I try as hard as I can, but I can't seem to really "let go".
Yes, it's not to so easy to let go if you try to do it. You're not trying to lose attention, or manipulate yourself into a particular state - you're just aiming to stop interfering and accept whatever experiences come up. You are not meant to be using effort at all. You are giving up direct control.
For immediate things, like "find the chocolate that's in the house somewhere", you feel an urge to go somewhere. But if it was in the car, say, you might later that day feel the intuition to fix a shelf, which means you go into the garage, and then you suddenly think "I'll just look in the car door sidepocket".
That's why, after you "ask", you need to let go and be okay with anything that happens. When it's time to take action, you'll feel the feel.
Also, this doesn't reach into occult stuff, does it?
Not really, just your extended memory or intuition, which you don't have direct access to, but you can allow to lead you. In effect it's not different to the arm-wrestling or being good at catching (technique: centre your attention behind your forehead, let your body move by itself). You're just trusting your nervous system to operate spontaneously and correctly, rather than trying to control things manually.
There's no danger of "possession" - that's just people being scared that if they loosen control, their own impulses and urges will take them over. Letting go can feel a bit scary though, because it feels like you are lowering your defences and becoming completely open. But you are only lowering your defences against your own self! :-)
Q: [Deleted]
No problem. Remember, the larger picture is basically telling yourself you want something, and then getting out of the way, forgetting about it.
The biggest impact is the just the simple one of stress-free living without tensing your body. The "imagination patterns" is then extra icing on top.
Very good explanation.
Thanks. Always trying to come up with good ways to describe this, even thought it's slightly not-describable!
Interesting, your stretching idea. Wanna share?
My general feel is that you can't harm your body so long as you aren't forcing it. If you switch you attention to the "open background space" of your awareness, then "just decide" what you are going to do in broad terms, your body will get the job done.
Micro-manage it though, you can't.
What my teachers always taught and tried to convince everyone, is that muscle reflexes that you would normally only be able to control yourself, like raising your hand, absolutely cannot be autonomic (visceral).
If you have got into the habit of "holding onto" yourself then you will indeed get in the way of things like automatic arm raising - because you are constantly asserting yourself into your current posture. If you do that, you then have to "fight past it" to get anything done. This is why people feel they are putting effort into movement and activity, rather than experiencing it "happening to them", as they should.
...
I just thought of something before going to sleep. Maybe your mom is influencing the other person's thoughts when winning those arm wrestles. I've been looking at some reddit posts recently about energies that we can transmit. I'll link them later. You may have seen some of them because I saw a post about it on this subreddit.
This also makes me remember how I finally talked with a friend who also acknowledged the ability to visualize (while concentrating really really hard) what the opponent in a RPS game will do. And then win. Oddly, I have always visualized what hand will be needed to lose, so I have to quickly reverse the idea to make my decision and win. My friend would visualize the winning move. We did not test this on each other because I was too tired during that time period.
Jeez, and I might as well share this too. I was playing CS:GO with a friend and some other players I was sort of friends with. I've played Counter Strike for thousands of hours previously, so I had a really good idea of how people move around in the map. So I ended up predicting perfectly where the opposite team would be going every single round, for almost all 15 rounds, until I realized that my microphone was off. I was shouting to my teammates where the enemy team was going, but we always ended up going somewhere else. My friend was impressed lol...but we would have won way more easily if my team had heard my directions. In this particular map, there are at least 10 places the enemy could be heading towards to defend (they were Counter-terrorists), and many other paths they could take to get to these places. A lot of choices. Basically, it wasn't chance. To reiterate, I accurately predicted the enemy's exact movements, which I know because there are points on the map where it becomes obvious where you and the enemy may have intersected or not intersected as the game goes on. So either I predicted accurately due to my extensive skill in understanding the enemy and knowing what choices they make based on previous map gameplay decisions and turnouts, or I used the method of asserting facts, and the enemy team followed my facts. Just as a note, I'm generally really good at identifying human patterns and conditions once I take a long time to learn them, so it's not impossible that I predicted their movements simply based off of our round wins/losses, and the previous choices in movement that the enemy and my team had made in the other rounds, as well as available money and weapons, which affect future game play choices.
I've included this story because it combines mental gymnastics with asserting facts. Both are ideas you included in your comments.
Hey, good stuff!
I think it's not about her influencing other thoughts, although that's how someone could imagine that it was happening (and then the limits that implies would apply). It's more straightforward than that: she is simply deciding that something is going to happen and, remaining in a relaxed state, she is then allowing that to unfold (without re-deciding or preventing it happening).
Possible interpretations in general (pushing it out a bit here):
I say: We can't tell the difference between experiencing something we caused, something we influenced and experiencing something we predicted, because it amounts to the same thing:
- Although we encounter time in a "moment by moment" sequence, it is actually laid out like a landscape - always there even though you are only "looking" at a certain part.
- If we predict something, we are "reading" the landscape before getting to a location.
- If we assert something, we are "writing" the landscape before getting to a location.
- When we get to the location, it is whatever it is. We can't then tell whether reading/writing occurred specifically, or whether reading/writing occurred indirectly.
For instance, by "asking for information" you might be implicitly "asking for information that corresponds to your desire", which involves making the information correspond to your desire. The background intention or assumption behind the act makes a difference.
Basically, it's like you dream your world. It unfolds spontaneously according to the current "facts"; you have the ability to modify "facts" whether the evidence corresponding to those facts is present within the senses at that moment or not; subsequent experience will be in alignment with those facts. As suggested earlier: once we've made a decision about what's going to happen, though, we have to then not "re-decide' and thereby re-pattern events again, undoing our good work. That's why you need to be non-attached and allowing.
From elsewhere:
However you imagine that it works,
That's how it works. - TG
That's one take on it anyway: What you are sensorily experiencing arises as a 'transparent mirage' from the facts-of-the-world in the background. All intention operates indirectly, via adjusting the facts-of-the-world. We never actually interact with our sensory experience. We never actually "do" anything directly, instead we just experience things.
EDIT: Inserted earlier paragraph which I'd omitted.
Ever since I read your post there have been bloody owls everywhere!! I even bought a T-shirt the other day with an owl on it and realised after I left the shop!! You and your bloody owls! I mean, it could be worse I suppose, but it could have been better dammit! I have had to route out your comment again just to tell you about the curse you have bestowed upon me. Its no hoot I'll tell you that much, aw God damn it.
Haha, a hoot indeed! :-) Thanks for sharing.
You've got off fairly lightly: people who've done it more deliberately suddenly find that, apparently, they've been amassing owl-related objects for years without noticing...
Still, if it works for summoning The Owls Of Eternity, perhaps it might work for other, less beaky items eh?
The Owls are a good way for people to explore the idea, I think, because it can't cause any damage. Well, bar a few sleepless nights from nocturnal noise, perhaps. (8>)=
A nice way to think of this is, you are "recalling" an idea or thought-pattern into your experience from the background memory of the world (summary here with deeper links [A Line Of Thought]). Objects are like ideas overlaid onto experience - and more interestingly, aren't situations a bit like momentarily-present, environment-sized objects?
Worth experimenting with anyway, I would imagine (excuse pun)...
POST: Discovered this sub and have two things I can't understand
A few of those "crash didn't happen" stories on the sub. Did you notice anything else different about the world afterwards? Randomly:
This happened to both my friend, Steve, and his father. Steve's son was accidentally shot by another family member. Steve remembers seeing his son die in front of him, but suddenly his son was fine and had only been hit in a non-vital area. His father and 3 friends accidentally drove off a cliff, but suddenly were all back on the road. All 4 remember this very vividly!
So, basically these are Ctrl-Z events.
POST: A Hiccup In Time
[POST]
My husband and I just got home from my parents house. I have to take the interstate to get home. Well, we had just passed the tall buildings downtown and were coming around the curb on the interstate that's right before our exit when we heard a train blow it's horn not far from us. I laughed and said it sounded like a crash symbol and that it scared me, it was so loud. Then when the train stopped blaring it's horn, I suddenly had no idea where we were at. Neither did my husband. After about 30 seconds of silence we realized we were about to pass the downtown area AGAIN. Everything happened is less than a minute and we both witnessed it.
[END OF POST]
Q: That's trippy as shit! I've had some... eh... interesting things happen to me while driving, as well. I recounted one in another thread; the only one I recall in enough detail to actually talk about. I started driving with a dash cam about 2 years ago, though, and such events have utterly and completely ceased since then. The system, it seems, doesn't like to change things there is a provable record of; probably because there would then be concrete proof of the glitch and not just the ramblings of a handful be people who may well by psychotic (yes, I'm including myself in that group).
Of note in your story is that you say the train horn sounded like a crash symbol. That's not at all what a train's horn sounds like, but clearly it sounded like a horn at the onset, as you were able to identify it. Did it seem to morph into the crash symbol sound after it started? Was there any type of electrical buzz or harmonic sound to it that would have been atypical of either a train's horn or a crash symbol?
If you want to dig deeper into the "reality is a simulation" concept, google "Tom Campbell Calgary". There are 3 talks by him on YouTube, all given over the same weekend, each a little over 2hr long. The first 2 cover much of the same material, but it's important to watch both before watching the 3rd, since there are some different bits in them; anything he repeats, he's repeating for a reason. Pay really close attention from 21:35 to 29:11 of the first talk, though, if you're at all skeptical. In fact, watch that first to decide if it's something you even want to get into.
Funnily enough, I've not long finished reading My Big TOE. It's a bit of a slog, and I don't quite agree with it, but it's full of interesting reality-as-simulation stuff and pertinent to this sub. (I agree with him on the potential flexibility, but I think he overdoes the "digital reality" stuff.)
Probably easier to watch the vids - good call!
Q: Yeah, if my glitch experiences tell me anything, we're in an analog simulation; definitely not digital. But, then, he does talk about everything he says being a metaphor, and we do generally have a better understanding of digital computers than we do analog, so it's possible that's just another metaphor, as well.
Yes, he does emphasise it's a metaphor - I just feel he's a little enamoured with that one beyond its usefulness. It means he ends up talking about defined 'rulesets' when in fact I'd say that something more like 'established habits' would be appropriate.
At that level, everything gets metaphorical because the "basic stuff" isn't really an object anymore... it's the "non-material material" that objects are made from.
POST: [EXPERIMENT] Glitch Generation Test, I Need Your Creative Ideas!
I've got a couple of silly tricks that are good to try, which benefit from randomisation. I'll stick with the more obscure but easier to perform one for now. It'll sound odd, and it's not exactly an obvious glitch generator, but there's method in the apparent madness. Here goes:
- Choose a situation that you want to change, but one that you don't necessarily have much influence over.
- Decide clearly what the current situation is, and what the desired replacement situation is.
- Get two glasses.
- Get two bits of paper or labels.
- Fill one of the glasses with water.
- On the first label, write a word that summarises the current situation, and stick it to the filled glass.
- On the second label, write a word that summarises the desired situation, and stick it to the empty glass.
- With the two glasses in front of you, pause for a moment, and contemplate how your life is currently filled with the first situation, and empty of the desired situation.
- Then, when you're ready, pour the water from the first glass (the current situation) into the second glass (the desired situation), while really noticing the sounds and feeling and shifting of the water from one to the other.
- Sit back and see the glasses in their new state; allow yourself to take deep breath and feel relieved.
- Take off the labels, put away the glasses, carry on with your life.
The audience should feel free to try this one at home.
POST: What happens if you get stuck in an alternative universe?
Q1: it's a sad thing that /r/DimensionalJumping/ is closed. It was the best sub to explore this idea. According to the leading contributers of this sub, everyone experiences such timeline changes all the time but mosts are unaware of it, because of a mix of conditioning, brain automatic filtering, and our own memory limits.
Also timeline changes are controlled by our unconscious mind. It's hard to control this part of our mind, but there are methods to tricking your mind that such or such thing is true when it's not (yet). It looks more or less like a metaphysical prey and its associated rites. According to the sub, by following these non-religious rites, you'll trigger successive timeline jumps in the direction of your wanted reality.
Q2: Is there a reason this sub was closed?
Q3: It has been said the sub had been started from the wrong basis (with a bad name to begin with) and it lead to confusion for newcomers. For example, the sub attracted perturbed people who got anxious about jumping into a bad time-line. My opinion is that the growing popularity of both the sub and u/triumphantGeorge started to turn the whole experiment into something a bit dangerous.
One version of the answer [POST: Ever heard of r/DimensionalJumping?]. Essentially, it became unwieldy to operate the subreddit as it was designed and keep it on track - as a dialogue-based subreddit where moderation would be via participation (the content would be in the comments, with everyone unpacking people's ideas and experiences, based on previous insights).
* * *
TG Comments: /r/philosophy/
POST: Can we formulate panpsychism such that it doesn't sound completely ridiculous?
[POST]
EDIT: This certainly got away from me. I was hoping to keep it short, but I also tried to cover a lot of ground. The result is that it is not as short as I'd like it to be, nor as detailed as I wanted it to be. I'd appreciate any responses. Thanks very much.
EDIT 2: I should be more clear about my project here. I'm not even really endorsing panpsychism (or if you prefer, panprotopsychism). I'm pointing out the reasons why it has some appeal, and then defending it against a particular objection: namely, that it is ridiculous to think that fundamental particles could have full-blown conscious experiences.
I will (quite briefly) argue that we can.
Panpsychism, for those who are not familiar, is the view that all matter is mental in its fundamental character. There is something mental, phenomenal, or experiential about all matter-- right down to the electron. It sounds like a bizarre view, but it has some appeal and is gaining traction.
For those of us who are convinced that there is a Hard Problem in explaining how conscious experience can arise from a physical system, the doctrine of panpsychism offers a way out.1 If panpsychism is true, we know where consciousness comes from: it comes from the mental or proto-mental properties of the matter which comprises it.
Galen Strawson goes so far as to argue that if physicalism is true, then panpsychism must be true. That is, if the universe is comprised of nothing but physical matter, and consciousness exists in the universe, then physical matter must just be consciousness. consciousness must just be something physical. Otherwise, consciousness "emerges" from nothing at all-- a phenomenon sometimes called "radical" or "magical" emergence.2
Still, it seems like panpsychism solves one problem while raising others. How could something like an electron possibly be conscious? How could we even entertain the idea? Some may say that we must be pretty far afield of the truth to give panpsychism any credence at all.
But perhaps it's possible to characterize the mental content of matter in such a way that it does not sound completely ridiculous. In his Two Conceptions of the Physical, David Stoljar provides one possible avenue for exploring this possibility.3 According to Stoljar, there are two kinds of physical properties. There are t-physical properties, which are the sorts of properties which are explained by physical theory. If physical theory talks about a certain property, than that property is a t-physical property ("t" for theory). On the other hand there are o-physical properties, which are those properties of objects which comprise their intrinsic character. t-physical properties are grounded by, or have their basis in o-physical properties ("o" for object). In other words, o-physical properties describe the properties of the object which make it the kind of object that it is. The t-physical properties are those properties which explain why it's behavior is in accordance with physical theory.
There is an intuitive shift to be made from panpsychism to Stoljar's two conceptions of the physical. Perhaps those o-physical properties which describe the intrinsic character of an object are also the mental or proto-mental properties described by panpsychism. In that case, physical entities would be mental in their essential properties. And those mental properties would provide the basis for the way physical things behave as described by physical theory. As David Chalmers explains, this approach might kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it provides an explanation of the intrinsic properties which ground physical relations and dispositions. Physics tells us about the relationships between physical things, but not about an intrinsic character to ground those relational properties. Augmenting our definition of the physical with an essentially mental character might plausibly solve that problem. On the other hand, it provides a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. If matter is essentially mental, it is much easier to explain the mind arising from the brain.
To be sure, this still sounds like a strange metaphysical thesis. One might still object that it leaves us with a stranger metaphysics than that with which we started. We started with a Hard Problem, and no we're left with conscious electrons. Is that really an improvement?
To answer this question, we must explore the meaning of "consciousness" as it applies to an electron. Could an electron be said to hold beliefs, see colors, hear music, and so on? Certainly not. No one argues that electrons could have sophisticated experiences. But could they have any experience? It seems absurd that they could, but then, if they don't, what is so "essentially mental" about them? There are two possible problems the panpsychist faces at this juncture. The first is to attribute too much mentality to fundamental particles, which would be absurd. The second is to attribute no mentality at all to fundamental particles, in which case the assertion that electrons are "essentially mental" is empty and meaningless. Moreover, attributing any mentality whatsoever to an electron seems ridiculous, so it seems like the panpsychist must face one of these two absurdities.
Despite his predicament, I think the panpsychist has a way out. Consider the higher-order thought (HOT) account of consciousness. According to this account, a mental state is conscious by virtue of our having a higher-order thought about it. My sensory states are not therefore conscious-- they only pop into "the light of consciousness" when the spotlight of higher-thought comes to rest on them. I take this to be an independently plausible theory. Cognitive psychology has shown us time and time again that our conscious experience is much narrower than we often take it to be. This makes sense; as soon as we want to pay attention to something we shine the HOT spotlight on it, so to us it seems that everything is in the spotlight all the time. But that just isn't the case, as famous selective attention tests have shown.
I believe the HOT account of consciousness can save the panpsychist from absurdity. If electrons are somehow mental in their character, they can have a sensory mental character but lack a conscious mental character. Unlike us, they lack the sophisticated mental machinery to access their own intrinsic phenomenal character. Therefore, also unlike us, there is nothing it is like to be them. Despite the fact that there is something mental about them: namely, that they have phenomenal states.
One final bit of explanation. It might seem a bit ridiculous to attribute sensory states to an entity but not attribute to that entity any consciousness. But actually, I think we can sympathize a bit with the electron's lack of consciousness. I have often suddenly come to the realization that I have been having some experience without realizing it. For example, I will realize that I've had a song stuck in my head but not realized that I've been replying the lyrics over and over. Or I will realize that I've had a slight headache but not been thinking about it-- despite the fact that it has actually been bothering me, even when I didn't realize as such!
Perhaps these experiences are something like the existence of electrons under this formulation of panpsychism. They have some intrinsic phenomenal experience which provides the categorical grounds for their behavior, but they have no access whatsoever to that experience.
I hope that if nothing else, the links scattered throughout this brief exposition have provided some food for thought to those interested in the subject.
1 If you aren't convinced that there's a Hard Problem, panpsychism is likely to sound like utter nonsense, and reading on will certainly not convince you. Arguing for the existance of a Hard Problem is beyond the scope of this brief exposition.
2 A counterexample (employed by Strawson) is the property of liquidity. Although liquidity emerges from a system of molecules, it does not radically emerge. The property of liquidity can be explained by reference to the property of the constituent properties.
3 Stoljar does not endorse this interpretation of his view, but other philosophers have. David Chalmers, in particular, describes Stoljar's physicalism as a kind of panpsychism.
[END OF POST]
Thanks for the thought-provoking post.
I'm thinking: is the basic issue not just that of mixing up consciousness, conscious-of and self-consciousness?
Conscousness/of/self
An electron isn't conscious - rather it is consciousness. That's what it is made from, and everything else is too. All things therefore have being-awareness, the experience of being itself as itself. This is not the same as reflective consciousness.
From there, we have:
- Conscious-of: If there was patterned structure within the boundary of the electron, then the electron could be said to "experience" or be conscious of that structure. For a human, this means the sensations, perceptions, and thoughts which arise within themselves.
- Self-consciousness: This would be the ability for something to (incorrectly) identify with one part of the structure within its boundary and not another. This is what humans do: They identify with certain sensations, perceptions, thoughts (within themselves) and not others.
Within this, we would then go to more subtle structures, such as directed attention (often described as a "torch" but really better referred to as a "filter" perhaps).
The Blanket Metaphor
For this overall picture, I quite like the metaphor of a blanket of material whose only property is awareness. Laid out flat, the blanket would only experience being-aware. It wouldn't experience being aware of anything; it would just be "consciousness". It would have no perceivable boundary; it would have no characteristics at all.
Until, that is, folds or ripples were made in the blanket. At this point, the blanket would be "conscious of" those patterns. Those folds and ripples would be its "world", as far as it was concerned.
Patterns would change and shift and over "time" (measured as one shift relative to another) the world would become different. However, perhaps one part of the pattern would remain reasonably consistent or change very slowly. As the only consistent thing in its world, the blanket might incorrectly identify that part of the pattern as "itself" - confusing its knowing of being unchangingly simply being-aware with the persistence of one of the experiences, the content of its awareness. This would be "self-consciousness".
Worlds, Ripples and Nonlocality
I'd say the bit that comes after this, though, is the form in which facts-of-the-world are then present. The notion of a literal extended-in-space world that is "external" to localised peaks of consciousness starts to seem dubious. The world as experienced may be better described as a shaping or enfolded patterning of consciousness within that area.
This would mean that the enfolded topology of a region of consciousness would be identical with its experience of the world (and basically would be the world, for that region). Furthermore, one's mode of thinking would deform the topology as much as sensory experiences would - one would to an extent literally experience one's beliefs.
Referring to the blanket metaphor: In a sense, the "blanket" is simultaneously everywhere, only the "patterns" are located. The "blanket" is non-spatial and non-temporal; the whole world is therefore within it at every point. (Obviously this is trickier to imagine, because the picture we have of a blanket is spatially extended - however, we can see that it is all "blanket" and that "blanket" is everywhere and nowhere.)
Wow thank you for this. I have argued for exactly this for a while (and below) without realizing that the terms I use interchangeably and make sense in my mind because I understand it conceptually might be very confusing for people who think of consciousness in other terms. (I'm not the gold giver by the way).
I completely empathise - I've been wrestling with ages to get terms that make sense to more than just myself (consciousness, awareness, everything means different things to everyone). It's a painful process!
Turns out an excess sprinkling of hyphens and italics is the way forward! ;-)
Q: I like this formulation. A while ago, I had the realization that "this" (my personal experience) is what my brain actually "looks like" in the sense of what matter or the substance of the universe actually is. Ever since I've been trying to formulate it in a way that other people can understand without having had that personal experience. I'll try to see if this helps if you don't mind.
To start, strip yourself of all assumptions and truths you believe about the world. Reduce yourself to the most basic experience, and examine what it is that exists.
It is clear that this, what you are experiencing, exists. There are qualia of different natures: colours, sounds, shapes... There is also a sensation of a sort of continuous stream of information feeling like it originates in the "center" of this experience, yet nowhere and everywhere at once. Examining the qualia, you can see most of them are static, except a few connected oblong shapes, whose movements seem to correspond some sensations in that continuous stream of information. Intuitively, it feels like commands are originating in this stream of information, commanding these oblongs to move. Let's call them the body.
Commanding the feet (the bottommost oblongs) to move around seems to cause the entire field of qualia to change. However, there are some patterns to this change. For instance, an area of a certain colour may grow larger and larger, until it stops, the feet can't move anymore, and there is a new sensation at the point where the consistent area is closest to the body. We'll call that sensation touch.
Moving the feet in a different way, you experience the consistent area of colour move sideways, until it disappears from your experience. Then, moving the feet a different way again, the consistent area of colour reappears.
From examining your experience like this, a few things become clear after a while: There appears to be some sort of "things" which cause certain predetermined qualia to appear by affecting the body. For instance, the hands are stopped with "touch" at the exact point where the areas of consistent colour begin.
You conclude that there must exist some "things", separate from your sphere of experience, acting their influences upon what exists as your personal experience. However, you cannot access the "thing" as it exists by itself. You can only access the influences the "thing" works on your sphere of experience. There appears to be a sort of "space" to move around in, but the body is always at the center of the experience.
Further, you notice a lot of "things" are shaped very similarly to the body. And these things tend to move and create information very similar to the continuous stream of information. Through looking in mirrors and exchanging information with these things, you conclude that "the body" is also one of these "things". You conclude these "people" all must have spheres of experience centered at their bodies, with their own continuous stream of information. Hence, in their spheres of experience, they experience your body in the way you experience theirs: as a "thing" acting influences on their experiences.
Further research leads you to know all people have an organ in their heads, and the nature of the activity in this organ, the brain, tends to correlate with the nature of the activity in their spheres of experience. You have come to believe in a kind of physicalism, that all that exists are these "things" you can describe through information gathered in your sphere of experience. Yet, the true nature of these things are inaccesible to you as anything but the reflections they cast in your personal experience. Just like the true mind of a person is inaccesible to you, except as this image of a grey lump transmitting electrochemical signals, as which their mind appears in your personal experience.
Is there any reason to believe this gray lump is special in the domain of "things"?
Occam's razor tells us we should prefer an explanation of these spheres of experience which does not assume some sort of special intangible property assigning mind to these brains but not other matter.
Is it not reasonable to assume that a "mind" is simply what a brain "looks like" when its existence is not seen as a reflection caused by sensory input into some other mind?
Just in the same way as there is an inaccesible property to other objects. Their "true" nature as objects in space: That which exists outside your personal experience and is the cause of you "seeing something" at an area in your experience.
Is there really any reason to believe the "true nature" of a brain and a chair is fundamentally different?
The brain contains and manages complex information whose true existence takes the form of complex qualia like "feelings" and "memories". However, the basic unit making up qualia, let's call it "consciousness", is just "what the mind is made of". Which is exactly the same as "what the chair is made of", only configured differently.
Here's where IIT falls short. It is in a sense similar to this kind of panpsychism in the sense that it says mind is something that appears when matter is arranged in a sufficiently complex manner. However, it claims that matter fundamentally has a different sort of existence from mind. I.e., not only mind, but consciousness appears only when matter is arranged in a sufficiently complef manner.
You cannot make one thing from another thing which has a fundamentally different kind of existence. IIT, as I understand it, claims as soon as matter reaches a certain treshold of complexity, 'pop', the kind of existence which we call consciousness appears.
Panpsychism on the other hand would claim "consciousness" is the intrinsic nature of matter, and that complex phenomena like "feelings" are simply consciousness arranged to contain that information, the same way we can observe "experiential matter" to be arranged to encode information in our brains.
Good stuff.
Working from direct experience onwards is definitely a key approach. Everything you experience exists as experience, and if you imagine turning off your senses, you find there is an open unstructured background to it. (I had a fun play with this in a post elsewhere. ["Why did the devs implement dreams?" /r/outside]) If you shift your perspective to this background (and it can be done, simply by deciding) then that sense of the world passing through you becomes prominent, and the nature of objects becomes clearer.
You have to be careful when pondering this to stay 1st-person and not drift into 3rd-person thinking-about mode. That way you realise when you are supposing "external things as the source of experience" and so on. It's important to realise that we never have an experience outside this perspective, no matter what clever conceptual frameworks we come up with.
Is it not reasonable to assume that a "mind" is simply what a brain "looks like" when its existence is not seen as a reflection caused by sensory input into some other mind?
Or rather, that a "brain" is what a mind looks like, as an image?
If "awareness" is the fundamental property, and everything is patterns of that, then all reality has an experience of being-aware, of being itself. Sufficient complexity is what allows one part of a pattern to reflect upon itself, using patterns within itself.
Meaning chairs and brains are indeed the same, fundamentally. Complexity doesn't change the nature of things, but it does allow more degrees of freedom.
Cristof Koch has in the past taken IIT and then adds to it that: "consciousness is fundamental". There's a recentish article by Koch on panpsychism here [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-consciousness-universal/] which is worth a read.
It still doesn't get there though, because it still has a duality to it that you can't find in direct experience.
EDIT: Excuse the major extended rambling on my part. You're about to see how difficult this stuff is to put into language, and that when you do attempt, it usually sounds mystical and slightly nonsensical... Perhaps a bit of dialogue can clarify it though! Thanks for engaging in the discussion. If nothing else, it means I'm forced to try to describe it more clearly (or not).
Steps Along the Way
It might be confusing if you're using it to explain to someone who doesn't quite get the idea of panpsychism yet.
It's so often the case that we have to describe things "incorrectly" for a while until we're along the path a bit, at which point the context has shifted and we can reformulate that description. The "brains and images" concepts definitely fall into that category. And "standard panpsychism" itself is really a step along the way. It still assumes a fundamentally n-dimensional spatial-temporal world. But we leave that once we've established the "matter" of the matter, when we start to see the implications of a "single nonmaterial material".
I don't have the time to read the article by Koch this week or the next, but I liked that post of yours.
Personally, I wouldn't bother with the Koch article except for context, if you are already on-side with our discussion so far. But I feel obligated to include links like that in an "other opinions are available" way. :-)
this open field in which experiences unfold themselves, if I understand you correctly, would in the context of panpsychism represent the entire universe?
Right. Although to say "universe" is even too much, because "universe" would be patterned content. This is before that. But that' just a language thing - if we say that the term "universe" means "all patterned content" then the universe is entirely within and made of that open field, then we can put that aside.
Whirlpools Reviewed
I believe this is the separation between those who believe we all are fundamentally the same "I", or "God" if you will, and those who believe we are fundamentally separate "souls" (one blanket per person). . . I tend to be in the former camp
I believe we can join the two together, and solve most of the problems you pose. We've already done it, in fact, we just haven't realised it.
The whirlpools metaphor is great, but it has the difficulty of being "spatial" so it only goes halfway. (The blanket metaphor is identical in this respect. The whirlpools really correspond to localised little circular folds within the blanket metaphor.)
It leaves us with our the experience of the body, mind and world (specifically: sensations, thoughts and perceptions) appearing within the perimeter of the whirlpool. But... where do they come from?
If every person were to be an individual whirlpool, how do we perceive one another at all? How does that information "cross the space" between whirlpools? What are the boundaries of the whirlpool?
The answer is to reconfigure the metaphor a little.
Perspectives and the Enfolded
To say the "world is within you" doesn't just mean that the present moment sensory experience is within you. It really does mean the whole world - all patterns everywhere - are within you right now and you are actually experiencing it at this moment. However, only one aspect of it is "unfolded" as senses; the rest is "enfolded" into the background, simultaneously everywhere.
Metaphors:
- During day time we see the sun shining in the sky, we do not see the stars. But the stars are still there, it is the brightness of the sun that conceals them. Just so, visuals and sounds and textures conceal the subtle global felt-sense in the background of experience. This global felt-sense is the entire universe, summarised.
- Imagine a stretch of unbounded water. Waves and patterns within it, your gross experience. Now, take some coloured dye and place a drop into the water. From the perspective of the water:
- Spatially: The colour is simultaneously everywhere, while being nowhere.
- Temporally: There is no record of a time when the colour was not there.
- To take on the ultimate perspective of awareness is to take on the perspective of the the colour rather than the patterns within or structure of the water.
So let's return to being-a-person. Language will cause us problems here, but we can get halfway.
You are not a person, you are a perspective. An area of awareness, made of awareness, but unbounded (because it is non-spatial and non-temporal). Within every perspective is everything, enfolded. Because everything is enfolded everywhere.
Your present moment sensory experience is an unfolded aspect or pattern of the complete enfolded universe. Your felt-sense is your experience of that everywhere. If you think of yourself like this, as a "perspective" that is *tuned-into" a particular part of the overall pattern, then you can solve the other problems.
If you release a hold on your present attention, you will find you relax and deepen as the unfolded aspect dissolves into the background of experience. The waves settle and you identify as the colour-that-is-everywhere, or the entire-sky (with both its stars = universe of all patterns, and its sun = present moment experience). Your present moment becomes unformatted, dimensionless, timeless.
The Overall Picture
The implications of this could be summarised thus:
- The only fundamental property is awareness or being-aware.
- The "universe" is all patterns in currently formed in awareness.
- A "person" is a "perspective" which has experience in the form of "unfolded" sensory experience and "enfolded" background experience.
- The "enfolded" background experience is actually the entirety of patterning everywhere. By which we mean "all existence" not just the post-big-bang universe we theorise in physics.
- All information is accessible to you, to be unfolded, because all information is everywhere, enfolded.
- Deep sleep or meditation corresponds to there being no unfolded content in your perspective.
- Death of the body just means those particular bodily sensations no longer appearing.
- True dissolving would mean the ending of the "perspective". But this cannot be comprehended, because the "perspective" is not spatially or temporally defined.
- Your absolute true nature is the true nature of everything: simply unpatterned being-aware.
Phew. That's my best attempt for now.
Q: Perhaps a bit of dialogue can clarify it though! Thanks for engaging in the discussion. If nothing else, it means I'm forced to try to describe it more clearly (or not).
It's appreciated. It's difficult to find occasions to genuinely examine these perspectives with some attempts at logical rigour to make sure what you're saying is meaningful. Pretty much the only places I've found to discuss "mystical" matters are the psychonaut subs, and the environment there isn't very conducive to inquisitive rational analysis.
In order to be avoid some confusion, I believe it's a good idea to introduce two terms. The transcendental "I" , the "spotlight self", and the "ego" (not the freudian one). Essentially, the "I" is the blanket, the "spotlight self" is the particular pattern, all the sensory and mental activity which makes up an individual mind, and the "ego" is a person's sense of being a separate acting agent.
The difficult part of trying to think of everything as one consciousness is the question of "why am I experiencing 'me' then, and not someone else, or everyone else?". There's some intuitive perception that you're aware of everything within your consciousness. This can be helped somewhat with examples like the control of your breath, which clearly passes in and out of the spotlight self multiple times a day, demonstrating that what the average person thinks of as themselves is not a static thing, but rather a conglomerate of experiences changing in nature continuously. From there a better understanding of how a spotlight self is an occurance in a greater field of self might make more sense. Noone has any trouble understanding why a cup is not a different cup: they're different occurences in the spatial model people are familiar with. In the same way two "minds" are different occurences in the conscious model.
I don't know if it's very clear to call it a perspective, because it's a very antropomorphic and spatial term. It might be better to say that these experiences are, and they exist fundamentally as consciousness, and when they exist within the conglomerate of experiences that is the spotlight self, they are experienced as a part of that loose collection of experiences. These collections contain basically only one constant component, which is the ego. The ego is the experience of other experiences being evaluated and manipulated, interacting, in this spotlight self.
The ego is the individuality of a person, and what most people identify with.
The point is that the source of the feeling of "me" as an individual, is the same as the source of the feelings that make up "my mind", meaning no one but "me" can experience "my mind".
So if you clear your mind completely, you'll see that this ego was just another one of the experiences in this field of consciousness. Nothing fundamental. Just like what the ego thought was experiences happening to it.
It's curious though, how it's always the same set of experiences that are unfolded. You don't go into deep sleep and wake up in a different room as a different person. And there's lots of different instances of such unfolding, each separate.
It's really difficult to come to terms with how my mind is a perspective arising in this field because of how mind-bending it is.
I guess the point is when you experience the whole of it, you don't experience the individual perspectives that occur in it. What's difficult is for me to reconcile is that in some sense when I enfold my spotlight self and try to experience the whole, in some sense it's still jonluw trying to experience the whole, nlt the whole itself, since jonluw can recall the experience.
Jeez, this is difficult to write about. The Tao that can be named is not the real the Tao and all that.
Thanks, I think we can get somewhere here.
So, if we talk about selves and so on we are still talking about partitioning the content of experience in some way. I basically say "this part of experience is me, the rest is not". The "ego" is our identification with one part of experience and not another part of experience. Why is your arm part of you, when the cup is not, for instance?
The distinction is surely arbitrary and is simply convention:
- We make the distinction based on spatial proximity. Perceptions that are near the point-of-view are assumed to be "me". In particular, bodily sensations are assumed to be "me" whereas visual perceptions not near the body sensation are assumed to be "not me".
- We make the dissociation based on temporal proximity. I intend my arm to move, it moves shortly afterwards. However, I might intend all sorts of things - passing thoughts - all the time that arise as experiences later. I don't say I caused them and they are part of me, though.
- Things that seems to persist we identify as "me", things that are fast changing we see as "not me". For instance, body sensations and thought locations persist and recur; the scene around us changes dramatically all the time as we "move about".
All of this, though, occurs in the same "open space". (Yes, "perspective" is an awkward word and I'm not all that keen on it. I mean it more in terms of "assuming a perspective" or "taking a point of view" in experience. Unfolding this rather than that.)
Obviously, when you let go of all content then you are not really a perspective anymore. A perspective is something you temporarily become.
So if you clear your mind completely, you'll see that this ego was just another one of the experiences in this field of consciousness. Nothing fundamental. Just like what the ego thought was experiences happening to it.
Right. All that is fundamental is the being-aware. None of the content is fundamental, whether it is being experienced unfolded or not. And by content we mean both the current experience, the background facts of "this world", the broader patterns of "all worlds in existence". If you let go too far, you stop being/having an experience completely and totally dissolve as an apparent separation in Awareness.
The point is that the source of the feeling of "me" as an individual, is the same as the source of the feelings that make up "my mind", meaning no one but "me" can experience "my mind".
Different "spaces' could have the identical experience, maybe? Not sure on this. You could "take on the perspective" of my position right now. But this would mean you'd also be taking on the present moment in its entirety, including memories. So you'd actually just become TriumphantGeorge.
It's curious though, how it's always the same set of experiences that are unfolded. You don't go into deep sleep and wake up in a different room as a different person. And there's lots of different instances of such unfolding, each separate.
Well, you don't know this, perhaps. There could be a complete discontinuity in the arising experience and you (as an open space) might be unaware of this.
e.g. The experience of being a Japanese Professor could be arising - experiencing from the perspective of a Japanese Professor - and the next step you are experiencing from the perspective of Jonluw typing at the computer. Unless a memory was available of the previous experience (i.e. there were traces of the Japanese Professor Walking experience in the Jonluw Typing experience), you would not know.
I guess the point is when you experience the whole of it, you don't experience the individual perspectives that occur in it. What's difficult is for me to reconcile is that in some sense when I enfold my spotlight self and try to experience the whole, in some sense it's still jonluw trying to experience the whole, nlt the whole itself, since jonluw can recall the experience.
Right!
For as long as you try to do this while holding onto a point of view you won't be able to. If you do release your hold on that point of view, however, this means when you re-adopt the perspective of Jonluw, you perhaps won't have the memory.
If you let go of the Jonluw experience absolutely completely then you may reattach to another perspective. If you release too far, you may cease to be a partition at all?
The phrase "pure perceiver" might be a nice one to adopt for this discussion; it's the "most subtle perimeter". The three-dimensional camera, as it were.
See, I believe what we see as objects within each spotlight self experience, reflect some nature or behaviour of the field of consciousness.
Right. That we see consistencies simply means there are persistent generalised patterns, though. This is not to be dismissed; they are the channels along which the experience of "this world" forms, and while we are in that context then this is quite important!
It means the world isn't subject to eternal, independent laws; it does mean that generalised regularities can be seen as incorporated within consciousness in the same way as the actual experiences.
Basically, I think the entire physical sciences are a very advanced form of the blanket metaphor.
Yes, the blanket metaphor says "there's the fundamental" and then "everything else is folds". Anything we observe or become corresponds to such pattern. The generalised regularities of science (as noted above) are such patterns.
So even though it's one continuous blanket, I can still identify and describe with physics, one relatively simple fold and one ludicrously complex fold.
Right. Physics, say, is an accounting of a particular subset of folds. (And also, as a subject and mode of thinking, takes the form of a subset of folds.)
Scramble these nerves, and there would be no jonluw. There'd still be a transcendental I, but the experience of jonluw would not be manifested in it.
Transcendental I (the blanket/property), pure perciever, perspective-of-jonluw, ego of jonlaw.
This is important because what we can see in our physical model reflects what is going on in the world of actual existence, consciousness.
Only a particular, greatly-reduced subset. And we have to be careful and not assign the human experience to other aspects. For instance, cups experience being cups, they don't experience "sadness". "Sadness" is a sensation in the body linked to various other perceptions and thoughts. Cups don't have thoughts and feelings. They have... ceramic. Cups aren't even "cups" as we conceptualise-experience them.
It is, however, easy to say something is spatially separated in the physical model. Not so much in the field of consciousness.
Right, although things are separated out in the physical model, they are not separated out even in experience or apparent reality, if you truly investigate it. Nothing is spatially separated, fundamentally. But when we think of things, we are forced to imagine them in some sort of extended space, in metaphor and in daily life.
For jonluw to experience what "you" are seeing as well as what "he" is seeing, the two sets of experiences would have to be arranged into one set. In the physical model, the brains would need to be connected with some seamless form of communication.
However, this is possible I think - having simultaneous experiences. And I don't think it requires literal brain connection. Remember, our "pure perceiving" isn't actually bound to brains or any particular structure.
However, with the help of the physical model we can see that consciousness arranges itself into complex structures, where "sound" only exists as a structure within that structure.
In fact, by adopting the physical model as the structure of you perception/mind, you directly experience this physical model as if stable and underlying. If you let go of that, it stops being unfolded in that manner and you have the raw being experience. Or, it has you...
A problem arises: You can't separate out the "physical model" from your patterned perception of "the world". And changing your physical model changes what you perceive. Effectively, your world is the structure of your mind. This is before brains.
There's something else to cover here:
Fundamentally, there is only the property of being-aware. Within that, patterns appear.
Immediately when we imagine this we are incorrect: we will tend to think of the patterns as spatially extended or interrelated, but this not the case. (Space in fact would be one such pattern, which might from the structure from which other patterns borrow.)
There are no limits on the form those patterns, although we cannot think of this. And there are no rules, inherently. Only temporary regularities. To describe a particular arrangement requires a language that corresponds to it for the duration that it persists.
Our physics codifies a certain subset of patterns (patterns of perception which exist as regularities in mind, persisting in memory, tied together within conceptual framework which also exists as regularities mind, persisting in memory, in a mutually-reinforcing relationship). Because it involves a shaping of mind and perception, it seems obviously true that we are describing an external, dependable world.
But we are not. The world is not external, it is internal.
However, the shifts in language required to describe one aspect of experience deny us the ability to describe - and even have - alternative experiences. We need to kill one point of view to shift to another.
...
Hi, thanks for taking an interest and joining in. Just going to bash out a quick ramble here for now to keep things going. Some of the disconnect here might be that it is reaching for terminology to describe a foundation that is not itself an object - it is simply a property, something we'd come to - but can "entertain" objects.
You can build any number of complex, internally consistent, frameworks to defend any number of views, but there must be some basis for believing one over another, correct?
Yes, and this is exactly about anchoring a framework in that way.
So, why is the idea of a pure-perceiver relevant?
The source of this is an effort to connect the description of consciousness with the facts of direct experience. Rather than, say, just connecting it to another accepted framework, as is more common in this area. Hence the earlier hyphenations of conscious-of and so on.
After exploring this (our direct experience), we end up identifying a basic experience which does not have a boundary, but has content appearing within it, with no discernible "outside" form which it comes. Further investigation reveals a non-gross background felt-sense which encapsulates the whole experience and can be to some extent "unfolded".
There is no sense in which there is a "thing" experiencing the content of experience.
The felt-sense and next-step corresponds to a variation on Eugene Gendlin's philosophy and psychology efforts; the enfolded-unfolded to David Bohm's implicate-explicate order model as described in Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
i.e. The concept of the "pure-perceiver" arises from the need to have a borderless context for subjective experience. The notion of enfolded meaning/facts is to provide a link between the structure of subjective experience (the behaviour of the context, the current moment, and the felt-sense) and an objective or 3rd-person description of the world (time, space, objects, etc).
I guess this comes back to my previous response to you, why is it that "Within every perspective is everything, enfolded"?
The short answer would be, there is nowhere else for it (the content of the world) to be. On the enfolded thing, it's in the following sense that the world is dissolved within the pure-perceiver:
[Imagine a device that] consists of two concentric glass cylinders. Between them is a viscous fluid, such as glycerin. If a drop of insoluble ink is placed in the glycerin and the outer cylinder is turned slowly, the drop of dye will be drawn out into a thread. Eventually the thread gets so diffused it cannot be seen. At that moment there seems to be no order present at all. Yet if you slowly turn the cylinder backward, the glycerin draws back into its original form, and suddenly the ink drop is visible again. The ink had been enfolded into the glycerin, and it was unfolded again by the reverse turning.
-- Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm
TL;DR: The "pure-perceiver" is fundamental and is the non-thing whose only property is awareness or being-aware, which means that it "is" awareness.
what do you think of the idea that there is one experiencing subject, entertaining multiple, simultaneous self-contained experiences? This idea is in a way the opposite of Parfit's resolution to paradoxes of personal identity. Instead of there being no enduring persons, there is one subject, this "blanket". Instead of never stepping in the same river twice, persons endure simply because the conscious property of the universe endures.
That's pretty much where I'm going with that.
There is only the blanket - the infinite nonmaterial material whose only property is being-aware - and transient patterns forming with it. There can be multiple, apparently self-contained experiences - shallower patterns within the perimeter of deeper patterns - and any number of them.
Remember, though, that nothing is really separate. Any pattern can be said not just to be made of blanket, but to be "blanket". This is simultaneously everywhere, all-at-once. So in that sense, all patterns are available from within all other patterns if you drop down and quieten yourself to "blanket" level.
Being a "person" could be to be your own localised experiential world. However, you would also be all other localised worlds and the non-spatial, non-temporal background. However, given the subtle structure we might call "perspective", we tend to focus on the immediate large clumpy sub-.patterns. If we completely let go of that though, "our" experience could expand to encompass it all.
Our present moment is experience is just what we have unfolded right now. One enduring property is all there is?
So it's more like the one property that's guaranteed to endure during survival.
Of course. I don't mean it's all there is right now - but it's the "basic thing that never goes way" so it's all there truly is. Which is reassuring because it changes our relationship to "stuff".
If what we truly are a subtle "perspective" - needn't be annihilated if all the patterns of this world dissolve. Although we would cease to be this "person" perhaps.
I'm not sure what "transhuman technology" would mean given that context though.
...
This leaves us with the question: what the fuck is it like to be an electron?
What is it like to be a human arm?
On the electron: If you could transfer and localise your attention and somehow become just the electron for a while then return, you would never be able to describe it. All your concepts are human-experience-based.
What is it like to be a human in deep sleep? You do that every night. Try to describe the experience.
Fucking electrons.
"What is it like to be a human arm?" : Absolutely nothing: minds are conscious, and the human mind is the human brain. What is it like to be a human brain? Well, it's what I'm doing right now! So the answer is: quite complicated, actually... "What is it like to be a human in deep sleep? You do that every night. Try to describe the experience.": Fuzzy, still, fluid, lukewarm. (Also, sleep is unconscious. You're not supposed to be conscious when you're asleep.)
Why are brains conscious and not arms? Is your arm inside your brain? When you are asleep, do you stop being a "mind"?
If sleep is supposed to be unconscious, what about dreams and lucid dreams?
Is it more accurate to say that deep sleep involves a ceasing of there being something to be conscious-of rather than a ceasing of consciousness.
Now you're just shifting the definition of "consciousness" so that you keep panpsychism while leaving behind the original evidence and intuitions that helped you get to panpsychism in the first place.
Actually, you are right to some extent. But the wrong way around. Everyday panpsychism leads you to a perspective which forces you to kick away the basis of the original view, it having done its job. This is because you end up recognising that panpsychism's flaw is the assumption of a spatially-extended world. But you can't do this from the beginning.
However, I am careful in my definitions. That's where the whole consciousness vs conscious-of vs self-consciousness thing comes from. Remember, I am not OP.
...
A1: Ladies and Gentleman, the Chess Metaphor (not invented by me): A very experienced chess player, is playing a game of chess with himself. No chess set is at hand, so he plays the game "in his head". This mental chess game can serve as a model of a (very tiny) panpsychic universe. It's panpsychic, because its ultimate foundation is the player's consciousness. It's also a model of a universe, with space (chessboard), matter (pieces), time (moves), and physical laws (rules of the game). In this model, there's just one fundamental consciousness, but we could imagine that being divided among non-fundamental consciousnesses: the roles of white player and black player; a pawn "trying" to get promoted; any "theme" in the game which is engaging the attention of the player. We don't need to insist, that every object we can name is conscious.
Right, nice metaphor - differentiate between made of consciousness vs one part being conscious-of another part.
Every object has being-aware - it is what it is as it is - but that is not the same as self-consciousness and being able to take a stand as one part (chess piece) in order to manipulate another part. The human player has the whole chess board within him. An individual chess piece just has wood grain within him.
I question whether panpsychism does any of the work we want an answer to the Hard Problem to be doing. "What is consciousness"? "Consciousness is an intrinsic property of everything". Well...ok? Isn't this just an updated version of the homonculous, one of these infinite turtle regresses?
No, it skips that - it says that consciousness is the material from which everything is made. This doesn't mean everything is self-conscious though.
Whereas "matter" at a fundamental material has no intrinsic properties at all, "consciousness" as a fundamental material has the of "awareness".
It basically means you don't need to magic-up consciousness as mysteriously "emerging" at some stage of complexity. (What complexity allows is self-consciousness, of a particular structure being able to represent itself by having an "idea" inside itself. One part looking at another. This is what we casually just call "consciousness" usually, which is half the confusion.)