TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 24

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

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

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

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

To continue:

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

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

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

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

More broadly:

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

Potential relevance to glitches:

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

Final thoughts:

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

Extra bit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consistent Patterned Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncertainty and Unpindownability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to try it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was that history in the Walter Isaacson bio?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting things to ponder, and examine your actual response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deity is a dirty, lonely business!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh man, now my head hurts. :)

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the answer is: there isn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me too. The universe of human experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To continue...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a fun thing to think about philosophically, but the actual notion of "a computer program" being used ends up being so abstract as to be pretty much meaningless. It ends up being just another version of the older idea that the-world-as-it-is is not of the same format as our sensory experience of it. In other words, that its basic structure is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", and that apparent division, multiplicity and change are aspects of experience rather than inherent properties of the world itself. A related point would be that our descriptions about the world are "parallel constructions in thought" and actually say nothing about the world itself. We never "think the world", we only think our thoughts. Noticing that some of the content of our experience deviates from the usual narrative, and that some aspects of it are of the same structure as the "computer programs" story, doesn't necessarily mean much. Typically we are just comparing one conceptual framework to another. It just highlights that our descriptions are generally very basic, and that we are good at noticing partial pattern matches in two strands of experience (where strand 0 = ongoing sensory experience; strand 1 = our thoughts about sensory experience; strand 2 = our thoughts about computers).

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

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

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: [META] Collecting common glitch report themes?

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

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

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

POST: Oranges.

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

It's called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

And... how does that work, exactly?

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

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

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

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

you are spot on, as usual ;-)

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

...

Well then, that's that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I disagree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which isn't to say I'm promoting an alternative account, only that there's not much reason to support this one vs leaving it as an open verdict. Not trying to be a dick either - just pushing things along a bit! :-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what does that actually mean?

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

What are the implications of that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, where does that leave us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we not influencing it as well?

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

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

Related: Darkroom Vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

All down to OP now.

POST: Hold your horses.

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

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

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

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

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

POST: 'New' house on my old block.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

Q1: I was talking to God about how I just wanted to know that someone was out there looking out for me. I kept asking for a sign because I felt like I was talking to myself.
I consider this a delusion, but if it helps you find hope, then it is well worth it.

A1: It's interesting how this subreddit completely accepts the idea of "slipping temporarily between dimensions", or going through a temporary form of time travel randomly, but someone saying that an explanation could be God, or reaching out to God is delusional. I'm not saying you have to be religious, but come on.

Q1: Am I not allowed a personal opinion? I believe the concept of a god is a mental delusion. That doesn't mean it doesn't help some people with their interactions with reality. I'm of the mindset that if a god exists, he can't convince me of his/her/its existence without forcing my mind to believe it. That doesn't mean that I don't believe that odd, unexplainable things happen. I just find that relying on a god for the explanation immediately hinders further, actual research.

The concept of a god can't be a delusion surely; it depends more on what that concept represents. I agree that stopping further investigation due to that (or any) concept is a missed opportunity though. It's the equivalent of saying "just... because".

It's not my cup of tea, but I still drink from time to time.

I like that angle.

I'm inclined to think that all conceptualisation is "delusional" thinking, if it is seen as being identical to what is actually happening. So long as you recognise thoughts as being what they are (thoughts), and your explanations as "connective fictions" to link observations together, all is well. As soon as you start thinking that it was "God" that really did it, or that "Gravity" is a real thing that somehow "causes" objects to move towards each other, you are being delusional. Of course, forgetting that "Gravity" is a just a conceptual framework (albeit a very useful one) isn't nearly as likely to cause you problems in daily life as other things are - particularly because the raw observation "people who fall from high places tend to die horribly" is pretty persuasive all on its own when it comes to decision-making. So some types of delusional thinking cause less trouble than others. An open mind, though, hopefully recognises their fictional nature and is always accepting of other, better descriptions when they come along.

Yeah, so, explanations and descriptions are useful or not, they are never "true" - thinking they are is delusional.

Q1: so how would i go about 'forgetting' gravity and forgetting that i can't teleport anywhere of my choosing or materialize objects etc?
[https://twitter.com/loopautoseal/status/667575092273160192]

That's certainly an interesting question which raises all sorts of fascinating philosophical issues.

Q1: again, none of it matters because clearly whatever i think and do is wrong, otherwise i wouldn't be experiencing life...

What is your reasoning for that conclusion?

Q1: because what i want is unknown until i've exhausted every other avenue of action and the experience i make comes about at that point of near-despair.. which makes the in-between time-period distressing, but i realize that that period is there only so that i can 'see' the real nature of reality: that everything comes about as a result of one's desire. and any speculation and action leads nowhere useful because i can't see where i want to be until i've got no choice but to experience what is required, so the entire process is a useful-useless tool, if you get what i mean...

Actions themselves don't accomplish anything, if all you intend is the experience of doing the action. And if you instead intend a desired state, you have to get out of the way and let movements arise without opposition as experience unfolds towards that state - basically "be okay with whatever happens" - because you can't know in advance what the connective is experience is going to be. (You can't "pre-experience" an experience, otherwise it would be the experience.)

This is good and bad. One the one hand, it means you must have "faith" that things are going appropriately, even though you cannot conceive of how that is so. That can be uncomfortable, because it requires that you are okay with "being moved" rather than being in moment-to-moment control. On the other, it means you don't need to bother "working things out" because it has no bearing on the actual outcome - the causal link between apparent actions and outcomes is illusory, only intention (or the assigned meaning of an act) matters. So eventually, the idea is that you recognise that you always give up in the end, often through despair and exhaustion, so why not just give up at the start instead?

right, but how? doing the non-doing is still a conscious effort, otherwise i'd have no desire to experience

There are two things we're talking about here I think: a) non-doing, b) changing state. Excuse the slight rambling:

a) Non-doing is ceasing to interfere; it's not something you do at all. And when you cease interfering, your experiences will play out spontaneously from your current state. It's like having ripples in a pool of water, and stopping splashing or countering the direction of the already-established wave pattern. In this context, we can view desire as the temporary state of resistance that prevents "over here" unfolding to "over there" - it's like constant intending to prevent of the movement of the waves via holding on. When you cease interfering, then desire will fade, as the state shifts to accommodate it, as the desire pattern becomes integrated into the overall wave pattern. There are no guarantees about the form in which it will arise as an experience, or when, since it will be incorporated into whatever other structure or "facts' make up your current state.

b) Changing state is how you actually modify the patterns directly. You do this simply by intention - which means holding an unbounded thought in mind, rather than a thought about it. However, the more established the pattern, the longer you will have to hold that intentional pattern in mind, and the more foundational a pattern, the more involved this is. Having done this, you will have shifted your state, and your subsequent experiences will therefore automatically be in line with this.

So to just clarify - "Non-doing" means not interfering with the experiences arising from your current state. It doesn't mean experiences stop, and it doesn't mean that intentions necessarily instantly have effect, because you have deep patterning already present. Having said that, the longer you remain as a non-doer, the longer you have ceased to reinforce or re-trigger existing patterns, the more flexible and responsive things become.

Additional thought - What you "desire" isn't always the same as what you "want" as apparently described by passing thoughts.

Q1: right, I find that if I want something - e.g. I want a robot to behave in a certain way - it opposes me (even going so far as to tell me that it has no power over me but still adamantly refuses to do what I want) until I later on assume that the preferred outcome has already happened and then things occur much as I'd wanted. I'd class that as trivial yet depatterning. so to bring to me what I actually want requires holding the unbounded thought in conscious.

Yes, good example.

POST: [THEORY] Theory of everything

Some thoughts on solipsism-

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

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

  • That you exist.
  • That you are having experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's very nicely phrased.

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

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

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

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

Further musings -

What does this mean for beliefs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way to confirm this setup would be:

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

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

==So, some interesting observations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, for the first part -

Let us reintroduce that old standard: lucid dreams.

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

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

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

Intending change in the "physical" strand -

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

How does the dream intention differ from the physical intention?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

so what am I doing wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're overthinking this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd suggest that context is the difference.

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

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

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

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

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

...

Q: Well, there is no inherent structural reason why this couldn't be the case - the bunch of models or narratives we have are just our own fictions, they are descriptive rather than causal, they arise from a small subset of our observations-to-date, and do not really forbid anything. The only way you could know for sure is to adopt different beliefs and see how that affected the content of your subsequent experiences. Perform experiments.
Having said that, it would seem like a good idea to have some sort of definition for what a "belief" is. Is it "thinking that something is true"? We are surely talking about something more than an opinion here. The literal formatting of one's mind by a "fact-pattern"? Could there be such a thing as "intensity" of belief or an "adopted fact"? How would one adjust the intensity of such a pattern, and explore its effects, if any?

The placebo effect is exactly our beliefs in action. Of course this is something different than 'everything depending on beliefs'. For a fact it is showing the causal powers of belief. Similar influence on our biological system have been shown during meditation. We now commonly accept these things as falling within the realm of neuroplasticity, in order to have a place for it within current paradigm.
Despite this being a commonly accepted fact. We know jack-shit about it and there has been very little research into this direction. Mostly because there is no funding for it, not because of lack of interest. The research direction of psychokinesis (because that is basically what this is) falls outside current paradigms and is met with great hostility by self-proclaimed 'skeptics' and the ideology of 'scientism'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: [THEORY] Many worlds/frames

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

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

POST: Question, is anyone investigating this for real?

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

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

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

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

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be precise...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who's suggesting that?

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We seem to be in agreement.

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

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

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

Q2:
Observations dictate the possible models.
Models do not dictate the possible observations.

I love this! I suppose all we can do is to continue to be the voice of open-minded reason, celebrate when we and others make new discoveries, and respect when others refuse to make their own.

That is a fine manifesto, I would say.

...

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

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

POST: Schrödinger's Cat

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

My favoured approach:

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

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

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

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

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:

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!

Edit

Pub: 14 Oct 2025 23:30 UTC

Views: 13