Saturday, March 29, 2014

Talk Illuminates the Mental Board

talk illuminates the mental board:

such was a time when talk was magical and wonderful, for it confirmed we were not alone. it is in essence why we talk, we don't want to be alone. to contend with the idea that you might be alone is a miserable experience. is anyone who suspects solipsism might be true happy? the concept that within the reality there is only one person. of course there might be other people but they would be in separate realities surely, not connected at all?

but given that there may be many people in this reality, each a head containing consciousness, the prospect becomes intimidating, does it not? the situation is complex. if each head were like a lollipop contained in its own zone of personal space, the space of this reality is littered with lollipops, stuck forever in place. through whatever the real process is, the lollipops can communicate with the other lollipops, and talking is the most obvious form. now presumably, the lollipops next to you are the ones most familiar to you, let's assume distance has a real effect, even though some communications may keep integrity over large distances. and probably you share values and language after so many years together. this localization makes those far away, those beyond your neighbours, perhaps hundreds of degrees of separation away in space, seem almost alien.

beyond the initial joy of not being alone and having someone to talk to, complications inevitably arise. each has its own values, what is good and what is bad, and to what degree. you might argue there are universal values and this is true, like death is bad, whatever death is, as we who are living cannot truly define death, it remains a vague original fear in the mind. of course those who live on earth now have another incarnation and death holds a modern meaning now, different from what it originally meant. i don't think the original fear is ever lost though. and so the problem becomes what to make of opposing values.

outright hostility because of it seems the threat. if i hate something and you like it, does that not mean i hate you? that is the premise of the fear associated with talk. if we assume there are a lot of people, and they act as a buffer, it perhaps just means indifference in actuality. if we can preserve at least civility with our closest neighbours, perhaps in the final judgement, disagreement with those far away does not matter much.

for talk reveals our values, it cannot not do so. generally, we speak of things we like most of all, unless we be toxic containers of hate spewing thoughts of what we don't. if we conceive of a mental board indicating that that we think is good and what is bad, the other person talking to us has a real effect. if they think something is good also, we feel they confirm our opinion, again the sense that we are not alone.

of course, there are other things apart from personal curiosity about the other person, we like to learn truths from others, and we want them to make us believe things are not as bad as we think, and of course day to day we talk about what we do. also, as it is as sound, like music, talk is an art, it may have a quality not easily defined, and is more than just the functional exchange of ideas.

CLEARCHARGE

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Understanding Reality with Words

understanding reality with words:

"the thing is, none of us were born knowing a lot, right? how much did we know at the start of time, assuming our consciousness existed even then? but now we know a lot more, we've built up complexes of meanings for words that are related to everyday life. now the search to explain reality inevitably involves using these complexes as metaphors, if you like, to describe how reality works. so the old either or argument is whether reality is mental or material, material in the sense that the things we see and can touch are real. these are the schools of idealism and materialism or physicalism."

"it's easy to see why materialism is popular. we're highly visual."

"right. we're impressed by what we see and touch. idealism is a pulling back from sense perception, doubt comes in. is it all in my own mind kind of question."

"yeah. it's not easy to believe in materialism when you find your mind can influence what you see. really, someone who completely believes in materialism is someone for whom everything completely works, like as in scientifically. i don't think any highly schizophrenic person can be a materialist. imagine seeing what are called "hallucinations" all the time, really bizarre things, hearing many voices you can talk to, just like with other people you can see, and so on. materialism soon seems the theory of a hopelessly naive person living the perfectly "normal" life where nothing weird happens. the idea that the mind is greater than what seems "material" soon occurs. the schizophrenic may be ill, per se, but the instability mentally that occurs during a psychotic episode shows this to be the case. i may be "hallucinating" but what if i can touch the "hallucination", what if i can talk to the "hallucination"?"

"the irony is that most of Earth may be described as a "hallucination". i mean a guy may be "normal", not clinically schizophrenic, but if the world is full of philosophical zombies, illusions of people, is he not hallucinating?"

"that's going on hallucinating meaning not real. i suppose maybe you could argue that everyone on Earth is actually schizophrenic, it's just that most don't know it, they hallucinate people all the time, assuming philosophical zombies are real, and that they all have the potential to blow out to full clinical schizophrenia at some point."

"i think the word that came up after i became schizophrenic was "belief" or "believe". because the onset radically alters your beliefs and you think if only i could "believe" i could make things real."

"do you mean like magical thinking?"

"yeah. like believing if you did something, something would happen, against all scientific reasoning of course. but like things happened. at a railway station, i was looking at a train timetable and then it instantly changed in front of me, the whole board, and the same day, i looked at the railway map, at a map where all the towns of the UK were in different places. it was like i stepped into a parallel universe for a day. if i believed any of it, things might have turned out differently on the day."

"actually that sounds dangerous. maybe you shouldn't travel when you're very schizophrenic."

"that's the frightening truth about schizophrenia and idealism. it is all in your own mind. if you're mind's breaking down, it's actually dangerous. there's no comfort that there's a solid material world out there that's stable."

"but what is beyond mental and material, if there is anything? because now we have computers and that brings in a whole lot of new concepts."

"right. so now we use computer metaphors to describe reality, like it's a "computer simulation", it's a "simulated reality", "bits", "information", "data" and so on. but there's another word that is a factor in all these explanations, it's the word "personal", like is there is a creator who programmed it all in the beginning, a person."

"maybe it's because people want to believe that there is power over it all, that there is a god, if you like. to think that it all is chaotic, non personal, and the situation is highly volatile is kind of frightening. it's like everyone's trapped in a bus going at 120 miles per hour and there's no driver at all!"

"but let's say it is all personal, it's mental, but it's the unconscious in control. what is the unconscious? we all know what consciousness is, we identify ourselves often as our consciousness. i think, therefore i am, but what if i personally am a lot more than what i think, and part of that a lot more is the unconscious?"

"maybe that's what the collective unconscious is, it's like an invisible cloud spread throughout reality that connects everyone. and everyone's head is a pinpoint of consciousness."

"yes. the head is small relative to what surrounds it. the idea of personal zones, assuming everyone is fixed in position in real space, where in that zone everything is more closely linked to and influenced by the head there, where does one person become another person, where's the border?"

"what if, using the computer analogy, it's not all personal, because that's too egocentric, it's all data, or bits? and like even a pixel of light we see is a bit?"

"yes. it's easy to see how new things change the way we think about everything. it's like a new frame of thought appears through which we filter everything old to try to refine what we know and make sense of things."

CLEARCHARGE

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Ask of What You Think

ask of what you think:

"so your thought process is often a little vague to start with. maybe what you're thinking about has been in your subconscious for a while and only now you're really thinking about it. what comes from the subconscious may seem random and disorganized. it's the conscious thinker's job to organize it, if you like, to have it make sense and to question the assumptions it rests on. it may be thinking of an action, for example, something you should do. well, the first assumption you've made is that the action is possible and the second is that it is a good thing. if we examine the action part, we need to define our terms, what exactly is the action? if we express this as a sentence, what does each word mean exactly? then we can consider whether it is truly possible or not. the second part is an opinion and based on our own personal value systems, what is good and what is bad."

"most thoughts don't come into our consciousness with everything so clearly defined. i guess the subconscious is like a melting pot of ideas, mixing and combining them all the time. and what's going on in the subconscious is often not pretty, it's based on fears."

"what makes the conscious mind different from the subconscious is that it asks questions and isn't really satisfied until it has answers."

CLEARCHARGE

Monday, March 10, 2014

From a Dream to Earth

from a dream to earth:

it was something like this, a series of dreams that were snapshots of life as a three year old. it covered a period of about a year in my life history, although i estimate the time i was asleep was only for a few days. i question why i remember the sequence so well. it must be because they were particularly vivid dreams almost like waking life. certainly the last dream became such. i awoke in the dream. i had come to Earth.

i cannot remember the day before i fell asleep and was truly born on Earth. i guess life was very simpler. i am not solipsistic by nature, even though for short periods i did consider i could be alone, even that the world was created the day i was born and that was why i could remember nothing beforehand. of course i dismissed that. from experience, i know that in a dream, memory is destroyed or unavailable and that is probably why i remember next to nothing about my previous life. i am still held in the "dream" of Earth.

to the paranoid suffering on Earth, it is not hard to imagine that an external demon, much like that of Descartes' concept, has lured us to Earth and imprisoned us against our will. because we are powerless in the process, it seems there are greater forces at work, but is it really personal? i confess, given a choice, i would not have come here. but also, i have dreamed far worse nightmares, Earth is not the worst prison. it is the lack of power that is frightening. i didn't ask to be born here.

what is the way out? can we return from whence we came? it seems logical that the exit is the entrance, we can only leave through a dream as well. i guess that before i die on Earth, dreams will become more vivid, more lucid perhaps, and that one day i will dream of elsewhere and wake up there. i will have died just as i was born.

CLEARCHARGE

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

In Your World

in your world:

"in your world that might be a famous person, but i've never heard of him."

is there a metaphysical significance to that? could it be that we are really living in our own worlds, our own versions of Earth, only it just seems that we are living in the same, standardized Earth, with the same people in it? the invention of the computer and the internet showed us what was possible first of all and introduced concepts that we could borrow from to better understand the metaphysics of reality.

"ok, what if this person only exists in my world, i mean, i know when you say "in my world" you generally mean the place where you live, the people you know, etc. and that's individual but you assume that the media is the same, right?"

"maybe it isn't. how far you can test it is doubtful too. maybe you could look it up, this guy you're talking about, on the internet, and show me that he exists, but how do i know that you haven't just delivered that media to me through some channel in real space, just now, by us being together? and that he really didn't exist in my world before, but now i'm with you, he does? if you see what i mean."

"so real people meeting each other involves some kind of trade of information?"

"yes. so it opens up channels, i don't know, i'm tempted to say subspace channels but that's something else on Star Trek, maybe "interpersonal data channel" is better. i don't believe in the concept of the external world so how else could it work? i mean, of course, the data channels are open even when we're not together but presumably they're even more open when we are."

"so say we live in a more or less standardized, common Earth. i guess for it to be 100% standardized, it would require some central "Earth supercomputer" and maybe that doesn't exist. everyone has their own local Earth supercomputer, like everyone's an internet server, so to speak, in their own right."

"yeah, so data flows back and forth and yeah, obviously you each have some kind of supercomputer to render all your visuals, everything you see, and hear of course."

"and maybe data gets corrupted, there are errors in the transmission."

"and signal noise. that could explain how we live in slightly different versions of Earth. like we all live in parallel universes. because of poor connection. but i had an experience, where i was waiting to meet someone in a public place, and they appeared out of nowhere, literally."

"that happens to me too. we were going abroad and we were in a large train station and my father had wandered off and i was getting worried because i couldn't see him and then he appeared suddenly, just like that, at a distance. it's things like travel where you get paranoid whether the whole thing actually "works" or not."

"and then i was upset once, very emotional, and then either the dvd player broke or there was no electricity or something but it wouldn't come on. and then when i calmed down, it worked."

"i mean you could explain it away as, "oh, it's all in your mind", it was just an electrical fault, but the worrying thing is that if the external world is not real, it really is all in your own mind! weird things, frightening things, happen when you are very emotional."

"yeah like machines break. maybe it's harder to meet real people, assuming lots of simulated Non Player Characters, not just because there may be few real people, but because everything has to work, there has to be an excellent connection between real people."

"i don't know. real people. in one way, i think it's more frightening. what if you don't get along? a virtual character, someone simulated, you don't really care, right? it doesn't matter."

"well i don't know about that. what if the NPC came from someone else's, a real person's, database of characters, maybe they're not real but they're just like someone real, and they would know how you treat one of their simulated people."

"my army of illusions against someone else's? i still think it's less intimidating to deal with someone simulated and wouldn't you convert a character from somewhere else to someone more suitable in your own matrix? i don't know. but trade is good, right? when i was a kid, i really don't think i could write that easily. i mean, like when i was 6, we had to write an essay each weekend on that week's lesson on Native Americans, one page. it wasn't easy for me. maybe i could write better in a previous life and just forgot, but it's like, when i go to a book store and see all those titles on the shelves, that's got to come from elsewhere, other people have done all that, my unconscious or local Earth supercomputer may be able to create simulated people and a few snatches of speech but it's hard to believe it could come up with thousands of different books."

"think how much your world has changed. and you're not alone is what that shows. there are a ton of ideas out there."

CLEARCHARGE

Monday, March 3, 2014

The Extremes of Thought

the extremes of thought:

"you know i can't say it's true for everyone, but i think it tends to be that when people think, they think in extremes, in superlatives, or that something applies to everything. it's like they add words like "all" or "infinite" or "maximum", something like that. an example, the word "god", i mean that gives the impression of a person who is all powerful, all seeing, knows everything, infinite magical powers, present everywhere and so on. or when people make generalizations about nationalities, or gender, etc., it's like, without actually saying it, they're still implying it's true about everyone. it's like a common fallacy of thought."

"well, "god" is an extreme example, it's just that the word has that impact, you know? it just suggests all that naturally. but maybe that's why people don't believe in god, put like that, it's hard to imagine anyone really being that powerful. i mean what if a lesser version of a god existed, like just people who were powerful in ancient times, you know, who did things that determine what the present is today, like inventors or creators, but then again, maybe you wouldn't call them gods, i don't know. i mean it occurred to me, i had this idea that maybe someone drew a picture of a cat in ancient times and then cats appeared after that, you know something more prosaic like that. but anyway, i think the truth is that it's hard to think of exceptions or that something is only partially true, simple thought tends to initially assume the statement is generally true, that it's qualified by the word "all"."

"like space, for me, it's hard to imagine that real space, this reality, is infinite in size. i mean theoretically, the universe, which would be virtual if the external world were an illusion, could be infinite but that's only because the space of the universe is not real space. it's far easier for me to imagine and believe that the size of reality is finite. i mean maybe my own personal bubble in space, if you like, is part of the outer limit of real space and i sense there is nothing beyond that, who knows? but there are far more questions about time."

"here we go. time is change. real space is made up of discrete particles of matter and these change. that's what time is."

"or least bits of matter. even mental things are matter. everything in real space is matter."

"so it's sort of like philosophical idealism for you but mental is material, is a form of matter, in your concept. the problem for you is that the state of the language at present assumes materialism, "matter" generally means something else, something that exists in an external world, and therefore as it is, mental is not "material", is not "matter", to a lot of people, if that makes any sense."

"it's just that it's far simpler to call everything that exists truly in real space, matter."

"anyway, at least some of these least bits of matter change and in all time is a set of states that these can have, right?"

"yes, you can't assume that everything changes. the question is whether an individual least bit of matter's set of states is infinite or finite, i mean, even if change is discrete, theoretically you wonder still if the set were infinite."

"that's confusing because if the set were infinite, it would suggest that time would be continuous, because if change were continuous, obviously the set would be infinite, but maybe not the other way round, an infinite set does not necessarily mean that time is continuous. but i agree theoretically even if change were discrete, the set might still be infinite. but emotionally speaking, would i prefer to live in infinite change or finite? i mean first, you think, finite, well maybe that's not so good, i'm being limited, but then you think infinite, well, that includes all bad things as well, so rationally maybe it's not such a good idea? i think the length of time a state could last also changes. obviously, like, we can vary the length of time between blinks, for example, while still looking at the same thing, something like that."

"it's like a grand tapestry of life where everything that could happen is depicted in one huge picture, that's what finite is."

"and the whole question of immortality and death, though. again we can't help but think in extremes, what is immortality? perfect health, infinite time, free from illness and physical damage, fine food, beautiful gardens, wonderful life, etc. again, it makes it hard to believe in. and death, my thinking gets very confused. first what would it be in a metaphysical sense? when something ends? well what is time if not everything ending and becoming something else? and if you tried to stay the same forever, wouldn't that be the death of time? isn't there a contradiction there? time is a killer, it kills off the past? i mean what could real immortality, that is the opposite of death, what could it be?"

"but time repeats, at the micro level, and maybe even as a whole, at what you could call the end of time. this time now, unless it's a complete repeat already, like it's actually the year 40 trillion or something and we've already done like 300 repeats of this life but we still think the date is 13 billion or even Year 442 going into Year 443, it's a time of great change in general. actually hopefully it's just a once through event, i really don't want to repeat this lifetime."

"yes. maybe time is very "thin" now and this is not to be repeated, like once on earth is enough, never mind having to repeat this lifetime over and over again. but we think finite, and then little, but even if time were finite in a metaphysical sense the numbers are still huge. but back to thinking in general, we tend to think the word "all" about statements, but time and space make a difference, like maybe something is only true sometimes and not others and maybe something is only true somewhere else."

"like maybe it's true for someone else, somewhere else, but it's not true for me. also what about overestimation, something's true but it's not really that important?"

"well that's a problem of the mind, we can only focus on a few things or even one thing at a time consciously and everything we think, it blows up in our minds, so we overestimate it's importance. it's like, something was a huge deal when i was sixteen, but now i think, what was i thinking? and the mind is a fickle thing, because in actuality, we forget, we can't keep things in our conscious mind, but that's just time for you."

CLEARCHARGE

Saturday, March 1, 2014

A Sense of Progress in Time

a sense of progress in time:

"you might think, or rather like to think, that the world is stable, that history proves that progress is true, that time moves in a linear fashion, much like the timeline on a historical chart, but you might be wrong. there is that one idea of time which we entertain that time really is linear, the arrow of time and all that."

"but if that isn't the case, what is? the future seems different from the past. we learn from our mistakes, and so on."

"the essence of the theory that time is linear which infects everyone is that the future really is different from the past, in short that time is endless change different from the past, to infinity perhaps, or even that there is some catastrophic end to time, that everything must freeze or something like that, whereas that can't be the case. imagine a world like that, maybe i see red and blue today, but from tomorrow i will never see those two colours again, i will see completely different new colours, and the same again the next day, the past is irretrievable and life is violent change all the time."

"so what you're saying is because we experience the same things again, that we can take it for granted that some things are constants, that actually that the past repeats itself? we actually go back in time for a repeat?"

"exactly. which is a relief, don't you think? but it's not a repeat as a whole, i mean, imagine your own space in your own world, wherever that is, as mapped out with something like Cartesian coordinates, one axis goes out forwards from your body, one axis left and right, one up and down, sitting down to your computer, assuming you sit in exactly the same position and look at the same pixel of the taskbar on the computer screen in front of you at two different times, you may see the same shade of blue of the pixel for those exact coordinates, but of course everything else is different, your thoughts at the times, maybe your legs are crossed differently, etc. the point is we get localized repeats but as a whole, as in eternal return, perhaps never."

"your theory is that what seems like physical motion is an illusion, that actually everything is fixed in space and that each thing that makes up the stuff of reality can repeat?"

"yes, imagine if we were blind. motion wouldn't seem so real then, would it? so if time at the level of each discrete particle that makes up the stuff of reality, or least bit of matter, if you like, is merely a collection of changes in state, the question is whether this is finite or not. of course, if it were infinite, it would suggest that time would be continuous, would it not? however i posit that time is discrete. the question is how finite is the number of states that could exist?"

"so a simple discrete particle may only have a dozen or so states and it would look like it was leaping back and forth between them? there's the state at the start of time and it's like it's moving away from that and then coming back and then away again or something like that. but if the number of states is finite we'd end up repeating later sections of time as a whole surely, if not the start of time itself?"

"i guess so. though perhaps the time each state lasts could be variable. i think what gives progress meaning is the sense that things are getting better or rather even, that bad things have stopped. i came up with some of these ideas years ago, for example, in the 1990's but it is only recently that i've written about them, so it's like an idea popped into my head in say 1993 and then faded and came back in further thought again and again over the years but it's only now that this idea and others fully matured and manifested in this blog post."

"i used to believe a lot of things that now seem just wrong. so progress, in the positive sense, is that an idea becomes bigger and bigger until it manifests in a greater way. progress in the negative sense, it's that we stop believing in falsity. i can't stop thinking, are we more or less susceptible to false beliefs? it's so easy to be crazy. and it's frightening when we suspect we are. like relationships with people, what if we're completely mistaken about someone and their emotions or intentions?"

"it happens, but it's easy to make too much of it, i think. i am me and you are you, and we're all alone in a sense. connection brings a sense of immediacy that perhaps isn't that real. of course we have real neighbours in space and that doesn't change. it's all well and good to think about time, but space may be more important."

"like who your real neighbours are and what are they like? i mean, it's fine perhaps some of us live in a Matrix-like world that is Earth and maybe we "meet" real people in it, but what if the two people who do so are like 4 billion light years away from each other in reality? how does that work? it may seem like someone i meet is 4 feet away from me, but actually is light years away in real space and is just a hologram, in effect, to me. a real long distance relationship."

"you wonder how that works, is speech rendered accurately as to sound, or is there some guesswork in the system at either end?"

"and people are shocking. like you have in your own mind what people are like, but maybe that's just the people actually near you and people far away you meet are different, not what you're used to."

"the thing is, hoping to know everything about reality is like hoping to know all other people, it's not going to happen. the other thing against materialism, apart from the external world being an illusion, is that it makes everything seem non-personal. when i think of space i think of areas of personal spaces, beyond my neighbour is perhaps someone else who i only connect with through my neighbour."

"like what is the maximum degree of separation in reality? it could be over a thousand degrees! and what if two people a thousand degrees of separation apart got married in the matrix of Earth? wouldn't everyone in between know about it? or maybe the connection between them is secure?"

"but the signal, assume it's good, they might never know, perhaps. and maybe we're not aware of the communication traffic going on through us. but you never know, they might be a famous couple in the news."

"well it's always seemed like we weren't that alone here, maybe we live in a densely populated zone or we're somewhere in the middle of space. i imagine someone at the very end of space might think either that he or she were completely alone and living in solipsism or that there were only a few other people that existed."

"or that we are in a lonely area of space but that connection is great."

CLEARCHARGE