So, I thought it might be worth going over a few of the discoveries and postulates and thought patterns and what not that have led me to where I currently am, for those of you who haven’t been reading this and talking to me for years. For those of you who have, you may want to skip over this post, as there’s probably not going to be a lot new here.
As many of you know, about five years I set my mind world-readable. I invited anyone with the ability to read everything there is to read. Shortly thereafter I began having regular discussions with people I can’t see. Somewhat to my surprise, these people were *not* pushing me in the direction of mainstream religions all around the world, but instead wanted to offer me a introduction to how understanding the science of Earth could open the possibility of a amazing experience for me.
One of the first topics for discussion was the idea that our entire experience *is* information. While the universe may consist of mass and energy, our experience of it consists entirely of information. Everything we see, taste, touch, smell, hear, or otherwise experience (and there are senses beyond those 5 – both the network I am talking to my friends over, and a lot of less obvious ones like sensing acceleration, or sensing the position of your limbs) is information. If you’re a bytehead, you can look at it all as enormous numbers.. any experience you have, or want to have, can be found out there in raw infinity. Just like you can start at one and keep counting and eventually come to the number or pattern of bits that represents a MP3 of a song – or any digital encoding you care to name.. if you start searching infinity, you can find a set of information that represents a hug from a friend. Or even a infinite set that represents all hugs from friends.
So, most of us like to insist that this data is coming from a single monolithic reality – what we like to call “the real world”. Well, at least two separate things cast serious aspersions of doubt upon this idea. The first is in quantum mechanics, and I encourage anyone who hasn’t already done so to watch this video. The second is in neuroscience, or more correctly, in a understanding of what we are, from our best guesses and observations.
Now, as I’ve mentioned to many of my friends, various experiments I performed – some while I was actively trying to die, and others that just happened when I was a bit on the wild side, suggest strongly that we are hypervised. Dying before the owner or controller of the hypervisor wants you to is not really a option. However, that’s a subject for another series of posts. However, it’s worth mentioning that if we are hypervised, it is very likely by someone who wants us to be able to make meaningful experiments and observations, and so there is very likely virtualization that lets us accurately see, if only in a lies-to-children version, directly into the appliance that makes us what we are – the human mind.
And this is where the second argument against me experiencing “the real world” comes from. Our minds, scientists tell us, consist of 10^11 neurons. That’s well beyond what a high end desktop computer has for transistors – several orders of magnitude. And, those of you who play games like World of Warcraft can tell us, desktop computers can do a suprisingly good job of creating a convincing 3D experience of reality. Our minds, several orders of magnitude more powerful, can easily make up our experience of reality out of whole cloth, and in fact there is somewhat a case for them doing this at least somewhat while we are dreaming.
In addition, a neuron is not a transistor. It is a far more powerful device – comparisons can be drawn both to a op amp and a microcontroller. Also in addition, our minds use a far more efficient architecture than a modern computer – while most of the transistors in a modern computer only do one thing, during one active pathway, and the rest of the time are dead weight – neurons are often involved in many many different subnets and used for many many operations at once. In addition, while a modern computer has several bottlenecks that limit the flow of information, our minds allow parallel traffic between almost everything and almost everything else.
So, even if there is a “real world”, you will never ever know if you are seeing it. There’s no way to know. No way to know what the many many layers of neural network between your senses (‘the edge’, if you will) and your conscious experience (what I call “the ride”) are doing to the data streams. It’s unlikely that there *is* a single real world – there are very likely a number of entwined realities – and even if there was, you could never really know what it contained.
Now, why does all this matter? I mean, it’s a fun discussion for philosophers, but what impact does it have on people like you and me? Well, several different ones. The first one is, it becomes clear that the best way to experience a utopia (heaven, for you religios types) is to configure your neural network correctly. IN fact one of the first things I was taught once I started talking with people I can’t see is that the people in heaven and the people in hell inhabit the same physical space – the difference is in what’s happening in their minds. And in fact, as I’ve started studying both pushing my neural network with various exercises and deliberately and directly rewiring it I have seen a dramatic difference in my life in a number of ways. My dreams are getting better, I’ve experienced emotional states higher than drugs ever got me to, and I’ve experienced a general shifting more towards the experiences I would like to have of my emotional states.
One of the things I was astonished to discover, although in retrospect it is rather obvious, is that what you believe affects what you experience. I had thought our beliefs were built out of our experiences, but in fact it is a two-way street. Your beliefs control the neural wiring that filters out the data coming from whatever is out there (and unlike some of my friends I do not believe I am the whole universe, so clearly there is something and someones out there). We have far more data coming at us, all the time, than we can handle, so our beliefs form filters to help reduce the data stream to something we can handle. In addition our beliefs can directly translate one chunk of data to another, acting more like a CODEC layer than a filter, or amplify certian barely-present signals like a resonant filter will.
Another thing that I was astonished to discover is that my beliefs were all wrong for having a good experience. I suppose this isn’t that suprising.. I mean, you don’t end up being suicidal at age 10 from having good neural wiring. At this point I have no way of knowing how many of the negative and disturbing experiences I have had throughout my life were the results of my beliefs.. i.e. my neural wiring.. but I do know I have memories that I am fairly certain never happened. I still have to figure out what to do with them insofar as they are things I experienced and at times took damage from – at times tried to repress the emotions generated by, etc.
However, constantly being aware of the fact that my conscious experience is happening in my mind rather than in the “real world” is extrordinarily helpful. Among other things, it makes sense of some otherwise very nearly incomprehensible things that I experienced happening. One frustration I deal with is, rather like my discussions of money vs. value, I see a world out my eyes and wander around in a world where people are not discussing these things and don’t seem to realize they exist or that they are important. It seems to me that studying how neural networks behave, especially surrounding the questions of perception and generated reality, would be one of the most important branches of science. It seems to barely get a footnote, even though *all other scientific discoveries are having their results colored by the fact that the scientists themselves are neural networks and can not possibly get away from the fact that the experiments they are doing are, if not happening in their minds, at least having the results interpreted by their minds”
Anyway, I think that’s a good overview of where I’m at and how I got here. A few other things I’d like to mention in passing before closing this up. First of all, one of my major tasks to accomplish in order to reach my #1 goal is to remove all the inhibit wiring in my mind that is preventing me from being able to do lucid dreaming and dream control. There’s a particular set of experiences I want to have that I don’t seem likely to have on Earth, and beyond that, this gives me the holodeck. Who wouldn’t want the holodeck, especially knowing that it’s something they already own the hardware for and all they have to do is develop the software for it? I can’t fathom why everyone on earth who doesn’t already have it isn’t searching for the holodeck.
A second thing I’d like to mention is that because I can’t really know what’s outside my CE, I can’t really know what certain religions actually look like. From where I sit, most religions are bad things. They are collections of information that seem very unlikely to describe the actual higher powers that there are, seem very likely to obscure those higher powers through a series of very bad ideas, and through said bad ideas make direct communication with a higher power very difficult. They look to be self-replicating information – viruses – that in a number of ways disempower us and burn computing capacity we could better be using elsewhere. For a long time, I was very angry at Christianity for lodging in my mind and refusing to either compile and run or unload and get out of my way. At this point, with the help of my friends, I have been able to dislodge it and begin the process of deconverting. Anyone who can offer any support in the process of deconverting, especially places where the bible makes claims that are clearly absolutely false, please pass your strength along.