Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Continuation...

More room to type, I guess. I mean, I'm not very interested in blogging here anymore, to be frank. I love to talk to all of you, but lately my interestes lie elsewhere. What spare time I have is mostly focused on my inner world lately, and blogging about it on my other blog, "A WORLD OUT OF MIND," devoted to my Salvia Divinorum experimentation. Sorry, I know most of you couldn't be less interested in that. I'll be around, so feel free to talk... and Pboy, I'm still depressed about your bird. Talk to you later.. -St. B PS: I remember Jerry telling me that I was unhappy because I wasn't writing about my passion, or something like that. He may have been right; this is more fun, and the christians depress the living fuck out of me. I still 'do battle' from time to time on Huffington Post, but less and less. My skull is metaphorically dented all over from trying to get through their brick wall of idiocy, and after all these years trying I'm pretty certain that it can't be done. PPS: Pliny, you being my most scientifically-minded critic here, I wonder what you think of my latest post on the other blog. You too Pboy. It has progressed a great deal since last we spoke about it, the SD thing I mean. Getting objective third-party results on a consistant basis. I value your criticism and your grounding influence. I swear that I'm not 'losing it' in any way. I suppose that the testimony of the person in question that may be 'losing it' has little value, but I haven't changed. My visions have, however. Love all of you people... take care... I'll be around, floating in the ether or something like that.

128 comments:

  1. Over on Facebook I was challenging some haters who agree with that pastor's decision not to let the Scouts use his church anymore since they are letting "TEH GHEYS" in.

    I hit on a way to argue, not from the atheist perspective but from their own.

    "If you believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross to save us from the effects of Original Sin...", kind of thing.

    I'm not saying whether I do or I don't but we're knee deep in morality from their own perspective there and they can't simply dismiss me for being a heathen.
    Worked great! I bashed this pastor for being the bigot he is, bashed another asshole for being judgmental and bashed a good ol' boy pastor for coming to the first one's defense!

    Good stuff, and 'atheist' or 'atheism' wasn't mentioned once!

    Okay, about the bird, I know how much you love animals and you know, it saddens me to imagine how bad you feel for Prettyboy Floyd and my losing him and I thank you for your sympathy.

    I will look in on your other blog, I haven't yet, you know.

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  2. I do feel terrible about him, and I never even bet him. I feel bad for you.

    I've tried arguing the "why do you not follow Jesus, this is not what He would want' thing to absolutely no avail. I mean, Jesus had flaws and said some strange shit in the bible but mostly he was decent to others and loved the poor and all that, the diametric opposite of today's neochristians. You'd think you'd be able to get through to them on that score, on them not following the bible, but alas no. They have their own bible in their imaginations that they DO follow. IN it Jesus wants his followers to be wealthy not in spirit (because hey, wtf is that anyhow?) but in cash. Jesus said (in that bible in their heads) that there will be poor always, so fuck them. You can't win. Truthfully, the only way to deal with a christian is and always has been a lion.

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  3. As to my other blog, it's not something you're going to get into or anything... However my little 'experiments' are sort-of at the next level now. Something happened a few nights back... wild stuff, really. I've never heard of anybody having an experience anything like it.

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  4. I'm getting readers from all over the world on the other blog, too. I mean, Serbia? Pakistan? Why there of all places?
    A ton of them are from Russia. Most are from the US, but that's not even half the total. South Africa, Poland, Brazil, the UK, Greece... and a slew of other countries.

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  5. I forget, do you still have the budgie and Mighty Moe?
    Are you going to get another cockatiel?

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  6. The budgie died. The poor thing was really cage-bound but I tried to bring him out of his shell a bit. He'd so sit on one of Emma's many picture frames mostly but he did get curious and came, by himself to visit my room a couple of times just to see what the hell was going on in there I suppose.

    Then one day something 'came over him' and he landed on the floor. I put him in his cage but he was dead at the bottom the next day. That was a while back. We don't know how old he was or anything.

    Mosie is fine, daft as ever. I went over the side of my foot and was hobbling around for a week or two so I haven't been walking him around Walmart lately. Soon as I get the car fixed I will though.

    Emma doesn't want to get another bird. Too soon I guess, plus, Mosie was really jealous of Prettyboy, so there's that too.

    I had a look at your site. I noticed that no-one seems to be commenting at all. I would have said something, you know, just 'because' but I really don't know what to say.

    Oh yea, I guess you're right about the Christians, but I just thought that there's no reason to show your hand, the atheist thing, unless you have to, those Christians who are not followers of Jesus, like you were saying, are haters who are looking for someone else to hate anyways. You know tree-huggers, gays, atheists, feminists, anyone who doesn't hate who they hate, and no doubt even if you break through their ideology, their twisted, perverted, hypocritical version, they'd just hate you for that and push it away anyways.

    But it's fun, especially if you can get the people who are at least trying to follow Jesus' teachings on your side, right?

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  7. I had a look at your site. I noticed that no-one seems to be commenting at all. I would have said something, you know, just 'because' but I really don't know what to say.
    ------------------
    Oh, I know. I do get a lot of hits though, as I said, from all over. No need to comment. That site is more my 'salvia diary' than it is like this place, a conversation-centered blog. IMHO there aren't many people that really can relate to my experiences, so it may be a while before someone finds the place that has anything to say about it.

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  8. I'm not trolling or advertising it anywhere... whoever finds it, does so through search engines.

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  9. I mean, just today I got your two hits from Canada, 17 from the US (mine are not counted), 2 from Germany, 2 from South Korea, 2 from Russia, 1 from Belgium and 1 from France. And I've never had Belgium or France before.

    By comparison this blog, even in its prime, was just mostly US, Canada, and a maybe a hit from one of a few other countries from time to time, nothing very exotic.

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  10. Who in Pakistan wants to read about Salvia Divinorum? They're probably using my blog as evidence of the decadence of the West or something. Weird. South Korea too. I once got one hit from Serbia.

    Anyhow, hope we stay in touch. Like I said, I'll still be around here just to say hi or whatever. It would seem weird without you guys.

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  11. So anyways, this will likely tie in with your other blog at some point.
    I think that we can safely assume that there is a World that everyone agrees is real, because we can interact with it with our six senses.(sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste and balance.) I think we can agree that our senses are not 100% accurate, someone might think they smell something that no one else notices, "Pfft, must be my imagination."

    I think that we think in general using focus, we can focus on something, memory, we can remember from moment to moment what's going on, and we can remember, not necessarily accurately at that stuff way back into the past, and imagination, which seems to me to be an attempt to make sense out of what we're focusing on and our different memories(short and long term and whether it was a good experience or no).

    Now it's not exactly clear in my mind how it works, I'm no expert, but it's certainly always 'now' for us, I'm pretty much certain of that.

    Now we have to be able to focus, there is no point in having senses at all unless there are differences which we focus on. If the world was in blackness, or even if everything was a uniform color there'd be no point in having eyes, if we lived in a vacuum, there'd be no point in having ears right? Vibrations through the ground maybe?

    So, two things we can be certain of are that it is always now and we need something to focus on with whatever senses we have.

    I'm trying to build up a picture here so I'm going to post this and try to expand on it.

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  12. If you've read my most recent posts on the other blog, you have seen that I recently experienced what seemed to be the future manifesting itself as multiple potential probabilities seen by me as separate 'frames,' and I consciously selected the one that had the desired outcome, ie, my wife waking up. It actually happened exactly as I described it, including her initial movements matching the ones in my vision of it. It was quite startling. But hey, proves nothing I guess. Still, the very next time I tried it, it worked again. I've awakened her many times and also the dog several times as well, and with the dog it seems it works (he notices it) even when he's awake.

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  13. Lately in fact, each and every single time that I've taken SD enough to get to the point where I see moving 'green light fields' in the room, which is to say about twice a week, it has affected either my wife or both her and the dog. Either by making sounds in their sleep or actually waking up. I know how crazy that must sound, but that's what has happened. Now, sure, the very next time I do it nothing might happen... but so far it's very consistant.

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  14. I'm getting off to a few false starts here because I want to make the point that what we all see around us here, our common 'reality', is reality. If some physicists propose a model where we're information on the surface of a black hole somehow being projected or if we're all in God's mind(whatever that would mean), it doesn't matter at all.

    It's just like saying that we are solid, well solid liquid and gas, but when we look at really small stuff we can 'determine' that there's no such stuff as solid stuff, it's mostly empty space. So what?

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  15. I'll give you that. Seems sensible enough.

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  16. I do see potential differences if we are all in a communal dreamlike state in a purely psychological reality, though. For one thing, what happened (okay, *appeared* to have happened) the other night with me choosing one of many options consciously could not have happened.
    Also, take the Copenhagen solution. The first interpretation of quantum reality, a la Niels Bohr and Heisenberg. In it consciousness is the factore that collapses the waveform. Now modern physicists reject it, but I have yet to read a reason why that doesn't depend on their supposed common sense, as in, it "makes no sense" or it's "obviously not right." No real evidence that it isn't. Seriously, I've looked. Have you or pliny or whoever heard anything about that?

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    1. Factor, not factore... I must have lapsed into Italian.

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  17. Although I just read that many physicists still accept it. It implies 'coherent superposition' where particles all exist in all states at once, and it is our observation of them that 'collapses' them into one definite particle out of the many possible ones. Which reminds me very much of what I see when on SD. Objects often appear to me as multiples of themselves in superposition, like a cloud of the object all centered on it, with the 'others' all clearly visible.
    That way you don't get many worlds, just may unrealized possibilities of worlds with one winning out. Much more economical.

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  18. So if the Copenhagen solution is the correct answer, and many still think it is or something like it is, then reality is definitely affected by consciousness, which elevates consciousness from a mere epiphenomena of matter to basically the 'Whole Shebang.'

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  19. From what I've read, the only reason they thought up the 'many worlds' interpretation is that they could not accept the idea of the centrality of consciousness to existence, or even that it affected it in any way. Understandable, but typical for us humans; our pride often prevents us from seeing something truly revolutionary.

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  20. What I'm saying is that what physicists say about the lack of solidity of stuff if we look well below the level we can see stuff, is neither here nor there, the physical model they use is neither here nor there to us in what we call reality.

    I'm trying to build up a consensus of what we certainly know and what we could infer from this, what we could assume from this and so on. You want to leap to the end and talk about your SD experiences(which I thought your other blog was for) or Quantum Physical Theories or models.

    But a table is a table no matter which QM model we're thinking of, I don't want to try to be at odds with you and say, a table is a table no matter what your SD experiences, I'm not sure we even got close to that with the couple of certain propositions, "It is always NOW.", and, "Without something to focus on, we cannot use focus, there's no point in having sight if there's nothing to see, etc. etc."

    Seems to me that I'm trying to pull diamonds out of the garbage and I'm asking you to help. You're like, okay, stand back, here comes the biggest load of garbage you've ever seen! (dumps it on top of the stuff I've separated)

    Y'see the analogy isn't that what you're saying is garbage, it's that it's all jumbled up and we aren't separating it by mixing it up more.

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  21. I was just saying that your thoughts there make sense in situations like the 'singularity on which we are 2-d beings being projected holographically' and such theories, but not in one based in consciousness.
    You belive your thoughts are right because they conform to science, and I try to show you they don't to ALL science (Copenhagen solution) and you basically tell me to post that stuff on my other blog? You are showing evidence of a belief system and not free thinking here, complete with requisite annoyance when your ideas are challenged. I don't 'believe in" science any more than I do religion. Science works, in almost all situations, and thus is is vastly superior to any religion in that regard, but don't mistake that for perfection of understanding. It's still far away from knowing the nature of the universe. Some of it's ideas lead away from mine, but you choose to ignore that some of it's ideas lead TOWARD mine. If you're the science guy in this scenario, then tell me about the Copenhagen solution and how it can't be right.

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  22. I understood your point. I agree that it doesn't matter if matter is basically made of nothing, it's still what we know as matter. Same with energy and time and space, for that matter. I thought that was obvious, and that there was little more to add to it, other than pointing out that the ONLY scenario where that doesn't necessaruly apply is in a consciousness-based 'psychological' reality. Please don't take offense to that, you can hardly expect otherwise from me.

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  23. Been reading about the Copenhagen thing. Apparently the consciousness involvement is only in some interpretations with the exception of a few scientists including the very highly esteemed Roger Penrose. Others think it's the instrument that collapses the waveform. The early ones, like Heisenberg, went mystic over it though. Penrose basically is too, only he's practically contemporary. I just bought his book tonight, started reading it. "The Emperor's New Mind."

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  24. I just love this, though, from the wiki page:

    "To many scientists the dualist interpretation fails a priori to compete with other interpretations of quantum mechanics because "consciousness causes collapse" relies upon a dualistic philosophy of mind (in particular, a radical interactionism), which is inconsistent with the materialist monism presupposed by many physicists."

    So basically, unless I'm reading this wrong, consciousness cannot cause collapse because it is inconsistant with the prior theory that everything can be explained by matter.

    That's tantamount to saying "It's not true because we don't believe it's true," isn't it?

    I believe so.

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    1. Well, yea. Of course scientists would say that, "It's not true if it's woo."

      Woo artistes are not prone to saying, "Here's some woo that science cannot explain but I CAN explain!", no, they're prone to saying, "Here's some woo that science cannot explain therefore science is wrong! HAH!"
      I'm not saying you do that.
      I AM saying two things so far. We need something to focus on and we're always in the now. I haven't even really started yet and you haven't said no. Seemed to me you slipped something in about the future, a personal 'experience'.
      Well yea, sure, that belongs on your SD experience stuff now, for now, surely.
      We haven't gotten anywhere at all with those two premises I put forward, I'm not sure if you really agree or if you're just hitting them side on, putting them off-balance, so to speak. Why don't you come at it from the other side, help me along, tell me that you agree and add to it? Or why you don't agree.

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  25. We need something to focus on and we're always in the now.
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    And the sun is bright and at night it gets dark. I'm apparently not getting you because you keep saying that, and it seems to be just obvious. Our minds do need something to focus on, but in sleep they provide it themselves. One story after another we follow from one thought to the next. We are always in the now, but we can rememberr things frm the past and speculate or project or extrapolate into the future.
    I think you need to flesh this out for me a bit more so that I know what you're getting at.

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  26. Okay, Descartes is famous for saying, "I think, therefore I am."

    Now just going by the last thing you said, we can see that in sleep, we are 'not'. It seems to depend on what you and I can agree what 'to think' is. You might argue and say, "Sure you think when you dream, suminagun it's nothing BUT thought, right? And what is thought if not the outcome of thinking?"

    You might even protest that you know that you're thinking about the dream that you're thinking up! Not only that but that might end up being the very definition of someone in a coma, you know, what she dreams, what she thinks of her dreams!

    But you know when you're dreaming, you know when, while the dream is 'running' like some weird kind of movie in your sleeping head, you start trying to guide it and your focus notices that it's a fucking dream, and that's when you wake up from dreaming that you ate a giant marshmallow and the pillow is missing!

    Is this reality only real when we're awake and our focus is on the actual world around us? How can we know if it's even possible to wake up after a dream and imagine that the incidents in the dream didn't actually happen, if it were a sufficiently lucid or vivid dream?

    I think that it is natural for you to read my comments and relate what I am saying, what I said, and make sense of it as it meshes with what is on your mind.

    Can you not read my initial comments and see that I'm trying to build a foundation to work on, like I'm trying to build a house of cards and I only have a couple of cards leaning against each other so far, and it's like you're jumping in and throwing packs of cards in the air? Maybe that's asking too much, I don't know.

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  27. Who knows maybe we get so focused(always think that should be a double 's') in on our own agenda to the exclusion of anyone else's POV.

    My agenda here is certainly not to debunk yours. We can run over that ground again and be pissed off with each other(again), but what would be the point of that?

    I suppose what I'm trying to do is build up a philosophy, but nothing as grandiose as 'a philosophy', maybe something a bit realer than, "My favourite philosopher is Jesus!"(LMAO)

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  28. How can we know if it's even possible to wake up after a dream and imagine that the incidents in the dream didn't actually happen, if it were a sufficiently lucid or vivid dream?
    ----------------------
    Interesting comment. Do you realize that this very mechanism is one of the things I think about that I think *supports* the idea that this is a communal dreamlike state?

    But let's put that aside for now. I see what you're striving for I think, but I'm not sure it's possible. I sometimes have more lucid dreams in which I know I'm dreaming and I still remain in the dream... I don't see lapses of consciusness such as sleep as any possible 'proof' that we are "not." I think, therefore I am, seems valid to me still. And incidentally since I've been taking the SD my sleeping life has been revealed to be a lot BUSIER than my waking one; I often wake up remembering something like a hundred intense conversations all going on at once in my head while I slept, and I get the impression that it's not that it's something new; instead I get the feeling that they are always there at all times, even in the background while I am awake; they're just pretty far below the level of waking consciousness so we cannot recall them when we wake up.

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  29. Here's a "Salvia Insight" that seems to me to be true; in fact it seems self-evidently true since it's not like I can fake it to myself no matter what substance I may be on:

    Even assuming that everything I see on SD is "all in my head," it often occurs while I am in that altered state and clearly aware of it, that I see and feel things on the order of a thousand times more complex than anything that I formerly thought my own brain capable of producing or even holding. Hard to describe the details, but imagine hearing what sounds like many thousands of people all having conversations while your surroundings are forming fractal-like shapes that you feel involved with, and glimmers of even being able to sense each personality directly as a discrete being in all it's own complexity... the point is, while I'm there, I'm just stunned by the unimaginable compexity. It's akin to realizing that you have an entire populated planet in your head, with many millions of people all doing their own thing at the same time, all in your imagination. And it's not just getting the impression of it, it's actually sensing it clearly in all it's detail. So brain complexity must be many orders of magnitude higer than we even think it is in order for me to experience that so clearly, no?

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  30. Once again Brian, I think your salvia blog is bleeding(profusely) into this one. No big thing though.

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  31. It's okay I cleared it with the blog author. He says it's fucking fine.

    ;-)

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  32. Sometimes I think you're a Turing machine that just barely passed the test. You have sharp, clear, definite limits to the borderlands of your imagination. You patrol it well. No offense.

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  33. Imagine a truckload of sand. You're determined to figure out wtf it is. So, you collect a sample, it all looks the same, hard little bits. You look at it through the microscope, it looks like a tiny rock. What the HELL is it made of though? So you smash a grain of sand between a hammer and an anvil, it's powder now. So you look at it through the microscope and 'what do you know?', even tinier rocks!
    So now you're pretty much stymied, what do you do?
    Well, and don't forget that this is in response to your last comment, what you do is...

    is...

    is...

    ... smoke some Salvia Divinorum and contemplate the make up of the Universe starting from the pre-conceived notion that it's all information, completely ignoring the fact that the Universe is just like it is regardless, information is only information if there is a thinking being that considers it information. Somebody can be informed, some inanimate 'thing', cannot.

    Theists turn tables on the idea of the supremacy of consciousness over matter as if they were both substances instead of matter being substance and consciousness processes.

    If you think you can reduce substance, matter, to a process, then you're doing the exact same job as the Kalam Cosmological argument does for theists, and you're not so much saying that they're wrong as they're coming to the wrong conclusions.

    So sayeth this Turing machine!

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  34. information is only information if there is a thinking being that considers it information.
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    A TOTAL Turing machine! Lol!

    The above sentence is where we disagree. You assume that a thinking being is necessary, and I do not. If the body and the brain are also made of consciousness, then we are powerless but to ASSume that the consciousness arises from the body and the brain. We would think that. It appears to be that way. However when you think about it, there is no more reason that it is made of 'matter' and 'energy' than 'consciousness.' If consciousness is the ground of all being, then we beings of consciousness are fish that do not know what the word "water" means. And that is to be expected. But it can be surmounted. Open the mind, dude! Open doesn't mean empty, you know.

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  35. And incidentally, my 'last comment' that you were responding to, was not about anything to do with the idea that all is consciousness. I tried to make that plain. It had to do with the complexity of my own brain. If I hallucinated something more complex than I had ever thought my own mind capable of, to me that said that my own mind has to be more complex than I thought it to be, regardless of the stimulus that caused me to see it. Isn't that plain?

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  36. I generally hate to descend to citations of authority, but if someone like Roger Penrose can see the world in this way, I do feel a bit less crazy for doing so myself. I mean, he's up there with Hawking... even has been on the stage with him receiving the same awards. A very impressive scientist indeed. Not a flake in any other way, except in the same way I am. The rest of his science is cutting-edge.

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  37. You stopped way too soon with your examination of the truckload of sand. Take it down to atoms, then hadrons, then what? Where is the sand now, my friend? Where are the little hard bits? Why is it all emptiness? How to explain that? The original meaning of "atom" is "indivisible" as in, the smallest piece of a thing that can no longer be divided.... that turned out to be fiction! There is not ANY smallest piece!

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  38. You can say "it's all fields" as if a field is a real thing. That disappears when you ask "so where did the fields come from? Why are there fields?"
    If you really follow the rabbit down the hole here, what you get is that every fuckng thing under the sun including the sun is composed of a bunch of "bits" of probability. Mathematical probabilities seem to rule the universe. And last time I checked, a probability is not a substance. Probabilities tend to exist in MINDS, not just lying about the place like discarded socks.

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  39. The waveform of a particle is composed of what? Waves of probability. Now, as absurd as that sounds, it's only absurd if we insist that the universe is not like a vast mind.

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  40. You said this:
    "... smoke some Salvia Divinorum and contemplate the make up of the Universe starting from the pre-conceived notion that it's all information"

    On my Salvia blog, I was talking with Jerry, and here's what I told him:

    "You have known me a long time, from before I ever tried salvia divinorum, and so you know I had my "Big Brain Speculations" which were essentially about the idea that all of reality is consciousness, a communal dream of some sort, and SD has obligingly shown me many things that look like evidence that this is true. This is however a bit "conveeeeenient" for me, since that was what I was basically hoping for, so I'm not about to become a total believer, even now, even with what appears to be fairly decent objective evidence that at the minimum, *something weird* is definitely happening. It's so close to fantasy fulfillment that I strive to remain extra-cautious. I will continue with these experiements of course, and see where they go."

    I think that's pretty reasonable of me. Not an unscientific attitude.

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  41. " Take it down to atoms, then hadrons, then what?"

    You have equipment to do that? Gemologists must get mighty big paychecks!

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  42. What do you mean? We know they exist, and that they follow quantum rules, wave-particle duality. As a wave, they have no physical existence, just a probabilistic one. It's like saying that 'sometimes it's a basketball and sometimes it's a quadratic equation.' How does that NOT sound more like consciousness than what we normally think of as "real?"

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  43. "Mathematical probabilities seem to rule the universe."

    But Brian, you're putting the cart before the horse here to suit yourself. The math describes how PARTICLES act, there's no consensus that there are no particles at all now.

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  44. When in the waveform, there is no particle at any specific location. There are only probabilities of it being in one place or another, and those probabilities are arranged in waves that can interfere with each other. Probabilities interfering with each other? Sounds pretty strange to me.
    My horse likes to push.

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  45. http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Physics-Particle-Wave-Duality-Paradox.htm

    "i) We must know the truth to act wisely, and truth comes from physical reality."

    Simply because fundamental particles are standing wave forms best described by 'probabilities', that doesn't mean that they don't exist. That's what I meant by 'cart before the horse', a description of something follows from it's existence and not the other way around, where, if we describe something, it must therefore exist.

    God would be a good example of defining and redefining, not even coherently, saying stuff like God is love, God is all powerful, God is this and that which we know to be, physically or even abstractly(as in 'love'), therefore God must be.

    Another thing you seem to be mixing up is information and consciousness. Mathematics is an abstract description. While it is true that one plus one is two, without relating it to a physical object, there is no physical reality. One apple plus one apple are two apples, but the accuracy of the count is for nothing if there aren't really any apples around.

    I have an experiment for you Brian. You, your wife, son and dog go to a park. You smoke some Salvia and put on a blindfold. Now your wife throws out, or places some objects, and it's your job to detect them using your heightened awareness of reality around you.

    You just have to look past the information that is your eye-lids, and the blindfold to the information beyond!

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  46. What about waking her up on cue, over and over, when she's a sound sleeper, with no movement or sound from me, just by 'touching' her with an hallucination that I am having? What about doing it again by seeing many images of her asleep with one of her stirring, and selecting the one of her stirring, and as I feel myself "merge with" (for lack of a better term) the one image of her awakening, she wakes up, at that precise moment, and her initial motions are identical to the image of her waking up that I just merged with? Yeah, that'll do it too.

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  47. "i) We must know the truth to act wisely, and truth comes from physical reality."
    ------------
    Since I contest this point, your whole argument is a bit presumptuous from my POV. In any other argument it would be a solid base to support your conclusions, but in this one it's meaningless. I'm saying that I am getting hints (at the minimum) that physical reality is not the ground of all being, that it's illusory in nature and will literally deceive you that it is real because that is what we expect it to do at all times, at a very deep level of our subconscious, and you're saying 'that can't be because physical reality is the basis of ALL truth.' Can't you see that insisting on that may make you feel good and secure, but in this argument I am positing that that very point is not real, not true, and so you're literally telling me "it is true that physical reality is the ground of all being because all truth comes from physical reality.' In this discussion, and in this discussion only, your argument is circular.
    Thus, whether I am correct OR mistaken, your argument is not one that can pursuade in either direction.

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  48. A more advanced experiment like the one you describe is not possible for me right now, because I don't plan ahead of time for these things to happen. I take SD, and *something* happens, no guarantee what, it's different all the time with some instances being similar and some not. So far I've had "glowing fields" to work with, and I didn't invent them, they just happen. One time it was different, without the glowing fields, but with a 'panel' of 'images' in front of me, all of my wife, and I improvised from there, finding one that showed her awakening and going with it to see what happened. Perhaps such a thing as you describe will be possible to *attempt* at some point in the future as I gain more control, if I do, but not at the present time. However within the confines of what I can do, I have tried to do things that would show objective confirmation, and my success rate is very high indeed. In fact, I can say positively that every single time I see glowing fields, there is some reaction from my sleeping wife and/or my dog (sleeping or awake) to them. And of course, the one time that I had the images of my wife to work with, I intentionally caused her to awaken precisely on cue. Not proof positive I grant you, not nearly, but certainly reason to continue as I am and see what happens in the future with this.

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  49. In an argument about whether physical reality is the ground of all being or not, any argument that proceeds from the assumption that it is and must be, is invalid. That's pretty simple, huh? It's literally saying "it is because I say it is because it says it is and that's all I need."

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  50. Furthermore, it is logical that, if we are deceived by our own minds into believing that physical reality is the ground of all being and nothing we can do in a normal mental state can prove otherwise, putting ourselves into an 'abnormal' mental state might be one way to get clues to whether it's true or not.

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  51. Here's a small thought experiment:

    What if one day for some reason, you suddenly realized in a way that you could not dispute that your whole reality is an illusion and you are actually a part of a huge whole of some sort, and that whole is the *only consciousness in all of existence,* and your independance as a human being was a lie you told yourself so as not to realize this? How would you react emotionally?
    I'll tell you how I think you would react. Terror. Absolute stark terror. I've been there, and that's how you feel.
    So if we are here living our lives under the illusion that we are separate individuals, and from time to time we get a hint that we're not, we will automatically push that whole thing away from us posthaste, because we *do not want to know.* Knowing it would destroy us, or so we fear. So with that in mind, how likely is it do you think, that even if our subconscious minds know the truth at some deep level, that we'd ever let it surface to our conscious minds?

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  52. Well, Brian, an inadvertent noise could wake someone up, right? Even worse if the dog is on the bed beside your wife since dogs hear and react to very faint noises.

    The idea behind finding inanimate objects is that there couldn't be something like a noise giveaway.

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    1. I accept that, and it is marginally possible, however I am very aware of SOUNDS around me at these moments because I am, due to the SD which makes it uncomfortable to move much, both absolutely immobile, and also have a heightened sensitivity to noise. When I do move in these states, I can hear my own fingers rustle at arms length with only a very slight pressure between them as I move them, and I can also 'hear' my own hand's movements due to the sound from the AIR CONDITIONING that is always on during these times for WHITE NOISE bouncing off it. On SD, hearing is perhaps twice as sensitive as normal. And as stated, the room is filled with the sound of the AC fan, so small noises would not be significant or audible to my wife. Also, she sleeps like the dead, seriously. I've never met anybody that sleeps as deeply as she does. So there's that.

      Delete
  53. "Atheist Physicist Roger Penrose on Reality

    Post Author: Bill Pratt

    I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts this morning, Unbelievable?, where the two guests were atheist physicist Roger Penrose and Christian theologian Alister McGrath. In a fascinating exchange, the host, Justin Brierley, asked Penrose if reality could be reduced to matter.

    I expected Penrose to say “yes” and was shocked when he said “no.” In fact, Penrose said that he tends to divide reality up into three realms: consciousness, the material world, and mathematics. Penrose, if I understood him correctly, said that these three slices of reality are all intertwined but also distinct from each other. Penrose seemed to be saying that a reduction of all reality to matter was mistaken.

    In fact, Penrose went on to explain that as a physicist, the more he discovers about matter, the more it looks like mathematics!

    What is so interesting about Penrose’s comments is that he recognizes that consciousness and mathematics are not explained by the material world, which runs very much counter to the standard atheist dogma. Mathematics, according to Penrose, seems to exist as an objective reality outside the material world. He didn’t venture to offer a theory as to where mathematics has come from, but he is clearly disdainful of the materialist reduction program. How refreshing."

    http://www.toughquestionsanswered.org/2011/02/18/atheist-physicist-roger-penrose-on-reality/

    Coming from this man, I find this compelling.

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  54. Last night something different happened. After I had an incredible experience on the SD, I was still feeling it but no longer in the dreamlike state that it induces. I woke the wife at that point (in a normal manner) to describe my 'trip.' I won't bother boring you with it here. So she got up to go to the bathroom and I went into the kitchen where she joined me in a couple of minutes. Now I was there looking aroung the house and of course noticing how the air looked foggy as it always does after one of my trips, when she said "why is the room misty?" I said to her, "Well, I know why I see mist in the air, but I can't tell you why you do!" There was no mist in the air, not really... I focused hard and it went away partially for a few seconds then came back as I relaxed again... but she still saw it and was concerned that there might be a fire somewhere or something. Nope.
    Not proof of anything, but still, worth mentioning.

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  55. "...in a way that you could not dispute that your whole reality is an illusion and you are actually a part of a huge whole of some sort, and that whole is the *only consciousness in all of existence,* and your independance as a human being was a lie you told yourself so as not to realize this? How would you react emotionally?"

    You seem to be forgetting which one of us believes that we have free-will here.

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    1. Not getting this comment either. Care to 'splain?

      Delete
    2. Perhaps you took my "independence" for "free will?"
      No, what I meant by it, was being a discrete and separate being from other beings and from the surrounding universe.

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  56. *only consciousness in all of existence,*

    And this part is what some people would call GOD, and their lack of will/independence would be being guided by the Holy Spirit, right?

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    1. Some people misinterpret this as god. It is somewhat similar in concept, much to my chagrin. It's not really like any established god ever worshipped though. For one thing, it seems to be conscious, perhaps self-conscious, but not thinking in the sense that we do. More like just the "I AM" sense part of being conscious. It takes patterns of this I AM sense in the form of physical bodies to actually have complex thoughts. It is aware, but we think.

      So what if the truth has elements of both the natural and what we would consider the supernatural about it? I won't reject it for that even if it makes me uncomfortable.

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  57. "Sisyphus was a king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth) punished for chronic deceitfulness by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill.."

    Now imagine yourself, being punished, but to a much lesser extent. You get up in the morning, do what you do, each day, every day, then go to sleep for a bit.
    The you get up in the morning, do what you do.. and so on, 'til you die.

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    1. Totally not getting your point with this one, sorry.

      Delete
  58. I guess what I meant was, how would it feel to "wake up" and realize that you are all that there is in all of existence, that your prior physical existence and the whole universe that you used to live in, were nothing more than a random thought, a contemplation, of a "being" (for lack of a better term) that just sits there alone in the void (or even worse and more likely, no void, no body, nothing outside yourself in existence at all) and contemplates itself, for there is nothing else to contemplate, for all eternity? If it had actual self-awareness, it would necessarily be "insane" by our definition, and that might explain it's schizophrenic splintering into many 'beings' that all believe they are discrete and whole in and of themselves.

    I know, far out. Sorry.

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  59. I should say that all of this is my personal conjecture informed from many sources including my SD experiences, but I may well be way off. Still, I'm sensing "something amiss" about this reality, and my SD experiments are indicating that this much at least is true.

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  60. Not sure why you'd be impressed by Penrose, to say that 'there is mathematics' as if it is anything but an attempt by our consciousnesses to quantify the physical World, is ludicrous! The man is a buffoon.

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  61. Don't you think that calliing Roger Penrose a "buffoon" is a bit much?

    Also, I wonder if it occurred to you that I had already said much the same thing, that it appeared to me that reality is based in nothing more than statistics, which is math. Am I a buffoon too?

    Let me know, okay? Because I'd really like to know if that's how you see me. It would be worth knowing, I think.

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  62. I think he's saying that it seems to him, someone who is very fluent in the language of mathematics, that certain kinds of mathematics are inherent in nature, are "things" so to speak, that the math isn't just how we describe them, but more what they really are. That the thing is not merely described by the math, but the math is what causes the thing. Or so I guess. He's not an easy read.

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  63. "Penrose said that he tends to divide reality up into three realms: consciousness, the material world, and mathematics."

    This is not the same as your view.

    "..certain kinds of mathematics are inherent in nature, are "things" so to speak, that the math isn't just how we describe them, but more what they really are."

    I think you're giving Penrose a giant hole to escape through with this 'mysterious' math.

    Honestly Brian, you know my position, I'm pretty sure that I know your position, so, bringing in Penrose, who doesn't deny the material world at all, but he does add consciousness and for some loony-tunes reason, math.

    Your position: No actual material reality. Some kind of Consciousness reality. (math is abstract, therefore in your kind of reality math is real enough)

    My position: Material reality. (Everything else is describing material processes, including math)

    Penrose' position:(as I understand from the comment you copy/pasted) Material reality, Conscious reality and some kind of math reality.

    I think it's kind of disingenuous of you to be getting upset with me simply because Penrose' position is kinda, sorta, more like yours than it is mine, don't you? It's being, at the very least, kind of thin-skinned of you, since you're noticing the giant difference between his position and yours.

    I'm not going to say that there's anything at all that is buffoonish if you include it in your position since you're saying that it's all consciousness and information, but I AM saying that, since math is an effort to quantify material reality and he's complicating everything by giving math a whole independent domain of it's own, then he's a buffoon.

    I know that there are a lot of people who feel that consciousness has it's own domain, separate from the material reality or that consciousness is actually a higher reality than material reality where consciousness can somehow invoke material. I think that your position is that material reality is in actual fact some kind of consciousness based reality, and since math is abstract, then in a consciousness based reality abstract notions are as real as the notion of the material, surely.

    I'm not apologizing Brian, I'm not about to apologize to you about what I think of Penrose' position, no matter how you try to pin his ideas to your own. I don't think that was even fair of you to try to do that since a lot of the time I say stuff and you come back on and say, "Well, duh, Ian, how obvious is that?", where from my position, I'm not sure if what I'm saying is obvious from your consciousness-based perspective.

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  64. I am in the process of reading his book. That's where I got that latter part.

    Perhaps I am being thin-skinned, so I'll just disagree with you then. Penrose may be wrong, but he's no buffoon.

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  65. More about Penrose's ideas:
    http://plus.maths.org/content/roger-penrose-knight-tiles

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  66. I'm not sure if what I'm saying is obvious from your consciousness-based perspective.
    ----------------------------
    I used to have the same perspective as you, remember. Most of the time I get what you're saying, except when you get a bit whimsical and baroque. Like say in that Sissyphus post above.
    When you say something and I come back at you with the 'consciousness-based' perspective, I am not saying yours is wrong. I offer my opinion as another possibility. I've always said that you may be right here and I wrong.

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  67. Yea, here is the problem with that idea that you can, and do, argue from your totally unfalsifiable hypothesis if you like, you can tell me I'm simply stating the obvious from our shared hypothesis that material reality is 'what there is', and you can suit yourself.

    If we were talking to a Christian who was willing to argue with us that sure, (for example) the shed is getting old and it might fall down and kill someone from the natural stresses placed on it by the weather, but then when it suits her(the Christian) that it up to God when it falls because God acts upon the World in mysterious ways!

    Now, I introduced a fictitious shed there, did you notice? Are you willing to, are you tempted to 'rebut' that you have never heard of this 'falling down shed' before and you don't know what I'm on about?

    What I'm saying is that these kinds of tactics that you're prone to using, changing perspectives to suit yourself, missing my overall point because it might seem to be giving ground, as if you imagine that I too am drawn into your Consciousness perspective and I'm trying to fight my way out of it, are the same kind of arguments that religious debaters find they need to employ, don't you think?

    I started this conversation by trying to put forward something realer than, "I think, therefore I am.", which can be thought of from two perspectives and may, if you wish, bolster the notion of consciousness supremacy, right?

    You can simply reread the comments above to notice the superposition you take, from, "But cutting edge physics might support my POV!", to, "What? Are you thinking I don't know the same obvious shit that you know?"

    Sucks to be me in this kind of situation, from a 'debate' standpoint, right?

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  68. I vehemently disagree with the glib assertion that, "I think, therefore I am."

    It is a gross oversimplification with a kind of double meaning thrown in. You certainly 'ARE', but not because you 'THINK'.

    Example: You murder me and you're hoping to get away with it. There I 'am not' (since I don't think anymore), there I 'am not', right on the floor there, not thinking at all. The police show up and you explain, quite philosophically accurately that you didn't murder me, that body certainly isn't me, it doesn't think, Ian thinks therefore he is, that body doesn't think, therefore it isn't Ian. The cop likes your nuanced argument and advises you to get rid of that lump of meat laying on the kitchen floor!
    Since you don't want to go to prison, you are so relieved, but your kind of upset that you weren't able to use your, "The material World is simply an illusion!", argument.

    Example 2:-

    You can imagine differing scenarios where you are radically different from the you that you know. You were kidnapped as a baby and sold into slavery in Saudi Arabia/ your actual guardians were killed in a car accident and you were brought up in a rich family's house/etc./etc. each scenario making you a completely different you because you'd think differently because you'd have had different experiences ranging from the extreme of you becoming a 'king of the World, a Wall St. billionaire, to your short life ending with you dying of malnutrition.

    You're not you because you think. You're you because of the environment you grew up in all through your life, exactly the same as you're not you because you didn't have a terrible lawn-mower accident, cutting off both your feet, you're just not the same you that you'd be if that did happen to you.

    Decartes was a total asshole by making this oversimplified statement, "I think, therefore I am.", because if it wasn't for the exact environment he grew up in, he wouldn't be the same 'him' and might never have been able to say that or might not thought of saying that or might have said something less glib.. and so on and so forth.

    How many people are Christians because, and perhaps only because, they believe the 'obvious truth' that, "I think, therefore I am.", proves the supremacy of consciousness, of thought, over matter??

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  69. Yea, here is the problem with that idea that you can, and do, argue from your totally unfalsifiable hypothesis if you like, you can tell me I'm simply stating the obvious from our shared hypothesis that material reality is 'what there is', and you can suit yourself.
    ---------------------------------
    Is that what I do? I did not know that. Here I was thinking that I was communicating my inner stance on these matters, how I attempt to retain one foot in the water of 'your' matter/energy universe for perspective, and still venture out to explore the alternative one that I postulate may be true. How silly of me. Thank you for telling me what I was thinking like that.

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  70. What YOU are doing is trying to pin me down to one viewpoint when I have two. When you take the materialist viewpoint, what do you expect me to do, just say "I agree" and then we can move onto other subjects? Part of me does agree, but the other part does not, so I argue from the one of my two views that contradict you, so that we have an argument, a discussion, rather than mutual acquiescence. Basically I say "that may be, but it may also be this..." I don't know what reality is, but I have my suspicions. However I also intellectually realize that I might be deceiving myself. So I try to retain a "realist" paradigm while exploring another one. Lately the other one has been showing me that it's not easily dismissable. But it has not proven it.

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  71. I think, therefore I am"

    Funny thing. I've never in my life, not ONCE, taken that phrase to mean what you take it as. The ONLY thing that I've EVER gotten from it, is that "at the very least, I can be sure that I exist; everyone else may be a creation of my mind, but I must exist because I think. I cannot tell if anybody else thinks, but I can tell that I do, so the only person that I can be POSITIVE exists, is myself."

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  72. I've never taken it as "I think (in a certain way that is unique to me) therefore I am (that person.) Is that how you take it? Is that how it's meant to be taken? I honestly never ever thought of it that way. To me Descartes isn't even saying that he can be sure that he has a *body!* Just a mind that thinks.

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  73. Maybe this actually is one of the situations where my outlook and yours have caused us to interpret one thing in two very different ways.

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  74. "Penrose said that he tends to divide reality up into three realms: consciousness, the material world, and mathematics."

    This is not the same as your view.
    -------------------------------
    True. However I postulate that mathematics cannot be an actual 'reality' or 'realm' if the universe is purely physical in nature. It (reality) would have to behave in a "mindlike" fashion on some level.

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    1. This is what I felt I was 'needing' to explain after you complained that since Penrose imagines a real realm of math, and since you imagine a realm of probabilities, then perhaps I'm calling you a buffoon too!

      That's why I said it wasn't fair of you to throw that out there that I might be hinting that I think you are as buffoonish as I think Penrose is, but that I may be not willing to say that about you, you know, not straight out like that, right?

      It's as if you said, "You calling me a buffoon? Well fuck you if you are then!", and here I am left to put the puzzle together and demonstrate that you and Penrose are using two different puzzles, and although part of you two's puzzles match, there are parts that definitely do not match. (Here 'the puzzle(s)' is an analogy of a 'picture of your, and Penrose' POVs(or PsOV, LOL))

      Delete
  75. How many people are Christians because, and perhaps only because, they believe the 'obvious truth' that, "I think, therefore I am.", proves the supremacy of consciousness, of thought, over matter??
    ---------------------
    It only really proves that one cannot be certain that anything else truly exists other than one's own mind. I just thought they went off the deep end with it. Does it purport to prove more than that? I didn't take philosophy.

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  76. When I say about the, "I think therefore I am.", thing, to talk about it, I kind of have to say something about YOU(thinking that you 'are'), I'm not pinning you to some kind of board saying that you actually think that it means what I'm saying it means, I'm saying that the statement, "I think, therefore I am." COULD be taken to mean what I am saying.

    Talking about the statement, "I think therefore I am.", is tricky if the person one is talking to, about the statement, is just going to say something like, "Well, phaw, I've never thought that about that!", right?

    So, you know, just wow! Or is it just obvious that you can see that it is talking about the supremacy of mind over matter, since we CAN say that the mind(oneself) exist even though one cannot say that anything at all else exists?

    Another empty can of beans which you looked in then threw in the river, right?
    IOW, I say, "Look at it like this and tell me what you think.", and you respond, "I've never looked at it like that, so, keep trying if you like, maybe you'll think of something and I won't answer like that!", as if I'm a hostile witness or something.

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  77. Night before last (short version):

    I felt the green glow suffused about the room, and thought of awakening the wife (my poor little guinea pig!).
    So I can literally feel my mind reaching out to her, and the green glow moving toward her. As it started to reach her, she stirred and made a small noise. So I pulled back, trying to take my mind away from her. She remained asleep, making no other noises... so realizing that that had worked, I then pressed on and re-directed my thought (and the green glow thingy) to her in earnest, not letting up this time. She promptly awakened. Completely. So I told her "I just did it again." And so forth.
    I am not making any of this up.

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  78. Talking about the statement, "I think therefore I am.", is tricky if the person one is talking to, about the statement, is just going to say something like, "Well, phaw, I've never thought that about that!", right?
    ---------------
    Only if that (your way) is the "correct" way to think about it. What I'm honestly telling you is that I'd never thought of it that way. So I did ask you if that is indeed the way it is meant to be taken, because if that was Descartes' intention with it, I have been misunderstanding it all my life.

    You're being confrontational, not me.

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  79. Ya know what's funny?

    I have these conversations with you, and they're fun. A lot of fun. I go and enjoy them, enjoy having the discussion or argument or whatever, right up until the point where it becomes apparent that you are NOT.

    That gets me every time.

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  80. I said, "I vehemently disagree with the glib assertion that, "I think, therefore I am."

    It is a gross oversimplification with a kind of double meaning thrown in. You certainly 'ARE', but not because you 'THINK'."

    Here it is implicit that I'm asking your opinion of what I'm saying about the 'Cogito'.

    Your answer, "I've never in my life, not ONCE, taken that phrase to mean what you take it as."

    Right, right. You neither agree nor disagree with my thinking on this. THAT is your entire 'thinking on this'.

    You're fighting me every step of the way here, and it seems to me that no matter what I say, you see it as a first step of convincing you of something that you don't want to believe, and that is WHY you are fighting me every step of the way.

    Sucks to be me since there is so many ways to turn tables on anything I say since we're talking about consciousness/thought and you can just take it personally and come out with, "Funny, I never thought of that like that."

    So there's a pattern.

    1)Anything I can think of saying about the subject of consciousness.
    2)Change the subject to your SD experiences, that's what you want to talk about.
    3)No, no, I'm talking about the subject of consciousness
    4)Well, I never thought about that like that so, try something else.
    5)Back to (1)

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  81. Personally, I think I'm doing pretty good.

    What I mean is, I've got this world-view where reality might be consciousness, then I discover SD and have all these BIZARRE experiences that obligingly point to precisely that, and I'm not a starry-eyed convert trying to preach it from the street corners. I think considering that I'm getting very consistant real-world confirmation from another person, I'm doing a pretty good job of not letting it convert me to a solid belief in it. I do that because while it is very compelling, I am keenly aware of how we tend to deceive ourselves in matters like these.
    However, how to explain the awakenings? I think that you have to concede that if I'm not lying, if this is what is honestly happening to me, most people would be completely freaked out over it or would be absolutely religious about the whole deal. What I chose to do however, is to keep it up and wait and see. Aren't you at least proud of me about that?

    Sure you are. lol..

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  82. Okay, tell me where I'm going wrong here.

    You have a hypothesis that matter doesn't exist except as the product of an overall consciousness(or 'mind') which we are all part of, in the same sense that matter is and in the other sense that each of our Earthly consciousnesses are 'bits' of the overall consciousness(or Mind).

    You put together this hypothesis because of synchronicities which are coincidences that happen to you way to often to be written off as the simple coincidences that other people write them off as, or as the mysterious hand of God as others, no doubt pawn them off as.

    For some reason you imagine that smoking Salvia Divinorum can enlighten you as to this ultimate Consciousness reality that the rest of us assume to one degree or another.

    If I'm right so far, why would smoking SD help? Why did you think that smoking SD would help? Was it that other people told you it would?

    Why would weird subjective experiences while high on a known hallucinogen convince you that you're breaking through to this objective World, especially since your hypothesis denies said objective World?

    Why Salvia and not DMT? Why not massive amounts of 'E' or LSD or cocaine or fucking Scotch broom?????

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  83. Okay, tell me where I'm going wrong here.
    -Okay

    You have a hypothesis that matter doesn't exist except as the product of an overall consciousness(or 'mind') which we are all part of, in the same sense that matter is and in the other sense that each of our Earthly consciousnesses are 'bits' of the overall consciousness(or Mind).
    -Check.

    You put together this hypothesis because of synchronicities which are coincidences that happen to you way to often to be written off as the simple coincidences that other people write them off as, or as the mysterious hand of God as others, no doubt pawn them off as.
    -More or less, check. The "synchronicities" were definitely the start of that, which led to me experimenting with self-hypnotic states and symbolic magic, which is similar to a yoga system of the mind. Getting good results (but not definitive ones) from that contributed, and then reading books like Amit Goswami's "The Self-Aware Universe" (I think that was the title) led me to my position that reality is consciousness-based. So more or less, check.

    For some reason you imagine that smoking Salvia Divinorum can enlighten you as to this ultimate Consciousness reality that the rest of us assume to one degree or another.
    -I smoked it before thinking that. I was just looking for something different, and had never tried an hallucinogen before. I never expected it to be such a profound thing. Trying to analyse what I was "seeing" in those experiences I realized that all of them would make more sense if it were a universe of thought, but of course, that's a bit convenient so I'm also looking for other interpretations. My recent experiences with objective confirmation are profound. I'm not even sure what they mean.

    If I'm right so far, why would smoking SD help? Why did you think that smoking SD would help? Was it that other people told you it would?
    -I didn't, as I just said. They do seem to, now that I've tried it.

    Why would weird subjective experiences while high on a known hallucinogen convince you that you're breaking through to this objective World, especially since your hypothesis denies said objective World?
    -Because the effect *seems* to be that SD causes you to travel to the deepest depths of your own subconscious mind, and if there's any interface with reality, that'd be where it is. It's action seems to be that of removing illusion rather than providing one. It really does feel that way, realer than regular reality, more basic in all ways.

    Why Salvia and not DMT? Why not massive amounts of 'E' or LSD or cocaine or fucking Scotch broom?????
    -A. Because SD is legal and easily available, and so that's the one I tried. As it turns out, now that I've read about it extensively, if my idea was recreation, it was the worst choice. It USUALLY produces bad trips. Really bad, for some people. It's feared BY users of the other hallucinogens you mentioned. They all single it out as something very different, nothing like anything else on the planet. And so I believe it to be. I don't know what "Scotch broom" is, but if it's alcohol, um, nope. I've plumbed the depth of that substance and if anything, it works to dull your perceptions, not enhance them as SD does.

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  84. Why would weird subjective experiences while high on a known hallucinogen convince you that you're breaking through to this objective World, especially since your hypothesis denies said objective World?
    --------------------
    On re-reading this part, I realize that I'm not sure that I understood it. Can you elaborate for me?

    I can say that my experiences now are both of the subjective and objective kind. So there's that. If you're asking how do I break through to my wife in the objective world when my hypothesis denies the existence of said objective world, then I would answer that my being able to break through to my wife is actually more evidence that said objective world does not exist *as we believe that it does.* It still exists, but in a psychological way. It's like we all are mutual figments of each other's imagination, in a way. If the real universe were strictly material in nature then it should not be possible, right?

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  85. " I've got this world-view where reality might be consciousness.."

    Right off the top of my head I can see these differences between the consciousness universe and our consciousness, between the 'universal mind' and our minds.

    For example this universal consciousness/mind doesn't think, it doesn't focus on anything, take in information, it doesn't depend on pictures of the World through it's eyes, sounds all around from it's ears, tastes of stuff in it's mouth, a sense of which way is up from it's inner ear or a sense of pain/pleasure/cold/heat from it's skin, since it doesn't have any of these things.

    Try to imagine a person who is blind, deaf, tastes nothing, doesn't know what up is, can't feel hot or pain or anything, can't move or at least doesn't know if he/she is moving or no.

    There's nothing to think about, and this universal consciousness/mind, well you can't even claim that it's genetically predisposed to have basic instincts, it is less conscious/less aware than a plant which turns towards the Sun.
    I mean, we're at the zero end of the scale of 0 to 'The power of Christ compels you!'

    How could the universal consciousness/mind be anything at all like our minds, our consciousness, made by our making connections about what is being sensed, between specialized cells? Are you saying that the added complexity of the brains connections are nothing to do with our consciousness at all except that they're a mirror of our true 'consciousness only' reality expressed in this imaginary physical reality, as some kind of cosmic joke?

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  86. Hey, you could always use a couple of video cameras, set them up so that they can record your activity and post it to youtube with an explanation!
    Then, you could link to that youtube vid and prove to everyone that you do indeed sit there, stoned on Salvia, and that you do indeed wake up your wife(hope she sleeps naked! LOL), and/or the dog(hope he sleeps naked too, 'cos it would be a bit creepy if he didn't)

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  87. Ooo..Oooo, just thought of this, maybe you've accidentally stumbled on 'THE FORCE'!

    Better hope that you don't get tempted by the DARK SIDE, what?

    Have you had your mediclorian count checked lately?

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  88. LOVE the last two of your posts there!

    As to the first, well, dunno of course, but it could be that it just started long ago with little 'bits' of it's consciousness setting themselves apart by forming groupings, creating larger and larger groupings which in our reality corresponded with the earliest atoms and molecules and so forth, with it all evolving toward life, since that seems where matter tends to go when the conditions are right for it. Perhaps all primitive consciousness consists of is the self-realization of "I AM" and then perhaps it became "I AM and I will PERSIST." This I guess would place the "birth" of this particular "local group" of concciousness at the Big Bang.

    Alternatively it all started as consciousness developing to the point where it bacame self-aware, and then it started to shape it's surroundings to conform with it's expectations of them, expecting more and more 'independance' from the main part of it, more and more individuality as it were.

    This is really pure speculation of course. I more proceed from observing things that do not fit in with my previous materialist paradigm and trying to explain them in the context of this universe. When I did that, I was forced to modify my concept of said universe toward a more "conscious" version. So I can't say with any certainty which alternative is more likely, or if the real truth isn't something else entirely.

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  89. In the Penrose book, he mentions that there is one theory of the Universe that states that ALL possibilities of the evolution of life on Earth existed simultaneously in a state of superposition (because of the lack of conscious observers with reasoning ability) and then when ONE such species finally evolved, that species (us) collapsed the whole shebang right back to that particular 'vein's' origin point, as being the one real timeline. And yes, this is still seriously considered by some researchers.
    Pretty crazy, no?

    It's funny how whenever he gets to a certain point and he says basically "and we don't know why that would be so" or "since that makes no sense" I am here with my hand up, so to speak, thinking "but it does to me!"

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  90. That would of course also hold true with all possible evolutions of matter in the universe. Once one leads to our kind of life, it collapses all the rest into that paradigm that we have collapsed, at least as far as the observable universe is concerned.

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  91. I know how silly it sounds to you, but even if it's an amazingly convincing hallucination, I actually know what it feels like to be conscious of my own state of quantum superposition. I know what it feels like to be many "me's" at once. And I can answer Penrose's question of "Why wouldn't we evolve to sense all of them instead of just the one?"
    We needed certainty, a simple timeline, and not multiple ones at once, so that's how we evolved to sense reality. We want to be discrete, singular, simple entities and not 'clouds' of one entity repeated ad infinitum.

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  92. I am frankly surprised that, at the date of his book's publishing, not very long ago (the eighties) there were still a decent 'faction' of Q. P. researchers that gave actual consciousness a role in the collapse of the waveform. Several different factions, in fact, all with different ideas of what that role is, and so forth, but added together, a respectable portion. The majority deny that such can possibly be the case, but they have no reallly good reasons for doing so other than what boils down to "it just can't be!"

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  93. You seem to have missed the part where, as our body grows until finally it is born, then we really start to develop mentally, learning language and so forth making physical connections between brain cells.
    But this is all an illusion, right? How the brain works to record senses as memories is just an illusion since we're part of the universal consciousness that for no reason at all needs to record a bigger part of the universal consciousness with our part that demands to be separate, right?

    Why would our piece of the ultimate conscious need to make physical(but on "really") connections at the cellular level, I mean why would it need to take up space at all?

    It's a very nice diversion to start talking about bits of information/consciousness as if they are fundamental particles congealing out of the plasma, much as physicists imagine particles are formed.

    But this doesn't explain why this universal consciousness would 'dream up' organic life and how that would lead to bits of the universal consciousness ending up in animals brains where we/they need consciousness to make sense of the physical World as best they can.

    So Brian are birds and dogs etc. brains holders of bits of the ultimate consciousness that wish to be separate???
    How low does that go? Are bacteria bits of wayward ultimate consciousness? How about grains of sand? How about stars?

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  94. As I understand your reasoning, the separated parts of the consciousness demand some kind of coherence and see what they think they ought to, right down to the sub-atomic level where they, quite reasonably(sarcasm alert) see stuff they can't reasonably explain!(turn off sarcasm alert)

    Of course, why can't I see that being the case when you use our expectations to explain your theory right up until you use the unexpected to explain your theory!

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  95. Of course, why can't I see that being the case when you use our expectations to explain your theory right up until you use the unexpected to explain your theory!
    -------------------------
    It's not my fault if you are determined to not understand it and mock it. While it may well not be true, if a significant percentage of quantum physicists have thought it possibly true then I have to say that I do not believe that you are finding things here that they didn't think of first before backing it. All of reality can be consciousness, and we'd never know. They realize that, the ones that aren't put off by the necessary paradigm change.
    There are many degrees to which is may be true, the spectrum being from the "soft" truth where all matter and energy and space and time are consciousness but it's a difference that makes almost no difference, and there still occured the evolution of higher forms from the lower, to the "hard" truth where this is ALL a dream and we create it out of our expectations of it in its entirety, from lower life forms to perhaps some other people even, to the very stars. No way to tell which, but many gradations are possible. I always personally leaned to the more 'materialist' side of that, the 'soft' truth of it, but SD seems to say it's the latter. That it's a "story-based" reality, where we just follow the plot we have already laid down one step at a time into the future, getting pretty much what we expect (or dread) as we go, together fleshing out the dream in all its detail.

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  96. Ian, let me know (here) what you think of my latest SD vision, detailed on my new post to the SD blog, if you feel like it. I like to get the skeptic's view on these things.

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  97. Gee Brian, is it just me or do you seem to get vaguer and vaguer while at the exact same time you're telling me that I'm disagreeing with 'a significant percentage of quantum physicists, no less?

    I repeated your reason why things are like they are, simply our expectations unfolding, and your reason for believing that things aren't really like they are, simply our expectations NOT unfolding.

    Instead of dealing with those facts, whether you imagined them 'mocking' or no, you're practically calling me an unbeliever!

    Yes, you have said that Salvia seems to be pointing your 'research' in a certain direction and I did ask where you got the idea that it, and not other drugs, would, no response there.

    Let's say that you're absolutely right, Brian, what is the value in it for you, what are you getting out of it?

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  98. Gee Brian, is it just me or do you seem to get vaguer and vaguer while at the exact same time you're telling me that I'm disagreeing with 'a significant percentage of quantum physicists, no less?
    -Only that I'm fairly certain that your expressed considerations were thought of by them and it didn't stop them from still taking it seriously. I think that's worth noting.

    I repeated your reason why things are like they are, simply our expectations unfolding, and your reason for believing that things aren't really like they are, simply our expectations NOT unfolding.
    -Things are exactly like they are because of our expectations unfolding. Quantum Physics raises certain questions. My own coincidences and other things in my life raise certain similar questions. I decided to 'expect' that the world gives us what we expect, and it started to do so, to give me what I expected. That means something to me.

    Instead of dealing with those facts, whether you imagined them 'mocking' or no, you're practically calling me an unbeliever!
    -I don't mind unbelievers, what I don't like in particular is when it seems that you think I'm a fool.

    Yes, you have said that Salvia seems to be pointing your 'research' in a certain direction and I did ask where you got the idea that it, and not other drugs, would, no response there.
    -I answered it in two locations if you read my long post up a few posts, but here it is again in more detail: I never thought SD would do any of this. I simply heard of it, from my wife who noticed that Miley Cyrus had claimed that she was smoking SD and not marijuana in some picture that was published of her with a bong. I'd always wondered what an hallucinogen would be like, but I didn't like the idea of trying to obtain any. So SD is legal, and readily available, and pretty cheap too. So I ordered some over the Internet, and tried it, and that's when I started to think it was more than an ordinary drug. I was terrified that first time, but immediately afterwards I was consumed with wonder and curiosity, so different was it than anything I'd ever thought to experience. I have a lot of confirmation on that BTW, by talking to other users, ones that *have* tried the other major hallucinogens like LSD and DMT. Salvia has a completely different feel, and is, or can be, more harsh by far, and it takes you right out of your body in about three seconds like you've been hit by a train. (Most of those other users HATE salvia, BTW) It's ferocious! However, the more I used it, the more I began to be able to control it and the more that I could retain memories of the experiences, and the more I could think coherently while "out there" on a trip... eventually being able to resist it's pull enough to keep my eyes open, and then things started to get interesting. And they certainly continue to do so.

    So be honest; how fucking insane do you think I am now that i claim to have been able to see through my own hand? Because I know it's somewhere between 'dotty' and 'nucking futz.'

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  99. Let's say that you're absolutely right, Brian, what is the value in it for you, what are you getting out of it?
    -I have nad a lifelong need to know what reality really is, since I was a child. It's that simple. Every night as a kid I'd stare up at my ceiling as I was going to sleep and imagine the stars far above me beyond the roof of the house and think "what the fuck does all this *mean?* Why is reality like it is?" That sort of thing. That's why I loved science as a kid and still do. Now as an adult, after over thirty years of being mostly satisfied with the scientific paradigm, I've come to realize that it seems that there's more to it than that, and I find that incredibly exciting. Also, as to my SD experiences, they're like going to Disneyland every night, only a lot more fun. I'm learning to manipulate my mind in ways that I didn't even know existed. I can experience things that I'd only read about happening to yogis and Zen Masters. I feel like I'm more alive. It's very rewarding in those ways. I'm a happier person.

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  100. I should mention that the only reason that it's that much 'fun' for me is my aforementioned sense of curiosity. Most people hate this drug with vehemence. I managed to get used to the tough parts by persisting, and so by getting past that I'm now seeing things that are amazing to behold, if you'll forgive the verbal flourish.

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  101. BTW, dude, did I mention that I saw *through* my fucking hand last night? Clearly?
    I mean, how would that affect you? Serious question. I guess what I really mean is, knowing you as I do, how would you explain to yourself that that didn't really just happen, that it was all a mirage due to a substance? While lucid? I mean, I could see things, but I was as present in my head as I am now... what would you tell yourself?

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  102. Do you really dismiss it all as a druggie's rant? I guess you must. What else can you do?

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  103. Honestly I'm worried about you Brian. This seems to be consuming you.

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  104. Yes, that's called "finally finding something in life that's really interesting to me." It's consuming me with the thrill of new discoveries about myself and my reality, and with new ideas, and incredibly awesome experiences. My health has never been better, I'm less depressed, my wife thinks it's great for me (and she's not the type to say that lightly) and there is nothing different about me but this "consuming" interest and my improved mood. I wish other people could be so lucky.
    I appreciate your concern. Frankly I expected scorn. So that's a good thing.

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  105. I guess I can be glad that we don't know each other personally or, fuck, I'd have to worry about an 'intervention.'

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  106. Hey, George W. Bush is getting positive ratings again! Whee! and even 24% of Democrats approve!
    Short memories, or maybe they were just snakes to begin with, going with the prevailing political winds when it suits them.

    I swear, I never knew people were this stupid on average. Nowhere near.

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  107. Documentation fees! The cheapest, most underhanded tactic by car-sales people, EVER! We were all set to buy a 2003 Grand Am for the sale price of $2500(not including the e-deal!)
    In the end it was going to cost us $2900 plus tax, because, apparently they were going to replace a front-end bearing hub, which, apparently was shot.

    A bit of quick math here, and it turned out that the bearing hub was going to cost us $400 to have fixed.
    But a bearing hub for that model costs about $100. I'm thinking that $300 is a bit much for labor!
    But no, after all this humming and hemming about what was costing what, it turns out that they were putting the bearing hub in for nothing and the extra $400 was a Documentation fee, which covers paperwork on loans, they may do the paperwork to insure the car for us, and I don't know what else, none of my business.

    The final excuse for this was, some places charge $1000 Documentation Fee!
    But we were being expected to buy this car for $2900 thinking the extra was for a repair on a car we hadn't bought yet!

    Car dealers and the like know how stupid we are, they count on it.

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  108. Nice. Car salesmen eat their young. (Republicans eat OUR young.)

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  109. Yea, but, it may well be that any publicity is good publicity for a politician who knows that the public have a short memory, but when it comes to a sales driven business, it can't be good for them to know that there's people like me explaining the Documentation Fee which they charge for doing nothing!

    If I make a purchase or a sale of a car myself, there's no less documentation to fill out, it takes 10 mins. so $400 is a total rip. Now I'm going around town explaining to anyone who will listen, about this sneaky trick that they're pulling!

    I'd like to get someone to go ask them about their cars and put it to them, how much would the cost be, the final cost, and could you break it down? Then, as soon as they mention Documentation Fee, just go ballistic, "You want me to give you $400 to sign the car over to me?? Are you fucking nutz?"

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  110. I want my friends to be the kind of people who will wake up in the morning and ask themselves, "WTF am I doing here?", and I want them to truly believe that they are doing this for the obvious reason that they don't want to be waking up one morning and asking themselves, "WTF am I doing here?", right?

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  111. That last one went right by me again. It self-negates. Do your friends constitute the Empty Set?

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    Replies
    1. First fat guy: I'm a fat fuck. A fatty fat fat fatster. I'm fat in clothes and when I'm naked. Fat when I have a salad or that seventh donut. Fat when chicks dig me, and fatter when they don't. Even after I've lost weight I'll be the fat version of a dry drunk, dreaming of steak and potatoes.

      Second fat guy, after going to the doctor and told he has high cholesterol, high blood pressure, probable heart disease and that he'll die if he doesn't lose his ridiculously excessive weight: I'm fat?

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  112. No, no, no, you don't want to be waking up one morning saying to yourself, "WTF am I doing here?", so, what you do is make it a point of waking up in the morning and saying, "WTF am I doing here?"

    Tch!

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  113. Okay then. I still don't get it, but perhaps it's best to let it lie?

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  114. New Post is up!

    Going off in a different direction this time. Just cathartic silliness.

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