[AIM9X]

Information is just patterns. Without the '1' And '0', without the 'zero' and 'infinity', without the 'on and off', 'black and white' 'light and dark'
'crest and trough' without the 'something and nothing' without the 'matter and space' etcetc there is NOTHING.

http://everythingforever.com/

Take a black and white drawing for example, it is the CONTRAST between the 'black' and the 'white' that makes the 'image'.
Neither the white nor the black by itself contain anything information. It is the imaginary border between these two polar
opposites that information, pattern, visual image, and existence can occur and be conveyed.

http://www.imprint.co.uk/C&HK/vol7/kauffman_7-4.pdf

A blank CD can contain a lot of things. It can be for a new Operating System, contain a whole lot of porn, or it can be
the latest flight simulator 2006, but what makes the Disc what it is is the patterns of '1''s and '0's . A CD with ALL
'1's or ALL '0's across the disc contain no information whatsoever, it is absolutely BLANK in either configuration.
Only Cd's with '1's AND '0's alternating in meaningful combinations can contain 'information' that can be useful to man.
Yet herein lies a paradox, if none of the individual '1's and none of the individual '0's contain any information at all, then why should the
illusionary 'border' between the two 'nothings' contain an entity that is simultaneously not 'nothing' (otherwise there would be no 'information') and yet surprisingly it is obvious that it is not any particular 'thing'!

After all it is only between each of the individual '0' and '1' CONTRASTS that any information can reside, yet this boundary or border does not exists on the CD itself, and obviously is not a part of the physical world; one can search in vain and never find the location of this abstract platonic 'existence' of this information.

Since the 'nothing' by itself does not exist, and the pure 'something' by itself also does not and cannot exist, then the only
't-ing' (non-thing And not-nothing) that exists is the illusionary and imaginary 'intermediate' 'i' that is simultaneously 'everything' and 'nothing', 1 and 0, on and off, and yet both not any particular thing and yet not exactly nothing. It is like a superposition of all possible and maybe even impossible combinations or permutations. 0 i 1 or 0i1

In Penrose's The Road to Reality he talks about the Mandelbrot set and its extraordinarily elaborate structure. This structure as infinite complexity yet it is not of any human design. Remarkably, this structure is defined b a mathematical rule of extreme elegant simplicity.
The set if just objectively there in the mathematics itself. If it has meaning to assign an actual existence to the Mandelbrot set, then that existence is not within our minds, for no one can fully comprehend the set's unlimited complication. Nor can its existence lie within physical world or reside within your Pentium computer. At best software such as Fractal eXtreme can only provide a shadow of an approximation to the set itself.



http://www.andrewcohen.org/quote/?quote=178

Consciousness is not an object, so you cannot say it is something. And yet it is not nothing. Nothing is void; it has no attributes, no qualities. Consciousness is empty of any thing, and yet there is something endlessly compelling in that emptiness. When you contemplate consciousness, you discover a mysterious sense of knowing that is both knowing nothing and knowing everything at once. Whatever you are becoming cognizant of, its nature seems to be everything—fullness, completeness. The emptiness is full. That's why the emptiness is compelling, because it is full of the knowing of some mysterious everything that is not a thing. It's everything; it's nothing—you can go on forever: everything, nothing, nothing, everything, always meaning the same thing. If you could say everything and nothing in one breath, perhaps you could capture the paradoxical nature of consciousness.


http://nonduality.info/awareness.html

[EnergyUnlimited]

Consciousness disappears temporalily when you SLEEP (in so called deep sleep dreamless phase) and with all likelyhood it disappears permanently once you DIE.

Nothing to worry about.

[sicophiliac]

Ok here is something to riddle the mind with for a bit. Not exactly on topic but something in the same ballpark. Let us assume our consciousness lies 100% in the biological brain. More specifically it resides in the millions of neural connections in it. The biological hard drive of our mind if you will. Lets say that somehow that imformation could be scanned and stored in some fancy star trek like replicator machine. Now after you are dead and your brain is destroyed... rotted away into the ground gone forever. If that replicator machine reproduced down to every last molecule your brain and all of its billions and billions of neural connections would YOU wake up in that new hard drive? Or would it be for all intents and purposes be somebody with your memories and your personality and your skills? From the perspective of others it would be YOU but would YOU really be awakened in that new brain? There are cases where people are undergoing brain surgury and thier body is chilled and most of the blood is drained from thier brain while the surgury is taking place. Brain wave activity is gone and for all intents and purposes the hard drive is turned off. After surgury the body is warmed back up and blood flow returns and they wake up. Now is it that very same consciousness that wakes up in that body or is it somebody else? We could assume that it would be the same person.. I mean why not ? Now what happens if that person during surgury gets a shot gun blast to the head... the imformation in that biological brain is obliterated. Yet if it was stored somewhere else on our fancy star trek style replicator and used to reassemble all the splattered mess all over the operating room would that very same person wake up again ? You'd have to assume yes it would be THEM I mean why wouldnt it be them? If all was restored structurally with no errors in the brian.. there would be no trace of the shot gun blast to the head.. therefore no relevance that it even happened. For that matter what if that replicator used matter from another source to reproduce that persons brain ? After all on a molecular level there is no difference from a nitrogen or carbon atom from my brain VS a lump of dirt or a blade of grass. No signature of consciousness or mind power attached to anything on the molecular or even on the cellular level in many cases. Therefore we can draw a conclusion that our mind and our "soul" if you will is the product of the whole sum off neurons and pathways in the brain. Throw in some oxygen rich blood and some glucose to provide electrical energy and bam we awaken. Now going further down this train of thought, what if two identical copies of your brain were produced? Which one would YOU awaken in ? Would or could you be awakened in both brains at once ? Would the genuine YOU just awaken in the first brain created and if so why not the other one.. after all how is the imformation known to that other lump of matter that another identical copy of it has already been created? Could somebodies consciousness essentially teleport if you obliterated one copy of thier mind and recreated it seconds later say 1000 light years away? Now I know that what I just described will likely never be possible to test or at least not any time in the forseeable future. Perhaps it will defy the laws of physics to ever test this due to thermodynamics and the uncertianty principle. Maybe there in lies the nature of consciousness.. existing in a network too complex to ever duplicate to a T. Something that would take longer than lifespan of the whole universe to scan and attemp to duplicate. Almost like a boundary programmed into a videogame that the gamer could never cross. Ok enough philosophical ranting for me.

[robski]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sicophiliac', 'I')s AIM9X basically trying to imply that we have a soul and that our mind or consciousness must be over origin outside of our biological brain? Something as expansive and indestructable as time or space itself?

[robski]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergyUnlimited', 'C')onsciousness disappears temporalily when you SLEEP (in so called deep sleep dreamless phase) and with all likelyhood it disappears permanently once you DIE.

Nothing to worry about.

[gg3]

Re. Sicophiliac:

The stuff you saw on Discovery was real (or was a demonstration based on real research), and wasn't rigged (the original research was sound).

The experiments on random targets ("coin toss program") were typical of the work done at Princeton in the 80s and 90s. They, as with most similar experiments, demonstrate an effect that is robust (persistent and easily replicable) but small (the slight percentage shifts in outcomes), and highly statistically significant over large numbers of runs (where the slight shift in outcomes becomes less and less likely to have occurred by chance). This is what I meant when I said "a trickle of bits." Nonlocal information flows to/from the human brain are small but persistent.

The item about disturbing pictures retrocausally triggering stress reactions is based on a very interesting set of experiments and a later analysis thereof. Darn if I can't cite author and publication, but you can probably look this up under "retrocausality" and find it online. Basically what happened was that some researchers were looking to measure brain responses to stressful imagery, and they were originally looking at the period of time *after* exposure to each image. They got their findings, published their papers, and that was that; they were not concerned with retrocausality, they were not looking for it, they didn't publish about it.

Later on, *a different researcher* looked over their raw data and discovered that there were specific and regular brain responses that occurred shortly *before* each of the disturbing images were shown, but not before each of the neutral or positive images were shown. In other words, a clear retrocausal effect, small and subtle but highly robust and statistically significant. So the researcher who published the retrocausality study was using data that had been collected by others for an entirely different purpose.

The above cases were not measurement errors. The original data were recorded and stored on computers with sufficient accuracy to prevent that kind of mundane misinterpretation.

This stuff shouldn't be surprising; a number of equations in modern physics are time-independent, i.e. they work equally well in forward time or in reverse time. The most accurate view seems to be that time is a scalar (quantity without direction) rather than a vector (quantity with direction). It also shouldn't be surprising that the human brain is capable of interacting with scalar time, any more than that the human eye can detect single photons against a totally dark background.

That is, none of this throws common sense out the window. That already happened with Einstienian relativity and quantum physics throughout the 20th century:-) Or more specifically, the notion of common sense has been revised in light of new theories and findings. Consider how many centuries have elapsed since we determined that the Earth orbits the Sun and not vice-versa, yet people still talk about the Sun "rising" and "setting." Traditional ideas of "common sense" take longer to change in the culture at-large than in the scientific community.

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Re. Sicophiliac, "...proof of the soul..."

Nope, the above and other suchlike, do not give us proof of the soul as conceptualized in religion.

In fact this debate has occurred before. Western psychology began (in the late 1800s) with psychodynamics, i.e. the study of mental events, typically related to differences between healthy individuals and psychiatrically disturbed individuals. Behaviorism arose (in the early 2nd half of the 20th century) as a countervailing body of theory, concerned with externally observable behaviors and not with subjective events. The behaviorists made the point that subjective events were not amenable to scientific treatment, and that the psychodynamic school was basically engaged in a search for the soul.

Since that time, new techniques of measurement, from the EEG forward, have made it possible to correlate objective observables with subjective reports, so the tension between psychodynamic and behavioral theories has abated somewhat. But the point is, the critique "searching for the soul" has occurred before; it tends to occur whenever psychology attempts to deal with subjective events, and the present debate is no different in that regard.

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Rogerhb: re. Pavlov:

Doesn't work that way. Randomized target sequence: some disturbing images, some pleasant, some neutral, where the target selection occurred in realtime rather than being predetermined. Pavlov doesn't apply when dealing with randomized stimuli.

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Energy Unlimited, re. "...you cannot predict the future without time machine..."

Nonlocal information does not provide predictions as such, i.e. information known ahead of time to be true. In the human brain as in photon entanglement experiments, you don't know the actual state of the nonlocal target except via local information available locally.

This brings up the obvious question, "if that's so, then how could nonlocal information have had survival value to humans?" The answer is, statistically and over long time spans. A "small trickle of bits" is sufficient to indicate (for example) "game animal is this way" or "predator is that way." The confirming local signal would be the sighting of a game animal, not being attacked by a predator, etc. Groups of humans whose brains were more nonlocally capable, would have a slight edge over groups of humans whose brains were less so or not at all (or whose culture did not provide the means of using the information).

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Fergus, re. "are we trying to prove God exists..?"

No, no more than was Edwin Hubble when he conceived the Big Bang theory; though the fact that he was also a priest was used for some time as a basis for questioning his motives. But either way it turned out he was right (as far as we can determine), and either way, the Big Bang did not prove (or disprove) the existence of God.

In fact, if you postulate a God who is omniscient and omnipotent, then you have an entity that can foresee the intent of any experimental design and can affect the outcome of any experimental procedure. Thus, there is no experimental design or procedure that will produce a reliable confirmation or refutation of the existence of that entity. By analogy think of a Turing test where the evaluator always knows whether s/he is communicating with another human or with a computer. The evaluator's judgement of whether the computer is sufficiently human-like to pass the Turing test, will always be biased by their knowledge of the actual situation, and this invalidates the test under those conditions.

To postulate that God always knows, is to invalidate any possible test of the existence of God.

The view I take of science and religion is that they are complimentary rather than mutually exclusive, in the same manner as sculpture and symphony, ballet and literature, etc.: truth or beauty in one art form does not translate to truth or beauty in another, each abides in its own domain. You can't judge a sculpture by a symphony. Nor can you use one for the purpose of another: studying the literature of a period of history may help inform you of the context in which music was written at the time, but does not inform you about the music itself.

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AIM9X: re. the hard problem

Your description is right on target. The easy problems of consciousness are well-solved by now, including the question of mystical experience itself (as per the psilocybin experiments).

Chalmers makes similar points about qualia as fundamentals. And you make a good point about the irreducibility of other fundamentals not counting against their relevance in theories of physics. Where I go with this is to say that qualia are the emergent phenomena of the interaction between brain and information. At one level this is mundanely obviously true: light strikes the retina and you perceive color. At a deeper level this is addresses the hard problem: consciousness is the metaprocessing of qualia, and mind is the entity that consists of the entire set of emergent phenomena involving brain and information.

Re. "the entire universe may have a low level of 'consciousness'..."

Before anyone takes that as a rationalization for animism, what AIM9X is getting at is the idea that information can be self-reflexive and self-modifying, as in any type of feedback mechanism, for example a thermostat. Interactions in the physical universe involve matter and energy acting locally, and presumably also involve nonlocal actions as well (entangled photons etc.). What you have there is a large set of interacting feedback mechanisms on astrophysical scales of spacetime.

Nice description of information as the emergent phenomenon from patterned contrasts between 0s and 1s. Well said.

Also, good stuff re. everything & nothing. And for those here who might try to dismiss it as nonsense, consider Godelian incompleteness. Attempts to describe an entire system from within the system itself are necesssarily incomplete, and any such description will always appear to be paradoxical. A complete description of the natural universe necessarily includes a description of consciousness as an element of it; we have no choice but to try to describe consciousness even though we reside within the system. And so we end up with paradoxical language as our best approximation.

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EnergyUnlimited, re "consciousness disappears when you sleep..."

In fact that's not correct; consciousness does not cease, it just slows down to a much slower timescale. Normal waking consciousness is driven by brain activity in the range of 30 to 60 cycles per second (Hz). During the deepest states of nondreaming sleep, brain activity slows down to 0 - 4 Hz: roughly 1/10 of normal. Thus we would expect (and in fact we actually find) that thought processes run at roughly 1/10 of normal speed.

What makes it appear as though consciousness is absent during sleep, is the rapidity of the transition from sleep to waking that occurs in most individuals in most cultures. By analogy, if your eyesight has dark-adapted in a dark room and then you enter a brightly-lit room and attempt to look back into the dark room, you won't see the objects in the dark room (though you'll still know that those objects are still present).

Here I should also mention that a few times I've had the experience of "lucid nondreaming sleep" where I became aware of thought processes during deep sleep and noticed (perhaps by comparison with other physiological markers such as heart rate?) that they were present but very much slowed down compared to normal. One anecdotal observation does not a hypothesis make, but the hypothesis (of sleeping consciousness) was already present in cognitive science to begin with; my experience was nothing more than a personal observation of a known phenomenon.

As for death, we still don't know. My best guess is that the information from which individual mind/consciousness emerges, which is densely localized in the brain during the individual's lifetime, dissipates into the larger field of information-at-large when the brain ceases to function. As with other fundamentals (matter, energy, spacetime), information is neither created nor destroyed, but merely changes form. The individual localized "me" ceases to exist in much the same way as an individualized drop of rain ceases to exist when it splashes into a pond or ocean. So strictly speaking, the conclusion of this line of reasoning would be that there is not an individualized immortal soul in the sense held by religion. For all I know, information-at-large could be self-organizing in a manner that qualifies as conscious, but that's getting way beyond the present scope of data or theory.

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Re. Sicophilac, re. uploading and downloading mind.

You would not have continuity of experience forward, but the replicated-you would have apparent continuity of memory backward. In other words, dead is dead, you're still gone, and the replicated-you in the future is a new and distinct person though with your memories.

Re. those brain surgery cases: Nice bit of reasoning there, but I would have to say that those people are still the same people as they were before their brains were temporarily switched off. Not only is the configuration of information identical, but the entity in which it resides is the same entity.

The difference hinges on whether the individual mind is merely suspended for a period of time and then re-started, or destroyed entirely and a new copy created.

There is a difference between brain/mind and a lump of rock, which is structural complexity and order. The brain/mind is highly syntropic (negentropic) compared to the rock.

As for the "two copies" problem: Assuming it's possible in the first place, a hypothetical Star Trek transporter that replicates rather than transports: what you end up with is three distinct individuals, all having the same set of memories. Their histories begin to diverge from the moment they all "wake up."

For example, let's say that Me 1, Me 2, and Me 3 decide to live together and share everything as if one person. One day, Me 1 is on the job working, while Me 2 is out socializing. Me 2 meets someone interesting and one thing turns into another, turns into spending a most intimate afternoon at the other person's house: love at first sight. As per our sharing arrangements, we arrange for Me 1 to go out on the next date with that person. Now Me 1 has not had the experience of meeting the person and falling in love at first sight, so Me 1 has to start from scratch with that person. Same case for Me 3. And if Me 3 has a conversation with the other person, Me 3 has to fill Me 1 and 2 in on the conversation so there is some continuity with the other person so the other person doesn't wonder if they're dealing with someone who's crazy or has no memory. But for each Me, the relationship consists of 1/3 first-person and 2/3 information shared from the other Mes. Each Me does not have a complete set of memories of the events of the relationship.

Now let's say that Mes 1, 2, and 3 each went out socializing to different parties on a Friday night, and each Me met someone wonderful and fell in love at first sight. Now assume that we decide to let each relationship run in parallel, i.e. not "share" partners. Each relationship is a separate timeline and set of experiences and memories. If Me 1 and his partner broke up painfully but Me 2 and his partner stayed in love, each Me would have a separate and distinct set of emotional lessons learned, which would affect his future with respect to seeking future relationships. In any case, each Me is a mind unto himself; there is not a "group mind" among us.

Last but not least, the fact that certain cellular substructures of the neurons are at borderline quantum scale, means that any attempt to replicate them will necessarily have a margin of error due to quantum uncertainty. By analogy, each copy will come out with a different set of "bits" flipped to 0 and to 1. In some cases, the difference from the original will be inconsequential. In other cases, highly consequential. And there is no way to predict which copies will be closer to the original and which will be more radically different. For all we know, this flipping of quantum bits in the nerve cells may even affect memory. But in any case, as a practical matter, the complexity and density of the brain is such that it will never become possible to scan and upload its contents without substantially altering the brain and the data stream in the process (and in this case, "never" is a safe claim, as even a brief study of neuroanatomy will demonstrate).

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Robski, re. people under anaesthetics:

What you're describing are out-of-body experiences with objective correlates. Fairly common, and interesting in that they involve an apparently higher bandwidth of nonlocal perception than we find in e.g. the Princeton studies.

Undoubtedly these experiences are the source of much that has gone into the shamanic traditions, and into religion generally. Whether they prove the existence of soul, much less of God, is beyond the scope of present research.

----

All of this is very interesting; I never expected that the PO website would spawn a little consciousness studies seminar, but we've had this topic and the psilocybin research this weekend, so that's two.

[EnergyUnlimited]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('robski', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergyUnlimited', 'C')onsciousness disappears temporalily when you SLEEP (in so called deep sleep dreamless phase) and with all likelyhood it disappears permanently once you DIE.

Nothing to worry about.

[EnergyUnlimited]

gg3,

As you had written, that in deep sleep phase brain is working with frequency 0-4 Hz.
But if it is 0 Hz, than it does not work at all and is simply suspended.
What I try to say is that from my experience during deep sleep phase I (or rather my consciousness) actually DO NOT exist.
Obviously brain is still functioning this time, but I do not know that.
Perhaps too low level of activity.
How do you know, that your odd sleep experience was in deep sleep?
May be it was in REM phase?

"Information cannot be created or destroyed".
Sounds correct, but physicists researching black hole theory are getting perplexed here.
You cross event horizone - get anihilated in singularity - information join singularity - black hole evaporate due to RANDOM process called Hawking radiation unable to carry any information - singularity cease to exist - INFORMATION DESTROYED.
Physicists DO NOT like that!

[gg3]

Re. Energy Unlimited: anaesthesia: "...people drugged by fancy chemicals..."

Ahh but it's all too easy to black-box the situation without looking at what's really going on. First of all, general anaesthesia attenuates inbound signals from the sensory organs, and second, it reduces brain activity to a minimum.

What I think is going on is, there is still a local information flow (via the normal sensory organs), though at a low bandwidth and slow speed ("a trickle of bits") and the patient's brain does the same kind of inference & extrapolation routine as human brains do with nonlocal information.

The study of consciousness in nondreaming sleep, particularly the use of first-person methodologies, is notoriously difficult but is nonetheless an interesting area of research.

Re. consciousness returning in people close to death: Hardly possible if their brains have been starved for oxygen and their brain activity has been reduced to incoherence that is incapable of maintaining a signal flow. This is the case for the majority of causes of death. For other causes involving direct injury to the brain, there damage to the physical structure is quite sufficient to prevent it maintaining signal processing.

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Re. sleeping EEG frequencies of 0 - 4 Hz. The common convention is that 0 Hz EEG refers to frequencies of less than 1 cycle per second, for example 0.25 cycles per second = 1 cycle per 4 seconds. This is not the same thing as zero activity. I am not aware of any case in a living organism where large areas of brain mass have zero electrical activity whatsoever.

According to Hameroff, consciousness occurs in a series of discrete moment/events that are knit together by the driving frequency of electrical activity in the nerve cells. It is perceived as continuous when in fact it is discontinuous. Now if you slow down the driving frequency to the range found in deep sleep (or anaesthesia) you end up with a lower percentage of consciousness compared to clock time. But to the individual it is still perceived as continuous.

Re. how I know my experience was in deep nondreaming sleep: In an objective sense, I don't, because there was not an EEG recording being made at the time and there was no attempt to correlate clock time of my experience to clock time of a particular period in an EEG recording. On the other hand, I've trained myself at observing my states of consciousness since the age of eleven years old, so I'd say I'm pretty good at it, and this includes parsing out the distinctions between apparently similar states. So I would call this a first-person report by a trained observer but without objective correlates. The value of such things, scientifically speaking, is only in that they are interesting starting-points for asking questions that should then be addressed using proper research methods.

On the other hand, you might spend a lifetime in a sleep lab and never have an episode of "lucid nondream sleep." This state would seem to be notoriously difficult to replicate in its natural form. One might have a go at it by looking at the nondream EEG patterns and seeking a medication that is known to produce similar results, for example a combination of narcotic anagesics and general anaesthetics (do not try this at home, it can kill you), but that would be a pharmacological model for deep sleep rather than for lucidity.

Now in fact there may be another better way to get at this "artificially." The use of audio entrainment to alter EEG is well known (it's the basis for those "relaxation tapes" you can buy, some of which work quite well), and originated in attempts to replicate other notoriously difficult states of consciousness (out of body experiences, see also Robert Monroe et. al.). So we know we can use this to get complex EEG patterns, and we also know that out of body experiences in the lab have characteristics similar to a sleeping EEG but with lucid consciousness present. Therefore we might try using audio entrainment to induce a deep sleep state and then bring back some kind of lucid consciousness.

That procedure would be far better than using the pharmacological model of deep sleep. I would guess it could succeed at producing a type of lucid nondreaming sleep, though not necessarily the same type as occurs naturally. If I were rich I'd have opened up a consciousness research lab long ago, and this is the kind of thing I'd be looking into.

Is lucid nondreaming sleep useful for anything..? Probably. From my experience, it seemed that the thought process was "slow but deep," in the sense that the logical-consistency-checking function had a greater opportunity to check each element of thought before proceeding to the next. It also seemed that the effect of emotional state on thought process was attenuated due to the inherently peaceful (emotionally quiet) nature of deep sleep.

So here you have a state where the thought process is exceptionally slow but exceptionally calm: all other factors equal, I would say that the output of that type of thought process could be considered as more reliable or objective than the output of a thought process that is highly influenced by random sensory inputs and emotions and rapid internal feedback loops. The obvious usefulness of this is in being able to make more level-headed decisions than during the waking state.

To the extent that this kind of process runs automatically during sleep, a certain amount of evaluation & decision-making will naturally get done during a normal night's sleep. This backs up the folk wisdom of dealing with difficult issues by saying "I'll sleep on it" and then doing so. A good night's sleep, in addition to providing overt rest and eight hours of critical distance from a problem, may also be a time when active problem-solving occurs (throughout the night, not just during dreaming) and the results are presented to the waking mind in a manner similar to "background information" or memory.

Thus it could be said that we make better decisions when we're getting adequate sleep, because some of the processing of those decisions has occurred in the sleep states and been transferred to "background status" with respect to our waking thought processes. The conclusions reached during sleep, even if not available as conscious information, would implicitly influence the conclusions reached during waking.

And to return this to relevance to our general topics of coping with resource depletion and climate crisis, the Darwinian challenges of our times demand that we use every adaptive strategy at our disposal.

[Doly]

Interesting comments about lucid nondreaming sleep. In my experience, I remember sometimes dreams and sometimes thinking in words but without the visuals of dreams. I assume that's what you call "nondreaming sleep". I don't notice things as my heart rate at the time, so I have no idea if this happens in deep or shallow sleep.

My experience is that the thoughts that come into my mind in such times feel very clever at the time, but if I remember them afterwards, they're not clever at all. It reminds me totally of that story of the poet that thought he composed wonderful poems in his sleep that he didn't remember afterwards, but one day he did remember one, and it was the lowest trash.

The best that can be said of those thoughts is that they may be very creative and poetic. "Surreal" is the right word. A couple of examples that I remember afterwards:
"The blue sky sank into the blue night"
"They came like a foreboding, like a hurricane, like a birthday present on a non-birthday"

It may be then when people make creative breakthroughs in their sleep, I don't know. But I wouldn't expect any well-built argument to come out of it.

[robski]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')ow in fact there may be another better way to get at this "artificially." The use of audio entrainment to alter EEG is well known (it's the basis for those "relaxation tapes" you can buy, some of which work quite well), and originated in attempts to replicate other notoriously difficult states of consciousness (out of body experiences, see also Robert Monroe et. al.). So we know we can use this to get complex EEG patterns, and we also know that out of body experiences in the lab have characteristics similar to a sleeping EEG but with lucid consciousness present. Therefore we might try using audio entrainment to induce a deep sleep state and then bring back some kind of lucid consciousness

[AIM9X]

sicophiliac,

Have you read the book The Physics of Star Trek? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006097 ... e&n=283155
You might like that book.

If I understand you correctly, you are asking where did ‘*YOU*’ go.
If you are frozen in time (consciousness/ thought process totally stopped) and a machine
Recreates an exactly another YOU. When both are awaken the question is where
Did THIS *YOU* go? I’m just guessing here, but the answer may be that the ‘*YOU*’s
Of all 6.5 billion of us are actually all the SAME!

For example in the paragraph above, when the original YOU wakes up you certainly won’t
Notice any difference, you will still know what it is like to be you. However the Other you will
From its point of reference think that HE is the first YOU and indeed his ‘quilia’ has been
Transferred to the copy and the original physical ‘you’ is now an imposter.

Which means perhaps there is an ‘supreme’ YOU-ness that has the ‘quilia’ to KNOW
What it is like to be that which is itself, and each so called ‘individual’ is a little piece of the
Supreme ‘YOU-ness’ which is limited to its very own domain, but the quality and experience is
The ever self-same ‘YOU’.

When I was five I had a weird question in my mind that has always bothered me. I knew that in order for ‘ME’ (not just the physical me, but more importantly the identity-quilia-unique experience of me) to exist all the millions of my ancestors before me had to exist, the universe had to have occurred precisely the way it did. Why was ‘I’ in THIS body instead of some-other body in some
Other time period, being someone ‘else’? Or put it another way, why is ‘MY’ body not occupied by
Some ‘OTHER’ quilia-identity?

When you fall asleep at night, and wake up the next morning, how do YOU know
YOU are still the YOU that went to sleep last night? Get what I am saying?
See, its easy to say that of course, I remember going to sleep and I remember
Waking up, etc. But what I am getting at is even between moments in coconsciousness, how
Do you and how can you know that YOU hasn’t been replaced by some other ‘you’?


My WILD uneducated guess is that awareness-consciousness- quilia is a fundamental
Property of the totality of all existence. (it is not a ‘physical’ property, but it belongs in
‘existence’ ) When something of physical matter gets organized in a complex enough manner
(like a brain) consciousness ‘leaks’ through and finds a home to occupy itself in the ‘physical realm’. The level of awareness and ability of expression of consciousness (quilia) is limited by
the complexity of the physical system. In that sense, we are all interconnected because the essence of every cognizing being is the one and the same. Each individual consciousness is
just localized within the physical system (body casing) and thus we get the impression that
WE are indeed different separate entities in our own right. Like a raindrop thinks it is
Different from that of the ‘other’ raindrops, but all are from the ONE ocean.

[sicophiliac]

Well damn, by far this has got to be the most interesting forum topic yet discussed on this site. You people have got to be some of the smartest I have ever come across. Making the peak oil theory all the more ominous since you are subscribe generally to its imminence.

aim9X - No I havent read the book but I can get where you are going kinda (saw a TV show on it). They discussed how rediculously impossible it would be to create a transporter device because to store the imformation of every single atom in the human body would take a computer hard drive stacking for earth to Jupiter or something like that and it would take longer then the existence of the entire universe to process all that data. Same rules would apply for replicating something as complex as a brain.

The whole issue of me waking up and still being me, how do I know it ? Well from my, or the imposters perspective we'd both be the originals since we'd both have all of the memories which in a large part make up who we are as people. But who the genuine me be would be, would be something only I could know. This begs the question what is the signifigance of our individuality anyways? Maybe our consciousness is renewing itself every nano second just as our body regenerates cells.. consciousness itself dies and regenerates with every firing neuron.

Another thing I wondered, regarding your question about why did you wake up and come to being in your very body.. why not somebody else or some different time. Well in order to even comtemplate that you have to be in existence to begin with and then its just a matter of random chance isnt it ? Or something else who knows? Maybe you did live in other times and lives but your consciousness can only manifest itself once at a time. Not reincarnation in the traditional sense but maybe something else, but maybe that consciousness itself cant be destroyed and can only burnt out in your biological brain at death and afterwards must resurface somewhere else?

Also if you believe in parallel universes maybe we reawaken into alternate selves in those parallel realities indefinatly.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Sicophiliac,

I rather believe, that our Universe will undergo so-called Thermal Death and all consciousness (no matter how elusive it might be) as well as all information about earlier stages of its existence will be erased in the process.

Information will be destroyed by singularities formation-evaporation process (when black hole is formed and then evaporate, all information about physical system forming it is apparently lost).

All barionic matter (all atoms are example of it), if escape massive black holes, will decay to leptons (eg photons, neutrinos, electrons) with huge but finited half life (apparently the most stable form of barionic matter are iron atoms). Quantum physics is quite certain about it.

Further down this line heavier leptons (say electrons) will decay to light ones (photons).

As we all know, space is expanding and expansion itself is accelerating.
Many physicists would like, if gravity could stop and reverse this process in distant future but current astronomical observations are showing that this will NOT be the case.
This is "streaching" photons and they are getting more and more redshifted (weaker and longer wave).
Sufficiently red shifted photons (at extremely long wavelenght) may equlibriate with gravitons and become simply ripples in space time.
With progress of space expansion those ripples will even out and space will become flat at T=infinity.
There will be so called virtual particles (popping in and out of existence) there (as they are now) and entire world will be governed by Heisenberg principle.

And this will go for ever and ever....

(detailed discussion of Thermal Death is beyond scope of this post but essential features are presented).

[gg3]

Agreed, this is one of the most interesting discussions on this board. Lots of smart people here. Good that we're also all getting prepared for a rough century; the world will be better off with our memes than without them.

----

Doly, interesting that you've also been aware of verbal thought processes during sleep; might be the same state as I reported (see, we're not crazy:-).

The relative quality of the output from this state probably varies as with other states: some good, some trash. What I recall was a thought process that proceeded from one point to the next along a series of reasoning, and didn't proceed to the next point until I had marked each preceding point as completed. In any case, subjective sense of "oh this is clever!" is an emotional marker and may or may not have objective validity; best to take it as another datapoint on an independent axis of measurement, rather than as an evaluation of the content of the thought process.

In my experience, some of my output from altered states is pretty good stuff, a bit of it is really excellent, and some is more or less worthless. Just like output from normal state thought processes.

(This is similar to what happens under the influence of drugs e.g. marijuana and psychedelics: an individual might think something is clever or insightful and later on realize it was not so. On the other hand, some of that stuff does stand up well, e.g. Carl Sagan got some good material while he was high, and Aldous Huxley's mescaline experiences translated well into his writing.)

---

Robski, very interesting stuff! Re. Yoga Nidra, that figures, Asian philosophy in general has a few thousand years of history studying these things and most importantly, developing methodologies such as yoga and various forms of meditation before Western philosophy started to catch up. I'll look into Yoga Nidra further when I have more free time....

You must have been having OBEs with objective correlates. That's where the proverbial rubber meets the road in terms of nonlocality; the bandwidth certainly appears to be much greater than in other types of nonlocal perception experiments. The implications of this are very interesting indeed; suggestions of Huxley's "brain as reducing-valve" analogy come to mind... (Feel free to write to me via private message on this board, I'm interested in the details...)

I'm intrigued by Monroe's Locale 2 and Locale 3 experiences. On one hand these could all be lucid dreams (and scientifically speaking, that has to be our starting hypothesis for these). But it's an interesting thought experiment to ask what would be the case if they were objectively real in some sense.

For example, in Locale 2, "thought is primary," in the sense that matter and energy are primary in our universe: the most readily observed characteristic of the place. It seems to have characteristics in common with those found in near-death experiences, and suggests a "place" where people "go" after they die. Yet the dominant paradigm says that nothing persists after death, and my preferred hypothesis says that the localized information from which individual mind emerges simply blends back into the larger information field as a whole, without retaining individual identity as a persisent characteristic.

Locale 3 appears to be something you'd see if the "many worlds" cosmology were correct, i.e. a parallel track that diverged from our universe at some indeterminate point in the past, or perhaps a parallel universe, though of course both of these are black-box hypotheses. The fact that it appeared conventionally physically lawful, and that the "people" there appeared to be conventional humans, points to a "divergent track" rather than "elsewhere," but again, no way to parse the two except perhaps with reference to visible astronomical features if any.

The methodology I'd use to go after this stuff is based on my "shared states" studies in grad school. Subject A goes to destination 1 and makes a visible change in an observable characteristic (by analogy, spray paints a picture on a wall somewhere), and then comes back. Next day, Subject B goes to same destination and attempts to find the modification left by Subject A. If Subject B finds the modifications left by Subject A, we would say that the "place" has objective characteristics.

This hinges on the "imaginal worlds" hypothesis, having to do with subjectively-accessible experiences with place-like characteristics and with objective correlates: by analogy, think of a novel: two people read it and "go" to the same "place," and one person can write notes in the margins of the book that the next person can find when they read it, etc. The book itself is an objective correlate of the subjective experience of the "place" you go to (the setting of the story) when reading it, etc.... And for y'all cynics in the room, note that we have not said that the "place" is "real" in the same sense that your kitchen is "real," all we have done at this point is examined whether the "place" has objective correlates.

(Damn!, what I wouldn't do to have a half million bucks in research money to run these studies for a few years!)

----

AIM9X:

Re. "all 6.5 billion of us are the same." I once spoke to Russel Targ about this stuff and he said basically, if you look only at your fingers you see separate objects; if you look further you see that they are all part of the same hand. Someone else I know who is related to him also used to say "there are no separate selves." To a mystic in any of the world's religions, the fact that people are bashing and killing each other over religion is insane; all these Middle Easterners who are busy hating and killing are basically doing unto themselves in the guise of others.

I've also had the experience of asking, in essence, "who would I be had each of my parents married someone else?" I tend to think that anyone who is reasonably thoughtful would have asked a similar question at some point. Age 5 is well ahead of where most of us get to this item (I think for me it was 9 or 10).

Re. "when something get organized in a complex enough manner (like a brain), consciousness leaks through and finds a home to occupy itself..." Nicely put. Consider this though. The universe at-large on the astrophysical scale can be seen as a highly complex system with communication paths that are analogous to the brain. You have transfer of matter (endorphins, neurotransmitters, etc. in the brain; quantities of rock, plasma, etc. in the universe at-large via collisions between object); transfer of energy (electrical impulses between nerve cells; light and heat and other electromagnetic energy in the universe at-large); and nonlocal information flows (nonlocal perception in the brain; entangled photons and perhaps more in the universe at-large).

Now it may be that in the universe at-large, none of this carries information per se, it's all random. But we don't know because the universe works on sufficiently large spacetime scales that we are in no position to determine if there are larger patterns, any more than a hypothetical microbe perched on a single nerve cell can observe the pattern of activity in the entire brain and correlate it with communication by the organism. Physicists say that the universe looks more like a thought than like a machine and perhaps they are intuitively getting at something that isn't quite amenable to quantitative methods at this point.

The metaphorical raindrop believes itself to be an individual as it falls from the cloud to the sea, and when it hits the ocean it believes it has merged with God. The molecules of water then evaporate and rise to form clouds, from whence they reincarnate into more raindrops, and the cycle continues. If only the ocean could speak to the sky.

----

Sicophiliac: Yes, Star Trek matter transport is completely infeasible, thus the replication of identical brains in realtime is also infeasible.

"Consciousness dies and is reborn with every firing neuron..." But the apparent continuity is more parsimonious. Do you have any basis in observation to support this?

"waking up in another body." That's an experiment I've wanted to do since I was sixteen. Take two people trained in OBE methods by e.g. the Monroe Institute. Have them leave their bodies and re-enter each others' bodies temporarily, then return. Do they pick up a decent quantity of each others' stored memories along the way? ( And, note to cynics, a positive result for retrieving other person's memories would be quite enough to demonstrate that something was going on that deserves a lot more investigation; and at worst, we've only wasted the cost of doing the initial inquiry.)

And maybe we inhabit parallel universes simultaneously...?

----

EnergyUnlimited: I have a myth for you.

Somewhere in the heavens, in a place that's 90 degrees from X, Y, and Z, the departed souls of sentient beings throughout the universe, have made a discovery.

By itself, left to its own devices, the universe will expand unto heat death. But they, the collective souls of all sentient life, could, if they tried, reverse the process and cause the universe to cease its expansion and then begin to collapse.

The discovery they have made, is that this is the ultimate purpose of life itself: to prevent heat death and trigger a rebirth. And so they exert themselves, force of will translated through invisible entanglements to reach its frail fingers around galaxies and dark matter alike, gently gathering them up, slowing their flight, persuading them to return home, to the center, to the place whence all things came.

They, the collective souls of all sentient life, knew something else: when they succeeded, they would surely and truly die, consumed in an instant, into the same primal unity as matter, energy, and spacetime. But this they also knew: they would meet again. And as near as they could determine, this same process had been going on for eternity and would continue for eternity; only the details would change from one instance to the next.

This will, as you said, go on for ever and ever....

[AIM9X]

gg3,

I like your analogy & myth of the collective souls of all sentient life.
It’s kinda poetic
I don’t believe the universe is open, we haven’t accounted for everything
Yet, I think the missing oil from the abiotic theory, once accounted for,
Will be enough to make the universe closed.


With regards to your lucid dream, OBE’s, astral travel, NDE, remote viewing
Experience etc, have you ever tried salvia divinorum? I’ve always wanted
To have hyper-real lucid dreams and total OBE’s but could never have
The discipline, patience, talent or luck to do so. I’m one of those people who
Never remember dreams, even though statistically all of us have at least several
Dreams every night whether we remember it or not. Do you have any useful
Tips to get stubborn ones like me to experience those empirical ‘experiences’ that
You and some others here on this forum seem to do so well at ease?

I’ve used things like Holosync’s binaural beats brainwave entrainment and tried mediation to ‘silence the
Mind’ etc, but know of it has ever worked to well with me.

This doesn’t really have anything to do with the current topic, but what do you think about the validity
Of Orgone/Pyramid Energy? It amazes me how ‘primitive’ societies could have discovered the
Healing and preserving power of the pyramid-pattern-form-shape. Of course, Western science will
Try to deny it, but you have to try the experiments yourself empirically to come to your own
Conclusion.


Maybe its just me and my ADD/ADHD/OCD but I’ve always had a strange quirky desire to find IT. Basically Just what IT is. Some call it ‘G-d’, others call
It ‘quilia’ ‘epiphenomenon’ , still others may call it TOE (Theory of Everything)
, I myself call it ‘the one true essence and core of reality and existence’.
Call it what you want, but I’ve been trying all my life to pin down exactly this illusive, mysterious and all evading ‘IT’. Whether this ‘IT’ is some Objective abstract, platonic entity in a purely mathematical realm, or if ‘IT’ is the fabric
Of ‘consciousness/quilia’ or the smallest unit of ‘quilia’ or whether if it is
The smallest unit of ‘stuff’, or if it is the core essence and ground state ‘soul’ of all living entities, or whether it is the illusive and often times quite ephemeral and transient emotions of true and genuine selfless sacrificial caring love, adoration and enchantment, intimacy and blissful perfection unity comfort eternal serenity, or if it’s the angelic ‘Chr-st’ Conciousness, Or even if it is the ultimate paradox of all, being that ‘IT’ is simultaneously Everything and nothing, and both nothing and everything, and then not Nothing nor everything, or a combination of all possible and even impossible adding Up to nothing at all. How do you capture and define the essence of a 'perfect' hyper surreal ultra concious moment ? How do you at that point in it-conciousness-space-time-?- define WHAT it is, HOW it works, and WHY it is what it is? How do you extract, preserve, duplicate the sensation of being, the equation and code of what makes it what it is at the instance in existence? And how can it be explained, understood, 'touched' and 'realized'???


But whatever IT is, IT eludes my definition and I cannot conceptualize it.
I cannot grasp it and I cannot understand it.

I would have given up long ago, except the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over. No just joking!
Except the irony is that this has to do with Peak Oil, this has to do
With daily life, this has to do with friendship, careers, food, sex,
Housing, religion, IT is the only thing that has to do with anything and
Everything!

Life is a zero sum game in that you can’t really win and you can’t really lose.
There are no ‘rules’ for success and no ‘definition’ of a good life lived.
When thinking about Peak Oil we need to look at the Bigger picture.
Think Jevons Paradox. Peak Oil awareness is good. Why? Because
It is more sustainable. Why do we care? Because that means humans can
Have more ‘life’. What is ‘life’ about? (I’m not talking about physical objective
‘Purpose of life’ but the subjective meaning) You see, when you ask questions such
as this you never really come to a satisfactory answer! It’s like having a eternal itch
That you can never scratch! Most people don’t care about finding just what ‘IT” is, and
I don’t blame them. But how many people pursue a career and only to find out its not what they really want after spending a good decade or so? How many people THINK they are in love with their ‘soulmates’ only to find out that they didn’t really even
Know that person at all , (or worse, they didn’t even know THEMSELVES at all)?,
How many people waste an entire life going to church and reading the Bible and fighting
Lust, fighting greed, fighting for religious wars and only to find out when they die that
God is not real? People act to soon, do to much, and in the end I can say 99.999% of it
Is in vain, done without a real purpose or meaning, done without being within the context
Of conforming to ‘IT’, which means they will eventually come to deeply regret it for
A very long time.

I realize I am ranting and rambling here, and its getting late and I need to retire, but I think this is the MOST important thing anyone could ever talk about, and yet it is almost
NEVER talked about. Instead we care more about the football game or which star is getting pregnant and the War in Isreal etc.

Gg3, you want to give me a forensic analysis of what is wrong with me?


Should I see a physcolgoist?

[robski]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')'m intrigued by Monroe's Locale 2 and Locale 3 experiences. On one hand these could all be lucid dreams (and scientifically speaking, that has to be our starting hypothesis for these). But it's an interesting thought experiment to ask what would be the case if they were objectively real in some sense.

[robski]

eep

[gg3]

I'm supposed to be programming a PBX at this very minute so I'll keep it brief (ha) and come back later (tomorrow night?).

AIM9X: If you're interested in Salvia Divinorum, use it carefully.

It's not on the controlled substances list (as far as I know; a local tobacco shop where I buy pipe tobacco has it in stock along with some other herbs) so there are no legal issues. But anyway, look up the Shulgin Assay Method: take 1/10 the apparent active dose, observe; wait some number of days, take 2/10 the apparent active dose, observe; repeat etc. until gradually working your way up to a dosage that produces the desired effects without undesirable side effects. And if you're ADHD (and for anyone else with measurably unusual brain functioning or diagnosed psychiatric issues), be particularly careful. And never drive or operate machinery after taking any exploratory compound; wait until the next day to be sure.

IMHO the preferred use of exploratory compounds is in dosages that are just sufficient to get to the threshold of the desired effects, and then use your natural mind to go the rest of the distance. This enables you to maintain enough control to back out if you get into a difficult spot. Dosages that are sufficient to produce psychedelic or disassociative responses should only be taken in sessions that include a qualified monitor or guide, see Masters & Houston 1966 for more on qualifications for guides.

Robski: Very interesting, a website for people who have frequent OBEs. Hmm! (Frequent Flyers' Club?:-)

Apparently Monroe Institute had at one time a large backlog of session tapes that were not transcribed, and I imagine they must have a huge amount of first-person data from the people who have been through their lab and training programs; how I would love to have the chance to read through that stuff...

Re. Locale 1, 2, and 3: Comes from Journeys Out of the Body, his first book (1971). BTW, Charlie Tart was also an electrical engineer before he went into the human sciences. Interesting connection between geekdom and psi research:-). Anyway... Locale 1 = the normal world, recognizable people and places from here/now. Locale 2 = a realm in which thought is primary and "individuals" exist as disembodied spirits, apparently part of the hereafter. Locale 3 = parallel worlds or other worlds which appear similar to ours but differ in details of people, places, technologies, etc. Again, all of this could be lucid dreams, and scientifically we can't say otherwise except for the Locale 1 experiences that have objective correlates. But it is most interesting to speculate....

I've read a bunch of Monroe's later stuff also, and should probably go back and re-read his stuff about phase relationships and so on. F12 if I recall correctly seems to correlate with Locale 1; it's been a while since I read his stuff so I'm slightly out of touch about the rest.

Frank seems very interesting; I'm going to sign on to that site this weekend, and if he pops back in, if you can tell him someone with scientific interests wants to communicate with him?

This stuff about phase angle is intriging; as far as I can tell, right now it's more of a model than a theory, but it could lead to a theory... Some of what Frank is describing could also be considered as a hypnagogic state, something I'm quite intimately familiar with (and you can too!, it's incredibly simple to access, I'll post instructions next time I log in here). But this raises the question of whether the hypnagogic state is a potential step along the way to OBEs. Hmm...

One reason this OBE stuff is so interesting to me is, it appears to be a case where the bandwidth of nonlocal information is much higher than normal. If that is the case, it contradicts almost everything else we know about nonlocal perception, and thereby suggests that our curent best theories (Hameroff & Penrose, Chalmers et. al.) are incomplete.

An alternative explanation would be that the bandwidth is the same, but the reduced level of cognitive noise in the brain allows more of it to be utilized, and the brain still does the extrapolation/inference routine to get the rest of the experience. From my shared states research in grad school (human subject experiments), it was remarkable how much "stuff" could be "conveyed" with very little verbal input from one person to the other, and just as importantly, how fast it occurred. I observed instances where entire scenes (including pretty far-out stuff such as details of locations) were conveyed between two individuals in very few words almost immediately. So the proverbial "trickle of bits" may be entirely sufficient for OBEs as well.

Either way is equally good as far as I'm concerned. Either we strengthen the current best theories, or we end up expanding them in some way, or discovering something that requires a new theoretical approach entirely. Either way we learn something new.

We need a better word than "nonphysical." Immaterial perhaps?:-), but seriously, ultimately it's all physics at one level or another; even information itself (see also Shannon).

Monroe et. al. all seem to believe that individual minds remain intact after death. This differs from my own hypothesis about information dispersing back into a larger field (raindrop into the ocean), but those guys are at least reliable observers (whatever the ontological status of their experiences); what we need is replication in detail between multiple observers. This is where I think my shared states research protocols may be useful.

Frank seems to be getting at a "multiple universes" model, with one common Ground of Being in what he calls Focus 4. His "simultaneous model" also seems to accord with scalar time. More to talk about...

Robski, I have to sign off now, but I'd like to get in touch in more detail. Write to me via the Private Message function on this board, and let's exchange email addresses and phone numbers. I have free long distance within the US so if you're here I can call you any time and we can talk at length.

[gg3]

Robski: Oh, I see you're in Australia... hmm, no free phonecalls to there, but we can do email... (OK, me go back to work now!)