Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Condensed Chaos

"A mind went forth to form worlds: now order reigns where chaos once held sway."

I have a lot of thoughts on object boundaries that have accumulated on various bits of paper over the last week and a half. I should probably take a stab at forging them into something cohesive, lest they continue to plague me. :)

(By the way, when I say 'thoughts', I generally mean 'questions', so this may not appear to be accomplishing much, other than clearing my desk.)

Many of the topics covered at the conference triggered for me at least some association to the idea of object classification and object boundaries. (And, naturally, that which you are thinking about becomes a filter for all incoming information, so in the end this may prove to have been a vicious cycle of thoughts that leads nowhere.) Mysticism, per se, was not a huge topic at the conference, though various terms and ideas associated with it were discussed - ego dissolution, non-dual awareness, all-is-one, transcendence. Various states associated with psychedelic experience were also discussed. A key feature in most of these states is a radical alteration of how object boundaries are perceived. 'I am the plant/animal/universe.' Which leads me to wonder...

What are object boundaries? A purely cognitive construct with no corresponding counterpart in the neurological or neurochemical make-up of the brain? Doubtful. Where then are object boundaries located? What changes are triggered when I see a moth sitting on the tree bark, as opposed to just tree bark? The visual input has not changed. Higher order information must come into play, but how is it integrated with the visual input to form a unified experience of two objects where before only one was perceived?

Why do I bother to mention these things? Because it occurred to me at some point that the nature of the representation of object boundaries within the neural, neurochemical, or electrophysical architecture of the brain might allow for a degree of fluidity not unlike that seen in field dynamics. (No, I haven't mastered field dynamics. Don't get excited.) Object boundaries attached to a given field of input can fluctuate to accommodate or define different portions of the input. The limiting aspect in the shifting of object boundaries appears to be the speed at which attention can shift... In fact, are there reasons to believe that there is a dissociation between a change in perceived object boundaries and a change in attention? (No, I haven't mastered the attention literature. Or the object classification literature. Don't get excited.)

Is there a predictable manner in which perceived object boundaries can shift? A series of steps that cannot be circumvented, and which therefore might be a clue as to the dynamics of object perception and the physical correlates of object classification? Do these dynamics resemble field dynamics?

It also occurred to me at some other point to wonder what the relationship was between our perception of time, and our perception of changing object boundaries and/or changing relationships between object boundaries (motion)? Can these be dissociated in a meaningful way?

Alright, if you are still with me, rest assured that all this is not completely unrelated to hacking the smear. Our physicist friends will be the first to tell you that one cannot ignore time or gravity. And in order to violate a rule, one must understand where it comes from... ;)

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

A Separate Reality (Pt II)


"We therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we use abstract generalilties, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experiences."

I saw a picture similar to this one in a talk at the conference. If you look carefully, you see a moth sitting on the tree bark. (The other moth was actually more 'hidden' than this one, but I couldn't find that picture online.)

The picture prompted some thoughts, which culminated in this statement being written in my notebook...

When the boundaries between two objects are indistinguishable, such that you do not/cannot recognize that they are two separate objects, then gravity is not apparent and cannot be inferred. When the same structure is identified as two objects, then it becomes necessary to identify a force or forces that keeps them/holds them at the relevant proximity to one another.

The issue of object classifications and boundaries came back to me again and again at various points this past week and in various contexts. But perhaps none was so startling as this one... What would we know about gravity if perceived reality weren't divided into 'separate' objects?

Monday, April 14, 2008

Non-Dual Awareness

"To be nobody but yourself in a world that is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being ever fights and never stop fighting."

Well, I'm still on conference time, so...

I wanted to blog a couple of times during the conference (mostly bitching about what you absolutely should not do when giving a talk), but I haven't yet reached the point where I feel compelled to travel with a technical appendage that would allow me to do that.

I have to say, it's like a drug... being able to soak up and untangle the workings of so many exceptional minds in real-time. I will probably be experiencing withdrawal this week... I did, however, get enough new material/ideas to keep me blogging for a little while longer. I even had a couple of moments when, through a misty haze, I could almost see the solution to a particular problem. (And yes, I know there are many problems. And no, there was no psychedelic usage involved in these insights. ;)

The weird thing about this past week was that I spent the better part of it in a state of dual awareness... (Non-dual awareness is a target state for enlightenment.)

Many times I found myself thinking - 'Oh my God, I know nothing!' Other times it was 'Geez, 75% percent of the people in this room know why that's wrong!'

I found myself thinking about the fact that I exist somewhere between the tenured professor, with the academic background and the scientific skills, and the person who just wants to talk about consciousness because it's 'so damn interesting!' (The fortunate (or unfortunate) thing is that consciousness is a topic that almost everyone thinks about. This means however, that there is a such a diverse range of language and schemes used to describe what people are trying to say (even among the scientists) that it is sometimes difficult to talk to people who do not share your perspective.)

I found myself at various times thinking of my role as a teacher, and at other times, as a student who has much to learn in many areas.

I found myself walking the borders between wanting to participate in the experience and wanting to objectively study it.

The week was full of these types of dual I-don't-know-where-I-belong moments. I should have kept a better list...

Thursday, April 3, 2008

A Kind of Magic

"The bell that rings inside your mind
Is challenging the doors of time."

Yesterday I amused myself (okay, distracted myself) by creating a story. In keeping with the scholarly (cough) purposes of this blog, I'll edit out all the juicy details about the protagonist - Simon, the physicist. And just so no one confuses this with a fully-formed theory about the way things really are, we'll say that Simon lived on Hypothetical World Gamma-12 (HWG-12).

Let's talk a little bit about physics on HWG-12...

Time on HWG-12 was defined by consistency, and deviations from it. To be more specific, time on this world had no direction on its own; rather, it was arbitrarily defined in units that reflected nothing other than the rate at which the field mechanics that gave rise to consciousness were able to process change. This made a kind of sense to Simon, who recognized that without consistency and change, what would we know about time?

Few knew this great secret about time - that its passage was entirely relative to the rate at which consciousness processed a change in state. You see, quantum physics on HWG-12 was much the same as it is on our world... The inhabitants of HWG-12, though only able to observe matter on their world in a single state, had, by experimenting with photons, deduced the existence of a greater state of matter, which they had dubbed 'the smear'.

As it turns out, the subjective passage of time on HWG-12 was nothing other than the bias that each instance of state selection introduced into the system that gave rise to consciousness.

(Consciousness on HWG-12 was recognized as a kind of interface with the smear, and once the inhabitants of HWG-12 came to peace with the idea that they were something less than the center of everything, they could more objectively examine the mechanisms that gave rise to their experiences of consciousness.)

This influence of one particular field configuration upon the others, this bias introduced by a single subjective moment in time, this differential that was perpetuated somehow and reflected back in other moments of consciousness, was not dependent upon time as subjectively experienced by the inhabitants of HWG-12. From their subjective perspective, time moved in a single direction. (Well, most of the time.)

(It's worth noting that this subjective experience of time's arrow did not mesh with what they had deduced about the mechanics of the smear.)

Yet occasionally this bias, which was modified with each instance of state selection, could also be deduced from subjective experience to be moving backward in time from the subjective future...

Which led to questions...

Why does the preponderance of experience reflect a single subjective arrow of time?

If time's arrow reflected nothing other than a bias in 'future' state selection, what, if any, other biases existed, and how could they be manipulated?

Simon was intrigued...