When the Sleeper Wakes

"We have a rule... we never free a mind once it reaches a certain age. It's dangerous, and the mind has trouble letting go."

"It is not good to overwhelm another person with argument even when he is wrong and you are right. Yet it is also not right to give up easily, saying 'I am wrong,' when you have every reason to believe you are right. The best way is to drop the argument naturally, without pressing the other person or falsely admitting that you are wrong. If you don't listen to his arguments and don't let them bother you, he will do the same and not become angry. This is something to watch carefully."

"Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds: do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire."

(For T, who keeps trying to understand this all because it's me who's doing it.)

Had a wonderful conversation yesterday about consciousness, the nature of reality, and modeling experience in 5 dimensions. By 'wonderful conversation' I don't mean that I 'won the day', but rather that it was gratifying to engage someone who was willing to challenge his (fairly well-entrenched) ideas about the universe. Mind you, this person watched The Primacy of Consciousness talk that I mentioned earlier, and concluded "I've decided that I believe in an objective reality." Okay.

How interesting to come upon you now reading Reading the Enemy's Mind, which is a substantial tome about the Stargate remote viewing project. The seeds of many previous conversations are germinating, perhaps, eh?

The major challenge for this person (and, I assume, for a great many others) is reconciling these ideas with the Bible. [Editorial Aside: You cannot productively engage a person of religious faith about things which appear to challenge that faith unless you are familiar with the faith and its doctrines.] Fortunately for this conversation, abilities like this are discussed in the Bible, so we are not sidetracked by disputing the reality of the abilities (according to the Bible), and are free to move onto the implications of such abilities. What do these things tell us about the nature of God, the nature of time, the nature of the universe?, etc. Though irrationality (in the form of accepting the Bible as primary/absolute truth) was present, the conversation was ultimately more productive than what one could have with a die-hard skeptic, whose irrationality is failing to see the implications of the records of these abilities that have existed throughout human history. Neither party has (presumably) had direct experience with such phenomena, but based on a few words in an old book, one of them is willing to engage the idea, while the other clings to dogma of a different kind...

I decided long ago that, for my own sanity, this would have to be a Johnny-Appleseed endeavor. Plant a seed if the ground appears fertile, foster it if the opportunity presents itself, but move on if nothing appears to be growing. Sometimes something does take hold, and blossoms when you least expect it.

The Primacy of Consciousness

"Among scientists are collectors, classifiers, and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics."

With the current level of chatter on paradigm shifts, artificial brains/AI, etc. being what it is, it seems like a good time to throw this excellent talk into the mix. It was originally given at a Physics of Consciousness conference in 2004. (How did I miss that one?) It's worth watching in its entirety; don't cut corners and watch the edited versions. ;).

Go on and watch it. I'll update this post with discussion points later.

Catching the Light

"If you are a physicist, you won't find it unusual to be confronted with a problem much too difficult for you to solve..."

"For the rest of my life I will reflect on what light is!"

(This one's for PR and BJ.)

Some time ago I mentioned that I wanted to post all the questions that I had accumulated during the process of trying to explain certain experiences. But in the end there were really only a few questions that stood out. To me, they represent the crux of understanding the connection between mind and matter, and how mind emerges from matter and/or matter emerges from mind, as well as explaining the experiences that prompted my query in the first place. These questions reflect our/my current state of knowledge about the correlates of consciousness; the most substantial correlates that we've currently identified are specific energy dynamics within the brain, therefore it makes sense (to me) to focus on units of energy and their behavior. Most of my other (physics-related) questions can (currently) be subsumed under one of these over-arching themes.

What is the relationship between entanglement and the Pauli exclusion principle? (I'm currently trying to make sense of this, this and this, among other things, like boson-fermion correspondence.)

What enforces the dynamics underlying the Pauli exclusion principle, and what, if any, relationship does this have to certain dynamics of conscious experience that appear to forcibly exclude specific states?

Here's a special question for the psi-entists... Why is there still a time-dependent element in certain interactions that we like to label 'non-local'? Our understanding of entanglement is presented largely as 'spooky action at a (spatial) distance' in (essentially) zero time. But unless I've missed something, the unification of space and time suggests that entanglement should also occur across a temporal distance in (essentially) zero space. What would that look like? How would it show up in conscious experience?...

DISCLAIMER: Occasionally I'm tempted by the idea of information as a primary unit, and certainly information-transfer dynamics are a large part of what I look at, but I have a hard time ignoring the idea of a substrate upon which information is stored/transmitted.

ADDITIONAL DISCLAIMER: As much as I'd sometimes like to throw up my hands and give in to some kind of mystical proclamation that 'everything is light expressing itself', I'm not ready to do that either. I think that there are very real dynamics that can tell us important things about exactly how we are connected to each other, and how to use those dynamics in beneficial ways. I think that those dynamics are worth exploring. In detail.

Back From the Future

"Half my life I sacrificed
But I only came to party tonight."

"The idea was that ripples of the measurements carried out in the future could beat back to the present and combine with effects from the past, like waves combining and peaking below a boat, setting it rocking on the rough sea."

Those of you playing along at home might want to take a look at the April 2010 issue of Discover magazine. It highlights the work that Jeff Tollaksen and Yakir Aharonov have done on isolating/quantifying the effects of information from the future on the present.

If the arrow of time "may be not just an illusion but a lie," is it really so hard to believe that a mind, properly trained, can recognize subtle differences in its own states that reflect/reveal the influence of the future? Retrocausation is not a new idea (Aharonov himself has been 'pushing it for four decades'), and neither is the idea that a mind, adept at pattern recognition, might see (and exploit) the same types of correlations between past and future within itself. "This isn't airy-fairy philosophy - these are real experiments" applies to psi research as well as quantum physics.

"It is upsetting philosophically... All these experiments change the way that I relate to time, the way I experience myself." Amen, brother.

But Tollaksen manages to keep free will alive in the process - "You simply have to put it down to random error in your apparatus." "The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Aharonov. I've got to think a bit more about that one...

Time Enough At Last

This is either the start of something big, or the end of something beautiful.

Having lost my protected status as 'society's asset', I'm beginning to look for a home for this research. There just isn't time enough right now to do all the things that need doing (like reading somebody's new book on time). Ironically, this search has forced me to confront the fact that theoretical modeling is neither my forte, nor a great source of enjoyment for me. (It is, however, what scientists are supposed to do after they run their experiments. Test and refine.) Me? I tend to get too hung up on what doesn't work, rather than celebrate what does work.

What I am really good at (and what I actually enjoy) is teaching/training. I've done it in a variety of settings and subject areas, so I know that it's not so much the topic as it is the process. (And not everyone has the special kind of patience needed to deal with wayward students. ;) So I'm looking to land somewhere that can provide excellent teaching/training opportunities.

The other thing I'm good at is asking questions. For some time now, I've wanted to collect and post all the questions I've come up with along the way. Had I 350 years, I might have a shot at answering them all, but more than likely the answers are obvious to someone who has a different background. And now that blogger has enabled jump breaks, I can post all the questions in this blog, and update the list on a regular basis. Look for that post to appear soon.

[Confidential Aside: Don't get too excited; you still haven't accounted for a critical aspect of the actual experience. But I will try to celebrate a minute or two of vindication for/with you. ;) ]

Flashforward (Pt III)

It's not about watching the egg unbreak itself. It's about erasing/overriding the memory of having seen the egg break in order to observe the egg in another (unbroken) state.

(This one's for P, who broke her leg today.)

Over the years I have told you many stories. And I've waited and waited for somebody to get it. Because when it finally clicks, you'll realize that the applications go way beyond what I could tell you six posts into this story.

We have repeatedly discussed memory as the anchor of a particular outcome/observation - the thing which enables consistency in/of experience. I've discussed the idea of undoing an outcome that you don't like. I've vigorously tested these ideas, and am now waiting for someone else to do the same. Occasionally I grow impatient because I see possibilities that I need help in testing and exploring. For example...

Imagine a future where first responders to an serious injury are able to administer drugs that block the patient's encoding of the permanent/traumatic memory the incident. (Not necessarily that drug, but you get the picture.) Of course, blocking the patient's memories is not enough to ensure s/he is not seriously injured, but the patient's memory is the most likely (and probably the strongest) anchor to the injured state/outcome. First responders would also be trained in the kind of progressive information acquisition and framework selection that facilitates state selection, thereby giving them the best chance to choose the best possible outcome. They can also employ a deliberately-fuzzy encoding of their own observations - one that is more easily overridden if it presents information that conflicts with a desired outcome.

I've talked about the medical applications of this theory before, and I hope you'll think about this post the next time a skeptic whines about how 'prayer' has never helped an amputee regrow a limb. While I certainly don't claim that that is possible, I'll take any edge I can get on reducing the probability of a serious injury/illness. And I happen to think that the best time to exercise that edge is in the first observations relating to the injured state.

Flashforward (Pt II)

"Every group of observers establishes a kind of local reality. It cannot deviate too far from consensus, from what the muses have ruled must be."

I'll subtitle this segment of futuristic flash-forwarding AI and Other Uberobservers. Among the many things I am not an expert in is artificial intelligence (AI), so take this post for what it is - an interesting speculation on what constitutes an observer.

There are currently 541 papers on the philosophy of artificial intelligence in the online repository of papers on consciousness. I have read exactly none of them. But a year or so ago, as I was writing about origins from a 5-dimensional perspective, a nagging thought took root and has stayed with me every since. Consider the following...

For example... At what point is the substrate of our consciousness advanced enough to act as an agent in the selection of outcomes? I am reminded of a study on baby chicks and other animals that were able to influence a random number generator so that target systems behaved in a way that benefited the animals. This suggests that even a human infant's consciousness may play some role in the selection of states. Could a fetus similarly impact a randomly-controlled system, provided it were able to interact with such a system? At what age could a fetus begin to exert an independent effect upon such a system?

Along the same lines, one might ask any number of questions about the optimal conditions of consciousness (COC) from which a noticeable influence upon random system might be obtained. Answering any of these questions requires, of course, that the question of multiple observers be settled definitively. (For what it's worth, and though it may leave me vulnerable to charges of ignoring a competing hypothesis, I believe, for various reasons, that the final model must be one that describes and accounts for multiple-observer interactions.) If our experience of this universe is a culmination of the effects of multiple observers, then our individual ability to choose outcomes may be severely limited at points of suboptimal COC.

Now take that same line of questioning and carry it to the other extreme... At what point does something that has access to the same observations that we do, and which has the ability to reason become an 'observer' in the sense that its effects on outcome selection must be accounted for? What attributes does an AI have to possess before it becomes a competing observer?

This question forces me to examine what I believe it means to be an observer, and what I believe about the importance/function of the substrate that connects us to other observers.

Would an AI need only to interact with us, using the same observations, in order to be an 'observer of influence' (OI)? Or would it also need to have the same substrate that we do as a base for its calculations? Is being an OI a function of what one can do 'mentally' with the observations/data one collects, or is it a function of some type of non-local connection we share to each other and/or some fundamental state of reality that I half-jokingly call The Smear? Or would it necessitate elements of both? This is not an appeal to dualism, but rather an attempt to understand the connection between substrate and the functional, predictable aspects of 5-dimensional navigation and multiple-observer interactions.

Let's presume we could determine an AI's status as an OI in much the same way as the baby chicks were tested for their ability to influence a randomly-controlled outcome. If strong AI is the name given to AI that strives to mimic such critical aspects of human-ness as consciousness, self-awareness, and sentience, then perhaps the strongest AI would be one that would directly compete with us in determining outcome states. Would a strong AI with the characteristics listed above be an OI by virtue of possessing those functions, or would it need to be based on a substrate that allowed for certain types of quantum interactions? (Yes, I said the 'Q' word. Hey, if you are willing to acknowledge that the warm, wet environment of plants can take advantage of quantum physics, then you really can't argue with the idea that quantum processes may play a fundamental role in consciousness.)

It's also worth asking another question... Given that most of us are mostly ignorant about any effects of other observers upon us, would we even recognize an uberobserver among us?

This definitely requires more thought...