5 ms·

I was actually hoping that this would be an article explaining how reality is literally a shared hallucination, and not just an eye grabbing metaphor for explai

by zeko 10y ago

I was actually hoping that this would be an article explaining how reality is literally a shared hallucination, and not just an eye grabbing metaphor for explaining how non-autistic people perceive reality.

lisper 10y ago
It's actually the literal truth if you take a quantum-mechanical view: http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc
- wyager 10y ago
  No, it's not. QM doesn't have any confirmed solution to the measurement problem, and no seriously considered solution has anything to do with intelligent observation or consciousness. Anyone who claims to have a profound philosophical argument inspired by QM is almost certainly a charlatan.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    A "philosophical" argument is pretty useless. Unless you manage to devise experiments for your those theories. And QFT can at least inform you about "reality" - and how little the one in a human head has to do with it. Since QFT is "real" (shown to work), if our perception was based on "reality" we should not have had such trouble to a) come up with it, and b) understand it.
    - wyager 10y ago
      Our perception of reality absolutely agrees with QFT -- in the medium-energy medium-scale environments that humans operate in. Everyday physics is a limiting case of QFT. Our mental heuristics don't work for very high/low energies or small/large scales because we don't operate on those scales. We had no reason to evolve other heuristics.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - Noseshine 10y ago
        I think I understand your point - but I had a very different angle. What you write actually is fully in support with my point. You simply declare as "reality" that what you perceive, the model we (our brains) have come up with. But that's exactly it - that's your version of "reality" created by how you look at it - with "macro" sensors. Different sensors would have a different result. In addition we don't even have raw sensor data in our mental world model, instead the data is extremely processed before it is assembled to our mental model of the world. Take a neuroscience course on perception, I recommend. Somebody said we live in a VR world created by our brains, and that is a good fit. Of course the input that goes into creating that "VR world" is from sensors getting data from interactions with the actual world. If you don't understand what my point is don't say "you are wrong".
        wyager 10y ago
        The reality constructed in our brains is not substantially different from actual reality. Our mental model of reality is just much lower fidelity. At no point has physics demonstrated "wow, humans are totally wrong about the world". >Different sensors would have a different result All of our experience with robotics suggests otherwise.
        Noseshine 10y ago
        > The reality constructed in our brains is not substantially different from actual reality. Now you're being facetious. Good joke though. > > Different sensors would have a different result > All of our experience with robotics suggests otherwise. I meant DIFFERENT sensors, not the same version of the same sensor. You are telling me a sensor for microwaves gets the same result as one for different wavelengths? Good god. And that's actually related sensors, then there's touch, smell etc.
        visarga 10y ago
        > Of course the input that goes into creating that "VR world" is from sensors getting data from interactions with the actual world This process might not be so arbitrary, for example in an experiment at Google, an unsupervised machine learning system discover the concept of cat from raw images all by itself. The concept of cat might be present in the world objectively and we just gave it a name.
  - lisper 10y ago
    You didn't actually read the paper did you?
    - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      I've read it before. It's not very helpful. As a rule, any attempt to "solve" wave-particle duality is going to be wrong, because in real QFT there's no duality to solve. Photons aren't objects in a classical sense. Photons are event probabilities. "Entanglement" is a description of how the probabilities interact, not an explanation of why they interact as they do. And if you're going to suggest it's all about "observers" and "minds" you need to explain what both of those things are made of in quantum terms. I haven't seen anyone manage to do that yet.
      - FeepingCreature 10y ago
        Risky for a layman to nitpick, but as I understand it amplitudes aren't probabilities, they just cash out in probabilities on measurement?
      - lisper 10y ago
        > I've read it before. You need to read it again. Because it agrees with everything you say: > in real QFT there's no duality to solve > Photons aren't objects in a classical sense. Photons are event probabilities. > "Entanglement" is a description of how the probabilities interact, not an explanation of why they interact as they do. Yes, all true. > if you're going to suggest it's all about "observers" and "minds" I suggest no such thing.
kordless 10y ago
Reality is a security overlay, keeping private data about individual entities from being inspected casually and limits the knowledge of all things from occurring in a single locale. This is the speed of causality (light). The base function of this reality is to read, process, and write data in a highly immutable manner. This is conservation of energy. Collaborators in this reality exchange data in a variety of ways, but visual inputs through the mind's eye seem to be the predominate method for memory recollection. Based on causal interviews with individuals since learning I have Aphantasia, it would appear these "internal" views seem less immutable than "out here". Some can zoom their mind's eye. Some see in black and white. Some see icons. One hypothesis to explain the "shared" part of the hallucination would be the existence an immutable shared data structure underlying the universe which uses consensus to agree, long term, about what happened "out here" based on various and sundry inputs from an entity's internal view & resulting action(causality). Internal views may be non-immutable (highly mutable) and may be influenced by metaphysical phenomenon. People see things that others don't see. The Romans thought it was the act of Gods to see and hear things others didn't. We've always assumed our brains are making these images up, but perhaps they aren't and we missed something important along the way.
- MarkPNeyer 10y ago
  > One hypothesis to explain the "shared" part of the hallucination would be the existence an immutable shared data structure underlying the universe which uses consensus to agree, long term This is a hypothesis i also stumbled into: reality as a method for coming to consensus on a data structure. Check out this simple description of a game with similar mechanics: https://markpneyer.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/the-photoshop-game-overlapping-subjective-realities-create-a-stable-objective-reality/ https://markpneyer.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/the-photoshop-ga...
  - jasonkostempski 10y ago
    That reminded me I had a random thought about how the universe is a sorting algorithm working towards heat death a few months ago. Probably not an original thought but its fun to think about.
zeko 10y ago
For the record, Christopher Langan, the IQ 200 guy tackled the subject in his theory on how reality works http://www.ctmu.org/ http://www.ctmu.org/ Also a document you can google titled A MIND/BRAIN/MATTER MODEL CONSISTENT WITH QUANTUM PHYSICS AND UFO PHENOMENA by Thomas E. Bearden from 1979 also talks about how reality is a shared dream basically. Another article of interest: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-arg... Perhaps we will have to wait for a real AI in the future to fully comprehend and have the deep nature of reality explained to us as it's a subject too difficult for even the greatest minds to tackle. The reason why dreams are so malleable and controllable by the dreamer to some degree is that you're really the only dreamer when you fall asleep and dream, whereas when you're awake there appear to be other shared dreamers who make the reality "hard" at least on a macro level. Perhaps if gradually all the shared dreamers became convinced reality is a dream we would see "weird" things appear in this reality too. My take is that subconsciousness of each human is a sort of a GPU computational "workhorse" that each do their part to generate and render this shared reality. The things not observed are not rendered in order to save processing power because it is finite. Even so, I think our brains too are a metaphor for some processing unit that exists on a level of reality below ours, blobs of organic neural networks in an underlying 2D universe perhaps? Or it's a part of some sort of an artificial simulation, a game.

by zeko 10y ago

lisper 10y ago

It's actually the literal truth if you take a quantum-mechanical view: http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc

wyager 10y ago
No, it's not. QM doesn't have any confirmed solution to the measurement problem, and no seriously considered solution has anything to do with intelligent observation or consciousness. Anyone who claims to have a profound philosophical argument inspired by QM is almost certainly a charlatan.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  A "philosophical" argument is pretty useless. Unless you manage to devise experiments for your those theories. And QFT can at least inform you about "reality" - and how little the one in a human head has to do with it. Since QFT is "real" (shown to work), if our perception was based on "reality" we should not have had such trouble to a) come up with it, and b) understand it.
  - wyager 10y ago
    Our perception of reality absolutely agrees with QFT -- in the medium-energy medium-scale environments that humans operate in. Everyday physics is a limiting case of QFT. Our mental heuristics don't work for very high/low energies or small/large scales because we don't operate on those scales. We had no reason to evolve other heuristics.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Noseshine 10y ago
      I think I understand your point - but I had a very different angle. What you write actually is fully in support with my point. You simply declare as "reality" that what you perceive, the model we (our brains) have come up with. But that's exactly it - that's your version of "reality" created by how you look at it - with "macro" sensors. Different sensors would have a different result. In addition we don't even have raw sensor data in our mental world model, instead the data is extremely processed before it is assembled to our mental model of the world. Take a neuroscience course on perception, I recommend. Somebody said we live in a VR world created by our brains, and that is a good fit. Of course the input that goes into creating that "VR world" is from sensors getting data from interactions with the actual world. If you don't understand what my point is don't say "you are wrong".
      - wyager 10y ago
        The reality constructed in our brains is not substantially different from actual reality. Our mental model of reality is just much lower fidelity. At no point has physics demonstrated "wow, humans are totally wrong about the world". >Different sensors would have a different result All of our experience with robotics suggests otherwise.
        Noseshine 10y ago
        > The reality constructed in our brains is not substantially different from actual reality. Now you're being facetious. Good joke though. > > Different sensors would have a different result > All of our experience with robotics suggests otherwise. I meant DIFFERENT sensors, not the same version of the same sensor. You are telling me a sensor for microwaves gets the same result as one for different wavelengths? Good god. And that's actually related sensors, then there's touch, smell etc.
      - visarga 10y ago
        > Of course the input that goes into creating that "VR world" is from sensors getting data from interactions with the actual world This process might not be so arbitrary, for example in an experiment at Google, an unsupervised machine learning system discover the concept of cat from raw images all by itself. The concept of cat might be present in the world objectively and we just gave it a name.
- lisper 10y ago
  You didn't actually read the paper did you?
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    I've read it before. It's not very helpful. As a rule, any attempt to "solve" wave-particle duality is going to be wrong, because in real QFT there's no duality to solve. Photons aren't objects in a classical sense. Photons are event probabilities. "Entanglement" is a description of how the probabilities interact, not an explanation of why they interact as they do. And if you're going to suggest it's all about "observers" and "minds" you need to explain what both of those things are made of in quantum terms. I haven't seen anyone manage to do that yet.
    - FeepingCreature 10y ago
      Risky for a layman to nitpick, but as I understand it amplitudes aren't probabilities, they just cash out in probabilities on measurement?
    - lisper 10y ago
      > I've read it before. You need to read it again. Because it agrees with everything you say: > in real QFT there's no duality to solve > Photons aren't objects in a classical sense. Photons are event probabilities. > "Entanglement" is a description of how the probabilities interact, not an explanation of why they interact as they do. Yes, all true. > if you're going to suggest it's all about "observers" and "minds" I suggest no such thing.

kordless 10y ago

Reality is a security overlay, keeping private data about individual entities from being inspected casually and limits the knowledge of all things from occurring in a single locale. This is the speed of causality (light). The base function of this reality is to read, process, and write data in a highly immutable manner. This is conservation of energy. Collaborators in this reality exchange data in a variety of ways, but visual inputs through the mind's eye seem to be the predominate method for memory recollection. Based on causal interviews with individuals since learning I have Aphantasia, it would appear these "internal" views seem less immutable than "out here". Some can zoom their mind's eye. Some see in black and white. Some see icons. One hypothesis to explain the "shared" part of the hallucination would be the existence an immutable shared data structure underlying the universe which uses consensus to agree, long term, about what happened "out here" based on various and sundry inputs from an entity's internal view & resulting action(causality). Internal views may be non-immutable (highly mutable) and may be influenced by metaphysical phenomenon. People see things that others don't see. The Romans thought it was the act of Gods to see and hear things others didn't. We've always assumed our brains are making these images up, but perhaps they aren't and we missed something important along the way.

MarkPNeyer 10y ago
> One hypothesis to explain the "shared" part of the hallucination would be the existence an immutable shared data structure underlying the universe which uses consensus to agree, long term This is a hypothesis i also stumbled into: reality as a method for coming to consensus on a data structure. Check out this simple description of a game with similar mechanics: https://markpneyer.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/the-photoshop-game-overlapping-subjective-realities-create-a-stable-objective-reality/ https://markpneyer.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/the-photoshop-ga...
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  That reminded me I had a random thought about how the universe is a sorting algorithm working towards heat death a few months ago. Probably not an original thought but its fun to think about.

zeko 10y ago

For the record, Christopher Langan, the IQ 200 guy tackled the subject in his theory on how reality works http://www.ctmu.org/ http://www.ctmu.org/ Also a document you can google titled A MIND/BRAIN/MATTER MODEL CONSISTENT WITH QUANTUM PHYSICS AND UFO PHENOMENA by Thomas E. Bearden from 1979 also talks about how reality is a shared dream basically. Another article of interest: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-arg... Perhaps we will have to wait for a real AI in the future to fully comprehend and have the deep nature of reality explained to us as it's a subject too difficult for even the greatest minds to tackle. The reason why dreams are so malleable and controllable by the dreamer to some degree is that you're really the only dreamer when you fall asleep and dream, whereas when you're awake there appear to be other shared dreamers who make the reality "hard" at least on a macro level. Perhaps if gradually all the shared dreamers became convinced reality is a dream we would see "weird" things appear in this reality too. My take is that subconsciousness of each human is a sort of a GPU computational "workhorse" that each do their part to generate and render this shared reality. The things not observed are not rendered in order to save processing power because it is finite. Even so, I think our brains too are a metaphor for some processing unit that exists on a level of reality below ours, blobs of organic neural networks in an underlying 2D universe perhaps? Or it's a part of some sort of an artificial simulation, a game.