5 ms·

> Could you go into a bit more detail? I'm not super lucid on it yet. Just recently encountered the experience and still getting a feel for what it is, but I'l

> Could you go into a bit more detail? I'm not super lucid on it yet. Just recently encountered the experience and still getting a feel for what it is, but I'll try to share what I can. > What does CartesianSelfAssertion feel like? A bit disorienting, actually. Though that could just be a function of it's current novelty for me. It has aspects of feeling like waking up, or remembering something crucial, or turning a corner and finally finding your keys. To philosiphize a bit, I'm tempted to say it's like recurively having a realization, "Oh! This is the real deal... Oh wait, that was just a dream, THIS is the real deal... Wait, no, THIS is it..." which seems quite utterly silly. And completely independent of all that, I also feel like I'm spinning clockwise, or at least at the center of some spinning thought-sensation storm. And the angle of 30 degrees is in the mix as well for some reason. I have no idea what to make of either of these. Then there's also a part of me that wonders if all the above is just nonsense, because it just sounds so tripped out. lol > How often is it called---on the order of 40ms per OP, or less frequently? Honestly, timing the interval never really occurred to me until reading the OP's comment. In my limited experience, there's definitely some bit of flexibility. In extreme cases I've even been able to halt the process altogether for tens of seconds or so, but modulo doing weird stuff, my gut feeling is to say somewhere on the order of 100ms---40ms definitely doesn't clash with my experience. > Do you notice this only during/after meditation? It's been most blatant in some of my more recent meditation sessions. Durning the normal course of the day it's mostly way in the background, though I can also sort of "consciously access" that awareness space to some level. Though the mathematician in me feels like "conscious access of sub-awareness processes" should be a contradiction.

psandersen 8y ago
Thanks for sharing, I can definitely relate. Good to know others have the same experience. I've also been trying to think how this can be used to design AGI, the goal being a machine that is able to recursively reason about it reasoning about itself etc... it would be logical if this was in discrete blocks that contained some representation of the previous state so as to avoid just going in circles. Maybe this is part of the reason why we so easily get distracted when observing ourselves observing ourselves - without some noise the mind would just endlessly go meta without any insight.
justinpombrio 8y ago
Thank you for sharing. > A bit disorienting, actually. Though that could just be a function of it's current novelty for me. It has aspects of feeling like waking up, or remembering something crucial, or turning a corner and finally finding your keys. Ok, that's definitely what I experience too. I have also described it as "disorienting" and "like waking up". I like your name, CartesianSelfAssertion. I might steal that. The weird bit is that I experience this much less frequently. Like on the order of minutes or hours instead of ms. And typically after but not during meditation. During meditation I'm busy catching my mind wandering off. > And completely independent of all that, I also feel like I'm spinning clockwise Ok that bit's a little weird :-). > but modulo doing weird stuff, my gut feeling is to say somewhere on the order of 100ms---40ms definitely doesn't clash with my experience. One idea I had for measuring this (because I can't read about something without jumping to how to measure it) is to try to compare the spacing of the moments against the peaks of an auditory sine (or similar) wave: http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ --------------------------------- Here's an excerpt from my meditation journal, about what it feels like to be in this state of mind (the period of time just after CartesianSelfAssertion): A change in perspective. Before: past present future --------->--------->---------> After: # - concrete (senses) @ - abstract (memories; hypotheticals) past present future @ ← # → @ past ↓ @ ← # → @ present ↓ @ ← # → @ future It's a chain of links, but you're only ever one link at a time. There's a lack of sense of self, probably due to the isolation of the links. (This has now happened a _lot_ of times. Why does it not feel ordinary? Jesus fuck. Ok, I guess I'll just run with it.)
ddingus 8y ago
The spinning at an angle is very likely you reaching self awareness with enough fidelity to become aware of your own inner ear noise floor. Like being in a silent room eventually relaxes your ear muscles and lack of other stimulation will bring out whatever birdies, tones, noise in your hearing, no movement and concentration can bring out same in your inner ear. As we age, these artifacts tend to accumulate. Happens in eyes too, but manifests a bit differently. What happens there is we need more photons to register the same sensory brightness levels. When we are in the dark for a while, the retinal noise floor can be more easily seen, like when star gazing. Secondly, blood flow, other things can be seen in that noise floor. That happens better in consistent, lower light, but not dark environments, in my experience. All of these are normally filtered in much the same way we filter our nose out of our visual field, unless we concentrate awareness there. How do I know? Well, we know nothing. But, my experiences come from three things: I have a very good sensory recall. I know what it used to sound, hear, feel like with high fidelity. My own meditative activities. Some built in degree of self awareness. When I relax a bit, those filters come down fairly easily for me. Have always been that way and was confused by it more than once growing up.

psandersen 8y ago

Thanks for sharing, I can definitely relate. Good to know others have the same experience. I've also been trying to think how this can be used to design AGI, the goal being a machine that is able to recursively reason about it reasoning about itself etc... it would be logical if this was in discrete blocks that contained some representation of the previous state so as to avoid just going in circles. Maybe this is part of the reason why we so easily get distracted when observing ourselves observing ourselves - without some noise the mind would just endlessly go meta without any insight.

justinpombrio 8y ago

Thank you for sharing. > A bit disorienting, actually. Though that could just be a function of it's current novelty for me. It has aspects of feeling like waking up, or remembering something crucial, or turning a corner and finally finding your keys. Ok, that's definitely what I experience too. I have also described it as "disorienting" and "like waking up". I like your name, CartesianSelfAssertion. I might steal that. The weird bit is that I experience this much less frequently. Like on the order of minutes or hours instead of ms. And typically after but not during meditation. During meditation I'm busy catching my mind wandering off. > And completely independent of all that, I also feel like I'm spinning clockwise Ok that bit's a little weird :-). > but modulo doing weird stuff, my gut feeling is to say somewhere on the order of 100ms---40ms definitely doesn't clash with my experience. One idea I had for measuring this (because I can't read about something without jumping to how to measure it) is to try to compare the spacing of the moments against the peaks of an auditory sine (or similar) wave: http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ --------------------------------- Here's an excerpt from my meditation journal, about what it feels like to be in this state of mind (the period of time just after CartesianSelfAssertion): A change in perspective. Before: past present future --------->--------->---------> After: # - concrete (senses) @ - abstract (memories; hypotheticals) past present future @ ← # → @ past ↓ @ ← # → @ present ↓ @ ← # → @ future It's a chain of links, but you're only ever one link at a time. There's a lack of sense of self, probably due to the isolation of the links. (This has now happened a _lot_ of times. Why does it not feel ordinary? Jesus fuck. Ok, I guess I'll just run with it.)

ddingus 8y ago

The spinning at an angle is very likely you reaching self awareness with enough fidelity to become aware of your own inner ear noise floor. Like being in a silent room eventually relaxes your ear muscles and lack of other stimulation will bring out whatever birdies, tones, noise in your hearing, no movement and concentration can bring out same in your inner ear. As we age, these artifacts tend to accumulate. Happens in eyes too, but manifests a bit differently. What happens there is we need more photons to register the same sensory brightness levels. When we are in the dark for a while, the retinal noise floor can be more easily seen, like when star gazing. Secondly, blood flow, other things can be seen in that noise floor. That happens better in consistent, lower light, but not dark environments, in my experience. All of these are normally filtered in much the same way we filter our nose out of our visual field, unless we concentrate awareness there. How do I know? Well, we know nothing. But, my experiences come from three things: I have a very good sensory recall. I know what it used to sound, hear, feel like with high fidelity. My own meditative activities. Some built in degree of self awareness. When I relax a bit, those filters come down fairly easily for me. Have always been that way and was confused by it more than once growing up.