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Ya I'm 44 and have had multiple personal experiences around the metaphysical that science simply has no explanation for. Now that I'm older, I realize that it's

Ya I'm 44 and have had multiple personal experiences around the metaphysical that science simply has no explanation for. Now that I'm older, I realize that it's the models that are wrong, not reality. So I'm open to substantially more spiritual explanations than I used to be. I'd even go as far as the say that stochastic and emergent behavior is what forms our reality, not determinism. And that consciousness itself is the emergent behavior of the chaos working at the lowest levels of reality. At the end of the day, emotion and love and magic and all of that woo woo stuff is at least as real as atoms. But we don't have good language today to talk about the physics of our own personal realities. The things that are true in my life may not be true in yours, and vice versa. We just assume that the true reality is the one we all agree with, but I have not found that to be the case. So we talk past one another about, I don't know, critical race theory or whatever the flavor of the week is. When it's really about, how is my reality impacted as I learn the truths of your reality and our shared reality? If I'm wrong because I don't know something, does that mean that my reality is wrong? What happens if I make decisions over years of my life based on incorrect information? What does correct mean if it diminishes my quality of life? Can I be correct without hurting anyone else? Some of these questions in the end aren't answerable. In my own reality, I struggle with having to eat meat because that's what my body was designed to do. I carved a rotisserie chicken last night, divided the breast into portions and consumed it. There was almost no separation between the chicken's life and my own. How do we solve something like war when an awful lot of people haven't even stopped to think about the violence their own survival requires?

can16358p 5y ago
About the first paragraph... I know this might go a bit off topic. I used to be a hardcore-non-spiritual until the recent few years of scratching the surface of the possibility of there might more more to reality than we see. I'd love to hear any of your experiences that led you to turn to metaphysics, if it's appropriate to share of course. I also sometimes experience phenomenon which can't be eliminated away with physics, or weird coincidences that can't be explained with confirmation bias or selective attention, and trying to pinpoint a pattern, so anything that you'd think worth sharing in that direction would help.
- krypton2k 5y ago
  Could you please detail some of these phenomenon?
  - can16358p 5y ago
    Weird synchronicities, sometimes just too much. As I've said in the comment, I know about confirmation bias and selective attention. I always try to be completely skeptic and try to dis and explain with psychological/behavioral phenomenon, until I reach a point that I can't, over and over. Even with the knowledge of our brains are subconsciously processing incoming information from everywhere and considering the possible bias by the fact that I'm seeking for something and want to believe, I still find many of the synchronicities with no possible scientific/statistically remotely plausible explanation. I won't call it "quantum" or any buzzword. I don't call it anything. I'm still skeptic and I just see some patterns emerging and believe there's something beyond what we have discovered about life and consciousness.
- zackmorris 5y ago
  I have no special knowledge, but ya I think that coincidence without obvious causation might be the basis of magic (spirit, consciousness, meaning, etc). It's also the basis of quantum mechanics. Pauli and Jung noticed the uncanny similarities a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity Basically, science can only puts bounds on this stuff, it can't predict the outcomes of stochastic/emergent processes. Which is where I believe free will resides. Which might sound like hand-waving, except that it's fundamental: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy People have tried to explain away stuff like quantum entanglement and failed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory Basically it comes down to: either the quantum decision was made before the experiment started and stored in hidden variables, or there's a nonlocal connection over a 4th space dimension which we don't understand, or the quantum way of talking about these things is the only description that works. Which unfortunately (fortunately?) seems to be the case. Maybe someone who groks this can explain it with better words. My gut feeling is that this is the physical manifestation of incompleteness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor... Anyway, I'm starting to believe that macro-scale effects like social interactions follow the same rules as quantum mechanics. Probably what we'll find is that it's waves and energy all the way down. Like if every person is an antenna, and our interactions play off one another in a vast multidimensional space we aren't aware of, like ripples on a pond. I suspect that this is what's going on inside atoms, and a real-world effect of this is that quantum computers will be limited by noise, and building a simulation of the Hamiltonian and running it would give the same result as flipping coins a bazillion times. This might be yet another hidden variables interpretation though so I'm almost certainly wrong. Probably. In my own life, I mostly journal any synchronicities, which tend to happen about every 5 days for me, then weeks or months of nothing. I have about 50 written down, but feel that I've only caught maybe 10% of them. In the last entry, I wore a bowtie to an event to try getting outside my comfort zone, then we came home and the TV was showing the scene where he makes the guy with the goldfish and bowtie leave the office in Wolf of Wall Street. Now what are the odds of that, since I've never worn a bowtie before and may never again? I've had more intense happenings like that, but unfortunately a lot of them are negative around tragedies so I don't want to get anyone down. Mostly bad feelings before bad things happen. I think that has a lot to do with my disposition, so I've started watching more for angel numbers, and more love-based synchronicities, which seems to help. I believe that our sensitivity to the quantum chaos foam or whatever it is gets more attuned the more we tune out, dissociate, meditate, etc and turn the volume down on our egos. So anyone can do this stuff at any time, it's just that western culture doesn't really have a place for it yet.
ianmcgowan 5y ago
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real." - Niels Bohr. If we're at the point in physics where string theory is the answer to "what are atoms?", it doesn't seem that woo-woo to ascribe some kind of reality to consciousness and the other abstracts that come with it. Unfortunately, as with string theory, there doesn't appear to be any empirical proof.
bee_rider 5y ago
What do you mean by 'metaphysical' here? I'm under the impression that metaphysics is a pretty deep branch of philosophy -- more like Descartes saying "how do I know I can know things", less like us saying the physics is probably magic. You seems to have landed on a particularly intense form of relativism, which is a fine way to run your life, particularly if it leads you to be open to the experiences of others. But I think it is different from metaphysics (although I'm not very educated in philosophy, generally). With respect to atoms -- the standard of 'realness' science seem to use is whether we can make reliable predictions about the behavior of a thing, and atoms seem to have put quite a few points up on the scoreboard compared to the woo-woo stuff. Now, if a real philosopher were here they'd probably point out that all of science suffers from the 'problem of induction' and that gathering a preponderance of evidence doesn't really prove anything, but c'mon we're mostly engineers at best here. Our models aren't wrong, they are just limited to a subset of the entire universe of possible phenomena (the ones people will pay to exploit, obviously).

can16358p 5y ago

About the first paragraph... I know this might go a bit off topic. I used to be a hardcore-non-spiritual until the recent few years of scratching the surface of the possibility of there might more more to reality than we see. I'd love to hear any of your experiences that led you to turn to metaphysics, if it's appropriate to share of course. I also sometimes experience phenomenon which can't be eliminated away with physics, or weird coincidences that can't be explained with confirmation bias or selective attention, and trying to pinpoint a pattern, so anything that you'd think worth sharing in that direction would help.

krypton2k 5y ago
Could you please detail some of these phenomenon?
- can16358p 5y ago
  Weird synchronicities, sometimes just too much. As I've said in the comment, I know about confirmation bias and selective attention. I always try to be completely skeptic and try to dis and explain with psychological/behavioral phenomenon, until I reach a point that I can't, over and over. Even with the knowledge of our brains are subconsciously processing incoming information from everywhere and considering the possible bias by the fact that I'm seeking for something and want to believe, I still find many of the synchronicities with no possible scientific/statistically remotely plausible explanation. I won't call it "quantum" or any buzzword. I don't call it anything. I'm still skeptic and I just see some patterns emerging and believe there's something beyond what we have discovered about life and consciousness.
zackmorris 5y ago
I have no special knowledge, but ya I think that coincidence without obvious causation might be the basis of magic (spirit, consciousness, meaning, etc). It's also the basis of quantum mechanics. Pauli and Jung noticed the uncanny similarities a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity Basically, science can only puts bounds on this stuff, it can't predict the outcomes of stochastic/emergent processes. Which is where I believe free will resides. Which might sound like hand-waving, except that it's fundamental: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy People have tried to explain away stuff like quantum entanglement and failed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory Basically it comes down to: either the quantum decision was made before the experiment started and stored in hidden variables, or there's a nonlocal connection over a 4th space dimension which we don't understand, or the quantum way of talking about these things is the only description that works. Which unfortunately (fortunately?) seems to be the case. Maybe someone who groks this can explain it with better words. My gut feeling is that this is the physical manifestation of incompleteness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor... Anyway, I'm starting to believe that macro-scale effects like social interactions follow the same rules as quantum mechanics. Probably what we'll find is that it's waves and energy all the way down. Like if every person is an antenna, and our interactions play off one another in a vast multidimensional space we aren't aware of, like ripples on a pond. I suspect that this is what's going on inside atoms, and a real-world effect of this is that quantum computers will be limited by noise, and building a simulation of the Hamiltonian and running it would give the same result as flipping coins a bazillion times. This might be yet another hidden variables interpretation though so I'm almost certainly wrong. Probably. In my own life, I mostly journal any synchronicities, which tend to happen about every 5 days for me, then weeks or months of nothing. I have about 50 written down, but feel that I've only caught maybe 10% of them. In the last entry, I wore a bowtie to an event to try getting outside my comfort zone, then we came home and the TV was showing the scene where he makes the guy with the goldfish and bowtie leave the office in Wolf of Wall Street. Now what are the odds of that, since I've never worn a bowtie before and may never again? I've had more intense happenings like that, but unfortunately a lot of them are negative around tragedies so I don't want to get anyone down. Mostly bad feelings before bad things happen. I think that has a lot to do with my disposition, so I've started watching more for angel numbers, and more love-based synchronicities, which seems to help. I believe that our sensitivity to the quantum chaos foam or whatever it is gets more attuned the more we tune out, dissociate, meditate, etc and turn the volume down on our egos. So anyone can do this stuff at any time, it's just that western culture doesn't really have a place for it yet.

ianmcgowan 5y ago

"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real." - Niels Bohr. If we're at the point in physics where string theory is the answer to "what are atoms?", it doesn't seem that woo-woo to ascribe some kind of reality to consciousness and the other abstracts that come with it. Unfortunately, as with string theory, there doesn't appear to be any empirical proof.

bee_rider 5y ago

What do you mean by 'metaphysical' here? I'm under the impression that metaphysics is a pretty deep branch of philosophy -- more like Descartes saying "how do I know I can know things", less like us saying the physics is probably magic. You seems to have landed on a particularly intense form of relativism, which is a fine way to run your life, particularly if it leads you to be open to the experiences of others. But I think it is different from metaphysics (although I'm not very educated in philosophy, generally). With respect to atoms -- the standard of 'realness' science seem to use is whether we can make reliable predictions about the behavior of a thing, and atoms seem to have put quite a few points up on the scoreboard compared to the woo-woo stuff. Now, if a real philosopher were here they'd probably point out that all of science suffers from the 'problem of induction' and that gathering a preponderance of evidence doesn't really prove anything, but c'mon we're mostly engineers at best here. Our models aren't wrong, they are just limited to a subset of the entire universe of possible phenomena (the ones people will pay to exploit, obviously).