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February 10, 2005
What Is Reality?
Does reality exist? Do our perceptions accurately map the world on the other side of our senses? Can we know with any certainty that the “out there” matches what’s “in here"?
Physics tells us that the “out there” is an interference pattern of quantum magnetic fields. Our individual interfaces give it form, solidity, and meaning. Our human sensory apparatus, constructed from shared genetics, provides us all with a roughly equivalent representation of the interference pattern “out there". We all see the sun and the moon and buildings and cats, but cultural and psychological factors layer associative relationships on top of the shared forms. My sun is paternal and reminds me of desert sand and circling hawks. Another’s sun might be harsh and dessicating, inspiring melanoma. The interface becomes personalized. The reality we rely on is an exposure on the neurocortex painted by associative emotional complexes.
Language is an abstraction layer between the interface and the mindbrain that allows us to classify and communicate. As language is acquired it quickly replaces the direct apprehension of the thing “out there” with a simplified data structure. Words become a painting of the thing; an occasionally effective representation of the garbled mass of signals coming into our heads, transduced into patterns, and modulated by neurohormones washing through associative networks. The next time you think about a piece of fruit try to do it without using words. Language defines the reality that we know.
Reality with a capital R is something far greater over which we hold only marginal dominion. For us ultraviolet colors are not a part of our reality. Yet bees and other insects see the world awash in such frequencies. Most mammals engage a world of smells everpresent, yet we generally acknowledge only the more pungent odors, usually related to food. Dogs smell cancer. “Out there” is a field of probability, a fractal hologram, a quantum wave function. Reality is the interface of a billion billion perceptual organisms, collective, witnessing. Human reality is a subset, narrow in perception but rich in meaning.
When we still the mind and let words settle and cease, what we are witnessing is the naked interface between our sensory networks and the quantum field. Dust motes hanging in a sunbeam. Soft notes echoing off shiny metal chimes. A brook babbling gently. The steady pulse of blood beating through our veins. These miracles are assembled within our heads. Modifying or shutting down the sensory apparatus through meditation, sensory deprivation, exogenous chemicals, or otherwise, can strip away even the interface and reveal the singular holographic quantum field, the interference pattern of the hologram.
The remarkable quality of entering the singularity of quantum consciousness is that consciousnous does not cease in such a state. Self-awareness does. Duality does. But consciousness persists. Information can be conserved and brought back into the kingdom. The body is simply a vehicle to which consciousness attaches and is momentarily restricted by. When we think of Uncertainty and the notion that consciousness is required to collapse the wave function and cause probability to occur, we assume that means that some being like ourselves must be opening every subatomic Schrodinger’s Box in order for reality to even exist. And it may be so. Or it may be that there is indeed a cosmic/atomic consciousness that pervades everything like a unified field, incessantly causing the “formality of actually becoming". Something we are at present unable to fully comprehend. Indeed, our definition of consciousness is limited by our consciousness itself. How can we imagine what we cannot imagine?
Posted by LVX23 at February 10, 2005 12:50 AMWow, a very clear exposition of your reality philosophy.
I was having a little trouble mulling over this concept the other day.
I was trying to come to grips with the relationship between Reality and reality and you've hit the conceptual nail on the head for me here.
Chris,
Question for you: Can there exist a quantum state of consciousness (Learys Circuit 8), that is self aware? I don't mean 'self' as in human ego, rather simply as being conscious of being conscious.
In my most far-out transcendent, furthest from planetside trip, human consciousness, I still retained at times an awareness of being a point of awareness having awareness. I would call it self-consciousness, although this 'self' was galactic in scope.
Posted by: Paul at February 10, 2005 10:06 AM..perhaps awareness itself needs to be viewed as a tool possessing un-limited potentials and dimensions and levels rather than the very semantically flawed concept that the word 'awareness' possesses -
ergo -- an actor such an keanu reeves has played a variety of various roles throughout his brilliant and sublime career: and while to some he remains neo of the matrix triumph and to others he remains ted from bill and ted's excellent adventure: and to others he will be remembered as john constantine in the upcoming film constantine: he remains keanu reeves at a core level but that core level has many other dimensions that reflects keanu as an evolving entity from his birth until his death arrives...
that awareness itself must become perceived as possessing not just one level of completeness or incompleteness but as completeness and incompleteness:
..a major city has x-million of people who occupy x-million of rooms in terms of housing and while it can be agreed that a house has a roof: windows: doors: floors: walls: and such these homes and houses are going to all possess different aspects therefore awareness itself represents a home and a house that has endless aspects as the home and the house defines and doesn't define the occupants while the occupants of the home and the house defines and doesn't define the home and the house.
awareness itself then needs to be seen as an entity in perpetual evolution and not just a word to hang a 'definitive' meaning on -
awareness represents the home and the house that learns how to repair itself and how to alter itself to meet the needs and the demands of the occupants living within....
We imagine what we cannot imagine by being away from imagining. In this definition consciousness is the awareness of a multitude of things. But in the awareness away from seeing 'certain things' it is possible to imagine the unimaginable. Only in words does it seem to be unbelievable, which it really is in words. The, in words, definition of true consciousness is the regression of a multitude of non-physical effects.
Posted by: Daniel at February 10, 2005 01:45 PMI think that both quantum and universal consciousness is driven to become self-aware. It's like two sides of the same coin acknowledging the shared space between them. The Absolute reflects upon itself through Creation. In the depths of quantum consciousness self-awareness expands out from the observer to include the observed. All is Self. I am that. This is why psilocybin causes things around you to reach out and grab your attention like they're physically pushing their way into your brain. When you break open your head the whole universe comes pouring out. It was all in there to begin with.
Posted by: lvx23 at February 11, 2005 11:48 PMThat's why I've always preferred the term transjective to describe it, a state of being that is beyond subject/object, internal/external. And I think it is for that reason that I think that consciousness is a fundamental, an integral part of all that is. The irony and frustration of that 'truth' is that it seems to be impossible to 'prove', it can only be expereinced. Because of this, that is why I believe science in it's current incarnation has limits. Now the science of inner exploration, where it is our own consciousness that is the tool, now we're talking!! :)
That was the point I was trying to make way back when with this post:
http://www.futurehi.net/archives/000094.html
Posted by: Paul at February 16, 2005 10:26 PMI've always felt that the best explanation for the effects of DMT was that it immediately suspended or reset the "collapser" inside of us. Then for the next 20 minutes the collapsing restarts and builds, beginning with primitive neon forms and moving gradually to more and more recognizable spaces and images, until reality has finally collapsed itself back to normal.
It's interesting to see how we find wave phenomena so attractive. Surfing is one example, another is music.
I personally subscribe to the concept of reality creation, that is, the idea that each of us is making up our world, in realtime, 24/7, in the exact same manner that we brew up dreams in realtime while we're asleep. In fact, if this were not the case then we would be performing a far more sophisticated act while we're sleeping than when we're awake, which isn't logical.
Therefore, life must be a dream, or more accurately, a network of trillions of dreams. We are constantly popping in and out of each other's dreams, but there is no one central dream that is more true than the rest. This is the ultimate in decentralization and explains why the Internet maps us so much better than the old hierarchical systems which are now whithering away.
An interesting consequence of this point of view, is that there is not a single "earth", but rather as many different "earths" as there are experiencers. While these different "earths" may be partially interconnected, the idea that there's only one is an illusion. Therefore, it's impossible to make statements like "the world is becoming more polluted" since that might only refer to a specific collection of "earths", but certainly not all of them.
This point of view radically eliminates the notion of bad guys. If we have a dream that someone punches us, we don't wake up and sue them. We realize that we called them there to act in our dream and that they represent some kind of conflict within ourselves. The concept of reality creation forces us to extend this same logic to normal waking reality.
It also implies that negativity comes entirely from within, which is another view that I've taken to heart. For me, if I find myself feeling life is a struggle, or that there are forces of darkness in the world, then I know it's time for me to do some strong therapy. A few hours of processing and the feelings of boundless optimism return and I can see that the negativity was all mine, and had nothing to do with the field of infinite possibilities that quantum physics has revealed to exist all around us.
Cheers,
D
once the head cracks open wide enough one cannot get the conciousness back in again.acid,peyote,mushrooms,if taken in sufficient dosage will tear one from thier ego and smack the words from one`s head.that`s why the world is a different place apon your return,only returning to normalcy over time.we live in a semantic reality.a word-formed world.those who control the meaning of the words control reality.reality tunnels.
here is a short list of semantic realities;
jesuit.
microsoft.
fox news.
university.
wall street.
nasa.
codified realities complete with dogma,priests and game-rules.
robert anton wilson asks that we drop the "is" from our language and replace it with "seems to be",like the sky seems to be blue.that way you don`t look like an idiot if you are wrong and you give others room for thier point of view.it`s all opinion,after all.nasa`s opinion is that the skies of mars and titan are red.some may doubt that.