Reality is a Shared Hallucination (1997)
reactor-core.org
reactor-core.org
Searching around, this appears to be Part VIII of a collection from Howard Bloom[1] entitled "History of the Global Brain" that looks to have been written over the course of 1997 for Telepolis[2]. It looks like these writings were put together in a book, published in 2000, called Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century[3].
There are a lot more links, images, formatting, and other stuff in the original articles. You can start with Part I of this series, called "Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain," still available online[4].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Bloom
[2] - http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/2/2227/1.html
[3] - http://www.abebooks.com/9780471295846/Global-Brain-Evolution...
> Yet you know sure as you were born that there's a broader world outside ... [you know a bunch of other things about reality] ... At this instant, reading by yourself, where do these realities reside? Inside your mind. Memory in a very real sense is reality.
Bloom is absolutely right that memory is central to all this. But it's a category error to say that just because your knowledge of reality is through memory, that memory is the only realitiy.
Ok, it's logically possible there is no external reality, and all that exists is just my (Ratnapala's) memory. But even then the distinction remains. Then, the lying medium (memory) is real, but the content of those memories is not a reality.
When you vividly remember an event from a decade ago it most likely did not happen like you remember. They've done longitudinal studies on people's memories of things like JFK assassination and 9/11. People swear they remember it clear as day but it never really matches up to what they were actually doing...
Memories are bunk, is my point. Only media can really record history.
I don't trust media because Berenstein bears is the proper spelling [0]. I died when I was 6 years old after an asthma attack and shifted into another timeline where I survived. It shares most of the same details but likes to throw a few typos in to check if I'm paying attention. I'm not sure the purpose of these tests, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation#Mandela_effect
/s
While confabulation is a severe problem with human memory, I don't trust media because history is written by the winners.
these two statements are both true (as far as we can verify in this limited human existence, anyway):
1. there is a world beyond an individual's consciousness.
2. an individual can only ever experience the world through their own consciousness, and therefore their own senses and memories.
Bloom's statement contradicts neither of those things. He is simply acknowledging that from an individual's own subjective point of view, their own consciousness is really the only thing they can work with in a direct sense. That isn't a denial or negation of exterior reality. For practical purposes though, if we wish to examine consciousness we are pretty much stuck in examining our own consciousness, since that's the only one we have direct access to.
Alternatively, someone can eat LSD without sensing it. But, that LSD is still going to have a profound effect.
Of course the human mind (which is NOT identical with the brain, not a good idea to conflate those terms) is influenced by the outside world. Sense organs (and the sensations in consciousness that arise due to them) are the means through which external reality causes changes in consciousness.
Why is it wrong to call that "senses"? How is that abusing the term? It's the literal meaning of the word.
First off, what does that even mean? Surely your own eyes directly stimulate your optic nerves which directly stimulate your visual cortex. Is there a different kind of stimulation you had in mind?
I'm not sure what you mean by "a stroke can do things without influencing memory or triggering anything you can detect". Do you mean that people sometimes become unconscious during a stroke? Maybe. So what? The effects of a stroke are most certainly detectable afterwards though. I'm really just not sure what you're trying to get at.
These are not in the two category's proposed earlier, thus memory and observation fail fully describe what's going on.
Bloom's discussion was a highlighting of the ways in which cultural transmission of events imbues the sensory perception and recollection of memory in every person in society with a certain kind of filter which he describes by analogy as if it was some sort of group mind.
my point of elaboration was meant to emphasize that when we examine the contents of consciousness, we necessarily are limited to examining our own consciousness qualitatively. Reporting on the consciousness of others is only ever capable of producing yet another stimulus in our own input stream that we would interpet the same way we interpret any other exogenous stimulus. Despite that, this does not imply solipsism. Only an admission of the limitations we are faced with in this examination.
> we necessarily are limited to examining our own consciousness qualitatively
Err no. It's just as much a physical things as a rock or your toenails.
PS: The modern CPU your using to read this is to complex for any one person to understand. It has billions of connections all doing important things some of which don't work. But, it was designed so each connection is intended to do something understandable. Further, it's way to fast to understand what's going on at a second by second basis, but every individual interaction is predictable. So, that CPU is to complex to understand, but that does not mean your limited to looking at it qualitatively.
Both are physical things. An abacus does not undergo long term change when you move the beads. But, the arangment of beads can have meaning. Brains and CPU both treat the intermediate state as something meaningful and act on it.
"To see things in a new light is a cognitive challenge; to adjust the language to the new insight is nothing more than a bothersome technicality." - Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking
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.
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-ga...
[1] - https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
The fact people can actually do this in their minds has blown my mind - metaphorically. I'm genuinely still reeling from this.
(edit: then as a note, you might find this interesting: https://medium.com/@jedgar/my-broken-mind-24bb98a1e793)
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-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.
Anyone who claims to have a profound philosophical argument inspired by QM is almost certainly a charlatan.
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.
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.
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.
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".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel
>In addition we don't even have raw sensor data
Of course that can be turned around to point out that our senors (for machines) only provide us with very filtered information. It just seems to be 'raw' compared to the information available to our conscious minds.
Intelligence isn't the ability to gather massive sums of information, but instead to filter it.
There is simply too much information around you. As a biological creature with a limited energy budget and a limited lifespan this is a big problem. As we know from computing, two things can save massively on your energy requirements. Good algorithms and early pruning of unneeded information. For example interpretation of UV and IR wavelengths has been unimportant for the continued survival of our species, and for most of the human timeline it has been abstracted away. We knew something existed because we were affected by it, but without science we created things like magic and gods to explain it. How right or wrong our mental model (subjective reality) is really doesn't matter much until we reach a critical junction of events were the fitness algorithm kicks in, survival of the fittest as Darwin coined.
We have come to the point of evolution where we realize 'reality' is much larger than our set of filters and learning algorithms. We also realize our algorithms are not well adapted for the massive increase of knowledge and rate of change we are experiencing.
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.
> The concept of cat might be present in the world objectively
>Different sensors would have a different result
All of our experience with robotics suggests otherwise.
> The reality constructed in our brains is not substantially different from actual reality.
> > Different sensors would have a different result
> All of our experience with robotics suggests otherwise.
Howard is a piece of work, he used to always sit in the exact same chair in a Brooklyn cafe every night for years. It is now closed and I wonder where he ended up. I haven't given his work a chance, I'll admit, mainly because of that outrageous bio and the content of some of his work. I'd prefer to remember him as that eccentric guy in the coffee shop.
LOL
However as the individual matures ( talking about humans here ) this should fade away, and critical thinking should take its place, but apparently doesn't really happen.
"One of the processes important in perception is the comparing of current input with similar past experience.
When we see a friend, a memory image of his face is presented to our consciousness along with the
sensation of his actual present appearance.
This memory image (which can be called a schema) blends with the current sensation, so that the
perception is a combination of the two. The relative strengths of each source of information probably
vary from person to person."
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Neural-Basis-Free-Will-Criterial/dp/0...
http://www.pbs.org/the-brain-with-david-eagleman/episodes/wh...
Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear.Just like invisible gods :)