My best summary of it: consciousness is primal, every bit of matter has perspective, every interaction has experience, the body you're 'occupying' is having a particularly complex and long-lived experience.
As for your question of why this one, well, someone's got to be having this one. As for why not another, there's no saying 'you' won't have another 'after' this experience ends, but if 'you' had them in a perfectly undifferentiated way that'd be a different experience again, and as stated, someone's got to be having this one.
This doesn't solve the "hard" problem, it's still quite mysterious how exactly and at what point neuronal mappings become sentient, but it does leave you without having to wonder the particular questions you asked there.
It answers very clearly these questions posed by the person I was responding to:
> why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none.
It definitely does not answer the "hard" problem of consciousness, which is what you're alluding to and which I specifically and explicitly said it didn't answer.
Your actual stated questions (why am I me and not someone else, etc) are in no way part of the "hard" problem's formulation, and are indeed easily answered by materialism as I noted.
Perhaps take a look at the wiki article on the hard problem: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
My hunch is that this is related to the question of why we are experiencing this particular moment in time and not another one in the past or in the future, is related. If you believe in the many words interpretation of quantum mechanics, one can also say why I’m experiencing this particular branch.
They've made a good book to help people get the concept. It's called "the gateless gate" and it's a series of seemingly non-sensical stories, that you're supposed to think about and try to see the meaning behind it.
If you want to give the exercise a try, it's on wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gateless_Gate
Do you know of any modern translations that frame the story in actual modern references?
For example, when somebody touches someones hand in your view, your mirror neurons activate just like you yourself have been touched. Then your nerve endings in your hand send a signal to cancel the effect, but sometimes you still get a tingling from the neural confusion depending on the strength of the signal (e.g. watching someone getting kicked in the balls or russian daredevils walking on top of highrises). But, if there is no nerve endings there, there is nothing to cancel the signal, so you do experience another persons feeling of being touched as your own. Therefore, the only thing that separates our consciousness is literally our skin and our nerve endings on it.
Sorry for the dump.
But what I find cool is that the lonely social ape can also look up the antenna and find all the security it could want - where I think some religions err is that when this happens, if you keep identifying with the insecure social ape rather than the many-antannaed-deiform it can interfere with the smooth communication between the two.
No! We can explore it by calming our mind and our senses with well established methods which are known for thousands of years (the ancient tradition of yoga for example, an do not think twisting and bending, no this goes MUCH further!!)
And then, when the senses are turned of (by practice or "outside help" e.g. think tank) and the mind is silenced, then we start to explore what lies beneath!!
They say: "When all the movements in the mind have ceased to exist, the knower dwells in his real nature" (or something along the lines, in the Yoga Sutras, roughly 1500 to 2000 years old )
Although nobody has a clear answer on this subject (globally it seems, not only in the local one I'm exploring), the variety of answers and debates it has led to has been very exciting. On the other hand, I am a bit disappointed that none has been able to bring anything more insightful than I could find via exploring the possibilities by digging around on Wikipedia.
In fact, one question that I had been wondering, which is, at what point does an analogous conscious experience appear in terms of the quantum to human scale of complexity, has been asked already in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F by Thomas Nagel. I still wonder what it is like to be a planarian, or a fly on the wall of a board meeting (audio fidelity must suck).
I think the problem with the argument is that you are giving way too much credit to consciousness. You are giving an opinion on its uniqueness from the point of view of a Conscious entity that itself hasn't grasped it's own Consciousness.
The really exciting part of all the latest AI tech, you can prove 'state of a neural net' is the 'state of experiencing the phenomena'.
For Brains. They can now do an MRI on a brain, and re-construct what image it is thinking about.
So, State of Neurons = Phenomenal Experiences.
The Phenomena you are saying is not physical, is really the physical state of the brains neurons.
But if you have one person reporting an experience and can capture the 'physical state'. And then take someone else and have them report an experience, and capture the 'physical state'.
And they match, then you can start making the relationship.
Then if my mind is captured, and I'm thinking something that correlates, then I can 'assume' i'm experiencing what the other person is.
It will always be imperfect. I agree the experience of each person is unique.
But-> The whole problem of the 'eye-can't-see-the-eye' means the eye doesn't exist is also kind of just playing with logic.
So just because we can't embody the experience of another person, doesn't mean we can't reason about how that experience is being generated.
But it's even worse than you say, because those relationships are generated purely within the mind, we don't find them outside the mind, so really all physicality is an illusion, it's all ultimately internal.
Kind of what was described in 'Being You', by Anil Seth. Our reality is a 'controlled hallucination'. Though I don't like the terminology because it is to easily misunderstood.
But. Guess, I fall on side that we can still study how Phenomena is generated internally. And still be able to understand it. Just because we can't experience the exact same phenomena as someone else, shouldn't mean we can't figure out how it is generated.
You don't really believe that. If you did, you would be fine jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, or something even more fatal.. because the physical "doesn't matter", only the internal.
So yes I do really believe it!
You don't want to admit it, but you're basically confirming that you do understand that you can not stand apart from the physical realm. You are playing mental gymnastics to pretend you're in touch with some higher knowledge and understanding... but you're still constrained to the physical world, just like the rest of us.
It seems kind of like you can’t really accept that this is how I understand reality. I have a tip for you: others’ views will be much clearer to you if you don’t assume they’re lying about believing them. Maybe they really do see differently to you
She didn't have to have any thought about the bullet. She didn't have to think ANYTHING about the physical world. Nothing about her state of mind affected the outcome.
Physical reality is independent of what we think of it.
> Maybe they really do see differently to you
I appreciate you think you see it differently. But your actions show you don't believe it as deeply as you think you do. You are a prisoner of the physical realm, not an inhabitant of a higher, more spiritual, plane. What good is it saying something is imaginary, if it affects everything you do, and you can't escape it. That sounds like something very real indeed.
The point of the video, is that she had zero awareness of the bullet. It all happened in 2 seconds without attracting her attention. I'm sure if you're honest, you can think of 1000 other examples as well.
Physical reality proceeds without your thoughts, it will continue after you and I die, it doesn't need our feelings or thoughts to exists and persist.
> Yogachara philosophy of Buddhism says...
Tony the Tiger says, "They're great!!"
Sorry, I simply don’t believe in this.
It can't account for something like the fossil record, that existed before any human was on the planet; other than to say, "I dreamed that up in my own special imaginary fiction!!"
Perhaps the primal nature of the world isn't physical matter, but to pretend that we create reality with our mind, is not only silly, it's dangerous and flies in the face of how everyone, even those who claim to believe otherwise, actually act in the world.
Promoting these types of wrong understandings really distract people from further learning.
This turns people away from further investigations that might help them.
People that might be aided in their suffering by learning more about buddhism, read some weirdness posted about "buddha can earth bend, whoooo, I learned about buddhism from watching Avatar, I'm a bender", and are completely turned away.
Read and meditate further before promoting something that is incorrect.
Also the fact you said meditate makes me think you are quite ignorant about Buddhism. Most Buddhists don’t meditate, the idea that most do is a western misconception. I’m a pure land Buddhist, which is the most popular in the world, and we mainly engage in recitation and offerings and bowing
EDIT and I understand it may just be ignorance but it’s highly offensive to characterise traditional Mahayana Buddhist beliefs as some kind of children’s show. This is effectively slandering the Dharma
To tell people that buddhas have supernatural powers, and take that literally, is turning people away from the teaching.
'Faking' his appearance? Being omnipotent in this physical world? Able to manipulate this world?
You are supposed to understand that those are metaphors. Stories, not truth.
Language is imperfect and only points the way, not to be taken literally. A core teaching is how imperfect language is, and that even the sutras should be only taken as a rough guide and eventually abandoned when they no longer serve a purpose.
You can cite sutras, that doesn't mean you understand them. I fear that publishing these concepts as if an authority is damaging to people.
Meditate, prayer, recitation/mantras. Call it what you want.
Concentration/Samadhi is part of the 8-fold path.
That you would say that is not part of Buddhism is frankly making me think this whole thing is a Troll. Maybe you can make some argument that concentration in every moment is meditation, so you don't need to sit. But to say most Buddhist don't? Come on.
You know enough Buddhist terms to Troll someone on the internet. But this is damaging. Someone could read what you say and think that is Buddhism and be turned away or mislead.
Also, there is no such thing as slander to Buddhist, like there is some god in a Church that is taking offense. I guess we all get offended by things, and what I said was offensive, wrong speech. Just not technically 'slander'.
No it isn't, it's literally the sutras say and what a vast majority of Buddhists actually believe.
> You are supposed to understand that those are metaphors. Stories, not truth.
Then why don't we see this reflected in traditional teachings? This is a modern western reinterpretation, so called "secular Buddhism". Supernatural powers are well documented in Buddhism and even today in Tibetan Buddhism.
> Concentration/Samadhi is part of the 8-fold path.
A vast majority of Buddhists are relying on Amida's path for salvation through the Pure Land and/or producing merit for a better rebirth though, they don't practise such things in this lifetime.
> You know enough Buddhist terms to Troll someone on the internet. But this is damaging. Someone could read what you say and think that is Buddhism and be turned away or mislead.
Well, I'm right, and it sounds like I've actually researched, studied, and practised Buddhism more than you.
> Also, there is no such thing as slander to Buddhist
Yes there is, it's even included in Amida's 18th vow:
> Excluded, however, are those who commit the Five Gravest Transgressions and slander the right Dharma.
and is mentioned throughout the Lotus sutra. For example the whole basis of Nichiren's theology is that those who slander the Buddhadharma will be reborn in avicci hell.
What you are presenting is a very inaccurate view of the Buddhadharma. Let me set some facts in order:
* The sutras do teach extensively of supernatural powers
* The sutras do teach extensively of both mind-only philosophy and anti-physicalism (in both the sravakayana and the Mahayana!)
* There is no evidence that those aspects of the sutras should not be taken literally
* Those aspects of the sutras are indeed taken literally by most Buddhists historically
* Most Buddhists in the world follow paths that don't involve meditation/samadhi/concentration
* Buddhism ultimately even has no concept of metaphor vs. literal, since everything is emptiness anyway, so already it denies the fundamental reality of anything
If you are actually willing to learn about Buddhism, not just some western misconception of it, I am willing to point you to resources...
however from what you say I have a feeling you will just abuse the teaching, and likely be reborn in Hell, due to your fundamentalist religious belief, therefore I will not pass on any resources to you beyond what I did unless you can somehow prove to me that you won't abuse it
It's okay if YOU don't want to believe those things, but going around and telling others that they are wrong for accurately portraying the Dharma is unwise. Please do more research, ideally with an actual teacher
Seems like we understand words differently. Have different definitions of same words.
You say I'm 'fundamentalist' even to point of going to Hell, then in return say the most scary extreme 'fundamentalist' things. Maybe we just mean different things by that word 'fundamentalist'.
You say you are Mahayana, then say things that are not very Mahayana.
Then you say for me to get a teacher. And I'm thinking, man your teacher isn't doing you any favors, you should find another.
Who is right? No way to know?
So. Guess there is nothing else. I think you are wrong, you think I am wrong.
We can quote the same sutras endlessly and both have opposite interpretations. Can quote demographics, and 'who meditates', 'who doesn't', what is it, what is it not, as some kind of proof. Using sutras to disprove sutras, then cling to them, is kind of blowing me away. I haven't encountered something like this.
I guess I just have to say, to try and help. Try to understand the sutras a bit more and less.
You are very wound up in conceptual thought. And it seems to be blinding you. Sutras are to be abandoned when their purpose is done, not clung to.
""Though others may talk of the Way of the Buddhas as something to be reached by various pious practices and by sutra-study, you must have nothing to do with such ideas. "" - Huang Po
Next time just think a little before you accuse someone of what you did. You are the one that insisted I was wrong about the concepts of Buddhism, that's why I called you a fundamentalist. The previous comments are still there, you know? We can actually just go back and check this.
Now, what do we plan to achieve in this discussion? You accused me of perpetuating falsehoods, I showed that I'm not, now you are upset. Why? I guess it's just human to not be able to accept when you are wrong. Quite sad but that's just how it is I guess. I won't reply again, for your sake. I don't want you to hurt yourself even more. I hope you have taken some education from my information at least, and have dispelled some ignorance for you.
> I think you are wrong, you think I am wrong.
I've proven that you are objectively wrong.
""All this stuff about "conceptualization is a barrier on the path" is not really relevant. We don't even believe it is in my tradition, in fact.""
You just re-iterated a falsehood.
That is a fundamental Teaching. That is part of Mahayana. Your claimed tradition. One of you're arguments was just "man everything is emptiness", but I mention 'concepts', and suddenly it isn't part of the tradition. You are going in circles.
You haven't proven a single thing. You simply listed sutras and gave your own opinion.
I can't believe I'm falling for a Troll.
Please, if you are for real, continue studying. Maybe some clarity will arrive. But stop posting misleading statements. It can turn people away from a path that can help them.
This is not what Buddhism teaches.
Conjecture, at best. All thought experiments purporting to show this non-physicality are deeply flawed. We literally have no reason to conclude that mental states are non-physical.
Bowsamic orignally posed a question that gets at the relevant fact: "Why am I me and not someone or something else?" However, the argument here doesn't rest on this question being puzzling. The argument is simply that the relevant fact of personal identity (whether puzzling or not) does not seem to reduce to any specifiable set of physical facts.
The form of the argument is exactly like a Platonist argument against physicalism: "2+2=4" is a fact and does not reduce to any set of physical facts; therefore not all facts are physical facts. This argument does not require the assumption that truths of arithmetic are surprising or difficult to explain. However, I think the irreducibility claim is more compelling in the case of personal identity than for mathematical truths.
If you are using an abstract definition of "yourself" (such as your brain's internal representation of you), you are no longer talking about physical objects, so of course your question can't be answered using physical facts alone. Similarly, "2+2=4" is a statement about our abstract representation of the world, not the real world itself. That we can reason about integers without relying on facts about the real world doesn't mean that integers are any more "real" than unicorns - or for that matter, your concept of "self".
I don't know how that follows from what I said. When someone says "the floor is slippery", that refers to a very much real physical property of a very much real thing. When someone says "the floor is lava", that means we're playing a game. We have no problem distinguishing between the two.
If you define yourself as the set of atoms that currently make you up, you are talking about the real world. If you define yourself as the set of your memories and experiences, you are not. The former definition has a lot less issues than the latter - firstly because you don't have to define anything further, you can just point at yourself; and secondly because a perfect clone of you would have the same set of memories and experiences, and that doesn't make them you. This is why "Why am I myself?" is much easier to answer when we're talking about your atoms. Now, if a theory can answer a question with ease, how is that question an argument against it? I've certainly never heard anyone say "If global warming is real, why are my car tires melting into the asphalt?".
Bowsamic may have a different take on this, but in my version of the argument, the point is not to answer the 'why' question. The 'why' question is just used to gesture at the relevant non-tautologous and apparently non-physical fact. So it doesn't really help with anything to redefine the terms of the question until it becomes a tautologous statement about atoms. All that shows is that physicalism doesn't have a problem with the concept of two physical things being the same thing – which isn't in dispute.
>If you define yourself as the set of atoms that currently make you up [...]
I don't see how I'm going to do this without some prior notion of who I am. Otherwise, one set of atoms is as good as any other.
Yeah, but to clearly define what that fact means, you'd have to introduce a bunch of intermediate definitions, and eventually you might just end up in physics-land again. It isn't physics' fault that the human brain is complicated.
> I don't see how I'm going to do this without some prior notion of who I am
Protip: if you pinch it and it hurts, it's probably yours :) Well, that or a very angry cat.
To be more serious: having prior notions of things is fine. Required, even. We can't reason about things without having at least a vague understanding of the language. It can't be turtles all the way down.
Sure, anything might turn out to be explicable by future physics (or indeed, future astrology, future phrenology, or any possible future knowledge). There are no knock-down arguments in this domain. The point is that the fact of your personal conscious identity is apparently not a physical fact, which is a prima facie argument against some of the stronger forms of physicalism.
>To be more serious: having prior notions of things is fine.
You can't use the physical definition to dispense with other notions of personal identity if you need those very notions to bootstrap the physical definition (and maintain it over time, as your 'set of atoms' is constantly changing). To point out that your informal notion of self is connected somehow with a loosely-defined lump of physical stuff isn't really to succeed in reducing anything to physics. It's just to say what pretty much everyone agrees with: that humans have physical bodies.
Now that you mention, I don't need to. "I" simply means "the person who is currently speaking" (or in this case, writing). This already determines, beyond reasonable doubt, which physical body we're talking about. No other definition needed, since you can't say "I" without speaking. QED. Sorry, I should have noticed this 4 comments earlier.
(Caveat: this definition doesn’t feel satisfying, which might be the source of our disagreement, but I can’t put my finger on why - perhaps you can)
> the fact of your personal conscious identity is apparently not a physical fact
The human brain is astonishingly good at BS-ing itself, so I wouldn't attribute much to how you intuitively feel about your own conscious self. To me, this smells like a more abstract and philosophical version of the puddle analogy.
But on this definition you can raise the question of why the person who is currently speaking is the person who is currently speaking (which by alternating de re and de dicto interpretations can be understood in the same non-tautologous ways as e.g. "Why is the person who is currently the President the person who is currently the President?") So this linguistic analysis doesn't succeed in dissolving facts about personal identity into nothing. You still have the fact that you are who you are and not someone else. And the intuitive notion of personhood (on which your definition depends and which you haven't in any way reduced to physics) is intimately connected with the idea of a more-or-less uninterrupted stream of first-person conscious experience.
> I wouldn't attribute much to how you intuitively feel about your own conscious self.
If we set 'intuitive feelings' aside, then of course the whole problem of conscious experience disappears immediately.
"person": a member of the genus Homo
"speaking": phenomenon wherein the previous object vibrates its own vocal chords and moves its own mouth to produce sound waves
"currently": a point in time in which the aforementioned act occurs
Notably missing are: any references to continuity of experience, conscious action, or even thought. Suggestion: I have, in fact, completely reduced it to physics.
> You still have the fact that you are who you are and not someone else
Please describe to me a hypothetical universe where that statement doesn't hold true. If there is none, then we must accept that this "fact" does not require any explanation, and therefore can be dismissed as trivial.
Consider the absurdity of the question “who am I?”, uttered by an amnesiac, if it means simply “Which lump of physical stuff is currently speaking?” Even if we ignore the problem mentioned in the first paragraph, the answer is trivial – the same lump that’s making the noises. But it’s difficult to accept that the amnesiac is confused over a triviality: they really don’t know who they are; they lack a key piece of non-trivial, non-tautologous knowledge.
>If there is none, then we must accept that this "fact" does not require any explanation
As I've tried to emphasise, I do not claim that the fact is puzzling or requires an explanation, only that it is a fact. By analogy, it is not puzzling that the sum of two and two is four, and no non-trivial explanation of this fact appears to be required, but it is still a fact. Now of course you can try to make such fact dissolve via various forms of philosophical therapy. For example, there are some philosophers of mathematics who would try to argue that all mathematical facts are tautologous. You are trying to do something similar with facts of personal identity. However, philosophers of mathematics who claim that all mathematical truths are disguised tautologies can point to lots of actual work that has been done to show that this position is more plausible than it might first appear.
In that context, that question would just mean "what was my life like prior to losing my memories?", wouldn't it? So in this instance, the missing non-trivial knowledge is their long-term memory, not a problem with understanding the definition of "I".
> For example, there are some philosophers of mathematics who would try to argue that all mathematical facts are tautologous. You are trying to do something similar with facts of personal identity.
I'm not arguing that the subjective experience of personal identity is tautologous, I'm arguing that it's a chemical reaction (EDIT: and that the underlying objective truth is tautologous). Any feeling about the intuitive concept of "myself" having some kind of esoteric component above the physical matter (which I also share, don't be mistaken) would, presumably, also be given voice to by a computer simulation of your brain. That would be your brain being caught red-handed in the act of lying to itself about how special it is. And if this turns out not to be the case, then we have rock solid evidence that something is indeed missing from our simulation, which gives us an opportunity to measure that something, which in turn makes that something physical.
> Your linguistic analysis of 'I' doesn't work if understood in purely physical terms. Lots of people are speaking at any given moment, but I don't refer to all of them if I say 'I'.
Valid point. Refinement: in any speech, "I" refers to the person making that speech.
[0] https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-indi...
Another way of saying this is that there's no need to postulate separate consciousness for separate people, one is enough.
Built from the same shaky foundation and shared desire for it to exist
One hit upside the head and you’re a completely different person. (Or dietary change with different microbacteria, or following heavy psychedelics use, etc…)
I am with you on this. Today's scientific debate about consciousness sounds a lot like the scientific debate about the human soul from a century ago.
We just want to be special so badly, meanwhile evidence keeps piling up indicating that we are not.
But I don't see how, it seems intractable to me. The brain could theoretically do anything it does from information processing, problem solving, planning or even develop a theory of the mind without a conscience, it's computation all the way down. But why and goddamned how does a human brain go from perceiving and processing the visual information of red light hitting your eyes to "feeling" red, how does it "feel" anything at all, heck what is this "observer" that does all the "feeling" even made of? if you could break "him" down into constituent parts(theoretically computable sub-problems) at all that would be nice, it would be more progress than I've done over years of thinking about this bullshit problem.
The "observer" seems indivisible to me, heck it seems made of nothing at all, it just is. Sure it being indivisible might be an illusion made up by the brain, but, if so, it's an illusion that still needs to be fed to "something", and I haven't heard any working theories that I actually buy that explain how the brain comes up with that "something".
your supposition still relies on their being a separate entity to imagine, quantify or figure out, when that is not necessary. a tribunal of processes is enough for this "observer" phenomenon.
so, back to square one...
One of my ancient aliens theories is that the Pyramids are artificial mountain caves.
Are you sure this is a well-formed question? To be clear, this isn't what the hard problem of consciousness is about, although perhaps that's what you meant by "none".
As for the research in focus in this thread, It seems that we are facing another Great Humiliation[0], with the potential to affect the course of development in so many other areas.
It will be interesting to see what developments this research will inspire in the cultural/anthropological field: so were the tree-huggers right all along? So is there really a harmony and connection between all the "children of Gaia"? :)
[0]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/copernicus-...
As a thought experiment, imagine we could emulate the corpus callosum between brain hemispheres through a computer chip, and had the medical technology to split someone in half. There have been cases where people have lost a brain hemisphere before birth or due to an accident but continued leading relatively normal lives, so we know that such a division is plausible.
Before separation, we'd experience being an individual.
At the moment of separation, our consciousness would anchor to one of the hemispheres we'll call "A". We'd see our other half "B" pull away and look back at us in curiosity as it continues experiencing its own consciousness. The other half B is still our consciousness, but anchored to a different point in spacetime. The halves would begin accruing their own memories independently, but act like the original individual for quite some time or even a lifetime.
At the moment of reunification, we'd see B approaching and then experience a download where our memories suddenly contain more than they did a moment ago. We might even experience "hearing" the other half as another person until the merging is complete. But afterwards we'd still be the same individual we always were, just with new narratives running in the code of our mental model, built from the memories acquired while separated. This experience is identical for the other half, except seen from its own context.
Warning (spoilers): This is analogous to a Vulcan mind meld, although it's unclear from Star Trek whether minds maintain their individuality or become a single consciousness. Because Spock's consciousness existed separately within McCoy until he was reincarnated, I tend to think that the show took the society of mind approach where our thoughts maybe come from a collection of simpler agents, meaning that Spock's anchor transferred to McCoy when they separated, so both their anchors shared one mind for a time, and Spock would have been in McCoy while he was asleep and his partial (a term borrowed from Eon by Greg Bear) B died in the warp chamber.
But I think the hemisphere splitting thought experiment is more useful because it sheds insight on reincarnation and the multiverse. It also helps us step up to 4D/5D and consider what it subjectively feels like to straddle realities as we shift laterally through spacetime rather than waiting for events to unfold in forward (linear) time. Insight and downloads might come from our consciousness constantly splitting and reuniting from other timelines as it explores possible future outcomes in the quantum probability distribution.
That might shed light on how the inner mind seemingly affects outer reality by overcoming the odds to survive via affecting probability itself (the principle of manifestation). In other words, it's likely that there is always an anchor, since quantum reality can't exist without an observer (consciousness), so an individual sees unlikely events whose odds of happening are so remote that science can only call them coincidences (synchronicities).
That would mean that our souls always continue, even if our physical bodies die, by straddling another reality where a body for us still exists. We may experience an infinite, continuous, individual timeline spanning countless lifetimes over billions of years, interspersed with long periods of nonexistence that we have no way to remember. And each time we die, the people around us can no longer be with us, since our anchor is no longer in their reality.
And it's unclear whether our soul can reincarnate in simpler life forms or if our complexity keeps evolving as our soul ascends. Dreams and psychedelic accounts seem to lean towards the idea of a lizard brain, where consciousness can exist unfiltered. So that it may be that we are allowed to "choose" our next incarnation during unconscious periods and "opt in" to a 3D experience like here on Earth to experience the novelty of suffering.
The main takeaway is that since those around us are aspects of ourselves, then egocentric narcisism is a refusal to see the big picture. If we act to enrich ourselves by exploiting others, we karmically doom ourselves to more suffering in our next life. Our old A becomes the resource-hoarding enemy of our new B. Making a deal with the devil may feel good, but it's like being the top inmate in a prison, starving the soul of real connection. So the meek and pious spiral out towards peace/connection/heaven while the rich and powerful spiral in towards their own violence/loneliness/hell.
I haven't read this, but I think it leans more towards the objective side, where multiple consciousnessness would occupy a single mind, more like schizophrenia than a fractal split from a single source consciousness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
And of course all of this could be completely wrong. But it's all derived from first principles and a collection of insights from the spiritual community that seem to keep resonating and expanding in this post-pandemic era entering the New Age. We may not know until we meet aliens who have performed these experiments. But it provides a useful framework to explore the idea of consciousness existing in higher dimensions and even visiting us through the paranormal/supernatural (magical) experiences we all have as conscious aware beings.
Another benefit is that consciousness affecting probablity means that time travel is not possible, since any repeat scenario is a copy of the original and subject to random outcomes. The same events can never be replayed exactly the same way twice. Many vocal people in the scientific community have arrived at the conclusion that free will doesn't exist, which self-evidently defies our subjective experience, but they're basing that on the fallacy that time travel is possible.
The impossibility of time travel is maybe the best (albiet weak) explanation we have for consciousness and free will. It's how our timeless nature steps down from 4D/5D to experience a timeline, similarly to how a photon doesn't experience time since it's moving at the speed of light. There may only be one photon in the whole universe, creating a 4D holographic "crystal" encoding everything here. The mutable state of our consciousness is kind of like the in-between times when pure functional programming blocks to wait for new input, with the deterministic portion running unconsciously. An android would have mutable state, while a robot would mostly run hardcoded logic.
Which is why I don't subscribe to the idea that humans are just AIs running in complex robots, or that this is a simulation. Although if we substitute the word dream instead, then it all begins to make sense again. There's no matrix or holodeck that created the simulation, it's more like source consciousness projects the simulation to give us something to do. And of course there's no way to prove any of this, it's just a descriptive model that may lead to deeper insights.
I also agree to the connection between the karmic ‘field’ and our consciousness, and I sometimes feel like I am simply guiding an observing vector across all possibilities, collapsing the wave functions along time. Other commenters in the thread have done a better job articulating that aspect than me, however!
For what it's worth, I wrote that long rant for my 25 year old self going through an exceptionally painful time in his life. I hope someone finds some value in it, even if simply to forgive others and ourselves, and find gratitude for the miracle of life. Even when things feel so terribly unfair that just surviving these human trials amounts to an act of heroism.
I feel that is what was termed the dreadful g-o-d word by many cultures but if we can understand this under that light, the readings of the second ever yogi that came to the west called Paramhansa Yogananda are highly recommended. His Autobiography of a Yogi was Steve Jobs favorite book and he made everyone that attended his funeral to get a copy of it. Not that that means a whole lot, as he was by far not an embodiment of love, but I feel he had the capacity to see the brilliance in this undestanding.