Is The Uncertainty Principle Incompatible With Determinism?

Tegmark 2015. Consciousness as a state of matter.

Very interesting paper

 

Conversation between Max Tegmark and Sam Harris

https://soundcloud.com/samharrisorg/the-multiverse-you-you-you-you

 

Have you ever seen artwork for schizophrenics and/or those with other mental disorders? A lot of the stuff is pretty 'psychedelic'. Suggesting the differences in style under the influence of psychedelics is probably not the best illustration ( pun intended) to distinguish these substances from psychotomimetics, let alone suggest that what the people are drawing is more than novel interpretative forms elicited by significant changes in the brain brought on by these various chemicals and plants.

 

Ok, but what does this say in regards to reported differences amongst psychedelics? Do dreams fit into the abstraction model? Daydreams? Imagination? experiences under significant duress vs. experiences under calm?

It sounds interesting on the surface, but I also don't see it saying much either.

 

hehe .. dreams. They are quite different than normal waking consiousness. They in some ways are similar to an altered state of consciouness, similar to what's seen with psychedelics. Especially Lucid Dreaming States of consiousness ... not sure where they fit.

might have to come back to this later when i've had time to think ...

Code:

strobe 42 BFB63F 3FB2BF

... its amazing what you can see from that, but you have to be dosed to see it.

 

Not even exhaustive either..

This is one of the primary issues when dealing with the subject of consciousness, much like the way the term 'God' is used, it can become an amorphous concept. I've noticed certain "magical thinking" here that starts off with these assumptions as to what the phenomena is and then use circular reasoning 'against' science, as if it's Science's duty to bend the available evidence to prove their view right, otherwise let's view the methodology of science as inherently flawed.

It's like "let me assume consciousness is all pervasive, therefore my chair must be conscious. Science cannot disprove that the chair is not conscious, obviously a flaw in science and not my intuitions. Here is a hodgepodge of links that remotely suggest something similar."

 

It's all magical thinking when it comes to consciousness. Anybody who claims to know the answer is full of it. The answer is unknowable.

 

The data is highly ambiguous and sparse. These lab experiments are nowhere near the number and rigour that would allow us conclude anything like this.

So I'll ask again, how many experiments need to be done to verify it as truth? It's already quite fascinating that it's even happening at all, isn't it? The truth that it's even happened once, is quite miraculous.


It would help you if you stopped putting words in my mouth and especially assuming what my stance is on things considering you get it wrong most of the time. Just engage in a normal conversation like an adult instead of pitting me against things in order to make me fit into your narrative of 2012 et al. For example, I didn't say quantum mechanics isn't spooky, i said it IS spooky. That's a big difference, and if you would just slow your roll and focus more on learning rather than on trying to score Gotcha's, you would benefit more.

But you've said in past posts that something spooky can't be the explanation, and are highly against coming to that conclusion. So the fact that you are now saying that Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness IS spooky when you definitely have shown that you don't feel that way about Consciousness is rather confusing. I will dig up posts of yours if you request.

You've also been trying to "help" me for a long time, from how "misguided" I am on my path. You did it to yourself if you feel that you are somehow being attacked. I'm simply proving my point throughout this whole process. Keep shape-shifting if you want but it's not going to work. You said yourself that an idea can be ridiculed, so get used to my ridicule.

I also didn't say there's no way that consciousness and QM could be related, I said that it's not good to just assume so from limited data. It's got nothing to do with spirituality, and this is getting tiring dude. I am very spiritual. I think true, transformative spirituality is the only game in town.

If you really felt that transformative spirituality is the only game in town then you would at least be open-minded to the idea of Spiritual Awakening, Kundalini Awakening, and the like. Put your bias of throwing this into the "supernatural" realm away and realize that this has been fundamental to transformative spirituality for thousands of years.

If you really feel that Quantum Mechanics and especially Consciousness are somehow not linked with Spirituality then you are simply wildly mistaken on the matter. There's not really much more to say about it.

Your category of "the Mystics" also is highly suspect, undefined, and we could form a thread just to argue about what and who constitutes a "mystic".

I would call a Mystic someone who strives for a direct experience with what might be called God, or some sort of higher intelligence in Nature. This is distinct from someone who uses dogma and religion, and simply are "believers". I think this is also the general opinion of what a Mystic is. The key is that a Mystic strives for a connection not through belief but through some sort of direct experience.

Sure, but then a hallucination is still a hallucination right? Like, being stranded in the desert and seeing an oasis that isn't actually there, is still seeing something that isn't actually there, even if all reality is consciousness (whatever that means). Calling everything one thing actually doesn't get you anywhere (this is the crux of the atheism/pantheism symmetry).

If everything is in your mind as you have argued, then technically seeing an Oasis, a dream, or drinking a cup of water would all equally be both reality and a hallucination. One couldn't possibly be more real or less real than the other.

Calling everything Matter vs. calling everything Consciousness is actually a high difference. It's the difference between seeing yourself as One with all or seeing yourself as separate from all. It's the difference between Non-Local Action at a Distance and Localization. There's a huge difference.


Go slower. You majorly misread this, as you misread in the deleted thread when I referenced problems with the radio interpretation of consciousness.

I wasn't calling a PhD physicist an armchair physicist; that would be like calling a married man a bachelor. Do you really think I am operating on that level?

Armchair physicist is a term to describe virtually anybody who ISNT a PhD physicist.

(The problems I referenced in the deleted thread were not problems with one's reputation in the scientific community, again, that is so far below what I was speaking about. I was referencing the scientific problems of postulating a new mechanism for consciousness, ie, the radio analogy. It seems to have more "moving parts" than an emergent model and thus is subject to Occam's Razor from a purely hypothetical standpoint.)

So then why go into anything regarding an armchair physicist after I have posted data and conclusions come to from someone with a Ph.D? He believes that Non-Local Consciousness is an actuality, and when asked what your thoughts are on the study, you go off about armchair physicists.

He also shares my views in his book that Occam's Razor is a rather narrow and limited approach, even though it's clung to for Scientists like the Bible is for Catholics.




Why does this baffle you? You know that if you eat large amounts of diphenhydramine that you may converse with friends who are not really there and utilize objects to perform tasks which are not even in front of you or being performed. You know that it is possible to perceive any kind of phenomena under all kinds of conditions, and that phenomena is not "really" happening. So why does a psychedelic experience get a free pass? It's not like there's no such things as hallucinations right

In my opinion, a dream is as real as watching a movie is as real as making a movie is as real as drinking a cup of water, etc. etc. An experience is what is real. Your definition of "not really happening" is rather undefined. If you take Devil's Weed and start talking to people that aren't really there, guess what? You're still ACTUALLY having that experience. It's only not real for the person not having that experience. If you were Schizophrenic and weren't actually experiencing what you were experiencing, then you wouldn't be Schizophrenic. An experience is an experience, and an Experience is Real.

There's nothing "nothing but" about being in the mind. It's all we know.

So you might as well not have this argument about everything being in the mind then. If it's all that exists, then you might as well throw the concept away altogether. Just as you argue that saying that "everything is Consciousness" doesn't get you anywhere.


Again with the references to the hermetics and mystics. I really am not interested to be quite honest. I don't see the relevance; even if they arrived at a correct interpretation of reality, they did it through a modality quite different than what we are discussing here, which is QM and science. I have no dogmatic beef with any "mystics" or "hermetics" because I simply do not know to whom you are refering nor what their works are.



It's HIGHLY relevant. Modern Science is just now catching up to what Hermeticism already knows. Proving the Quantum Non-Local Consciousness is a GIANT step in the modern day to being able to Scientifically utilize Magick. Your bias is what stops you from seeing the very obvious relevance between the two. If you don't care, that's fine, but that doesn't mean they aren't highly inter-related.

You also truly don't feel that Magick is real. And I'm here to show you that you're incorrect.

 

Yes and how is a Schizophrenic's experience not effecting his outer reality?

 

You can call it a hodepodge of links or you can accept the studies for what they are, and that's that Non-Local communication between minds has been repeated in Science labs on multiple occasions. The implications of this are GIGANTIC. I only posted New Age sites as well to try and be all-inclusive and show all the different perspectives.

But the data is the data is the data is the data.

 

You didn't post a study for me though in that previous thread, you linked an actor's website who talks about a documentary he saw or something and doesn't even properly reference.

Then some other links from websites like "debunking atheists" which clearly has a biased agenda.

 

Attempting to make sense of this question in regards to how it relates to the quoted response, the drawn 'demon with the distorted features' the schizophrenic draws, does not all of a sudden become an actual living creature. It's pencil to paper not DNA, genes and a nervous system.


If your hinting that the art can move people in some type of way, which is effecting reality, well ok but that's like the end of a cascading casual chain of twisting and turning what was said to acknowledge. A slant I am assuming you might take based on prior convos. We could probably get into the cultural interpretations of mental disorders here too, but futile convo and off topic.

If you're just asking questions to set up some contrarian point, I'm probably wasting my breath.

 

The study is the study. I've seen the documentary and Goswami says the same thing.

 

Experience is reality. Whether it's art, dreams, hiking, "hallucinating", etc.

 

There can be no one who is not an absolute expert in conciousness . Beware
the deceiver who will have you believe you are stupid .

 

"You also truly don't feel that magick is real and I'm here to show you that you're incorrect"

Do you remember that time like 2 days ago when I said that if your definition of magick is "intentional placebo effect" then magick is real? Do you remember that China? Or do you prefer to just lock me and you into certain dogmatic positions in your imagination so that you can pretend you are on a righteous crusade against the evils of materialists . . . a concept you still don't understand despite all the links and explanations provided for you, as you still mistakenly categorize it as a form of dualism, which it is not.

When a schizophrenic perceives Mickey Mouse chasing him with an axe, there is no 5 foot tall rodent weilding an axe chasing him, despite the reactions of the patients' nervous system.

Right, all experiences are part of reality, but the CONTENT of those experiences are not the same part of reality; imagining that you are on fire is manifestly not the same as actually being on fire. Do you not agree with this basic premise of reality? I just don't understand how you are so stuck on this point, when we both know that you obviously do agree here. You're being deliberately argumentative and obtuse. Dreaming that you are falling out of an airplane does not result in you slamming into the ground at terminal velocity in the waking world. Hallucinating goat men dancing all around you is part of reality, but it's an abuse of language to say that therefore those goat men have the same kind of reality as you do, a flesh and blood person, hallucinating.

I hope you enjoyed my post I actually put some time into, but it seems you're more interested in these petty interactions still.

I'd like to officially welcome you as the very first person in my life I have ever added to my ignore list on the internet, ever.

I'll no longer be interacting with you on these forums. Best of luck. Sorry I wasn't more of a domineering, dictatorial taurus, but sometimes water has to know when to flow away.

Actually the vast majority of people have not put in any time into actually becoming an expert on their own consciousness, and dogmatism can still exist in this realm of discourse, so no, your statement is not true.

It would be like saying "Everyone has an endocrine system, therefore everyone is an absolute expert in human endocrinology. Beware someone who questions your knowledge of endocrinology, like evil medical schools".

It is manifestly possible to be incredibly ignorant about the nature of your own consciousness; otherwise there would be no discoveries possible through transcendental practices and mysticism. Yet we know transformations abound in that realm, so if everyone is already an "absolute expert", what's there to discover?

 

Do you remember that time like 2 days ago when I said that if your definition of magick is "intentional placebo effect" then magick is real? Do you remember that China? Or do you prefer to just lock me and you into certain dogmatic positions in your imagination so that you can pretend you are on a righteous crusade against the evils of materialists . . . a concept you still don't understand despite all the links and explanations provided for you, as you still mistakenly categorize it as a form of dualism, which it is not.

Are you kidding me? You think I don't sense your sarcasm? You have told me in the past things along the lines of that you would "give me your life savings" and whatnot if Magick turned out to be real. Are you prepared to do that now?

When a schizophrenic perceives Mickey Mouse chasing him with an axe, there is no 5 foot tall rodent weilding an axe chasing him, despite the reactions of the patients' nervous system.

Hallucination or not, the experience is real for him.

If everything is in the mind, then you might as well say that even talking to me isn't real. Or if I have a thought about something, that somehow my experience of that thought isn't real. Saying that your thoughts are somehow not real just doesn't make sense to me. The terror felt from a nightmare is as real as actually being attacked. Even if you die in the dream and wake up, you actually do die in that dream because you are temporarily identified with that reality and that reality ends the moment that you die.

A mirage may be a mirage. But your experience of an Oasis mirage in the desert isn't somehow less real than your experience of the heat of the sun. Once you get to the Oasis, you realize it's not there, and that experience is also just as real. There's no lesser or more realer experiences. There's just infinite experiences. If I have a thought and start laughing from the thought, how is my thought not real?

I'll no longer be interacting with you on these forums. Best of luck. Sorry I wasn't more of a domineering, dictatorial taurus, but sometimes water has to know when to flow away.

I don't care man. You already threatened to be done with the forums a while ago, and now you're back. You initially challenged me in the first place. Run along now.

 

I tend to agree. The most we can know about consciousness is the experience of it, and anyone who experiences it is an expert by default.

There are parts of the brain "responsible" for visual processing, but there is no part of the brain responsible for accurate visual processing, or accurate touch, or accurate smell, or accurate anything. The truth is that, realistically, we have no idea what the brain even looks like. We only know what it may look like to a brain. If indeed the brain is the concrete "thing" responsible for processing all information. The point being that there's just no way to say that we are our brain and simultaneously say that the brain can determine that we are our brain. As far as putting information together goes, our brains might be totally full of shit. After all, they are just some meat. Why would anyone think meat was good at perceiving the world?

 

Right, all experiences are part of reality, but the CONTENT of those experiences are not the same part of reality; imagining that you are on fire is manifestly not the same as actually being on fire. Do you not agree with this basic premise of reality? I just don't understand how you are so stuck on this point, when we both know that you obviously do agree here. You're being deliberately argumentative and obtuse. Dreaming that you are falling out of an airplane does not result in you slamming into the ground at terminal velocity in the waking world. Hallucinating goat men dancing all around you is part of reality, but it's an abuse of language to say that therefore those goat men have the same kind of reality as you do, a flesh and blood person, hallucinating.

And so do you just argue that if you walk into a room and someone is unexpectedly there and you get frightened, even if it's your friend, do you somehow argue that that experience isn't real? The actuality is that it turned out to just be your friend, standing there, but your nervous system reacted in the exact same way as if it was a murderer ready to attack you for a split second. Therefore, according to your reasoning, does that mean that this experience is somehow not real?

You could just as easily walk into the room and not freak out, but your friend is actually secretly plotting to kill you and then does. The "unreality" of him being your friend AKA the reality of him not being your friend is just as real of an experience as if he was actually your friend and didn't kill you. Just because you hallucinated that he was your friend, doesn't mean that this hallucination is less real than feeling like he was your friend when he actually is. Your experience of believing that he is your friend is the same either way.

If he kills you, then that's a real experience. If he doesn't kill you, that's also a real experience. If you think he's a murderer and he isn't, your wrongness is still real. If you think he's a murderer and he is, your correctness is just as real.

Or if some voice in your head is haunting you and commanding you to kill people and you listen and start killing people, does that mean that the voice wasn't real? It commanded you to kill people, you listened, and then you did. Even if you decided not to, you are still negotiating with this voice in your head, are you not? Or you could decide that the voice is "unreal", but the thought keeps reappearing. Are you trying to say that the thought reappearing is unreal? Or the thoughts could disappear, but does that mean that you never had the thought at a prior time? Did that somehow never occur? Whether you pay attention to it or not, believe in it or not, act on it or not, it's still a real experience of having the thought.

The reality is the actuality of your experience of the moment. If you go through deja vu, are you somehow not going through deja vu in that moment? Is your experience of feeling like you've experienced this exact moment before not real? If you feel that you've experienced this moment before, whether you have or you haven't, your experience of feeling that way is the same and just as real for both options. It's a real experience. If you're high on Cocaine, and feel on top of the world, then guess what? You're high on Cocaine, you feel on top of the world, and that experience isn't somehow unreal. You very well could be a millionaire on top of the world or a poor bum, and the experience of being high is the same, as is the comedown. It's a real experience.

If you believe that a placebo is curing you because you think it is medicine and you get better, are you somehow not actually healing from it? Because it's a "hallucination", is your healing and feeling in relationship to it unreal? Are Placebos unreal in manifest reality? Is a Placebo somehow not actually there, since it's not a "real" medicine?

Right, all experiences are part of reality, but the CONTENT of those experiences are not the same part of reality; imagining that you are on fire is manifestly not the same as actually being on fire. Do you not agree with this basic premise of reality?

Imagining being on fire is a DIFFERENT experience than actually being on fire, but the reality of both experiences are the same. Singing lyrics to a song and visualizing the lyrics in your head is a DIFFERENT experience than reading those exact lyrics from a piece of paper, but the experience of both are equally real. And usually, most things brought into manifestation by man is first thought of and visualized in the mind.


righteous crusade against the evils of materialists . . . a concept you still don't understand despite all the links and explanations provided for you, as you still mistakenly categorize it as a form of dualism, which it is not.



If it's not a form of dualism, then that's fine, but that's also implying that thoughts and dreams are equally as much of reality as is a table. I call Scientific materialism or realism a form of duality because it's implying that since everything is ultimately matter that consciousness is created in the brain and that matter is ultimately separate from other matter, where non-locality of consciousness and monistic-idealism is implying oneness and singularity of consciousness and matter.

It is manifestly possible to be incredibly ignorant about the nature of your own consciousness; otherwise there would be no discoveries possible through transcendental practices and mysticism

Why are you saying that you don't know what a Mystic is but then using Mysticism later in your post as part of your argument?

 

Signals mean nothing until they are processed and interpreted. There is more to "seeing" than just receiving a signal. The retina, and then the brain itself processes this signal through various stages, and this is how we make sense of this signal and actually see something. Remember the sound of the dialup modem, that white noise sound due to the modulation and encoding of the signal ... could be images, text, or even music but listening to the signal of the modem itself just sounds like noise. So what is that signal exactly ... it certainly doesn't "sound" like what it supposedly is. A digital camera can convert photons to an electrical signal and store it on some digital media, encoding in some common file format that a computer running the proper code can process, manipulate and reproduce, but the machine isn't "seeing" anything, only we see what we see, to the machine it's just information, a signal that could mean anything at all or nothing at all.

Here is some info on the Microsoft BMP image format, one of the more simple image formats to understand: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd183391%28v=vs.85%29.aspx. Via this link, a programmer can be provided the information needed to write code to read, manipulate and write Microsoft BMP files. I have written some simple code to manipulate BMP files, rescaling them and applying various types of simple color filters. Simple errors in the code IME yield a corrupted image which is unrecognizable, bearing little to no resemblance to the original picture, basically garbage, or at the worst cannot be displayed at all because it's not a "valid" BMP file and programs written to display BMP files can't make sense of it because it doesn't conform to the expected data structure, deviating just slightly from what is expected so they refuse trying to interpret it at all. On the other hand, in some cases a file may be slightly larger, and a program that reads the file header which specifies the size, will only read the amount of bytes specified in the header, even though there may be a little extra trailing data which could contain anything at all but it won't be seen unless looked for specifically because it is unexpected. It really depends on how the program is written and how picky it is, it could just as easily be written to actually check that the file is the size that it say it is, and if it is not declares it as corrupt and raises an error. JPEG is far more complex, writing code from scratch to manipulate JPEG images would be difficult, but the information is out there, though one may be better off using a library provided by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the creators of JPEG rather than reinvent the wheel.

For the curious person, they should try opening an image file such as BMP or JPEG in a text editor like gedit or Windows Notepad ... same information but what you see will be quite different, now that you are interpreting it as ... text? Steganography is a technique where information is hidden inside of another file such as an image file, you will see what appears to be a regular image, unless you possess the knowledge that something else is present, and know where and how to look for it. You could also take text, and write those bytes into a properly structured BMP file, each alphabetic character representing red green or blue values in each pixel. Viewing this image would just look like a corrupted image or noise, I've never actually tried this but thought about it, It would result in an image that looks meaningless but actually does contain something meaningful if you know its there and how to look for it.

What makes reality, are objects really separate entities. Physics may suggest that everything around us is just fundamental fields in various configurations. How do we make the distinction between separate objects, and how do we determine what scale to use or level of abstraction at which to make this distinction between things we perceive to be separate entities? How do we resolve ambiguities? It seems like we need some sort of context, or prior knowledge in order to do so.