The Concept Guy
Esteemed member
Greetings DMT nexus. I wrote this just now while high after watching the social dilemma documentary on netflix then watching a closer to the truth episode 802 "what's beyond physics?". This is one of the stream of consciousness things, I just wrote what I was thinking. I'm half-stoned as well but the thoughts actually make sense (I reread it and error corrected). When I thought about sharing it this was the place seemed like the the right place to share. Apologies for it's length, I have broken it into paragraphs that loosely have a main topic for each one. Hopefully, some will enjoy it :thumb_up:
Sell me an algorithm that I can choose what I want it to curate, what information I want or how I want to receive information. For example, in a biased or unbiased way. Do I want to see opinions from people across a spectrum of concerns or do I want to make money? What information do I feed myself? Can I have control over an AI so that I can get it to give me what I want not what an advertiser wants? I’m not interested in engagement. I want the right information. The type of information that places me in a position of knowledge. This knowledge will allow me to make better decisions.
What are better decisions? Better decisions are based on my point of view, my values, my culture, my ethics, my life experiences. So, if I change my experiences, I change what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong.
What is good for me? From a biological perspective its living, living without severe pain, having offspring, projecting the human species into the future.
Am I philosophically aligned with the human species? Is what the human species represents something I wish to promote? What do we represent? Problem solvers. But we define the problems.
Is death a “problem” we need to solve? Some suggest it is. We need to live longer, happier, healthier lives. Is this good? From my perspective it is. From an individual human level, I want to maximise my wellbeing, or do I? This is not completely true. I also want to increase others overall wellbeing because if I am selfish this still benefits me. Co-operation allows us to define our reality more precisely. We have control over our environment. We make it nice to live in. We can choose our own reality bubble. We can decide to allow ourselves to become slowly manipulated into puppets for corporations or enormously wealthy people for profit.
Is this a good thing for our species? The consideration of this question shows that the collective wellbeing of our society is actually important to us and ultimately suggests we are not entirely egocentric as individuals, but it is indicative of egocentrism as a species. We ignore our impact on our environment which when really considered seriously, we are entirely dependent. We live in a narrow band of survivability and our collective action is seriously jeopardising the future of not just our species but mammals on the whole. If we destroy ourselves through a mismanagement of our extractive process, we are likely to wipe out hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Now this might ultimately be good, maybe humans have an inbuilt flaw that should it play out on even larger scales the suffering would be even more immense. It could also be terrible.
Terrible in what sense? Where does the value judgement come in? Does the universe care what humans want? We care, certainly. It’s a necessary part of our code to exist but maybe it’s not necessarily enough and we might self-extinguish ourselves through a utopia such as an infinitely deep virtual world where we lose ourselves for our entire lives, never procreating and having children. It might be such a fantasy filling world that living in the real world is just unbearable, even what we consider minor suffering today would be intense for someone who only knows what we consider “pleasure”. Our utopia would be their normal. So where do you go from there? Ever more deeply down the pleasure hole? Very likely, at least for some time.
Will we lose track of other fellow humans? Will our consciousness be so free that the idea of the human form becomes irrelevant? Sounds like a technotopia but what happens to the things we leave behind? If we calibrate our AI’s wrong, they may wreak havoc on the universe in service of fulfilling our virtual utopias. Will we leave an anchor line back to where consciousness comes from? Do we even know if the human experiences we are having now are the bedrock of consciousness? Might this just be a virtual experience, upon death we release into one level up? We return to the body that is dreaming our life, ad infinitum.
Is there a beginning to consciousness? Does it come from the material universe? Does it come from another dimension? Are we simply projections? Ephemeral spirits inhabiting a physical body? Like how our avatars in video games come alive when we control them? Might our sense that we control our actions simply be a mental trick? An illusion. We deceive ourselves as being the ones in control. Is consciousness the slave of the body or is the body a slave of consciousness? Is consciousness a product of the body? The body constrains and curates the type of consciousness experience that can be had. But is it the seat of consciousness? Does consciousness rest inside the body, attached to it, and with its passing, the light snuffs out? It seems plausible. From my perspective I have only ever known the consciousness supported by my physical body. It seems to follow me everywhere. If I want to go somewhere the body must go too. Except with imagination. The body falls away and consciousness is in some sense detached from the body. It goes wandering in the possibilities of ideas. We construct realities in our minds but there seems to be limitations to the corporealness of these experiences. They lack physicality. They are visual, emotional, they contain space, and even sounds but they are not felt by the body. There is no physical sense of touch in these places and that’s why they aren’t “real”.
Can societies exist without a physical reference? Can customs of living be formed without a stable physical reality to embed itself in? Living in an ever-morphing virtual pleasure dome will likely preclude the necessity for interacting with other beings that have physical bodies. Then again, it is possible that we can emulate physical sensation. If this is the case, then I guess there are no sense left to distinguish reality from fantasy. With consciousness unbound to the laws of physics and with the capacity to generate internal fantasy worlds that feel as real as any reality we could experience we may develop new sense modalities. Capacities for experience that are beyond current human experience not limited by natural laws. If this was to become the case it is very likely that our internal models of reality and the things that are important to us would change. It could be seen as morally outrageous to stop living inside these fantasy worlds. To lose these new senses would be like plucking out someone’s eyes.
If you now experience reality through additional senses, then you have more information streams that need to cohere to create a clear experience / model of your new reality. These additional senses would therefore change how you operate in your reality and the types of things you could do, will do, and therefore what is ultimately important.
The social media phenomenon that is supercomputer AI’s tweaking how they present information to us to influence our behaviour towards increased engagement with their platform to maximise add revenue needs to change. At its core it is misaligned with our species wellbeing. It maximises time spent but not quality of experience. It pulls at deep biological strings which hotwire the brains attention. We need to be in control of our own algorithms….. or do we? Maybe the idea that “individuals” should dictate their lives is naïve. If our human nature has been given to us through evolution then the fact that we’re learning to game ourselves is just a new iteration of the “more resources = better” biological drive in us. Humans are now seen as a resource for other humans. Why shouldn’t humans be a resource? If we hopped outside of our human centric perspective. Being able to be manipulated is the flip side of being able adapt to the environment. To be honest, I think reality will win out. The fears of misinformation distorting the world so much it implodes is plausible. But you can’t ignore physical reality. At least not yet. Not sufficiently that it doesn’t matter. That which works will survive. That which does not will die. It’s evolution baby. If humans are a resource we know how to create more of them. Co-operation is a resource. Conflict is a resource, it forces adaption. Consciousness allows us to navigate new problems. Consciousness is the trouble shooter; it is the thing which does the living. Evolutionary history gives us instincts, provides us a body, it sets the stage. Consciousness is the link between the past and the future. It’s the experience of the present moment. The only moment there will ever be is right now. It is always happening. Consciousness is like a giant synchronome. Consciousness is the act of being alive. It is the current happening. Based on our understanding, consciousness stops when you die.
Or might all consciousnesses be stuck in an infinite now? How could one tell time has passed if not for consciousness? If consciousness occurs just by random luck it would be inevitable. Infinite time, infinite possibilities would manifest in the moment between death and life. Nonexistence and existence. Why does time pass quickly when you’re asleep? Because there is relatively less going on? If consciousness is the cosmic timekeeper then time goes away, space goes away, everything goes away upon consciousness ceasing. In this infinite void of timelessness can exist all time. Let me clarify. Through reduced awareness of events, time speeds up relatively to the conscious observer. Take this to the extreme no consciousness means infinite time. With an infinite amount of time consciousness will re-emerge. It must. Consciousness must exist because if it didn’t it would at some point and there is nothing there to limit the passing of time and the passing of possibility. So, consciousness creates time, but time simultaneously creates consciousness. If everything was frozen, consciousness would not exist. Consciousness is the flow of experience. It is movement, it is change. No change, no consciousness. There is nothing to be conscious of. How to perceive the sun if its photon is but stuck inside it’s belly? I cannot. How too might I gaze upon an open field if not for the light for which the sun shares. I cannot. So too would be gone my sense of sight, for no stimulation of my nervous system would be available. Without stimulation of sight, I am blind. Without stimulation of sound, I am deaf. Without sensation of touch, I cannot feel. Without sensation of smell there are no fragrances. Without taste there is no flavour. Without temperature there is no cold, no warmth. Everything frozen, locked in absolute relation. No atom, molecule, cell or organism could experience anything. No interaction, no reaction. No cause, no effect. To freeze time is to remove causality. The fundamental pattern of our universe. The past causes the present, the present causes the future, consciousness is the medium through which the present comes into being. No observer, no time. No change, No consciousness.
Unless of course consciousness is not bound to matter but simply conforms to it. Consciousness, all pervading, existing beyond space and time, permeating the universe. It crystallises in human minds, in animal minds, in organisms. Maybe our concept of consciousness is too limited? What does it mean to be aware? For this is the root definition of consciousness. To be aware. Is awareness a product of consciousness or its cause? Do they mutually arise? Might consciousness simple be energy? Is energy the timekeeper? It seems very likely. Is consciousness energy? It must be. Because energy is underpins all that we know. What is the essence of energy? It’s the universe, it’s us, our bodies and the hardware of our minds. So, energy and consciousness are the same thing but energy is not necessarily aware. Blind energy, non-feeling. Reaction without experience. Evolution, change, adaptation, pattern forming protozoic plasmodial movement. Life without consciousness. Change without mind. Our basic assumptions of how the universe came to be suggest this is the fact of existence. So, from nothing came consciousness.
Awareness is claimed to be a property of our brain. Yet our brain is ephemeral but a transient pattern of energy, literally. Our atoms are energy, so must be our brains. If our brains are the seat of consciousness, then consciousness must also be temporary. A temporary pattern of energy. A pattern that relates to and understands the world in a constrained way. It has limitations in the way it can operate due to it being of a particular kind of pattern and not another. To have form it is necessary to dispel possibility for actuality, collapse the wave function. In doing so we are born, consciousness comes into being. But when it blinks out. What happens? Does it all just cease? To the individual, time ends. But that means to that individual infinite time begins. So, with unlimited possible unconscious primordial states of infinite universes the individual is inevitably born again. The form is made, the stage is set and the drama begins again. The drama is very engaging. It is what gives life its spice. We are problem solvers after all. If there were no problems what would we do? Die of boredom? Seek infinite pleasure? The possibilities are endless but to get there in this world we must survive. It’s an odd paradox. Death could be absolutely final and this thesis wrong or it could just be a nonexperience infinity remerging as a conscious being In a new universe. We all must face it in the end, at least for now.
Sell me an algorithm that I can choose what I want it to curate, what information I want or how I want to receive information. For example, in a biased or unbiased way. Do I want to see opinions from people across a spectrum of concerns or do I want to make money? What information do I feed myself? Can I have control over an AI so that I can get it to give me what I want not what an advertiser wants? I’m not interested in engagement. I want the right information. The type of information that places me in a position of knowledge. This knowledge will allow me to make better decisions.
What are better decisions? Better decisions are based on my point of view, my values, my culture, my ethics, my life experiences. So, if I change my experiences, I change what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong.
What is good for me? From a biological perspective its living, living without severe pain, having offspring, projecting the human species into the future.
Am I philosophically aligned with the human species? Is what the human species represents something I wish to promote? What do we represent? Problem solvers. But we define the problems.
Is death a “problem” we need to solve? Some suggest it is. We need to live longer, happier, healthier lives. Is this good? From my perspective it is. From an individual human level, I want to maximise my wellbeing, or do I? This is not completely true. I also want to increase others overall wellbeing because if I am selfish this still benefits me. Co-operation allows us to define our reality more precisely. We have control over our environment. We make it nice to live in. We can choose our own reality bubble. We can decide to allow ourselves to become slowly manipulated into puppets for corporations or enormously wealthy people for profit.
Is this a good thing for our species? The consideration of this question shows that the collective wellbeing of our society is actually important to us and ultimately suggests we are not entirely egocentric as individuals, but it is indicative of egocentrism as a species. We ignore our impact on our environment which when really considered seriously, we are entirely dependent. We live in a narrow band of survivability and our collective action is seriously jeopardising the future of not just our species but mammals on the whole. If we destroy ourselves through a mismanagement of our extractive process, we are likely to wipe out hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Now this might ultimately be good, maybe humans have an inbuilt flaw that should it play out on even larger scales the suffering would be even more immense. It could also be terrible.
Terrible in what sense? Where does the value judgement come in? Does the universe care what humans want? We care, certainly. It’s a necessary part of our code to exist but maybe it’s not necessarily enough and we might self-extinguish ourselves through a utopia such as an infinitely deep virtual world where we lose ourselves for our entire lives, never procreating and having children. It might be such a fantasy filling world that living in the real world is just unbearable, even what we consider minor suffering today would be intense for someone who only knows what we consider “pleasure”. Our utopia would be their normal. So where do you go from there? Ever more deeply down the pleasure hole? Very likely, at least for some time.
Will we lose track of other fellow humans? Will our consciousness be so free that the idea of the human form becomes irrelevant? Sounds like a technotopia but what happens to the things we leave behind? If we calibrate our AI’s wrong, they may wreak havoc on the universe in service of fulfilling our virtual utopias. Will we leave an anchor line back to where consciousness comes from? Do we even know if the human experiences we are having now are the bedrock of consciousness? Might this just be a virtual experience, upon death we release into one level up? We return to the body that is dreaming our life, ad infinitum.
Is there a beginning to consciousness? Does it come from the material universe? Does it come from another dimension? Are we simply projections? Ephemeral spirits inhabiting a physical body? Like how our avatars in video games come alive when we control them? Might our sense that we control our actions simply be a mental trick? An illusion. We deceive ourselves as being the ones in control. Is consciousness the slave of the body or is the body a slave of consciousness? Is consciousness a product of the body? The body constrains and curates the type of consciousness experience that can be had. But is it the seat of consciousness? Does consciousness rest inside the body, attached to it, and with its passing, the light snuffs out? It seems plausible. From my perspective I have only ever known the consciousness supported by my physical body. It seems to follow me everywhere. If I want to go somewhere the body must go too. Except with imagination. The body falls away and consciousness is in some sense detached from the body. It goes wandering in the possibilities of ideas. We construct realities in our minds but there seems to be limitations to the corporealness of these experiences. They lack physicality. They are visual, emotional, they contain space, and even sounds but they are not felt by the body. There is no physical sense of touch in these places and that’s why they aren’t “real”.
Can societies exist without a physical reference? Can customs of living be formed without a stable physical reality to embed itself in? Living in an ever-morphing virtual pleasure dome will likely preclude the necessity for interacting with other beings that have physical bodies. Then again, it is possible that we can emulate physical sensation. If this is the case, then I guess there are no sense left to distinguish reality from fantasy. With consciousness unbound to the laws of physics and with the capacity to generate internal fantasy worlds that feel as real as any reality we could experience we may develop new sense modalities. Capacities for experience that are beyond current human experience not limited by natural laws. If this was to become the case it is very likely that our internal models of reality and the things that are important to us would change. It could be seen as morally outrageous to stop living inside these fantasy worlds. To lose these new senses would be like plucking out someone’s eyes.
If you now experience reality through additional senses, then you have more information streams that need to cohere to create a clear experience / model of your new reality. These additional senses would therefore change how you operate in your reality and the types of things you could do, will do, and therefore what is ultimately important.
The social media phenomenon that is supercomputer AI’s tweaking how they present information to us to influence our behaviour towards increased engagement with their platform to maximise add revenue needs to change. At its core it is misaligned with our species wellbeing. It maximises time spent but not quality of experience. It pulls at deep biological strings which hotwire the brains attention. We need to be in control of our own algorithms….. or do we? Maybe the idea that “individuals” should dictate their lives is naïve. If our human nature has been given to us through evolution then the fact that we’re learning to game ourselves is just a new iteration of the “more resources = better” biological drive in us. Humans are now seen as a resource for other humans. Why shouldn’t humans be a resource? If we hopped outside of our human centric perspective. Being able to be manipulated is the flip side of being able adapt to the environment. To be honest, I think reality will win out. The fears of misinformation distorting the world so much it implodes is plausible. But you can’t ignore physical reality. At least not yet. Not sufficiently that it doesn’t matter. That which works will survive. That which does not will die. It’s evolution baby. If humans are a resource we know how to create more of them. Co-operation is a resource. Conflict is a resource, it forces adaption. Consciousness allows us to navigate new problems. Consciousness is the trouble shooter; it is the thing which does the living. Evolutionary history gives us instincts, provides us a body, it sets the stage. Consciousness is the link between the past and the future. It’s the experience of the present moment. The only moment there will ever be is right now. It is always happening. Consciousness is like a giant synchronome. Consciousness is the act of being alive. It is the current happening. Based on our understanding, consciousness stops when you die.
Or might all consciousnesses be stuck in an infinite now? How could one tell time has passed if not for consciousness? If consciousness occurs just by random luck it would be inevitable. Infinite time, infinite possibilities would manifest in the moment between death and life. Nonexistence and existence. Why does time pass quickly when you’re asleep? Because there is relatively less going on? If consciousness is the cosmic timekeeper then time goes away, space goes away, everything goes away upon consciousness ceasing. In this infinite void of timelessness can exist all time. Let me clarify. Through reduced awareness of events, time speeds up relatively to the conscious observer. Take this to the extreme no consciousness means infinite time. With an infinite amount of time consciousness will re-emerge. It must. Consciousness must exist because if it didn’t it would at some point and there is nothing there to limit the passing of time and the passing of possibility. So, consciousness creates time, but time simultaneously creates consciousness. If everything was frozen, consciousness would not exist. Consciousness is the flow of experience. It is movement, it is change. No change, no consciousness. There is nothing to be conscious of. How to perceive the sun if its photon is but stuck inside it’s belly? I cannot. How too might I gaze upon an open field if not for the light for which the sun shares. I cannot. So too would be gone my sense of sight, for no stimulation of my nervous system would be available. Without stimulation of sight, I am blind. Without stimulation of sound, I am deaf. Without sensation of touch, I cannot feel. Without sensation of smell there are no fragrances. Without taste there is no flavour. Without temperature there is no cold, no warmth. Everything frozen, locked in absolute relation. No atom, molecule, cell or organism could experience anything. No interaction, no reaction. No cause, no effect. To freeze time is to remove causality. The fundamental pattern of our universe. The past causes the present, the present causes the future, consciousness is the medium through which the present comes into being. No observer, no time. No change, No consciousness.
Unless of course consciousness is not bound to matter but simply conforms to it. Consciousness, all pervading, existing beyond space and time, permeating the universe. It crystallises in human minds, in animal minds, in organisms. Maybe our concept of consciousness is too limited? What does it mean to be aware? For this is the root definition of consciousness. To be aware. Is awareness a product of consciousness or its cause? Do they mutually arise? Might consciousness simple be energy? Is energy the timekeeper? It seems very likely. Is consciousness energy? It must be. Because energy is underpins all that we know. What is the essence of energy? It’s the universe, it’s us, our bodies and the hardware of our minds. So, energy and consciousness are the same thing but energy is not necessarily aware. Blind energy, non-feeling. Reaction without experience. Evolution, change, adaptation, pattern forming protozoic plasmodial movement. Life without consciousness. Change without mind. Our basic assumptions of how the universe came to be suggest this is the fact of existence. So, from nothing came consciousness.
Awareness is claimed to be a property of our brain. Yet our brain is ephemeral but a transient pattern of energy, literally. Our atoms are energy, so must be our brains. If our brains are the seat of consciousness, then consciousness must also be temporary. A temporary pattern of energy. A pattern that relates to and understands the world in a constrained way. It has limitations in the way it can operate due to it being of a particular kind of pattern and not another. To have form it is necessary to dispel possibility for actuality, collapse the wave function. In doing so we are born, consciousness comes into being. But when it blinks out. What happens? Does it all just cease? To the individual, time ends. But that means to that individual infinite time begins. So, with unlimited possible unconscious primordial states of infinite universes the individual is inevitably born again. The form is made, the stage is set and the drama begins again. The drama is very engaging. It is what gives life its spice. We are problem solvers after all. If there were no problems what would we do? Die of boredom? Seek infinite pleasure? The possibilities are endless but to get there in this world we must survive. It’s an odd paradox. Death could be absolutely final and this thesis wrong or it could just be a nonexperience infinity remerging as a conscious being In a new universe. We all must face it in the end, at least for now.
It is the great mystery. For me, the question "what is conciousness" almost equates to "what is existence". I find it very very hard to imagine or understand how a universe without conciousness could exists in any sense except theoretically in the minds of beings residing in universes with conciousness!
