The Reflections Theory of Memory

When you close your eyes and open them again, you are most likely not shocked by your immediate surroundings. Why? Because there is usually nothing out of the expected, that is, you remain in the time and place where you would have expected or believed that you last left off before you closed your eyes. But what you do not question further is why and how you came to expect the continuation of your existence in this particular point in spacetime after opening your eyes – not just your existence in this particular point, but also your existence as you.

The key is that you cannot prove or disprove the state of existence of anything or any event unless you are constantly perceiving it and/or direct evidence of it. Assuming you could not possibly perceive every and any event simultaneously forever, there always exist an infinite number of possible alternate events that could have happened, are happening, or will happen outside of your perception. Therefore the way you choose to interpret, invent, or interact with your memory of the past dictates the way you exist in the present. But what is memory exactly? And what is its relationship with reality?

How do you know if what you remember as having happened actually happened in reality or whether an alternate story happened instead that led to the same exact outcomes? Or perhaps you only ever came into existence in the present moment with your memories pre-installed into your mind? And what about a moment into the future when the present will inevitably become the past? Depending on the level of skepticism you raise toward your continuous existence from the past to the present moment in such a particular time and place as such a particular person, however, you have varying degrees of ultimately unlimited freedom to manipulate the reality of the state of your existence depending on what exactly you are able to convince yourself into believing.

There seems to be an obvious but inescapably circular relationship between the perception of memory and the reality of the past. Compare the reflections of physical objects through mirrors with the recall of events through memories. A real object serves as an initial source of light that is then reflected onto a mirror and then into the perceiver's eyes. If the mirror is perfectly flat, then the image transferred from the mirror will be a perfect mirror-imaged representation of that object. However, if the mirror is warped or colored, then the image reflected off of that mirror into the perceiver's eyes will not be of accurate resemblance of the real object.

The only way to know whether an image reflected by a mirror were an accurate representation of the original object would be to directly look at the original object and compare it with the reflection, just as the only way to verify the accuracy of a memory of an event would be to look at a recording of the past. But the point we revisit is that unless we constantly perceive the original object or the recording of the actual event in the past, there is no way of proving or disproving the true state of anything outside of conscious perception. In other words, if you closed your eyes and stopped all your sensory perceptions, then the external state of reality may as well be the equivalent of the internal state of your mind.

What's more, even if not on a metaphysical level, the encoding of events in human memory is already contaminated with all sorts of secondary information that form the subjective human realm of experience, such as emotions or thought – if memory were a mirror, it would most certainly not be a flat one. Also our recall of the past is not usually a direct remembrance of an event through one memory, but instead through the memory of a memory of a memory and so on. The farther away from the original object or event, the more mirrors, the more room for manipulation of the reflection of an image, since any or all mirrors along the set of mirrors reflecting light from the original object to the eyes of the perceiver could be warped. 

In the end, what reaches the eyes of the perceiver is not an image of an event but a reflection of a reflection of reflections which may or may not bare any accurate resemblance of the event that actually happened. So memory does not teach you anything about your current state of existence by giving you accurate information about the past – it's not a matter of knowing about the past; it's purely a matter of believing what you think you know about the past. No matter what may have happened in the past, it is only through recalling them in the present moment through perception that they even begin bare any existence at all. And for that matter, any memory is as good as another, so long as they lead to the same outcomes.

On the other hand, changing the past to affect the present and ultimately the future may not be a matter of changing the outcomes, but changing what you choose to believe as the reality of the process. Existence and identity are never dictated by the past since they can only ever be defined by how you choose to perceive your past within the present moment. In a circular way then, the past seems to be dependent on the present as much as the present seems to be dependent on the past, at least theoretically - but in a world where there are no true or false answers, what difference would it make? In a subjective universe where the exact way any given set of events happened in the past can never be objectively proven, all that could ever matter is how you actively perceive that set of events as having happened in the present moment. 

Here is a list of questions to constantly consider:

Who was I yesterday?
Who will I be tomorrow?
Who am I today?
How many times have I lived my life?
How many times have I lived the same exact life?
How many different lives of different people have I already lived?
Have I ever actually lived, or have I been stuck in this very moment for all eternity?

In a universe where nothing can even seem to exist objectively without first being subjectively perceived, it matters not what anyone else tells you they perceive; it matters not what you think you have perceived; it matters not what you think you perceive. All that matters is what you believe you perceive.

Ignostic's Interpretation of Religion

An over-asked question - if religion teaches us to love and accept, why does it seem to cause so much conflict? From my own ignostic perspective, I think that what any religion attempts to teach is ultimate acceptance with the goal of ending all suffering, giving meaning to life/what we encounter in life, and providing answers to questions. In my opinion, all that you need to know/understand in order to be able to “accept” unconditionally is this: 1) There is no good or bad, only thought makes it so. 2) The finger that points to the moon is not the moon.

However, this is not what most religions seem to be interpreted as. Any religion comes with its own set of specific beliefs, strict rituals that must be followed, and rules that must be observed at all times. There is nothing inherently right or wrong about any of these activities, and their purpose is to help the one who caries out the actions be able to accept and find a meaning to their life. So everything is fine if you understand that, but it becomes problematic when you do not realize what your belief is trying to do for you on a deeper level (acceptance), but instead overemphasize what seems to be conveyed on the superficial level of language and human interpretation (the finger that points to the moon).

Belief becomes the origin of conflict when one side believes that what they belief is the objective/absolute truth, and the other side believes that as well. Both think that they are only trying to do the other side “good” by “enlightening” them to the “truth” and the “real path to liberation”, does not understand why the other side just won’t understand what the first side does, but completely miss the whole point of acceptance - “there is no right or wrong”, “the finger that points to the moon is not the moon”.

Consider how musical notes on paper help you interpret a piece of music, but the notes are not the music - nor are the combination of notes played by an instrument, nor even the interpretation of melodious sounds by the mind. You can play the same piece of music with whatever instrument in whatever way you like and listen to it however you like, and no one would ever say that it’s “right” or “wrong” to play or interpret the music a certain way, and there is no “inherent meaning” in the music aside from what arises from the interpretation of music on a personal level, whether from the original composer or someone else.

There is no way to know how any other person interprets the same piece of music, let alone know whether your interpretations are the “same”. There is no way to know what the “music” “actually” is, and all you can ever know is that the music is what you’ve interpreted or perceived for yourself. This does not mean that any interpretation can never be a “real” interpretation but that the term “real interpretation” is just rather strange. Any interpretation is just as meaningful as another (or just as “real” if you will), and no interpretation is ever “meaningless” or “false”.

The bottom line that you realize though, is that even “there is no right or wrong” and “there is no objective truth” are ultimately still views, which become beliefs. The more you believe in one certain set of beliefs, the less readily you will be able to understand (if at all) any other set of beliefs, which is the problem that I’ve realized that I’ve run into - I’m afraid I’ve taught myself to become so strictly ignotic that no matter how much knowledge I ever gain of another religion - or better yet, of anything at all - I will never understand anything at all - there comes the paradox (that scientists hate the most): that you’ll never understand anything unless you believe it, but when you believe you no longer understand.

Q&A

Q: "The only way for something to “not exist at all” is for no one to have ever even thought of it." is this necessarily true? what about all of the concepts that seem exist prior to our discovery or "awareness" of it? The field of mathematics, the numbers, concepts or sequences and series that infinitely exist, are we creating the patterns or do you think the patterns exist and we discover them?"

A: “The only way for something to “not exist at all” is for no one to have ever even thought of it.” Is this necessarily true? What about all of the concepts that seem exist prior to our discovery or “awareness” of it?

In short, something that exists now or in the past or future “exists” and therefore does not “not exist”. For something to “not exist at all” means that it never existed and never will exist, so math and the like that you’ve mentioned simply do not fall under this category. But of course that’s just another “definition” with zero relevance to “necessary truth” whatever that means, and right now I’m only arguing for the sake of the definition of “non-existence” I’ve created, which is in the grand search for meaning, supremely pointless, although not necessarily uninteresting.

On the other hand, whether mathematics, logic, and the like are “discovered” or “invented” is up to personal interpretation. There is no way of proving it, and since proof is based on logic, what it the point? Ever if we were to assume they were “discovered”, how do you know with certainty that they “existed” prior to discovery? The whole point is the existence of anything outside of awareness, whether in the past or future (or that would be non-sensical anyways because does time really exist outside of awareness anyways?), cannot be proved or disproved.

Perhaps you could try and distinguish things this way: that which has been “discovered” and exists in the present moment exists or does not exist with uncertainty in the past when it was not yet “discovered”. But in order for something to not exist definitively, it must not exist in any time, not in the past, now, or future, i.e. if can never “be discovered” because it does not exist, and in order for this to be true, no one must ever be able to think of if. So I suppose a slightly better way of trying to word it might be “the only way for something to “not exist at all” is for no one to have ever thought of it or ever be capable of thinking of it.” - which includes not only its possibility of existing in the past but also in the future.

I guess some people argue that the only things that “exist” are the things that exist in the “present moment”, but I don’t know what that means because I have no idea what “present moment” means or if it’s possible to have an infinitesimally small increment of time or if time even exists, and the existence of time outside of human perception can neither be proved nor disproved so long as you’re perceiving as a human. And of course this once again becomes a debate about what the word “exist” is defined as and the many other problematic words with definitions that it comes with.

Q: Why is it that various geologically isolated cultures “created”/”discovered” the same abstract patterns?

A: How should I know? Maybe it’s a property of the brain? Maybe we’re all aliens? Maybe we’re just all the same person? Maybe those things existed somewhere in the universe before? Etc., etc., I could come up with as many theories as I desire, but none of them could be “proven”, could they? And even if they could, what is the point of “proof”? What is “proof”?

Vis Imaginativa

Science - what ever happened to the experimentation of mind and reality through first-person exploration with the power of imagination? Where is the hope in an all-objective method when reality can only be perceived subjectively?

Uncertainty is the Only Certainty (Death is NOT)

I saw a picture of this flying public artwork thing by Sebastian Errazuriz, and it intrigued me a little - it seemed to carry a lot of conceptual significance. (I’ve been questioning the significance and interpretation of conceptual art and design more and more ever since the time I approached that fashion designer guy to tell him how intrigued I was by his geometrically complex constructions, only to awkwardly find that he had no idea what hyperbolic geometry was and that his inspiration came purely from what he thought to be visually interesting, but this is different.) This flying all-caps sentence was extremely interesting to me not for the content itself, but the extent of further inquisition it raises - “death is the only certainty” - is it really now?

What I mean is not that there could be other certainties in life, but seriously, how could anyone ever assert that “death” is a certainty if no living person has any idea what death even is? I’ve come to realize that whenever anyone speaks any sentence, my mind immediately asks a million why’s and why not’s so quickly that it escapes my conscious awareness, but the most important ones pop out to my attention. This one especially. “Death is the only certainty” - forget the “in life” part, that makes it even more incredibly nonsensical, but sometimes I simply do not understand how people could completely overlook so, so many questions out there, making billions of assumptions every nanosecond of their lives without ever.. wondering - it’s absolutely incredible.

I have no idea how people, especially philosophers and other people doomed with a bunch of “knowledge”, just go around making these statements, statements of all different kinds, all consisting of words and concepts, concepts that they have absolutely no understanding that they have no understanding of, as if they had the slightest clue what they were actually talking about - this is just bizarre. But forget whether the people will ever have any hope of understanding. What I’m interested in is the curiosity of the statement and why/how it could possibly seem like a “true” statement to anyone.

“Death is the only certainty.” Rule #1: If you’re making a statement of any sort that you believe to have any relevance to anything at all, you have to understand what the words mean. Rule #2: Words about fundamental things have little meaning if any at all simply because by nature you have no idea what anything means, especially not if you want to put it in words. (Well, of course these rules have no meaning either, but the point is that I am frequently really bothered by the seemingly extreme ignorance of educated grown-up people, and I would like to point them out just in case.) So anyways, “death” - what in the world is “death”? Forget death, you want to say that it’s the state of ceasing to be alive? Well what in the world is “being alive”? What is the state of being “alive”? What does it mean to say that I am “alive” if I have no idea what it means to be “dead”?

Now, there is a very big difference between what it means to “be dead” versus the action of “dying”. The flying sentence seems to be talking about the latter. So we as “living” people have plenty of knowledge of what it means to die, perhaps physically, perhaps spiritually perhaps both, but not only do we know nothing about what happens after the act of dying, but there is in fact *no* possible way of knowing unless you are already in the state of being “dead”, and I mean exactly that. There are a series of infinite issues concerned with the state of “being dead” that basically reduce to 1) the act of other people dying outside of yourself has absolutely nothing to do with what it means to either “die” or “be dead” yourself 2) the act of “dying” as far as the word seems to be concerned, is the transition from being “alive” to being “dead”, but how on earth can we possibly begin to understand what it means to “die” if we have no idea what “alive” and “dead” are, i.e. 3) “I am alive” is an assumption - how in the world would I know if I’m “alive” if I have no idea what it means to be “dead”, in other words it’s just as meaningful to say “I’m dead” as it is to say “I’m alive”.

If you think about it, it could get as complicated, confusing, nonsensical, and completely meaningless as you want, but really all this is really doing is just creating another infinite set of unfalsifiable models of existence/reality/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. That’s the fun in these sentences that concern the fundamental nature of reality (which is really completely meaningless because it is all meaningful and vice versa). 

So start from the sentence “death is the only certainty in life” - bull shit!!! (But the most meaningful bull shit ever because it is completely meaningless, obviously, which is a good thing.) Everybody is going to die - false - but not true either, just unknown, uncertain, and completely meaningless. People “die” (or seem to anyways) outside of yourself, but just like anything else, that’s go absolutely nothing to do with dying with respect to myself. And now let me just create a few more fascinatingly magnificently terrifying and amazing theories of “life” - I could write a mansion full of books on this - novels, fiction, but not really, or not at all. Actually I’ll just write another post devoted to that.

Point being, “death is the only certainty in life” - what in the universe!?!?

Computers & Aliens: The Abstract (as opposed to the concrete)

Continuing on the topic of placebo universe, i.e. why is the placebo necessary/why can’t you just believe without believing in something? Basically, it’s a concrete vs. abstract concept. Concrete (or supposedly concerte) concepts are a lot narrower than abstract concepts, which is also why abstract models become what I would call “higher level” on the hierarchy - because they encompass more by becoming looser.

What is a concept? How do you define any concept? When you give (or attempt to give) something a “definition” or “meaning”, it becomes more concrete, i.e. you seem to have a better “grasp” of what something is.. but really? Sometimes the opposite happens, and you realize how absurd it is to attempt to define anything at all, and you’re then left only with abstract uncertain unfalsifiable ideas. Ok sure, but then why do most human beings seem more accustomed to concrete concepts even though there’s no real “meaning” in that? Why is concrete preferable and more statistically apparent in thought patterns than abstract? Or what I mean is, why do the things that constantly swirl my mind hardly ever (if not never) stir any attention at all in the vast majority of other people in the universe? Is it because they’re not “real” people?!

I’d like to bring the topic to the human discussion of “mind”: What is mind? What is an intelligent being? What is having consciousness? In particular, computers and aliens: Can a computer have a mind/be consciously aware? Does intelligence exist outside of earth? These are all questions that human beings LOVE to ask, and seem to gain much pleasure from attempting to answer, but from my perspective, it’s absolutely absurd!!!!

Humans talk about minds and intelligence as if they had the slightest clue what “mind” and “intelligence” even are (just like they talking about what God is or isn’t). They invent definitions for what they think “are” mind/intelligence, which are clearly nothing more than “definitions” and then they have a battle of definitions and languages that touches on absolutely nothing beyond language and conclusions that have nothing to do with minds and intelligence at all. Actually that’s even the better type. Most people don’t even seem to think that far, that is, they don’t even attempt to concrete-ify the already abstractly existing ideas of mind/intelligence, but jump directly to the assumption that mind/intelligence is and can only be what we as humans “know” as mind/intelligence even though they clearly have no clue that they know nothing about what mind/intelligence is.

I’m really tired of people going after computers/robots and aliens having “human consciousness”. You “people” find it so difficult to form an abstraction of the concept of mind that you don’t even realize that you’re still caught up in the human bubble of experience that’s got nothing to do with what conscious awareness even means. Stop trying aliens out there that will comprehend in the exact same way that human beings do, because if they do, then they’re not even extraterrestrial intelligence anymore, they’re just human beings! And stop asking whether computers can be intelligent, whether they have the capacity to experience things the way humans do - if they could really do all of that then they’d be “human beings”, not “computers” and that’s got absolutely nothing to do with whether they’re consciously aware either!

Please, people - actually know what you’re talking about (i.e. know that you know absolutely nothing about anything at all) before you go of explaining things as if you had a clue what an explanation even is. Oh the trouble/joys of incomprehension of (human) comprehension.

The Inverted Spectrum Problem of Language

And finally, this - probably one of the most powerful of all realizations - I’ve been debating quite some time whether to document this one at all since the very documentation of it would be completely ironic.

Language is a tool of communication. Language is a bunch of words organized in meaningful patterns. How do we learn language naturally? By hearing it and then utilizing it once we infer the meaning, over and over again. But the point is, when you learn your native language, you learn the meaning of a word by inferring it. The majority if not all words are learned by inferring the meaning through the context, hardly ever if not never through a given “definition”. In other words, there is no “definition” to any word or concept, but only the word itself. Words and the combination of them are then used to communicate as though they replaced the actual meaning of anything at all - as if an explanation through language is the equivalent of a “meaning”. 

But what is “meaning”? It seems as though you could give that question an answer, as if meaning had the same meaning to each and every person even though you have no way of possibly getting into another person’s mind and perceiving the meaning of meaning through their conscious perception (and even if you did, how would you know? since you would have given up your own conscious perception and forgotten completely that you aren’t actually that other person). Point being, meaning is a completely subjective experience of a word. Not just the meaning of “meaning”, but the meaning of any word at all.

Yes, you could attempt to give a definition to any word and ignorantly believe that you just proved that you agree on the meaning of that word with other people after checking that your definitions indeed match, but what in the world has that got to do with anything at all!! The definition is still a definition made of words, and how in the world am I supposed to know whether you comprehend that strand of words the same way I do? More straightforwardly, my red is red, you agree that red is red, but I have no possible way of knowing what “red” actually looks like to you. Same with any word, hence the “inverted spectrum problem of language”.

Anyways, that’s all trivial understanding, the point is - the conflict caused through disagreement in belief - how does this make any sense at all? How could you even infer that someone has a belief contrary to yours when you don’t even know how that person comprehends the words he/she is speaking to you to convey his/her beliefs? For example, a reasonable number of people seem to dislike the way some religious people attempt to spread their beliefs. They dislike it because the religious people tend to explain their beliefs as though they were the one and only true “truth” even though there is clearly no way of knowing what truth even means when you’re inside the box. Well then the problem is, however, that it is not that religious person who is making you comprehend his/her words the way you are, it is you who is comprehending the words.

So take the sentence “if you don’t believe in god, you won’t go to heaven” if you disagree or if you agree with it, what are you actually agreeing with? Do you actually think that you agree with the idea, the belief that someone else has attempted to implant in your mind? Or course not! The only thing you ever comprehend from that sentence is what your mind comprehends for itself, it’s got not the slightest thing to do with what the person who said it “meant” at all. What does the word “god” entail? What does the word “heaven” entail? What if you happened to disagree with religious people on what “god” and “heaven” meant even though you agree or disagree with that sentence? You can’t know anyways, so how could it possibly matter?

Too often religious believers will tell you that you must have faith in order to experience the extraordinary. They will describe the supernatural spiritual awakening that they’ve experienced, and their indescribable encounter with god. Atheists will immediately combat the idea, dismissing it as ludicrous because it does not survive the scientific method - which advocates the “objective” perspective in everything. But what you don’t realize is that the religious believer says you need to experience it for yourself. They do everything they can to describe /their/ experiences, and what /they/ think that you should experience or believe - yes, but using what? WORDS! How on earth would they know how you happen to comprehend/believe the words they spoke to you, and how on earth would you know what they comprehend/believe compared to what you think they comprehend/believe from their words?

Doesn’t anyone actually realize that we live in a world of unfalsifiable assumptions? The finger that points to the moon is not the moon. What is the moon? Something that’s not the finger pointing at it. It’s completely ridiculous that there are so many disagreements, conflicts, fights, wars, over whose finger is actually the moon. Actually, it’s absolutely insane. I don’t understand any of this. Humans are such bizarre creatures, sometimes I believe that they’re not real at all - they’ve got no consciousness. Well, maybe it is like that then, is it not? The only people who are actually conscious are the ones who understand that all that could possibly be understood is that there can be no understanding at all. How strange - I wonder how I ever got to this universe to start with..

Time Without Human Perception

Continuing the topic of - what the heck is spatial position when your eyes are closed - - what the heck is the passage of time when you have no perception?!

How do you know that time is passing by? The second hand on the clock moves. Stuff moves. There are sounds. There are actions. Okay so what about when you close your eyes and eliminate all sound - well yeah of course you know that time is still passing my because you perceive your thoughts - thoughts moving by, thoughts. But what about when you eliminate all thoughts and simply sit only as the observer? How do you know that time is passing by? What does it then mean for time to pass by? If there is no sight, so sound, no thought, what is left to perceive? Do you then perceive nothing? Does time then stop existing?

Well first of all why should we assume that there is nothing to observe without sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, thought, feeling? Is that really all that we perceive? What about the perception of time? What about the perception of space? What does that mean? Is the perception of space and time only a by product of our perception through other senses? What becomes of - what are - space and time when you’ve got no normal perceptions left to observe the universe with? 

Does time stop? Is that what they call being entirely “in the present” when you lose all sense of passage of time? Is it then not only a metaphorical portrayal of the moment, but instead a literal one? And when the normal way of perceiving is non-existent, wouldn’t it be absurd to suppose that the rest of the universe does not exist? Or would it be absurd to suppose that it did? Does the universe exist independently of my perception? Or rather, does it exist independently of my conscious perception? Well the answer to the latter is most certainly uncertain and unfalsifiable, but the answer to the first one - as long as I am still consciously aware, then I obviously still observe something, and that something is the universe, so the universe still exists, but in a way that is entirely different from what we “assumed” it to be under our normal way of perceiving.

How many times do I have to repeat the phrase, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon (it’s just a finger pointing). Your perception, your description, your model of the universe is not the universe, but it is all that your universe will ever be - what you believe it to be, that it is. But the question is, how do you escape perception and perceive the universe? That’s the universe I attempt to explore a little further every day, every hour, every minute.

The Universe Without Eyes

Anyways, what I wanted to wrote down was this:

1) When you close your eyes, how is it that you know where the different parts of your body are? When you close your eyes, you still feel your fingers, your hands, arms, body, legs, feet, yes. But more importantly, you still feel their relative position to each other - why/how? Is it only because you remember where your hand goes and where your foot goes, etc.? Well that sounds absurd does it not? Yes, you feel them, most certainly, but HOW do you feel RELATIVE POSITION? How do I know that when I close my eyes, my feel aren’t positioned above my head? How do I know that my hands aren’t 5 kilometers away even though I can feel them exactly as they were when I had my eyes open and saw them half a meter away from my eyes?

2) How is living in a 3D world relevant at all once you close your eyes? What does position mean when your eyes are closed? Distance, direction, dimension, how do I know that there are 3 dimensions when my eyes are closed? Well, I don’t, obviously. But then how to I begin to comprehend anything in 3 dimensions with a relative position to be when my eyes are closed? Yes, perhaps I’ve only seen things in 3 dimensions when my eyes are open, and therefore I only have experience of perception in 3D in “real vision”, but how has this got anything to do with the way I perceive anything when my eyes are closed? 

I’ll attempt to document the ideas I got from these questions later, but the bottom line is, how the hell do you even start comprehending anything in the normal human perspective when you haven’t got any eyes? What in the world is the universe even when you don’t have to see it through “eyes”?

Severe Lack of Dimension in Language

Haven’t posted in a really long time, partly because there are so many ideas that keep on popping up in my mind that I literally can’t afford the time to document all of them (especially because it’s a lot more time consuming to attempt to document them using words). Usually they pop out within a matter of seconds - the idea - but to document them is a whole different task, an act of translation, even, or more like a mapping. Language is so limited, I’m almost certain all it could ever do is provide a mapping - a 3D cube onto a 2D piece of paper - you lose one dimension, but you get the gist of the idea, although what you get is most certainly not a cube, but some random 2D arrangement of lines. Language is like the paper, except it’s not just one dimension lower than the actual idea that attempts to be portrayed, it’s i don’t even know how many dimensions lower. It’s just incredibly limiting, and most of the time I find it bewildering to even think that it’s at all possible to convey anything meaningful using language.

Language is a tool of communication - its primary purpose - but it is most certainly not the most ideal tool for communication. At times I wondered why I should even attempt to convey these ideas using language at all, but I suppose if the primary purpose of these posts is to document my ideas before they risk disappearing, then the inverted spectrum of language problem doesn’t really since I’m only trying to communicate with myself? Although if I were to forget completely the original idea one day and then re-read this post, that would be a different story. But I’d like to believe that that won’t ever happen because I like to believe that it’s indeed not possible to forget anything at all, and therefore I won’t. 

Dumbledore actually said something reasonably meaningful

“Of course it’s all in your head, but why should that mean it’s not real?”

And then say ok, define “real”. And it loses its meaning completely once again. But who cares about meaning or meaninglessness?

Theory as Art and as Escape (1)

Sometimes people don’t seem to understand why/how there is so much for me to think about. It’s like, once you’ve drawn a conclusion - which I seem to have (i.e., there is no objective truth in anything at all, and reality IS exactly what you perceive through belief subjectively) - what’s the point of continuing with all this theorizing of reality? What’s the point of theory if it’s just that? Where does it ever get you?

Well, I think I have two answers to these questions that aren’t really related: 1. It’s not as if I’m after some sort of answer (as I’ve mentioned over and over again), I just like becoming immersed in the process of it, thought. The product is always secondary if of any importance at all. It’s like art. 2. It’s not as if I can’t see reality in the “normal” not bewildered state that most people seem to see it, it’s kind of like a search for any possible reason at all to live in a reality, to morph my reality to something that is completely detached from “ordinary unquestioning perception”. It’s like a vessel, like an escape. From whatever reasons, I cannot stay put in “reality”.

I will elaborate:

1. I think I have come to believe that philosophy in the academic sense is terribly boring and rather meaningless. I cannot read “philosophy”* even though I guess you would classify what I write as philosophy wouldn’t you? Maybe I should just give it a different name. I’ll just call it theory. Theorizing. I am a theorist. That is what I’ll say I do.

I would like to speak of philosophy as a medium and compare it with a set of watercolors. Academic philosophy is like when you focus on all the techniques of painting and try to figure out and argue which techniques are better and which will allow you to paint the best picture of the universe and such. Theorizing (what I’m calling it) would be like just painting freely and losing it and not caring, just going with it for the sake of it just because the process is so incredibly captivating, and then ending up with some sort of picture of the universe that happens to be amazing anyways. Yes, you see the clear bias from my words, but I’m not arguing that academic philosophy is objectively meaningless. I don’t want to argue or “prove” anything. That has no point to me. It’s just my view on art. I do not think the former use of watercolors is what art is, and to me theory is an art where the medium is reality itself.

I think a great many people paint for the sake of perfection of skill and satisfaction in the production of a precise painting, but I don’t think that is what artists do. It seems strange to go and ask an experienced artist “Why do you paint?” “What is the point of continuing with painting if you already have such skill and have decided which techniques are your preferred?” “Where does painting ever get you?” So why should you ask me the same questions when reality is my set of paints? Don’t you understand the point of painting at all? Haven’t you ever painted anything yourself? Do you not know/can you not relate to what it feels like to paint?

I fear I have already presented myself as a terrible romanticist, but it pains me to think about how much the world (of artists) is missing out on the unbelievably extraordinary medium of reality. Talk of creativity - paints, pencils, music, words, whatever, those are just media, as is reality. But what is reality? With what could you possibly create with more freedom, more space for vision, more enchantment, wonder, than with the manipulation of reality itself?! How could anyone not realize!?

And then you would probably say, “What do you mean “manipulation” of reality? You can’t just change reality the way you create whatever you want on paper when you paint with watercolors.” But you would be missing the point! You can manipulate reality though! That’s what you do all the time! And I am NOT talking about it as if it were some sort of figurative thing. It is absolutely LITERAL!!*** (also see: reality the strange loop) You change reality into exactly what you (at the present moment) believe it is**. That is your creation. It is your work of art, just like everything else.

And how could I not be constantly addicted to this most inordinately immense field of freely floating imagination? Where would you possibly find more room for imagination than in the state of reality itself? This is infuriating! It’s like the most enjoyably possible explosion of my brain and my mind. It’s like, “Ughhhhhhhhhh, I can’t! All I can do is stare..”

But anyhow, this is why I don’t especially enjoy reading academic philosophy, academic “reality”. It’s like painters and painters painting so many paintings and for the primary purpose of presenting their painting as THE painting of the universe. That is absurd. It’s a painting. We enjoy its distinct aesthetic profoundly, but not nearly its attempt at persuasion. There is no “best” painting. The act of “comparison” based on subjective perceptions is bizarre. There are only paintings, all marvelous, magnificent, magical, each and every single one. That is why you keep on looking, living more paintings. Why would you just stop at one?

//Part 2 to be continued…//

*Most if not all of it angers/infuriates me. I cannot handle the restricted/narrow-mindedness of it. Can’t you at least leave your human mind behind first before you start floating in theory?

**This is why the inverted spectrum applied to perception of present moment time create a whole convoluted “mess” of overlapping realities assuming that other minds do exist, and other “realities” of all different natures would exist at the same instances in time (in space?). How? What?

***But of course - this is my universe, and this is what I believe. (And yes, of course it’s circular? What isn’t? What’s wrong with circularity? What’s not wrong about being non-circular?)

Inverted Spectrum II - Time

So back the the problem: Inverted spectrum does not just apply to colors. It applies to all perceptions, including the perception of space, time, and consciousness itself (well, yeah). I focus on the idea of the inverted spectrum problem as applied to the perception of time.

So just because I am perceiving the present moment instantaneously at this exact moment, how do I know that you or anyone in the world is also perceiving the same exact “present moment” at this point in time. You would always agree with me on “what is red” and likewise, you would certainly agree with me that “now” is now, but does that even have any meaning at all? So at this present moment - say 11:42:37:09 AM (UTC+8), Wednesday, August 22nd - that I am experiencing as the present moment, how do I know that you’re also perceiving this exact moment at the time that I’m perceiving it? Why should our times be synced? Why shouldn’t they?

(Of course this goes into a bunch of complicated problems such as whether time even exists at all, whether other people’s minds exist at all, etc. And also, there’s always the “I have no reason to assume why not” argument (that infuriates me, because please - actually listen to my argument. I never said I was arguing that we should assume that we all perceive different times or different colors or whatever. All I’m saying is that you can’t know if we do or don’t. I never said we had to choose a side. In fact I explicitly argue that neither side can be right/true. The nature of subjectivity.) But let’s just disregard that. I am only thinking about this problem because it brings me pleasure to be puzzled by it, and we’ll see what happens from there.)

So at any rate, if you didn’t perceive the present at the same present moments as me, does that imply an argument on the side that the mind is a separate entity from the body? Does it matter? How does this affect free will and causality? Do all conscious beings need to perceive the present in the same frame of present in order for free will to exist? Well, for “free will” as we know it, that seems to be the case, but already we have a million other problems because of our ill definition of “free will” - yet another definition. Free will is just a definition of something. It’s a human invented concept, just like logic and all other things.. 

Well, just because we invented a definition for the term “free will” does not necessarily imply that something such as what we define as “free will” does not exist in the universe, but that somehow seems unlikely because don’t all definitions have to be consistent, and if any description is internally consistent, does that not imply that it cannot be a complete definition? So point being, definitions are completely useless, meaningless, and irrelevant. Ok, let’s throw away the problem of “free will” and just theoretically suppose what it would be like in a universe where conscious perceivers perceived present moments at different present frames.

So like most other theoretical universes (where I can be sure of no nature of other people’s conscious perceptions) that I’ve thrown myself into, this one also seems quite lonely if I suppose that I’m the only person in the whole entire universe who is perceiving this present moment at the present moment.. What happened/happens to everyone else? That leaves room to suppose that I could indeed be everyone and everything in the whole entire universe, and there is no such thing as separate, different people with different conscious minds, because as “you” are reading this post in your present moment, that may not be my present moment or anyone else’s present moment at all. And so if there is no reason why any present moments should overlap at all, there is no reason why I can’t believe that at some point in time, I could experience every single present moment of every single conscious being in the universe. When “you” are reading this post, that is actually “me” just in a different location in space time and consciousness and reality.. But it’s still in the same universe. You can’t get out of the universe.

Yes, but again that’s just a theoretical universe, and I have absolutely no grounds to either believe or not believe the truth in it. There can be no arguments to prove or disprove a theoretical universe, so in the end it is a choice, isn’t it? The universe exists in the exact way I choose to believe.

The Secret Life of Plants

This book of artwork by Anselm Kiefer reminded me of some things. Whenever people ask the question “can _____ have consciousness”, they never actually ask that question. What they are asking is “can _____ have “human” consciousness” - this has absolutely nothing to do with the former question. It’s an absurd generalization to assume (or classify, rather) that “all forms of consciousness” must exhibit behavior or experiences such as “thought”, “emotions”, and “senses”. These are things that humans perceive through human consciousness. Just because something “thinks” differently from what we are used to calling (or experiencing) as “thought” does not (ABSOLUTELY not) mean that _____ does not “think”.

The whole AI debate is no more than a grossly exaggerated grand argument of DEFINITION, nothing else. I hate it when this happens, and the debaters never realize that they’re getting nowhere besides disagreeing on their definitions of “consciousness”. No matter how specific, how elaborate, how clever you think your definition is, it is a “definition”. It’s got nothing to do, nothing at all to do with anything at all. Absurd, just stop. I don’t attempt to undermine anyone’s definition of anything. What good would that do anyone, and what understanding would I ever gain by merely creating definitions and more and more that contradict each other? Why did philosophy have to evolve into this kind of “stuff”..

Real and Imaginary People

Just because something is imaginary does not mean that it does not exist. It would seem absurd to say that thoughts do not exist even though we clearly experience them. Perhaps more surprisingly however, just because something is real does not mean that it exists either.*

People, grown-ups in particular, have lived in and experienced reality the way they have for so long that they forget, or don’t even understand how to question and interpret through questioning what they experience anymore. General consensus of belief makes this even more difficult.

Let’s say the people who we perceive in real life every day - friends, family, strangers on the street - we can all agree that they are “real”, that is, they “exist”. And now lets say I decide to create certain “imaginary” people in my mind, that I know are not “real”, but that I know exist because I can think about them. In both cases, I can attempt to communicate my thoughts with them and also receive responses, but in the real case, I hear a response concretely through sound waves, through my ears, and in the imaginary case, I hear a response through the form of “my thoughts”.

“My thoughts”. What does this mean? Yes, any lay person could simply dismiss all of this as ridiculous because I have obviously “made up” in my mind all of the responses from my imaginary people that I have created, and they are not the ones that are communicating with me; I am communicating with myself, they don’t exist. Sure, but what really is a “thought”? Yes, I perceive it through my head. Yes, it seems so be associated with intention, and I seem to be the underlying reason why they are appearing, but how do I know that? I perceive them, but how do I know that I’m not also just perceiving intention as well? That there is actually no underlying causal relationship between what I perceive as “intention” and what I perceive as a “thought”? So there is indeed no way of knowing whether these responses that I get from my imaginary people are from the imaginary people who do exist, or I “made them up”.

Now, there is a more fundamental difference between real and imaginary people that does not have to do with whether I can physically perceive them and their behavior or form of communication, and that is their own underlying intentions and thoughts. We perceive the behavior of real people, but we do not perceive their thoughts. We believe we may know what their thoughts and intentions are, but we do not and cannot perceive that.

But - it seems like we do and can perceive the thoughts and intensions of our imaginary people. We perceive their consciousness directly from the inside as if it were part of our own. It most certainly “exists” - we may not know how exactly it exists, but we know it does because we can directly perceive it, rather than just infer it. Well, shouldn’t this make the consciousness of imaginary people be more “real” than “real” people? And yet not at all - this is exactly what makes them imaginary. That is, you can only be “real” when you don’t directly perceive it. And when you do directly perceive it, you somehow… are no longer “real”.

So, which do I choose to be the “real”? Which one is really the “imaginary”? Obviously there is no answer because there is no “truth”, there is just what I believe in - again and again it’s the same answer, it’s so obvious, just because of the nature of unfalsifiable things… But how am I supposed to know what to believe? Well, I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know, again. I’d be worried if I knew, wouldn’t I? Yes, Indeed.

It is 5:08 am again, and I can never find myself living in the reality that “everyone else” does.

*We could go into the definition of existence and raise books and books of arguments, but they would only be arguments based on definition and language, devoid of actual meaning, so I don’t want to go into that.