I was actually hoping that this would be an article explaining how reality is literally a shared hallucination, and not just an eye grabbing metaphor for explaining how non-autistic people perceive reality.
Reality is a security overlay, keeping private data about individual entities from being inspected casually and limits the knowledge of all things from occurring in a single locale. This is the speed of causality (light).
The base function of this reality is to read, process, and write data in a highly immutable manner. This is conservation of energy. Collaborators in this reality exchange data in a variety of ways, but visual inputs through the mind's eye seem to be the predominate method for memory recollection. Based on causal interviews with individuals since learning I have Aphantasia, it would appear these "internal" views seem less immutable than "out here". Some can zoom their mind's eye. Some see in black and white. Some see icons.
One hypothesis to explain the "shared" part of the hallucination would be the existence an immutable shared data structure underlying the universe which uses consensus to agree, long term, about what happened "out here" based on various and sundry inputs from an entity's internal view & resulting action(causality). Internal views may be non-immutable (highly mutable) and may be influenced by metaphysical phenomenon. People see things that others don't see. The Romans thought it was the act of Gods to see and hear things others didn't.
We've always assumed our brains are making these images up, but perhaps they aren't and we missed something important along the way.
> One hypothesis to explain the "shared" part of the hallucination would be the existence an immutable shared data structure underlying the universe which uses consensus to agree, long term
This is a hypothesis i also stumbled into: reality as a method for coming to consensus on a data structure.
Check out this simple description of a game with similar mechanics:
That reminded me I had a random thought about how the universe is a sorting algorithm working towards heat death a few months ago. Probably not an original thought but its fun to think about.
Weird. I searched for the definition of Aphantasia and came across this[1] link which describes it in detail. I think I'm the same - I can't visualise things in that way.
Wow. Just finished your link. A great read. I don't know which I find more surprising. The fact that Blake (The creator of Firefox) can't picture anything in his mind, or the fact that he thought everyone was the same, and that "picture a beach" was metaphorical.
Wait what, really? I can literally draw anything you ask me to in my mind, I can see things so vividly I can manipulate them with my mind if I want to. Fascinating that you can't, totally... blows..my...mind. :)
Most of us with Aphantasia can feel three dimensional models, however. My tests show I have a high accuracy of the items I'm feeling, but not necessarily a lot of detail. It could be compared to a 3D model with no texture mapping. I will also note that not everyone's visualization systems are the same, so you may be able to draw anything, but some may not be able to zoom, enhance color, rotate, change perspective, etc. I have one friend that can move icons of things around and draw lines between them, but can't imagine a beach.
Sorry about that. If it helps any, it would appear Aphantasiacs have purpose here. My kids have it. We're immune from commercial and "bad image" influence as well.
For the record, Christopher Langan, the IQ 200 guy tackled the subject in his theory on how reality works http://www.ctmu.org/
Also a document you can google titled A MIND/BRAIN/MATTER MODEL CONSISTENT WITH QUANTUM PHYSICS AND UFO PHENOMENA by Thomas E. Bearden from 1979 also talks about how reality is a shared dream basically.
Perhaps we will have to wait for a real AI in the future to fully comprehend and have the deep nature of reality explained to us as it's a subject too difficult for even the greatest minds to tackle.
The reason why dreams are so malleable and controllable by the dreamer to some degree is that you're really the only dreamer when you fall asleep and dream, whereas when you're awake there appear to be other shared dreamers who make the reality "hard" at least on a macro level. Perhaps if gradually all the shared dreamers became convinced reality is a dream we would see "weird" things appear in this reality too.
My take is that subconsciousness of each human is a sort of a GPU computational "workhorse" that each do their part to generate and render this shared reality. The things not observed are not rendered in order to save processing power because it is finite.
Even so, I think our brains too are a metaphor for some processing unit that exists on a level of reality below ours, blobs of organic neural networks in an underlying 2D universe perhaps? Or it's a part of some sort of an artificial simulation, a game.
No, it's not. QM doesn't have any confirmed solution to the measurement problem, and no seriously considered solution has anything to do with intelligent observation or consciousness.
Anyone who claims to have a profound philosophical argument inspired by QM is almost certainly a charlatan.
As a rule, any attempt to "solve" wave-particle duality is going to be wrong, because in real QFT there's no duality to solve.
Photons aren't objects in a classical sense. Photons are event probabilities.
"Entanglement" is a description of how the probabilities interact, not an explanation of why they interact as they do.
And if you're going to suggest it's all about "observers" and "minds" you need to explain what both of those things are made of in quantum terms. I haven't seen anyone manage to do that yet.
A "philosophical" argument is pretty useless. Unless you manage to devise experiments for your those theories. And QFT can at least inform you about "reality" - and how little the one in a human head has to do with it. Since QFT is "real" (shown to work), if our perception was based on "reality" we should not have had such trouble to a) come up with it, and b) understand it.
Our perception of reality absolutely agrees with QFT -- in the medium-energy medium-scale environments that humans operate in. Everyday physics is a limiting case of QFT.
Our mental heuristics don't work for very high/low energies or small/large scales because we don't operate on those scales.
I think I understand your point - but I had a very different angle. What you write actually is fully in support with my point.
You simply declare as "reality" that what you perceive, the model we (our brains) have come up with. But that's exactly it - that's your version of "reality" created by how you look at it - with "macro" sensors. Different sensors would have a different result. In addition we don't even have raw sensor data in our mental world model, instead the data is extremely processed before it is assembled to our mental model of the world. Take a neuroscience course on perception, I recommend. Somebody said we live in a VR world created by our brains, and that is a good fit. Of course the input that goes into creating that "VR world" is from sensors getting data from interactions with the actual world.
If you don't understand what my point is don't say "you are wrong".
Of course that can be turned around to point out that our senors (for machines) only provide us with very filtered information. It just seems to be 'raw' compared to the information available to our conscious minds.
Intelligence isn't the ability to gather massive sums of information, but instead to filter it.
There is simply too much information around you. As a biological creature with a limited energy budget and a limited lifespan this is a big problem. As we know from computing, two things can save massively on your energy requirements. Good algorithms and early pruning of unneeded information. For example interpretation of UV and IR wavelengths has been unimportant for the continued survival of our species, and for most of the human timeline it has been abstracted away. We knew something existed because we were affected by it, but without science we created things like magic and gods to explain it. How right or wrong our mental model (subjective reality) is really doesn't matter much until we reach a critical junction of events were the fitness algorithm kicks in, survival of the fittest as Darwin coined.
We have come to the point of evolution where we realize 'reality' is much larger than our set of filters and learning algorithms. We also realize our algorithms are not well adapted for the massive increase of knowledge and rate of change we are experiencing.
> Of course the input that goes into creating that "VR world" is from sensors getting data from interactions with the actual world
This process might not be so arbitrary, for example in an experiment at Google, an unsupervised machine learning system discover the concept of cat from raw images all by itself. The concept of cat might be present in the world objectively and we just gave it a name.
The reality constructed in our brains is not substantially different from actual reality. Our mental model of reality is just much lower fidelity. At no point has physics demonstrated "wow, humans are totally wrong about the world".
>Different sensors would have a different result
All of our experience with robotics suggests otherwise.
The base function of this reality is to read, process, and write data in a highly immutable manner. This is conservation of energy. Collaborators in this reality exchange data in a variety of ways, but visual inputs through the mind's eye seem to be the predominate method for memory recollection. Based on causal interviews with individuals since learning I have Aphantasia, it would appear these "internal" views seem less immutable than "out here". Some can zoom their mind's eye. Some see in black and white. Some see icons.
One hypothesis to explain the "shared" part of the hallucination would be the existence an immutable shared data structure underlying the universe which uses consensus to agree, long term, about what happened "out here" based on various and sundry inputs from an entity's internal view & resulting action(causality). Internal views may be non-immutable (highly mutable) and may be influenced by metaphysical phenomenon. People see things that others don't see. The Romans thought it was the act of Gods to see and hear things others didn't.
We've always assumed our brains are making these images up, but perhaps they aren't and we missed something important along the way.