Little late reply but I wanted to add something up to this topic because it is so rich. The whole essay of the Infernal Loops speaks of something completely real.Cardenio wrote: ↑Wed Feb 02, 2022 2:10 am Upon reflection, it is obvious that we traverse many different realms in consciousness and spirit in a manner that is analogous to, but not identical with, that by which we move between physical locations with our limbs. It is possible to set up an analogy between worlds despite that it is a perilous game insofar as if we forget what we are doing, we will condemn ourselves to the infernal regions. But like Thucydides observed, "The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage" so we should not allow fear to discourage us from the pursuit of higher knowledge. Whereas in the corporeal world, our locomotion is achieved through the exercise of our limbs (i.e. either directly or as augmented by various "garments of skin" (Cf. Gen. 3:21) like dogsleds or motorcycles), in the soul and spiritual planes, we travel through attunement, like the way we can match a pitch with our voice that we hear through our ears. Hence our spiritual "legs" are our thinking-feeling-willing's ability to transform itself into the likeness of that which it seeks to approach.
Science, in its attempts to form quantitative grasp of the sensory world, has gradually reached in the most general terms, the idea of state and its transformation through time. Currently, thinking tries to produce mathematical thought-forms which when followed, numerically mimic the quantified sensory perceptions (potentially powered by mechanical extensions). As I've mentioned in the Central Topic, the greatest leap that scientific thinking can currently make is to realize that the supposed World state that it tries to model mathematically, is really our own state of being, most clearly experienced in the flow of thinking. The continuous transformation of our cognition is the World state in constant metamorphosis. We don't need to quantify and model it - this only splits thinking from its own immediate reality. We need to intuitively grasp its dynamics and learn to navigate it.
Cardenio has pointed very well in the bolded part that we travel trough attunement. This is actually true even in the sensory spectrum, although in a much more 'bureaucratic' way. In the higher forms of being, we navigate Imaginatively through the soul and spiritual topology. We practically continuously will the transformation of our full inner (first-person) state in a holistic way. In a way this is still principally true in the bodily spectrum but due to the decohered nature of the metamorphosis, we must will that transformation 'in parts', so to speak.
The more coherent and holistic transformation of our state can be likened to quantum tunneling. As a rough analogy, if we are at one place and we want to reach another, we simply focus our spiritual activity directly towards the desired state. We practically quantum tunnel towards it. In the state of great decoherence, this kind of Imaginative transformation begins to break down. We need to will the parts of that transformation. In other words, we need to will the movement of one leg, then the other and so on. Practically everything still happens in the holistic overarching idea (to reach the destination) yet this idea can't effortlessly transform our state but instead it is continually decohered through our interaction with the sensory environment and thus we need special effort of the will to correlate the partial transformations with the context of the overall goal.
This quantum tunneling metaphor may sound far-fetched when we imagine it in regards to physical movement (and this was given just as an analogy) but it is quite immediate experience in our thinking. We don't shape the sounds of our verbal thinking manually, oscillation by oscillation. Instead we reach in for certain meaning that we want to express and the words align with it quite naturally (in most cases). But if we imagine that we want to express some difficult idea, then we struggle to align words with it. Then everything becomes much more 'bureaucratic', we begin to juggle with words/concepts and try to fit them with the meaning that we intuitively experience. It's similar with our spatial movement analogy. If everything is well tuned, if we're in perfect health, full of energy, well motivated, then we can focus on our overarching goal of going from A to B, and the flow of states manifests quite effortlessly. But if we're sick, in pain, without energy, then our overarching idea begins to decohere and we're forced to confront every little step of the walk as a small ordeal that we must overcome with our will.
So it's really a gradient of spiritual reality. The sensory state is not some special kind of reality. In it's essence it is still a spiritual first-person reality but gone through several phases of decoherence.
I'm mentioning this because the apparent stability of the sensory world is still the main reason for misunderstandings for both materialists and idealists. For example some time ago Eugene said:
In other words, the world is there, it operates in some way but we can't find a single math model that fits all the data. And that's true. There isn't such a model because reality is not created from the rules of such model. Yet this lack of singular math truth seems as a problem only as far as thinking is caught up in the hysteresis process and splits from itself, while it tries to model perceptual dynamics. As explained in the Central Topic, we need not annihilate thinking in order to spiral the hysteresis process into unity but only understand that thinking is both the activity of the World Process and its most immediate perception. In other words, within our human thinking, the Living Spiritual Cosmos confronts its own activity.Eugene I. wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 1:47 pmWell, this is a consequence of a deeper phenomenon so characteristic of our times. A few centuries ago in Europe people lived in the world of singular knowledge, there was only one variant of religion, of math, of physics and perhaps a few versions of philosophy. Modern humanity is facing the phenomenon of explosion into the unlimited number of worldviews and theories. In physics there is about 10^500 variants of sting theory with no way to experimentally prove which one corresponds to reality. Same in other areas of knowledge. We have to adjust to it and live with that, there is no going back to a cozy world of singular knowledge, no matter how much some people may feel nostalgic about it.Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 12:53 pm Unless you make a name for yourself in academia, it's a question of a continuous, lifetime effort - since, Leo says, there are limitless people with theories of everything, and most must be sifted out based on qualifications (as BK weeds folk out if they don't have a PhD).
When this is grasped, thinking itself becomes for us a metamorphic flow, just like the one exemplified through movement in space. As long as thinking is locked in the intellectual loops, one is bound to think mechanically about the spatial world (see Ashvin's essay on idolatry of space).
The spatial world is one of the strongest factors which cause people to speak of objective world and about subjective mental world where there may be 10^500 individual truths and no one being more correct than others. Somehow, we're forced to admit that we live in a shared spatial world. We feel it is real and undeniable. On the other hand, when it comes to our life of thinking, feeling and willing, everyone is on their own opinion.
I'll try to hint that this separation is artificial. We arrive at the agreement about the shared spatial world in the exact same way we could arrive at agreement about the inner world.
The first step would be to realize (it shouldn't be too difficult in an idealistic forum) that we have a spectrum of conscious phenomena - color, sound, taste, touch, feelings, thoughts, will, etc. All of these are perceptible/experienceable phenomena that we can think about. We have learnt to divide this spectrum roughly in two buckets - one contains the phenomena which we associate with the bodily senses, the others are feelings, thoughts, will, imagination, which we commonly call our inner life. So the common objection is that we can agree about the sensory spectrum, which seems to reflect a shared realm, while the inner world is considered completely private and quite unaffected by anything shared. For this reason, both materialists and many idealist, readily take the sensory spectrum as the ground truth, while the inner world as an ad-hoc, completely private cloud of phenomena for which it is meaningless to speak of reflecting some common realm (in the way the sensory phenomena reflect a common realm).
The above easily leads one to believe that the sensory spectrum somehow inherently carries the truth of the shared spatial world in itself. In other words, there's hard dualism - the shared spatial world is considered to be categorically different from the private conscious bubbles. But this is not the case. We simply don't pay attention that the reason we agree on a shared spatial world is only because we entertain the same ideas about it.
It's naively conceived that space is what it is and it somehow automatically conveys its logic to us through the senses. But actually we simply learn this logic very early in our life and take it for granted from then on. Let me illustrate this in a few ways.
Thanks to computer graphics we can surprise our cognitive habits. The above video shows how we can experience spatiality of quite different kind. The main point is that ultimately, what we experience is a flow of imagery. This flow is partially shaped by our own thinking, feeling and willing activity. In the above case, we use the willing of our finger movements to press the keys on the keyboard. In real life we will the movement of our feet. In both cases we conduct our spiritual activity and as a result our state metamorphoses, the perceptual world feeds back on us. It is our thinking which grasps the logic of these transformations. For example, in our ordinary space we know that if we go through 1, 2, 3, 4 doors at right angles, we return to the first room. But as we can see in the video this isn't necessarily so in non-Euclidean space.
So what we call space is really the lawfulness of the stream of imagery that we navigate through with our spiritual activity. The reason we seem to agree on the objectiveness of space is simply because our daily life forces our thinking to grasp the same logic about the stream of imagery. Clearly, everyone sees different stream, yet we somehow agree that these streams reflect a common and shared lawfulness.
It is actually the very same for all conscious phenomena. But if it is so, why don't we agree on the dynamics of inner phenomena? Simply because the lawfulness of these more inner phenomena is much more spread out in time. Here's where things connect perfectly with the Infernal Loops. People don't agree because their conscious span is too narrow, they simply can't encompass the lawfulness in its holistic nature.
Let's put that in an analogy. Imagine once again the example in the video with going through the rooms at right angles. Imagine that a group of people go together but they have very short attention span. As they go from room to room most of them simply lose track of how many rooms they have traversed. Soon they begin to argue. They may even go to such extents that they arrive at the weird idea that there's no single truth about the geometry of the rooms but everyone is right! If some of them is sane, and tries to walk them through, room by room and tries to show them "Here, now we go through the first, now through the second" and so on, the attention span of the others will still lose track and they will still fail to grasp the full picture. These are exactly Ashvin's Infernal Loops!
So, as it can be expected from any consistent monistic world conception, there aren't really some exotic modes of consciousness existing in parallel universes. At its core there's always a state of being going through continuous metamorphosis. The difference is how integrated are the rhythmic time-waves which shape the dynamics of this metamorphosis. The more decohered they become, the more our Imaginative flow must act in parts and mechanically stitch together shorter time-waves (for example of bodily states, like feet movement), in order to fit them in a higher order time wave (like the goal of going from A to B). The more harmonically integrated the time waves are, the more our conscious span expands and we grasp reality as a coherent musical harmony.
In the context of the recent VR metaphors, I can mention a game that exploits the non-Euclidean techniques as those in the video above. It's called Tea for God.
Just as Ashvin, I also want to be clear that I don't advocate for VR. I think for the majority of people it can serve only to suck them even deeper into the digital mechanics of our age (see Ashvin's essay). But still, since VR is here anyway, we can at least use it to draw some useful observations.
The experience in this game is very interesting. As it is explained in the video, we actually never leave the physical bounds of our play area in our room. Yet from our virtual perspective we have travelled maybe hundreds of meters, going through corridors, elevators, escalators, floating platforms, etc. It is really interesting how we feel we have traversed all this space, while in reality we haven't moved further than a very small area.
Similar technique is exploited also in the game Eye Of The Temple (this one I have no personal experience with. Click the videos on the Steam page to see it in action). Here once again the game mechanics guide us physically within the very small area in our room, while in virtual space it seems we traverse quite some distances.
The point here is that ultimately, while in VR, we learn to think in the terms of virtual space. It's the same flow of metamorphosis - we will our movements through the thinking which grasps the lawfulness of the virtual space, the game feeds back to us the stream of imagery.
Experiences like these can help us realize that the concept of space is not that absolute after all. It is really the lawfulness of our continuous Imaginative transformation. A lot can be achieved when we extricate ourselves from the spell of rigid space that we imagine to exist 'out there'. It's not about believing in some fantastic ideas. It's simply about focusing on the given. And the given is that we as spiritual beings are continuously active with our thinking, feeling and willing, and this activity feeds back on us as perceptions, in an unbroken metamorphic flow. This feedback is not random but follows certain lawfulness. The lawfulness which plays in our sensory perceptions we unite through our thinking with the idea of 3D space. This is not something granted. We know that some people have much worse spatial awareness than others. As an extreme case we can imagine someone (clearly a pathological case) whose thinking and attention span are so damaged that by the time he turns around he loses track of his previous view. Thus for that person the visual field is like a stream of disconnected pictures with no logic. For the normally developed person, the lawfulness of this stream of imagery is grasped very early in life. Even few months old babies begin to turn around when their toy is moved behind their back. This is primitive thinking at work. The baby already instinctively knows that it can will the transformation of its state, such that some object can be brought into view, based on the lawfulness of visual imagery.
Hopefully this has shown that our agreement on the shared nature of our spatial perceptions is not some special case but results simply because all normally developed humans can effortlessly grasp the lawfulness of the stream of sensory perceptions.
Alas, this is not yet the case with the stream of other perceptions - those of our inner life - simply because they extend into much wider timespans. People don't even try to spot the lawfulness of inner phenomena that manifests in larger periods of time. Just like the rooms analogy, for this reason people argue and some even believe that there's no shared lawfulness for these things, that there are as many truths as there are human beings. Hopefully, people will begin to realize that there's indeed lawfulness in inner life, which reflects a shared realm. The ancients of course knew this very well and that's why concepts like Karma were forged. Just as certain bodily actions lead to certain transformation of our sensory states, according to the lawfulness of the sensory spectrum, so the manifestations of our thinking, feeling and willing as a whole, reflect back to us over long periods of time, the lawfulness of the shared spiritual world.
Imagine what the people with short attention span look like when they transform through space without any comprehension of the spatial lawfulness. They'll be like lost. They'll move as if through a maze, practically taking random turns. This is really the picture of our contemporary humanity. Even though we've learned to grasp the lawfulness of the sensory spectrum, we're moving as if through a maze in regards to the states of our inner life. People today lack even the most basic knowledge of the lawful dynamics of the interplay between thoughts, feelings and actions. It's hardly understood how what we think, feel and will, feeds back on us over larger periods of time. Because of our spiritual short-sightedness, we simply don't recognize the transformed reflections of our own spiritual activity which has reverberated through the lawfulness of spiritual reality and is fed back to us in unrecognizable form. Thus people are assailed by illness, misfortune, war, and they blame everyone else about it, without understanding how through their own unorderly inner life they have contributed to this outcome.
People reject the shared lawfulness of the full spectrum of reality only because they don't want to face the responsibility of being wise and loving about the way they conduct their Imaginative becoming. Thus it's all so common to hear today that there's no such thing as moral order, there's no good and evil, that everyone's ideas are just as valid as anyone's else - it's all a matter of taste - and so on. The disconnected nature of inner life is assumed to be what it is - there's no deeper unity to be sought.
When we lack the attention span to understand the spatial lawfulness of our visual stream, we bump around as in a maze and suffer. The suffering motivates us to seek the logic of the stream and correct our conduct. As we grasp better the spatial lawfulness, our consciousness expands, we're no longer confronted with disconnected pictures but we live in expansive ideal spatial lawfulness, of which the pictures are only snapshots from various angles. Similarly, it seems humanity has yet much to suffer, bumping in the mazes of inner life, until we come to our senses and begin to grasp the shared lawfulness of the soul and spiritual spectrum. When the attention span expands and more and more individuals will grasp the same lawfulness of the spiritual dynamics, this in itself will be felt as we live in a common spiritual world, just like the same lawfulness of the sensory spectrum leads to feel we live in the same spatial world.
