Mind, Patterns, & Hypotheses

[Telepresent]

Ok, this is fresh and I'm writing it pretty much to clarify it for myself!  So apologies if it doesn't make sense...

The mind is essentially a pattern-creating machine.  It gets small pieces of data, and creates hypothetical models based upon them.  Case in point, the Necker Cube:

The cube doesn't exist in that image, right?  It's a hypothetical cube, created by our mind's tendency to create patterns from raw and incomplete pieces of data.  And it's actually really hard to look at and not see the cube: that's how intrinsic our pattern-making machine's operation is.  It actually takes more focus to see what's really there, than to see what isn't there.

Now, expand this concept out.  Connect it to how you experience life.  You have a few 'data points': sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, internal sensation, emotional energy, and thought.  And from these, oh boy... EVERYTHING ELSE.

But look closely, look really closely, and something odd starts to become apparent: almost everything we think about, act upon, fear, love, engage with - in short, everything we think we experience - exists in the gaps.  In the negative space between the data points.  Very little is actually what IS: it's the thoughts and judgements about what is, the projected/imagined future consequences (often established from patterns interpreted from past events).  It's the "what does this mean?" instinct, rather than "what is this?"

In other words, it's an incredibly complicated hypothetical pattern.

In other words, I'm living in a hypothetical world.  A hypothetical person, living a hypothetical life, in a hypothetical world.

Blimey.

Edited June 25, 2016 by Telepresent

[Mal]

@Telepresent

Yes. For the ego the external world is just a representation of it own arrangement. 

 

[Buld]

Hey. I'm currently reading a book called Godel, Escher, Bach, that goes into a lot of what you are saying, you might find it quite interesting!

[Telepresent]

Brilliant @Buld, thank you - I'll look into that!  A quick search brough this series of lectures up: having neither read the book nor watched these yet, I have no idea if they expand further on the ideas in the book, but I figured you might want to have a look too!

Edited June 25, 2016 by Telepresent

[Buld]

Thanks @Telepresent, appreciated. Series seems quite good, I will watch at some point.  

[StephenK]

The ability of the brain to create objects within awareness from raw data (sight, smell, touch, etc) is so fundamental to  truly understanding the breadth and scope of awareness itself. As an experiment, do the following:

1) Pick a mug

2) Now describe the mug using as many adjectives as you can (hard, shiny, smooth, etc) 

3) Now, ask yourself: "Are any of the words I used to describe the mug an objective description of the mug?"

Most people would agree that a mug is hard, but that is not objectively true -- from the perspective of someone that works with titanium drill bits all day, a mug is soft. From the the perspective of someone that makes disco-balls, a mug is rather dull in its appearance.  Notions of soft/hard, shiny/dull, smooth/rough, light/heavy are all dependent on your frame of reference (and how your brain is currently wired). In fact, you can easily adopt the view that a mug is soft: imagine it just crumbling under the weight of a 10 tonne steel block. This view is no more false than the idea that a mug is hard! 

But here is where the interesting part comes in... Since a mug can be described as hard or soft, which is it? Both? Neither? What starts to emerge is that there are an infinite amount of ways to describe a mug. At the same time, the mug is objectively none of these things -- that is, the mug is in reality 'empty', only taking on characteristics once a mind comes along and gives it 'life', so to speak.  

To truly understand this is to see nothingness and infinity in a flower -- it is the ability to hold paradox in ones mind without cognitive dissonance. To truly understand this is to see how your own mind is sitting in a particular frame of reference to the world.

Hard mode: Is the object you call a mug, really a mug? What is the purpose of a mug? To a young child, maybe it is a cave for a toy dinosaur?  Which one is true? 

Play.

Edited June 26, 2016 by StephenK

[Telepresent]

8 hours ago, StephenK said:

Most people would agree that a mug is hard, but that is not objectively true -- from the perspective of someone that works with titanium drill bits all day, a mug is soft. From the the perspective of someone that makes disco-balls, a mug is rather dull in its appearance.

Thank you for this reply, @StephenK - I've been trying to deal with relativity and what I'm calling 'heirarchical/relative mapping' for a while now, and the visceral application or reality of perspective/context, but this simple description summarises it perfectly.  But the step I hadn't taken yet was your next point.  Instead, it seems, I have been attempting to establish a 'deeper truth' of each something I see, hear, etc. - some kind of absolute that I can hold onto (i.e. some more 'advanced' version of 'the mug is hard')

Of course the really interesting thing here is that without perspective, there is no absolute.

Wait... hang on... [at this point I go off on a bit of a stream-of-consciousness.  Sorry if it reads a bit weird, but I needed to write out what I was working out, and it felt best to leave here]

Extrapolation: "I" is a perspective.  It is also a product of perspective - self-defining particular sensory attributes to itself as an absolute thing.  God, what even is a thing?  I've been tied up in knots trying to understand something/nothing, but they're both objective approaches aren't they?  Both definitions, both bordered with start and end and perspective and definition.  Mind stuff, not true, can't be true, only the extrapolations from the negative space...

Ok, wait.  I is a self-perpetuating, self-referencing, and self-constructing objective perspective?  Perspectival object? Things, there's something important in things.  What is it what is it what is it?  WAIT!  Objective reality.  Always believing things have objective reality.  Rejection of one objective reality with the expectation of a replacement.  What do I mean, what am I saying?  Ok, let's say I'm English.  Part of my identity, right?  Not an absolute truth, of course, but a label used to categorise and stereotype and put me in a particular box with particular expectations and... and what?  And we reject this notion and we say that it's just an idea just a thought a concept and we throw it aside all proud of ourselves.  But there's still a hole there, isn't there?  A hole where it used to be.  A hole of identity, and on a very deep level we're waiting for something better, something bigger, something else to come and fill the hole.  Another thing.  Another bloody thing.

Only... all the things are mind-objects, aren't they?  All relative definitions in one way or another.  All false.  In absolute terms, all false, because they all rely on relativity to be considered anything.  Everything sodding everything full of these MADE of these.  Object, object, even just looking at the mug and thinking OBJECT.  What is object?  Isolated, culled from what is around it by mental lines edges beliefs assumptions shit.

Always this idea this idea that there is SOMETHING.  Of course cannot deny experience that is but the SOMETHING: sneaky little mind-objects.  Sneaky little buggers.  Just the word: some thing.  Thing.  In isolation, in separation. 

Ah, man, I need to sit with this a bit.

Edited June 26, 2016 by Telepresent

[StephenK]

Reality, or the universe -- whatever you wish to call it -- truly has no objects. The universe is a dynamic, flowing mass of energy and matter: nowhere do we find true separation. Here's another thought experiment to think about: 

1) Imagine that you're holding the same mug in the previous example.

2) You place that mug on a table.

3) You now declare that the mug, together with the table, form a single object called a "mugetable".

This seems silly, right? A person can come along and say: "Hey man, that's clearly a mug and a table, not a mugetable. A mugetable? That's absurd!"

However, you can validly respond with: "Hey man, you arrived here in this thing called a 'car'. But a 'car' is just 4 wheels, an engine and a chassis! A car? That's absurd!"

We can create objects out of anything. I can declare that my two thumbs together form an object called a 'double-tumble'. 

The only thing that is relevant is: "Does this way of relating to the world help me in any way?" Talking about mugetables and double-tumbles to your family and friends really isn't going to help you that much, haha. Reality is like a continuous, flowing fluid of energy and matter. Objects are the mind's attempt at finding patterns in this flowing field of energy. What we call a 'mug' is not so much a real object, but a group of patterns in reality that the mind has identified. The brain is great at seeing patterns in this continuous reality field we live in.

 

[Telepresent]

Dammit @StephenK, you're good at this! 

This is all connecting to a TED talk I saw recently which provided a real 'aha!' moment.  The gist is that this guy has modeled that evolution not only doesn't guarantee that our sensory interpretation of the world is 'accurate', but that it actively works against accuracy: that shortcuts, simplifications and symbolic representations are selected-for, and that organisms that see things more accurately go extinct.  In other words, our perception is most likely the product of millions of years of evolution geared towards fitness for survival, rather than truth.

Makes sense.  And I wonder if this talk stops short of the biggest implication.  Because he talks about how we don't see the world accurately, but doesn't talk about how we THINK.  The possibility that our entire mode of conceptualising, understanding, pattern-making, etc., may be entirely at odds with objective reality is hugely liberating.  It seems we mostly go about imagining that, ok, we might not quite see accurately (i.e. "how can I know your red is the same as my red?") but that's it's mostly accurate.

And this shit goes frighteningly deep.  Because there comes a point where you have to start asking whether any of the basic principles we take for granted - including matter and energy - are true.  Which is where it gets really tricky, because again dropping them leaves a hole, and we don't have anything to fill that hole with (of course, the question is "does it need to be filled?")

But using the analogy from that TED talk, if we percieve matter and energy as being constituent elements of the universe, but everything within perception is the equivalent of a computer's GUI compared to its source code... how do we know that the source code of the universe has anything remotely close to 'matter' or 'energy' running the show?

It's back to that idea that all I can know for certain is that experience is.  Everything else, drawn back far enough, becomes an interpretation.  And yet, I'm so deeply enmeshed in these interpretations, I KNOW there are many more to be worked through!

Edited June 26, 2016 by Telepresent

[Telepresent]

3 hours ago, StephenK said:

1) Imagine that you're holding the same mug in the previous example.

2) You place that mug on a table.

3) You now declare that the mug, together with the table, form a single object called a "mugetable".

I'm also spending a moment here to extend this thought experiment out: turning mug/table into "mugetable", then adding the book next to them, and the remote control next to them - hell, let's just do the whole room - and now we've done that let's go for the whole house... and before too long everything becomes one thing.  Of course it does.  One big jumbled dance of whatever.  In all kinds of colour and sound and scent and all the perceptual elements you can think of, but it's all one cat (to pinch a phrase from Alan Watts).  But funnily not the universe as is commenly thought of: not a huge space 'containing' everything.  Containment doesn't fit here.  I like this experiment.

Edited June 26, 2016 by Telepresent

[Friend]

@StephenK I'm over here dying at "double-tumble"

[StephenK]

@Telepresent Yeah, the thought experiment can be extended to any number of objects -- we can 'nest' objects within other objects to create higher order objects. Pretty cool, huh? Continue with this thought experiment, but now include your body: imagine your hands and the keyboard you're typing on is a single object! Hell, go further: imagine that your your entire body and the universe around you is a single object! -- this one is hard though, because we, as humans, have a visceral feeling that our bodies are 'me'. But think of it this way: the only reason your body and mind are able to function as they currently are is because of the strong and weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravitation. People often say that they 'are' their body (including brain) and their genetic code -- however, without the strong nuclear force, the very material integrity of our bodies would collapse. So 'I' am as much my body, mind, and genetics as I am the atomic forces that keep my very DNA together! Crazy! Break down the notions of where your body ends and identify the entire universe as 'your body', working in tandem to allow this thing called a brain to generate your awareness! Think of your entire body and brain as a tiny organ in your 'real' body, which is the universe. I think what readily becomes apparent is that the notion of a separate "I" that exists is absurd!  This kind of thought experiment can become experientially real on psychedelics: people often talk about 'oneness' and the ability to see how objects are just things created by the mind. 

Seeing all this, all this beauty in the universe, I always ask myself one question: "Why am I relating to the world in a negative way, when there are so many positive ways to interact with this beautiful machine called the universe?" Relating to the world (hate/compassion, anger/love, sadness/happiness, fear/trust, etc) are merely perceptual modalities. Which ones have experiential utility for you? We intuitively understand that kicking our foot against a wall is going to cause pain, so in terms of experiential utility, doing that serves no purpose -- we don't really need to think about it. Now, getting angry at someone/something is like kicking your foot against a wall -- what utility does getting angry have for you? For me, I've realized getting angry is as crazy as kicking your foot against a wall -- so I try to let go of anger. This can be done for various other unpleasant emotions. The brain or mind needs to see for itself that these negative experiences (hate, anger, blood-lust, fear, loneliness, etc) are causing it harm -- once this happens, the thirst for spiritual liberation hits hard.

I think one of the hardest pills to swallow is this: Our biology and evolution and society itself is not primarily concerned with our well-being. It is largely up to us to navigate our biology and society.

@Friend Protect your double-tumble, you only have one!