Here's a fucking topic.

[GregKasarik]

Thanks Trick and IJesusChrist.

I certainly understand the logic behind SWIMing, but feel that the time has arrived for me to acknowledge who I am and to scream the world down with my beliefs. Of more concern is that I am the only person with my name in the world. Google me, if you like, I'm sure it will be highly educational.

I am far too easy a target, which will make me very hard to miss!

But IJesusChrist has actually hit upon what is one of the key realisations to emerge from the use of Entheogens, namely that all of the metaphysics and stuff is almost totally irrelevant. Your Belief 2, actually mirrors what I consider to be the only moral commandment that we can follow, "Act with Empathy". It is simple, but infinitely deep.

Who cares if your metaphysics is correct if you are an arsehole?

The other thing that IJesusChrist has communicated well and which I've previously mentioned is that is impossible to adequately communicate any genuine spiritual insight, as each of them are slices from the Infinite Mind of God and are ours alone. Even if you could transmit all of the sensations, images and feelings that accompanied your visions, or experiences, straight into my mind, I would interpret it differently based on my own history, situation and surroundings. My set and setting interferes with my ability to understand yours.

Beware anybody who tells you otherwise. They are nothing more than snake oil merchants.

But this truth is part of the reason why exploration of the Divine Mind is such an important task. It opens our eyes to the whole gamut of possibilities that are contained within. It allows us to understand that religions and people who try to force their black and white philosophies upon us simply don't understand the nature of the Infinte and the God they claim to worship.

But the real question isn't actually whether there is a god. Instead, it is "Am I Eternal?". If I am Eternal, then I need to make sense of my beliefs within the context of that. If I am eternal, then I need to ask myself, "what am I going to do with my Eternity"there is a very good chance that I'll be living many more lives on earth, after this one. Indeed, being the curious person that I am, I'll be certain to live every single one of them! As such, it behoves me to act in such a way as to ensure that my subsequent lives are ones in which I am able to ensure that my chances of happiness and meaning are maximised.

I believe that I am Eternal, but if I didn't then I would be obligated to make the most out of my life and to ensure that it was not wasted or spent selfishly.

In either case, I fully intend to pursue the practice of my religious belief and to create a world where SWIMing is not required.

I also doubt that the Victorian Police frequent these boards that often. Most I've met aren't really the metaphysical type.

 

[GregKasarik]

IJesusChrist.

I like your thinking and it mirrors some of my own.

My conceptualisation of the origins of the universe is that it has arisen out of the one thing that can exist without a supporting universe and indeed that must exist: Mathematics.

The problem of course comes in understanding how mere numbers could produce all that we see around us. My thinking is similar to yours, in that the Mind of God is what processess all that we are and all that shall ever be, and does so through the manipulation of highly advanced algorithms. How this Mind arose is a puzzle, as is whether sufficiently complex mathematics would allow us effective free will. I think yes, but I am guessing that your view is much more deterministic? This also explains how it is that I believe that I am Eternal. Maths is Infinite, which means that any consciousness based on it also has the potential to be Eternal. If even one Eternal conciousness exists, then the odds are aproximately an infinity to one in favour of me being that (or one of those) being(s).

With respect to the potentially fractal nature of the universe, I say both yes and no, although if you are correct about them being infinitely complex, this would lead me to change my mind more towards yes. I always thought that fractals, while highly complex were essentially shapes which mirrored each themselves on any particular scale that you might happen to examine it on. As such, while they might be infinitely complex, there isn't neccessarily a huge amount of variety occuring either. And this would eventually bore God shitless!

In my view of the metaverse, the infinite nature exists in all dimensions, so while infinite swathes of fractal possibilities exist, so do an infinite amount of it that does not conform to this logic. From the conceptualisation of the Universe as a mathematical entity, fractals are only a small subset of the possible equations, and I can't see any fundamental reason why all would not be explored.

I like your idea of being creatures that only exist in the form of snapshots, rather than the full sum totality of what we believe that we've experienced. But I tend to not agree with you, because it seems to fly in the face of the Infinite. For an Eternal being it takes just as much out of their lives to examine a single second of my existence as it does to sample the full totality of every setient creature contained within every potential possibility expressed in this universe. Given the nature of the Infinite, it would seem appropriate that they do the former, rather than the latter.

You've certainly put a lot of work into your ideas and I look forward to anything else that you'd like to share.

Greg

 

[IJesusChrist]

The first thing I would like to say is my ideas conflict, to a great deal, to where I want to pull my hair our and blind myself at times simply because the possibilities seem impossible!

But I am determinisitic when we are considering the universe.

I tend to not care of determinism when thinking of empathy - I see no reason to relate the two, and doing so takes far too much brain power to accomplish.

Secondly, the thing with your proposal of God being 'bored' (I know you're just using this as an example to explain something) but to me, I don't see why God would see time as linear. In my perception, I don't see why we cannot see all of time simulataneously - I'm sure it is possible by some means, and by my definition of 'God', linear time is irrelevant, time is like a plane - everything spread out, and a birds eye view will give all the information you could ever conceive for the future & past. However with determinism, it's just a thread, a simple single thread that must happen - since there are no random events, and freewill, in this view, is an illusion.

I am troubled by this also; the effect of consciousness is so grand, so omnipotent to who we are, how can it be a simple illusions, "who" is watching the watcher? Where is consciousness? It seems as if it may be impossible to contain consciousness in a box, the brain - however, with determinism, which seems so important and necessary to me, it must be.

I personally believe, that given enough information from any point in time, one could predict all events to come, simply by using the math of physics.

It is, I admit, a somewhat unhappy way to gaze upon the universe, to let go of freewill, purpose, etc... but the beautiful thing I find is that I am my father, and I am my son. I may not be consciously aware of their doings, but they are fully a part of me, as well as their mother... We all came from the same cell, long, long ago, and we are all one organism, if you strip away the veil of linear time. In fact, we all came from the same dot, that same 'bang' at the center of it all... we are connected to everything, not only in the past, but that we exert a force that effects everything in the universe. That is by far the most amazing thing I see in this world.

 

[GregKasarik]

The reason for this is the nature of the Infinite. Not only is it enourmous, but it is also impossible to ever attain!
IJesusChrist. Your ideas should be in conflict. If they weren't I'd be wondering if you were sampling the Infinite at all!

I have at least three different theories about the universe, and am sure that I'll have at least that many more before I exit this world.

God doesn't neccessarily see the universe as linear, but by the same token, I don't believe that he can simply experience it in a single "moment".

Lets look at the example of numbers. If we imagine the highest number that we can, we will merely be stating a finite number and not even begining to sample the Infinite. As soon as you start to say that God can experience time in an instant, it seems that you are making a claim that there is a finite reality that can be percieved, rather than an infinite one. There are also a range of issues over whether such a being could be said to be conscious in any meaningful sense.

In my view, it is the expansion into the infinite, from the known into the unknown that God, and us experience as time. I've put up the "Symbol of Life" as my avatar which hopefully can explain it (although it is very small...). In the middle, we have an ourobouros, which represents life giving birth to itself. But life (ie God) has to force its way into existence and struggle to maintian itself, and this is represented by the two bars, which continually push in against life. If live gives up the struggle, and they meet, it is effectively extinguished. The key part of the diagram for this discussion, however, is the oval. It represents the current state of knowledge and experience contained within God. It doesn't matter how much is contained within the oval, there will always be more potentials to expand into. It doesn't matter if the oval is 10 centimetres wide, or spans our entire universe. There will always be an infinite into which God can explore, and this is what he will percieve as "time".

When I say "God getting bored", I am talking of a genuine reality. God as a purely self referencial being needs to overcome his own personal existential crisis, in order to find the will to keep on living. If he doesn't, then he will decend into depression, dispair and ultimately cease his mind's function. If God has no purpose to life, then one can not expect him to do any better than any other being.

This is where we come in. God chooses to incarnate himself an infinite number of times through us, in order to experience life, ignorance and the beauty of mortal achievement. Our planet is like a massive jigsaw puzzle, where he will ultimately explore all of the stories contained within our experiences.

This is why I don't believe that you can control your world supernaturally, as to do so would make the "game" far too easy. What need has an eternal being for playing the game on easy? And yes, in his exploration of the Infinite, there would almost certainly be some universes where you could do some of these things, and maybe this is one of them. If so, kindly control a few million dollars and a beautiful, intelligent girl my way ASAP!

Free will must ever remain a mystery. Not even God knows if he has free will. Key aspects of logic (which I can't discuss just yet, as they are hopefully going to form the basis of a paper for submission to a peer reviewed philosophical journal), mean that God can never know if he really has free will, or not.

For me, I choose to believe that I do have free will. It certainly appears that I do and I'm not aware of any reasons for rejecting the evidence in this case. But whichever way, it is one of those things that I will never be able to accertain, so I choose to not worry about it. And yes, I am aware of the irony of being a potentially dederministic being that is "choosing" free will!

 

[ophiuchus]

 

[ophiuchus]

that last post was supposed to be edited before it was posted, but oh well, i suppose it worked just fine...

ijc and others : i can see it's silhouette, but your right, i will need another divine sample to really perceive it vividly in my face again. after reading this, i believe that at least a couple of us see it. but i do think it's about time for another peek through that tele/microscope for me. been waiting for that little stash of psilo i have to call my name..

but yeah, that's what i refer to as the balancing act, when something is never black or white, when or when two people try to argue the validity of things like quantum mechanics and string theory against each other. *bangs head on wall*

there is always opposition, if you wish to see it that way. i see the complimentary. but i have to agree:

"To be honest, it consumes all my trips... it's basically all I can think about while altered to a higher state of mind..."

my obsessive compulsive mind will not let me do anything other than examine and scrutinize though. it has lead me through some very difficult, yet beautiful trips..

 

[IJesusChrist]

Adrian: ... all I can say is yup. heh.

Greg, this video I have shown before, and you should understand it, but it will give you insight into why time is very limited in our perceptions... There is no reason I know of that we should not be able to experience our entire life like a slide show, please listen to the video, i think it may be enlightening:

[youtube]JkxieS-6WuA[/youtube]

theres parts, totalling 10 minutes.

 

[GregKasarik]

To be honest, it consumes all my trips... it's basically all I can think about while altered to a higher state of mind... Never constructively do I think or examine it though...

I probably should comment on this.

For at least the last three years, my trips have been largely dominated by the exploration of a certain set of principles and ideas, which have largely created the foundation on which I have built my understanding of the universe and the Mind of God.

Some people report that they never trip in the same part of the Infinite more than once, while a few others, such as myself seem to continually revisit very similar areas, each time using the insights from the previous experience to build up a detailed answer to particular questions that they are wanting to pursue. I don't think that one way is "better" than the other, but am sometimes amazed at the insights that I've achieved through taking the latter path.

So don't worry if you are focusing only on one area, or if sometimes it seems a bit intense. It is where your intuition and your greater mind wants to take you and you'll find that once you've worked that part through you'll most likely find yourself scurrying down a different rabbit hole!

 

[GregKasarik]

IJC, I found the video quite facinating, if not entirely in keeping with my understanding of the nature of string theory and higher dimensions.

Of particular interest, was the tenth dimension. The concept mirrors a realisation that I had a number of years ago, and that is that existence is an all, or nothing affair. As soon as anything existed, everything must exist.

I experienced the concept in a number of ways, both through the mind of god and through the act of creation. Effectively, as soon as something came into existence, it did surrounded by an infinite series of questions, and each of these questions generated an answer, which was then again surrounded by a similarly large number of questions, which upon being answered repeated the process to an infinite scale. This process is one that occurs outside of time.

But the only problem that I have is that I'm not entirely convinced that it can be expressed within a single consiousness at that level. To use the analogy, of time, where we are three dimensional creatures, who utilise a fourth in order to experience our lives, I would say that using the analogies provided by the video the Mind of God would inhabit the ninth, dimension in order to experience the tenth. Just as it would be meaningless to say that you can live your life in a single instant (remember all of your decisions are predicated on an awareness of past events and an ignorance of future ones), I believe that the same applies to the Mind of God.

So, the Mind of God, is the unitary consicousness that makes sense of all of these possibilities. It spends an eternity discoverying and exploring the totality of the universe. Because it inhabits the dimension below, it can make sense of it. To inhabit the same dimension would be impossible.

I will note, however a key error in the video, which is that the maker has confused "time" with the "fourth dimension" and treated them as if they were the same. However, this is not the case. You'll note that time exists in both the first and second dimensions. The flatlander wouldn't live his life through accessing the third dimension, but rather through accessing what the author has labeled as the "fourth", ie time. This is understandable, as most of us have heard time being described as the "fourth dimension", however it is inaccurate from the perspective that he is attempting to describe.

From the perspective that the creator of the video is taking, a true fourth dimension to our universe would not be time, but instead would be an additional dimension of space. It would not allow us to move in time, but woudl rather allowed us to move in space. From our perspective, it would look like your traditional science fiction wormhole connecting two points, such as those found in the game Freelancer, or shows such as Babylon 5.

Because of this confusion, there are major problems in the way that he has expressed the higher dimensions in his theory. Effectively he has conflated the concepts of time and space at higher dimensions and this has allowed him to then claim that and Eternity in a lower dimension can be represented as a single point in a higher one.

That this isn't the case can be illustrated by the example of the mobius strip, which he used to represent a two dimensional universe. If it was infinitely long, the ant crawling across it would never get to his point of origin, which indicates that you can't just do away with the realities inherent in an infinite set by kicking up a dimension, or two. An infintely long line will still be an infinitely long line in the first dimension, will still be an infinitely long line in the third.

Although, I'm not a physisist and stand to be corrected. In fact, I am meeting up with a couple of friends, who are physisists this week, and will get them to have a look at the video and let me know what they think. They are entheogenic, so they understand the reality that I live in, even if they do think that my ideas are crazy and unscientific!

Still, the entire video was quite thought provoking and I'm certainly going to be looking further into this guys work, as it contains quite a number of useful insights and potentially valuable ideas.

Once again, thanks for posting!

 

[trick]

I aggree, that video was eye opening, i love learning peoples theories on things, although i dont really have many myself, reading this thread is inspiring for me to form my own . I must say, im not much of a socal tripper, but i wouldnt mind tripping with you guys and bumping ideas back and forth.

 

[ophiuchus]

I will note, however a key error in the video, which is that the maker has confused "time" with the "fourth dimension" and treated them as if they were the same. However, this is not the case. You'll note that time exists in both the first and second dimensions. The flatlander wouldn't live his life through accessing the third dimension, but rather through accessing what the author has labeled as the "fourth", ie time. This is understandable, as most of us have heard time being described as the "fourth dimension", however it is inaccurate from the perspective that he is attempting to describe.

i dont think that there exists separate lower and higher dimensions from our reality, rather i believe more along the lines of hawking (in this respect), that if their are higher and lower dimensions, they are intrinsically linked (or "folded up into") to ours, and maybe that's beside the point.. (i also dont feel like expounding upon that at the moment)
i think that the illustration of the man walking around in time was simply to make the concept of making the jump up a dimension slightly easier to grasp (although inherently flawed from this POV as you've noticed).
the point that this forces you to look at is that, yes while you have a "smaller" line (in the aspect that it exists in a lower dimension only), it is important to note that the line is still infinite, which really doesn't make it any smaller than something comparable in a higher dimension. another (albeit flawed as well) example would be that a standing next to a rectangle that is 30feet tall and 40 wide, has the same area of a rectangle that is 20feet tall and 60 wide . this is a purely illustrative example as i know it has many flaws too.. the point is they are both the same, even though their appearance to you (from your point of view) is that one must be larger since it appears taller.

The reason for this is the nature of the Infinite. Not only is it enourmous, but it is also impossible to ever attain!
IJesusChrist. Your ideas should be in conflict. If they weren't I'd be wondering if you were sampling the Infinite at all!

+1

This is why I don't believe that you can control your world supernaturally, as to do so would make the "game" far too easy. What need has an eternal being for playing the game on easy? And yes, in his exploration of the Infinite, there would almost certainly be some universes where you could do some of these things, and maybe this is one of them. If so, kindly control a few million dollars and a beautiful, intelligent girl my way ASAP!

i think that this universe is one in which there is an equal amount of good and bad, and so in that respect, if you truely wish to get yourself somewhere positive towards the end (or any point for that matter) of life, then there must be a "compromise" (negative giving room for positive and the other way around, like sound waves) somewhere before or after (or even simultaneously) that must keeps everything in balance.( and i think that that is where having a positive mindset comes in handy.) you realize that if there is nothing that can be done in preventing an undesirable event from happening, it's important to not take it personally, or if you do, understand that it is just as important, if not more, in teaching you the things that you need to get closer to the ideal version you have of yourself. the important part is the lesson, or the journey, like you said, not so much the destination.

i know your joking here, but that mode of thinking is the instinctive impulsive side of our brains. where's the treasure?! why cant i have ice cream RIGHT NOW?!?! to do this is to miss the entire point imho. or rather, to indulge this side of our brains any more than the calm collected goal calculator is to unbalance you life, short term good, will balance out eventually... the same goes for analyzing and idealizing too much, but never doing anything... i believe this to be a universal fundamental, not just a personal moral standard. and i also believe3 that even with this view, there can still exist the notion that you created it all (not as an empirical theory of course) for yourself *if you so wish, so that you may better yourself, aka, you give yourself the best thing you can, which is mental *(you give yourself your mind), not the best thing you can in the physical world *(material objects, social staus, jobs) :| . it all must =

sorry for post editing so much... too many ideas in my head

 

[IJesusChrist]

I had not caught that the second dimension would be experiencing the 4th dimension, not the third...

But I think you may be taking it too literal.

For:

We assume all these dimensions exist. That is, a 2 dimensional person only exists in 2 dimensions, yet there is three dimensions that he is unaware of. Yet he is still kept to his 2 dimensions.

Now, one of two things (which I haven't given enough thought):

Either time is somehow different than space, in that all dimensions of space are influenced by time
OR
The 2-dimensional creature lives in the 10 dimensions. He can experience all of them, but his physical body is limited to two dimensions...

 

[ophiuchus]

after thinking about this much, i think i have come to the conclusion that i cannot accept this 10 dimensional framework.

 

[IJesusChrist]

Thanks for that awesomely indepth conclusion adrian :roll:

I don't agree with it either, although its fun to think about. I can't see the possibility for a 5th dimension.

 

[trick]

muahahaha @ the puney minded!! :axe:

 

[????????]

I am meeting up with a couple of friends, who are physicists this week, and will get them to have a look at the video and let me know what they think.

please do, post results

 

[Sprax]

Sorry but I think either you're not explaining properly or you're getting lost in rhetoric.