Got a whole lot of thoughts o this! :D
What's really intense is when the 'simulation' reveals itself with one's eyes open, I really can't unsee some of that stuff. A little tryptamine push really cracks it.
Oh yeah, I remember your description of the walls of your room being moved on giant pistons... I had a similar thing on an xPCP/4-x-T trip that I keep going on about but even that was almost too weird and otherworldly that my memory of it is almost dreamlike. Although I haven't experienced what you have - I can imagine - there is something really special about the apparent sharp, highly lucid, even "realer than real" clarity of ketamine or indeed, ketatryptamine hallucinations that matches little else that I can think of...
PYTH said:
I think what I primarily got from those combined journeys is a sense of infinite virtual dimensions both within and external to the brain, essentially endless worlds of quantum information science hasn't yet learned to detect, with 'life' and intelligences that exist in these spaces without a traditional physiology or physical manifestation.
I get this, I think. I often get a sense of touching the infinite - again, this comes with the psychedelic territory - but with ketamine there's a distinct sensation, find, of once again tapping into some kind of deep energy conduit that runs beneath the fabric of the universe itself... it begins with that telltale buzzing sound usually... followed by drifting upwards, into something I can only describe as a soft cosmic web, and once I touch it,s it's like each tendril is some kind of link into another realm, another time, another mode of being... another version of ones' self... another version of the overself of which we are all avatars, our minds trimmed to a specific purpose to live our lives on this material place, unbeknownst to us... a journey from unknown origin to unknown destination... The thing with the "virtual dimensions" you mention though, this made me really think, that I think doing ketamine (and, no doubt - other drugs - but, we're discussing ketamine
) - made me a little less concerned about the distinction between what is virtual and what is illusory. I often descirbe many fairly fundamental aspects of waking life as "illusory" - ie, the self, free well, time - even the representation of reality that our brain provides us with, or rather, the skein of our consciousness induces us to believe exists, while inducing us to believe that we have a brain, and the brain is the interpreter of this reality rather than the whole thing being a multidimensional equivalent of a HD TV screen... or even an old cathode ray tube one, except we have no bodies and our eyes are bound to stare at it forever, and the mind converts this lack of bodily sensation into the illusion that we have a body, even when we will may not...
Plato's cave come to mind, although I think that in many ways our technological age of software and high fidelity VR, even full fidelity VR threatening, as well as our deeper understanding of neuroscience, allows us to appreciate what an apt metaphor for the limited perspective we have of greater reality Plato's cave really was. Anyway, I digress... I think that once you open the door to the idea that
real things are in fact conceptual constructs - then it stands to reason that things that are merely conceptual constructs (ie, the mathematical "forms" to go back to some Greek philosophy, I can't remember which one... like the concept of a cube exists as the perfect cube, and numbers which are traditionally purely conceptual actually represent
real things that exist somewhere, in some kind of higher universe which lies between us and the great sun of ceaseless creation itself, limitless light, "Ain Soph Aur", (to borrow from yet another metaphysical phillosophy, Judaic Kabbalah this time - where Ain Soph Aur is the godhead and source of all creation at the top of the tree of life) and these things, numbers as conceptual constructs, and other mathematical forms existing as
real things which cast mere shadows upon our own universe... So, where was I? Oh yeah, once you blur the line between "real" and "conceptual" it's very easy to start wondering about whether the difference is itself real or just another illusion in an existence that is a dance of amorphous light and flickering shadows, all just as real, all just as illusory.
This is part of the reason I wonder about whether characters in our dreams might actually be a part of their own universe - might have some sentience beyond a reflection of our own... and indeed, it makes it harder to truly dismiss "drug induced delusions" as pure delusions... when the entire universe is a hologram created by the mind... when our reality is merely an evolutionary advantageous interface model, which we are bound within like hamsters in one of those somewhat cruel looking perspex hamster balls as we roll around, struggling to understand our surroundings... well, I don't know where I'm going with this now. Oh yes - I think that for me, this has made it a lot easier for me to understand more traditionally religious phrasings - like when people say "We are all god" (happened in Philosophy forum recently, lol)... and in fact I feel like I even get many creation myths not that I think we will ever find proof of the more wacky ones, I think material science seems to be the dominant method to understand the
material nature of our universe - metaphorically, I no longer see that it makes sense to draw any distinction between god and the forces of nature... but I've found this a very hard thing to convey. Arguments for the origin of existence being either "random" or "a conscious choice" seem utterly nonsensical to me because I genuinely don't understand the distinction any more, and equally (sorry, massive tangent) this viewpoint I feel makes it easy for me to entertain the idea of invisible entities existing in
real but also
conceptual ways, like fluctuating self organising patterns in the quantum foam.
There's a sci-fi book which I haven't read but the title and concept really appeals to me -
Vacuum Diagrams - actually I see now it's a collection of short stories, but one of the premises I believe is that these entities evolve in the very early universe without form, or matter, but as conceptual self-organising mathematical diagrams and they go on to shape the evolution of our material reality. Not saying that's the only possibility - my bias is towards modern science - I freely admit - although I;m sure most modern scientists would dismiss that particular idea... but if concepts can be said to be as real as solid objects, then the scope and breadth of strangeness of our world multiplies immensely.
Also - another guy who has written a book which I haven't read - but he's also done a podcast with Same Harris, the book is entitled "The Reality Illusion" and discusses a lot of what we've been discussing here, in fact I think I borrowed the "interface model" of interpreting reality phrase from that podcast:
#178 - THE REALITY ILLUSION A Conversation with Donald Hoffman and Annaka Harris
PYTH said:
So, with that said, I think your last point is maybe the *least* absurd to me... except instead of 'hiding aliens' there are just endless layers of information and alternate types of sentience all around everything at all times, we're just not physiologically capable of seeing any of it under normal circumstances and our tools and conceptual frameworks aren't there yet. I definitely have the sense of the world being 'essentially real' but with a kind of permeability, that it's all just information either way.
Yeah well, I totally get that, no argument there! I guess I still have a kind of innate bias against the idea that we can realistically communicate with them or ever get anything other than garbled noise our of these interactions.. but, I'd love it if someday that changed.
I've been toying with the idea of writing a novel for some time now - well actually I've written an few pages - maybe sharing here will give me some public accountability to kick me up the arse, lol... but the basic premise is that the setting is in the billions of simulated realities in the mind of a Tipler Oracle (look it up if not, interesting shit) at the end of time, trying to break the laws of thermodynamics and escape the heat death of the universe - but he/she/it or rather the various humaniform subroutines (difficult to write a relatable book where the main character is essentially a god) start to notice some persistent software issues that they cannot pin down. In their journey to debug this immensely complex mother of all simulations, metasimulations, even, they have to travel to multiple different times, planets, and species, and observe them at different parts in their evolution, looking for bugs in the rendering engines that simulate their consciousnesses. They quickly notice a pattern which is that on mind altering substances, the bounds of the simulation start to break down - like one of the very opening scenes is a subroutine (I called her "Susan", shorthand for some sci-fi designation :D) is observing a group of hominids chanting around a fire, imbibing some kind of psychoactive herb. She has the simulating in debug mode, and should be entirely invisible to them, but she slowly notices that one of them has stopped dancing and is watching her - she looks within their mind and confirms this. He can see her. She tracks back time, winds it forwards, visits from different perspectives, but always with the same result, and the bug, whatever it is, seems to be so fundamental to the architecture of the mind of the Omega Point entity itself, that it defies her understanding. She escalates it up the chain of command, and a pattern emerges which is essentially some kind of unresolvable, seemingly supernatural, buffer overflow error which manifests during certain altered states, where certain sentient entities separated by millions of years of either light or even time can briefly interact with and glimpse each other - and also glimpse the bounds of the simulation... if this issue cannot be identified, it could mean the Omega Point god mind is going insane, or perhaps that it is missing something fundamental about the nature of being despite all it's trillions of years absorbing the last holdout technological civilisations as the universe grew dark...
Without giving too much away, I'm thinking as a side plot there is a second entity at the end of time which has gone a different route, and is attempting to escape the dying universe not by contemplating countless potential alternate realities, but by devoting all it's resources to building titanic engineering constructs, galaxy scale machines to bend space - this entity sees the endless wasted clock cycles on rumination about the past as a waste of limited resources and thus there's a slow, battle at the end of time type sci-fi clash between gods as they disagree with each other's respective methods, while one of them works to solve an inscrutable mystery about him/her/itself and, by extension, the nature of reality itself...
Man... I should really fucking devote more time to writing that book... but, I suck at character development. Would be interested to hear if any of you guys think it's an interesting idea, might be a littler too obscure I'm aware for general audiences...
