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DividedQuantum
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: thealienthatategod] 2
#26536718 - 03/15/20 01:54 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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thealienthatategod said: if science could explain why we dream, would it give us any more understanding about what we're doing when we're not dreaming?
on death, i was just curious how often other people die in their dreams, or how often they die in a wake reality and wake up in a dream that is apparently a new wake reality, if that second one sounds too strange, then just stick with the first one.
i'm still posing the original question too, why are illusions recognized as illusions in dreams, but in wake reality these illusions are not seen as illusions. why is it so hard to believe in eyes? if you wear glasses in wake reality do you wear glasses in your dreams?
if dreams are the opposite of possible, what gives wake reality its potency? i've always thought it was peculiar that families don't wake up and share their dreams with each other - at least not in the culture i'm from - i wish more people would openly and freely talk about their dreams. are we supposed to keep them a secret?
i have a reoccurring dream where i'm trying to turn off a 'reincarnation machine' it looks like a space ship that's gold and gray. it's parked in a valley on a green grass field surrounded by mountains. there is no entrance, so I can't get in.
I have died in my dreams a few times, but one instance sticks out very vividly. I was in some sort of Middle-Eastern market, just like in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was in some sort of alley, and there were vendors everywhere with their stands and baskets, and the buildings were all of sandstone just like in the movie. Some guy walks up to me, gets out a Colt .45 semi-auto pistol -- the old, original kind that used to be a military sidearm in WWII and Vietnam, and it was black -- and he shoots me right in the chest. This was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, and it was in a dream. And I died and woke up, scared as hell. I'll never forget that.
The thing about dreams is that they're very close to consciousness with no real object, somewhat similar to the goal of all meditation. So the whole dogmatic insistence about consciousness being an epiphenomenal, deterministic phenomenon really leaves no room for dreams, if you think about it. It is without any sensory input at all. Dreams by definition happen with no sensory input. So consciousness must have a dimension and an actuality that is far beyond the needs of the organism. And of course, all animals dream. I see it in my sleeping dogs every day. So consciousness has some obvious independence.
Also, dreams are a huge part of indigenous cultures. Indians in North America have a huge cultural dimension based on dreams, and they are very important to most Indian tribes because they are perceived as offering lessons to employ in life, and can also bestow visions of future events, like the characteristics of particular hunts. I think actually that our culture is unique in minimizing dreams, because most cultures I have studied indeed emphasize them.
I would think dreams would be a very great topic for science to address, but until we get a better perspective on consciousness, it's probably useless. As I point out above, when you really think about the ramifications of dreams, they rather contradict materialist science. So I suppose it's a case of, well, yeah, pretty interesting but probably not important, let's just continue to sweep it under the rug. But neuroscience will have to deal with it sooner or later. Afaik, they don't know that much yet.
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thealienthatategod
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: DividedQuantum] 1
#26538366 - 03/16/20 10:53 AM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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thanks for sharing your dream DQ, I have had a similar dream where i was shot in the chest with a shotgun. i couldn't get into my own house as someone was stalking me, so I went into a neighbors house, and explained to them what was going on. the person stalking me broke into the neighbors house, and killed them, as well as me. i remember knowing that I was dying as my neighbors body was lying over mine.
the dictionary definition of dream is: a series of images ideas emotions and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.
oneirology, the study of dreams, defines a dream as an activity in the brain that occurs during REM sleep and it's seen as a form of thinking that occurs under minimal brain direction. thoughts create dreams, because dreams are thoughts.
if dreams are a type of thought process, then the brain possibly provides the hardware and processing power needed to render this non verbal thought process into what is experienced as a dream. nature does not allocate resources trivially, so what could be the reason that we go into this state?
a lot of what science knows about sleep comes from studying disordered sleep patterns like sleep walking. in a sleepwalking state a person is stuck between full awake and NREM sleep and we do know in this state there is more hypersynchronous delta wave activity.
if you are reading this from wake reality right now, then you feel conscious, but we also know that thru a lucid dream we can have this same feeling of consciousness while in the dream reality. if we can be self-aware that we are dreaming in a dream, can we become self aware in wake reality that we are also dreaming? becoming conscious in a dream is like snapping out of a trance, because suddenly you can see the illusions all around you.
wake reality is constantly streaming data to the brain via perceptions, in sleep reality it seems the brain emulates these perceptions and creates whole vivid worlds for these perceptions to play in.
is there a Planck Constant in Dreamworld to measure the blocks of dream matter?
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redgreenvines
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: thealienthatategod] 1
#26538372 - 03/16/20 11:02 AM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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the mostest awake that I feel in dreams is when I am having a flying dream. I can feel the air I am breathing and flying through, and I feel the body floating in a way that is not ordinary but very natural. It is exciting and infrequent but wonderful to experience or remember.
I do not suppose that "nature" has purpose or design especially wrt dreams; but when complex systems evolve, side effects naturally occur (without design), and if these are significantly beneficial or if significantly harmful, then the species survival is affected, otherwise it is just an emergent feature of life like a freckle or like an earlobe.
Dreams are the earlobes of consciousness.
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thealienthatategod
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: redgreenvines] 2
#26538394 - 03/16/20 11:15 AM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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but if dreams are just thoughts, then why use all this energy to render these thoughts into a virtual reality?
when in the dream reality the brain treats perceptions the same way it treats perceptions in wake reality. dream reality can have some pretty stunning 3d rendering.
we seem to have evidence that animals dream, but i've always wondered if trees dream, and if they did dream, what would they dream about? do trees dream about being a bird and flying in the sky?
if i sleep in the same room that i have fungus growing in, there is a greatly increased chance that there will be fungus growing all over everything in my dream, almost like we enter the same shared dream reality.
"For those who would dream, there is reality." -Robert A. Monroe
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redgreenvines
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: thealienthatategod] 1
#26538917 - 03/16/20 03:52 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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thoughts are like v/r word based thoughts and conversations with one's self are low baud rate v/r.
there is an economy to linguistic thinking, but it is not the only way to think at all.
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thealienthatategod
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: redgreenvines]
#26538989 - 03/16/20 04:18 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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i wonder what reality thinks
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DividedQuantum
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: thealienthatategod] 1
#26539189 - 03/16/20 06:39 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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According to David Bohm's thesis of the implicate and explicate orders, our waking reality takes place in the explicate order, and dreamscapes occur in the implicate order. The implicate order is essentially consciousness, but it's complex. Anyway, the wavefunction of quantum mechanics is at the level of the implicate order.
So the explicate order is that realm described by classical Newtonian mechanics, or classical physics. It is that part of reality detected by our senses. According to Bohm, the explicate order is a special sub-set of the implicate order, from which the explicate order is "projected." So, the implicate order projects our 3-D reality, and then re-absorbs it, over and over very rapidly. The "collapse of the wavefunction" in quantum mechanics describes the moment of projection from the implicate to the explicate order. Quantum mechanics gives no account of the continuation of this process, which is a sort of re-superposition, or an absorption of the explicate projection by the implicate order.
Anyway, by this hypothesis, our waking reality has the distinction of occurring in the explicate order. Our dreams do not enter the explicate order because we are not awake -- they remain in the implicate order, where there are no constraints, but still orderly perceptions. I think this would be the difference you have been wondering about in this thread.
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Yellow Pants


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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: redgreenvines] 1
#26539427 - 03/16/20 08:44 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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redgreenvines said: I do not suppose that "nature" has purpose or design especially wrt dreams; but when complex systems evolve, side effects naturally occur (without design), and if these are significantly beneficial or if significantly harmful, then the species survival is affected, otherwise it is just an emergent feature of life like a freckle or like an earlobe.
Dreams are the earlobes of consciousness.
The quantum state of the self would suggest that dreams may have “purpose”. There is a difference between Newtonian nature and the quantum psychic observer entity thing.
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AZZI
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: thealienthatategod] 1
#26539659 - 03/16/20 11:11 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
thealienthatategod said: but if dreams are just thoughts, then why use all this energy to render these thoughts into a virtual reality?
when in the dream reality the brain treats perceptions the same way it treats perceptions in wake reality. dream reality can have some pretty stunning 3d rendering.
we seem to have evidence that animals dream, but i've always wondered if trees dream, and if they did dream, what would they dream about? do trees dream about being a bird and flying in the sky?
if i sleep in the same room that i have fungus growing in, there is a greatly increased chance that there will be fungus growing all over everything in my dream, almost like we enter the same shared dream reality.
"For those who would dream, there is reality." -Robert A. Monroe
If not for you.
Sanity is hard to come by.
Love, Az
Love your posts full of color.
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thealienthatategod
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: DividedQuantum] 2
#26539931 - 03/17/20 04:45 AM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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thanks DQ! re-absorption sounds like a channel switch, receiving input at one frequency vs another. once we tune off of the consensus reality radio station we enter Dreamworld. i have noticed that during the channel switch is the easiest time to collect unfiltered information, to take back into wake reality, that i can then document. it's def higher order information.
it seems then dreams are part of some higher dimensional structure. with reality emerging from the slice upon which it is embedded, so it seems that wake reality has just an embedded slice of the code of sleep reality. i'm very curios about information flowing between these two states by staying tuned to both frequencies simultaneously. has anyone else tried to do this and written about their impressions of this state?
i like the analogy of a camera recording ripples on the water. modern neuroscience is like the camera only detecting the changes in the ripples on the waters surface, the camera cannot experience what it is to be the water itself - who sees the ripples from the perspective of the interaction between water molecules and the endlessly dynamic agitations. within literally means against the inside.
thank you for the piano music Az, i like that, sometimes i get so confused, piano music is so clear
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redgreenvines
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: Yellow Pants] 1
#26540019 - 03/17/20 06:01 AM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
Yellow Pants said:
Quote:
redgreenvines said: I do not suppose that "nature" has purpose or design especially wrt dreams; but when complex systems evolve, side effects naturally occur (without design), and if these are significantly beneficial or if significantly harmful, then the species survival is affected, otherwise it is just an emergent feature of life like a freckle or like an earlobe.
Dreams are the earlobes of consciousness.
The quantum state of the self would suggest that dreams may have “purpose”. There is a difference between Newtonian nature and the quantum psychic observer entity thing.
that quantum stuff keeps trying to mean something significant but I find no consensus there at all. could be misdirection.
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DividedQuantum
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: thealienthatategod] 1
#26540371 - 03/17/20 09:22 AM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
thealienthatategod said: thanks DQ! re-absorption sounds like a channel switch, receiving input at one frequency vs another. once we tune off of the consensus reality radio station we enter Dreamworld. i have noticed that during the channel switch is the easiest time to collect unfiltered information, to take back into wake reality, that i can then document. it's def higher order information.
it seems then dreams are part of some higher dimensional structure. with reality emerging from the slice upon which it is embedded, so it seems that wake reality has just an embedded slice of the code of sleep reality. i'm very curios about information flowing between these two states by staying tuned to both frequencies simultaneously. has anyone else tried to do this and written about their impressions of this state?
i like the analogy of a camera recording ripples on the water. modern neuroscience is like the camera only detecting the changes in the ripples on the waters surface, the camera cannot experience what it is to be the water itself - who sees the ripples from the perspective of the interaction between water molecules and the endlessly dynamic agitations. within literally means against the inside.
thank you for the piano music Az, i like that, sometimes i get so confused, piano music is so clear
Right, that's well said. The explicate order, or consensus reality, is only a relatively autonomous sub-totality. The implicate order is enfolded everywhere in the universe -- this is known as the phenomenon of nonlocality -- and it unfolds in this universe into explicate structures and functions, those structures and functions undergo some subtle change, and then the explicate order re-folds into the implicate order. This interchange occurs, let's say, trillions of times a second, so that we see the Buddhists are right when they say all is impermanence. The stability we see is only relative and approximate.
Naturally, the implicate order, then, is a more fundamental level of reality than the explicate. And we have Newtonian mechanics morphing in the 20th century into quantum mechanics. These two branches of physics describe, respectively, these two orders. The implicate order is the source of consciousness, and one could think of the explicate order as the universal contents of that foundation of consciousness, that are constantly evolving.
The implicate order and explicate order are not sharply separated, however. The explicate order is just a sub-whole, whose source and essence is the implicate order. Once again, nonlocality, which has been confirmed completely scientifically, is the confusing manifestation of the implicate order in our 4D spacetime.
Indeed, the implicate order is a higher-dimensional structure, and dreams indeed are of this nature as well. So dreams, even though they do not occur in consensus reality, are no less real than waking reality. They are simply disconnected from the explicate order, which in the West receives all the emphasis. In many cultures, such as Native American culture, or even in large part India today, the implicate order is what is emphasized culturally. So we're all hopelessly biased. In any case, the atomistic, materialist, Cartesian, Newtonian framework is seen within this schema, and indeed even from the point of view of quantum theory itself, not to be in any way fundamental.
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redgreenvines
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: DividedQuantum] 1
#26540608 - 03/17/20 11:31 AM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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I cannot say that I find any comfort in casting the impermanence referenced in Buddhism as supporting any modern theory using implicate and explicate dimensional non-locality, which are not at all part of Buddhist canon, even if some of Buddhism (notably Tibetan) include accounts of supramundane events (magic, telepresence, clairvoyance, etc.).
Does adding a tangential reference to Buddhism make this explanation stand more solidly? How does Quantum theory creep into it? Does the word "quantum" add authority?
Are you really suggesting that implicate reality is one joined space where all of our minds may overlap (in non-locality space)? I kind of agree with that as a potential explanation for remote viewing, and some other kinds of real but unpredictable psychic phenomena, but I do not claim to understand any of it.
Maybe it is a good place to look scientifically, but what kind of laboratory would be suitable?
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DividedQuantum
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: redgreenvines] 1
#26540731 - 03/17/20 12:47 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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The reference to impermanence is that, in the implicate order, literally nothing is permanent. That's all. I'm not trying to appeal to authority to sound cool.
By quantum mechanics, I mean literally the formalism and science of quantum mechanics. I solved the Schrodinger equation probably a thousand times in college, and have been reading about it and related matters for the last twenty years. Once again, I'm not trying to sound cool. The implicate order is, in an approximated but real sense, what manifests as the wavefunction, which is the statistical solution of the Schrodinger equation (or in relativistic field theory, the Dirac equation). In Bohmian mechanics, the probablistic nature of the wavefunction is interpreted as an averaging over the random fluctuations of the quantum potential, which is given by a field relation that does not depend on distance, only form. So ultimately, the whole notion of unreality in popular conceptions of quantum mechanics is merely an averaging over ignorance, especially since we cannot know the initial conditions of a quantum experiment.
Implicate reality is not a space, it is higher-dimensional. Our familiar dimension of space is an explicate projection from a ground of reality that is common to space, time, mass, and energy, but transcends all of them. Indeed, it may be supposed that an individual's consciousness may overlap another individual's in the implicate order, but I'm not as interested in that because it's so hard to understand. Naturally, the implicate order hypothesis could give a basis for paranormal and parapsychological activity. Ymmv.
Scientifically, the rub is that all of the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, and there are several, are as yet experimentally equivalent. Meaning, we cannot yet peer deeper beneath the quantum surface, so we do not know which of the ontological, or many-worlds, or Copenhagen, or decoherence, etc. is correct. Until our technology improves, we can all hold strong opinions either way.
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thealienthatategod
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: redgreenvines]
#26540865 - 03/17/20 02:05 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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when lucidity is gained in a dream, to me it feels like breaking through to a new presence. everything that was confusing before melts away.
why does it feel like dreams take place within physical reality before this lucid state is achieved? why is it so hard to see the illusion, but once you do, breaking thru into the new presence, the confusion about believing that you are in physical reality just melts away?
just as consciousness lies across a spectrum, so does lucidity - it's not strictly an on or off matter. in the fully lucid state the conditions of both realities are fully remembered simultaneously. it does seem that the more familiar you become with dreams, the easier it is to recognize a dream.
misdirection is about perspective, when insights are clear, orientation becomes corrected freed from cloudy disorientation. an observer may be self-reflective, but a detached observer is a witness - de-embedding themselves. as some high level unity, the concept of separately acting individuals seems to fall away.
we live our lives from behind our eyes, in our own personal worlds, the brain generating, perceiving, and processing information, and we experience this information as our subjective world - consensus reality or Dreamworld reality.
"If the outside world fell to ruins, one of us would be capable of building it up again, for mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, all that is shaped by nature lies modeled in us."
--Herman Hesse
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redgreenvines
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: DividedQuantum] 1
#26540874 - 03/17/20 02:07 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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why invoke anything Quantum related if you are trying to say something specific?
for a moment I believed that you were forming a theory of higher dimensional spaces where implicate overlaps become explicate.
but I see now you do not mean spaces when you talk of higher dimensions. It could be that my grasp of gravity and light is too weak to get your meaning. but I am glad you are not trying to use Buddhism to gain acceptance of the idea.
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DividedQuantum
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: redgreenvines] 1
#26540884 - 03/17/20 02:13 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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I only bring up quantum mechanics because it is intimately tied to the idea of the implicate order. What is supposed by people who subscribe to the implicate order hypothesis is that the wavefunction literally describes part of the activity of the implicate order, and the solutions in field theory even more so. I'm sorry if that is something you do not like.
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redgreenvines
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: DividedQuantum] 1
#26541072 - 03/17/20 03:53 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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It makes little sense to me as relates to reality versus dreaming.
I can see a wave function describing a defined system, even a complex ones with enough points being modeled, but I don't think about a wave function as satisfactory explanation for much that I am facing. Maybe in the future when I have a star trek transporter in my room, but at the moment it does not jive with life much. Are we not talking about subatomic particles when we get into the wave function work with which you have experience?
Some people think that consciousness is in the domain of Quantum physics, but this has not seemed to make sense to me. The issue of the observer and the double slit experiments is unfortunate, of course wave and particle combine in fields and play out according to the mechanics.
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thealienthatategod
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: redgreenvines] 1
#26541092 - 03/17/20 04:06 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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if space has an infinite number of dimensions, there is no somewhere to begin until a point is fixed by a will - direction introduced for its own convenience, as we know there is no way to detect absolute motion in empty space.
matter and energy distort space, but space also affects mass, distorting the motions of energy and matter. in this sense space and matter are continuous as they are just different aspects of a higher order.
dreaming or perceiving of doing something is equivalent to actually doing it.
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DividedQuantum
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Re: reality vs. dreaming - which is more of an illusion? [Re: redgreenvines] 2
#26541186 - 03/17/20 05:02 PM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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Quote:
redgreenvines said: It makes little sense to me as relates to reality versus dreaming.
I can see a wave function describing a defined system, even a complex ones with enough points being modeled, but I don't think about a wave function as satisfactory explanation for much that I am facing. Maybe in the future when I have a star trek transporter in my room, but at the moment it does not jive with life much. Are we not talking about subatomic particles when we get into the wave function work with which you have experience?
Some people think that consciousness is in the domain of Quantum physics, but this has not seemed to make sense to me. The issue of the observer and the double slit experiments is unfortunate, of course wave and particle combine in fields and play out according to the mechanics.
Oh you're right, my posts have gotten a bit tortured. Just sticking to the qualitative ideas of the implicate order was my original intention, but I brought in some of the more technical stuff. I'm not going to belabor it; you have a point. But I think anyone who wishes to investigate these ideas further could possibly go down a very deep rabbit hole, and there are at some point many intersections with some of the salient ideas in science. But this is not really the time or place for rabbit holes, I agree.
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