Sure! First off, representing any information in your experience requires some symmetry breaking because otherwise there's just no differentiation between anything and anything else. Particular objects like an apple require a lot of such breaks in order to differentiate red from every other color, construct the sense of space the apple i…
Sure! First off, representing any information in your experience requires some symmetry breaking because otherwise there's just no differentiation between anything and anything else. Particular objects like an apple require a lot of such breaks in order to differentiate red from every other color, construct the sense of space the apple is in and specify it as in a particular spot, construct the imagined inner visual field as distinct from the outer one, tile the apple with textures, etc. Now, there're also more subtle differentiations that happen, like the distinction between awareness/consciousness of the object, and the object itself. It's possible to take the distinction that's made there and instead of having a particular object you are conscious of consciousness of consciousness of... and so on. When done quite deeply, this state doesn't contain stuff like objects or understanding of cause and effect because the number of symmetry breaks and the degree of them is too large to be supported by the state. Instead, you get a ball of "pure" consciousness that feels like pure knowing with ~epsilon interference between one knowing and another. You can also kinda imagine it as every piece of your experience doing the AND operation, or (almost, if it was perfect they'd cancel entirely) perfectly reflective particles all reflecting each other. Beyond that, there are two main historically understood states with less symmetry breaks, which are nothing (everything does NOR/everything cancels out except for a super subtle wrapper to remember the cancellation) and "neither perception nor non-perception" (actually empty of information, including time differentiation, must infer the existence of it after the fact when you notice it's been 30 minutes since you started meditating and you thought it was more like two). Anyway, because there's so little information in the state itself and because most people have an approximation of pure consciousness from looking at what is conserved between their experiences in normal conditions, it naively seems like it wouldn't be able to do anything, but a lot of that is because people do not have access to states that largely change the quantity of consciousness (and are tracking that variable) in order to see effects, like nothing or well-done consciousness without content (that is, a really small epsilon). Also, it's difficult to reason about anyway because the effects of consciousness are embedded in whatever tools you are using to reason about consciousness because they're part of your experience, so attempting to compare imagined differences between consciousness and not during usual conditions will not (trivially) reveal the effects of consciousness.
Feel free to ask more questions, I love talking about this stuff. Unfortunately it's pretty esoteric rn and tricky to understand without having good references to it within your own experience. Hopefully we get to the point where the basics have been very clearly mathematized so we can talk about it precisely without having to personally experience really wild meditative stuff!
Thank you! I must ask... do you think it's possible to understand this without having enough corresponding first-hand meditation/psychedelic experiences? I'm sad to admit that from the first sentence I'm a bit confused about what symmetry breaking is happening. I'm also confused about the distinction between awareness of an object, and the object itself. In one sense this seems very obvious: "An object is molecules in the world, awareness is something I experience". But in another sense (probably the one you're getting at) it seems *extremely* subtle: "Objects don't really exist; the world is a buzzing idiotic evolution of the wavefunction; objects are an abstraction created by my brain to help me navigate in the world successfully." In the latter case, I do indeed have trouble understanding the difference, or how an "object" can "exist" without someone being conscious of it.
I am generally pretty optimistic on people being able to understand exotic states of consciousness without directly being in them much, so probably, though it may take a bit of explanatory work. The symmetry breaking I'm referring to here is pretty subtle (though it is in all experiences, fish in water type subtle), it's any difference between part of your experience and another part of it. This also includes stuff like perceiver and perceived and is/isn't, so it's fairly tricky to reason about the super general cases. Additionally, you're on the right track with the latter case! The subject and object in this sense can not exist wholly independent of each other and are created from the same source, and this does imply that to some degree subjects are objects and objects are subjects. Another way of getting to that result is that everything in experience to some degree is like a mirror and therefore is perceived as containing a bit of the mirrored. That said, an object doesn't necessarily have to be experienced as observed by a person in order to be differentiated from another piece of experience, though of course these experiences will be happening inside humans, and the usual modes of perception preclude stuff like a large degree of objects perceiving each other without an intermediary person in the experience (I do think that some degree of this happens normally for everyone, but typically very very subtle). This also makes it hard to do and remember, because memory systems are typically quite entangled with the usual sense of self, which I suspect is part of why super-advanced meditators sometimes report worse memory. I am very much looking for ways for that to not happen to me. Anyway, the "pure consciousness" state that I referred to previously is like taking the subject/object duality of a normal perception like you seeing an apple, removing the particular informational contents of the normal subject (you) and object (apple) so that you just have structure left, then letting both the subject and object in that structure be the structure itself. After that setup there are many options for exactly how the recursion and differentiation go, plus possible variation in the quantity/amplitude of experience in a particular bit of the structure. Eventually I'd like to get more precise for replicability, but that's a good first approximation. Also, I'm going to be making some really precise analogies in the structure and mechanics of consciousness and known physical and mathematical stuff at some point in the future, so even if the previous descriptions don't help a lot I expect that we'll be able to find a lot of common grounding without having to experience the stuff directly. One in particular that I am quite excited for is the holographic properties of experience; the mechanics of taking a reference beam, splitting, reflecting one beam off of an object, then recombining the beams on a plate are basically identical to what happens a lot of the time in experience, though what exactly the plate and object are made of and how they work is a bit different. There's also some stuff that works pretty much how optical tweezers do, that will be p cool too once I describe all of this stuff in a full-length and not off the cuff post or something. Hope this helps!
Sure! First off, representing any information in your experience requires some symmetry breaking because otherwise there's just no differentiation between anything and anything else. Particular objects like an apple require a lot of such breaks in order to differentiate red from every other color, construct the sense of space the apple is in and specify it as in a particular spot, construct the imagined inner visual field as distinct from the outer one, tile the apple with textures, etc. Now, there're also more subtle differentiations that happen, like the distinction between awareness/consciousness of the object, and the object itself. It's possible to take the distinction that's made there and instead of having a particular object you are conscious of consciousness of consciousness of... and so on. When done quite deeply, this state doesn't contain stuff like objects or understanding of cause and effect because the number of symmetry breaks and the degree of them is too large to be supported by the state. Instead, you get a ball of "pure" consciousness that feels like pure knowing with ~epsilon interference between one knowing and another. You can also kinda imagine it as every piece of your experience doing the AND operation, or (almost, if it was perfect they'd cancel entirely) perfectly reflective particles all reflecting each other. Beyond that, there are two main historically understood states with less symmetry breaks, which are nothing (everything does NOR/everything cancels out except for a super subtle wrapper to remember the cancellation) and "neither perception nor non-perception" (actually empty of information, including time differentiation, must infer the existence of it after the fact when you notice it's been 30 minutes since you started meditating and you thought it was more like two). Anyway, because there's so little information in the state itself and because most people have an approximation of pure consciousness from looking at what is conserved between their experiences in normal conditions, it naively seems like it wouldn't be able to do anything, but a lot of that is because people do not have access to states that largely change the quantity of consciousness (and are tracking that variable) in order to see effects, like nothing or well-done consciousness without content (that is, a really small epsilon). Also, it's difficult to reason about anyway because the effects of consciousness are embedded in whatever tools you are using to reason about consciousness because they're part of your experience, so attempting to compare imagined differences between consciousness and not during usual conditions will not (trivially) reveal the effects of consciousness.
Feel free to ask more questions, I love talking about this stuff. Unfortunately it's pretty esoteric rn and tricky to understand without having good references to it within your own experience. Hopefully we get to the point where the basics have been very clearly mathematized so we can talk about it precisely without having to personally experience really wild meditative stuff!
Thank you! I must ask... do you think it's possible to understand this without having enough corresponding first-hand meditation/psychedelic experiences? I'm sad to admit that from the first sentence I'm a bit confused about what symmetry breaking is happening. I'm also confused about the distinction between awareness of an object, and the object itself. In one sense this seems very obvious: "An object is molecules in the world, awareness is something I experience". But in another sense (probably the one you're getting at) it seems *extremely* subtle: "Objects don't really exist; the world is a buzzing idiotic evolution of the wavefunction; objects are an abstraction created by my brain to help me navigate in the world successfully." In the latter case, I do indeed have trouble understanding the difference, or how an "object" can "exist" without someone being conscious of it.
I am generally pretty optimistic on people being able to understand exotic states of consciousness without directly being in them much, so probably, though it may take a bit of explanatory work. The symmetry breaking I'm referring to here is pretty subtle (though it is in all experiences, fish in water type subtle), it's any difference between part of your experience and another part of it. This also includes stuff like perceiver and perceived and is/isn't, so it's fairly tricky to reason about the super general cases. Additionally, you're on the right track with the latter case! The subject and object in this sense can not exist wholly independent of each other and are created from the same source, and this does imply that to some degree subjects are objects and objects are subjects. Another way of getting to that result is that everything in experience to some degree is like a mirror and therefore is perceived as containing a bit of the mirrored. That said, an object doesn't necessarily have to be experienced as observed by a person in order to be differentiated from another piece of experience, though of course these experiences will be happening inside humans, and the usual modes of perception preclude stuff like a large degree of objects perceiving each other without an intermediary person in the experience (I do think that some degree of this happens normally for everyone, but typically very very subtle). This also makes it hard to do and remember, because memory systems are typically quite entangled with the usual sense of self, which I suspect is part of why super-advanced meditators sometimes report worse memory. I am very much looking for ways for that to not happen to me. Anyway, the "pure consciousness" state that I referred to previously is like taking the subject/object duality of a normal perception like you seeing an apple, removing the particular informational contents of the normal subject (you) and object (apple) so that you just have structure left, then letting both the subject and object in that structure be the structure itself. After that setup there are many options for exactly how the recursion and differentiation go, plus possible variation in the quantity/amplitude of experience in a particular bit of the structure. Eventually I'd like to get more precise for replicability, but that's a good first approximation. Also, I'm going to be making some really precise analogies in the structure and mechanics of consciousness and known physical and mathematical stuff at some point in the future, so even if the previous descriptions don't help a lot I expect that we'll be able to find a lot of common grounding without having to experience the stuff directly. One in particular that I am quite excited for is the holographic properties of experience; the mechanics of taking a reference beam, splitting, reflecting one beam off of an object, then recombining the beams on a plate are basically identical to what happens a lot of the time in experience, though what exactly the plate and object are made of and how they work is a bit different. There's also some stuff that works pretty much how optical tweezers do, that will be p cool too once I describe all of this stuff in a full-length and not off the cuff post or something. Hope this helps!