Think differently part 2. :0

Hi - so I was a little confused by your over-use of the pronoun THEY/THEM. Are you doing this because you’re trying to use gender-neutral pronouns? Or are you so beyond self/other that there is no distinction between your thoughts and your co-worker’s thoughts? Either way, it made it a bit difficult to understand who thought what and who said what…

I was also confused by the SWIM thing - I just looked it up and I’m guessing you meant Someone Who Isn’t Me… right?

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to point out that humans have this amazing capacity for non-verbal communication and theory of mind. We have entire centers of our brain cooperating to feed us theories of what might be going on inside other people’s brains.

Some people are naturally better at this than others, and I’ve certainly read a lot of anecdotal evidence, and had my own share of psychedelic experiences which let me know that our capacity to do this particular trick can increase in those situations.

So yeah, while it might be possible that some sort of telepathy was taking place, it’s probably a lot more possible that this was just one person’s mind being really good at making sense of the world. In other words

  • the person not feeling well was giving off all these non-verbal signals that this is what was going on in their head
  • another person absorbed those signals and - without even trying - created a complex mental model that predicted what was going to happen next, and then
  • the thing they predicted actually happened

I’m not saying that this is somehow 100% proof that telepathy doesn’t exist, but it is the much simpler explanation…

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I like to fall back on that ‘ol rock & roller William Blake who tells us “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.”


To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

The rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam -
“the flower once blown, forever dies”

The way that can be told is not the eternal way.

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Swim is clearly me lol and yeah he didnt see me, he was walking past talking to someone else and my half cubical blocked me from his vision. It was the timing too it wasn’t like 5 mins past it was like i thought it he said it level creepy.


Stage 1 cleared. Now repeat “We would like to offer you a position at our company” and wait for the phone call.

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my random ass neo call and then text #matrix

So it’s funny you say wait for the phone call lolz
Guess I didn’t follow the white rabbit to clear stage 2.

This is more a taste of what empty means than what infinite means. Quite the opposite.

perhaps. You’re right

No I have watched infinite totem poles scroll in front of my vision. Even simulated infinity is pretty intense.

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This is more of an awkwardness in our representation system. We cannot fully write down 1/3 or pi in our decimal system, so in a certain way our decimal system is lacking in expressive power. The actual value of those numbers is found by their definition (1/3 as the ratio of the whole equal to the ratio of 1 to 3, and pi being the ratio of the circumference and the diameter of a circle). Their decimal expansion is a way to approximate their value, and in that way yet another infinite process, comparable to “keep counting”. This is indeed the potential infinite, and not the actual infinite.

The same story holds for fractals, although I think fractals are an excellent example of how something extremely basic can create an extraordinary amount of complexity. It’s a good argument for something as mysterious and complex as conscious being part of something “simple and understandable” as nerves.

It’s quite difficult to get an appreciation for what the actual infinite might look like without involving infinite processes. It is possible though. For example, the following is a characterisation of infinity: a collection of things is infinite, if we can remove some elements from the collection without changing the size of the collection. If we remove less elements than the size of the collection (for example any finite number of elements), then we won’t change the size, and there are indeed even ways to remove the same number of elements as the size of the collection and still not change the size of the result (for example as I did with the even numbers).

Not in how I understand the universe. I don’t see how life / humans changed the motion of elementary particles or the information made possible by the forces acting on elementary particles. You could see the great oxidation event as not much more than a chemical reaction being sped up by a catalyst. Somehow (in my view by chance) some chemical structures in the form of molecular biological life started catalysing a chemical reaction that produced O2. As far as the atoms are concerned, not much changed, really.

It seems the point you want to drive home, is that the universe grew in complexity, in the sense that in order to describe the state of the universe, we would need more words to do so: A dead planet made completely out of iron atoms is easier to describe than a dead planet with our composition of chemicals, which is easier to describe than a living planet.

However, this is describing the complexity of describing the state space of the universe, but it is not a measure of the size of the state space of the universe.

Compare it with a (hard) erased hard drive containing only zeroes in all its memory cells to the same one after it had been used to store the entire content of Wikipedia. The former has very low complexity, since it’s easy to describe completely (I just did), whereas the latter will be comparatively difficult to describe (I estimate it could be compressed a bit, but still will be barely less than the actual size in memory of the Wikipedia, in orders of magnitude). We could make it even more complex by filling the hard drive with pure random noise, in which no patterns emerge, and hence it will take describing every bit of information individually to describe the state of the hard drive (as there will be almost no recurring patterns).

In the meantime, the state space did not change, since the hard drive still has the same number of bits of information in each of those cases.

Note that it is a law of physics that the entropy (and thus the informational complexity) of the universe can only increase, so it is not even the human element that makes the universe more complex: it’s expected to happen regardless of what we do or have done.

This could mean two things:

Clearly, it would be amazing if it was the former, so I suggest you test whether it’s the first or the second that happened. I’ll show you how you can test it (at least enough to moderately convince me):

  1. State your method of telepathy beforehand (for example, ‘repeat the word “weather” inside your head for the first minutes after you arrive at your desk’). Make sure it’s something easy, like enticing your coworkers to say a specific moderately common word (“weather”). Also write down under which conditions you figure the telepathy was successful (someone said “weather” within the first 20 minutes you got inside). It is important that you do this before you do the experiment (you could even post them here if you want to be believable). It is also important that you state beforehand how long you will do the experiment.
  2. On each even date you go to work, practice the telepathy. If you witness the conditions that you had described beforehand, mark the date with a big green cross on your calendar, if you didn’t, mark it with a big red cross. Ideally, let one of your skeptic colleagues do the marking for you, just so you can prove them wrong afterwards (and to eliminate bias, of course).
  3. On each odd date you go to work, do not practice the telepathy at all, but pay attention to the conditions that would have made telepathy successful if you had practiced it. If you witness those conditions, mark the date with a big green circle on your calendar, if you didn’t, mark it with a big red circle.
  4. Do this for a few months. Preferably ask some friends to do it as well.
  5. Gather all the information: the total number of green crosses, red crosses, green circles and red circles.
  6. Analyse the data statistically to see how likely it is you’re telepathic (feel free to post the data on the forum here, then I’ll do the statistics for you)

Then of course, if the data makes you an exceptionally proficient telepath, we have to do follow-up studies (at least one where we switch the odd and the even days, to test if telepathy only works on even days / people only mention weather on odd days / etc), probably supervised by a team of psychologist who can make history if they could describe the first scientifically proven human telepath.

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Look man, I’m not trying to test this anymore and i’m not like professing this to be a gospel thing. More like an oddity.
Linear things don’t seem as interesting as they normally did before hand. So i could formulate methods and such but have issues sticking to it just due to the nature of experience.
Also it almost seems serendipitous. Which seems fitting if you’re playing in god’s realm it’s hard to nail down lolz
The guy who wrote the stuff about telepathy was a Harvard psychologist xD

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Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
Do you know we exist?
Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom?
Have you been born yet, and are you alive?

Let’s reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages
Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests
Have you forgotten the lessons of the ancient war?

We need great golden copulations

  • Jim Morrison

I keep thinking I’m going to reach a point in this discussion where I’m OK with the idea that we’re just on different sides of some philosophical divide, and just shrug and walk away - but you keep mentioning things where we are so close and yet on different sides that I can’t help but keep poking at those edges.

And this is the part where I’m genuinely confused - you seem to have drawn a line at the motion of elementary particles and said - any descriptions beyond here do not add any additional complexity - and I’m honestly a bit puzzled.

Let’s just do a Gendankenexperiment - let’s say you’re some advanced being from out in the Multi-Verse*, and you are capable of popping in and out of any of the available multi-verse bubbles out there, at any time in their existence you choose. Now let’s say you come from a very suspicious/nosy race of advanced beings, who not only want a description of all the elements of that universe, they want a fully functional super-computer model of everything those systems are capable of doing, just in case they should be worried or something.

Now, let’s say that these beings pop up in our universe about 500,000 years after the big bang. They see a huge almost-uniform soup of hydrogen, helium, and lithium. The complexity of this system is pretty low - the various elements can interact in only very limited ways. They press the FF button and pop back into the timeline around 5 million years after the big bang, and now there are all of these other elements - created by the emergent properties of large stars creating heavy metals etc. Also, now that galaxies and planets have emerged from the interplay of fundamental forces, these elements can become concentrated enough, and undergo a variety of energy changes, making organic chemistry possible.

So at this point, even though they’re still describing the motion of elementary particles, the particular state spaces (i.e number of elements available in the universe, the range of possible chemical interactions made possible by organic chemistry) has increased. In order to describe it accurately, they will have to write a more complex program with a larger (but still finite!) state space to model all these new interactions.

I’m not going to belabor the point, but you can see where I’m going with this - if you imagine program they would have to write to account for the state space of

  • all the valid statements that are possible to write using the genetic code available to Earth organisms
  • all the ways in which the conscious awareness of that organism could play out in the actual tissues available to the realm of genetics
  • all the products of conscious awareness as it can be expressed by living tissue, etc

In order to model these phenomena accurately, the models would have to get more and more complex, and exist within an ever-larger series of non-overlapping state spaces.

As such, I am having a hard time understanding how just accounting for the motion of the elementary particles involved provides an accurate or meaningful description of the complexity of that system.

(*and yes - I know that the Multi-Verse is just another theoretical construct )

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If they want to do that they have to calculate the phase space of the universe using something like quantum field theory and general relativity. Genes, conscious brings and all their doing will emerge from those theories.

Please note that the huge almost-uniform soup of hydrogen, helium, and lithium is capable of creating all those other elements, galaxies and planets and so on. So, a supercomputer model of everything the first state is capable of doing has to contain the second state, since we know the first state is capable to transform into the second state.

Btw. Atoms aren’t elementary. One probably can’t call even elemental particles elemental.

Also the number of elemental particles in the universe is not fixed. Even at a fixed point in time (what ever this means) the number of elemental particles in the universe is not as clear-cut as one would think (you can complain to quantum field theory if you like).


This has some relationship to Napster’s OP:

excerpted from an article titled Why I Seldom Teach The Hero’s Journey Anymore — And What I Teach Instead by Craig Chalquist, Ph.D.(

The Journey of Reenchantment :

Stage 1: Islands and Oases of Childhood Magic

We all come in with this, even when born into impoverishment. Dolls and plants speak to us. Animals make magic. Fabulous beasts hide under the bed. Dream and daytime merge.

Stage 2: Disenchantment, Forgetfulness, and Adaptation

As we get older we learn to adapt to the outer world, and to societies often unfriendly to the world of fantasy in which we live. Birds stop speaking to us. Imaginary friends go away. We try to be grown up.

Stage 3: Alienation from the Magical

Often we stand apart from the magic for so long that we forget it was there at all. From this springs the odd idea that fantasies and fairy tales are only for children. Creativity gives way to commutes, paperwork, and “practicality,” as though loss of wonder were practical. (My impression is that about 80 to 90 percent of Americans live at this level. The rest don’t say much, in public anyway.)

Stage 4: Rupture and Underworld Descent (if you’re lucky)

When we detach for too long from the numinous, glamorous, intuitive side of life, it has a way of summoning us, usually through our own unconscious in the appearance of symptoms, nightmares, or just prolonged dissatisfaction. Troubles may confront us. What we take for normal and real turns inside out; nothing is as it seems. This is life telling us, “You were made for more.” The truly unfortunate are they who receive no further signals.

Stage 5: The First Seeking

What more? We go looking, discontented, confused, but resolved to seek what meaning and revelation can be found. We ask the big questions of ourselves. We question values and begin to study the worldview we look through instead of taking it for granted.

Stage 6: Reemergence, Gradual or Otherwise

Usually this phase ends with a feeling of relief. Vital energies flow once again. We haven’t found The Goal, perhaps, or The Source or The Prize or whatever the great answer is, but the very act of sustained searching for a path brings renewed life and yearning.

Stage 7: More Seeking

So we keep looking, learning new truths along the way, entering new relationships, finding mentors, discarding toxic people who deplete us, perhaps finding new occupations, certainly new interests. A common thought in this stage is, “Perhaps things weren’t so bleak as they seemed.” You’re right: they aren’t.

Stage 8: Finding the Magic Door

In Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf , lost and discontented Harry Haller walks down a dark, rainy street one evening and comes unexpectedly to an alley containing a neon sign with flashing words: Magic Theater — Entrance Not For Everyone. Eventually he goes inside — and awakens to the richness of his own imagination. You round a corner one day, and suddenly things make sense in a deep way. What was fragmented connects. Meaning appears. Your heart opens.

Stage 9: Learning to Live in Both Worlds

Campbell refers to being a “master” of both worlds, but for the less heroic, the role of the wayfarer or witness might fit better. We learn to live in the liminal zone between cultures, identities, spiritualities, aware of conscious decisions and unconscious promptings, logical rules and imagined ideals from the depths, the dayworld of consensus reality and the moonlit realm of intuition and dream. We have outgrown the urge to reduce each dimension of being to the other.

Stage 10: Opening the Door for Others

Which prepares us for mentoring others in how we got to this stage. The Hero would go on stage, appear before the royal court, lead a tickertape parade; we might prefer informal conversation, a bit of writing, a presentation or two, civic participation. We share how we moved from innocence to disenchantment to reenchantment and invite others to find their own path.

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