Information density - densities of information?

[luc]

To add to the above - some clues by the Cs about brain hemispheres:

(Joe) The question is, before the Fall, was the human brain divided into two hemispheres?

(L) Well, the brain has got two hemispheres no matter what.

(Chu) I think what you said on The Wave was that they were way better connected back then, and that after the Fall, they became lateralized.

A: Exactly. There was always a division in function.

Q: (L) But it was more connected and integrated before the Fall?

A: Yes.

Q: (Ze Germans) Was telepathy how people communicated before the Fall?

A: Partly. But there were "sounds" emitted both by individuals in 4D as well as objects.

(Luc) Iain McGilchrist's work had a big impact on me, so I was wondering: What, if anything, have the left and right brain hemispheres to do with our uplink to the information field and the higher realms?

A: They interpret in tandem the information received by full body sensing.

Q: (L) Left and right brain interpret the information sensed by the full body sensing system...

(Joe) Proteins.

(L) Yeah, all your proteins and your antennas...

(Joe) And your left hemisphere and your right hemisphere fight over it.

(Andromeda) Probably overinterpreting it.

(L) And the uplink to the whole thing is, what, your pituitary?

A: Yes

So it seems part of the process is tuning your proteins (presumably via knowledge, research, thinking, cleaning up the body and emotions, etc.) which then connects you to the higher type of information. But you also must bring your right and left brain hemispheres into harmony/alignment, because otherwise they fight over the information: the left hemisphere over-thinking, over-abstracting, and chopping everything up into tidy bits and pieces, obsessed with pinning down The Truth once and for all. The right hemisphere absorbing the totality of information and going off into "we are all one", "love and light" and "just listen to your spiritual heart, man!" territory.

This would explain why psychedelics can have such a profound effect on some people: it basically blasts your right hemisphere open, connecting you to the cosmos in that sort of semi-rational way, and you go all "unite! love! I've seen the light! Halleluja!" But it bypasses the realm of rational thought, effort, knowledge, understanding and so on. Hence some people simply go bonkers after that, while for others, it might be beneficial: it sort of re-balances the hemispheres by blasting the right hemisphere open, which might have been dormant. After that, once you go back to the "here and now", you might be better able to receive the cosmic information in a more balanced way, combining the earthly with the spiritual, using the former as a springboard to the latter. Because to read the "geometric language", you must engage both hemispheres simultaneously and in harmony.

With regard to

Q: (Ze Germans) Was telepathy how people communicated before the Fall?

A: Partly. But there were "sounds" emitted both by individuals in 4D as well as objects.

That's very interesting in light of this sort of "higher geometric language". We know that sounds can have meaning themselves (the sounds that make up languages are not arbitrary). In fact, when learning a language, you can often dimly discern meanings just by the sound of certain words and phrases. So it seems that those "geometric forms" are not only part of the thought world (telepathic) and discernible there, but also part of the world of sound.

 

[brandon]

This lovely thread made me think of something I once read - that perceived beauty is related to organised complexity. i.e., the more "organisedly complex" something is - in its inherent geometries, the more beautiful it looks to us. Visually, at least (the study was in the context of fractals).

I can't remember where I read it, but found various articles and studies about this, e.g.:

Aesthetic preference is related to organized complexity - PMC

There is extensive evidence today linking exposure to natural environments to favorable changes in mental and even physical health. There is also a growing body of work indicating that there are specific geometric properties of natural scenes that ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

There is extensive evidence today linking exposure to natural environments to favorable changes in mental and even physical health. There is also a growing body of work indicating that there are specific geometric properties of natural scenes that mediate these effects, and that these properties can also be found in artificial structures like buildings, especially those designed before the emergence of modernism. These geometries are also associated with aesthetic preference–we seem to like what is good for us. Here, using a questionnaire-based survey, we have tried to elucidate some of the parameters that play a role in formulating a preference for one form over the other. The images used were nature scenes from the Alpine landscape with various manipulations to alter their complexity, or with additions of computer graphics or various buildings. In all cases, the presence of a natural scaling hierarchy and of either fractal graphics or of ornate, non-local pre-modern buildings was always preferable to the alternative.

Pioneering work of Alexander [29] and Salingaros [30–33] has identified a number of parameters that codify this “connectedness” between the viewer and the environment. One important factor is the presence of fractal features. The term fractal, introduced by Mandelbrot [34], denotes a structure that exhibits self-similarity on different levels, from the largest to the smallest. Perfect fractals are purely mathematical constructs, but statistically self-similar fractals, where the repetitions are not exact, are everywhere in nature, from coastlines to galaxies and from tree branches to pulmonary airways and blood vessels [35–37]. It has been shown that exposure to certain fractal visual patterns in nature, architecture or visual arts has significant physiological effects [24, 27, 38, 39]. However, there is more to these qualities of the natural or “biophilic” environment than their fractal properties. Our processing “… system is acutely tuned to the visual complexity of the natural environment, specifically to respond positively to the highest levels of organized complexity. Fractals are an important component of this effect, but by no means represent the full gamut of connective qualities” [40]. This “organized complexity” is also defined by a hierarchy of scales, the presence of local contrasts, as well as overall coherence etc.

and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0276237421994699

A number of studies show that human observers find images with fractal statistics visually pleasing. When given a choice between fractal and non-fractal patterns, there is an overwhelming majority preference for fractals (Taylor, 1998, 2003). Sprott (1993) found that appealing evaluations were provided to patterns with a low to moderate fractal dimension. Aks and Sprott (1996) found aesthetic preferences correlated with a fractal dimension of 1.26. Spehar et al. (2003) found that observers displayed a consistent preference for fractal images regardless of whether they were generated by a natural process, by mathematics, or by human hand.

One explanation for these preferences stems from the similarity between such images and natural scenes. Paintings and natural scenes in particular have been found to share similar image statistics, including power spectra distributed as 1/f2, sparse spatial structure, and similar edge co-occurrence statistics (Graham et al., 2006). Redies (2007) suggests that an artist creates a work of art so that it induces a specific resonant state in the visual system. This resonant state is based on the adaptation of the visual system to natural scenes. In this view, looking at a painting activates our brain the way it does when we are looking at natural scenes. The sense of naturalness induces a positive aesthetic quality.

The relationship between symmetry and fractal properties has not been as thoroughly investigated. Rainville and Kingdom (1999) looked at the ability to detect mirror symmetry embedded in fractal noise. Performance was facilitated in images with power spectra that characterize natural scenes. Modeling of their data show that humans are not ideal observers when detecting symmetry and do so only over a few cycles of spatial scale rather than the entire range. They conclude that this is probably an efficient strategy, as it reduces the associated neural costs.

(I bolded that sentence in the last quote because it made me think, what would it be like if we could perceive [scaled/rotated/translated] symmetry over the entire (or at least a much wider) range of scale.... a walk in the forest would be pretty intense :) Maybe we would see patterns that go back to the dawn of time. Maybe we could tell what somebody is thinking just from the way they slightly moved their hand - because we're seeing the overall geometries as a whole.. Schizophrenics seem to see patterns everywhere, and so do people under the influence of hallucinogens, in an out-of-control way)

Those studies are talking about it with the idea that humans evolved this receptivity to fractality because of living closely with the natural world, but it seems to me like that's a bit of an inside-out way of looking at it. We're part of the natural world and it makes sense to me that this kind of "wave-reading" (receptivity to the patterns/cycles of nature/the information field) would've always been there...

Would the information field be, rather than something like a collection of data... more akin to algorithms? i.e. it's always moving and dancing, it's about relationships..

Those are my vague thoughts so far... very interesting thread!
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"

 

[Joe]

I agree, but I'd clarify what we mean by an observer. I think this only works if anything can be an observer. For example, an atom is an observer. The information about another atom becomes actualized when that information is transferred, for example, in the form of energy and position in space. That information is then processed by the receiving atom, which produces a response, e.g., changing its own trajectory. Or bonding with that other atom, or any other physical interaction. These are the "meanings" for atoms. This is just another way of saying that all information processing is cognitive in nature (and all cognition is information processing). Atoms just process very limited consciousness/information compared to, say, a human mind.

I think anything can be an observer, i.e. have some level of consciousness, even if only basic. But what is consciousness? I think we have to accept an unsatisfactory definition of it as, like you said, 'energy', that is transferred from one thing, or unit of information, to another, and in doing so it 'organizes' it based on the nature or 'type', or 'density' (or something) of the energy that is the consciousness.

It's difficult formulating theories about the actions of things that you can't observe at the level at which the actions take place.

 

[Joe]

Just realized, there seems to be a lot of left hemisphere being employed to analyze this subject! Maybe that's part of the problem we're running into. We can use the left hemisphere to try to pin down the precise nature of information and consciousness, but we always eventually run up against a brick wall it seems.

Maybe the only way to really understand and know what we're trying to define here is with a more holistic right hemisphere approach. An understanding through a kind of 'knowing' that is based on 'seeing' or observing, rather than an atomized, bit by bit, analysis. Maybe consciousness and information don't exist in isolation, and trying to define them in in those terms is just not possible, and not just for us because we don't know enough, but for anyone of ANY level of knowledge, because they *actually* and objectively only exist, and therefore make sense, in relation to one another.

It kind of reminds me of irreducible complexity.

 

[Jones]

Like when you have a strong intuition, you feel (and sometimes vaguely see in your mind) various puzzle pieces clicking into place. Sometimes this produces a sense of "steady euphoria" or "rational euphoria" (again for lack of better words).

Three equal and intertwining meanings (C's)- I think that all three are necessary. A visual image, a felt sensation and what you have called 'a sense of steady euphoria' I've referred to as an immediate impulse to act in the past because the image and the felt sense seemed to compel a certain action or chain of actions and the euphoria seemed to come after the completion of the action - but maybe the euphoria was building during the commission of the actions as a fuel for their completion. Dunno. Will have to pay more attention.

I've wondered then if flow is all three centres working together with a unity of purpose and a singularity of focus. But as you say, the ground work has to be put in to learn to get to that point and the rest, the visual image, felt sensation and the euphoria is like a gift - or grace bestowed maybe.

Kind of like flight where navigation is reliant on balancing or adjusting four forces - thrust, gravity, drag and lift - and if you put in enough thrust, the lift is a gift.

I just think that it's like we're swimming in a sea of information with infinite data points and consciousnesses is about how much we can be aware of. You can grab one set of data points and do a deep dive on them or you can just skim along the top of multiple data points. The organising factor is maybe something like curiosity or focus or what issue needs solving or understanding and why.

 

[Ryan]

It seems that we have no tried and tested idea or concept of what we will be experiencing in the future. So we will just have to experience 4D more to get any closer to a working or 'objective' concept it seems. So the actual process of experiencing 4D, or some aspects thereof, would somehow mold our '4D perceptive organs'. Perhaps something like when a blind person who's never seen anything is given an operation to see. The patient usually struggles to interpret what he is seeing, until he 'learns' how to see.

Yep, and I would also add that preparation and having a "clue to the view" can have significant influence on that struggle, making it anywhere from jarring and traumatic, to easy, smooth and even ecstatic.

Maybe consciousness and information don't exist in isolation, and trying to define them in in those terms is just not possible. They only exist, or make sense, in relation to one another.

It kind of reminds me of irreducible complexity.

I've been pondering recently that what we mean by "definition" is also related. It seems that "defining" something is to invoke a left-hemispheric process that creates an abstract model of the subject being 'defined', usually in view to communicating a larger concept. It's similar to 'proof' - entirely subjective. What is a totally inadequate definition for one purpose may be a superlatively adequate definition for another, and what seems to facilitate adequacy in this respect is consensus between the two communicating consciousnesses. So, a definition may only be as useful as the degree of agreement that it can facilitate. Of course ideally, the definition would also be as representative as possible of an ontologically prior meaning, and this is probably a major aspect regarding whether the communication has an STS or STO outcome, osit.

Continuing in this theme, I very much agree with your post.

I just think that it's like we're swimming in a sea of information with infinite data points and consciousnesses is about how much we can be aware of. You can grab one set of data points and do a deep dive on them or you can just skim along the top of multiple data points.

Nice metaphor!

The organising factor is maybe something like curiosity or focus or what issue needs solving or understanding and why.

Sounds a lot like meaning!

 

[Ðekel]

Almost as though the right hemisphere is doing a more wave type function, and the left a more particle like function...

 

[Kika]

This thread reminded me of watching 3D pictures . If you (consciousness) are well focused (asked question) and you do quality work; tuning, adjustment - you become coherent and „get a picture" (answer/in-formation).

That's how I understood it. (from my density of understanding )

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Maybe the only way to really understand and know what we're trying to define here is with a more holistic right hemisphere approach. An understanding through a kind of 'knowing' that is based on 'seeing' or observing, rather than an atomized, bit by bit, analysis. Maybe consciousness and information don't exist in isolation, and trying to define them in in those terms is just not possible, and not just for us because we don't know enough, but for anyone of ANY level of knowledge, because they *actually* and objectively only exist, and therefore make sense, in relation to one another.

It kind of reminds me of irreducible complexity.

That's why Langan calls the ultimate stuff of the universe "infocognition."

 

[Joe]

Indeed. Meaning, significance. Here is something related, especially p. 42 for illustration:

Carlos Castaneda and the Phenomenology of Sorcery
Author(s): Donald D. Palmer
Source:
Humboldt Journal of Social Relations
, Vol. 4, No. 2 (SPRING/SUMMER 1977), pp.
36-45

Here's (most of) the text from that pdf.

Carlos Castaneda and the Phenomenology of Sorcery

[...] David Hume's devastating critique of our ordinary conception of causality could well serve don Juan's "argument." Hume had shown that there are no necessary connections between any two things in the universe, rather, the cause/effect relations we claim to perceive in the world are really the result of certain psychological assumptions and animal needs which we humans bring to reality (Hume, 1963: 66-83).

The problem that Hume discovered was supposed to have found its resolution in Kant's synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. Kant agreed that there is no such thing as necessary causal relations between things "out there," and even agreed that causality was imposed upon the world by the human mind, but he claimed that a necessary condition for understanding the world at all was understanding it in terms of causality (Kant, 1961: 574).

He believed that the universality of the human mind was this necessity of understanding the world as a causal sequence. Like Hume and Kant, don Juan teaches that the human consciousness imposes relations upon the world, but unlike Kant, he does not believe that there can be only one system of causality which we bring to the world.

The sorcerer, without denying the effectiveness of our ordinary system of causality, claims to have discovered an even more effective one. This one can best be described in terms of "omens," "power spots," "agreements and disagreements with the world," "rings of power," and "lines of the world." To participate in this new system of causality is to have achieved the "new description" Castaneda talks about. It is to inhabit a "separate reality." Perhaps an oversimplified but helpful illustration would be the following comparative analysis of the "cause" of a man's falling in the street:


A splendid example of don Juan's attempt to make Carlos attend to the new causality is the episode in Chapter 10 of Journey to Ixtlan in which Matus points out something in the dusky desert which Castaneda takes to be a dying animal.

As they approach it cautiously, it takes on the appearance of a monster with a mammalian body and a bird's head. In its death agony it lunges at Carlos and he runs away in horror. After several minutes of anxious attempts to determine what the monster is, Carlos suddenly "understands." He says, "something in me arranged the world," and he realizes that the "monster" is only a large branch of a burnt shrub blowing in the wind.

Relieved, he explains to don Juan how such an error is possible in the twilight and wind. Don Juan, rather than being pleased with the explanation, angrily hushes up Castaneda, saying, "What you've done is no triumph. You've wasted a beautiful power, a power that blew life into that dry twig." The Yaqui adds that the real triumph would have been for Carlos to "let go and follow the power until the world had ceased to exist" (Castaneda, 1972: 132).

A similar example occurs in Chapter 15 of the same book when Castaneda, staring at a distant mountain range, suddenly spies a section of the mountains which seems to be pulsating and moving toward him. Castaneda leaps up and discovers that what he had been seeing is "really" a piece of cloth hanging from a cactus in his line of vision. Again, he laughingly explains to don Juan how the twilight had created the optical illusion. Don Juan carefully removes the cloth from the cactus and puts it in his pouch, saying, "... this piece of cloth has power. For a moment you were doing fine with it and there is no way of knowing what may have happened if you had remained seated" (Castaneda, 1972: 224).

In each of these cases don Juan was calling Carlos' attention to a certain aspect of reality and stressing its absolute significance in such a way as to transform it and the rest of reality along with it. What he was doing is not so different from the activity of a good art critic who points out certain aspects of a work of art causing us to redescribe and re-evaluate the whole work.

Just as in the case of Jastrow's duck-rabbit (made famous by Wittgenstein, who used it as a central example in his philosophy,


which can be read either as a duck or as a rabbit, but not as both in the same moment, so the world can be read either as "lines of causes and effects," or as "rings of power," but not as both in the same moment.

Don Juan and Wittgenstein raise the question as to whether it makes sense to talk about one interpretation as absolutely more correct than the other. Only the context determines which is more correct, and don Juan provides a new context. We have a natural inclination to say that surely a minimal amount of empirical research would establish once and for all which system of causality is more true to reality. But, of course, by "empirical research" we mean research which makes all of the assumptions of the ordinary system of causality, hence the conclusions of such research already are contained in the very assumptions we wish to question.

More dramatically, if some of the events that Castaneda reports are accurate, then there can be hardly any question of whether the sorcerer's system of causality "works." (It has always been an embarrassment to us Westerners that voodoo is at least as effective as psychoanalysis.) And in deciding whether Yaqui sorcery works, we do not have to appeal only to the more bizarre episodes, such as those in which Carlos flies, or talks to a coyote, or travels magically from one end of Mexico City to another in seconds, or finds his car transformed by don Genaro; rather, all we have to attend to is don Juan's "impeccability," which trait has been sought after for millenia by would-be saints, philosophers, and therapists.

 

[Joe]

That's why Langan calls the ultimate stuff of the universe "infocognition."

Well, it makes sense. The stuff of the universe is bi-component, like epoxy. Both (consciousness and information) exist on their own, but aren't much use until they come together, and when they do, they become way more than the sum of the parts. Consciousness has all the ideas, information has all materials through which those ideas can be brought forth into manifest reality.

 

[luc]

Indeed. Meaning, significance. Here is something related, especially p. 42 for illustration:

Carlos Castaneda and the Phenomenology of Sorcery
Author(s): Donald D. Palmer
Source:
Humboldt Journal of Social Relations
, Vol. 4, No. 2 (SPRING/SUMMER 1977), pp.
36-45

[...] David Hume's devastating critique of our ordinary conception of causality could well serve don Juan's "argument." Hume had shown that there are no necessary connections between any two things in the universe, rather, the cause/effect relations we claim to perceive in the world are really the result of certain psychological assumptions and animal needs which we humans bring to reality (Hume, 1963: 66-83).

The problem that Hume discovered was supposed to have found its resolution in Kant's synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. Kant agreed that there is no such thing as necessary causal relations between things "out there," and even agreed that causality was imposed upon the world by the human mind, but he claimed that a necessary condition for understanding the world at all was understanding it in terms of causality (Kant, 1961: 574).

He believed that the universality of the human mind was this necessity of understanding the world as a causal sequence. Like Hume and Kant, don Juan teaches that the human consciousness imposes relations upon the world, but unlike Kant, he does not believe that there can be only one system of causality which we bring to the world.

The sorcerer, without denying the effectiveness of our ordinary system of causality, claims to have discovered an even more effective one. This one can best be described in terms of "omens," "power spots," "agreements and disagreements with the world," "rings of power," and "lines of the world." To participate in this new system of causality is to have achieved the "new description" Castaneda talks about. It is to inhabit a "separate reality." Perhaps an oversimplified but helpful illustration would be the following comparative analysis of the "cause" of a man's falling in the street:

This reminds me of Collingwood's discussion of causality.

He agreed with Kant that causality is a concept imposed on the world by the human mind. But Kant thought that causality is a necessary (a priori) feature of the human mind (one of his categories). Even if it's imposed on the world by minds, this means it is universal.

However, Bertrand Russell argued ("On the notion of cause" 1912) that there is no such thing as universal causality in modern physics.

Collingwood therefore argued that Kant simply took the physics of his day and turned its concept of universal causality into an a priori feature of the human mind. To illustrate this, Collingwood told the following story about how the concept of causality logically evolved in the history of ideas since the Greeks:

1. The origin lies in human persuasion. That's how people came up with the idea of causality: Someone convincing (or commanding) someone else to do something. The persuader causes the other person to act in a certain way.
   
   
2. Then another meaning developed which was technical and utilitarian: we ask "what's the cause that this thing doesn't work" so we can fix it. He uses the example of a car that is driving uphill. When there is a malfunction in the engine and the car stops, we say that "the stopping is caused by the engine malfunctioning". But we just say this because then we can fix the engine and solve the problem. But why should this be the cause? We might as well pick any other cause, for instance the slope of the hill and the inertia that causes the car to stop. The picking of the cause is arbitrary, except in a utilitarian sense. Our minds just want to persuade the car to work again, hence our picking of causes!
   
   
3. Out of that, the notion of universal (or physical) causality developed: now causality is entirely decoupled from the human mind, and claimed to be a feature of the purely physical world, where cause and effect rule the day, regardless of minds. Until modern physics, that is, if we follow Russell.

In other words, yes, causality is a feature of the mind, of how we look at the world. But it doesn't have to work the way Kant or many physicists/materialists think it works. It just depends on how we look at the world.

Related to that is Collingwood's idea of "absolute presuppositions": unconscious assumptions on which our entire world view is based but which we take to be simply a feature of reality, when in fact it's just assumptions. These might be useful to generate certain lines of thought and certain inquiries, so they give us access to aspects of reality. But they are not "true"; they are not themselves a feature of reality.

As the article says:

Don Juan and Wittgenstein raise the question as to whether it makes sense to talk about one interpretation as absolutely more correct than the other. Only the context determines which is more correct, and don Juan provides a new context. We have a natural inclination to say that surely a minimal amount of empirical research would establish once and for all which system of causality is more true to reality. But, of course, by "empirical research" we mean research which makes all of the assumptions of the ordinary system of causality, hence the conclusions of such research already are contained in the very assumptions we wish to question.

In other words, if you conduct research that relies on certain "absolute presuppositions", such as, say, divination is nonsense and only materialist causality can be researched, then you won't do any research that includes divination in your concept of causality.

What I take from all this is that whether something like "4D magic stuff" that stretches our notions about causality is possible partly depends on our minds. If Kant was right that causality is something we impose on the world, but wrong to think that we necessarily impose the causality of classical physics, then all bets are off as to what we can "impose" on the world. Again we come back to the concept of consciousness/information, and the interplay between the two, that seems to be at the root of it all. The devil is in the details though

 

[Ðekel]

Well, it makes sense. The stuff of the universe is bi-component, like epoxy. Both (consciousness and information) exist on their own, but aren't much use until they come together, and when they do, they become way more than the sum of the parts. Consciousness has all the ideas, information has all materials through which those ideas can be brought forth into manifest reality.

This also reminds one of the "learn fourth level assembly" that the Cs once mentioned. Also they described how information is sent through 4th into 3rd and that matter reassembles itself to generate the template.

i.e.- Informing matter how to assemble
and if there is no time, this should be a possibility. Fow whomever can perceive this no-time.

But again, I feel the why is more important than the how. What the "polarity" of the intention is.

Repeatedly it has been stated that STO goes with the flow and does things naturally, doesn't abridge free will, etc'.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Hume's account of causation was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of sense perception. Whitehead dealt with this in his very short book "Symbolism." While Whitehead didn't use the phrase "information processing," that's essentially what he described. We don't "just" project/impose causation onto the world based on things we see or a priori categories that are disembodied from the world of experience (that's very left-brain, and Kant was a left-brain virtuoso). We sense what has been called "causation," i.e. the physical information transfers that we take in from the world, experience and transform within our minds, and output in our behavior. And because info-processing is cognition, this is a mental phenomenon, even on the so-called physical level. Going back to the Greeks, per Luc's post, you could even call physical causation "very strong persuasion."

 

[JGeropoulas]

... Maybe that's a question for the Cs sometime, i.e., how do they understand the idea of no beginning and no end.

And while I'm on it, another question for them is: they talk of us having future selves. Are these future selves doing stuff somewhere? If so, what? I know, I know, "3D thinking".

Related is my question to the C's: What are you doing when not channeling information to Laura?