This fascinates me. Can you tell me what the perception of time is like for this experience? Obviously it must be extended as compared with waking reality, but how long did it feel like? Was it like a lucid engrossing dream that has a plot that literally feels like many days length, or did you perceive the outside reality moving in more slow motion?
I went onto study physics, I used to think about it every now and then. It’s not easy to characterise / quantify an answer but there was no experience of time, I was not aware enough of externalities to know what slow motion would be as that implies a connection to outer time. I don’t remember a cradle to present run through of memories but I certainly saw / experienced a slideshow and then ‘real time’ moments of positive interactions with people, which then moved on. Was that seconds or moments or just memory clusters firing I don’t know. Enough to re live the experience with a different perspective. of course early memories are not (for me)as complex or emotionally involving or nuanced with language so the bulk of memories were from later life. I have no recollection of the composition of ‘the slideshow’ but do remember for eg love for my mother in certain ‘scene(s)’ and that was more of a ‘real-time’ segment. A precession of memories certainly indicates time flow. I was dimly aware of the ground at the last moment as it came towards me and thinking back on it the scenes faded and real time came back along with my sense of the outside world aka the ground.
I wonder if there's a connection here to "dream time", how you can have a dream experience that connects to something waking you up in the real world (a noise, or sensation like cold or wet). But the dream experience of whatever it was feels like it must have taken way longer than the amount of time it actually took you to react to the real world thing.
That's a smart theory. I have another theory: life-review is the simulation diverting additional compute resources to your local "process" to quickly judge whether or not your annihilation would be optimal for the reality/simulation/timeline. This requires intense extra compute in real-time to assess each moment of your life, and the reason you experience it is because there's no priority in that moment to maintain the normal veil between "in-time" (real time subjective to observer) and "out-of-time" (ie as in simulation time) experience. So the rapid processing starves the normal "subjective you" process, and your consciousness gets to "peek through" at the workings of the simulation as it judges whether you dying would be catastrophic. If you "pass", then the simulation ensures your exist for at least a while longer, otherwise, it lets the event take its course.
The subconscious knowledge of this is why we've internalized and re-expressed the "judgement upon death" notion across many religions.
I appreciate the notice. It's important to point out that the user appears to be suffering from schizophrenia, which is not really an attack. But I can understand how it can be misconstrued or hurtful.
Internet psychiatric diagnosis is also misconstruable at best, and at worst ranges amounts to more personal attack and trolling, so please don't do that either.
You're right. I mean, my intent wasn't to attack -- which is recognizable by the fact that I started with a big compliment and I called them a creative genius (which I still think is true). But I have to admit that what I said still teeters into promoting a toxic environment, not to mention isn't backed up by evidence and could have been very hurtful.
This is the most valuable place on the internet for insightful, meaningful discussion, and it seems as if you (among others?) are responsible for that. So I want to say your work is deeply appreciated, and I'm so sorry for adding to the load :)
1. I do apologize specifically to you for jumping to the conclusion of schizophrenia when I don't have sufficient evidence nor qualification to say so. Sorry.
2. To be clear, I created this account because your idea inspired me, rather than the suggestion I created it for anonymity. I hadn't posted on Hacker News in years.
3. The reason I jumped to that particular conclusion about you is simply as such: (a) your conception of reality differs from current scientific understanding, (b) you have not conducted any proper scientific experiments on the matter, and (c) you are unshakably convinced in spite of insufficient scientific experimentation. Unfortunately, I jumped to a conclusion without sufficient evidence, but it was merely me making a guess based on the data I had. It wasn't about ego or devaluation. If I am wrong, then I am simply wrong -- being wrong doesn't always come from a place of ego or attack, but simply mistaken understanding.
4. For context, my partner has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I do not use that term to insult people. To me, it's a neutral description of something that causes people to suffer (in the case of my partner, often horrible, horrible pain -- she constantly has experiences of being raped, electrocuted, and suffocated). Once again, I do not use that term to insult people. Unfortunately, I stepped too far by assuming someone else has it.
5. If you are correct, and wish for others to see that, then it must be demonstrated by a properly conducted scientific experiment. If you do not do that, then you cannot expect people to discard their current conception of reality. Any form of argumentation or scattered observation is insufficient to discard current scientific consensus -- only experiment can do that.
Lastly... I know you expressed resistance to this form of apology, but... I really didn't mean to hurt you. It hurts me to know that I caused you pain. I'm sorry. And yes, we disagree on the topic, but ideally we can disagree without making the other feel bad about it (an ideal which I unfortunately failed to live up to).
3. Not unshakably convinced. I'm dispassionate. If I saw data in my inability to do this, I'd change my model. I didn't start out thinking I could do this I just started out noticing these things and then I started to try to formalize it more, and eventually I arrived at this model. Where it's simply easier to believe, yeah I can do it, than to keep entertaining doubts because of some consensus outside of what I've experienced, when I've already processed those doubts in relation to what I've experienced. I agree it's not the best absolute scientific method but the best I can do so far (a step up from telling my friends, then emailing myself) to optimize: posting data on future events to Twitter it's sort of my best effort to do that so I'm sort of stepping towards being more scientific, organized and methodical about this.
But there are lots of other remote viewing or precognitive studies out there that are scientific but people find some reason to dismiss them anyway. And there's actually an industry that uses associated remote viewing for stock market predictions, and also for corporate intelligence.
I agree that you can be simply wrong but the topic of what you're wrong about, and how you express that, you know that requires some empathy and consideration. Otherwise it functions effectively as an attack. Also, I kind of get the feeling that maybe you just dismissed all this stuff without actually looking at my Twitter and letting that data make an impression on you because your priors are it's just too preposterous.
4. That's terrible I feel sorry for you that that happened. It must be very hard for you to deal with I'm sure. And maybe some element of what you said was projection and taking out all that anger and despair you must feel. I can understand how in that experience you would be predisposed to say that to someone because in your intimate experience it's sort of part of the daily discourse. But I can also think that given your experience you would feel more responsibility or pause towards using that label for someone you don't know. Anyway I feel sorry for you that you have that experience and all is forgiven.
I'm not saying the following relates to your experience and I don't have personal experience of severe mental illness but I have this view, that in some cases people who are diagnosed as mentally ill are in fact people who are just somehow connected to the signal of the informational field (this kind of psychic data) but they don't know, they don't have a context for, and they have not yet learned, how to process it. And they don't know how to shut it off.
I think there are many people who initially have some sort of abilities like this as a child but then they learn to shut it off because it gets in the way of air quotes regular life. And I think some people are just connected to the informational field so strongly that they have all of this bandwidth coming in.
At the same time I don't think psychic abilities account for all mental illness at all, I think there's definitely cases which are mental illness pathologies and are not related to any sort of informational field ability.
I don't wish to impose, nor step on your territory, and I'm not pretending to speak to the specific experience of your partner, so I'm sorry that this will probably seem like that, but I'm just saying, with relation to this model, I think it's plausible that there are people who could have these abilities and also have, a high kind of empathy and, for whatever personal reasons, place a high significance on these types of rape or torture events and it makes sense that they would pick up that data about it happening, or having happened, or going to happen. In my experience of data on future mass casualty events the suffering and pain of people is a main component of the signal and sometimes I will get data about people individuals being murdered and I will feel experience, and it can be a very, very traumatic data. I'm not saying this relates to your partner but I'm just saying it's conceivable that someone with that type of presentation of experiences could actually be tapping into these things, as they did, as they are, as they will occur. But it's also conceivable that someone such as your partner experiencing this and then becoming aware that these things were actually real events happening to others would be just adding more burdens to the trauma they're experiencing. And if that model were accurate it may be better to simply find ways to downregulate the signal incoming.
I'm not saying this with some grandiose idea that I think I can help you in your situation I'm just sharing a model that I have. It's a sort of a hopeful model that I have that there are some people out there who are said to be mentally ill but instead it's just people who have not yet learned how to handle signal of the informational field that they're getting. I guess I hope that in future with more public science investigation unless stigma around psychic abilities then maybe these types of people could get the training treatment and help that they need.
To share some personal experience (maybe it helps you understand more):
I guess I've always been able to sort of dial in how connected I am to the data by using my focus. If I try to ignore it completely I'm still aware that it's there. I experience like an energetic pressure, like a physical sensation. Which I learned is informational field signal coming in. That's my current model. And if I look into that sensation I can resolve details (sense impressions, events) and record the data. That's the "receptive" side of my process. The other "active" side is I can go to a deep focus state and go and look for things that are going to happen.
I find that if I don't process that signal that comes in (by resolving the details and recording it somehow by writing it down or voice memo) then that uncomfortable sensation will often remain with me.
Some things that I find that assist me in handling these things are: avoiding caffeine nicotine alcohol and processed foods, and trying to eat healthy with a lot of vegetables. Also, Meditation and body relaxation and yoga. And also acting and assertive and confident, and expressing myself, and not acting anxious and avoidant, and not saying what I want to say. But it has been a lot of learning and a lot of difficulty.
5. Fair enough. I'm doing my best right now. I don't expect them to discard it I just expect I think a little bit of fair consideration you know to allow the data to make an impression on them to allow themselves to wonder a little bit. I don't want to get the wall of conservative dismissal based on prejudice, rather than just looking at what I already posted.
I agree the scientific method is a great thing (I have a degree in a hard science after all) I just don't think that science as a community, as a way of thinking about the world, in the way that it's practiced, I don't think that science is capable of thinking all the thoughts that need to be thought about the world, in order to properly and accurately comprehend the world in front of us.
So our scientific method is a great idea, but the practice of our science is flawed. By many human cognitive biases and other flaws.
Overall
Thank you for saying that I appreciate your response it helps me feel a lot better now. These kind of things are painful and thanks for your apology. I feel sorry for you that you feel pain about this hopefully you learn from this experience and avoid this kind of thing in future. It was a good apology. I hope you and your loved ones get what you need. Thanks :)
Anyway, I guess you'll dispute my vision and subsequent analysis of your psychological state, because admitting it would give a little bit of support to my psychic ability, as well as exposing a weakness of yours. But refuting it, that boosts your priors that psychic abilities are fake, or at least that mine are. You may reform, but you may just stick with a different version of your current attitude. That's not that important because it's not the main thing here, but it is important for me to say I anticipate it, and also that I offer this vision of you aware of the risk to me of doing that--the risk that you may, say, "Hah, that proves that you're not psychic because that's not how I feel at all!" Normally, I wouldn't expose myself like this for so little reward, but like I said, I believe there's a chance of a good reward here, realized by your reform, which I am now acting to assist.
So, what's the second possible reality? In that reality, psychic abilities are real, I'm not deluded, I really am psychic, and you are wrong.
When I say two possible realities, I'm not saying they have equal probability...The second is almost entirely certain, the first is basically zero probability. In other words, there's only a tiny possibility that I'm deluded about this, and there's 0 probability that I'm schizophrenic.
Through my development, I considered these question many times: maybe I am simply deluded? Could I be psychotic? Or might I be schizophrenic? But I realized those things are not likely, and for the schizophrenic question, impossible. I considered this a lot, and I came to see that through the data, what I was able to see, before it happened...that I was not deluded. I wasn't always correct, but I was correct enough, and in stunning enough ways that it's impossible essentially to be done by chance.
Aside from those negatives, there's certainly a strong psychological compulsion to believe I'm psychic, because that: makes me special, makes me important, makes me right, makes me significant. So it is conceivable I'm just deluding myself in the same way you were distorting your reality, to make up for, to overcompensate for, a less than satisfying reality. I thought about that many times. But I still kept using my power. I made records, and I saw things happen, again and again.
At this point, I consider the data speaks for itself, and the possibility that I arrived at all those data simply by chance is essentially nil. Believing it's coincidence, is the crazy, insane point of view. But if your priors really are so invested in psychic ability being false, I encourage you to go over my Twitter. Very likely that will not convince you, because very often people will not see what they don't want to see, even when it is shown to them. That's fine. But I encourage you to try again, not only with my Twitter, by go to reddit/r/remoteviewing and try it yourself. See what you can do. If you're able to discover your ability to data from the signal...then you will likely convince yourself that there has to be something to it.
So in this reality...where psychic abilities are real, why is your comment bad? Because for someone like me, with these skills, it's a constant battle, against people like you who want to say stuff like this. Of course I have doubts, and your arrogant hurtful insults, only give me pause and interfere with my ability, and my free exercise of that. That's harmful to my development. It's also just harmful to me emotionally. And, it's not just about me...these kinds of abusive behaviors are harmful to the development of these abilities on Earth. If you consider that these skills would be good for people to have (they are adaptive), then your arrogant dismissal to save your own ego, ends up cascading out into the world into a tsunami of harm. You saying that, hurt me, and will hurt other people who pass by this place and see your words, because it will contribute to the voices discouraging them from developing this.
And with a skill like this it's especially important. It's an "internal" "subjective" "consciousness" skill, and so your beliefs play a large part in our faithfully you can do it. If you keep believing, "this is bullshit,", "I am crazy", "this is impossible", those ideas will get in the way of you doing what you need to do to develop and use this. It's an extremely subtle skill, you're dealing with subtle perception, and pulling data and interpretations out of raw informational impressions. That's not a perfect description, but it gets close enough, and is adequate for here.
It's like any other skill. It's particularly like a sporting skill, like basketball. Are you going to shoot the 3 from the line every time? No. But people can get better at it. Does the mind game matter? Absolutely. If your head is not in the game, if you don't have confidence, if you are overcome by doubts or criticism, that can get to you. So just like pro athletes, but even more so as the skills is so intimate with subjective consciousness processes, you have to protect your mind game.
The unfortunate thing about that is you have to get good at dealing with abuse or abusive people. I'd much rather not have any interactions with such, but, the hurtful comments are too painful and too damaging to my development to leave unaddressed. If I don't say something (which I've tried), I find myself still thinking about it years later. So to protect myself, I need to respond.
Given that's the case, why expose myself at all? Well...I did this in private for a couple of years, making records in my email, and to my friends, until I felt confident enough that what I was doing was real, before starting to make it non-repudiable (I think I'm looking for a more accurate word here) by posting it on Twitter. I never delete psychic data record tweets. But I tweet about some other topics (popular daily topics) and delete those to keep my twitter feed pure with the data in the long term. I don't get everything, and I am constantly learning how to interpret the signal and record the data better, but I have some amazing hits. Impossible to achieve by chance. We're not picking bits, we're picking whole descriptions, events. The reason I focus on the future is, to my perspective, this is the most challenging. The past and the present are easy (well easier), you're just reading the matrix for the data that already exists. The future is more challenging, but more valuable, because you can verify big events in the news, and you have to pull data out of the sea of possibilities. It sounds amazing, and it is. But anyone can try to do it. But just like any other skills, there's a spectrum of abilities, and talent and practice affect. So why post publicly at all? I want the public record. I think that's an important thing, to make it non-deniable. And it is amazing, so I want to share it around.
So whether you think psychics are crazy, and you know everything, or you think psychics are real, I hope you'll be kinder in future, because that's better for everybody, including you.
Please know I don't intend to invest more time even if you reply in good faith. If you have disbelief, the onus is on you to educate yourself by trying to do it.
The premise that we can have a community focused on above-average-quality conversation on the internet? Yeah, people question that daily. Thankfully, dang is here to keep us in line.
When it comes to feeling "slow motion" on psychedelics, it feels like you're just taking in and focusing on too many details so your memory of the experience feels a lot longer than it actually was.
Under normal circumstances when looking at a random car, you most likely just see a car. You've probably seen a car before so it's not something you need to pay attention to.
But under the influence of psychedelics you pay attention to all the details of the car. Like how it's somehow symmetrical in shape, the reflection of the car from the sun, transparent windows that somehow reflects the environment a little bit but is still somehow lets you see the inside of the car, the front part of the car looks like a face, the car is larger than you, etc, etc.
The experience under the influence might feel like it took 2 minutes, but in reality it probably took 10 seconds. It can feel even longer when recalling the memory.
(you might also see things that aren't part of the car but I'm leaving that out here to talk about how long an experience feels like)
I have a pet theory that this is why time seems to move faster as you age. Novelty runs out.
As a child, nearly every day is packed with novel stimuli. The number of distinct “imprints” on your memory during this time is extremely high. In other words, you have a higher “memory density” during this period compared to when you’re older and the mind uses these reference points as a proxy for the passage of time.
It follows that you can lead a “longer” life by prioritizing novel experiences over routines.
Since you've thought about it, my impression was more that we're forced to distribute consciousness. Consciousness as in mindfulness. What we aren't conscious in doing becomes reflexive, we put our bodies in autopilot. I think novelty is one way that yes, because it calls forward consciousness, we can expand our mental time frame, sort of like pressing record. I think a good aside here is the concept of the beginner's mind.
In terms of untrained optimization, though, autopilot is prioritized. I think this is pretty well corroborated by Kahneman's chimera in Thinking, Fast and Slow but I think it's less of a metabolic thing than it is an interruption in train of thought.
Perhaps this is derived by the fact the mind can create its own feedback loops, and in the circumstances where you've mastered to the point of intuition and reflexivity some practice, those feedback loops are given precedence because they're more rewarding, and being called to the real world becomes frustrating. At least that's how I'd assemble my own experience in narrative.
It almost seems like time can only be measured when recalling past conscious events.
If you've ever been anesthetized for a medical operation, it really feels like the moment you lose awareness to the moment you wake up again is the same event, except that 15 hours has passed in between.
I've heard people who fall unconscious from head trauma say the same thing. Suddenly they wake up in hospital not knowing what has happened.
That's my conclusion, too. Our sense of time is defined not in seconds but in terms of events, and our perception of the passage of time is defined in proportion to the total number of events we've experienced.
It reminds me of that statement in Starship Troopers (the book): "The death rate's the same for us as for anyone. One person, one death, sooner or later."
