words words and some more words

friendly reminder that your perception of reality isn't actually a live stream. remember, there is a certain amount of neurological latency involved in processing external stimuli (on the order of 25+ ms), not to mention the actual amount of time it took for the stimuli to travel to you from its point of origin. anything underneath that lower threshold of perception seems instantaneous to us, but there are for further subdivisions of time that period could be sliced into, down all the way to planck time as the individual quanta for time. everything you perceive, everything you feel, is the result of a complicated biological equation that takes time to process, given that it is confined to 3-dimensional slices of the reality stream. i would posit that this means that our current level or state of consciousness is not very far past 3 dimensions as it is very much rooted in the sequential ordering of events of a system separated by some arbitrary buffer, which would be time in the case of the "reality" that our brain builds and feeds to our consciousness. and yes that does indicate that I believe that consciousness exists as a property or aspect of reality separately from, but parallel to material reality. not only that, but I would go so far as to say that consciousness exists in all things to varying degrees of complexity, though there is no reason in my opinion to constrain consciousness to a biological host. now, as to the actual quantifiable and tangible nature of consciousness, the difficulty in it is you can only really observe the side effects of it. there isn't really an empirical way to measure it given our current perspective and level of technological advancement and understanding of the universe. this is a pretty good time to bring up the old concept that hippies like me tend to love: at a far enough distance, advanced technology and magick become indistinguishable. or, more to the point, magick is just unexplained science of you have the opinion that science is the absolute arbiter of the perception of and interaction with reality. i personally believe that while science is great, it's only one aspect of a complex, multifaceted concept, and there are many other routes and explanations that can be ascertained and utilized with regards to any given experience. science is just one method of describing and interpreting the systems and actions of reality as we observe it. granted, as defined, it strives to be the most objective and intellectually grounded of them, along with other cognitive domains such as logic, mathematics, etc. those cognitive domains represent a layer of perception over reality created by humans as a way to transmit conceptual information about patterns in the informational matrix of said reality in a unified and ideally universal way, at least with regards to the max depths of the universe that we have branched out to. the problem with these objective and rigorous things is that they are very steeped in the need for confirmation and consensus, and by nature they are designed to keep you within them as a system rather than to open up to the possibility of integrating external concepts or procedures into the process. they strive to be axiomatic and to represent the fundamental nature of reality, and they often do very good at this, but it is important to remember that they are only meta-expressions of reality. they are only temporary symbolic schemes and encodings of perception created by a specific group of conscious entities that chooses to accept the validity and rigor of them. that doesn't make them arguably "perfect" or in absolute synchrony with the nature of existence as a whole by default. they are fully constrained by the limits of our perception and the limitations of our empirical senses, since they by nature are empirical things. "empirical" observations tend to be correlated with the absolute raw and true experience of "reality", but it should be noted that because they are subject to so many limitations due to the formation and efficiency of the sensory organs used to formulate them, that they do not actually give you the raw experience of the "reality" stream, and that's not even counting all the layers of subtraction and filtering that your brain automatically does on reality without your conscious intent. i certainly believe that if we could begin to rigorously quantify and qualify consciousness, we would be able to develop the ability to control 100% of our synaptic pathways and influence even subconscious behaviors. and some might say that consciousness really only appears to be just an emergent creation of material reality, and as such is only a manifestation thereof, and while I would agree that our current empirical understanding of the universe would point to that conclusion, it just doesn't answer some very specific questions I have. the most relevant and perhaps pertinent one is, after all the neurological processing of external stimuli is done.... what happens to it? does the brain just do those calculations and essentially discard them? granted it isn't actually discarding them, it's more akin to running a function without capturing or actually using the input. it's just a raw deterministic system. why would the perception of individual experiences of reality and cognition arise from a purely mechanistic and deterministic system? why would there ever be any sensation of "I", of the self as a discrete entity inside the universe capable of cognition and intent? you can say that the nature of consciousness is illusory and such all you want and that it's just a side effect of a material system, and I respect your right to do such and believe that, but that doesn't answer WHY–despite the fact that it appears to be an illusion, an emergent property created from the synthesis of our biological systems, based on our fundamental understanding of reality– there is such a manifestation of experience. everything might empirically point to one perception or explanation, but you have to always remember that empirical reasoning and experience of reality is not absolute. it is constrained by the operation of the systems that work to create the sensation of it. and those systems are well known to take several shortcuts and discard several layers of information in their operation. and yes you can suggest that we develop technology and practices for reasoning about reality objectively and measuring the raw nature of it, but as I implied earlier, those things are still constrained by the limitations of our empirical faculties and fundamental understanding of the universe. one should remember that in science, the goal isn't so much to prove an actual positive point (that's what you call confirmation bias and cherry picking, aways actively seeking to confirm your given hypothesis), but rather to falsify claims that are not in line with the fundamental objective nature of reality. it's not so much about adding new external concepts into your internal cognitive framework as it is discarding concepts that currently exist in it that don't have any sense of rigor or connection, logically or rationally or whatever other expression of cognitive invocation and conscious experience you might want to invoke. everything that you know is, by nature, experiential and consensus-based. it is all formed based on your past and current experiences, and every one of those was and are fundamentally a synthesis of your own internal representation of the reality stream and the actual context of the reality stream as it is given to you (aka external stimuli, and more specifically, other conscious entities.) there is no reason to believe that anything you ever experience is actually representative of the absolute nature of the universe, and that extends to even your rational and cognitive abilities. instead, those are all essentially just software relative to the hardware that you run on. oh and to continue the analogy since some people might think that consciousness should be the software, in the complete analogy, thought and mental experience, or the actual process of perceiving reality is the software, your biological body and the systems that it is comprised of are the hardware, and consciousness would represent that actual entity operating said hardware and software and influencing the pathways that that deterministic system will take by manipulating internal variables and methods in the state of the software to affect changes in the state of the hardware. assuming this interpretation to be accurate and appropriate (which of course there's no proof for and you should take that with a grain of salt and skepticism naturally. it's good to question things that don't have empirical proof, it shows your mind is working properly) that would logically lead to the idea that you should be able to modulate the mannerisms and methods by which you interact with those two deterministic systems as an external entity that can directly influence variables and aspects of them. and this would certainly appear to be the case if you accept the validity of purported "higher states of consciousness", which in my interpretation would merely just be discovering different ways of exerting your intent and control as that conscious entity operating the software and hardware. it just happens that the experience of it is one of additive experience and of iterative development, but that also is a side effect of viewing it as "higher". it's not really a vertical process, you're not manifesting MORE consciousness. instead you are exerting more conscious control over your experience of reality, and influencing processes that normally you would have just let remain as automatic because that is the current apparent design of the system. it's sorta like the difference between operating a graphical interface on a computer, and operating a command line interface. they both are different and distinct methods of operating the software and influencing the state of the hardware within a well defined and deterministic system such as a computer, but they both expose different aspects and procedures within the actual process of interaction. they are just different ways of constraining the experience of influencing an external system. and in this analogy, consciousness is, again, not the interface through which you use the system, but the actual entity that is using the interfaces available to interact with the system. but again it should be stated that there is no absolute proof for what I'm saying, and that this is really all just conjecture and perhaps what you might call philosophizing on my part. of course, if you're following along, by now you'll understand that I don't think proof I'd actually necessary for belief or to maintain a specific mental state. as i am so frequent to say, all truths are but half truths. a great principle to take away from hermeticism really. but I don't think it goes far enough. i believe it's more like the perception of veracity, of a dichotomy between true and false, exists, but that in actual raw reality, there really isn't such a thing as the truth. it's just a system of information. it doesn't purport to be anything objectively. it just is. any experience of something being the absolute nature of reality and as axiomatic should, again, be taken with a grain of salt because, as it directly says  &5 is only an EXPERIENCE of the thing, and not the actual thing itself. yes, you can logically derive the attributes of a system by reasoning about it, and for most purposes the experience of a system is really no different than just the raw nature of the system itself, but it's important to remember that experience, by nature, is non-deterministic in this mental framework, because it isn't actually an aspect of the material and empirical reality, but rather an expression of consciousness interacting with the reality stream. an experience of a thing is absolutely distinct and separate from the actual intrinsic nature of that thing. that's like how there is an obvious difference between recalling a memory and experiencing the current moment, despite that the fact that at their core they are nothing more than a series of synaptic patterns firing in your biological hardware. everything you know and believe is an extension of what you have experienced and retained within your internal mental system. while i do believe that free will exists and that you can exert intent over your internal (and sometimes external) systems to modulate the actual expression and experience of the reality stream, it certainly doesn't exist in a materialistic or biological sense. a material system is by nature mechanical and deterministic. it reacts to causes with correlated effects based on the laws and constraints of the system as a whole. that's the whole point of empiricism, to provide, as best as possible, a deterministic and rigorous definition and/or representation of the reality stream, as defined through the experience of sensory input. and that is why consciousness currently is outside of the realm of empiricism; we have not yet qualified the biological method through which consciousness is able to exert control (though I certainly believe that there is some specific section of the brain that consciousness is able to channel itself through and gain influence thereof. in the computer analogy, this would be akin to an input device such as a keyboard or a mouse.) but just because we haven't yet objectively and empirically defined it in a rigorous and consistent way that can be experimentally replicated doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. all that it means is that given our current perspective, we cannot provide a proof for its existence. but before humanity came along, there wasn't a way to provide proof that the Earth is round, or that the sun is at the center of the solar system, or that there is a whole universe out there of possibilities, but that doesn't mean that any of those things are inherently false, because our current experience certainly seems to indicate that those happen to be the truth. and if you believe Earth is flat, more power to you. like i said before, truth doesn't exist. only the perception and experience of it. so it doesn't really matter if the Earth is flat or not. however, it isn't. we have empirical proof. if you don't accept that, and your standards are more strict than that, that's fine, but you should know that science and reason as a method of consensus have established them to be the accurate representation of reality as we currently are able to perceive. again, that doesn't mean that in the context of the universe as a system of information as a whole, that truth actually exists as an aspect of it. again, it's just a layer of artifice and perception we put on top of our experience of the reality stream.

anyway ive gone on for long enough. ill probably write more later, but I really just needed to get all that expressed.