The threads of reality

Transcribed from a conversation between Angelo Dilullo and Josh Putnam (favorite parts bolded):

Josh: This was something entirely different. It was almost like a spontaneous destruction and creation of all possibilities that, I guess, could be time. So, it definitely spills over into, just, all forms of reality, too, I suppose. Yeah, like, it kind of felt like a—I'll just describe it—this is always going to be conceptualized, of course, and it even came with some imagery in memory, but it was almost like these trillions of teal strings, like threads, kind of swirling in something like a sphere and pouring into an infinitely tiny singularity and vanishing. And also simultaneously, it's spewing something out, and it was just like a repeating cycle. And yeah, out here, in this distance, it was twisting and doing all sorts of chopping. It's really difficult to put into words, but it gave a very distinct sense that anything that could be, has already happened, almost—but not even like in a sense of a past.

Angelo: [...] There's something about it, like you said—it collapses into a singularity and then becomes infinite again, and again, and again. It has this essence of infinite penetration into itself. And also, it's fractal-like. It's as if no matter how far you zoom in, it just becomes more of itself, with more possibilities and iterations. And, at the very same time, nothing is moving at all. It's so paradoxical.

Josh: It's like the essence of paradox—that's what it felt like. There was this sense of being at the singularity, almost like the eye of a hurricane, and it was that nothingness. And you can't even describe it; even the idea of "nothing" is something. It was just... yeah, nothing—not even like it was a black space. There was nothingness; it was just frozen nothing. And then there was this turbulent outer, almost disk, and that just seemed like potentiality. It almost seemed like the stuff that dreams are made of, or the stuff that imagination is made of.

Angelo: It's very fundamental to the most fundamental way of experiencing anything at all. It just feels like this giddiness, like being able to experience anything at all is just a miracle, miraculous sort of ...

Josh: It felt as if there might have been a substance that was being simultaneously pulled apart—that was the substance, and I was the substance—and then put back and jammed so tightly into a tight singularity that there was nothing there. So, it wasn't like watching, or even necessarily feeling, but it felt so fundamental, like the threads of reality.

Angelo: I actually sort of avoid talking about it in videos and like, publicly, because it sounds so enticing, and there's nothing your mind can do with this. Like, you can seek it, but that's not it. But it's quite real, and I've called it "the fabric of reality"—that's the best terminology I've come up with for it. It's like a fabric of reality, sort of. Yeah, but it's even before overt reality. It's fundamental even to reality coming into being. It's neither something nor nothing; it's neither real nor unreal. It has way too much— I can say potentiality, or flexibility, or unhindered essence—to be encompassed by any of those terminologies, mind frames, or even physical confirmations, you know.

Anticipated regret

I was reflecting on my propensity for indecision which, despite all my spiritual practice, is a trap I seem to fall into way more than anyone else. And the notion of anticipated regret came to mind (which I'm sure I must have read about somewhere, despite it feeling like a fresh idea of mine).

Anticipated regret is the experience right now of the regret that we think we may feel in the future, typically about decisions we are currently considering making. This unpleasant feeling may well affect our decisions, sometimes wisely and sometimes less so.

The mind sure is twisty! We're imagining now that in the future we'll feel bad about the past, which ruins the present. This reminds me of some ideas from Bernardo Kastrup's More Than Allegory:

The sophistication and skill with which we trick ourselves in these circular cognitive games is dazzling. We imagine a future wherein we remember a past wherein we predicted a future that matches the future we are now imagining. From this tortuous intertwining of imaginings we conclude that the future and the past must exist, well, objectively, even though all the while we’ve never left the present. Wow! Do you see how we create past and future out of thin air? Past and future are myths: stories in the mind. If you truly grok this, you will be dumbfounded.

The usual process for me is trying to curtail the anticipated regret by collecting more data, or trying to think more clearly, so that the right answer becomes clear. (Spoiler alert: it never does.) But the longer that process lasts, the more I'm reinforcing the propensity for regret in the mind -- which means that I'm more likely to regret the decision no matter what it is. That's obviously bad. Worse, because the building feeling of anticipated regret is interpreted as regret that will be felt later (if I make the wrong decision), it becomes all the more important that I get the answer right. You see where this goes.

Any sane person would just put his foot down, make a decision, and live with it. But alas, I'm me, so I'm going to sit here and philosophize.

Next up is this quote from one Vinay Gupta:

Lowering the mental background noise means going through all the emotional layers and all of the attachments that generate thought. A single emotion that you don’t really deal with properly can generate 5 years of internal chatter. Should I? Shouldn’t I? Should I? Shouldn’t I? You finally come back and it’s this deep feeling of uncertainty about your place in the world. You feel it – it goes away. You’ve been liberated of an emotion, that stream of thought stops. And as a result your mind gradually empties and empties and empties and empties. 

(emphasis mine) 

That sounds closer to the root of the problem. Anticipated regret isn't really about what's going to happen -- though the mind is entirely convincing in its assertion that yes, that is what it's about, because yadda yadda. It's about an unresolved emotion now. It feels inconceivable that a "real problem" that has its roots in the past and tentacles in the future could be resolved now, but that's part of the central illusion. Bernardo again:

Existence only appears substantial because of our intellectual inferences, assumptions, confabulations and expectations. What is actually in front of our eyes now is incredibly elusive. The volume of our experiences—the bulk of life itself—is generated by our own internal myth-making. We conjure up substance and continuity out of sheer intangibility. We transmute quasi-emptiness into the solidity of existence through a trick of cognitive deception where we play both magician and audience. In reality, nothing ever really happens, for the scope of the present isn’t broad enough for any event to unfold objectively. That we think of life as a series of substantial happenings hanging from a historical timeline is a fantastic cognitive hallucination.

It would be nice to have a deep insight into the emptiness of time all the, uh, time, but if one has had even a glimpse of this truth, it ought to lend credence to the idea that resolving the unease now is key.

Or, as the sane person would put it: just make a decision and have faith that it will work out. 

A closer look

Close your eyes and listen carefully to a sound. Normally we think of "consciousness" as a property that you have that lets you experience the world. Instead, I now want you to conceive of consciousness as more like a substance that is currently taking the form of whatever sound you are intently listening to. Can you get the sense that "sound is made of consciousness?"

Some find this immediately intuitive. Others find it a little harder. Surely sound is made of something like air waves? If this is where you find yourself, just reflect on the fact that all experience happens in your mind. Sound, as one such experience, can therefore only be made of mind-stuff. Here we're just giving that stuff the name "consciousness." Don't let this remain just an idea: close your eyes and see that this is what noises actually are.

You can do this with other sensory objects, too. More subtly, do it with emotions and feelings. Finally, notice that your thoughts are also made of this "stuff."

Become really interested in what this "stuff" is. Be like a scientist in the field, examining it from every angle, in every guise. What, exactly, is it?

Now comes the really interesting question: who wants to know? "Well, I want to know, of course!" But that thought -- like all thoughts -- is just consciousness itself, in one of its infinite costumes. Try to find this "I" that wants to know. Maybe you feel a sensation behind your eyes, where it feels like the "I" must be. But this sensation is just consciousness shining, as well; no more special here than in any of its other myriad incarnations.

What if there is no "privileged position" where this one-who-is-conscious sits? What if the very idea of such a one is a myth; a story that's been told for so long that it seems too obvious to doubt?

But discovering the illusoriness of the supposed "I" is only half the fun. Because even if there's nobody there to be curious about what, exactly, this consciousness stuff is, it has become pretty damn interested in itself.

It's ineffable and ungraspable, yet "your" whole world is made of it. Look around. Pretty awesome, huh? And if you've ever had a moment where you're in awe of life's majesty and wonder, it's this magnificent substance you've been bowing before.

Whatever it is, it really deserves a closer look, doesn't it?

A poem by Nyendrak Lungrig Nyima

Although subject and object are not two,
They appear to us as fundamentally distinct entities.

And through attachment to them, we further strengthen this tendency.
Samsara is nothing else but that.

While good and bad actions are devoid of true reality,
By the power of our intention they produce joys and sorrows,
Just as seeds of sweet or bitter plants
Give fruits of corresponding taste.

Thus, the world appears similarly
To those with common karma,
And differently to those whose karma is different.

In fact, even if one “goes” to hell or elsewhere,
It is only a change in one’s perception of the world.
As in dreams, where the things that appear do not exist,
The root of all our illusory perceptions is the mind.

The nature of mind transcends the notions of existence
And nonexistence, eternity and nothingness:
To this nature is given the simple name “absolute space.”

That space, in itself perfectly pure,
That immaculate sky, empty and luminous, with no center or periphery,

Has always been in the heart of every being,
Its face obscured by the temporary veil of mental constructs.

It is hard to put an end by force
To the continuous chain of thoughts,
But if, when they occur, their nature is recognized,
Thoughts have no choice
But to be liberated in their own sphere.

Without pursuing past thoughts
Or inviting future thoughts,
Remain in the present moment, and simply recognize
The nature of whatever arises in your mind.
Relax in simplicity, free of intentions and attachments.

Although there is nothing to meditate on
Remain fully present without getting distracted.
By getting used to the way things occur of themselves, without altering anything,
Primordial wisdom, self-luminous, will arise from within.

“How is this so?” you might ask.
If you leave cloudy water undisturbed,
It will naturally become clear.
Most other meditations
Are only temporary ways to calm the mind.

The space of great unchanging emptiness
And the simple luminosity of uninterrupted wakeful presence
Have always been inseparable.
You must yourself experience that essential thing
Which is within you: no one can do it for you.

Ricard, Matthieu. On the Path to Enlightenment: Heart Advice from the Great Tibetan Masters (pp. 166-167). Shambhala. Kindle Edition. 

Forget about your brain

Everything you think of as "reality" is a construction or projection of your own mind. If you see this clearly, you will awaken.

Instead, most people think "well sure, everything I think of as reality maybe, but obviously there's also a real reality that's not a construction of my mind." Whether or not that's true, your rabid clinging to this belief will forestall realization.

Or maybe you think "obviously this is all a construction of my brain." But this is a grave mistake as well. You are convinced that if you could ever step outside your reality, all you would find is more of your reality -- in particular, a brain. Even the subtlest expectation of this kind thwarts what needs to be seen.

It is like trying to bungee jump, but every time you step off the platform, you carefully and transparently lay down more platform in front of you to catch you. You may think you've jumped, but you haven't.

The Marvelous Primordial State

From a root Dzogchen text (the Mejung Tantra):

The definitive secret instruction is the meaning of the marvelous [state]. The marvelous secret is that all phenomena originate from me, are created by me, expand from me, and I manifest in them. They emanate from me and are reabsorbed into the expanse [of my nature]. 

I enjoy myself in all phenomena that originate from me. I reveal and proclaim the greatness of myself in the qualities [that arise from me]. I show the total self in the phenomena that originate from me. As to their arising, phenomena originate from me and are re-absorbed into [my] expanse. Not a single phenomenon exists that does not originate from me or is not me.

Translator's commentary:

The definitive instruction consists of the fact that just as waves arise from the ocean, exist as the ocean, and subside in the ocean, all things originate from one’s self, exist as one’s self, and dissolve in one’s self. Without renouncing anything, enjoying the creations of one’s state, one meets the true condition, thus openly revealed as the all-inclusive reality.

Lama Gendun Rinpoche on the Nature of Mind

"The recognition of the nature of mind is the only thing that we actually need – it has the power to liberate us from everything and to liberate all beings in the universe, too.

All phenomena of the external world are only the manifestations of the luminosity of our own mind and ultimately have no reality. When we allow our mind to rest in the recognition that everything that it experiences is its own projection, the separation between subject and object comes to an end. Then there is no longer anyone who grasps at something and nothing that is being grasped at – subject and object are recognized to be unreal.

In order to experience this, we allow our mind to remain in its ordinary consciousness, the awareness of the present moment, which is the deep, unchanging nature of mind itself and which is also called “timeless awareness.” That is the natural insight that arises spontaneously when in every moment we look directly at the true nature of mind.

In seeing the nature of mind, there is nothing to “see” since it is not an object of perception. We see it without seeing anything. We know it without knowing anything.

The mind recognizes itself spontaneously, in a way beyond all duality. The path that leads to this is the awareness of the present moment, free of all interference. It is an error to think that the ultimate truth is difficult to recognize. The meditation on the nature of mind is actually very easy, as we do not have to go anywhere to find this nature. No work needs to be done to produce it; no effort is required to find it. It is sufficient for us to sit down, allow our mind to rest in itself and directly look at the one who thinks that it is difficult to find the nature of mind. In that moment, we discover it directly, as it is very close and always within easy reach.

It would be absurd to worry that we might not succeed in discovering the nature of mind, as it is already present in us. It is sufficient to look into ourselves. When our mind directs its gaze upon itself, it finds itself and understands that the seeker and the sought are not two different things. At the moment, we cannot see the nature of our mind because we do not know how we must look. The problem is not that we do not possess the capacity for doing this but that we do not look in the right way.

To become capable of recognizing the nature of mind in the way described, we have to work at relaxing deeply and letting go of all wanting, so that the natural state of mind can reveal itself. This work is the exact opposite of worldly effort, in which we strive to obtain concrete things and put ourselves into a state of strain. In the practice of Dharma, we must “strain without effort.” This does not mean that we do nothing at all and simply remain as we are, because then we would continue to reproduce the same behavior patterns that have existed in us since beginningless time. We must make an effort to purify our ego-centered tendencies and become aware of our intentions.

We must also make an effort to meditate, otherwise no awareness, no insight will arise in us. But this effort should be free of ambition and of the wish to accomplish something. In a deliberate but relaxed way, we give all of our thinking and acting a wholesome orientation. Merely having the wish to become awakened is not sufficient. But we should also not strain after it, full of tension and impatience. The crucial thing is to change our attitude of mind – everything else follows naturally.

When we become proficient in accepting the movements of our mind in a relaxed manner that is free of judgment, even when these movements are strong and lively, greater clarity and transparency will arise in our mind. To have strong thoughts and feelings is actually a good thing – provided we deal with them in the right way. If we feel uneasy when emotions come up, then evidently we are still attached to a desire for a quiet mind.

Because of this attachment, we are easily tempted to want to have a pleasant meditation, a meditation without thoughts, problems and disturbances. We desire quiet and believe that when thoughts no longer arise, our mind will feel well. As soon as this wish is stirring, we can be sure that ego-clinging dominates: our longing for personal well-being pushes itself to the fore. This attitude is called hope – hope that something good will happen to us. It blocks the mind and prevents it from being truly free."


Rinpoche, Gendun. Heart Advice from a Mahamudra Master (p. 150). Norbu Verlag. Kindle Edition.

Pointing out instructions by Padmasambhava

This needs to be in more places on the web.


To introduce this by pointing it out forcefully: it is your very own present consciousness. When it is this very unstructured, self-luminous consciousness, what do you mean, "I do not realize the mind-itself"? 

There is nothing here on which to meditate, so what do you mean, "It does not arise due to meditation"? 

When it is just this direct awareness, what do you mean, "I do not find my own mind"? 

When it is just this uninterrupted clear awareness, what do you mean, "The nature of the mind is not seen"? 

When it is the very thinker of the mind, what do you mean, "It is not found by seeking it"? 

When there is nothing at all to do, what do you mean, "It does not arise due to activity"? 

When it is enough to leave it in its own unstructured state, what do you mean, "It does not remain"? 

When it is enough to let it be without doing anything, what do you mean, "I cannot do it"? 

When it is unified, indivisible clarity, awareness, and emptiness, ness, what do you mean, "It is affirmed and unaffirmed"? 

When it is spontaneously self-arisen without causes or conditions, tions, what do you mean, "I can't do it?"

When the arising and release of thoughts are simultaneous, what do you mean, "They do not occur together"? 

When it is this very consciousness of the present, what do you mean, "I do not recognize it"? The mind-itself is certainly empty and unestablished. 

Your mind is intangible like empty space. Is it like that or not? Observe serve your own mind! 

Empty and void, but without a nihilistic view, self-arisen, primordial wisdom is original, clear consciousness. Self-arisen and self-illuminating, it is like the essence of the sun. Is it like that or not? Observe your own mind! 

The primordial wisdom of awareness is certainly unceasing. Uninterrupted awareness is like the current of a river. Is it like that or not? Observe your own mind! 

The dispersing discursive thoughts are certainly not being grasped. This intangible dispersion is like a hazy sky. Is it like that or not? Observe your own mind! 

Recognize all appearances as self-appearing. Self-appearing phenomena are like reflections in a mirror. Is it like that or not? Observe your own mind! 

All signs are certainly released in their own state. Self-arising and self-releasing, they are like clouds in the sky. Is it like that or not? Observe your own mind!


Karma Chagme. A Spacious Path to Freedom: Practical Instructions on the Union of Mahamudra and Atiyoga (Kindle Locations 1354-1361). Kindle Edition.

Do Buddhas think?

https://www.lionsroar.com/ask-the-teachers-18/

This is an interesting piece, because of the very different answers that various Buddhist teachers give to the question "do Buddhas think?"

One teacher:

As I understand it, the awakened mind includes thinking; it’s just that the thinking is necessary, functional, and discerning rather than indulgent, unnecessary, and addictive. Without attachment to thinking, silence and peace are available. In not grasping after thoughts and taking them to be me and mine, there is freedom instead of bondage.

Buddhas plan, but don’t engage in worry. They make decisions but are not swayed by self-centered emotions. Buddhas are immeasurably creative but not interested in fantasy. Buddhas think but are not caught up in their thoughts, and do not mistake their thoughts to be who they are. They are present in the midst of thoughts arising, and use thinking as a way to benefit all beings.

This is a position I've heard many times: the thinking is reduced to the essentials. Direct! Necessary! Functional! Sounds very... Zen. Obviously you couldn't function without any thought, right? How would you know what to do?

The second teacher agrees:

The short answer is, yes, buddhas do think. However, I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Don’t believe everything you think,” because so often we identify with our thoughts and set up a self there.
...
“Who is it that notices these thoughts as wholesome or unwholesome and responds for the benefit of all beings?” This is an example of how a buddha or bodhisattva thinks. 

But I think these are wrong. This has all been mapped out by the Dzogchen tradition. Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (TUR):

What this really means is that we should repeatedly look into what thinks. We should recognize the absence or emptiness of this thinker over and over again, until finally the power of deluded thinking weakens, until it is totally gone without a trace.

But this is not how a Buddha practices; this is how a beginner practices. Recall from the first quote:

They are present in the midst of thoughts arising, and use thinking as a way to benefit all beings.

Dzogchen talks about three stages of capacity:

Within this method of [cherdrol], "liberation through bare attention," there exists a minimal mental activity; we turn our attention to the thought as soon as it arises and recognize it as a thought. ... Although this may have become a largely automatic process, there still exists a small time gap between the arising of the thought, the becoming aware of its presence, and the recognition of it as a thought, on the one hand, and its dissolving again, on the other hand. For the beginner this practice is appropriate, but later it will become a fault if it is not transcended. 

At the next stage, the thought disintegrates as soon as it arises. Patrul Rinpoche illustrates this process with the example of drawing pictures on the surface of the water. The picture disintegrates as soon as it is drawn.
... 

With the third stage, even the distinction between arising and liberating or dissolving is transcended. ... Thoughts liberate as they arise; their very arising is the process of their liberating. This is the method proper to Dzogchen, and all else is but preparation.

When thoughts liberate simultaneously with their arising, they are no longer "thoughts" at all. This is very hard for the mind to understand. TUR again:

As conceptual thinking diminishes and finally vanishes, what is left to cause us to wander in samsara? The very basis for samsaric existence is none other than conceptual thinking.

This is what the third teacher (also a Dzogchen master) indicates:

By definition, a buddha—one who is free of the suffering of existence—does not have a grasping mind. Since a buddha does not grasp, a buddha does not have thoughts. 

A buddha’s perception is pure awareness, or rigpa, which is not a product of the moving, thinking mind, but is direct perception. Thought can never experience the true nature of mind directly, so in Dzogchen, thought is not encouraged since it will not liberate us from suffering. And while conventionally we could agree that the thought to benefit another is preferable to the thought of jealousy, in order to achieve full realization one needs even to be free of positive thoughts because of their involvement with the grasping mind.

The hardest part about getting here is that it seems very clearly impossible to function without thoughts. Therefore, we set up this idea that in the awakened state, we will have only the necessary thoughts. But this belief ultimately prevents us from seeing what lies completely beyond thought.

Radical skepticism, revived

Radical skepticism gets a bad rap. Sure, it's possible to question everything about your reality, but what's the point? Countless freshman philosophy majors and enterprising potheads have done just that, and look where it got them. Better to face up to the cold, hard facts!

But maybe they simply didn't know how to wield the tool properly. Let's take a trip down the rabbit hole and see if we can't do better....

Ompha, Lompha

Young Earth creationists believe that the earth was created in the past ten thousand years. According to their so-called Omphalos Hypothesis, dinosaur bones and other seemingly-old artifacts were planted there by God as a test of our faith.

As ludicrous as this may strike you, it contains no logical contradiction. In fact, there is no way to disprove that the universe sprang into existence, fully formed, last Thursday. Mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell takes it one step further (as mathematicians and philosophers are wont to do):

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that 'remembered' a wholly unreal past.

But why stop there? For all we know, this may all have appeared freshly in this very moment. But while such a claim is not logically impossible, it is certainly very improbable. Right?

To help answer that, let's look at a technique called Bayesian inference.

Bayesian inference

Suppose I am hiding a coin from you. I tell you it is either a (US) penny or nickel, and you have to guess which. What kind of evidence would help you decide?

If I tell you that there is a US president on one side of the coin, that is no help at all, because it applies equally well to both coins. Whatever you thought the relative odds were before, they should remain unchanged after.

On the other hand, suppose I tell you that I flipped it and it landed on its edge. Both coins can theoretically do this, but because the nickel is thicker, it is probably more likely to land that way. Depending on how much more likely, this evidence should nudge your bias toward the nickel to a corresponding degree.

So we see that evidence is one crucial component in determining your beliefs. The second, equally important piece, is something that we hinted at earlier: your pre-existing bias, technically known as your prior.

If you're like most people, you probably started with the assumption that both the penny and nickel were equally likely. And why not? In lieu of any information, this seems like a reasonable starting point. But you don't have to start at 50-50. You might look up some stats on the number of pennies and nickels in circulation, and use that ratio as your prior. Or perhaps you know that I secretly love pennies, and use that to inform your initial bias. It's totally up to you.

Whatever your prior, you must combine it with evidence, to get an updated bias (called the posterior). You can either stop there or use this posterior as a new prior, to be combined with further evidence (generating yet another posterior), and so on. Over time, as the evidence accumulates, any mistakes in your initial prior will get ironed out.

In this way, Bayesian inference is a formal framework for doing something that's already very natural to us. We may start off uncertain about something, but we allow the weight of evidence to bring our beliefs into closer alignment with reality.

Let's apply this to our question about the past.

Evaluating the past

First let's try to pick a good prior.

Basic physics tells us that fully-formed worlds are very unlikely to just pop into existence. Therefore we should a priori be very biased against this possibility, right? Unfortunately not: we could only have learned about physics in the past, which we cannot trust without resorting to circular reasoning.

Okay, what about Occam's Razor? It tells us that we should prefer simpler theories to needlessly complicated ones. But this is a statement about preference, not likelihood. Moreover, it runs into the same problem as before: when, exactly, did we collect evidence that justifies the Razor?

Try as we may, we cannot logically justify any particular prior. So let's throw up our hands and start at 50-50. The evidence should settle it, right?

Well, this picture I took yesterday seems like pretty good evidence at first. But remember that our hypothetical sudden-world is designed to provide such fabricated evidence. So this supposed "picture from yesterday" fits both models equally well, and it is therefore of no use. By design, neither is anything else. Drat!

A final attempt might be to say fine, let's accept that maybe the world sprang into being five minutes ago (or whenever you began this exercise). But since then, you've been collecting evidence that justifies your trust in physics, Occam's Razor, and the rest. This ought to restore your faith, right?

But notice that you can repeat the thought experiment right now. How do you know that this is not the first moment? When you try to work out the answer, you will find that your supposed "evidence from the past five minutes" goes out the window just like our supposed "picture from yesterday." So this approach fails, too. There's nowhere to get a grip!

Strange as it may seem, we are not rationally justified in saying that a real past is "more likely" than a fake one. It certainly feels like the real past is more rational, but this is an illusion. For now, simply notice how powerful this illusion is. We will return to it later.

Choosing our beliefs

We do not necessarily need to rely on reasoning to choose our beliefs. Discussing a different skeptical hypothesis, physicist Sean Carroll points out:

There is no way to distinguish between the scenarios by collecting new data.

What we’re left with is our choice of prior credences. We’re allowed to pick priors however we want—and every possibility should get some nonzero number. But it’s okay to set our prior credence in radically skeptical scenarios at very low values, and attach higher prior credence to the straightforwardly realistic possibilities.

Radical skepticism is less useful to us; it gives us no way to go through life. All of our purported knowledge [...] might very well be tricks being played on us. But what then? We cannot actually act on such a belief [...]. Whereas, if we take the world roughly at face value, we have a way of moving forward. There are things we want to do, questions we want to answer, and strategies for making them happen. We have every right to give high credence to views of the world that are productive and fruitful, in preference to those that would leave us paralyzed with ennui.

Russell also recognized this:

Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it.

In other words, given that evidence cannot help us, we might as well pick whichever belief is most helpful. And our commonsense notion of time is the most helpful of all.

But is this really true? Have you ever been genuinely free of the belief in a real past, in order to make a fair comparison? Is such a state even possible or desirable? Wouldn't you be like a proverbial goldfish, totally unable to function?

As it turns out, that is not what it is like to be free of conviction about the past. It is entirely possible -- though not easy -- to drop your belief in a literal past while retaining the ability to function as though it were real. You can (and should) try to enter that state right now, but unless you've cultivated exceptional facility with your most subtle mental processes, you will attain at best a vague facsimile of it. Something deep inside you is unwilling to genuinely and completely let go. It protects itself by telling you "well, our belief is the best one anyway!"

The authentic state of not-knowing belongs to the purview of mystics and contemplatives. It is unfair to expect mathematicians, physicists, or even philosophers to find the time to explore it properly.

The future

Let's visit another oddity. 18th-century philosopher David Hume popularized something called the Problem of Induction. Roughly, it goes as follows.

It seems painfully obvious that the past provides good evidence for the future, right? But why do we believe this? Well, it has certainly been true in the past. Okay, but so what? We'd like to say "... and therefore it will be true in the future," but then we are assuming what we set out to prove. There's that nasty circularity again! So we cannot justify our belief that the past will continue to provide evidence for the future.

Thus, the fact that the laws of physics have faithfully operated for billions of years gives us no reason at all to believe that they will continue to operate even one second from now [1]. As before, notice how ridiculous and illogical this feels, despite being impeccably rational. This is a powerful clue, if used properly!

Unfortunately Hume, too, loses his nerve before fully taking on board the implications:

Should it be asked me whether I sincerely assent to this argument which I have been to such pains to inculcate, whether I be really one of those skeptics who hold that everything is uncertain, I should reply that neither I nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly of that opinion. I dine, I play backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends and when after three or four hours of amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strange and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further. Thus the skeptic still continues to reason and believe, though he asserts he cannot defend his reason by reason.

The nature of reality

It does not stop with time. Consider the hypothesis that this world is a simulation -- and further, that its creators are clever enough to hide all evidence of this fact from us. Then, by assumption, there is no way to test the hypothesis, and we are again free to discard it on the basis of practicality, even if not on pure rationality. In fact, there are an infinite number of strange and seemingly-pointless possibilities that we can cut away with one fell swoop in this way. This can make us feel supremely confident in our default worldview. But there is at least one strange possibility that comes away unscathed.

Consider the hypothesis that the world is a dream of sorts. This possibility may seem inconsequential, as with the previous examples: if the dream behaves exactly as a physical world would, then there's no point in pursuing the belief further. On the other hand, if it actually is a dream -- and moreover, your dream, in a sense -- then your participation might be pivotal in gathering evidence of the fact. How might this work?

In a nighttime dream, naively questioning your surroundings is often insufficient to expose the dream's unreality. In most cases, the dream will fabricate an explanation that -- despite being nonsensical from a more awakened perspective -- will nonetheless suffice to quell your suspicion. Nothing to see here, move right along! To expose the sham, you must question the dream in just the right way, at which point you might become lucid.

So how does the analogy extend to this reality? How would one question it in "just the right way?"

The mind doth protest too much

You might begin by noticing how illogical it is to feel so dead certain about the past despite having no rational basis for the belief. Next, watch as your mind tries to wriggle out of this accusation: "well, such a belief is evolutionarily adaptive, so it's probably embedded deep in our ancient limbic system, beyond the reach of higher cognition...." Bam! In a finger snap, circular reasoning again magically restores your faith: I believe in the past because the past made me do it, duh. Whew! Nothing to see here! 

This should trigger a great deal more suspicion in you than it probably does.

If you were to sit and grapple with this conundrum very sincerely -- not just thinking harder about it, but experientially penetrating the very heart of the discrepancy -- you might have a mind- and reality-shattering "aha!" moment, not unlike what Zen Buddhists call kensho or sudden awakening. It might reveal that you've been taking life utterly for granted [2], subtly (but erroneously) assuming that you have the slightest inkling of what it is and how it works. Side effects may include an overwhelming flood of gratitude, awe, wonder, love, joy, and humility, beyond what you believed possible. There may even be insights about the nature, purpose, and evolution of this dream, though they may be hard to prove or even communicate via the standard channels.

Why is it impossible to prove that the past really happened, or that it's even likely? Sure, maybe this is all just sophistry and there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. Or maybe something much more curious is going on, right under your nose but hidden by a cleverly self-protective veil.

If this all sounds like too much for you, well, then, luckily you have the option to continue to blindly trust your default beliefs. And why not? After all, some Very Smart Scientists have assured you that being too skeptical would be "ridiculous," "frivolous," and "paralyzing." And who are you to question that? Nothing to see here, move right along....

[1] http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2012/10/problem-of-induction-explained-simply.html

"It’s a good test of whether someone has actually understood Hume’s argument that they acknowledge its conclusion is fantastic (many students new to philosophy misinterpret Hume: they think his conclusion is merely that we cannot be certain what will happen tomorrow.) ... [But] if Hume is right, the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is as unjustified as the belief that a million mile wide bowl of tulips will appear over the horizon instead. We suppose the second belief is insane. But if Hume is correct, the first belief is actually no more rational. ... 

[T]he onus is on these defenders of “common sense” to show precisely what is wrong with Hume's argument. No one has yet succeeded in doing this (or at least no one has succeeded in convincing a majority of philosophers that they have done so)."

[2] Notice that to take something "for granted" can mean either to be unappreciative of it, or to logically presuppose it. Here it takes on both meanings: we are quite confident that we've been experiencing life for a long time, which is why this moment feels so mundane. And now notice that "mundane" means both "pertaining to physical reality" and "tedious, repetitive, dull." Again, this is not a coincidence.

Tying some things together

In quantum mechanics, until a superposed system entangles with you (i.e., information about the system reaches you), you are not entitled to say that it is in a definite state. In a meaningful sense, the place you call "the world" comes into definite existence only when it comes into contact with you.

A key lesson from Mahayana Buddhism is that the world you think you are passively experiencing is actually a world that you are fabricating. Listen to a sound. It seems like it is happening to you, right? Well, it turns out that if your attention becomes precise and subtle enough, you'll discover that you are constructing that experience out of a slew of assumptions and habits.

In both of these descriptions, the word "you" is central, but what does it really refer to? Who or what are you, exactly? Discovering the answer to this question is, of course, another crucial issue in Buddhism. Who is fabricating the world? What is that without which no world exists?

A common meditation to learn first is breathing meditation, where you passively observe the sensations of breath. With practice, you may learn to passively observe other sensations as well. The pinnacle of this kind of practice is to be the silent observer of your entire field of experience. This is sometimes called "bare attention"; a kind of raw perception supposedly without interpretation.

But in such a practice, there's a subtle activity that's not privy to observation: the very effort required to artificially separate oneself from the field of experience. And until that subtle effort is released along with the rest of the field of perception, it is impossible to uncover even subtler forms of identity.

When the subtle effort of distancing "oneself" from perception finally subsides, it becomes clear that the whole radiant field of experience is experiencing itself. Listen to a sound again, and notice that the experience is a sort of energetic phenomenon. This energy can manifest as sound, as color, as smell, as thought, etc. You are not a separate self experiencing this energy; "you" are the energy itself, contorting itself into a form called "my human perspective." The whole experience you call "the world" is made of you.

The task before you is to discern how exactly you play this game of hide-and-seek. You are all that exists, and yet you form yourself into a perspective that seemingly doesn't know or believe this. In fact, in most incarnations, it flatly refuses to even consider such mystical nonsense.

Sooner or later, though, the game will be up.

You've probably heard of superpositions in quantum mechanics.

In the Schrödinger's Cat scenario, the cat is said to be in a superposition of alive and dead, and we're asked to note the absurdity of a cat that is somehow both alive and dead (which isn't exactly what a superposition is, but never mind that).

Thanks to a phenomenon known as decoherence, it's not really feasible to put such a macroscopic system into the kind of superposition that's useful, the kind you can exploit. So maybe we never have to worry about such a cat.

But you might still wonder: what if some far future technology allows us to do so? There's every reason to believe it's theoretically possible. And what if we put a human into a coherent superposition? Or, as quantum computing professor Scott Aaronson suggests, upload their consciousness into a quantum computer, where we would keep it coherent?

Instead of using the macabre example where the human lives or dies, suppose they simply either see a red or blue light. And suppose you leave the experiment running for five minutes. At the end of it, the subject will report having seen only one colored light for the past five minutes.

Imagine being such a subject. Imagine seeing one light turn on and stay that way for five minutes. At the end of it, you'll have a memory of having done so. And it will be an authentic memory, right? All that time really happened.

But now switch back to being the experimenter. Are there really two subjects, each seeing one light? There are various forms of the many worlds interpretation of QM, but the modern ones suggest that worlds split only when there's decoherence. Here there is none.

From the outside, we can say (in a precise and provable way) that there was no definite state for the light or subject during those five minutes. Nothing "really" happened. But the subject will find that absurd.

Is their memory reliable? Did it "really" happen? It depends on whose perspective you take.

You don't know that you're not in some elaborate quantum experiment right now. What is real to you may not be for others who you may even one day meet.

Noticing existence

Finally, a post on practice instead of philosophy. I need to do more of the former and less of the latter right now.

One instruction for practice might go something like this: simply notice existence.

This is a tricky instruction for a few reasons. First, what is "existence"? And second, who is noticing it?

The first place my mind goes is to the world's existence. "Yes, the universe exists. So what?" But that isn't what we're looking for. One useful tip is to consider: what if the world is a simulation or dream? I can't know that it exists. So it's not the world's existence that I should be noticing.

Next, I might ponder my own existence. But again, all the details I think of as "me" may not really exist. My body, thoughts, and memories might also be simulated.

As you eliminate possibilities, you find yourself working your way back toward that which is asking itself to notice existence. It's hard to pinpoint that thing, but it clearly exists. It's easy to confuse it with the thoughts it is producing. In fact, even to call it a "thing" or "it" is misleading. It's somehow sitting "behind" all the things that it can point at.

It is trying to point a finger back at itself, but it always comes up short. It always ends up pointing at something or another: this thought; that sensation. This becomes frustrating, as it (you) forgets what it's supposed to be looking for. Maybe at some point it gives up.

If you don't walk away from the practice at this point, something interesting can happen. You simply notice that "the light is on." Instead of noticing any of the particulars of experience, you notice the simple fact that you are experiencing. Your entire field of experience is lit up, quite unlike if you were dead.

You cannot stop experiencing, even if you wanted to. The whole field is just there, shining brightly. Even if you close your eyes and plug your ears (which is actually very useful here), you will find that the shine continues. Nothing in particular is shining, but somehow a light is still on. You're not dead, are you?

At some point you may begin to sense that it is not you noticing this light; the light is noticing itself. In fact, noticing is not something this light does; it is what the light is. There's nothing for you to do, and there's nothing for it to do. Its mere existence is enough.

The hard part of this practice is the "so what?" that can arise. The mind starts chattering, looking for the significance of this most obvious fact. The suggestion given here is to not listen to the mind's tricks. Just rest and allow the light to shine.

Your true nature

In a nighttime dream, you believe yourself to be a character wandering around as an isolated subject in a fundamentally external and threatening world. The only way to see through this illusion is to become lucid, at which point you discover that the whole of "reality" -- all the sights, sounds, textures, etc. that constitute the dream -- are made of the light of your own mind. Not "you" as in the character, but you as in the dreamer -- a being that exists beyond the confines of the dream.

With increased lucidity, you discover that you do not occupy a position sitting behind the character's eyes, observing all this light. Instead, you are the light. "You" are distributed throughout the entirety of the apparent reality. And with still further awakening, you discover that the storyline of the dream is not something happening to you (perpetrated by your subconscious mind), but instead something you are actively doing. You weave yourself into a fantastical adventure and then embed yourself in it as an apparently localized, isolated subject.

Once you see this clearly, there can be no doubt. You are free to weave and re-weave realities as you see fit; to lose yourself in them for arbitrarily long periods of "time" (another devious invention of your making, not necessarily present in all dreams); to generate apparently external beings who ruthlessly mock you for questioning reality; to rediscover the truth (it's infinitely delightful every. single. time.); and to rinse, lather, and repeat to your heart's content.

By now you may have suspected that what I'm saying applies not only to nighttime dreams, but to your present one as well. Just as you would at night, you find this idea to be utterly preposterous; not even worth a second thought. You will devise comically useless tests to "prove" that it's false. Look how internally consistent this place is! Look at all the external evidence! I'm not clever enough to invent this place! Well, your character certainly isn't, but You are.

If you really want to become lucid, you will have to dig really deep, and not turn tail at the first sign of difficulty. You will have to ignore all the warning signs: "Do Not Enter! Nothing to see here! Don't be ridiculous! The scientists would have found this out already! Sciiiieeeence!"

So how do you do it? How do you become lucid? That's too big a topic to cover in one post, but here are some hints.

First you must understand, intellectually, that many radically skeptical hypotheses are not meaningfully unlikely. If you try to prove that it is "unlikely" that this is a dream, you will find yourself presupposing that it is not, in one sneaky way or another. This is circular reasoning, and utterly bogus. Similarly: did the world suddenly pop into being one moment ago, or is the past real? Any way you try to establish a real past, you will find yourself subtly assuming one: "we know (from past experience) that the world just doesn't work that way!" If you find yourself resisting this point, sit down and look more carefully and honestly. Philosophers discard these hypotheses not because they are unlikely, but because they are (apparently) useless.

Once you understand that, recognize your extreme reluctance to genuinely consider the conclusions they suggest. "Fine, I cannot prove that a real past is more likely, but I know deep down that it is, dammit! I can feel it!" While belief in a real past may be useful for practical reasons, you go further and take it 100% literally. Just as in a nighttime dream, this utter (unfounded) certainty is what kills any chance of becoming lucid.

The next step is to understand, intellectually, that the world around you is made of your own mind. You can accept this even as a materialist, by substituting "my own mind" with "my own neurons firing." Every sight you see, every sound you hear, every thought you think, is your own mind, illuminated. Just listen: what else could that experience be than your own mind?

Once you understand that your experienced world is made of your own mind, your mind will immediately follow it up with "but obviously there's a real world out there, causing it." This is the crucial moment. It is not obvious, and purely rationally speaking, it is not even likely. If you can grok the fact that the apparent world is your own mind, and simultaneously grok that there is no reason to take the standard explanation literally, then there is the possibility of becoming lucid. In Eastern traditions, this is known as awakening. It is simple, but it is not easy.

Now you might wonder: if the Buddha was lucid, why wasn't he flying around with superpowers and such? And now for the punchline: this is your dream. The Buddha is an idea you planted to remind yourself how to wake up. Instead of waiting for "others" to wake up and prove it to you, why not do it yourself?

---

Sometimes you get the sense that life is magical or miraculous. You generally squash this idea as irrational, but it's closer to the truth than you know. The Light that constitutes your dream comes from beyond it, and in a sense, the whole point of the dream is to awaken to this fact.

So close you can't see it

So deep you can't fathom it

So simple you can't believe it

So good you can't accept it

-- Tibetan Buddhist saying

What everyone gets wrong about Wigner's interpretation of QM

There's an interpretation of QM known as the "von Neumann - Wigner interpretation," aka the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation.

Wikipedia says:

In the 1960s, Eugene Wigner^[2] reformulated the "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment as "Wigner's friend" and proposed that the consciousness of an observer is the demarcation line which precipitates collapse of the wave function, independent of any realist interpretation. 

There are other possible solutions to the "Wigner's friend" thought experiment, which do not require consciousness to be different from other physical processes.

This is true, but he also suggests another way out of the paradox: consciousness is not something that other people have:

"It is not necessary to see a contradiction here from the point of view of orthodox quantum mechanics, and there is none if we believe that the alternative is meaningless, whether my friend's consciousness contains either the impression of having seen a flash or of not having seen a flash.

However, to deny the existence of the consciousness of a friend to this extent is surely an unnatural attitude, approaching solipsism, and few people, in their hearts, will go along with it."

(Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, from Symmetries and Reflections, p.180)

But a few pages later, he seems to have switched to the view that only he has it:

This takes place whenever the result of an observation enters the consciousness of the observer - or, to be even more painfully precise, my own consciousness, since I am the only observer, all other people being only subjects of my observations.

(From Two Kinds of Reality, from Symmetries and Reflections p.185)

This is presumably for rhetorical effect, but nonetheless it makes his model so much more sensible (at least, to my eye). It's not that consciousness is some magical property that lives inside human skulls and collapses wave functions. It's that (from your perspective, you might say) you are the only observer.

Even the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gets it wrong!

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/ 

Among these approaches, the one with the longest history was initiated by von Neumann in the 1930s, later taken up by Wigner, and currently championed by Stapp. It can be roughly characterized as the proposal to consider intentional conscious acts as intrinsically correlated with physical state reductions.

Wigner's view is actually a natural result of the Many-Worlds Interpretation. MWI claims to get away from the consciousness problem by explaining that each branch has a copy of you, with its own consciousness. But there remains a meaningful sense in which "I collapse the wave function," and it reduces to Wigner's view.

Specifically, before I come into contact with the world-eating superposition that is the natural evolution of any experiment, I should (in theory, though decoherence makes this impossible "for all practical purposes") model the system as evolving unitarily. In particular, this is because if I undid enough of the evolution, I should be able to run an interference experiment demonstrating that the original observable is in superposition. But once I come into contact with it, and I join the superposition, the copy of me on either branch is now free to model the entire universe with just his branch.

Sometimes people explain that different branches of the multiverse can "communicate" -- in the sense of interference. But it seems that I ought to be able to do this only before the superposition has spread to me. Once I make manifest the branch -- aka, collapse the wave function, or become conscious of the result -- there is no other universe, as far as it concerns me.

This is functionally indistinct from "I collapse the wave function."

Now, what is this "I" that collapses the wave function? I better pin it down if it plays such a crucial role in reality, right?

Well, the Vedantins and (some) Mahayana Buddhists covered the "locating the I" thing. And what do you find at the end? That I, as consciousness itself, am the very fabric from which the world is made. Of course the buck stops here. It's the only place that's real, so to speak.

I am that which does not undergo unitary evolution, like all of so-called "physical reality." In other words, I am not definable from within physical law.

What's particularly unfortunate is how many assume that Wigner's view is radically different from MWI (see, e.g. "Wigner's friend in Many Worlds"). In fact, he was sagely pointing out that any interpretation will run into something fishy with consciousness. He continues the quote above:

Alternatively, one could say that quantum mechanics provides only probability connections between the results of my observations as I perceive them. Whichever formulation one adopts, the consciousness evidently plays an indispensable role.

And in another piece:

it will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality.

As you try to pin down the point at which I am (in principle, not just FAPP) allowed to stop modeling the world as a superposition in MWI, you close in on the definition of "I," or that which seems to be looking out these eyes. I am not my toes, I am not my torso, ....




-------
Hmm he also later says:

Solipsism may be logically consistent with present quantum mechanics, monism in the sense of materialism is not. The case against solipsism was given at the end of the first section. 

Radical skepticism and the non-affirming negation: a summary

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K Dick

Radical skepticism

Young earth creationists believe that the earth was created in the past ten thousand years. The Omphalos Hypothesis points out that dinosaur bones and other seemingly old artifacts might have been planted there by God as a test of our faith.

As ludicrous as this may strike you, there is no logical contradiction in it. In fact, there is no way to disprove that the universe sprang into existence, fully-formed, last Thursday. Bertrand Russell takes it one step further:

"There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that 'remembered' a wholly unreal past."

Taken to its logical limit, this may all have appeared freshly in this very moment. But while such a claim is not logically impossible, it is certainly very improbable. Right?

Well, stop for a moment and consider how you might evaluate such a probability. Suppose you have two models to choose from: one in which everything suddenly appeared exactly as it is now (let's call this the Russell metaphysics), and the other is the default model of materialism. What evidence will you use to decide in favor of one or the other?

Any facts about the world are fully compatible with either model. As such, they should not bias you toward believing in one or the other. As an example, suppose you are trying to determine whether an unseen coin is a nickel or a quarter. If you are told that it was flipped and came up heads, this shouldn't cause you to favor either answer. Even if you were told it has been averaging 50% heads over the last thousand trials, then (assuming both coins are fair) you still have learned nothing. You need evidence that differs in the two cases, and we've purposely constructed Russell to be identical in appearance to the materialism.

You may try to use something like Occam's Razor to make a case, but even here you must be careful. If your argument takes into account anything from the past -- such as evidence demonstrating that Occam's Razor is valid -- then you are assuming your metaphysics in order to prove it. This is circular reasoning, and clearly invalid. If you use Occam's Razor in its aesthetic form (namely, that simpler models are more beautiful and thus preferable), then you are not stating a probability but a preference.

Nonetheless, it is such an incredibly strong preference that it may be hard to recognize as one. The existence of a past is an assumption with no logical justification. Doesn't that statement rankle you?

It almost certainly does, and this is itself enough to give you a good reason to stick to your default metaphysics. Russell himself refused to take radical skepticism seriously:

“Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it.”

Same with Hume (whose brilliant Problem of Induction similarly destroys the supposed evidence for a sane-looking future):

"Should it be asked me whether I sincerely assent to this argument which I have been to such pains to inculcate, whether I be really one of those skeptics who hold that everything is uncertain, I should reply that neither I nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly of that opinion. I dine, I play backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends and when after three or four hours of amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strange and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further. Thus the skeptic still continues to reason and believe, though he asserts he cannot defend his reason by reason."

And finally, modern physicist Sean Carroll:

“There is no way to distinguish between the scenarios by collecting new data. 

What we’re left with is our choice of prior credences. We’re allowed to pick priors however we want—and every possibility should get some nonzero number. But it’s okay to set our prior credence in radically skeptical scenarios at very low values, and attach higher prior credence to the straightforwardly realistic possibilities. 

Radical skepticism is less useful to us; it gives us no way to go through life. All of our purported knowledge, and all of our goals and aspirations, might very well be tricks being played on us. But what then? We cannot actually act on such a belief, since any act we might think is reasonable would have been suggested to us by that annoying demon. Whereas, if we take the world roughly at face value, we have a way of moving forward. There are things we want to do, questions we want to answer, and strategies for making them happen. We have every right to give high credence to views of the world that are productive and fruitful, in preference to those that would leave us paralyzed with ennui.”

In other words, you should believe it because it is psychologically comforting. Leaving aside the obvious parallels with religion, we should consider whether there is an alternative that these great thinkers have missed.

Layers of thought

Have you ever had the experience of reading a book, only to discover that your eyes are still scanning the page but your mind is elsewhere? If you're interrupted mid-reverie, chances are you can recall the past few seconds of thought. Those thoughts were not really outside your consciousness and yet, somehow, you didn't notice them.

Chances are, you spend the vast majority of your day in a state where you're thinking without being fully present in your thoughts. The mind readily back-fills a sense of presence, so that you can easily convince yourself that you were present when you weren't. If you want to test this yourself, just sit down and pay attention to your breath. See how long it takes you to be distracted, and how long it takes you to notice that you are distracted. You probably won't catch it immediately, even when your whole being is engaged in the effort. What of the rest of the day?

If you decide to progress on the path of meditation, this starts happening less and less. As you become more present, you detect an undercurrent of more subtle thoughts between the big, coarse ones. When even these quieten, and you're sitting in a seemingly thought-free state, you might consider yourself basically free of thought.

But are you?

If you still feel like a self sitting in a world of space and time, it's because there's still a layer of your mind you have not yet penetrated.

If you look carefully enough, you will notice that your mind is taking experiences and subtly weaving a narrative from them. Memory implies a past; anticipation implies a future; together they imply time and a self. Vision and touch together imply space and matter. Etc. The sense that the past contained a physical world bolsters the certainty that this moment must, too, and that there will be moments to come, following a fairly predictable trajectory. This narrative becomes the "background" of your experience -- as though it were given to you, rather than you fabricating it.

In brief, the world feels mundane. These assumptions are so deep that they stop feeling like assumptions and start appearing as tangible, palpable, externally imposed structures. I mean, isn't it viscerally obvious that time and space are real, and not merely assumptions? Well, that feeling is there because you are continually reinforcing it (leaving aside for now the question of what "continuously" means in a world with no time). You do it because it's psychologically comforting. And like with distracted reading, it simply escapes your notice.

Hume's positive view is that the experience of constant conjunction [things happening together] fosters a “habit of the mind” that leads us to anticipate the conclusion on the occasion of a new instance of the second premise. The force of induction, the force that drives the inference, is thus not an objective feature of the world, but a subjective power; the mind's capacity to form inductive habits. The objectivity of causality, the objective support of inductive inference, is thus an illusion, an instance of what Hume calls the mind's “great propensity to spread itself on external objects” 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem

It's true, reality is what remains when you stop believing. But why on earth do we think we're capable of stopping something as deeply embedded as belief when we can barely even notice the constant cacophony much closer to the surface?

The non-affirming negation

So is the solution to convince yourself of radical skepticism? No, for two reasons.

First, the layer of mind that is reinforcing your metaphysics is much deeper than the one you likely have access to when you try to consciously change your beliefs about the world. This results in a conflict between what you "know" (really, assume at a very deep level) and what you "believe." Obviously this will lead to painful cognitive dissonance.

Second, you don't actually have any more evidence for the past being unreal than you do for it being real. The certainty that it is unreal is just as delusional as the certainty that it is real. And yet it seems that those are the only two options: mustn't time be one or the other?

This is where we reach the non-affirming negation. An affirming negation is one that, while negating one thing, implicitly affirms another. "No, that's not true" generally implies that the thing is false. But it is possible to withdraw your belief in something without affirming something else. This is the non-affirming negation. You don't have to start believing in a crazy worldview to undo your belief in the default one. You can simply loosen your death grip on this worldview.

You may fear that letting go of those beliefs will make it harder to interact with the world in a sane way. But actually, folks like the Buddha are far more sane than the rest of us.

Taking existence for granted

So why is it worth releasing our metaphysical beliefs?

When you look around you right now, don't you feel something like "I've seen this all before (more or less)?" And don't you take it for granted that the next moment will offer something similar?

You're not paying attention to life because of the (completely unjustified, remember) assumption that you've experienced something very much like it before, and that you will continue to.

Yet there's actually something overwhelmingly glorious about existing at all. From time to time we may notice this, but our metaphysics typically swoops in and dampens it. No doubt it feels amazing to recognize something like "wow, we're made of star stuff," but concepts are always few steps removed from the primordial epiphany itself. You'll know you're getting closer when you're filled with gratitude, wonder, and awe beyond your wildest imagination. It's the most natural response to encountering the miracle of existence for the first time.

Does consciousness "exist"?

For the duration of this post I want you to forget about your model of reality and return to your raw experience of the world. If you hear a sound, for example, forget the idea that there's some object causing the sound, some subject ("I") receiving it, some sense organs and neurons mediating the experience, etc.

Okay, let's try this.

Silence is the absence of sound. Now, pay attention to any particular sound in your environment, and recognize it as the presence of sound. "A sound" is some particular presence of sound.

Now close your eyes and notice a (relative) absence of light/color. Now look at something, and recognize it as the presence of color.

You can do the same thing with your other senses. Compare the presence of a feeling (like pressing your fingers together) with an absence of feeling (in that location, at least).

The senses are all different modes of presence, but what they have in common is presence itself. Now spend a minute and see if you can intuit what I mean when I say that presence is the very "stuff" out of which all experiences are made. Presence, modulated in various ways, is the sole substance of your perceived world. Really take a moment and notice this.

It is also the sole substance of your thoughts, memories, emotions, etc. Every single thought you've ever thought, like every sound you've ever heard, is "made of presence." For the most part, we do not even notice the existence of our thoughts, let alone carefully inspect their texture. Beginning meditators can spend weeks or months, possibly requiring retreats with constant practice, before noticing just how busy their minds have always been.

This can be hard to believe, since it's so counterintuitive. But if you've ever been reading a book, only to discover "crap, I thought I was reading, but I was really daydreaming," then you have all the evidence you need: you're consciously doing tons of stuff that you just haven't realized yet. What secrets lie in that murky deep?

Slowly you may discover that even your sense of identity is just a cluster of thoughts. There's nobody there, sitting inside your head, looking out at a world. You may already know this from neuroscience, but now you experience it directly.

As this happens, you might start to reevaluate the belief that "I am conscious." Who, pray tell, is conscious, if there's nobody there?

And now, slowly, slowly, it occurs to you that "consciousness" is just another word for what we've here been calling "presence." It's not that there is some object called sound, and a subject called I, and some abstract property called "consciousness" that magically links the two. Or rather, that model of reality may be useful, but it's not your actual experience of the world -- even though it has always seemed like it due to unexamined conceptualization. Instead, this shimmering show you call "life" is all consciousness, all the time. In a sense, it has always only been experiencing itself.

So now what do you do with a belief like "consciousness exists" or "consciousness does not exist?" You discover, directly, that those beliefs are made of the very "stuff" they are questioning. Even the concept of "exists" or "real" are made of it. Any answer you might muster is also it.

The sweater begins to unravel. A remarkable charade is exposed.

In each moment, the luminous fabric of consciousness weaves itself into a dazzling array of sensual delights, as well as a thicket of mutually reinforcing beliefs that together form your conception of reality. Beliefs form, such as "there must be a real world out there, responsible for all of this glory," and "these memories and expectations must prove that time is real." Whether or not any of that stuff is true, it is astonishing to discover how these beliefs really form (and re-form) in each moment.

Remarkably, during this model-building phase, consciousness brilliantly hides itself from itself, taking on fiendishly clever forms such as "the stuff of the world (aka matter) is all that really exists; consciousness is just an illusion." And like a snake eating its own tail... poof!, the sole substance of your reality seemingly vanishes into itself.

But it's always hiding in plain sight. It is what the Tibetans call "self-secret." It's not that some yogis in an ancient cave have been hiding it from you. It is everything. Yet somehow you are continually hiding it from yourself. This game of hide-and-seek is known as Awakening, and it can go on for as many cycles (lifetimes) as you wish.

This isn't a physical or philosophical fact, but an experiential one. Of course it doesn't prove anything about the world, but it's not meant to. Instead, you can consider it as a pointer to a peculiar mental habit we all have -- or in a sense, that we all are.

So if you're called toward meditation, I encourage you to follow that thread. There may be something worth discovering there.

So close you can't see it
So simple you can't believe it
So deep you can't fathom it
So good you can't accept it 

-- Tibetan Buddhist saying

(All that said, I still need a word to describe the fact that the organisms I experience are interacting with the world. I'm perfectly happy to use the word "consciousness" here, and study it scientifically. These things are probably, but not necessarily, related. That is, perhaps I can experience a world without being able to interact with it, or vice versa. The conflation of these two facts has led to no end of philosophical and scientific trouble.)

Buddhism and QM

Many religions seem to want to believe that their ancient scriptures predicted modern scientific discoveries, such as the distance to the Sun, the speed of neural oscillations, etc. I think it's all nonsense.

So, without any trace of irony, I present three ways in which the Buddha predicted modern results from quantum mechanics, with a scoop of woo to go along.


1) The doctrine of Emptiness.

Emptiness is the very core of Mahayana Buddhism, and also its most misunderstood teaching. Rob Burbea, a teacher I love, puts it most simply: it's the fact that there is no way that things "actually" are. There is the way that things appear, but fundamentally they have no essence; no substance. It is not that there is a "real chair" lurking somewhere "out there," independent of our minds. What is the actual truth then? That's a much more complicated question. It's an interdependent play of causes and conditions.

What has QM taught us? That when we're not measuring things, they have no well-defined objective properties. What does it mean to measure things? We don't know (though surprisingly many physicists will tell you that we have nailed this problem). Yes, particles in a sense can "measure" each other, but not in a way that makes the system as a whole well-defined. I would be roundly mocked for suggesting that the ultimate point of measurement is "consciousness," so I'll stop short of doing so. But it is.


2) There is no self.

This is the foundation of Theravada Buddhism (and Buddhism as a whole, in some sense). There's nobody sitting at the center of your being; no soul. All of your properties (personality etc.) are incidental.

Here's a quote from Hugh Everett, who originated what is now called the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of QM:

“The price, however, is the abandonment of the concept of the uniqueness of the observer, with its somewhat disconcerting philosophical implications.”

The implication is that when the universe "splits" into multiple, it's not meaningful to say that either copy of "you" is actually you. In other words, your sense of personal identity is an illusion.


3) You choose which world manifests.

Wait, what? Neither Buddhism nor QM says anything like this. You're right; it's my own addition, extrapolated from both.

The point is that in any given moment, the question of "which particular objective properties will manifest" (i.e., which world will appear) is not dictated by anything external to consciousness itself. Perhaps it is not determined by consciousness either. Heck, in QM the statement is meaningless: all possible worlds are manifesting.

But here's something to explore. When consciousness is "constricted," the world appears to be constricting. When it is deeply relaxed and free, the world appears to construct itself in a way that justifies that, too.

It seems as though the "constricted" vs "free" quality belongs to the individual; i.e., the illusory being that is manifesting along with the world. That is, it cannot belong to consciousness itself, which is prior to the manifestation.

That may indeed be so. In that case, the "true" cause is something more subtle. The only option I see is this: it is the degree to which consciousness has woken up to itself. The more consciousness recognizes its own face, the less sense that it is bound by anything else, which manifests in the person as freedom, and in the world as justifications for experiencing freedom.

Why the measurement problem in QM won't just go away

The founders of quantum mechanics knew there was something funny about its relation to consciousness. It seems that lesson has been lost through the decades, with many modern researchers believing that approaches like decoherence have solved the problem. They'll tell you that the idea that there's any relationship between consciousness and QM is just flapdoodle. But it's far from solved; we've just kicked the can down the road to ever-more esoteric possibilities. If you don't believe me, here's the world's smartest physicist (Ed Witten) agreeing.

There's something fascinating in here that I think every human (with time and energy) ought to think about. So I want to give you a quick summary of the problem and why I think it won't be solved any time soon.

Suppose we have a particle that's in a superposition state: if we measure its spin, it might be up or down. In classical physics, this wouldn't be strange: we can just say it's actually one or the other but we don't know which. In quantum mechanics, we can do what's called an interference experiment to show that it's a different kind of beast. Somehow, both possibilities remain, and those possibilities can interfere with each other (much like in the two-slit experiment).

We can introduce a second particle and have it interact with the first in such a way that their properties become correlated: say, if the first particle is spin-up, the second will be too, and vice versa. This is a form of measurement (you can "read out" the second particle to learn the state of the first) and it works by a phenomenon known as entanglement. The key thing to note here is that an interference experiment on either particle alone will show no interference. Each particle by itself looks classical. But we can exhibit interference on the pair. That's how we know that two possibilities remain in the system. This is the essence of the loss of interference in the two-slit experiment when detectors are placed at the slits.

As more and more particles get in on the entanglement (for example, in a macroscopic measurement apparatus, or just the environment), it becomes harder and harder to do an interference experiment on the system as a whole. There are way too many degrees of freedom to control. This is known as "decoherence," and explains why macroscopic systems look classical (show no interference). But crucially, it does not explain why, when, or how two possibilities become one.

That is the heart of the measurement problem, and there are two broad approaches to solving it.

The first is to say that something special ("collapse") happens somewhere to make the two into one. This is problematic for aesthetic reasons (it introduces a law that's very much unlike the rest), technical ones (that law disobeys certain key assumptions like time-reversibility), and practical ones (as our technology improves, we're able to demonstrate in larger and larger systems that there is no collapse). As time goes on, this position gets harder and harder to maintain.

The second is to say that nothing special happens, and two possibilities remain. If that is the case, why do we see only one? We don't: we instead say that both happen, each in their own "parallel universe." Since there is one copy of you in each universe, you do see two possibilities, not one. As time goes on, the multiverse keeps branching and branching. There are infinitely many "copies of you" right now. This is called the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI).

As absurd as this may sound, it's perhaps the most straightforward explication of the results that we have. But it comes with a nasty problem -- depending on your views on consciousness.

Consider how things look to a single experimenter. From his perspective, the universe is obeying its usual reversible laws, right up until the point it interacts with him. He can even confirm this (in principle) with a sufficiently sophisticated interference experiment. But once he interacts with the system, he splits. From a God's-eye view, the reversibility is maintained, and everything is fine. But from the perspective of any individual "copy" of him on one of the branches, the "quantum-ness" has been suddenly lost. He can only see the outcome on his branch, and there's nothing left to interfere.

In other words, "collapse" has found its way back in, this time with a vengeance: instead of happening at random unspecified places, it happens only when things encounter him. By symmetry, of course, it would look this way for any object in the system that found itself in the unfortunate circumstance of "being conscious" or "having an inside view." Humans aren't necessarily special here, but consciousness somehow is. Thus MWI really cannot afford to have consciousness enter the picture in any meaningful way. Who wants to be a lone superman (and maybe lone conscious being?) in their journey through the multiverse?

Let's take a step back. What problem are we trying to solve? The problem is that the math and experiments seem to predict multiple outcomes, but we see just one. If we somehow didn't see just one, there would be no need for these competing frameworks. The math would predict everything, with no wiggle room for interpretations. Most MWIers will tell you that this is precisely why you should adopt MWI.

The problem is that some obnoxious people keep insisting on this parochial idea that they do experience just one universe. In other words, that they are "genuinely conscious." And as long as that keeps happening, the matter will not be so easily settled. Sure, it's possible that "collapse" will solve it, but I'm not sure anyone actually believes that.

"Most physicists, even those who use quantum mechanics every day in their research, get along perfectly well speaking the language of the Copenhagen interpretation, and choosing not to worry about the puzzles it presents. Others, especially those who think carefully about the foundations of quantum mechanics, are convinced that we need to do better."

"I suspect that a substantial majority of physicists who use quantum mechanics in their everyday work are uninterested in or downright hostile to attempts to understand the quantum measurement problem." -- Sean Carroll

If you're unsure of what I mean by "genuinely conscious," I leave you with an experiment to try. Really try it; don't just think about it.

Pause for a moment, and look around. Doesn't it sure seem like something is going on? I emphasize "sure" here. If you check very simply and straightforwardly, you will notice an immediate and unequivocal certainty before your intellect kicks in and explains it all away ("That's just a trick of my brain! Nothing to see here; move right along!"). This flawless certainty -- that something sure as hell seems to be happening -- is more profound than it may seem the first few times you encounter it. It's the only thing that doesn't depend on a worldview. You can't be nearly as sure that time or space (or brains or QM) exist as that ... consciousness ... and even that doesn't touch the profundity I'm hinting at. If you've ever been completely overwhelmed by the magnificence of life, it's just the tiniest whiff of this realization that you're brushing up against.

But we're not ready to face this possibility. You can confirm this yourself, as your mind generates one explanation after another to disprove the fact that you're "really" experiencing anything. If it doesn't fit your worldview, psychological tension forces you to discard it. Of course you could just check again (and boy do I encourage you to, as many thousands of times as necessary), but who has time to confront their own outrageously profound existence? Ain't nobody got time for that. It's so much easier to just let the intellect run amok.

The one thing you can actually be meaningfully sure of is the one thing we can't fit into the theory. And yet we continue to insist that the cart come before the horse. And that is why the problem won't go away -- not because we haven't figured out the appropriate math, or been willing to overcome our ape-like beliefs.

"I think consciousness will remain a mystery. Yes, that's what I tend to believe. I tend to think that the workings of the conscious brain will be elucidated to a large extent. Biologists and perhaps physicists will understand much better how the brain works. But why something that we call consciousness goes with those workings, I think that will remain mysterious. I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness...

I'm not going to attempt to define consciousness, in a way that's connected with the fact that I don't believe it will become part of physics. ... And that has to do, I think, with the mysteries that bother a lot of people about quantum mechanics and its applications to the universe. ... Quantum mechanics kind of has an all-embracing property, that to completely make sense it has to be applied to everything in sight, including ultimately, the observer. But trying to apply quantum mechanics to ourselves makes us extremely uncomfortable. Especially because of our consciousness, which seems to clash with that idea. So we're left with a disquiet concerning quantum mechanics, and its applications to the universe. And I do not believe that disquiet will go away. If anything, I suspect that it will acquire new dimensions." 

-- Ed Witten