The dissolution of consciousness as we fall asleep

[eric144]

In physics the 4th dimension is time. <p></p><i></i>

[anotherdrew]

right, but the trick when thinking about hypercubs and such is to imagine time as being simply another 'direction' like height, width and depth.<br><br>I don't think that time needs to be a dimension tho, except as a variable in equations. It could just as well be explained as purely the sequence of different posible configurations in space. I know there are many objections to that within conventional physics, but conventional physics has many problems too. time as mere sequence would explain why it's so long been said that time is an illusion. (lunchtime doubly so). <p></p><i></i>

[marykmusic]

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>In physics the 4th dimension is time. <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>...But not necessarily LINEAR time, which is an artificial methodology by which we are controlled. We don't see the totality of inter-connectedness because we're stuck in a linear time-frame. --MaryK <p></p><i></i>

[JimNelson]

To those curious about 3D/4D relationships, an approachable guide is Michio Kaku's book 'Hyperspace.' He's a particle physicist at City College, New York, and runs through a number of different methods of allowing a layperson to conceptualize what higher dimensions might entail. There's also a very interesting chapter on the "history" of fourth dimensional concepts from the late 19th century, delving into sensational trials in London, the work of H.G. Wells, and other other authors.<br><br>The quote above: "I think I may sometimes be too "left brain" to see a ghost, for example. Maybe ghosts are real, and maybe someone else will see it...but my logic filters are too strong (despite being open minded in many ways to these phenomena)," is (I think--I'm no expert schmexpert) what Julian Jaynes was proposing in his book 'The Bicameral Nature of the Human Mind.' He thought that ancient man had much more "right brain" funtionality, and was in contact with the spirit world. With the emergence of language, "left brain" function became dominant, and nowadays, in our linear, rigid, Western scientific society, we humans have lost the capacity for contact with the supernatural (or preternatural, for that matter). I am over-simplifying, and possibly misconstrueing his arguments, but I think that's the essence. <br><br>Functional MRI (fMRI) is difficult to perform on sleeping subjects for a number of technical reasons. It is well-established that the reticular activating center in the brainstem, as well as motor neuron relays, switch off as you fall asleep. Cortical neurons, probably in the amygdala/mesiotemporal/limbic system, are left with the task of processing the days neurobiochemical events, which sometimes assume to form of bizarre dreams. Some of the quasi-supernatural stuff that this forum entertains, hypnogogic and hypnopompic imagery, may have to do with the re-emergence of right hemisphere function. The persistence of such imagery, noises, etc. even after "waking" could be neurochemical (the chemical milieu of the dreamscape hasn't fully "washed-out" yet), or possibly involves transient continuation of right hemisphere functionality, ala Jaynes. A 2002 article sheds some light on this: <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://hendrix.ei.dtu.dk/services/jerne/brede/WOBIB_124.html">hendrix.ei.dtu.dk/service...B_124.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>I always find amusing (or troubling, depending on my mood) Western (ie. scientific) society's arrogance when it has no real explanation for an activity that occupies 30 percent of our daily lives (Not to mention our befuddlement at the true nature of what we call light).<br>"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (obligatory pompous end-post Shakespeare quote)<br> <p></p><i></i>

[prunesquallori]

<!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://banubula.blogspot.com/2005/06/hintons-cubes-from-c.html">banubula.blogspot.com/2005/06/hintons-cubes-from-c.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://pturing.firehead.org/occult/misc-pdf/scientific_romances.pdf">pturing.firehead.org/occult/misc-pdf/scientific_romances.pdf</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_011/fourth_dimension.pdf">www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_011/fourth_dimension.pdf</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_011/hintoncubes.pdf">www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_011/hintoncubes.pdf</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br> <p></p><i></i>

[JimNelson]

Mary, we posted simultaneously (in defiance of linearity, perhaps). Linear models have limited applicabilty (unable to describe fields of energy, for instance), and our linear approach to time is most likely deeply flawed.<br><br>Phillip Dick had a riff in 'Scanner Darkly' about time being a circle, and has the main character, Bob Arctor (who is fried from addiction to Substance D) conclude that life goes on after death because of the non-linearity of time.<br>Substance D caused both right and left hemispheres to achieve co-dominance, and allowed poor Bob to see both reality and the mirror-image, backwards, nature of reality. If a left-hand glove is picked up from a 2D plane and flipped by a 3D person, and placed back into a 2D plane, it becomes a right-hand glove. Trans-dimensional mirror-symmetry. If a 4D creature were to similarly interact with us 3D creatures, then...? <p></p><i></i>

[JimNelson]

Prunesquallori--thank you.<br><br>Quote from first article:<br><br>After a period of limited popularity, Hinton and his strange cubes lapsed into obscurity. They were re-discovered again in the 1950's when they were featured in an article in Scientific American by Martin Gardner. Gardner presented some of the same history I have given here. Shortly after the publication of his article, he received a series of letters from readers who were both amazed and also a little concerned about the rediscovery of the cubes. Here is one such letter:<br><br>Dear Mr. Gardner:<br><br>A shudder ran down my spine when I read your reference to Hinton's cubes. I nearly got hooked on them myself in the nineteen-twenties. Please believe me when I say that they are completely mind-destroying. The only person I ever met who had worked with them seriously was Francis Sedlak, a Czech neo-Hegelian Philosopher (he wrote a book called The Creation of Heaven and Earth) who lived in an Oneida-like community near Stroud, in Gloucestershire.<br>As you must know, the technique consists essentially in the sequential visualizing of the adjoint internal faces of the poly-colored unit cubes making up the larger cube. It is not difficult to acquire considerable facility in this, but the process is one of autohypnosis and, after a while, the sequences begin to parade themselves through one's mind of their own accord. This is pleasurable, in a way, and it was not until I went to see Sedlak in 1929 that I realized the dangers of setting up an autonomous process in one's own brain. For the record, the way out is to establish consciously a countersystem differing from the first in that the core cube shows different colored faces, but withdrawal is slow and I wouldn't recommend anyone to play around with the cubes at all. <br><br>After Gardner's article and another small revival, the cubes were again forgotten. Recently the author Rudy Rucker has also tried to revive interest in Hinton's toys. Although I haven't felt the urge to do so, my copy of Hinton's book gives all the details for constructing the cubes. <p></p><i></i>

[Dreams End]

sorry I hijacked with my tesseract picture...though the discussion was interesting and it got back on track. Just wanted to acknowledge that I derailed things a bit.<br><br>But at risk of rederailing....the hypercube is a conception of an object in 4 spatial dimensions...or its shadow anyway, though you could, I suppose let one of those be time. For mathematicians (though not for me) it's not hard to consider and even work with, objects in higher dimensions. (think of the pythagorean theorem. It says for a right triangle, a^2 + b^2 = c^2. This can be extended in three dimensions to the diagonal of a rectangular prism thus a^2 + b^2 +c^2 = d^2. While I don't know for sure, I assume for the sake of example that there is such a theorem in 4d space: a^2 + b^2 + c^2 +d^2 = e^2. I'm probably wrong, but at least it demonstrates how a mathematician can easily play around with mathematical models that most of us can't really visualize.) String theory, still a favorite, I think, among physicists, suggests 11 spatial dimensions. Though most are so tightly wound that it's no wonder we can't "see" them.<br><br>I just started that line of thought not because I'm an expert (for some reason, even visualizing in 3d is hard for me...I don't have the skill), but because these things are so counter to our experience that we see how limited our perspective is and how things like "consciousness" may not be explainable in terms we have access to right now.<br><br>Or, as I said, most Western philosophers would be happy to erase the (sometimes) implied dualism of the term consciousness. (It doesn't have to be dualistic, but in common use I think we really mean something that directs the material processes in the brain. I don't mean "consciousness" for example, just to mean awake to sensory input etc, but also the ability to experience those experiences subjectively.)<br><br>Really interesting thread. <br><br> <p></p><i></i>

[starroute]

Dream's End -<br><br>I didn't mean to suggest that the various persons of DID resided in separate brain functions. It's more that creating a unitary identity out of a grabbag of mental inputs is like doing a connect-the-dots puzzle with no numbers next to the dots. Depending on how you connect them, you might get a dog, or a camel, or an alien spaceship. Most of us settle on a single "solution" and discard the other possibilities, but some do not.<br><br>My own belief is that much of this has to do with what I've seen called the Problem of the One and the Many. (Does that go back to Plato? Something ancient Greekish, I'm pretty sure.) We live in a universe which on the basis of mere sensory inspection would appear to consist of a bunch of disconnected fragments, flying about at random with no particular goal. And yet something inside us keeps insisting that the universe is, in fact, a coherent whole with a direction and a purpose of its own.<br><br>That same intuitive sense also tells us that we ourselves are an aspect of that cosmic whole -- but here the interpretations get fuzzy as they pass through human understanding. Some philosophies claim that we are only broken fragments of the whole, incomplete in ourselves and needing to subordinate ourselves to something larger and more perfect. Others see us as microcosmic reflections of the whole, already complete and needing only to refine our individual sense of identity and purpose in order to reflect the whole more perfectly.<br><br>My take on both these attitudes is that philosophies of the first kind tend to be fascist, or at least authoritarian, while those of the second kind veer into excessive libertarianism and egotism. It might be best thought of as a wave/particle kind of duality, with each interpretation to be taken as a useful counterbalance to the other.<br><br>Finally, there are those who insist that it's insufficient to regard the universe as a whole consisting of increasingly organized fragments -- that there has to be an original and unbroken wholeness behind the fragments-in-the-course-of-reassembling that is the physical universe. That original wholeness is generally referred to as "God."<br><br>For myself, I'm very suspicious of drawing philosophical conclusions of any kind, when all we know as certain is that we humans have an innate predisposition to regard both ourselves and phenomena in the world around us as coherent wholes rather than as unrelated collections of fragments. That tendency can be extremely useful -- giving rise to both art and science -- but pushing it too far winds you up with the sort of extreme conspiracy theories that blame 4000 years of human history on the Illuminati. And as awesome and overwhelming as mystical perceptions of Oneness may be, drawing any conclusions at all about the nature of just what is being perceived (not to mention the nature of just what is doing the perceiving) is certainly premature.<br> <p></p><i></i>

[Dreams End]

Well, in a certain way, solipsism is absolutely correct in terms of perception. We don't see objects outside of us...light reflects and a coherent image is then constructed inside of us...and, somehow not really clear, projected back outwards. In that sense, there is no "seer" and is no "seen". It's one, unbroken process. Unless we assume consciousness is somehow "outside" this system...and that goes back to the problem of dualism. <br><br>Thanks to all for this really cool thread. <p></p><i></i>

[prunesquallori]

Wonderful comment, starroute. The One and the Many problem precedes Plato by at least back to Zoroaster, and I wouldn't be surprised if it went back to Sumer. <p></p><i></i>