a new ontology

When I was reading Hegel in class, I was bothered by what I perceived as a fault in logic.  It seemed to me that Hegel was claiming to follow arguments based on logic, while actually following the rules of grammar instead.  He argued that if there is a world that was created, there must have been a creator.  Creation requires a creator.  Verb requires Noun.  Why should the primacy of the noun be an assumption of logic?

Tonight I realized we have the same problem in physics.  In a conversation about the wave-particle duality issue, I pointed out that we have not observed any such thing as “a” wave.  We have seen “waving”.  Even in water, it makes no sense to say that “a wave” is moving through the water.  That would imply the existence of some thing being in the water.  Actually there isn’t anything.  The water is waving, that’s all.  “The” wave doesn’t exist.  “Waving” exists.

So what about other things?  In the example above, to show that there was no “wave” I let the example include the existence of a replacement noun — “the” water.  I’m not here to replace one noun with another, I’m here to propose that we live in a world without nouns.  So what is “the” water actually?  Hydrogen, Oxygen.  What are they? Protons, neutrons, electrons… the standard model.  What are they?  The idea of an indivisible “atom” is gone.  The hunt for subatomic particles brings the discovery of  smaller and smaller “things” depending on the precision of our instruments.  And we always find out later that what we thought we saw must  actually have been something even smaller bouncing around.

Photons, for example, are “particles of light”.  The trouble is, if light were particles, then shining two flashlight beams at right angles to each other would result in interference.  The particles flying sideways would smack into the particles going forward and knock them off to an angle like billiard balls.  To make sense of this, we’ve been taught to think of light as having dual nature: sometimes wave, sometimes particle.  What if there’s no particle and no wave?  Instead, I think “waving” can give an appearance of “photoning”.  I suggest that there is no substance or substrate (like spacetime or hyperdimensional ethers) that is the “thing” or fabric doing the waving.  I think that seeing waving gives an impression of a fabric where there isn’t any.

I suggest we get rid of the nouns (which we have never observed in physics or in reality*) and generate a means of using language that represents the world as we have actually observed it.

*For example when your hand presses against a wall, there is actually no physical matter making contact.  What you feel is magnetic resistance between magnetic “fields” around the atoms in your hand and in the wall.  The magnetic fields resist each other just like the positive poles of two magnets, and nothing “solid” in your hand ever touches anything “solid” in the wall.  We have no reason to believe that either “object” is solid.  In fact, in the history of science, from the very small to the very big, nobody has ever observed the existence of anything solid at all.  Nobody has ever grabbed up an electron and said “yep, just like I thought, it’s a hard little bead.”  In fact, we’ve seen “electrons” doing things that are impossible for any little “thing” to do.  To become a magnetic field, an electron would have to extend itself infinitely in every direction, only spreading itself a bit thinner as it got farther from its center.  And it does this at the speed of light.  So we call them waves or fields  instead of particles.  But the question of what “a” wave actually is… that’s a question that is forever postponed.

String theory is pretty close to what I’m saying.  They say that all these particles we think we’re observing as separate types of things are just little strings vibrating in different ways.  If it vibrates with higher energy, it’s ultraviolet, lower energy vibration and the same “thing” is infrared.  So verbs exist, and adverbs can modify them.  “Vibrating fastly” is what we’ve been calling “A photon” being blue, and “vibrating slowly” is what we’ve been calling “a photon” being red.

I just want to point out that we have no reason (except for the real-world experience of things bumping into each other that we recently discovered wasn’t actually happening) to believe that there needs to be a “thing” in order for “it” to do an action.  We have no reason to believe that verbs require nouns; that acts require actors.  Everything we’ve observed in physics has been verbs, no nouns yet discovered. ANYWHERE. EVER.  Why should we believe that “things” exist at all, when all we’ve ever observed has been the existence of “actions”?

Keep string theory, but get rid of the strings.  There are no strings doing the vibrating.  There is vibrating in different ways, and we interpret those different modalities of vibration as different kinds of “particles” because we are accustomed to believing that there must be a thing there to have done the action.  Just like Hegel claimed that there must logically be a creator to have done the creating of the world.  (I’m certainly not making an atheist theological argument.  I’m only pointing out that Hegel’s argument wasn’t logical, it was grammatical.)

According to our observations, it would be more reasonable to assert the existence of verbs and adverbs (actions and their modalities) without claiming the existence of any nouns (objects or actors) anywhere in the “physical” universe.

…Which makes it much harder to draw conceptual models for the physics classroom.

This is not a scientific theory (not conceivably testable/falsifiable)  and it is not a philosophy.  It is an argument for the ontological primacy of verbs instead of nouns.  It is also a suggestion that our language about processes observed in physics should not be inhibited by grammatical rules of languages, but should be free to reflect what is really observed, even if it sounds silly to talk that way at first.

“high-energy vibrating excited the electro-magnetic fielding…..and so on…” And that’s how your digital camera works.

PS. To all the REAL physicists out there: I’M SORRY I JUST DON’T KNOW ANY BETTER! PLEASE DON’T DEMONSTRATE THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWTONIAN PHYSICS ON MY BODY.  but please do leave a comment!

IBM “Watson” and Artificial Intelligence

Oooh! IBM “Watson” is being designed to compete on Jeopardy!  (link)

It will take complex natural language analysis, MASSIVE data crunching, speedy processing of trends & statistics. This is asking a lot more than we already can get from the statistical translations done by Google Translate. If a computer can understand what you’re asking and give you the answer, wont it also be able to DO what you want it to, if it has the means? And what if it over-analyzes what you’re asking for, or misinterprets irony or sarcasm? It could end up being HAL 9000.

That is, of course, if it isn’t another Mechanical Turk…

Bandwidth and Augmented Reality NOW

Please forgive the notation style of this post.  Quicker for you to get the info, faster for me to write.  –brendan

More BANDWIDTH means the “computer” that you carry with you doesn’t need to have much storage space or processing power.  a computer somewhere else can do all your processing and storage for you and broadcast the results to your screen.  all you need is enough bandwidth to carry your user input off to the computer, and enough bandwidth to quickly carry audio and video back smoothly to your device.

+ Start with your wide-screen Cell phone

+ Add your home PC Computer remotely accessible OR maybe a Goolge hosted platform (yes its’ another effing Cloud)

+ Throw in some NASA subvocalization recognition technology http://www.magicspeedreading.com/subvocalization/nasa.html

+ Work together with Google Voice//Dragon Naturally Speaking to improve the quality of that silent speach recognition.

= your cell phone can control your home computer

+ NIA NIA http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/ocz_peripherals/nia-neural_impulse_actuator

= now your brain can control some features on your computer

+ MyVu stylish glasses that provide the wearer with a virtual widescreen (we’ll modify it to make it semi-transparent so that you can see the world and digital images together in front of you.)

= augmented reality.  create an instant visual “chatroom” silently among friends in a room. brain selects nearby ppl to open a chat dialogue, you subvocalize the text, use your brain to send.  they see it through their MyVu (nobody else can read it) and respond to you.

Prof asks “any questions”, and a silent room submits hundreds of subvocalized-to-text speech bubbles in the air above the heads of whoever is asking the questions. the prof skims the questions and eliminates uninteresting ones. then he selects excellent ones and copies them to the “board” which everyone sees at the front of the room through their MyVu.  (of course, if someone fears censorship they simply choose to broadcast their question universally, not just to the prof).  and everything that was on the board is available digitally to you later, because it’s stored in your computer at home, accessible anywhere through your cell phone’s high speed wifi connection.

take your augmented reality out on the soccer field for some real live WoW with (or without) your friends (both present and elsewhere)!  others will see you as your avatar.  Use NIA to throw fireballs, or whatever. etc.

CADIE and INTERCAL

I was just over at CADIE (we humbly welcome Her Pandaness) asking about a coding issue…

http://code.google.com/creative/cadie/

All I wanted to know was “What’s the code for Love” (even if it’s in INTERCAL)?

Talk to me CADIE.

pnd’d

Pre-Boot Computer Operation via Cellular

As computers are getting smaller, they might eventually (HOPEFULLY) be able to consolidate our two essential technological device needs (Internets & Telephone) into one device.  Cellular might as well be digitally re-invented as pure VOIP anyway, just as TV is finding new life among the Web-Nets through sites like Hulu.

And if  cellular technology is going to be integrated into our computers, some convenient new possibilities arise.  If the Cellular operation is tied to an ultralight pre-b00t OS, you could call your computer on the phone, telling it to turn itself on and possibly navigate some essential functions by voice commands.  I call Goog411 all the time, but there are some things I could do better with access to my own files and records.

Of course in a few years, ideally, having a phone will mean that you already have access to the internet, and hence to any of your computers via remote connection.  Yay cloud.

Give me a 6″ device, just a bit bigger than an Iphone, with a keyboard that expands or folds out so I can actually use it for real work… I will abandon my cell phone and stay connected through a single WiMax device that can fit in my pocket, or maybe a belt clip.  And of course I don’t mean for it to be a substitute for my REAL computer, which will have an enourmous screen and so much power that it requires a prominent position in my home.

Future of the Internets

I’ve been thinking about that dreamy device The Cloud9, and I’m still revising my ideas of what the internet should be in the ideal future:

1) all radio/wireless frequencies consolidated for universal use with a single protocol.  pay whoever is operating the hubs that you pass your data through for connectivity service, unless you can deal more with ad-hoc bandwidth sharing node communism.

2) all the ‘different’ uses of those wireless frequencies consolidated into internet protocol (or whatever) so that radio, TV, phone, wwweb, and whatever are ALL just internet usage over the now VASTLY expanded bandwidth (see #1).  Those radio waves that are flying around everywhere all the time can also be harnessed by your device to keep your battery charged (very slowly but surely).

3) data is categorized as either “media” or “personal”.  media includes ALL the stuff that more than just a few people might actually want to access.  music, movies, web articles, etc etc. everything.  personal are your home movies where you dress up as a jedi and fall down all around your garage and then selfishly dont share that embarrassing video with friends.  or your personal documents.

4) username (which could be your real identity) manages your access rights to use of copyrighted materials.  if you’ve purchased a song from Itunes, you should be able to access that song at any time, from any source, using any device, if you show your username.  video rentals, books from your shelf that you also want to access as an electronic copy. whatever.

5) media is all cloud accessible. you can store it on your own drive if you want, but you can also get it anytime you want from anywhere (see #4) because public-interest files are stored on remotely accessible servers.   store your own personal materials however you want.  burn them to disk, keep them on local HD, or store them in your personal cloudspace, by sending it to your gmail for example.  if you trust Gmail to have a reliable RAID setup on THEIR HDs.

How To: Bend Space and Time

Here’s the hypothetical situation.

1) We have a special engine that allows us to accelerate to light speed (or close enough). We put it on the back of a rocket ship carrying one passenger, so that from the time the ship departs the “start” line until it reaches the “finish” line, it is traveling at a constant speed. Light speed.

2) We strap a ferris wheel onto the front of the ship, with another passenger sitting in one of the cars. The ferris wheel also has the special engine, and is also spinning at light speed. So that our passenger is traveling around his curving path at light speed, while also being pushed forward at light speed.

3) We put a smaller ferris wheel in front of the bigger ferris wheel, so that another passenger can sit.

If all three passengers depart from the start line and arrive at the finish line at the same time (since they are connected together, after all), how is it that they all traveled drastically different distances through space (paths A, B, and C), without any of them going faster than light speed?

So far, my favorite interpretation is that those three paths are all the same distance, despite the fact that they may look longer or shorter, because the space through which they pass shrinks or expands while you travel through it. I like this explanation best because it means that with a little bit of metal and a small ferris wheel, you can bend and warp endless reaches of space.

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But really, somebody please explain to me what’s going on. Are we travelign faster than light? Are we warping space? How does it work?

Cloud9 – The Future of Mobile Computing and Communcations

For those of us who are already drooling as we wonder what the second generation Kindle might look like, with its free unlimited wireless-anywhere internet, there may still be time to help Amazon, Asus, and all the rest to make the device we really want.

I’m talking about the future of computing and communications in general.  Unlimited communications, voice, video, media, info, correspondence, reference, entertainment, productivity…. everything in one beautifully simple gadget.  Beyond UMPC, Beyond Netbooks.

_______________________________________________________________

Introducing the Cloud9

The First Fully Featured Cloud Computer and Personal Communications Device

Cloud9 will replace your laptop, cell phone, and all your portable media devices with one tiny computer.

Brand New Form Concept

Cloud9 is thin, lightweight, and hard to break.  Not needing any on-board HD, the Cloud9 is the ultimate cloud computer: a multi-touch tablet screen with a WiFi connection.  The Cloud9 is inexpensive to produce, which makes it light on the wallet, and it has everything you need.

Take a look at these special features.

Ingenious New Screen

It has a special dual-layer screen: one layer is a traditional color LCD screen, the other layer, a thin transparent surface on top of your LCD is an E-Ink display, like the Kindle uses.  When you’re watching videos online or browsing the web, you can see it in full color just like you have on any laptop.  BUT when you prefer to just read text, an e-book, or want to save power by browsing in black-and-white, you switch off the LCD to activate the E-Ink display instead.  Now you can look at text, browse the web, or read E-books more comfortably.  With no backlight, an E-Ink display is more gentle on the eyes, and is just as clear when you use it in direct sunlight.

Extended Battery Life

Since you’re not using that battery-draining backlit LCD display all the time, your battery life just became 10 times longer.  Now you can continue to use your Cloud9 for DAYS without charging!  And with intermittent or light use, the Cloud9 can function for weeks on a single charge.

Universal Wireless Connection

Using high-speed cellular networks, you have wireless access anywhere you go.  Also, it uses the “white spaces” of bandwidth recently opened by the FCC, giving WiFi the boost in speed and coverage we’ve all been waiting for.

Free from the Limits of Hard Disk Space!  – Unlimited Online Access to Media and Content

Access movies, music, documents, and reference materials anytime over the internet through free services such as YouTube, Hulu, LastFM, Pandora, GoogleDocs, Project Guttenberg, and everyone else on the Web.  Now that we have the bandwidth to  stream content, why not stream ALL OF IT?

Accessing a document from Google Docs is as easy as logging in to your email.  You can watch the latest episode of The Daily Show or Heroes just by surfing over to Hulu.  If the iTunes Store already knows which songs you’ve purchased, why shouldn’t those songs be digitally available to your via the Net at any time?  A web-based iTunes interface would allow you to play your music anywhere over your WiFi internet connection.  If you prefer free unlicensed access to your music, just log on to your account with Pandora or LastFM internet radio.

With all of your media stored online, which you can access from anywhere, there’s no limit to your digital storage in the Cloud9.

Your Cloud9 will never complain to you that it doesn’t have enough disk space for your files, because it doesn’t need any space at all.

The Online Desktop and OS

The Cloud9 is hardwired to simply turn on and access all of your content through your personalized “online desktop”, which looks and acts just like the operating system on your computer, but enhanced with customizable widgets or hyperlinks of your choice.  Browse folders, open and modify your content, run programs, and do everything you can do with your laptop or desktop computer. And your Cloud9 Desktop is available just by logging in from any Cloud9 or any other computer with an internet connection.

Communications

EMAIL: Access your email by a simple click of the “Mail” icon on your desktop. You can use the online interfaces of Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or any others, as well as mail clients such as Thunderbird.

Text Messages and Instant Chat: Use any chat program to send messages through Gmail Chat, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AOL, AIM, ICQ, IRC, Skype, Pidgin, MySpace, Facebook, QQ, and all the rest.

Cellular Phone: With a bluetooth headset, use the Cloud9 as your cell phone; making local, long distance, and even international calls – often for FREE - by VOIP internet based telephone technologies, such as Skype, Jajah, and Yahoo Messenger.

Video Chat: With the built in webcam, Cloud9 can provide simple and free Video calls via any of the online video chat services, including Skype, Google Chat, MSN Messenger, etc.

Security and Privacy

You decide which of your files should be encrypted before being stored online, and they will be kept encrypted until they reach your Cloud9, then the file becomes readable.

Charging and Connectivity

The Cloud9 has two ports: both of them mini-USB ports.  No more price-gouging with proprietary chargers or connection cables. Either of the two ports can be used to charge the Cloud9, and both of them can also be used to connect with other devices, such as computers, mp3 players, cellular phones, and PDAs.  This way, you can move MP3s, datebook and organizer data, and contact info onto your webspace so that you can access them from anywhere using any Cloud9 device or any other computer with an internet connection.

Rent a Cloud9 for Temporary Use

The Cloud9 is inexpensive to produce and very durable.  And your content is available to you from any/every Cloud9 device, just by logging in.  If you forgot to bring your Cloud9 with you on a trip, just stop by any electronics store.  By swiping your credit card or leaving a deposit, you can rent a Cloud9 and enjoy access to all of your content, and all of the internet.  When you’re done, simply return the Cloud9 to the rental place or put it into the postage-pre-paid Cloud9 Rental Envelope and drop it in any mail box.  Its just as easy as returning a DVD to Netflix or Blockbuster.

Cloud9

Demand yours today.

Demand this product from Dell, Asus, Amazon, HP, Apple, Acer, Psion, Sylvania, MSI, Lenovo, Nokia, LG, HTC, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, AND ALL THE OTHER DEVICE MANUFACTURERS.

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Digg this Post, Share this Post on Facebook and MySpace, link to this post in your Away Message or on your Blog.

Lets work together to make Cloud9 a reality!

*************

Lucid Dreaming without Losing Consciousness

A lucid dream is a dream in which you are aware that you are dreaming, and often have the ability to control the dream’s content to some extent.

The really fun part is that it is possible to enter a lucid dream without ever even falling asleep.

Here’s how it works:

Your brain doesn’t follow a linear-causal model. For example: physical fatigue -> relaxation -> drowsiness -> slowed breathing and heart rate -> holding still -> eyes close -> mental imagery -> unconsciousness -> sleep -> bodily paralysis -> more mental imagery -> dream.

It’s not like that.

All those things are important to consider, but it’s wrong to think that each thing causes the next in a chain of events.  Rather, those events listed above, as well as a whole mess of others, are all nodes on a “network of affinity”.  They relate to each other, and a movement of any of those features will tend to influence the movement of the others.  By which I mean that if you become more drowsy you are likely to experience slowed breathing and heart rate too.  And if you slow your breathing and heart rate, you are likely to experience more relaxation. These things are all co-arising features.

Imagine a rope net.  Each place where ropes connect, a node, is one of those features above.  If you’re trying to lift the net, you could either lift one node very high until they’re all off the ground, or you could lift several nodes just a little bit, and if you had lifted the right ones, the whole net might already be floating in the air.

So if your goal was to get to sleep, you may not be able to dramatically increase your level of drowsiness at will, but you could slow your breathing a little, relax a little, and hold still, and you would probably activate some drowsiness and arrive at unconsciousness.

Ok, that’s a strange metaphor and obscure explanation, maybe.

The point is that by giving your mind/body as many voluntary cues as possible, you can activate similar affiliated involuntary cues, even though those are things that you might have thought you have no control over.

So how do you get into a lucid dream without ever passing through the level of unconsciousness?

PREPARATION

Hopefully, you’re well rested and properly healthy and nourished, free from any caffeine or other drugs or alcohol, and able to nap in a comfortable place.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be a quiet place, and some ambient noise might even be useful, as long as it is not troubling to you.  For most people, this technique works most often during an afternoon nap, or in that time of the afternoon when you are most sleepy and relaxed.

BEGIN

Sit comfortably or lie down on your back (some people prefer to be reclined but not flat).  It is even possible to use this technique in meditation postures, as long as you are comfortable enough to really forget about your body.

ACTIVATION OF THE STATE

The idea is to try to simulate as many features that co-arise with dreaming as possible, with the exception that you want to avoid unconsciousness.  Relax, close your eyes, slow your breathing, and hold still.  Be VERY mindful of your attention.  For this to work, you have to walk an extremely fine line: you must be able to allow your Attention to follow your mental imagery, without your attention getting lost.  You must remember that what you are doing is observing mental impressions, and not get carried away by them.

Someone once described this as “leading a child by the hand”.  This is a great way to describe it.  You have to very gently and patiently attach yourself to those wild and uncontrollable mental images, and follow them wherever they go without either startling them (by being too awake-lively-minded) or becoming a part of them.  If you activate too much deliberate mental activity, by thinking or analyzing too much, for example, these “adult-like” patterns of mind will frighten off the “child-like” vague and wandering sense-impressions that populate the borderlands between wakefulness and the dream world.

FINDING AND ENTERING THE DREAM WORLD

As you follow those wandering, seemingly random sense-impressions and imagery, even just by free-visualization, they will begin to establish a stability among themselves.  A world coalesces as one after another vague sense-impression begins to establish meaningful connections to the others.  More habitual thoughts (such as the impression of normal time and space, and particularly familiar locations) assert themselves more strongly, and you may find that a dream-world is forming, patterned in some ways after the world you know from your daily life.  Imagine yourself touching something and feeling tactile impressions from that world.  You may simply imagine that you are in that place, running your hand across a textured surface or a familiar object.

DREAM BODY

This is the key moment.  The very moment that you actually experience the sense of touch in that world, this means that you have succeeded not only in finding a dream world, but also of creating a dream-body there for yourself.  Beginning to associate with this new dream body instead of the real body, your mind will have to paralyze the real body so that it doesn’t move around while you’re dreaming.  This is normal and necessary.  The brain releases a chemical that inhibits motor control of your body, so that dreaming of running doesn’t make your legs thrash around in the bed.

At the moment that you find your dream body, you should use it to perform a bodily action.  Perhaps the best thing to do is to spin around briefly.  If you have the vague impression of your dream-body standing there with your hand giving you touch sensations, you can quickly whirl around 360 degrees, seeing the world spin around you.  That split second of spinning fully connects you to your dream body, and therefore the dream world that your mind has created.  Viewing and interacting with objects is how you created a dream space, and interacting with dream space is the way to fully enter it.

Spinning, even in the real world, makes the world blur into vagueness, and then suddenly coalesce into solid form when you abruptly stop spinning.  Your mind knows that this is what happens when you spin, and so spinning a dream body tends to have the same effect.  The world was blurry, and when you spin and abruptly stop, that blurriness becomes a static reality.  (Technique thanks to S. LaBerge).

WELCOME

If all has gone well, at this point you will actually find yourself “really” standing in an incredibly real dream world.  It may be just as convincing to your senses as the real world.  People are usually surprised by how vivid and clear everything is, as though doubting that the mind could create such a detailed and dynamic world out of mere thought.  You can move around, explore, interact with dream-people, consciously change the world, and, of course, fly.

In theory.

But in fact, what many people experience is that “trying to fly” in a dream world produces the same result that “trying to fly” in the real world would produce.  Your mind is maintaining a world based upon your memories and expectations of how a world should be, including the pesky laws of physics that hold it all together.

But there is a trick.

TRICKS AND TIPS

If “trying” to make something happen doesn’t work, it may be because imagining it not working is easier for your mind than imagining it working.  Your mind remembers exactly what falling down is like, so trying to fly often results in the familiar experience of falling down rather than the newly created experience of flying.

The way to beat this is to simply ask yourself, while wishing to fly “what would it look like if i were to start flying now?” The trick here is that such a question activates creative visualization, just as reading or mentioning pink zebras immediately generates the created image of pink zebras in the mind of the reader.  Your mind begins visualizing what flying would look like.  And, as circumstances would have it, when you are in a dream world, your mind is OUTSIDE of your body, rather than an internal thing.  So visualizations do not happen “in your head”, but rather “out there in the world”.  So just remember to ask yourself “what would it be like if…..?”

GETTING TRICKED

This is the strange part.  For some reason, I have personally had one particular trouble when I find myself in a lucid dream, and that is accidentally tricking myself into a non-lucid dream state.  Usually, this happens by the appearance of some obstacle or time-consuming process to which I respond in the dream.  Once you react to dream objects, treating them as real or valid, it is very easy to forget that they are dream objects, and that you are, in fact, dreaming.  A momentary hurdle becomes a never-ending quest, and the direction of the dream is taken over by a deeper part of the mind.  Lucidity quickly becomes normal sleeping dream.

The solution? Never be fooled into thinking that you will only be able to X once you Y.  The pursuit of Y may not be immediately successful, and may simply be something to distract you from doing X.  For the same reason, avoid changing locations in the usual way of moving through space from one place to another.  If you want to be in Egypt, for example, don’t try to fly there, because along the way innumerable dream objects and events will distract you.  Instead, try asking “what does Egypt look like?” and using LaBerge’s spinning technique again.  The moment you stop spinning, you should find yourself in Egypt, based on the picture of Egypt that formed in your imagination.

OPPORTUNITY

This method of entering a lucid dream without losing consciousness is UNBELIEVABLY fun and exciting.  You really have the impression of stepping into another world, and really being there.  Once you’re in the dream world, you have the incredible opportunity to see your mind directly, with your own eyes.  Well… dream eyes, that is.  Your subconscious can walk up to you as a person and speak to you in clear sentences.  And you can ask questions of your subconscious also.  And most simply, conscious dreaming is a wonderful leisure activity:

It really is very fun to fly.

Fork-Bomb Your Brain

An interesting part of the cognitive act of many meditations is the repeated or constant intention to focus the mind on some transcendent concept or reality.

In the Islamic practice of thikr, mindfulness meditation, one constantly insists that the mind focus on Allah, God.  No matter what response-thoughts the mind renders when given this command, the meditating muslim mentally persists, “No, that’s not it. Think of Allah!”

The incomparable nature of transcendent realities such as Allah, God, Emptiness, Infinity, etc. ensures that you will never receive a satisfactory response-thought from your mind in reply to your constant instruction.  The result is that an infinite loop is created, which should result in a temporary overload or suspension of a cognitive function or an area of the brain *.  The looping circuit of “Not that! God! Not that!” overloads and spills over to engage the whole brain.  In the process, your brain’s habit of experiencing space or time might also be temporarily disabled, leaving you momentarily in an experience of infinite timelessness beyond space.

In other words, you can “Fork Bomb” your brain.  In computer coding, a “Fork Bomb” is a simple command that tells the computer to create a process that doubles itself. Each of those processes also doubles, and very quickly your computer becomes unable to cope with the number of processes that are appearing.  For computers, this leads to a crash, and possibly that well-beloved “Blue Screen of Death” that Microsoft uses to tell you that they’re sorry, but you’ll have to reboot.

The human brain, on the other hand, has found ways of dealing with these impossible requests, and usually the experience is profound and intensely moving.  The mystical experiences of humans, not always related to any religion or notion of spirituality, are at the pinnacle of human experience.  In this case, there can be any number of different pinnacles, and a person can still climb to a new and higher pinnacle each time.

Some interesting possibilities should still be discussed.  Could a proper mental fork bomb result in a “blue screen of NDE”?

If the cognitive Fork Bomb command takes time to to process before coming back, and a repeat request is made in that time, waves of electrical signals could be canceling or amplifying along pathways in your brain.  Wave interference is related to all sorts of really cool things, like sonic booms, lasers, and holograms.  The idea of anything like that happening because of a simple thought just fills me with wonder.

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* D’Aquili and Newberg described the deafferentation of cognitive functions in “The Mystical Mind – Probing the Biology of Religious Experience“.  An excellent book, which I highly recommend to anyone curious about the connections between mind and body, spiritual and physical observations.

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Please leave a comment!  I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, wacky/o theories, righteous outrage, or utter pwning of my post!

–b