Your dreams and imagination evolved as a view into another universe. As with the current beliefs, you cannot decipher technical information – no words in books, no details of how devices work, so even if you can describe things you see from another place, you could not reproduce a working version.
Now how do you convince others that the things your are seeing are really happening without being labeled insane? And how could you use this information to benefit yourself or others? Take a peek into the multiverse to see how other versions of yourself have solved these problems…
Would you really want to prove it? What would that accomplish?
You’re probably going to be depressed either way: either your parallel life is worse or your parallel life is better. If it’s worse then you have to witness it and (I assume) can’t do anything about it. If it’s better then it’s not really you that gets to enjoy it, and is nothing more than an existential cocktease.
I guess if you’re really lucky parallel-universe-you might have invented something world-changing and you figure out how it works and bring that information back to your universe. But if it’s anything like most of my dreams it’s mostly just uncanny anxiety-inducing quasi-nightmares.
Existential cocktease is one of the best phrases ever coined, and exactly the phrase I have needed for years to explain many of my dreams. I don’t fall in love. Like, I’ve dated, and had a few relationships, but I’ve never really connected with a person in a romantic way. I love my family deeply, in a non romantic way, so I know I’m capable. But I just have never had that with a romantic partner.
But I routinely do in dreams. Several times a year, I’ll have a dream where I fall deeply in love someone. And then I wake up, and I’m depressed for days thinking about it. It’s an existential cocktease.
Thank you for giving me the language to describe that.
This is a bit of a tangent, but: does it bother you that you’ve never been in love? I suspect if it’s a premise that is popping up in your dreams, and conscious-you has recognised that contrast between dreams and reality, it must.
I think it’s actually fairly common. You’ve probably had partners you cared very deeply for, but not at an intensity you would consider “in love,” yeah? I don’t think that’s actually a problem and more relationships / marriages are like that than we think. Just two people that care about each other, enjoy each other’s company, get intimate periodically, and are trying to survive this flaming roller coaster of a life we’re all experiencing. That’s why “partner” is an apt term, we’re all just trying to survive (and thrive), not live out a Harlequin romance novel.
If it works for both of you I wouldn’t fret too much - but I know brains don’t really work that way.
Honestly, in a relationship, the closest I have gotten to is essentially friend with whom I bone. :/ Part of the problem, I think, is that it takes me quite a long time to really consider someone a friend. Like, I need to know someone really well before that bond forms, and none of my relationships have lasted that long. I also saw my mom try in a bad marriage, she thought she could “fix him,” and that’s a fate I’ve always wanted to avoid. I think sometimes I bail because I realize they’re not the person I want to spend my life with, so what’s the point in dating them, y’know? What I want out of a partner is someone with shared interests, and someone who has a similar approach to life. Someone I can talk to about philosophy, or the books we’re reading. The culture where I live doesn’t lend itself to that, generally speaking.
Yeah, it bothers me to a degree. Less because I really crave that relationship, I do to an extent, but more because I desperately wanted to be a dad, and the only way that’ll happen for me as a gay man is to be married so I can adopt.
I’m also not what you’d call a great looker, so finding a person to go out with on something other than a hookup is kinda rare. Not fishing there, just acknowledging a fact. I’m at peace with that on most days. Lol.
You mention the culture where you’re from – might I ask what part of the world you’re from?
I know this will sound very therapist-y, but why do you think it takes you so long to consider someone a friend? Do you have a very high threshold for what you consider a friend? Are you worried about trusting them?
Regarding the “they’re not the person I want to spend my life with, so what’s the point” statement: so what if you know you don’t want to spend your life with them? Are you enjoying your time with them at that moment? My friend, I worry that you’re sabotaging your present in search of your future, but what if you’re also sabotaging your future by doing that? We’re monkey-brained humans so we’re constantly pondering all “what ifs” and that can sometimes distract us from what is right in front of us at the time. We constantly spite good in search of perfection, but there usually isn’t such a thing. It’d be like refusing a modest lottery winning because you’re waiting for the big jackpot. Work with what you have, my dude!
I can appreciate being gay can greatly reduce the dating pool, too. I’m a bi man but most of my relationships have been het; scouring dating apps for gay men I find the vast majority I do not vibe with at all, and most bi men here are poly with het female partners and are looking for threesomes / group play – from my experience, anyway. So I can’t fully appreciate how difficult it is for you to find someone you connect with (culture where you’re from, someone to talk about philosophy and books, etc) but I do have some idea. However, even if they don’t check all your boxes, sometimes “good enough” can be good enough.
Ah, don’t be so hard on yourself. Most people are not “lookers” anyway. Win them over in other ways!
Rural ass Appalachia. Lol. By culture I was specifically referring to the gay culture here, but the culture writ large is also not one I particularly vibe with. I try my best not to paint with a broad brush, but it’s undeniable that there are certain cultural and social elements at play here. The gay culture here is absolutely inundated with meth and “parTying.” The larger general culture has an almost… Antagonistic view on anything even remotely academic or intellectual. On top of that, my political views just do not align with the vast majority of the people where I live. And I’m not trying to disparage anyone, I understand there are reasons for all of that, and that education in this region has historically been so poor that they’ve had to retool a lot of the testing specifically for this region. But I’ve lived here 10 years, and I’ve managed to make 3 friends, 2 of which live an hour away, and we meet up in a city that’s central to us.
As far as making friends goes, it’s not that I don’t trust them at first blush or anything, I guess I’m just sort of stuck in my own routine, and it takes quite a lot of time before I can adjust my programming to include another human into that. I have to feel a connection with them to want to include them in my life, and that takes time. On top of that, it’s incredibly difficult to find people with shared interests. And I know, I make the perfect the enemy of the good. I do that, and I need to stop.
But lemme tell you about my most recent date. Lol. Met this dude online, talked for 2 weeks. He seemed perfect. Great guy, exactly my type. Smart, funny, into nerdy shit, loves philosophy, he’s a writer.
We meet up at a local park, where’s there’s a busy walking trail. Go on an hour long walk, where he informs me the love of his life is in prison for dealing meth, will be getting out hopefully in 2032. He wants someone who will me in with him, and keep him company, be a companion until his man gets out of prison, at which point the relationship has an expiration date.
The guy before that was also pretty compatible, not exactly everything I wished for, but a good guy, i thought it could be something. We broke up because he was in the closet, which, fine, I understand that. What I couldn’t tolerate is how he would go out on the weekends with his cousins to go fagbashing. They’d catfish a guy on Grindr, and then pummel the shit out of him. He was so afraid of his family that he would participate in that. Which is horrible that he had to deal with family like that, but I just couldn’t sit by idly. He broke up with me when I reported turned in his cousins.
Tennessee can be a lovely place, but get too far outside of a city, and it turns dark real quick.
Rural ass Appalachia
haha say no more. I’m from Toronto and have never been to the Appalachians (rural or not), but uh… that area of America is well known. Infamous, even. I’m a bit surprised there’s a discernible gay community there at all. There’s a lot of “parTying” here too (I see what you did there), not my vibe at all. As someone from outside of America looking in (because we are perpetually bombarded with American culture) it seems like the vast majority of the country is anti-intellectual. Which is of course by design, it’s much easier to stage an authoritarian coup if the majority is too dumbed down to think critically and fight it. Plus starve the beast, wedge the class divide further, and you have masses of people fighting each other for crumbs. I suspect your life would be greatly improved if you were able to get the hell out of there (of course that is easier said than done). I can’t imagine it’s going to get much better there anytime soon.
Wow, imagine waiting 10 years to be with a meth dealer. That man clearly has some serious issues. And the gall to assume that someone would agree to be in a long-term relationship with an expiry date. Plus if things end up going really well, and he doesn’t want to wait for his meth-man anymore and just be fully committed to you, you then have a potentially angry ex who just got out of jail, expecting his guy to still be waiting for him. No matter which way that would go it would be absurdly messy.
They’d catfish a guy on Grindr, and then pummel the shit out of him.
What in the fuck? If something like that happened here it would be front page news. But the way you describe it, and the fact that it has a colloquial term, makes it seem like it’s a common occurrence? That’s fucked up to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if you could apply for asylum in Canada because of it.
Okay, with all of that in mind I’d probably also be hesitant to accept and integrate friends into my life, and would have a very difficult time dating.
It’s not the most common thing in the world, and to be honest with you, the majority of people around here don’t hate the gays anymore (they’ve moved on to the trans!), but yeah, it happens. It just generally isn’t reported as being motivated by their sexual orientation. It’s just a random attack, or drug related, or whatever.
Jesus, I’d move to Canada in a heart beat. Sadly, I’m one of those working poor you hear about. No marketable skill that would let me. I know y’all have your own set of problems, but to be somewhere I wouldn’t have to worry about healthcare? Dream come true. Feel like marrying a southern neighbo(u)r for a few years? Just long enough to get me in. Lol.
“Everything everywhere all at once” seems to be a great example of your first point!
I’m also throwing an accolade for the existential cocktease phrase. It will come in useful I’m sure
My dreams always bring that moment of “this is so simple and it all makes sense,” but as you wake up further and reality starts setting in you realize you can’t actually remember much and the details don’t really make any sense at all. It’s so frustrating.
This week I had a dream I was singing an inxs song to little girl in the street as people watched, my voice was amazing and I was changing the lyrics on the fly to be more childlike and not adult. What in the actual fuck was I doing
Was the INXS song Original Sin?
Lol! No it was never tear us apart
You were seeing one of those realities where everyone expresses things in song and can bust out a lyric as easily as stating an opinion. 😀
So glad it wasn’t a Bollywood dream then lol
Or a porno!
When your dreams make you feel like you’re a paedo
God I hope that never happens.
even if you can describe things you see from another place, you could not reproduce a working version.
If you can’t functionally use any information from the other universe or vice versa, then what’s the difference between a real universe or a fake one.
Honestly it comes down to a similar question about whether or not you are living in the Matrix. If you can’t change or control anything, then it doesn’t make a difference. But if you can find a way to hack the system, what could you do with it? I’m enjoying seeing the different theories that everyone has.
There are a few ways it can be proven.
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If the parallel universes are different versions of our own, I can use them to get information I couldn’t get in my own universe. For example, if it’s a universe where North Korea has an open border policy, I could walk in and observe my surroundings, then end the dream and describe things about North Korea nobody knows about. Though this is not super hard proof.
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I could venture into the parallel universe to get a better understanding of physics, and people in my universe would know something is up because I came back knowing about how things work that the average person could never know. Though, again, this is not super hard proof.
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I can play Marco Polo with other sleepers from my universe to see if I can find them in the parallel universe, using a system of identification that cannot be impersonated if any entity tried. This would be hard proof, but it would require that people end up in the same parallel universes.
I think most of what you’re describing would require focused lucid dreaming, and with #3 it would require that you meet others who are also lucid dreaming? Sure that can be done, but #2 requires you to bring back critical details that the right brain just doesn’t seem to be able to handle. This does give me an idea that might get around that limitation though – what if you could remember images of artwork created in other realities? Basically steal their classic masterpieces (of course I’m still limited in that I cannot paint). And curiously, #1 sounds very much like the descriptions of remote viewing that are supposed to be proof that ESP is real but always fall apart because some details are wrong – exactly what you would expect from an alternate reality though…
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I had dreams of omnipotence. Including omniscience - they knew I was dreaming of them. In fact, one of them was particularly aggravated that I was aware of them.
If those universes are real, then they could contact me in this one.
They have not. So those gods aren’t real.
I dunno what this changed.
I’m confused by the premise. Is it hypothetical? What’s with the current beliefs assessment? Further narrowing the hypothetical?
I hope not. The other night I had one where I was pooping slugs
That could be you, in a Harry Potter universe. You know that spell that makes people vomit slugs? This would be just a variant
I know there’s many nights I’ve spent working on things in some other universe, like working on projects, building things, figuring out stuff, there’s other people there, it’s like I know them and they know me. Its probably just a dream but what if it isn’t?
Reminds me of the st voy ep where 7of9 visits that alternate place while she regenerates.
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Occam’s razor has been wrong before.
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Lucid dreaming being a thing shatter the whole premise anyway.
Oddly enough my own (limited) experiences with lucid dreaming didn’t really break down the barrier for technical details. Sure I knew I was dreaming, I could think about and control what I did, but I still couldn’t read a book. When I was younger there was a time where I kept having dreams about writing books on various subjects, it felt like I was actually planning out the arrangement of topics and writing down the words, and yet as I woke up everything was lost. So did I actually compose a story (because yes, I’ve written some short fiction) and then forget the whole thing, or did another version of me write down the stories and I simply couldn’t bring that knowledge back with me from the parallel universe?
Your experience is anecdotal. There are countless documented cases of people being not only in control while lucid dreaming, but also remembering what they did. It’s just that there is a limit to what you can do in dreams, because they have a purpose and trying to force too much through lucid dreaming ends up damaging your sleep, which your brain will do everything in its power to not let happen.
I feel like this is content for hypotheticalsituation sub from reddit. Not sure which lemmy equivalent is.
I think there needs to be some clarification to the rules. By imagination, is it an active process? Or is it a passive process like day dreaming?
By parallel universe/multiverse, is it known that it is only 1 consistent one every dream? Or is it random universes every dream, without guarantee of visiting the same ever again?
How long and short is each “view”? I’m assuming for simplicity it is passive viewing without being able to act upon anything.
Is it only me who can do this? Or is it everyone? Is it only a random subset of people (eg genetic mutations)? Am I the only one in the multiverse able to do this? Are all versions of me capable?
What am I seeing exactly? Am I only seeing through the eyes of my parallel selves or just random snapshots of people? If I only dream of mountains and random people, how do I ever know that this is just some generative biological process inside my brain rather than a link to another world?
Even if the premise is that there’s no details of how it works, I think I need to first convince myself I am not insane before trying to convince others or use any of the information in these dreams. Acting upon information from unreliable sources (how/why unreliable? cuz I can’t even convince myself) can cause harm not only to me but the people around me.
(Yeah I don’t know of any other suitable communities either, this seemed the most appropriate.)
In my hypothetical this would be the reality of everyone. Apply it to the world you know, but where you believe your imagination/dreams/whatever are creating new ideas, what you are really doing is seeing the possibilities of other realities. Except for that change, everything else is exactly as you know it now.
The way I see it, we would never know if the imaginative ideas that come into our head develop from the random crossing of neural pathways, or from a peek into a slightly different world. Maybe that peek is enough for you to piece together your own solution, but even in that case did you really just invent something or did you just happen to view a reality where a random set of occurrences caused something happen and it only feels to you as if you thought of it. The whole point of this thought experiment is that we really don’t know where our imagination comes from.
You dream of things you’ve seen others accomplish. As you accomplish and grow yourself, your dreams will become reality, leaving room for new dreams to occupy your mind.
Oh, I’ve got something unexpected for you. I got bored listening to people going on and on about the Universe being a simulation, so I built a machine that can check if you’re in some (but not all) classes of a simulated Universe. Take that, Plato!
It works using Bell’s Theorem and the limitations of Turing machines. The former shows that for some types of measurements, the outcomes are purely probabilistic, and do not contain hidden deterministic variables (seems like a dumb way to design a Universe for simulation!). Then Turing machines are capable of computing anything that can be defined as an algorithm (but only things that can be defined in an algorithm!).
Since the former provides a non-deterministic measurement that the latter cannot model, you make a machine that produces those measurements, and ties them to something on a bigger scale (stock market purchases, social media posts, whatever). Then you keep the measurements, and attempt to determine whether they were actually generated with an algorithm (this is very hard but possible in theory – sort of like reversing a hash). Meanwhile in the Universe upstairs, for the results to appear random enough so that analysis is nontrivial, it must consume extra computation in whatever device is running the simulation. In short, I’m doing a thing that consumes extra processing power.
So logically, if this Universe is being simulated, and someone is observing the machine closely that is doing the simulating, I can pass messages encoded in CPU activity. Just like in computer security where you can extract encryption keys by looking at a video of your power LED!
So if I’m not actually typing this on my laptop right now – but really am sleeping/dreaming with some equivalent to an EEG monitor or MRI or whatever in some other Universe – someone may be able to conclude whether this Universe is being generated by my mind or not. In the former case, they may have their answer, but have not woken me up yet. At that time, regrettably, your continued existence is not guaranteed. Sorry about that, but there was science to do!
If you would like to use the device I have built, you can do that. Because of course it’s sitting on my desk, connected to a server via MQTT, and subsequently connected to a Lemmy bot. If you message kong_ming on my instance (with a non-blank message), it will use the device as an entropy source to generate an I Ching reading. You know, to help you answer personal questions with only a vanishingly small likelyhood of causing the Universe to cease existing. Sometimes it is down for maintenance, although I just checked in on it now and it seems OK.
I also have a second such device, at an undisclosed location, that is designed to work with a coffee machine. You know, for those times you want coffee that’s simultaneously caffeinated and decaffeinated until you drink it.
Anyway, there you go. I’ve added a feature to the fediverse, I guess.
If our universe is being simulated on somebody’s desktop computer then yeah maybe, but if you were going to simulate a whole universe wouldn’t you at least have a decent random number generator to prevent easily-detectable patterns?
If we assume a malicious intelligence simulating a universe with goal of not being detected, all bets are off – this technique only works in a few cases, and that’s probably not one of them. Also if it’s true, I think we have bigger problems :D
There are a whole bunch of other assumptions too – like the universe running the simulation has entropy and time that work the same way as ours. It’s no magic simulation-detecting bullet – but it’s the only technique I could think of to make any progress whatsoever on the underlying philosophical question! A mote in the eye of a fictional God, so to speak.
In the hard sense, there are no such thing as random number generators on computers. With sufficient starting entropy and computing power, you can generate a mostly reasonable approximation. However, this must use more computing power than not doing it, which is the “signal” we’re sending out to be detected by a fictional observer in the scenario the OP presented.
Interestingly, this technique is used to exfiltrate data from secure computers – e.g. by making the CPU do slightly more work sometimes and modulating that to send data e.g. by radio emission, hard drive noise, power LED brightness changes, and so on. Here’s a generic one for you, if you’re curious: https://thesai.org/Publications/ViewPaper?Volume=9&Issue=1&Code=IJACSA&SerialNo=25
Also, there are sometimes interesting and strange artifacts even with our everyday “random” number generators. I read a really neat paper about that ten years ago, comparing the artifacts of random number generators across operating systems, which sadly I can’t seem to find for you presently. There’s an OK example for you here though: https://www.random.org/analysis/ under “simple visual analysis”.
That kind of weird pattern is pretty typical of most ‘random number’ functions used in software that aren’t security-facing (and sadly sometimes even ones that are). For cryptographically secure random numbers (more like the image to the left than the image to the right on that site), they are more computationally expensive to produce.
how could you use this information to benefit yourself or others
I would try to communicate the feel of things - either “this doesn’t feel right” or “oh shit, I think this is what we should do!” but idk how to do it better because the information from dreams is always so misty - what’s a silly amalgamation of experiences you’ve had, and what’s an actual analysis of things that might happen?
how do you convince others that the things your are seeing are really happening without being labeled insane?
I genuinely don’t know about this, because this is a problem I have in my real waking life: patterns and weirdness adding up to problems that cause me an itch that I usually can’t express until it’s an issue for everyone else, too, and then it’s usually too late.
Take a peek into the multiverse to see how other versions of yourself have solved these problems…
I think this is the best use of psychedelics - they help you see solutions that are outside your usual, obvious worldview.
I’ve had some experience with mushrooms and it really does change the way you perceive yourself and the world around you. I am definitely a better person for it.
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Define universe.
One universe would be one reality. Go with the multiverse theory that every potential decision creates a new universe, a new reality that followed each option.
