inner light - subreality
Posted by earthling at 16:21, 29 Jun 2009Has anyone read this book?
The Inner Light Theory
of Consciousnessby Steven W. Smith, Ph.D.
California Technical Publishing
ISBN 0-9660176-1-7 (2001)
Here is a short overview, which I am quoting:
Look around and concentrate on what you experience. Perhaps it is a warm summer day and you are sitting on an outdoor patio. You see a deep blue sky and smell the fragrance of the flowers in bloom. Wind blowing through the branches of a nearby tree provides a soothing melody. You feel the texture of these papers in your hands, and can still taste the last sip of your beverage. Of course, your experience will be different; you may be in a university library, at your desk at work, or relaxing on the couch in your home. You may be smelling the fragrance of flowers, the sweetness of newly baked cookies, or the lingering odor of disinfectant. You undoubtedly will be experiencing many things from your five senses, plus an introspective view of your mind's operation. These are the things you perceive, and are therefore the things that define your reality.
But now imagine that you suddenly awake and realize it was only a dream. The things you had been experiencing can now be seen from an enlightened perspective. Before you awoke, you justifiably believed that the sights and sounds you experienced were genuine, originating in an external physical universe. The tree, papers, and patio seemed more that just your perception of them; they were real objects with an independent existence. Or so you thought. But now that you are awake you have gained a greater knowledge, the knowledge that your previous reality was not genuine. The things that you had been perceiving exist only in your mind, and nowhere else.
The lesson here is extraordinary: the low-level activity of the brain is capable of placing its high-level activity into an artificial reality. We know this for a fact; it is clearly demonstrated to us each night as we dream. It is undeniable that the machinery to accomplish this feat is present in each and every human brain. The nature and extent of this "subreality machine" remains for us to determine; but one fact is indisputable, it is there.
The Inner Light theory takes this a step farther, asserting that this "subreality machine" is also activated during our waking hours, just as during our dreams. The unconscious processes that create our dream reality, also create our waking reality. This is not to suggest that the external physical world is an illusion. On the contrary, when we are awake and perceive an apple, we have every reason to believe that the universe contains such an object. However, we do not, and cannot, experience the physical apple directly. The best we can do is to capture clues about the object's nature. These clues come in the form of light photons, sound waves, molecules of various chemicals, and mechanical interactions. These are the physical principles that underlie our five senses, resulting in neural signals being sent to our brains. These indirect clues are all we know about the physical universe, and the only things we can know about it.
But of course, our conscious perception of an apple is nothing like photons, sound waves, or neural activity. We see an apple as red, feel it as smooth, and taste it as sweet. This is our introspective experience, because this is the representation that the subreality machine has created for us. Our unconscious mental processes fused the multitude of sensory data into the thing we recognize as an apple. Everything that we are conscious of has been created in this way. Our consciousness exists in this inner reality, not the physical world. When we are awake, the inner reality is constructed to mimic our external surroundings. When we dream, the inner reality exists on its own, without regard for anything outside of our brains. But either way, all we can consciously experience is the inner reality created for us by the subreality machine in the brain.
In groundbreaking work, The Inner Light Theory of Consciousness explores the evidence for this remarkable claim, from the structure of the brain, to the very way we perceive ourselves and the world around us.
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Comments
12 April 2007
4 hours 8 min
Incidentally, it occurs to me that I'm not aware if "fragrance" is a sense that has been reported during normal or lucid dreaming.
In dreaming mode, it seems the two predominant senses are visual & auditory, followed by touch and in some instances taste —there's a case of a boy who used his lucid dreamings to stuff himself full with chocolates— but what about smell?
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It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
22 November 2004
2 days 2 hours
I'm not sure about smell in dreams. However I have heard that people hallucinate about smells.
Perhaps a florist or perfume designer would dream about smells.
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It is not how fast you go
it is when you get there.
12 April 2007
4 hours 8 min
Maybe it is because smell is the one sense that humans rely less and less. And there´s clearly some "dampening" of the senses in dream time —except perhaps in the more vivid experiences of lucid dreaming.
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It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
22 November 2004
2 days 2 hours
I'm nor sure about the dampening, some of my dreams are quite realistic. Mostly with respect to visual, and with respect to speech (as opposed to background noise).
A peculiar thing about my dreams is that the sense of balance is almost not there, and the sense of weight is highly variable.
Perhaps this is because smells and the sense of resistance to weight/mass is not interpreted very much. Whereas visual and speech are subject to very complex interpretation by the brain.
The book is about consciousness, not just dreaming.
I have to read the whole thing, it's not that long. At least it's free :)
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It is not how fast you go
it is when you get there.
12 April 2007
4 hours 8 min
Take the dream I had last night. I don't know why, but I was instructing some kid to hit someone, and I wanted to show him that, in order to cause real damage, he had to use his mind power as much as his muscles —I guess a part of me realized it was in dream time— so I was smashing some kind of metal door but wasn't very successful, I eventually hurt my hand, but I didn't feel pain.
So that's why I say there's a diminished perception of sensory stimuli in dreams; quite possibly because there ARE no external stimuli, and it's all re-created by your mind from past experiences... maybe.
You read that book and give us a review, will you?
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It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
1 May 2004
10 weeks 3 days
Where you are when you dream, the laws are not those of where you are when you don't.
When you are in matter, you can't escape the laws of matter and you function in interaction with those laws. Its the same thing over there, the laws are not the same.
For instance, what is time for us here is distance over there.
They have a great limit put on distance but they don't on the forms that can be created as needed, except that it can be created if it has existed already.
22 November 2004
2 days 2 hours
I don't know about the distance stuff. Often in a dream I wake up (in the dream, not really) in Germany, and when I walk out the door, turn around a corner and I'm in California. No delay, no travel. The parts of the earth in between don't seem to exist.
I think that is representative of the time I spent in those places (lived there for years), and the time spent travelling in between is negligible.
But yes, in a sense the laws of physics in my dreams are more or less what I want. Much less gravity, much less inertia. For example, I drive a car (usually my first one), it gets stuck on a dirt road. Then I just get out and lift the car, which suddenly is much smaller and lighter. Typical stuff, objects change size and sometimes shape to make things more convenient for me.
The landscape changes too, but not for my convenience, it gets in the way :)
All this is consistent with the brain making up a virtual reality. During waking hours, this reality is constrained by contact with the physical world. In those respects I agree with Smith in the book.
Where I am not so sure is that there is nobody watching this. Smith's theory can explain why dream land and awake land look the way they do. But who is watching this? The introspective view implies that there is some entity looking into itself. Smith says there isn't, that the viewer is only the view. While this may be true, he offers no particular argument why it should be.
Let me say it differently: With a little more advanced computers, we could build a machine that filters senses and creates a virtual reality as he describes. But Smith still leaves out the top level, an agent that uses this reality.
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No amount of cursing at the round earth will make it flat.
22 November 2004
2 days 2 hours
Ok I read the book, and found it worth reading.
The overview that I posted reflects what the book says, so I won't repeat a summary, just comment on some specific points.
The title of the book is inspired by a Star Trek episode. One from the series with Captain Picard, aka Kennewick Man.
The basic theory proposed is that our conscious thought, including our dreams, are a virtual reality. This virtual reality is not created by some outside entity, such as Thirteenth Floor, Matrix, brain-in-a-vat, Descartes' evil genius.
Rather it is created by our brain, in particular by the unconscious (not subconscious) part of our brain.
This last part is not particularly unusual, unless you are religious. Then this will get you excommunicated, or whatever the appropriate term is for your religion. It will also not sit well with spiritually oriented psychologists.
But the entire argument is consistent, and does not involve additional magic.
Here is a quote (chapter 9, p155):
In my view, this is a little strong. I agree with most of his analysis, in that our perception is shaped by the underlying mechanisms, the unconscious parts of the brain. And this is a lot like signal processing. It is not digital signal processing, and it most likely does not use the same methods. But the result is the same, in fact the result is better.
Where his statement is strong is that there is nothing else, that there is no entity watching all this pre-processed information. He is probably right, but doesn't present an argument that excludes it. He does present good arguments that the traditional explanations are sorely lacking.
Another aspect that Smith does not touch on significantly is creativity. Our minds come up with new ideas. Well, at least some of our minds.
Smith tells us that consciousness is the way is is because our brain interprets incomplete information.
I go further, and say that we are creative because our brain interprets the incomplete information incorrectly. We match new impressions against old experiences, most obviously in dreams. A lot of these matches are incorrect, yes sometimes such an incorrect match is a useful new concept.
Lastly, of course many people will disagree with the book. Some people because they like their own theory better. A lot of people because, if the book should be correct, they don't like the result.
Smith says in the last sentence of the book,
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It is not how fast you go
it is when you get there.
12 April 2007
4 hours 8 min
Does it say anything about quantum mechanics? You know, the whole 'observer' shebang?
-----
It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
22 November 2004
2 days 2 hours
yes it does, Chapter 5, pp72-79 and p80.
For example [pp78-79],
and [p70]
and when listing requirements for an acceptable solution [p80]
Incidentally, the chapter numbers are the same as the file numbers of the pdfs on the website, in case someone wants to see the context of what I'm quoting.
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It is not how fast you go
it is when you get there.