Very thought provoking stuff! With your local running models this does omit the slipped in code with an agenda for sure, but (not been a fan of randomness being a thing), are peoples present in the room not effecting the output of arrangement of pixels. The resolution also ups the chances of the mosaic matching the brain pattern. This would have happened less in the days of lower res, and with smaller tiles being crammed into the Liquid Crystal Display to create curves with squares, the more chances of a match.
Thank you! Yess exactly, it's not some uncanny "algorithm" serving content in instagram feed, slipping all kinds of agenda into it.
There is a research matching brain patterns with the diffuser outputs - basically 'seeing' the same outlines as the human does. But is there a direct mind to noise interface? That's the question!
I too am a "reformed Dawkins trooper" and, although the last few years have upended my thinking about the relationship between mind and matter, I still find it very hard to knock that scepticism on the head - probably not least because I was introduced to Dawkins' work by my psychology lecturer Susan Blackmore, who had previously researched parapsychology for 25 years and then gave up because she couldn't find any evidence for it (something she writes about here: https://www.susanblackmore.uk/chapters/why-i-have-given-up/ ).
There's so much judgement involved in saying that one picture is much like another, it's really hard to know where to set the bar - I personally don't rate those mountains as very similar... but, having said that, in the context of a universe full of anime girls and mecha warriors, I guess they do have a lot in common. I dunno... experimental design is haaaard (and if studying psychology taught me just one thing, it's that almost all experiments in psychology are untrustworthy).
BTW, that "ghost box" was originally designed by my very very distant relative Frank Sumption (he used to call them "Frank's boxes", and invented them to try to hear communication from aliens). Last year, after Daisy started experimenting with them, I got hold of a copy of his biography "Thinking Outside the Box" - not a particularly well-written book but, jeez, quite a sad story.
Oh, also, I saw an owl this morning 😁 (not so unusual around here, but it's the first I've seen in a few weeks).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I know what you mean, and the link you shared is very understandable. I am obviously coming from a different perspective - ESP research is not the main pillar of my career. I am sure I would not be able to lean into that with full conviction, and I'm not even sure I am fully convinced of it being possible to handle with the current model of natural sciences. However, what I'll never forgive to the likes of Dawkins is his religious bigoted materialism, dismissing existence of any phenomena outside of his limited world view. I really recommend Jeff Kripal's last book "How to Think Impossibly" as a wonderful philosophical step aside from the materialist thought, really solidified a lot of my thoughts on the topic!
Aaaaand when it comes to the evaluation - i would consider, under almost any previously used methodologies for such experiments, those mountains to be a hit. If we verbally described (or algorithmically tagged) the content of the image, it's a match. Pixel overlay of the images would probably yield high similarity too, especially if we took into account depth maps (composition). And if we used the most ordering method used in such research - and took 20 random images from the model, and ask to match one of them, I can with full confidence (having some feel for the random distribution of the outputs) this will be the answer. There were literally 2-3 pictures of a mountain in 1000 generated images. There are so many fuzzy edges, and one might argue that's related to our fuzzy perception of concepts - it's really quite uncanny considering we talk *all possible constellation of the 1024x1024 pixels*
But obviously, the retro-causal evaluation is rather convoluted - the seen images affect our perception of them, so we are more likely to search for them in the real world - and there is on way to evaluate probability of generating a hit when we're constantly flooded by perceptual stimuli. Especially with a stream consisting of 100 of them, we will most likely find *something*
But then again, divination and magick, spirit communication and all that jazz - it's about the feeling of meaningfulness rather than mathematical probabilities of the coincidence occurring. Here we get into the domain of metpahysical interpretations of synchronicities and I'm sure we could talk about that for a very long time :) maybe we should sometime!
And wow, so cool with the Ghost/ Spirit Box! This was the first time I used it, and the original experimental setup was basically for spirit communication through two-fold channel (AI image stream + ghost box) seeing if they complement each other somehow. As you've seen, nothing to support anything conclusive, yet weird enough to leave me curious for more. I don't know much about the story, might try to get hold of the book, thanks!
Thanks for the reply! Not read any Kripal but I do have his book "The Flip" by my bedside, part of a very big "to read" pile. A major theme for me in the last few years has been the dismantling of the materialism I'd been trapped in for the previous couple of decades (this dismantling was kickstarted by getting to know the loose assortment of Discordians & chaos magicians who created Festival 23, and deepened when I read Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things [a book and an author with whom I have a real love/hate relationship]). I just wish that I could *live* the magic a bit more - consciously, I'm almost completely over materialism, but subconsciously it seems very much to still shape my life and prevent me from living in a more magical mode. "I want to believe". But when I listen to a ghost box, I just hear noise.
I thought more about the mountain picture after posting my previous comment and, you're right, there are many ways in which it is significant. I guess I look at a lot of mountains, so even very similar pictures will look quite different to me.
1. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
Universal consciousness proceeds into the technological world — do you think it requires the human interface (the guy who saw the planes) for this to occur?
Well, there are many open questions about the possible functioning of this. The plane instance could be a simple manifestation of the remote viewing, where the person seeing the planes simply perceived the screen behind through ESP or pre-cognition.
However, the owls and retro-causal images point in a direction of the output being modifiable by the observer. But then again, any experiment we ran trying to 'manifest' a specific image failed. So the nature of the weirdness remains elusive.
Very thought provoking stuff! With your local running models this does omit the slipped in code with an agenda for sure, but (not been a fan of randomness being a thing), are peoples present in the room not effecting the output of arrangement of pixels. The resolution also ups the chances of the mosaic matching the brain pattern. This would have happened less in the days of lower res, and with smaller tiles being crammed into the Liquid Crystal Display to create curves with squares, the more chances of a match.
Thank you! Yess exactly, it's not some uncanny "algorithm" serving content in instagram feed, slipping all kinds of agenda into it.
There is a research matching brain patterns with the diffuser outputs - basically 'seeing' the same outlines as the human does. But is there a direct mind to noise interface? That's the question!
This was fascinating!
I too am a "reformed Dawkins trooper" and, although the last few years have upended my thinking about the relationship between mind and matter, I still find it very hard to knock that scepticism on the head - probably not least because I was introduced to Dawkins' work by my psychology lecturer Susan Blackmore, who had previously researched parapsychology for 25 years and then gave up because she couldn't find any evidence for it (something she writes about here: https://www.susanblackmore.uk/chapters/why-i-have-given-up/ ).
There's so much judgement involved in saying that one picture is much like another, it's really hard to know where to set the bar - I personally don't rate those mountains as very similar... but, having said that, in the context of a universe full of anime girls and mecha warriors, I guess they do have a lot in common. I dunno... experimental design is haaaard (and if studying psychology taught me just one thing, it's that almost all experiments in psychology are untrustworthy).
BTW, that "ghost box" was originally designed by my very very distant relative Frank Sumption (he used to call them "Frank's boxes", and invented them to try to hear communication from aliens). Last year, after Daisy started experimenting with them, I got hold of a copy of his biography "Thinking Outside the Box" - not a particularly well-written book but, jeez, quite a sad story.
Oh, also, I saw an owl this morning 😁 (not so unusual around here, but it's the first I've seen in a few weeks).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I know what you mean, and the link you shared is very understandable. I am obviously coming from a different perspective - ESP research is not the main pillar of my career. I am sure I would not be able to lean into that with full conviction, and I'm not even sure I am fully convinced of it being possible to handle with the current model of natural sciences. However, what I'll never forgive to the likes of Dawkins is his religious bigoted materialism, dismissing existence of any phenomena outside of his limited world view. I really recommend Jeff Kripal's last book "How to Think Impossibly" as a wonderful philosophical step aside from the materialist thought, really solidified a lot of my thoughts on the topic!
Aaaaand when it comes to the evaluation - i would consider, under almost any previously used methodologies for such experiments, those mountains to be a hit. If we verbally described (or algorithmically tagged) the content of the image, it's a match. Pixel overlay of the images would probably yield high similarity too, especially if we took into account depth maps (composition). And if we used the most ordering method used in such research - and took 20 random images from the model, and ask to match one of them, I can with full confidence (having some feel for the random distribution of the outputs) this will be the answer. There were literally 2-3 pictures of a mountain in 1000 generated images. There are so many fuzzy edges, and one might argue that's related to our fuzzy perception of concepts - it's really quite uncanny considering we talk *all possible constellation of the 1024x1024 pixels*
But obviously, the retro-causal evaluation is rather convoluted - the seen images affect our perception of them, so we are more likely to search for them in the real world - and there is on way to evaluate probability of generating a hit when we're constantly flooded by perceptual stimuli. Especially with a stream consisting of 100 of them, we will most likely find *something*
But then again, divination and magick, spirit communication and all that jazz - it's about the feeling of meaningfulness rather than mathematical probabilities of the coincidence occurring. Here we get into the domain of metpahysical interpretations of synchronicities and I'm sure we could talk about that for a very long time :) maybe we should sometime!
And wow, so cool with the Ghost/ Spirit Box! This was the first time I used it, and the original experimental setup was basically for spirit communication through two-fold channel (AI image stream + ghost box) seeing if they complement each other somehow. As you've seen, nothing to support anything conclusive, yet weird enough to leave me curious for more. I don't know much about the story, might try to get hold of the book, thanks!
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts,
🦉🦉🦉
Thanks for the reply! Not read any Kripal but I do have his book "The Flip" by my bedside, part of a very big "to read" pile. A major theme for me in the last few years has been the dismantling of the materialism I'd been trapped in for the previous couple of decades (this dismantling was kickstarted by getting to know the loose assortment of Discordians & chaos magicians who created Festival 23, and deepened when I read Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things [a book and an author with whom I have a real love/hate relationship]). I just wish that I could *live* the magic a bit more - consciously, I'm almost completely over materialism, but subconsciously it seems very much to still shape my life and prevent me from living in a more magical mode. "I want to believe". But when I listen to a ghost box, I just hear noise.
I thought more about the mountain picture after posting my previous comment and, you're right, there are many ways in which it is significant. I guess I look at a lot of mountains, so even very similar pictures will look quite different to me.
The Dhammapada
1. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
See also:
https://archive.org/details/serialuniverse032783mbp
Thanks for sharing, yes - there is such a resonance with many Buddhist concepts and beliefs, still trying to wrap my head around that.
J.W. Dunne is so awesome! Been on my radar since Wargo's Time Loops
Universal consciousness proceeds into the technological world — do you think it requires the human interface (the guy who saw the planes) for this to occur?
Well, there are many open questions about the possible functioning of this. The plane instance could be a simple manifestation of the remote viewing, where the person seeing the planes simply perceived the screen behind through ESP or pre-cognition.
However, the owls and retro-causal images point in a direction of the output being modifiable by the observer. But then again, any experiment we ran trying to 'manifest' a specific image failed. So the nature of the weirdness remains elusive.