Are there any reason for the creation of the universe?

edit: I have writen and posted a series of 6 posts so possibly it would be better to read all before posting a response if interested in doing so.....

Firstly let me say that this conversation has devloped very much into one of the most facinating and useful I have had here at sciforums. For me you guys are helping put together a jig saw puzzle of expereinces and ideas inspired by those experiences in ways that you may not fully appreciate. Many thanks!

I wish to address this issue for Glaucon as a vehicle for responding to other questions:

The method I used incorporated the understanding of reflective memory.

I might add that if I relied upon conventional thought on memory and mind I would probably still be sitting there in front of this mirror drooling and semi catatonic.

What is reflective memory?

Simply it is the universes recording of everything within it´s very substance that has happened.

"....The substance of the universe in the present moment {now} can be considered to be a manifestation of all historical change....thus the universe is a record of memory....."

Take for example a favourite keep sake such as your most treasured ink pen.
This object although in-animate has been reflecting your thoughts through out it´s use, every time you pick up the pen and start to write down those thoughts, impressions, feelings and sensations are reflected by the ink pen and everything else. That reflection effects change on the mirror [ you] and that change is a recording of all that has been reflected. At a quantum level your desires have been changing the pen....with me so far? [ ha ...now you have a little insight into why I use the handle Quantum Quack]

A sort of reflective back up system.

I found that by shifting my attention to things people told me I used to use I was able to gain a impression of memories in reflection, and slowly over time I started to recognise those reflected memories as being the self QQ

So what I am saying is that contrary to popular belief the memory is not trapped inside our heads in the form of neurological and synaptic structure but is actually reflected from a reflection by those structures. Therefore memory is more a sense than an organ [ hard to explain ]

So to make the explanation easier I concluded and worked on the notion that I could sense my memories just like you can sense sound or light or smell.

" ....we humans are para-dimensional beings......"

So in answer to your question Glaucon, as to how can one´s self be reconstructed and what materials it would use the answer is the ability to sense your memories thus your identity.

I found that another way was to ask friends and relatives [ with limited speech capacity] that knew me most to enter into a discussion of those memories as I witnessed them doing so and I was able to gleen images and impressions that I started to recognise as being about me. "Me" being the operative word. Thus I started to relearn how to sense the memory of "me" and I might add got confused terribly when I sensed somemone elses memories of their own selves. { my minds eye was emmulating what I sensed... so I actually saw visally inside my head what I sensed - re: Extended and continuous flash- back phenonema}

"....Am I me or am I you....."

So in reconstruction the main method was to utilise other peoples memories of me in reflection. Possibly stories of relatives visiting Dementia and Alzheimer patients and sitting there talking about the past to them persistantly and every week has some sort of ironic value. Unfortunately for these patients the mirror is physically breaking down and the ability to sense and reflect those memories is being lost. [ This method is far from unusual but for me it was particularilly effective and observable ]

So essentialy I have concluded that self awareness is the ability to suffer ones own reflection. This suffering is caused by desire to change that reflection. Therefore non- passive is self aware and passive in absolutum is simply self reflective.

To recontruct my self I had to endure a huge amount of physical and emotional suffering as I had ot re-experience the truth of my reflection with in a short amount of time [memory of a life time] I can assure you it was not pleasant......

 

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The thing that may be necessary to realise is that the experience of reflective awareness etc and memory opens the door to many deriviations on the same theme.

For example the dying process, NDE´s, para psychology, language and cultural reflections of reailty showing through in our behaviours etc..

For example:
It is often said than when one dies he shall rest in peace for eternity, or shall become one with God or be in Gods hands etc......well metaphorically I can see no problem with the logic and rational, yet people consioder it to be poetic.

If when one dies the ability to be self aware is lost [ no desire to effect change on the mirror ] Absoluely NO change on the mirror means the heart stops and the brain ceases to be active desire to grow is lost desire to age is lost and so on.... the self then only exists as a recorded memory that universe as a whole maintains. The body as it decays is a part of that universe, " ashes to ashes dust to dust...." so superstitions about dead people, corpses and ghosts have some justification.

However to truely die the body and the "soul" or "self" must "die" together. In my case it was only my "self " or "soul" that was essentially temporarilly "dead" and not my body. So one could say I was " half dead" a "zombie" a body without identity and so on.

 

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So it could be postuated that it is the desire for an individual self that forces a differentiation of memories reflected by the universe. Thus the dualism "man and God" comes to the fore.

"....I ...exist....... somewhere out there......I used to say...."

So in search of self I went.......hmmm...where am I.....

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However if one desires non self the universal self is who you are.......[Samsara]

So Buddhism seeks to destroy the individual identity and become the universal identity thus ending the need for further incarnations simply because if one is the universal self then there is no where else you can be re-incarnated. So the cycle of re-birth and death is ended.

BTW I am not a Buddhist per se but have always had a very high esteem for some of their metaphysical principles even though I am only now starting to fully appreciate their meaning.

 

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To be come universal or God in total would require not only a self transformation but a material one as well. The person would have to endure the physical and self suffering that all memories stored by the universe inspires......

So I guess becoming a physical God would be extremely traumatic....thus my ideas expressed in another thread, that where the Buddhists fail is that they only deal with one side of the equation [ the self....] and the ending of desire does not ultimately defeat the cycles of Samsara, to achieve God-hood one must master the cycles of Samsara so that re-incarnation becomes a choice and not a universal necessity.... in other words master desire [ sufferance ] in total including the desire to relieve sufference [ death and pleasure].....hmmmmm not easy...hey?

Imagine puting you entire arm into a cauldron of fire and being able to make a choice as to whether to experience the loss of an arm or not....without emotion and desire for that choice.

 

It is those memories that we treasure so much that makes us who we are. It is the desire for self hood that separates us from God hood.

The fear of loosing self is a fundamental and the desire to keep it is the suffering we pay from being individual and self willed. The universal memory is an awfully big and diverse place. Very easy to get lost in....

Hence the enourmous fear suffered by those persons who suffer paranoid schizophrenia....the fear of loosing ones mind is similar to the fear of loosing one self.....

If you have ever experienced the fear of being lost in a dense forest or a maze, that little moment of intense anxiety is a good but lesser example of the level of anxiety a Paranoid Schizophrenic can suffer from full time.

 

I just recalled an important point to all this that may not have been made clear so far.

"the Self is of our own willed creation"

By this I mean the individual self takes suffering to maintain. The desire for self hood is demonstrated from the time we are conceived in our mothers womb until the day we surrender to the universe and die.

It is this constant struggle to maintain self hood that creates who we are. We slice out a small piece of the universe and call it our own but it really isn´t ours but a part of a collective. So we struggle while we can [ life] to keep what we have created. [ fear of loss]

But who we [self] really are is "nothing" other than or except what we create....and desire to maintain. [ keep]

So nothing is really who we are......

"....The universe is nothing other than what is being created....."


Trying to use conversational English to describe a point can be sooooo limiting....

notion:
"...when we fall into a deep dreamless sleep are we not all sharing the same no-eternal moment of nothingness?......"

 

Quantum Quack:

A pleasure! It is always enlightening speaking with you.

Yet memories are always distant from space and time. One can also remember a dream. Why is this so?

Para as in four?

What did you find especially difficult?

Why would this be truly painful?

Like that monk that set himself on fire in the Vietnam war?

As it is essentially one in the same.

So basically the Will to Power?

 

I'll admit that, to a degree, we can 'objectify' ourselves, i.e., take on a mental stance of objective passivity. But, I would hold that the very knowledge that we can perform such a mental act implies a certain artificiality; it is, so to speak, the act of taking a new role on the stage, one of character, rather than participant.

Wouldn't the removal of the "I think" negate the "I am"?
[I think perhaps I'm misunderstanding you here...]

I couldn't agree more.

You're right to note that introspection is key here. Nevertheless, I think the infinite regress still obtains. The introspective act requires a purposeful 'segregation' of the self, and no matter how hard one tries, or mindful of the operation at hand (which I think to be a major difficulty...) one cannot focus the 'mind's eye' on the 'mind's eye'. I would argue that this 'dog catching its tail' problem has more to do with the nature of our concept of self, rather than the purported nature of the self. What I mean by this is that while I agree with you that our knowledge of the ability to think facilitates the introspective act, I'm not sure whether or not I'd say that the introspective act itself, or indeed its object, can qualify as knowledge (or knowable).

 

Thanks to you.
It's always enjoyable to come here and partake in some decent conversation.

Aaaah... well this opens up another huuuge can o' worms.

Memory is a major stumbling block, especially if one attempts to make use of it with respect to the self. The problem here is the plasticity of memory and the incompleteness of memory. Without a continuous series of memories (which none of us can claim to enjoy), its usage towards facilitating the self is minimal at best (debilitating at worst). Given gaps in our memory, how can one grant validity to one over another? What's worse, even if one is to take a sort of 'averaging out' of one's memories, tossing out some seemingly anomalous ones, at best you end up with a fractured, compositional self.

The plasticity of memory is no friend to the self either. Medical conditions exist where people have fairly consistent memories that nevertheless are completely wrong (after head trauma, serious psychological trauma, etc.).

As far as memory goes, the most useful thing we really can say is that to the best of our ability to detect, our memories are (in some way...) ours.

 

I think what you have said is very valid but only from the conventional or proven by science perspective. As I mentioned earlier if I relied on current understanding I would still be sitting in front of the mirror wondering what the hell I was looking at.

So I have to consider my personal experience of reaching for my memories over time. kwowing what is like to be void of identity, and then having to go through the tedius process of discovering how to rebuild my identity and then set about to do such a horrific thing. Rebuild or re-engineer your own personality, character, intelligence, knowledge, feelings and perception is not a very nice thing to have to do. Identity may be prescious but when you understand how it is created it seems to loose that mysterious and priceless value that most take for granted.

But this I did. I found for example that we actually have total recall accessability but that as a matter of convenience we tend only to remember things that we consciously take note of. I call this Easy Memory. It is by far harder to remember the things that are deeper and subconscious that go together to generate an un-fractured [ your word and mine] sense of self, whilst maintaining some semblance of continuity of experience.

From a self perspective this is fighteningly difficult to conceptualise and employ. The struggle of learning again how to exist provides many insights that normally are unable to be achieved by typical approaches. Nature provided me with a way to experience self reflectiveness free of self awareness and I provided and found a way of moving from that position of non-self with the help of family and friends and guidance from gut instinct to a position of ´pseudo self awareness and gradually over time this self awareness become less fractured as I was able to sense those unnoticed memories, unconscious, subconscious, and conscious.

Thus slowly rebuilding the less than conscious memory strata [ hard memory as opposed to Easy memory ] by focus and retraining my instincts. Most memory is of course instinctivly maintained in nature.

 

I find this easily resolved by simply stating that they indeed do have the wrong memory, in fact due to damaging the mirror they are sensing someone elses memories and applying them as their own.

Our desire for self identity is so strong that even a fractured sense of self is better than none. So the brain fills in the gaps by instinctively sensing memories that afford the greatest sense of identity it can. [ I am not talking about embelished memory or fear based creations here either [ witness testimony tests] as these are another kettle to brew coffee with]

The very rare multiple personality [identity] disorder can be addressed also in this fashion. So to is the religious version of the same thing as in possessions, etc.

Of course one has to at least be prepared to look at reflective memory as an idea worth considering.

I ask you this:
Is it little wonder that in physics the same dilema of dualism exists as it does in philosophy, the subjective - objective arguementrs are endless, the god - man duality, the taosit trap duality the I am if I can reflect my thoughts duality the body soul duality etc etc and realise that it is all about reflection and reflecting. Of course memory will fall to the same dualistic reflective notions as everything else does.

 

Prince James,

Well from what I have come to understand a dream is the minds eye emmulating what it senses. The dream is a construct of what is sensed and is reflected on our inner mirror so that we can percieve it. Take for example when someone is sleeping and a joker places a warm towel on the persons arm or hand, many persons will report dreams of water and the desire to urinate becomes evident etc....The wet towel triggers a sensing of water and because of the persons passive state the dream is not unlike usual dreams and cryptic in nature as the mind uses the stimuli as a means to aid mind reconciliations not necessarilly directly related to the towel.

The sensory system is almost as passive as it can be during a dream and this allows the sensory pointing to be more open to the needs of the mind than the conscious needs of the self. Subconscious reconciling of that which needs to be reconciled to allow for growth of "soul". In deep dreamless sleep the sensory system is almost but not quite totally passive of the universe.

The ability to remember a dream is often reduced because the conscious mind fails to find a reference to aid and point to. Usually emotionally laiden dreams are remebered better as the emotional memory triggers the ability to point, by providing a reference thus the dream is capable of being remembered. The act of remembering occurs when the mind eye [ imagination ] reflects what is being sensed and as we know the imagination or the mirror so to speak is subject to subjective distortions and embelishments especially if fear is involved.

Hence mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic depression etc are better called Acute Sensory Disorder [ASD] IMO.

no, we have the ability to move with our minds senses through various "dimensions" easilly and as par of normal life [ taken for granted] and certainly we manipulate time in minimal ways all the time. [the feeling of sufference is the sympton of time/energy manipulation]

Having to re-live consciously all your memories in emotional and sometimes tactile ways is very difficult, Repeating the experience of cutting your finger as child is just as painful as it was originally. The only difference is that there is no blood on your hand but the sensation of blood is felt all the same, a sort of phantom pain experience but more tactile. Fortunately I learned how to mitigate this effect relatively early as a matter of necessity as I was going quite crazy trying to cope with the physical and emotional memories returning.

But I had to experience them consciously other wise I would end up being the phantom myself. I now have a very strong memory of my past and that itself is posing a bit of a problem, hyper or acute conscious awareness of self. Did the job too well me thinks....ha..

Obvously my own personal experience would be a cake walk as they say compared to the experiencing of everything and every ones memory. past and present and future. To become a God from a man one would have to experience everyones memories tactily so that the memories would be accessable and real [ unless another more efficient way could be found]. If you want to know what it´s like to die in a car accident then the only way is to experience it yourself and not just as a nightmare dream but consciously.

Not quite, a bit more dramatic if you will. Deliberate and fully willed choice of loose arm or not, whilst it is in the fire....the point being that you would have to be able to over ride the instinct to preserve the arm. Thus being able to be control the instictive desire to relieve suffering which is the greatest obstacle to reliquishing desire I have found. The desire to relieve suffering is the desire for pleasure which is the outcome of that relief.
".....My legs hurt from standing for too long [ suffering ] so I sit down [ pleasure ]......"
"....my hand is itchy so I scratch it...."
".....I want to know your name, so I ask for it...." [the suffering and relief of curiosity]

I am not sure power is the right choice of word but I think it will suffice.
I am suggesting here that the self is just as easilly created by nothing [ true self] as it is to be surrended [ suicide/sacrifice ]

The self is something we [ nothing] create with our memories and something we can decreate by death deliberate of passively [ old age or accident or illness].

So when I said:

“ But who we [self] really are is "nothing" other than or except what we create....and desire to maintain. [ keep] ”
The attitude or approach is important. WE are nothing but what we create........and thoughts are something we create, therefore "I think therefore I am" holds surprisingly true. With out thought we are nothing.
And thought is based on the awareness of our own reflection which brings be back to sitting in my chair looking at a mirror without recognnising that it was my own reflection....see?

 

Glaucon:

I had essentially meant that all non-sentient things (non-beings, in other words) would only have this "non-reflective 'self'" which implies, basically, non-self. "I don't think, therefore I am not." Non cogito, ergo sum nihil.

Yet you allow a more complete, full knowledge, of other things? That is to say, whereas there is a segregation of self issue that is unconquerable in introspection, there is no such in other thought? And that is because the object does not require us to look at ourselves in such a way?

Quantum Quack:

But where would a memory of a dream be? Would it be simply a "spatial connection to thought"? But thoughts do not, per your theory, properly occur in space, yes? That is to say, whereas they might be in the brain, they nonetheless, content wise, aren't in space, yes?

What do you mean by "dimensions".

So you basically "Fast forwarded" through your life? EVery single second of it?

I would agree with your assessment of its difficulty.

By which you mean the self as in our personality, intelligence, et cetera?

 

To be honest I am confused about this issue somewhat.

I mentioned paradimensional beings a while ago. One aspect of this is that the past appears to the minds eye not unlike watching a replay of reality in all it´s 4 dimesnional realness. yet when you look around you with physical eyes you can only observe the present or NOW.

When sensing a memory we are actually able to go back in time in our minds eye and literally see visually the past exactly as it happened.

People talk of a photographic memory. This I have come to know as similar to a mind snapshot of a noticed event. This snap shot is a summary of all feeling and sensation and meaning felt at the time and normally encapsulates a certain time span that is relevant. For example a football match may be encapsuolated in a single snap shot of the mark that caught your eye or a goal that was scored.
The entire match is encapsulated in that single snapshot. This is photographic memory as per my experience. Now depending on the quality of the snapshot one could for instance remember word for word the entire text of a given book say a Bible or Tolkens Lord of the Rings being able to quote word for word from memory the entire text and how you felt and what you thought and all teh distractions etc as you were reading it. This is achieved with just a single reading [ any more readings will only confuse the memory] too I might add. The potential of this form of memory is enourmous and virtually unlimited.

The other form of memory is more a "video" type memory rather than a still 2 dimensional image it is a moving three dimensional, an absolutely exactly as it was type memory. This is of course slower but more detailed than the snapshot type. I have only experienced this on three different occasions and then my mind learned how to do it again "in the black" or subliminally. Thus this avoided the tedium of real time reviewing of an entire life time. 47 years would take 47 years to review. The snap shot system is a much more efficient system, but sacrifices detail over extended periods and is more open to subjective distortions.

SO what happens when we recall things is a mixture of both depending on the need at the time. As Glaucon expressed memory is a real fickle business and very suseptable to distortions thrown up due to subjective interpretations rather than objective emmulations by the minds eye.[ and that is assuming a person is relatively healthy, in that no brain damage etc.] In other words our abilty to create and reflect meaning [ thought] generates an obstacle to objective memory.

So where are the memories of dreams? Where they were sensed from and also what was created by the imagination the same as our memory of thought. Exactly as it was and when, in our 4 dimensional video memory with the things we notice as held as a snapshot are the memories we tend to only have access to.

However in the universal NOW it is held by that universe with in it´s history of effects in the substance of the universe.

Sorry if I have confused as I am my self not to confident about how to explain these types of experiences in a way that makes sense to any one else other than myself. In other words I haven´t yet converted the meaning of these things into language yet.

I think the example above is one good example...

Initally yes until I learned how to do it subliminally. It took about 6 months before I avoided having to do it all sequencially and another 5 or so years before I was doing it more instinctively [ subliminally]. Eventually I was able to do it with the time dimension at right angles to the normal linea. Which is how we can compress an entire life into a zero duration instant of time Another example of para-dimensionality

As a way of explaining I use a string of numbers say
1579145632456798.
now normally this takes time to recall and bring into linea time ok.....you have to recall them sequencially in real time...therefore it takes time,.
However if you turn the string of numbers so that the numbers run sequencially away from you so all you see is a snapshot of the first number and all the other numbers are BEHIND that first number you get the idea I think......imagine "1" has all the numbers hidden behind it and you see a very efficient way the memory can work.

A bit like taking a "text box" [ word processor] and placing an infinite number of text boxes on top of it...what do you see? One text box with an infinite number behind it....yes?

Remember our discusion.....
".... if you take an infinitley thin slice of bread and place on top of it an infinite number of infinitely thin slices of bread ..how thick is the resultant combination of bread slices?...."

It took me approximately six months to work out how to get my mind to see things this way because we naturally want to see things go from left to right as per conditioning. These days I see only visual 2 Dimensional snapshots and am able to recognise the memories that these snap shots contain behind their visual surface. [ actually I just recalled that it was after I bought my first computer as a training aid that I was facinated by the use of text boxes when experimenting with Ms Word and this provided me with the inspiration concerning what to do with this sequenciality I was experiencing.]

So the ability to recall is improving all the time in fact it is difficult to cope with the amount of recall I am currently experiencing. At times it is almost perfect recall. Which can be rather confusing......too much information as you know can be much worse than not enough. I keep asking myself ...why do I need to remember that? As seemingly sponateous recall can be a real bother.

By which means the memory of personality , intelligance etc etc affords you.... no memory = no personality, no self and certainly no ability to use or remember your intelligence......so self is intrinsically tied in with memory.

 

Quantum Quack:

Sorry for taking a while to respond. I wanted to give this some thought

So would we be memory-sensing a brain state?

So basically in the memory of the universe?

So basically this form of dimension is a subconscious compression to get the "gist" instead of play it out?

Like a deck of cards instead of a spread.

This would indeed seem to be the case. But we would still have an awareness, just one which could not act.

 

Exactly.....self reflective awareness but not self awareness.

 

Quantum Quack:

So therefore the real difference is that beings have memory, not consciousness?

 

memory sensing a state of being...what ever that state of being was at the time.

Imagine when you look around you that you are, no matter where you look only looking at the top card of a deck of cards.....using your example...and by seeing the lower cards you are seeing your memory around you with your minds eye. [ what I call dark viewing as distnct to bright viewing ]

Correct an depending on your ability to recall the amount of memory information retrieved form this stacked memory there is a virtually infitite potential. Similar I guess to modern file systems used for hard drives etc.

Sometimes however the sensing the sequence of these dimensiooanl slices gets out of wack and events appear to be out of order or sequence. The mind instinctively determines this and attempts to correct it.

I used to call this " card shuffling" as my ability to remember in the corret sequence was severely lacking. There is a self correcting reflective confirmation available, the reflection is able to check itself for integrity and this helped me enormously. These days sequenciality is not much of a problem however every now and then I catch myself with out of sequence thinking or remembering. [ not an uncommon experience for most people either I imight add ]
."...Yesterday I was in the park. and the day before I was in the shopping center......."
when in fact it was the other way around.

so memory of time passage was very important as well.

You got it...well done!!

edit: My use of the words right angle dimension is not the best.

Because I was viewing my memories left to right across my minds eye I was seeing them at right angles to the normal which is in line with you nose so to speak. I had to learn to see my memories at right ngles to the wrong way I was seeing them. The mind has the ability to swing the minds eyes perception in this way as for example many persons talk of "bright" seeing with the minds eye and this is only because for some reaosn the mind has shfted the angle to 90 degrees off the normal. Possibly this is why we have a visual memory of some dreams and not others and flash back pheno....depending on the intensity of the experience. I assume.

 

Thus why I have the assesment that the universe is a 4 dimensional rendition of 3 dimensional reality.

The reality is we have width, length and time but not actualy depth.

so this leads to the notion that distance is an illusion given by this rendition. Distance is only applicable to past and future events and not present events. [ I have yet to fully bring this notion into language properly] Distance only exists if you want to move....sort of thing...

Depth or distance is an illusion, that space or vacuum only has distance because of the illusion that mass generates. Therefore distance for our photon is non-existant yet it has the illusion of having distance for objects of mass.

So to be more specific.
Our assessment that light travels is an illusion generated by our pre-occupation with material mass or matter(s) [ excuse the ironic pun..... material matters in a material world that focusses on the material instead of the non-material.....the tactile instead of the non-tactile.]

 

One could move down that path yes....

Self Reflective awareness [ not self aware ie no memory.o rindividual self...] could be considered as a state of pure objective consciousness. Witnessing a reflection with out a source. [ now that´s going to have an amusing impact I bet] "....a reflection without a source....."hmmmmmm

we are now getting back to the topic of this thread I might add..............