Kevin's Watch

Avatar wrote:Nah, only perspective matters all the time.

Sometimes things are actually different depending on where/how you see them...sometime things are only different because you can't see where/how they really are at all.

Exactly. To you though, they still appear different, regardless of whether it's because they are, or because you think they are. So you act as though they were different.

Get a different perspective, and they might not be. But you will be.

--A

I agree we see/know/act from our own perspective. Yet, to a limited extent, we can adopt other perspectives [even if it is just us doing it, and yes it changes us to do so], and a kind of, to invent a term, I think, take a 2nd order perspective or somesuch [while still only being us doing it].
Like this: we, depending on mood, can experience time moving at a different rate. At the same time we know it didn't really move differently. We can see that it both really did and really didn't. Also, we can know that time here vs. time near a black whole materially pass at different rates...yet if we moved from one place to the other, we would experience time the same despite the physical difference between locations, and still maintain knowing they are different rates. We know from perspective, but can also know about perspective. We can know THAT some things are so, independent of our perspective, even if we are incapable of knowing exactly what all those independent things actually are. Some of those things we are capable of knowing because we can model/comprehend multiple other perspectives to an extent. This adaptability, complex shifting, fluidity is really where all the fun/interesting human stuff happens.

Perhaps I'm being slothful, but the existence of 'mind' itself can be regarded as an example of synchronicity, particularly by extending the evolutionary context of synchronistic associations themselves as the precondition of 'mind'. I think this is what people feel when they intuit that there can be no human explanation of existence. I was 5 years old, lying on the grass under a tree, peering up at the azure void of a clear sky the first time I felt this way. Ironically enough, it spurred me to wonder and the thirst for knowledge rather than intellectual fatalism. Or, to quote one of the pillars of scientific rationality:

Socrates wrote:Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident. But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know;-that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.

Exnihilotto2 wrote:For the most part the most interesting speculative models seem to have been given short shrift in the major popular works on synchronicity. David Peat touches on, but does not elaborate on, the flatland metaphor originally articulated in the classic work by Edwin Abbot. The core of this idea is essentially that a being who understood only a two dimensional reality would encounter points which would seem totally disconnected, much as columns appear in an architectural floor plan. But seen from a higher dimension these would be seen to be part of a coherent integrated structure.

Hopefully I'm not missing, in what I've deleted from the quote, a statement of what I'm about to say, and therefore I hope I'm not being redundant. But when I read up again on Jung's idea of synchronicity (what we're talking about, right?), I thought it might make sense if modeled on the idea of time being multidimensional. Normal causality is the principle (as per Kant) that synthesizes events in the first, linear dimension of time; Jungian synchronicity is the principle that synthesizes multiple lines themselves. QED?

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

This is just a brief reflection, but I guess my experience was different: the suspicion that all was related, and that there was something deeper going on - though I still believe there is no central plan or direction - lead me to something along the lines of a realization that, since other people have come to this kind of thinking beforehand, I wasn't alone in my confusion.

But [earlier post] I have to disagree DotD.
"Transpersonal" doesn't require God. And while "design" "logic" and "intelligence" imply a mind, the nature of the universe doesn't necessarily, or even ordinarily/simplistically imply any of those. It only implies that we have a hard time reconciling that WE require it to feel safe/meaningful, in ways we feel we can understand. I've said before, in differnt ways when people say "the odds that we could just be" are 1 in a million, or billion, or trillion or even 1 in infinity, they ignore the fact that the times it COULD occur exceed the odds. Like saying the odds of winning a lottery are 1 in 10. If you actually HAVE 20/30/1000 different tickets, you win...not just once, but twice at least. [for the record, 1 in infinity is ridiculous...but even if it wasn't there really are, literally, many "smaller" and "larger" sizes of infinity.]

I think that also, one ignores the fact these occurrences of synchronicity, while potentially signaling a larger purpose, do not signal THE larger purpose, that is to say, capital G God - that is to say, in my perspective there could be multiple larger forces acting sometimes in concert, sometimes in conflict, and additionally there is no guarantee that they have full control, that they are not subject to random occurrences (see I think Hashi's post about Dr Manhattan being a puppet who can see the strings - maybe even larger entities are, by virtue of being interconnected to smaller things, mere puppets, with no puppetmaster pulling the strings). Finally, I have to say that even the most naked synchronicities I have experienced may simply be that the rest of humanity finds me more predictable than I think.

twm.co.nz/pribram.htm

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1277267401265791251

I'm sorry, guys, I'm in a rush but I do wish to elaborate on this, or rather go back to where I had these issues buried for the past few months. I'm a physics drop-out with a theist view of the world, cherried on top by a personal experience of synchronicity that borders on "magical thinking" but nonetheless has been peer-observed as well. However, everyday obligations and turning forty can account for a complex arrangement between feelings, reason and what the heck, so I will be the first to admit to turning totally lax on very important matters, exactly the way I shouldn't.

In recent months I have been experiencing synchronicity to the point where I think I might be schizophrenic.

Was synchronicity the first idea? And being thus, was it the first and widest casting of the net of mind? Such that it encompasses all that might be known or stated about the universe, the meta-schema of all later metaphysics? Could such an idea, kept primitive for aeons, be selected for in such a way that dark chthonic paths repellent to the bright candle of reason are mapped within it, meaning conveyed without a reason, knowledge given from a well of un-knowledge? Does this make us mad? What does this blind sight tell us about who we think we are?

Forgive the raving.

The link between two coincidences is the person who observes them.

(Sorry, nothing to do with Don's post really. )

--A

Perhaps synchronicity is pre-cognitive, at a level that is fundamental to mind itself: or, its elaboration becomes the mind.

I had much fun recently when I was reading some Lovecraft, including "The Nameless City". The computer I was sitting close to had problems with its ventilation system. It had some sound to it for quite some time, but not like then - it started to practically howl. The weather started to take a turn for worse, the wind could be heard well - the howling sounds joining together.

Certainly, with how often I read Lovecraft and with the ventilation generally not being too quiet, it wasn't too much of an improbable thing, though the ventilation rarely gets so loud and I don't remember it being so howling-like in any other situation, though it could sound more like that exactly because of the wind. The wind - so strong and loud is a rare thing where I live, however, not unheard of.

But that, of course, wasn't all. There's a screensaver application called "Electric Sheep" www.electricsheep.org/ - it connects to the Internet and generates fractal images - a video of ever-changing fractals.

electricsheep.org wrote:When these computers "sleep", the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep".
Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations
[snip]
The result is a collective "android dream", blending man and machine

When I finished reading and looked at the computer with that screensaver on, the video wasn't moving - and there was an eight-pointed star on it. www.pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Azathoth

You have achieved the rarest of the rare on the internet: the unironic "cool story bro." Congrats. BTW:



"We should be fucking dead, Vincent."