These are free form thoughts I'm marshalling for organization into a significant document about my ideas of solipsism as applied to Allam.

I’m struggling to maintain sanity. That doesn't mean I'm going nuts; it means I’m working to make sense of the insanity all around me in my world. And I’ve done a good job for the most part because I am convinced I am sane and most everything does make sense. And yet so much does not. When you get right down to the nitty gritty of quantum cosmology, I’m confronted by observer effects and multiple worlds. And the anthropic principle. Scientists carry on in the hope and aspiration of finding explanations and models but it seems to me that the effort is increasingly one of rationalization by way of complexity when the truth may be insanely simple.

The thing about observer effect and multiple worlds is that it is an intriguing metaphor for me and everyone else in the world. Metaphors are the currency of human psychology. I understand by comparing models of things in my memory with models of things I sense in the ‘real’ world. What I sense though is illusory because it is limited by my sensing apparatus – only five senses plus perhaps technical extensions – and my brain’s ability to classify and store sensations for sense making in subsequent steps of cognition, either by myself or collectively.

Ultimately, sense making is a collective activity because humans are social animals. That, however, adds another layer of complexity to the process because it requires absolute transparency in communication. And that’s impossible because of signal interference and differences in the metaphor models of sender and receiver – a problem compounded by the number of would-be receivers.

Each receiver actually has to construct, in their own mind, an approximation olf the model offered by the sender. Each step is fraught.

Then there is the challenge of time – all of those models and proce3sses change. Metaphors evolve to remain effective and relevant to the culture in which they exist. That is, if time really exists. Mathematics is an extension of our senses and it seems to have some questions about time.

All in all, the world I experience is incoherent with the model of the world that I carry around in my head. I mean, it’s good enough. I can carry on as if it all makes sense. That is it satisfices as a a model that I share with others in order to maintain sanity i.e. a coherent sense of Self. But the processes are hard work and often corrupt. I fudge on my models, or I avoid – ignore – inconsistencies and contradictory evidence. I defer to a collective sense of ‘normal’ or worse, to authority.

 

Where do I stand with my reader?

Here, since I’m the only reader, at least for Now. Here now. The question is actually metaphorical obviously. In normal use the question would be asked to determine the quality of a relationship. Are we aligned in our thinking? Am I supported in my aspiration?

I suppose the question to myself is not so silly if I remember I’m not necessarily the same person from one moment to the next. In that case the question is one of integrity. Is my thinking or mental model consistent i.e. true to itself? If I was living under threat, there might be reason for self-deception – survival. I’m not living under threat. Well, at least not immediately. There is Covid. Yet that is affecting my thinking. I am constructing mental models to fend off that threat. But there’s a deeper aspect to the ‘I’ that is being protected – that is being threatened. My model of Self!

I'm rather desperate to maintain the integrity of my physical being but I'm even more concerned about the integrity of my self -- my mental model of whatever it is that is trying to make sense.

If that self exists ask an evolved biological system working to maintain physical integrity then my model of it will be threatened by knowledge of quantum cosmology and the anthropic principle. Unless it keeps those ideas at arm’s length and abstract. To embody those ideas is to ask for trouble.

If, however, the Self exists as a locus of awareness in an infinite medium of such loci --where not only anything is possible but everything is -- then the resources to create a self are infinite too. The only limit is self consistency is whatever rule set is used to define self. Or embody self. To define is to embody.

A dictionary or encyclopedia is a rule set. Communication and empathy thus locate self, not in any node but in the connections. I becomes we. We becomes I. Everything is nonsense except for points of concurrence. Such points are infinitely rare but in an infinite universe, there are an infinite number of them. My slash hour conceit, at this moment, is that is the only one and only reality. We waffle off in all directions to rationalize that grand narcissism in the face of contrary evidence. After all, we or I must live in our conceit of reality as if it is all there is.

 

What’s the point if there is no point? For starters, we can’t live without meaning. Or rather, we don’t want to live without a point. At least that’s true for most of us. There seems to be an idea amongst wise people, though, that most of the things people live for are illusory grasping, especially wealth and pride.

Mindfulness teaches us to feel gratitude for the real blessings of life, which are mostly about simply living. We’re taught to meditate, which is to retreat from the noise of grasping for utility in our thoughts--to simply sit quietly in the now without trying to make sense—or meaning—of anything. To be aware that anything more than each breath is a distraction from the only thing we can know for sure is real. And even that breath is suspect.

But we have to start someplace. Or perhaps we have to stop somewhere … as if a point in time is anywhere.

Once again we are back to metaphors--analogies that explain ourselves to ourselves. Where was I going with that idea?

Nothing is real but that we make it so. My brain must do work to rationalize what I experience—what I sense. The science of thermodynamics is invoked to make sense of it all.

I was born with predispositions to make sense. My physical survival and that of all animals is dependent on the biases of senses. Babies are born with a very human brain physiology to accommodate language without any particular language specified. Animals with perfectly functioning eyes can be blind if their brains have not learned to make sense.

These lessons from science are strange when we are first exposed to them. They are novel. They don’t make sense so they engage the very human predisposition to make sense, or at least convince ourselves that say makes sense. We do that by matching or comparing the experience— comprising sensations -- with a mental model constructed in our brain. (The model is most often a collective model shared with community through communication.)

Building models in the brain is a low energy process but it is not effortless. It requires work to assemble networks of neurons firing in particular patterns to approximate a structure comparable to the structure and processes created by the raw experience. Considering the vast amount of information presented to us moment to moment, this is an incredible amount of work. Being human—or rather being animal—we cheat, take shortcuts, find efficiencies to do all that work. We jump to conclusions. We pigeonhole. We lie to ourselves. We don’t explain many things to ourselves as much as we explain them away. We rationalize. All this functionality is in play when we ask What’s the point?

 

Do neuro scientists ever stimulate false memories when probing in an exposed brain? If so, they are creating a matrix of sensations that other matrices then are compelled to rationalize with a narrative. Memory seemed to be the stuff of this research but I’m wonder if other experiences can be stimulated in the same way. And here, I must confess to confusion between sensation and feeling. I’ve been told that love is not a feeling. At least it’s not a primary feeling—it may be a compound of feelings and our language—the mechanism of narrative rationalization—is simply lacking in precision. That lack may in fact be a feature and not a bug since lack of precision permits metaphorical thinking.

This conjecture and the science in which it is grounded, is a rationalization that convinces my construct of self of its integrity. That’s not quite right. I am the rationalization because time is me too. Perhaps it would be better to say I am time. There is no matter me without time and there is no time without matter. There is nothing without me. That’s an interesting way to look at solipsism. It’s still not falsifiable but it is interesting and, hopefully, self consistent. It also provides new insight into the conscious universe idea.

I’ve been hung up on the idea because I’ve been thinking about it from the perspective of normal human consciousness, which is frankly narcissistic. But animal consciousness is different in the sense that it is not compelled to rationalize obsessively. Even then amoeba is fundamentally self aware in the sense that it can sense self and other -- predator and prey. But that animal consciousness does not construct complex models of that awareness to project either forward or back in time. Its consciousness is simply good enough to survive hopefully as individual and as species. The word hopefully is a human projection and key to the connection between self and time. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology we could say humans invented time too gain advantage over predator and prey. We survived as apex predator by gaming the system with a new rule -- a new goal post. Not consciously or with singular intent but with a grand rationalization of how we have this particular collective experience of now. The consciousness of a rock is good enough for a rock. A rock feels no pain. It is one with the universe. It changes with time as required in order to simply be. Of course, that’s a human rationalization because we are obsessed with dominating rocks and everything else for survival.

 

It takes more work to hold it together than I appreciate. By it I mean my sanity—the integrity of myself. The forces of entropy! Are strong but social entropy is even stronger!

The metric is personal self consistency nested in social self consistency. If I conclude xat one is inconsistent then that self comes into conflict with the other. In textbook insanity the inconsistency is in the individual, usually due to pathology in sensory or processing apparatus—a brain injury or a double find conditioning of behavior. Occasionally though it is an individual perceiving inconsistency at the societal level that cannot let it be. Then the question becomes what is the most important subject of or four therapy—the society or individual? Or rather, what path or activity is best in order to be effective in actualizing a life of quality for the individual?

At the experiential level of my life this is important but at the grand scale it is neither here nor there. In an infinite universe, nothing really matters. In an infinite universe, nothing really matters what use is this revelation?

Utility requires an objective or a goal. The fundamental goal for any animal is to survive. And beyond that to thrive without overreach into the realm of overconsumption of the resource is required for survival. Nature has managed that balancing act quite well with evolutionary systems. They are good for species not necessarily so good for individuals. Not so good for many species. Good for the apex predator species but not for all of individuals or subgroups within the species. So far it’s good for me. This evolutionary system is good for the individual who is currently trying to make sense of it in the grand scheme of things.

The anthropic principle allows me to write these words and you to read them. Allam makes it imperative. But what use is Allam? And to whom?

Is it merely a comfort that rationalizes my failure to actualize? Could be.

Beyond me, it could offer consolation to asociety that must restrain its consumption in the face of material extinction. Could be. Wait! How does it do that? It permits or rationalizes any path forward so it could just as logically permit or justify genocide on a grand scale in order to eliminate all material competition.

In Allam, it not only could go either way, it goes both ways – all ways. Who or what is the arbiter? Me. Now. The only thing I know for sure exists. And I’m not even so sure of that. I’m not sure what I am in the context of the universe. Am I the universe? Am I even equipped to know or make sense of such an alien transcendent question? Will I ever be? Now? Now? Now?

Is it impudent to think I am so significant outside of my own thoughts?

 

The power of positive thinking. The secret. Abundance theory. As above, so below.

These are clues around us in the way many people think and live that point to the point of Allam. In a solipsistic universe you can influence the future with your thoughts, although that kind of twists the perspective. Everything is so the question isn’t—about creating the future—as much as it is choosing the future you wish to experience. They all exist but you can’t experience what you can’t make sense of. Well, you can to some extent within limits. People, on attaining great fortune, often exclaim “I can’t believe it!” But then they do. They don’t persist in denial. They will make sense of winning by attributing it to luck or help from friends or they will start to believe in their own worth. Their world will not be destroyed by the incongruity of winning. They won’t go insane with denial.

I haven’t considered until now the opposite experience: the realization of chaos and tragedy. With that, we’re into Man’s Search for Meaning as described by Viktor Frankel. The realization of hell is not as quick as the realization of heaven. Why? There is survival value in denial in that case. Succumbing to despair insanity is deadly for the individual and dangerous to the species. The rules of evolutionary psychology have selected against it. The very process of sense making then becomes a force for survival.

On a more domestic level, I can sense that I live on a spectrum of order so organization becomes a key to effective living. People living in clutter—tolerating clutter—in their lives are often failures. I want to ascribe dysfunction to that but that’s not always the case. Most often it is, I suppose, but sometimes clutter confers benefits. Or at least sometimes messy people win.

Perhaps there is a tragedy in messy people believing they cannot win. That’s perhaps a lie I’m telling myself at the moment. It’s rather like the notion of “I’m unworthy of success or love.” There’s a kind of corollary between clutter and wholeness. Mankind has been successful because of organization. Entropy is the enemy so our science—our reasoning—to this day has favored order over the apparent natural disorder of the world. That chauvinism favoring order has brought us to a point of counter productivity.

Reductionism is now appearing to work against our understanding of the world to some extent. In quantum cosmology the ideas of David Bohm are starting to be appreciated. We can’t understand the whole because it is bigger than the sum of its parts. And we’re still discovering new parts so we don’t even have a sum anyway.

Perhaps we never will, especially if the observer effects always muddy the water. All we can know really is the observer

 

I learned last night while watching a documentary about human senses that they operate collaboratively. Sight adds to or even overrides sensations of other senses. Producing a mental model of experience requires a motivation; it doesn’t just happen in a vacuum.

The motivation is survival of the Self. Self cannot exist in a vacuum. And once it exists, it must have a form that makes sense to us. From infancy and beyond, we have been building and maintaining a Self. We experience the world initially as a singularity – there is no Self or Other.

Eventually, though, we feel things like comfort and joy. And we come to realize those things are correlated with other sensations. Meaning emerges when we realize some shapes, colors, smells, and touch sensations are associated with warmth and nourishment. At other times, the lack of those sensations associated with an absence of those sensations.

Eventually the consistency of those correlations of sensations constructs an object of meaning – Mama.

Mama – without words or any other meaning – simply means survival of not just the organism but the very being of the experience.

Baby consciousness. The infant has no constructed model in mind so it is unaware of form besided that endowed as raw animal instinct from the stuff of genes and organic biology. That changes though as the organism learns to differentiate for survival. Once the baby has differentiated its Self from Mama, it can build a more elaborate and effective Self on that foundation. Differentiating the sensations associated with Mama sets a precedent of learning that begs for more. The infant learns that its discomforts can be remedied by Mama and eventually associates it instinctive organic cries with response from Mama.

Eventually, it learns other forms sensed in its experiential fiedld are associated with sensations that are not the same as Mama. There was Self and Mother (My Other) and now there are other Others – (F)other and (Br)other and those less valued by inventors of language. Each Other requires a mental model that can be retrieved from memory to ensure each form in the field is not a threat to survival of meaning.

The meaning derives from consistency of experience in the presence of associated sensations. However, as models are constructed in the infant mind, there are only tentative approximations and guesses at projected consistency. The correlations of sensations may be false or the sources may be deceptive or otherwise inconsistent

As the child grows, the constructs become more complex and thus fraught. The motivation for building then, is not to experience the world as it is but to experience and validate the world as I am.

 

What do you suppose life would be like if you actually lived life as if Allam was true? Because I’ve been living it exactly as if the opposite was true. As if everything I experience is real and I am not. As if I’m a victim of injustice, inequality and oppression. As if I’m part of a great anonymous oppressed ‘We’ that must always fight in the endless wars of those who do control my mind. Our mind.

The sages have long said that the real battle in life is with the self. That’s the idea behind jihad that has been distorted and perverted by Islamic terrorists. It’s actually the way most people seem to live—people I’ve called complacent and willfully ignorant. My resistance to the idea stems from fear that the bad guys are going to get away with murder. Well, they already are and my blaming is completely ineffective.

I also resist because it seems like magical thinking. And I’m superior to that. Also, or maybe it’s the same as letting the bad guys win, I resist because it would be to surrender. Ironically—or tellingly—that is the solution I arrived at for the inevitable ascension of China. Rather than fight it, the West should just surrender to the inevitable. Once again, there’s a life lesson for me being played out on the big screen of my world.

Actually, it’s not a lesson because it’s as unresolved out there as it is in here. It’s more like a mirror to show me the complex in my own thinking. And I’m perhaps wasting my life attacking the mirror. What do I expect?

So far I’ve been expecting others to see and hear what I’m saying and to be inspired to align with my cause of peace and in and justice. Meanwhile I’ve been sloughing off appeals for charity from all around me. Because I’m helpless. Because I don’t have the resources to help the victims of injustice and war period I rationalized my futile war against demons within me by locating them outside.

Really? Well, conversely there is something else to learn. With Allam I have placed my salvation outside of myself in an adjacent possible. I also need to consider the nature of action, which is the domain of love. Writing rants in a social media is not exactly action. Perhaps it creates an illusion of action but in truth I'm simply screaming to myself. And I'm frustrated no one is listening.

So... After all this self revelation what will I do? Experiment with Allam and forsake all my anger and perception of injustice? Why not? I'm failing utterly and feeling ineffective anyway. Fight for a miracle or wait for a miracle? But maybe that's the real problem -- my expectations of reality.

 

I’ve had this idea for many years. Too long and now time is running out for me. It’s embarrassingly grandiose. Nevertheless, here it is.

Everything is. Or, if you prefer the idea of conscious/universal unity: All am.

I am not saying everything is possible. I’m saying everything is … period. In the scientific materialist sense and in the religious-philosophical sense, everything exists. Anything that could exist … is. Anything I think impossible to exist also exists. And everything I could never imagine exists too.  An infinite number of universes, worlds, realities, times, things, beings and minds including infinite versions of you and me exist.  One reality on top of another. Everything. Is.

You now exist. And now you exist. There is no time or space with which to keep everything separate from everything else. And yet there is time and space to keep everything separate too, because everything is.

In short, this moment is a singularity. And this one. You are the explosion that is this moment. You are a singularity of singularities. 

Everything is but you don’t see more than a tiny sliver of it. If you could, you wouldn’t be you. You, as you, cannot make sense of this. And this is the key: You are the judge of what makes sense. More to the point, you make sense. Although everything is, you filter out all that doesn’t make sense.  And that’s all your self does – your self is a set of rules that makes sense out of the nonsense of everything in order to maintain your self’s coherence and integrity. And it and an infinite number of other selves with their own sets of rules of what make sense exist too. Because this is “Everything Is” World.

Of course, this is madness. No one in their right mind could live in the world of Everything Is. Instead, we live in the world of ‘As If’ where we can make sense of almost everything we experience. Our sense of self is not in danger of being ripped apart by nonsense unless we live in Yemen or Myanmar in 2018. Or any other place where violence in any form is ubiquitous. Or if we live with life threatening health issues. 

I have the supreme luxury of living as if my world makes sense except for a few areas of mild and fleeting discomfort. I live by rules of rationality and science that hold, at least, for the moment. 

The integrity of my self was threatened last year. I – my self - was in mortal danger of being ripped apart by cancer. Today, I rationalize that I’m alive and intact because science and medicine did their magic. I can understand a good part of the mechanics of my surgical treatment, so the continued integrity of my self makes sense. 

On the other hand, if I firmly believed in the power of a god to heal me, my continued integrity of self would also make sense, despite the difference in process. The mechanics of maintaining my idea of self aren’t as important as is the fact that my self is a construct. It is an idea that is vicious and ruthless in the way it contorts my perception of my world. My self cannot tolerate much nonsense. If I cannot make sense of something, I will lie to my self about it with a rationalization. Everyone lies but the one to whom we lie the most is our self.  The reason is simple. We lie to our self in order to protect the integrity of a self that is nothing without integrity. A self is an algorithm, fearful of disintegrating if infected with nonsense. 

I am seeing so much nonsense (inequality, racism, war profiteering, social injustice, etc) in the world at the moment that I’m beginning to see that it’s not the politics, wars and general craziness out there that are the reality or the problem.  

The problem – my problem—is that I’m trying to hold onto two versions of reality at once. I’m trying to straddle two worlds: ‘As if’ and ‘Everything is’. 

Before we go further, I need to point out that settling on one or the other world does not extinguish the craziness out there, only the craziness threatening the integrity of my self. But choosing to live in Everythingis world provides me with agency. I recognize that my self—my idea of I and me—is something that I actively construct and maintain – reflexively and subconsciously. Knowing or thinking that I live in a universe where everything is, I have greater tolerance for nonsense in that I recognize that I don’t need to defend my self so viciously that I risk missing an opportunity to make sense where others merely hope to find it.

Everything Is and the Akashic Domain

I’m finding inspiration and encouragement to come out with this grandiose impudence on reading the recent work of Ervin Laszlo. In his book, What is Reality?, Laszlo proposes an interpretation of findings from quantum physics that points to an undiscovered, over-arching dimension to our reality – to the physics of our universe or universes. In particular, he bases his idea of this super dimension, that he calls the Akashic Domain, on work begun by the physicist John Wheeler. Wheeler and others after him proved that, according to the previous scientific paradigm, we are getting something for nothing in physics at both the sub-atomic and cosmic levels. They find that there is energy or matter showing up in the universe that, mathematically speaking, shouldn’t be there.

In what are known as double-slit experiments, researchers have found that results can only be explained by communication taking place between atomic particles – instantaneously - no matter the distance between them. 

The idea Laszlo and others have presented to explain the mystery is that in some sense everything in the universe is intimately connected through this Akashic domain. 

And, with this, we are immediately thrust into the realm of spirituality where such an idea has existed for ages. In addition, we open an avenue of scientific plausibility to consider other mysteries such as near-death experiences and clairvoyance, where people know things that, according to current scientific understanding, are impossible to know.

In effect, this new concept moves the idea of consciousness as residing exclusively in the brain to existing, to some extent, somewhere outside. 

The idea of an over-arching domain of reality embracing the one we and scientists commonly know is, in itself, a formidable conceptual leap. Nevertheless, the idea still abides as part of the current paradigm of a finite universe of material things and processes, albeit now with new things and processes waiting to be discovered in a new dimension by some kind of consciousness wherever it may exist.

We are still limiting ourselves to talking about this or that happening, now or then, here or there. Why?

The only thing dictating what we believe to be true is the science, right? We demand that the models of space-time, energy and processes we discover and share are consistent. We demand that the rules or laws we derive from our models are consistent.

My observation is that this framework is virtually synonymous with the idea of a constructive self. And so, I’m suggesting we turn the whole conceptual framework on its head, and take another look at solipsism.