The Reality Stack by Joel Crook
Sunday, August 3, 2014 5:41
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Thought experiments have a long history in science and philosophy as a means to explore ideas. I would like to explore a few ideas with you which Rich finds interesting and thinks I should share with you. The experiment here is to look at “unusual phenomena” from a different perspective and possibly tease out new ideas and maybe put old ideas in a different perspective. The only caveat to what follows is that I make no claim or representation that the ideas presented are either congruent or equivalent with reality as we experience it.
Recently there has been much discussion here of the “symbol” or “emblem” which Officer Ronny Zamora reported having observed on the side of the “craft” in Socorro, New Mexico in 1964. Some have said that this symbol was an “identifying mark” of terrestrial origin. Some have said that Officer Zamora was the victim of a hoax. Still others claim he was a hoaxer. Some think that he saw an Extraterrestrial craft marked with unknown symbols. Others have proposed that what Zamora saw was not a physical symbol but symbol drawn up from the depths of the “collective unconscious”. Setting aside the terrestrial and the ET scenarios, it is this latter idea of the collective symbology I’d like to take a closer look at. Understand that we are going to be taking a bit of a “grand tour” of a couple of ideas before we get to the fun stuff.
Jung over many years presented his ideas on the “collective unconscious” and the “common symbology” of humankind. He presented what he thought represented “proof” that it does indeed exist. Many people find a kind of personal “resonance” with the idea yet no one has [to my knowledge] ever attempted to put his idea into a tangible scientific framework. Think about that for a moment. How would such a thing work? How could everyone be connected in this manner?
Man’s current understand of consciousness is “limited”. Ask any cognitive scientist, physicist, or even a skeptic and you will find they are hard pressed to be able to give a fact based “numerical” representation of what consciousness is or just exactly what “mind” is or how it works.
Max Tegmark of MIT in a recently published paper entitled “Consciousness as a State of Matter”, has attempted to give “consciousness” a theoretical basis and therefore bring the subject something more than saying “Consciousness it the ability to be self referential” [1][2]. His basic principles required for a conscious being are:
1) The information principle — it must have substantial information storage capacity
2) The independence principle — it must have substantial independence from the rest of the world
3) The integration principle — it cannot consist of nearly independent parts
4) The dynamics principle — it must have substantial information-processing capacity and it is this processing rather than the static information that must be integrated.
So that seems to be a pretty good and fairly simple description of what a “consciousness” must possess as part of its hardware. But how does our hardware work in actuality? And what about the software that is running on “our” hardware?
On a lark [such as we are on] let us consider an a conceptual model taken from “network engineering” and adapt it to how “we” relate to / with / though our “hardware” to “reality”. This conceptual model is the known as the Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) [3]. The OSI model breaks computer communications down in to seven distinct “layers” which each serves a purpose in communication. These are:
1. Physical – the actual hardware
2. Data link – the means by which information is transmitted
3. Network – The way the information is formatted to be transported
4. Transport – the way in which information is error corrected
5. Session – The way the information is prepared for use or transmission
6. Presentation – the decoding / encoding of information
7. Application – the information as seen or sent by the user
We might call our version of the model “the reality stack”. It provides a framework for the observation, communication, and processing of ideas and how we relate to “reality” and with reality. There is not much that can be considered to be controversial in either Tegmark’s requirements for a conscious being or the OSI model as applied to how we as conscious beings receive or transmit information but now lets pull out pull out a “magic rabbit hole” and see how deep it goes.
Before the coming of Quantum Mechanics [QM] as the means to describe the universe at the particle level, the Newtonian Clockwork “Local Objective Universe” was the “Reality Du Jour” but what kind of universe was it? “Local” means that there is no magic means to transmit information and “Objective” means that the universe exists separately from an observer. A funny thing happened on the way to modern physics– the Local Objective Universe died. It seems that yes much to the dismay of Einstein’s ghost “Spooky action at a distance” is permitted via quantum entanglement[4] The objective universe seems to *require* observers for things to actually happen.[4a] It seems that many of alleged “skeptics” still cling to this form or “reality”.
With the coming of QM the universe has become a wild place with one of the interpretations saying that for every event a new universe is created and like Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths”[5] reality and or history forks into new realities. But why? It has been speculated by “Digital Physics”[6] that the universe is a computer of some kind and possibly running a simulation problem
In 1964 Daniel F. Galouye publish a science fiction novel “Simulacron-3″ [7]. The story of Simulacron-3 is that of a man and his partner who have built a computer system that simulates reality. It turns out that the partner has been secretly “visiting” the simulation and vicariously living a second life in the simulation. Then he is murdered under suspicious circumstances which points at the creator of the computer. After a few more plot twists it is revealed that the universe of the story is itself a simulation.
When I first read this story in 1969 I felt the world take a bit of a spin. Thirty years later “The Matrix” was released telling a similar tale of “simulated reality”. A few years ago I discovered Nick Bostrom’s site “The Simulation Argument” with its supporting documents[8].
Could reality be simulated or manipulated like a machine?
Among my father’s papers I found a document relating the following unusual events:
I had been observing UFO events in the western Antelope Valley, California (west of 170th St. West) since late 1971. These events consisted of observations of lights at night and many, many burned spots on the ground accompanied by trapezoidal impressions as if made by a “craft” of some kind in the ground. My wife, Bettie and I had chased lights all over the valley at night and encountered curious effects. Once we were chasing two lights and just as they crossed the road in front of us we both decided that it was motorcycles we were chasing and that it was time to go home. The next day we went back to that same spot and found that there was a barbed wire fence on both sides of the road there. Motorcycles could not have possibly gone from the field on one side across the road and into the field on the other side!
On another occasion also at night, we were chasing a light and we went off Highway 138 toward the north at 360th St. West toward the bottom of the valley (360th St. is a dirt road). We came to the old Los Angeles Aqueduct of which we were not familiar at the time. The aqueduct appeared to be a quick rising hill in the dirt road as the 10 foot diameter steel aqueduct pipe was buried where the road crossed it. The road was so steep until I didn’t know whether the car could go over it so I got out of the car and walked up to the top of the rise.
At the time, we thought that the rise where the aqueduct was located was another road because we had seen the light come up what appeared to be a road. By this time we thought it was a car but it definitely did not look like a car. As I got up to the top of the rise, I looked over to the far side and saw what appeared to be a regular station wagon with the interior lights on and containing four people. I was sure then that it was a car.
The next day we went back in the daytime and found that the rise contained the aqueduct pipe and that there was no road on top of it. In fact pieces of angle iron had been welded to the exposed top of the steel pipe to keep motorcycles off it. We also found that there were numerous burned “landing spots”, each with its own set of triangular footprints. In addition, the area where I saw the “station wagon” was a freshly plowed field and there were absolutely no car tracks or marks of any other kind in it!
During this period we also found “landing spots” in the ravine at the lowest part of the valley underneath the drooping branches of cottonwood trees that had absolutely no access from the outside. Even a small Jeep couldn’t have gotten in without leaving the tree branches broken off. How did a “craft” land in a place which had no access? I remember discussing this with Allen Hynek and he said he knew of several other similar instances of the same kind. He also said that he had heard from persons that he trusted descriptions of UFOs that “sank into the ground” [11]
On another occasion also at night, we were chasing a light and we went off Highway 138 toward the north at 360th St. West toward the bottom of the valley (360th St. is a dirt road). We came to the old Los Angeles Aqueduct of which we were not familiar at the time. The aqueduct appeared to be a quick rising hill in the dirt road as the 10 foot diameter steel aqueduct pipe was buried where the road crossed it. The road was so steep until I didn’t know whether the car could go over it so I got out of the car and walked up to the top of the rise.
At the time, we thought that the rise where the aqueduct was located was another road because we had seen the light come up what appeared to be a road. By this time we thought it was a car but it definitely did not look like a car. As I got up to the top of the rise, I looked over to the far side and saw what appeared to be a regular station wagon with the interior lights on and containing four people. I was sure then that it was a car.
The next day we went back in the daytime and found that the rise contained the aqueduct pipe and that there was no road on top of it. In fact pieces of angle iron had been welded to the exposed top of the steel pipe to keep motorcycles off it. We also found that there were numerous burned “landing spots”, each with its own set of triangular footprints. In addition, the area where I saw the “station wagon” was a freshly plowed field and there were absolutely no car tracks or marks of any other kind in it!
During this period we also found “landing spots” in the ravine at the lowest part of the valley underneath the drooping branches of cottonwood trees that had absolutely no access from the outside. Even a small Jeep couldn’t have gotten in without leaving the tree branches broken off. How did a “craft” land in a place which had no access? I remember discussing this with Allen Hynek and he said he knew of several other similar instances of the same kind. He also said that he had heard from persons that he trusted descriptions of UFOs that “sank into the ground” [11]
Somehow my father on these two separate occasions experienced something which could be considered impossible. Having known him I can accept that he was reporting exactly what he saw. The fact that his name is not associated as an “everyday name” in the UFO field should be some indication as to his desire to observe, measure, and evaluate this phenomena as a scientific curiousity.
In 1971 Phillip Jose Farmer published a “science fantasy” novel named “To Your Scattered Bodies Go” and four subsequent books. The tale is that sometime in the future all of the people who ever lived wake up along the banks of a great river revived by an unknown alien race for unknown reasons. The story follow the adventures of various famous people [among them Mark Twain, Sir Francis Richard Burton, and Alice Liddell] as they struggle with being reborn under an alien sky and trying to understand why they are alive again. Along the way some of the characters discover that if they are killed they wake up someplace else along the river.
A number of insistent skeptics repeatedly slam the idea that UFOs or UAPs or any encounter with an “non-terrestrial intelligence” as occurred at any time in the past or present. Somehow they cannot accept that any information which we observe can or should be “decoded” and interpreted as meaning “the universe is not only weirder than we imagine by weirder than we can imagine.”[9] In fact the very idea that something which does not conform to their belief system means that the events did not occur.
So what exactly is reality? What is it we are seeing when we see the inexplicable. Are we seeing a hallucination whose roots are firmly buried in the fertile soil of the collective unconscious. How could we be connected? Using the OSI model mentioned above imagine that somehow, someway the “transport” layer of our consciousness is connected to all the other transport layers of every other conscious being. I’m not specifying how or why, I just speculating this might be the case. This “connection” on the transport layer represents the “collective unconscious”. Still we don’t know how such a thing could work unless we re-examine exactly what reality is and how we use it and how it uses us.
So here is the thought experiment:
Imagine the universe is some kind of computational device… that it is calculating a solution to a problem which may have everything or nothing at all to do with us. A utilitarian evaluation of such a computational system would say that it will only include things which have some kind of functional purpose to aid in the accomplishment of its goal. So here we are. Observers. Noted for our ability to “make things concrete” by observing things. Strangely enough, Jewish mysticism has the concept of the four worlds of creation[10]:
1) Emanation named Atziluth
2) Creation named Beriyah
3) Formation named Yetzerah
4) Action named Assiyah
The world of Action is the final stage of a thing coming into being… the physical manifestation of a thing in this world. For something to exist in our “world of things” we must observe it exists.
What if a portion of UFO / UAP observations are some how “reality transcendent”? What if the observer of one of these events is in fact somehow seeing beyond the limitations of our reality and seeing beyond it into another. Is it possible that seeing these “unusual things” we are in fact making them real?
Another report from my father’s writings:
I was working for the EI duPont de Nemours Co. at the Atomic Energy Commission’s Savannah River Plant near Aiken, SC as an Instrument Shift Engineer at the 105-P nuclear reactor facility when this happened in April of 1954. I was married and had three small sons…
At the time we had bought a piece of land near the intersection of county highways 37 and 39 in Barnwell County, SC just west of Springfield and were living in a house trailer at the site of a house which had burned down. The trailer was crowded and in an effort to expand the living space, I had started to build a small house about 20′X40′ next to the trailer. The foundation and subfloor was finished but the upper part had not yet been completed.
I was working second shift at the plant at the time from 3 pm to 11 pm. I got home after 12 midnight. My wife, Bettie, was upset because there was a strange smell present in the trailer similar to rotten oranges and she thought it was the Freon refrigerant leaking out of the refrigerator. She insisted that we move the refrigerator out of the trailer on to the floor of the yet unfinished house. The refrigerator was not a small trailer unit but a full size 14 or 15 cubic foot model and was very heavy. I didn’t like the idea of moving it but she insisted. Well, we got it moved and it began to sprinkle rain soon after we got it moved. We finally got to bed very late.
Later that night Bettie woke up and looked toward the west end of the trailer where the children slept and saw an unbelievable sight! There floating in the air about five feet off the floor was a “thing” that glowed with sort of a luminous color about the brightness of the moon and underneath looked like a jellyfish. The central part was about 6″ in diameter and there were tentacles hanging down below of a greenish hue, the thickness of a pencil and moving in the air with a scintillating motion.
She called my name trying to wake me up but I didn’t wake up so she turned towards me (on her right) and there curled around my neck was another of these things! She said “Oh my God” and pulled the cover over her head. She felt a flash of intense heat beginning at her feet and travelling up to her head when she blacked out. She was unconscious until we both woke up the next morning!
I slept through the whole thing. She told me about what had happened and it sounded incredible to me. She was wearing a nylon hair net when it happened. The next morning the hair net was found to have melted and was matted into her hair. I had to pick it out a piece at a time!
Now nylon begins to melt at about 470°F and the bits of hair net showed that they had been at a much higher temperature than the minimum melting temperature because of the tiny size of the droplets of nylon. The hair net appears to have exploded in an extreme burst of heat. We could not think of anything that could account for the heat flash and unconsciousness. We kept this to ourselves and didn’t tell anyone about it. Several times later we smelled the same odd smell but never had any indication of a reoccurrence of a similar kind of incident and never saw the “things” again. Now I have no proof that what Bettie saw is connected with the abduction phenomenon, but what she saw was different to say the least. [11]
To my knowledge no one has ever reported something like what my mother saw and described to my father.
What if “the collective unconscious” is actually a kind of technology built on top of the substrates of reality and that what we think is physical reality is nothing more than the very edges of the user’s “application layer”? What if the “root of reality” goes far deeper than we imagine or are capable of imagining or measuring except by extrapolation. What if the alleged “visitors” reported in UFO/UAP events actually manipulate our reality and / or our perception of reality with their technology?
Before you discard these ideas out of hand consider them for just a moment. Consider what the consequences and the implications of these ideas have on our perceptual matrix. I
make no claim that this is the actual state of reality but I do claim that they have some value in evaluating what has been reported by various reputable sources over the last 70 years.
Notes:
[1] “Consciousness as a State of Matter” Max Tegmark http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0493
{2} “Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas” — a slightly popularized version of Tegmarks’s ideashttps://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/5e7ed624986d
[3] Wikipedia “Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI)”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
[4] Wikipedia “Quantum entanglement” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
[4a] Wikipedia “Copenhagen interpretation” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation
[5] Wikipedia “The Garden of Forking Paths” “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Forking_Paths
[6] Wikipedia “Digital Physics” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Physics
[7} Wikipedia "Simulacron-3" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3 The book was made into the movie "The Thirteenth Floor"
[8] “The Simulation Argument” http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
[9] “J.B.S Haldane” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.B.S._Haldane
[10] “The Four Worlds” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Worlds
[11] Private Papers of Gains M. Crook in my possession. I have given copies to Rich Reynolds who has published some of them on his other blogs.
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JC
Source: http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-reality-stack-by-joel-crook.html
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