What are some of the metrics people use, to judge whether something felt “real?” What are some metrics used to resolve fork-conflicts, between different ways of making sense of the world?
What does it mean, when these are different, and how do you resolve that conflict?
(A few example conflicts: A dream that is obviously not self-consistent, but still makes useful predictions. A vivid memory you have, that none of your friends can recall. A high-confidence intuitive prediction you could make whose certainty colors your perception, but which others insist is based on invalid starting premises.)
A bit of context: I ended up with an odd connection between the way he described a “Realness-gauging heuristic,” and how Blockchain works, that I wanted to share. This eventually led to the question bubbling up.
Vervaeke mentioned that a problem with some Higher State of Consciousness (HSC) experiences is that some people experience an “Axial Revolution in miniature,” and decide that the real world is the dream, and their experience in the altered state was the reality. (Which they usually feel a need to return to, due to what he dubbed a “Platonic meta-drive” towards realness.)
Usually, with altered states (ex: literal dreaming), one ends up treating the altered state as a dream-like subjective experience, and understand your waking-life as reality. In these cases, this seems to get flipped.
To paraphrase Vervaeke...
Realness is the pattern of intelligibility with the widest, richest scope. It makes the most sense of your experience; your beliefs, your memories, etc.
The way I interpret this is that one of the common heuristics to ascertain “realness” is to search for the most extensive, highest-continuity, or most vividly experienced comprehension algorithm that you’ve ever built.
This calls faintly to mind fork-resolution in blockchains.
For the most part, blockchains branch constantly, but by design turn whatever is the longest and most-developed legal branch into the canonical one*. This is not purely continuous, since this is not always the same chain over time; one can overtake another. As long as it’s the the longest, it becomes the “valid” one.
While this is one of the simplest fork-resolution metics to explain, it is not the only one.
Other varieties of forking (ex: a git repo for a software package) may use other canonicity-resolution heuristics. Here’s a very common one: for a lot of projects, the most-built one is called an “Alpha” while the canonical version numbers are reserved for branches deemed debugged or “sufficiently stable.”
(It is also sometimes possible to provide an avenue for re-integrating or otherwise feeding an off-branch to a main one (ex: uncles), but this can get complicated rather quickly.)
* With the notable exception of hard-forks: a rare event, where there is a social move to quash the validity of a chain in which a substantial misuse has occurred. Coming up with similar cases in history or social reality is left as an exercise for the reader.
A question:
What are some of the metrics people use, to judge whether something felt “real?” What are some metrics used to resolve fork-conflicts, between different ways of making sense of the world?
What does it mean, when these are different, and how do you resolve that conflict?
(A few example conflicts: A dream that is obviously not self-consistent, but still makes useful predictions. A vivid memory you have, that none of your friends can recall. A high-confidence intuitive prediction you could make whose certainty colors your perception, but which others insist is based on invalid starting premises.)
A bit of context: I ended up with an odd connection between the way he described a “Realness-gauging heuristic,” and how Blockchain works, that I wanted to share. This eventually led to the question bubbling up.
Vervaeke mentioned that a problem with some Higher State of Consciousness (HSC) experiences is that some people experience an “Axial Revolution in miniature,” and decide that the real world is the dream, and their experience in the altered state was the reality. (Which they usually feel a need to return to, due to what he dubbed a “Platonic meta-drive” towards realness.)
Usually, with altered states (ex: literal dreaming), one ends up treating the altered state as a dream-like subjective experience, and understand your waking-life as reality. In these cases, this seems to get flipped.
To paraphrase Vervaeke...
The way I interpret this is that one of the common heuristics to ascertain “realness” is to search for the most extensive, highest-continuity, or most vividly experienced comprehension algorithm that you’ve ever built.
This calls faintly to mind fork-resolution in blockchains.
For the most part, blockchains branch constantly, but by design turn whatever is the longest and most-developed legal branch into the canonical one*. This is not purely continuous, since this is not always the same chain over time; one can overtake another. As long as it’s the the longest, it becomes the “valid” one.
While this is one of the simplest fork-resolution metics to explain, it is not the only one.
Other varieties of forking (ex: a git repo for a software package) may use other canonicity-resolution heuristics. Here’s a very common one: for a lot of projects, the most-built one is called an “Alpha” while the canonical version numbers are reserved for branches deemed debugged or “sufficiently stable.”
(It is also sometimes possible to provide an avenue for re-integrating or otherwise feeding an off-branch to a main one (ex: uncles), but this can get complicated rather quickly.)
* With the notable exception of hard-forks: a rare event, where there is a social move to quash the validity of a chain in which a substantial misuse has occurred. Coming up with similar cases in history or social reality is left as an exercise for the reader.