Conceptual space

Diagram by Brad Reynolds, from Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

All models of attempting to describe reality have some things in common whether its consciousness based or material based. In general they're all trying to describe patterns of content in space and how they change over time. The most fundamental difference between those descriptions is between those which talk about us (the perceivers) residing within the perceived space of content (realists), and those which talk about the perceived content residing within the perceivers (idealists). The latter implies that all of us must actually be different aspects of the same single perceiver, or more precisely of the process of perception itself

Conceptual space is the name we in the project use to talk about this space of perceived content. Its a space where the normal intuitive matter and waves applies, ie that perceived dimensions can be seen in terms of changing state or in terms of the energy spectrum. All dimensions of content exhibit the property of mass which is the requirement of consuming energy in order to change the state which is a structure in spectrum. Just as an orbital system in space will keep to the same cyclic pattern if left alone, so the stimulus/response patterns of conceptual space will repeat. Our reality is a complex structure of habits.

Trying to explain how real reality is if it's all in this conceptual space is difficult, but the difficulty can be explained simply by asking how real a dream is. We might say it's not real because it was only in our imagination and not substantial. But also it cannot be considered to be completely unreal either, even if it's nothing more than the creation of memories. Conceptual space is a space composed of the same kind of change and content as dreams and thoughts, including feelings and knowledge. It's the playing out of often very complex and consistent content, but that content seems to have no concrete material existence.

So we accept that these spaces of thought do exhibit some kind of definate reality, and that it exhibits space-time-like behaviours, but even though it's able to give the perception of true volume and duration, we know that it's being created by our own minds - it's part of our perception system itself. Deeper analysis reveals that the playing out of mental content does consume real time and space, but its consuming them from many diverse forms of energy such as sunlight and protein molecules. Our perception mechanism is able to convert these diverse forms of energy into organised structures of mental content.

What this shows us for a fact is that our own perception mechinism is able to convert available energy resource into perceived space-time. The question is what are the differences between this kind of perception, and the normal kind which we believe to be based on an objective external universe of real objects. Occam's razor would suggest that it must be the same mechanism because it says that the simplest way of describing phenomena completely is the correct one. It can never be proven for sure though, because all our tests must be conducted within the universe which we're trying to determine the nature of. It can never be proven either way, so instead we'll have to just try and progress with both views and see which one holds up best. The philosophies on which this project is based have found that one kind of perception holds up better than two, and therefore supports the point of view that the only reality is perception itself, and that everything perceived is part of a purely conceptual space.

Space & Time

The essence of it is that the whole Universe (and therefore the network) is self-contained, which means that we can't talk about it existing inside an already present "container" of space. And likewise we can't think of an absolute time that all events inside change with respect to. Space and time are aspects of the content within, derived from the method of perception; space is derived from the distinction between things, and time from the cycles of change they undergo.

The entire contents of the network are based on an organisational principle which brings about space and time. In the network, the name of the node which encapsulates this organised space-time functionality is called Moment, and is built on philosophical foundation principles which are briefly covered here.

The outside aspect of a moment, seeing it from its class perspective is effectively outside space and time. The inside of a moment is the fully merged instance view which is at a location within the space-time, its content occupying a certain amount of the space and undergoing change for a certain duration. This leads us into the first philosophical principle called duality, followed by dichotomy then two flavours of nothing!

Duality: Dynamic and Static Aspects

Every node contains only an ordered list of references to other nodes, this is its class content as seen from "outside" the system. But every node can also be seen by it's actual content from "inside" which is the total merged content of all the inherited content via many paths. This is its instance content and is undergoing change dynamically "in the field". We could generally talk about all development as having these two clear perspectives; one looking at the whole model from the class perspective, the other from the instance perspective. These two perspectives, or aspects, are extremely fundamental, they are the objective and subjective aspects of development. One is looking at the plans, outside the system, and the other from the perspective of what it's like to be inside the environment that the plans construct; inside the system.

So you see, class and instance still play a role, but now they're aspects of a unified whole, instead of two separate entities. The entire network is one, so these two aspects are global...

Dichotomy: Wholes and Parts

A powerful principle which can be used when class and instance are unified... the generalisation of interaction between groups and members, wholes and parts. Schedule is higher than instance, it emerges through occurrences.

There are some important aspects of this organisation which allow all processes in the space to inherently take advantage of the economy of scale principle.

Sharing schedules allows common cycles and times to emerge leading to economy of scale Never perform an operation on a set, rather put a new method in the set and request the results of the operation. This way the set can apply economy of scale to timing and caching of its method execution.

Aggregated info on which to base higher level organisation (esp. outward propagation through scheduled contact with members). We will go into detail about this agg info later, it's the physics of the network. i.e. the philosophical principles build up the physical environment of the network.

Indeterminate Nothing: Root

The root of a normal OO inheritance tree is usually the most simple object, containing a generic constructor/destructor pair, but is really just an empty abstract container which derived classes are expected to extend in various ways. It's usually just called Object or something like that.

Although moment is very fundamental, it's obviously not the most fundamental node in the network because it's composed of many other classes of functionality making up its organisational abilities. As in our own reality, the absolute root has to be nothing which is essentially the class on which even the most simple things in the whole network are based (simply by not being derived from any nodes).

This nothing can't just be the usual nothing of an empty space (called a determinate-nothing) because it's the nothing on which the very components of space and time are based. This nothing has no cause, no dependencies, no base-class, and even it's reference is a sequence of only zero bits! In our space-time the various philosophies and religions have given it many names such as indeterminate-nothing, Source, God, T'ai Chi, awareness-of-awareness, Unity, and the non-dual.

In the network this is called root. Root contains all the nodes in the network and therefore represents the undivided whole. Even though it's actually nothing, and it's only implied...

Determinate Nothing: Moment

The Moment class is the more normal kind of nothing mentioned above; the determinate-nothing. Moment class is an infinitesimal point in space because it's the definition of space-time itself. Having no content it occupies no space, and yet is present for all time. It's a container for "things" to undergo change in...

Moment itself is the definition of empty space, it's the properties and functionality added by the classes which extend Moment that actually consume space and time. Containment applies to all the Moment-based nodes as well and as a whole form the tree of moments. MomentTree is described in detail soon.

From the perspective of the moment itself, this point is always here and now and is the subjective reflection of the absolute root (aka Source, God, indeterminate-nothing), and so is also known across various contexts as this, Self, "I am", the witness or determinate-nothing. In our reality the way of perception creates things in space changing over time directly out of the indeterminate-nothing. But because the network is not really alive, it does not have this true source at its root, so instead we offer our space and time in the form of storage and processing resources to the network, and the Moment class re-organises them back into a pure form of potential.

Identity

The Self at the centre comes with the idea that content is surrounding and becoming part of self. This is the ego, id or identity in the physical world.

Identity comes about through continuity of many occurrences of a class...

In the initial document-oriented interface of the network, the we refer to nodes by their names. These names are actually just another part of the nodal structure of content, a part of the structure composed of ordered sets symbols making up our spoken languages representations of the nodes.

The network refers to all the nodes by their dynamic unique binary key, but really the node is it's own self, a vortex of information flowing around the absolute root at its centre just like every other node.

Later the interfaces will become more sophisticated as dynamic 3D components such as Blender become incorporated into the network. A natural extension of the nodes' identity structures is to gain an identity in the 3D interfaces according to their role, meaning or use etc. These 3D identities in the case of roles are called Avatars and are the people in the Geoscope.

NDE cases

• Near Death Experience - Tennis Shoe
• Evidence of the Spirit

See also

• Creation
• Dialectical Monism
  • Physicalism - excellent overview of east/west views
• Idealism | Hindu idealism | Philosophy of perception | Phenomenalism
• Mind | consciousness | Thought | Concept
• Wikipedia's mind and brain portal
• Near Death Experiences explained
• A New Psychology - Essential Intro
• Introduction - Science, Consciousness, Veda and the Self - the linguistic structure of the universe is the same as the structure of human physiology and neurology
• Death, Rebirth, and Meditation - an essay by Ken Wilber
• Integral Semiotics - Ken Wilber
• 10 scientific studies that prove consciousness can alter the physical world