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Human singularities

#1
Magical Realist Online
http://consciousnessunbound.blogspot.com...actee.html

"In my last post, I spoke to the concept of human singularities, and used the astonishing case of the Brazilian healer, Arigo, to illustrate. My plan is to report on related cases that qualify as human singularities. My model for this is Joseph of Copertino, a case of voluntary possession producing a spectrum of psychophysical marvels. Giuseppe definitely scores as a singularity—in the strong, paradigm-smashing sense.


There are, like Joseph, other extreme expressions of the phenomenon, like Milarepa, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Franek Kluski, and the like. If we look and listen closely, this phenomenon expresses itself in varying degrees of its potential. Nobody knows the extent of that potential.

I’m intrigued by partial, inchoate thrusts toward full-blown “singularity”--as in reports of “contactees”—people who claim being contacted by aliens, angels, extraterrestrials, or interdimensionals.

For example, I wrote an account of HD’s experiences, a 28-year-old man who lived in Santa Maria, California. He was a printer with high security clearance and worked for Northrop Aerospace.

HD was on the job when he first heard voices in his head; it seemed at once like a mental communication. Then he heard a high frequency sound in his head that oscillated from left to right ear. Looking out the window, he saw a silent UFO hovering in the air.

That was the beginning. Because of the voices clamoring inside his head, he couldn’t concentrate and was forced to quit his job. Majoring in forestry at college, he hoped one day to work where the voices couldn’t interfere.

He had a few jobs such as working in a library, but was unable to hold them down for long. The voices were addressing him constantly now and had done so for five years. When he wakes up they say, “Good morning!” They monitor his day and seem to know everything about him. To communicate with them he has only to quiet down and listen, and he hears the voices.

HD was 15 years old when he first heard “high frequency tones” in his head. He was on his way home from school when he had this disorienting experience. At 18 he began to have vivid dreams of UFOs; in one of these dreams, he was shown a rather impressively detailed star-map.

About this time, HD, conservative and believing in a strong military defense, began to worry about nuclear war. He felt the UFOs were warning him about nuclear war. Later, the Entities declared to him that they sometimes communicated with people by dreams, and seemed to be priming him for later communications.

When the Entities began to communicate, he resisted and got into a “battle” with them. The more he battled them, the sicker he felt, especially in the stomach. (Arigo got terrible headaches when he resisted “Dr. Fritz.”) HD had various uncomfortable sensations such as being stuck with many fine needles and a kind of numbing frostbite.

On the mental side, the Entities made him sick because they attacked his religious beliefs. They declared there was no God, but after five years of wrangling, he settled down and agreed the Entities were part of his life who in turn agreed that for now it was best for HD to believe in God.

In addition to voices, he saw vivid pictures televised in his head. “Movie screens,” he said, flashed away. Also, the Entities caused objects to appear and disappear right in front of him. They said they could “manifest” anything. Once while driving on the California thruway, he observed a red car levitating in a perpendicular position. This disoriented him and he became unsure which cars were real or unreal. The Entities were tricking him and trying to rearrange his reality.

So for a while he copied down the license plate numbers of cars he wasn’t sure about. One day a man in a black leather jacket and dark sunglasses appeared out of nowhere and told him not to copy down license plate numbers any more. That was intimidating, but the Entities could be funny and once drove him to uncontrollable laughter by flashing cartoons in his head for four hours.

Now we come to the X-rated part of the story. A blond woman in a purple robe named Dian fully materialized before him in his living room and gave him an experience of extraterrestrial fellatio. After ejaculation, he heard a voice: “How did he react?” “Normal,” came another disembodied voice. HD (believe it or not) didn’t feel violated and told me he enjoyed the sex . Moreover, after the sex, Dian made the sign of the cross on his head. (This sounds like a script from Alfred Jarry, the inventor of Pataphysics.)

After the voices began, HD began to go back to church and one day while in church he encountered a woman that resembled Dian. Then he heard loud voices screaming and arguing, and the woman was shouting obscenities and blasphemies. This was an affront, and HD broke down. He spoke to a priest about his experiences who recommended he visit a psychiatrist. HD went to two different soul-doctors who pronounced him “normal,” apart of course from his freakishly odd experiences. He offered to take a lie detector test and convinced his parents that he was telling the truth.

In sum: He believed the Entities were “exterior” to him, and were “intelligences from another dimension.” He felt the purpose of these visitations was to open him up to a new perception of reality. His story describes what seems to me a nascent singularity, pressing its way toward self-realization. Unfortunately, I fell out of touch with HD, but his experience was a variation on a theme—stories that take us to the edge of known realities, as described in John Mack’s Passport to the Cosmos (1999), the late Pulitzer-prize-winning psychiatrist who took stories of people like HD seriously."
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#2
C C Offline
(May 24, 2017 07:52 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: http://consciousnessunbound.blogspot.com...actee.html

"In my last post, I spoke to the concept of human singularities, and used the astonishing case of the Brazilian healer, Arigo, to illustrate. My plan is to report on related cases that qualify as human singularities. [...] Later, the Entities declared to him that they sometimes communicated with people by dreams, and seemed to be priming him for later communications. [...] Once while driving on the California thruway, he observed a red car levitating in a perpendicular position. [...] One day a man in a black leather jacket and dark sunglasses appeared out of nowhere and told him not to copy down license plate numbers any more. [...] A blond woman in a purple robe named Dian fully materialized before him in his living room and gave him an experience of extraterrestrial fellatio. [...] He believed the Entities were “exterior” to him, and were “intelligences from another dimension.” [...]

LINK: "The term 'singularity' is used to denote the point where an extreme or transcendent change becomes possible. So there are mathematical, gravity, and technological singularities. They all mark break-off points, openings to new realities. I want to introduce the idea of a human singularity—a person whose life has features that point to new dimensions of function, of being, and of value."

Of course, the events of "those openings to new realities" would be dismissed by the mainstream as just hallucination / dream / apophenia affairs and "confabulating intelligible narratives from arbitrary data" (token examples in spoiler further down).

But how deep does that conventional, explanatory rabbit hole go -- this deriving of coherence and meaning from random patterns? (Setting aside the incongruity of how a video game program requires extensive designing whereas the brain can reel off a half-sensible virtual realm on the fly from gibberish input).

Dreams and hallucinations aren't static details in which some vague face is discerned in via our habitual preconceptions (pareidolia). But sustained / developing experiences of often normal-appearing objects and people / animals behaving in semi-consistent ways. Again, if meaningless "noise" can either guide the production of that or provide the stitched-together filler for a governing template that generates such lengthy story arcs, then what are the limits of that remarkable creativity?

In granting such prowess to those explanations, could they skeptically chip away at our waking and non-adulterated perceptions themselves? Which is to say, it's easy to conceive a higher-order toposophic being -- constrained or governed by a more regulated imagination than that of biological mortals -- outputting a whole, computed human lifetime in whatever its equivalent is for dreams and hallucinations. Triggered from what might amount to the haphazard stimulus of an itch or bruise in its "many more degrees of freedom" environs.[*]

While I can't recollect the last time I experienced life vicariously through a mouse or insect body in a dream, the tendency to assume oneiric or hallucinatory avatars of far lesser status might be a routine custom of transapient beings that threaten to fall off their scale of measurement. Also, why be restricted to the POV of a single simulated mind? A transap would have the capacity to splinter into billions of intertwined agents or phenomenal continuums concurrently interacting with each other from their own distinct, subjective perspectives. Ancient fabulists or Ed Woods caliber movie-makers might label it "The Sleeping or Stoned Beast With A Quadrillion Avatars (Points of View)".

[*] Nietzsche: Now, the dream is a seeking and presenting of reasons for these excitations of feeling, of the supposed reasons, that is to say. Thus, for example, whoever has his feet bound with two threads will probably dream that a pair of serpents are coiled about his feet. This is at first a hypothesis, then a belief with an accompanying imaginative picture and the argument: "these snakes must be the causa of those sensations which I, the sleeper, now have." So reasons the mind of the sleeper.

The conditions precedent, as thus conjectured, become, owing to the excitation of the fancy, present realities. Everyone knows from experience how a dreamer will transform one piercing sound, for example, that of a bell, into another of quite a different nature, say, the report of cannon. In his dream he becomes aware first of the effects, which he explains by a subsequent hypothesis and becomes persuaded of the purely conjectural nature of the sound.

But how comes it that the mind of the dreamer goes so far astray when the same mind, awake, is habitually cautious, careful, and so conservative in its dealings with hypotheses? Why does the first plausible hypothesis of the cause of a sensation gain credit in the dreaming state? (For in a dream we look upon that dream as reality, that is, we accept our hypotheses as fully established). I have no doubt that as men argue in their dreams to-day, mankind argued, even in their waking moments, for thousands of years: the first causa, that occurred to the mind with reference to anything that stood in need of explanation, was accepted as the true explanation and served as such. (Savages show the same tendency in operation, as the reports of travelers agree).
--HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN


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"Neural activity in the primary sensory areas of the neocortex produces the impression of sensory perception. This means that neurons firing in the primary visual cortex create the illusion of seeing things, neurons firing in the primary auditory area create the illusion of hearing things, and so forth. If that firing occurs at random, these perceptions can feel like crazy, randomly fragmented hallucinations. It is easy to imagine that the random imagery and sensations created in this way could be woven together to create a complex, multisensory hallucination which we might call a dream." https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...y-excerpt/

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"Hallucinations, often associated with psychotic disorders, may result from a natural process used by the brain to make sense of the world, say scientists. Visions and sounds that do not exist can be generated by the brain’s habit of predicting what it expects to experience, filling in missing gaps in reality, the research shows. It is this ability that allows you to recognise a fast-moving black shape in your living room as the cat, even though it was little more than a blur." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scienc...91601.html

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"Shermer takes the position that most people see such patterns and attribute meaning to them where there is no meaning. Notice how Shermer has decided for all of us that coincidences are meaningless, random events. Instead of calling it apophenia, though, Shermer in 2008 coined the term ‘patternicity’ — “the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.”

"Psychologist David Luke takes umbrage with the likes of Shermer and the belief that everything is random and those who experience synchronicity are simply misguided – if not becoming psychotic. So in 2011, Luke coined a new term, ‘randomania,’ the tendency to attribute chance probability to apparently patterned data. In other words, the opposite of apophenia or Shermer’s patternicity.

"In other words, Luke is taking the opposite point of view of Shermer. In an article in The Journal of Parapsychology, he writes that randomania is seen in people who dismiss psychic phenomena, such as precognition and telepathy, 'even if scientific research suggests that the phenomena may be genuine.' http://blog.synchrosecrets.com/?p=19553

- - - - - - -

Narrative is one of the great challenges of artificial intelligence. Companies and researchers are working to create programs that can generate intelligible narratives, but most of them are restricted to short snippets of text. The company Narrative Science, for example, makes programs that take data from sporting events or financial reports, highlight the most significant information, and arrange it using templates pre-written by humans. It’s not the loveliest prose, but it’s fairly accurate and very fast.

NanNoGenMo, Kazemi says, "is more about doing something that is entertaining to yourself and possibly to other people."

For last year’s NaNoGenMo Kazemi generated "Teens Wander Around a House." He made a bunch of artificial intelligence agents and had them meander through a house at random, his program narrating their actions. When two characters ended up in a room together, he pulled dialogue from Twitter. One tweet could be a question — "What’s for dinner tomorrow?" — and the next, a statement that also contained the word "dinner" — "Dinner is my favorite meal of the day," for example. "The result was a conversation that sort of stayed on topic but didn’t make much sense," he says.

This year he’s designing a program that interprets an online step-by-step guide to novel writing extremely literally. "It starts with ‘establish a day-to-day routine’ then ‘show the characters’ wants and dreams’ then ‘give them a call to action,’ all that stuff," Kazemi says. "It reads like crap but it actually does have a forward sense of narrative. https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/25/7276...thor-novel

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