Cloudscape

On the hypothesis of an ideal universe.

"Imagination is the greatest creative force"
— Albert Einstein

A Monistic Universe?

In the previous entry, I stated that it appears to be impossible for matter to cause consciousness. Rather than matter causing consciousness, consciousness would instead cause matter. After all, consciousness is what makes matter matter, and without consciousness matter could not exist at all. In a way, we create matter by perceiving it.

With this, I do not mean that an external reality flows arises from our minds, but that there is no external reality at all. Even matter, then, is but thought. That is to say, matter exists because we think it does.

Something subjective can, after all, become objective if it is subjective to all of us. That roses are red is said to be an objective truth, even though the photons reflected from their petals have no color at all: the color red merely arises in our photoreceptors (although even that, I believe, is just something we perceive to be so). Indeed, to people who are colorblind or have hallucinations they might not be red at all. This is the true meaning of objective reality.

There is no reason at all why we should be inclined to think matter causes consciousness instead of vice versa, after all. You might say that in this case the question remains where that consciousness came from, but on the other hand, if consciousness is instead caused by matter it also remains the question where that matter came from.

The idea that there is strictly speaking nothing outside of perception has some counterintuitive implications. For one thing, if the universe has no material existence, it must be atemporal and alocal. That is to say, it knows neither time nor space. Nothing in the universe can have a point in space or time because space and time are merely concepts. That doesn't mean we have to dispense with these concepts in how we view the world, of course, as they are as concepts still part of our ideal world.

I admit, however, that when one first considers an immaterial reality, there appears to be obvious problems with it: an immaterial reality would basically be a kind of dream. Yet, our reality isn't like a dream at all. For one thing, things make sense in our reality, and for another, we aren't alone. We share this world, be it material or ideal, with countless living beings. The existence of beings other than ourselves can be denied, a theory called solipsism, but there are some problems with this theory.

This can all be explained with a single principle. It seems to be a simple principle when one first hears about it, and yet the more one thinks about it the more complicated it becomes, until one realizes that the entire universe could spring from it, much like in a fractal.

Cogito, ergo sum

That's right. The famous quote by Descartes, I think therefore I am. But although this appears to be a very straightforward statement, seemingly the most straightforward there could be in the universe, even so we can raise questions about what it really means.

In fact, according to Buddhism the second word in the Latin sentence "I" is meaningless. It certainly is a very vague term: what are "you"? Your body? Your brain? Or are we just what we think? If so, Descartes famous quote is almost tautological: I think therefore I am; but I am because I think; so what it is really saying is: "I think therefore I think."

We are ourselves - I am I and you are you - because we perceive ourselves. We are, then, who or what we perceive. We are, therefore, just as much the world we perceive as our minds we perceive. Mind and matter are but two parts of our perception. Matter, therefore, even if it has a discrete existence on its own, is at the same time part of our own mind.

If we see our lives, or, said another way, our world of perceptions as what we really are, then essentially, this means that not only "I think therefore I am," but also "I think therefore my world is."

I am now going to introduce an even more controversial idea. Let us, for a moment, just suppose it could be true, much like I have in the previous entry supposed a lot of things to be true while I did not think they were: I have explored a lot of thought experiments, and how now finally come to this one. I have learned that even if you do not believe in an idea, it is interesting to learn about it, even if it is just to think of arguments against it, and if you do not favor this particular hypothesis, then you might find an argument against it or in favor of another hypothesis.

Suppose that everyone would program their own internal world. Perhaps we create our own world just by imagining it. We'd create our lives like a painter creates a canvas or a writer creates a novel. But we'd always have done so subconsiously, much like we dream subconsiously.

I am quite sure that if this is indeed so, it is better that way. Suppose that you would have to consciously choose everything that would happen to you, you would go mad. You would want to make everything perfect, and once everything would be perfect you would realize that it was not perfect at all in that it lacked imperfection to be perfect. We all need to dream and set goals and strive to achieve them… it is the most valuable thing we have in our lives: it is progress. It is being able to look at one horizon and once you'd have reached it look at the next.

I will henceforth omit dubifiers such as "would," "perhaps" or "possibly," for the sake of convenience, even though I want it to be clear that it all remains a hypothesis, even to myself. If you do not agree with the hypothesis, forgive me, but in the next few pages I will assume it to be true; that is, after all, what a hypothesis is for. Once we've fully explored the implications of the hypothesis, we can judge if it really could be true or not.

This subconscious need often battles with our conscious, and a good thing too. We cannot consciously make every choice in our life. This would necessitate that we would choose every single thing that happens in our life, as otherwise nothing at all would happen. To some extent we need to automatize our choices, and that is what we invented the subconscious for. It allows us instead to program our world and then sit tight and see how it works by itself.

Everyone is born omnipotent over their own lives; but that omnipotence is as great a burden as anyone can have. It puts us before an infinite number of choices which are often difficult to make.

The irony is that we solve this problem by choosing not to always have to choose. Instead of having to decide everything for ourselves, we leave some of the decisions to something, outside ourselves: the entire universe. We settled ourselves somewhere where we feel safe.

So we've delegated part of the task of choosing to something which is outside our own choice: we made an "outside world" which would make choices in our place so that we would not have to do so ourselves. We programmed rules in our world like an informaticist programs rules in an application.

We aren't very good informaticists, however, and our system is full of bugs. We want a lot of things at the same time, and these things conflict with each other in our subconscious. We are in disharmony with ourselves: often we want something with half a mind, and with half a mind we don't want it, and may even be afraid of it. In this way, the rules we've programmed in our mind often cause an infinite loop, meaning that they neutralize each other. In order to overcome this, one would have to find out what one really wants and stick to it, without looking back or concentrating on the negative side of it.
An example of this may be seen in some autistics, who often feel lonely yet at the same time feel afraid of social interaction, with the result that they can be very isolated.

It is sometimes said that you should "be careful what you wish for," and this is very applicable here. We often get bored when we don't have a problem, so that we are then inclined to think of one so that we can solve it again. Perhaps all our problems are but what we wish for.

The rules of our universe were but written by our own minds: they are nothing but the habits of our own thoughts. They are but there because we choose them to be there: because deep down in our subconscious, we want them to be there.

And although we might see them as an impediment, they are indispensable in our lives: they are the mortar of our qualia, and keep them in balance. Without them, everything would be somewhat like in our nightly dreams: nothing would make any sense. We choose to live in a world of logic because we want things to make sense. We want there to be a causality in the world outside the causality of our own imagination.

One look at our civilization shows that we surely like structure. We have our daily routines, our rules and laws, our customs; they make us feel safe. If nothing ever changes, there is nothing fear. And believe me, in a world where we make our own choices, we have ourselves more to fear than the outside world: without rules to stabilize it, the mind is a very unstable thing. It is susceptible to vicious circles, as is often seen in mental illness. People who suffer from mental illness are often people who have in some way become detached from the outside world, which is especially the case in psychosis. Lack of structure in one's life leads to lack of structure in one's mind.

The rules we impose on ourselves may make our lives difficult, as they impede our power over our lives, but they make them stable. They divest us of an immense responsibility, the responsibility to be the God in our own lives. We abdicated as gods because we could not bear not to have something above ourselves in our lives. Above all, we do not want to be omnipotent because then there would be no more challenge in doing anything.

There is another very important reason why we cannot be omnipotent.

We cause connections between our own consciousness and other consciousnesses because we do not want to be alone. If we would live altogether in a world of our own, we would be all alone. We could imagine other people, but they wouldn't be real: they would merely be part of our own subconscious. But if we want to live along with an entire world of other people, then we must accept that we do not have full control over that entire world, but that we must share that control with it. We cannot control others lives; only our own. At most, we can influence others lives because they choose us to do so.

One can therefore have influence upon others, but never truly have power over them, except on people who choose to live in a world where people can have power over one another; even so, however, they themselves choose to be in that world and can any moment choose to go to another world where everyone is free. However, people do not always want to be free. It makes them feel afraid because even this puts them before a greater responsibility.

So we each determine our own causality rather than actually causing it. We want other people and other things to have an existence on our existence, because we want to have a reality. We don't want to be alone, and therefore our entities connect to others so that we lose our omnipotence. We choose to not always have to choose.

The reason we aren't influenced only by those things and people we love, at least not usually, is that we may get to know other things and people we may come to love. The more open one is, the more one connects to other entities and so the less one solely controls one's reality: because we choose to let it be partly controlled by a world outside of ourselves. It would be quite scary, after all, if there were no world outside of ourselves. Not only would this mean that we would be all alone, but also that we would be meaningless to others.

In addition, we are often uninspired in creating our own reality and let others influence is, much like we do in any other creative field. People take over other's ideas in pretty much everything: it is in our nature. Not only in fashion or culture or in art, not only in language or conduct or science, but even in reality, we copy each other.

It's not hard to see why we could have created our entire lives ourselves: no doubt the common man could not have invented all the science and art of the past millennia, for instance, all the more because they often don't even understand it. We lack the imagination and intelligence to create an entire universe as complex and beautiful as our own.

Moreover, even in a world where we choose our own reality we must assume that in the end everything that is finite has a cause, even ourselves and our own consciousness; only if something is infinite, and therefore eternal, is it possible that it has no cause at all. This is so for existence itself, for instance. Existence cannot have a cause because that cause itself would be part of existence: a cause always precedes its consequence, but there can have been nothing before existence because it would per definition have been nonexistent.

However, we are not eternal. At least, one thing we can assume is that our past was not eternal. After all, we each have a limited age. There is, of course, the hypothesis of reincarnation. But even if we've reincarnated, there must have been a beginning unless all our incarnations would somehow form a circle: an infinite line is, after all, also an infinite circle, because in an infinite line every possible state is achieved, again and again and again.

However, any system must either grow over time or die. This is a very fundamental rule to which anything must obey, even the universe as a whole. It's evolution. There's only two ways something can go: totality or nullity. That is to say, infinity or nihility. Since we have achieved neither we cannot have lasted for an infinitely long time. A system that lasts for an infinitely long time must therefore, since it does not die, eventually achieve infinity. Something that is infinite in age must have infinite dimensions. If our consciousness had already somehow existed for an infinitely long time through a cycle of reincarnations, it would itself have achieved infinity. Infinite consciousness would mean omniscience, so that we would essentially be God.

In a few words: our existence must have had a beginning because if it hadn't, it would otherwise have achieved an end. If we had existed forever, we would have become God.

To reinforce this argument, think of how every reincarnation would have a different consciousness. One would have the consciousness of a slug, virtually nonexistent, another of an animal, another of a human -- if you think about it, any amount of consciousness between zero and infinity would be possible, so that if there were an infinite number of reincarnations, eventually one would have to be infinite, that is to say, one would have to be God. There is, after all, no reason why there should be an upper limit to the consciousness one could have. So what if it could be almost godlike, is there a reason it could not be altogether godlike? If you happen to be a fundamentalist you may think this is blasphemy -- and if you're a scientist you may think it is psychosis. But however hard it is to follow, it is nothing but logic.

One could argue that once an entity would have achieved infinite consciousness it would also eventually for some reason decide forgo it. Perhaps this would be because it would be too unbearable, as is stated in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. From the Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley:

"Following Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality—anything!"

However, if one is omniscient, how could one not know how one can be at peace with one's own omniscience? Omniscience means infinite consciousness, and so too infinite wisdom. It is through wisdom that we deal with our emotions, and so infinite wisdom would make one invulnerable even to the emotions of infinite consciousness.

Should an animal attain the consciousness of a human from one moment to the next, it as well would be overwhelmed by it, even though we ourselves can usually deal with our consciousness pretty well.

It follows that infinite consciousness would have to entail infinite love, as it would otherwise be unbearable; love not only for everyone, but for everything. Such unconditional love to us is impossible to fully imagine. This would mean not only loving your torturer but even the pain of being tortured. No-one can turn the pain of torture into bliss; but one can let it be as it is. It is possible, with the strongest will in the universe, to realize that even the worst pain is still better than nothing at all, better than oblivion. Even that pain is valuable, and it deserves to be loved like everything in existence.

In fact, humans are very good in loving pain.

Since this ability to love is not an absolute quality, even this would have to grow over time throughout every reincarnation. Even if every incarnation at the end of their life would choose to forget that terrible blinding light they saw at the end of the tunnel, they would choose the body they would return to, and therefore also the consciousness they would have in their next life. Since every incarnation would then adapt to its own consciousness, its ability to deal with its consciousness would grow over time throughout every incarnation.

Since this is a self-perpetuating process, in time the entity's consciousness would reach infinity. If one had learned to conquer all resistance, one would unite with God.

If, on the other hand, every incarnation would be random, it would also have a random lifetime. The longer the lifespan of the incarnation, the more stable it would be, which is logical. However, because no matter how high a value is it is still zero when it is divided by infinity, in an infinite cycle of incarnations this value would eventually have to achieve infinity, which means that we would eventually be immortal so that the cycle of reincarnations would have the end.

We must conclude that a cycle of reincarnations which is infinite is apparently impossible. If a cycle reincarnation is possible at all, it cannot be infinite.

If you are unable to follow the above reasoning, don't worry. I am barely able to myself. I don't think the counter-argument of reincarnation is very relevant. If you believe in reincarnation and have thought about it, it's more likely you've been able to understand the above. What I mostly wanted to prove was that since our consciousness must have an end, it must also have had a beginning (otherwise we'd already have reached the end), and therefore it must have been caused by something else. Thus, there must be something outside of ourselves.

You might think this is trivial, but this has been an issue in philosophy. After all, it seems impossible for you to know if anyone else at all is conscious. There have been philosophers who espoused the belief that there was no-one else outside themselves, and this belief is known as solipsism. Life could be but an invention of our own mind, after all: we could have invented other people, as imaginary friends or imaginary enemies. This happens sometimes, after all, most of all to psychotics.

But what the above means is that the universe cannot be of a solipsistic nature, at least if the universe follows any logic as is described above. Therefore, we must be part of a greater whole, and we must have arisen from it. We arose from a shard of consciousness that somehow separated from the whole and began to grow until it became us, with all our beliefs and feelings. We are nothing but thought, and we arose from the thoughts of the Universe, the thought the universe is made of: in a way, we are the thoughts of God, as God is the Universe.

If we are part of a greater whole, then, there must a kind of reality after all. A reality in which we could never haven chosen to be born in because there was no "we" before we were born, at least not before we were born for the first time (if there is indeed such a thing as reincarnation) as is explained above. Our reality therefore already existed before we were born - just not from our own viewpoint.

Still, I believe that reality was created through imagination, and not the other way around. However, the imagination that created it is the collective imagination of the entire universe. The universe invented itself, and still invents itself from moment to moment. It invents its own future.

However, the universe is nothing but an infinite collection of consciousnesses. It is made of them. How can one consciousness control an entire universe of consciousnesses?

It doesn't.

After all, we cannot control others' worlds any more than they want us to, and since this world is one which we share with very many other entities, we have only a limited control over the whole of it. However, this does not have to mean that we have only a limited control over our own lives.

This is best explained in the many-world's principle, which has been mentioned in the previous entry:

"If the universe is infinite, this means that anything that is possible at all will happen (see entry Modal Realism) because any probability, being dependant on time and space, will become 100% if time and space become infinite. This effectively means that any universe one can think of is real: and if we think of these universes, in our minds we are partly inside it.

This also means that there are an infinite number of universes identical or almost identical to our own, and that every moment infinitely many of those will diverge (while another infinitely many of them will still remain identical). Infinitely many of these universes will each have a different destiny: in one of them, you died a second ago, in another you a celebrity, in one you decided to travel around the world, in one you survived an earthquake with a broken neck, in another woke up to find yourself inexplicably in alien surroundings, in another you were brought to the mental hospital for acute psychosis, and in yet another you are reading this text. According to the many-worlds principle, this is an explanation for quantum chaos."

If, as I postulated, there is no material universe, then what determines which universe we end up in? What can it be in this case but our own thought? This is different from saying that we control the universe: it means that we control which universe we go to. In this way, it is possible for anyone to have full control over their own reality without having to detach from the reality of other people: in an infinite universe there are an infinite number of identical replicas of every entity in the universe, each of which has had the same history but infinitely many of which will have a different future, and that is so for ourselves as well as for the people we know or could know in our world.

Because each replica of every entity will go another way and have a different destiny, they will every moment split up into infinitely many possibilities of what you could have become. For every possible path you could take through the universe, there is a version of you which has chosen to follow it, but you follow only one of those possibilities because that as well is your choice.

What this also means, however, is that as we choose to, we will remain connected to other people in our world despite the fact that we each choose our own universe; one of the replicas of the people we know will always follow us wherever we are. These are still the same people we used to know because their history remains the same. In this way, no matter where we go, we never have to be alone, because there will always be some versions of the people in our world who will choose to go there too. In this way, existence is like an infinitely branching tree.

A universe in which everything is caused only by thought is in fact infinitely simpler than a universe in which everything is caused by matter. In an ideal universe, anything at all can spring from our minds; but could the same be said about anything at all in a material universe? If there is only mind and no matter, than our thought could be said to be the "primary causality" of all things. With "primary causality," what I mean to say is the original cause of everything in the universe.

If there is both mind and matter, however, then there can be no such primary causality: we are trapped in an infinite chain of cause and consequence. Every question we solve raises many more questions, like the heads of the Hydra. In the end, the universe only becomes more and more complicated as we find out more about it. Every cause must itself have a cause, which must itself have a cause, and so forth. In this way we are facing an ultimate cause paradox.

This also means that inevitably, we could never discover the smallest particles in the universe, because even their existence should have some underlying cause. Some scientists say the behavior of elementary particles "just is how the universe works," and that there is no real explanation for them. I am sure the same was said about atoms, and about everything we ever knew, before we found out how it seemed to work.

On the other hand, if there does not come an end to this chain of causes and consequences, then the universe is of infinite complexity. What's more, if there is no original cause which lies at the base of all other causes and consequences, then none of our questions can really be answered. If the answer to every question is just another question, then there is no real answer at all. And if there is no answer to any of our questions, then the material universe doesn't make much sense. Yet, if there is an original cause of everything in the universe and this original cause has itself no cause, we are dealing with the same problem because this means that it is per definition acausal.

It is said that physics could at some point find a single theory which would somehow explain every phenomenon in the universe, the "Theory of Everything," but if you think about it this appears to be impossible. There would always have to be four "laws" at the basis of a material world for it to exist: the first would be the existence of something material, which we'll just call matter; the second would be the movement of its components; the third would be a kind of interaction between its components; the third would be the existence of consciousness. Think about it as long as you will, it is impossible to find a simpler model, as these three rules would always be necessary for matter to form a structural whole. Without the first law, well, there would nothing to shape the material world from; without the second law, it would be static; without the third law, the whole would remain a homogeneous soup, without the fourth law, there would be no-one to think about this anyway.

You might say that the same counts in a monistic idealist universe, albeit in another form. If there is no material world, then causality must instead lie within the ideal world. The only difference, then, is that instead of material movement there would be ideal movement, movement within our thoughts.

Again, this would elicit the necessity of three laws. The first law would be the existence of conscious entities, the second of the possibility of change of that consciousness, and the third is the interaction between the entities. That's one law less than in a material universe, but in this way there's still three laws which seem inexplicable. However, the whole argument I have been trying to prove in this treatise is that everything is as we choose to think it is, and this would be the one rule of the universe, which would unify each of the three above. Whatever we think our world to be, it will be.

This is the true meaning of the sentence "I think therefore I am." This one sentence is the primary causality of the entire universe. Cogito ergo sum is, in a way, the Theory of Everything.

This elegant simplicity is why I have come to prefer the hypothesis of an ideal universe. As Occam's razor says, if all solutions have an equal outcome, then the simplest solution is usually the best.

Occam's razor is actually a controversial argument. After all, the sun does not turn around the earth, for instance, even though it would appear to be simpler. I say appear, because upon closer inspection this appears not to be so. For one thing, the mechanics of the celestial bodies are a lot more complicated, and for another, if the sun is just a star then this unifies the two concepts. The idea is not that we are to reason in the simplest way, but that the universe tends to take the simplest route.

There is another reason why a monistic universe is simpler than a dualistic universe, and it can be deduced from their names: in a dualistic universe there is both matter and consciousness, in a monistic universe there is only one, consciousness. If it can be shown an ideal universe could work, that is to say, if a reality like our own could spring from consciousness alone, then Occam's razor therefore tells us we would prefer such universe above one in which there is both mind and matter.

In a monistic universe, mind and matter are one and the same. The only way in which we can explain these concepts is by unifying them to one. Matter exists, but only in our minds; it is part of our minds, the part of it that behaves according to laws. Thus, what matter really means to us is reality, even if reality is actually but in our minds. Materiality can be perceived as a degree, the degree of consciousness in which it behaves as though material.

Put another way, in a dualistic universe matter causes consciousness, in a monistic universe matter is an element of consciousness.

Even if there is no real matter in our world, it does have physical laws. But this is simply because we have invented this world with all its laws. We are creatures who need an explanation for everything, and therefore we invented an explanation for everything - and invented scientific proof for them. But the only thing we're really doing is to create puzzles for ourselves to then solve them: there are no such puzzles outside of ourselves. But they give us a stronger feeling of reality. We are the universe, and therefore the laws of the universe are our laws. The laws of the material world were written not by the material world itself, but by science. We are constructing science much like we could construct a tower. That is beautiful, immensely beautiful. But it is not truth any more than anything else you might want to hold true; something is true because it is true for us. In this way, we create our own truth, the truth of our own world. We are each the Gods of our own world; we don't simply discover the laws of our own universe, we create them.

Earlier I mentioned the many-worlds principle, and how apparently identical universes may split up into infinitely many others. The reason that apparently identical universes can split up into infinitely diverse others is a phenomenon known as chaos. The universe is so complex that the tiniest change in it can have very far-reaching consequences.
In fact, this change could be infinitely small, for instance a particle which is an infinitely small distance from its original position. This change will still spread throughout the whole system it is part of to affect it in a way which can be quite dramatic.

Thus, the concept of "identical" universes is actually inaccurate; I should say, instead, that there are quasi-identical universes, even though they might not stay quasi-identical for long. In an infinite universe, there only be an infinite approximation of similarity between two universes, but even that infinitesimal difference may cause everything to change because the universe is infinitely complex. The chaos of a system is proportional to the complexity of the system, thus, if the universe is infinitely complex, even an infinitesimal change can cause a difference.

Indirectly, we always choose our own world; but our choice of the world we live in is based upon the rules we want it to have, rules that are essentially merely rules of our own mind. We want to have an external reality, a world outside of us we do not only influence but are also influenced by.

Then again, we might not always like how that world influences us, so that we still want to have some control over that world. This leaves us to choose between reality and fantasy; that is to say, between our outside and our inner worlds. Thus, we try to strike a balance.

People who have a lot of imagination attach less importance too reality, and some people choose to detach from it almost altogether, which leads to psychosis. These people create their own reality in a world of "hallucinations" and "delusions," although for them they are just as real as our own reality is to us. Psychosis usually occurs because of severe stress because this makes reality so unendurable that the patient may wish to disconnect from it - often this is counterproductive because they are then confronted with their own subconscious. Because of the stres they've gone through, they might have come to hate themselves, and this self-hatred might cause one's inner world (in the form of hallucinations) to turn against oneself. The same holds true in reality.
In fact, the same may happen in healthy nighttime dreams, and this illustrates how, if we choose our own reality, a lot can go wrong in it.

Sometimes, psychosis is episodic, as sometimes occurs in schizophrenia: when a psychotic recovers from an episode, this is because they have decided to return to the real world. To do this, however, they have to find a connection of their psychosis with the real world, and this connection is made in psychiatry: they convince themselves that their psychosis wasn't real, and the only way they can do this is to dismiss it as a neurochemical imbalance. Yet, for a psychotic, his hallucinations certainly are real enough; only for the outside world they can not be real, but this is because psychotics have subconsciously decided to detach from the outside world.

The mind is the most complicated thing in the universe; and if it is true that the mind creates the universe, then it is understandable why we cannot grasp the whys of the universe as we cannot grasp the whys of our own minds' strange ways.

One must be cautious with the lines of reasoning followed in idealism: the universe is not something we create; it is something we connect with. However, in this way we do create of our own lives. The universe is it's own creator, and so too we are our own creators.

We must therefore be aware that only those things spring from our minds that we imagined. The universe can be said to be our own personal computer; it works solely for ourselves, and we tell it what it should compute, but when it computes, we leave it do so by itself. The manipulation of this computation is the exception, not the rule. We choose our path through life not by exactly determining it, but by choosing what we do and don't want. Only our own choices, conscious or subconscious, influence our lives, and for the rest, we leave it to coincidence; we do not need to be able to imagine every single thing that happens in our lives, nor could we be able to as many things that happen in our lives are beyond our imagination. But the things that happen in our lives are based in some indirect way on our subconscious choices.

Finally, perhaps the best metaphor is movement: we move through the qualia that comprise the universe as we would move through a wood, and we take whatever way we go. We choose whatever path we take in life. The philosophy of idealism may be summarized as follows: movement occurs not in a material world but in our minds.

This train of thought is similar to, and to a certain extent parallel to, the famous Law of Attraction. There is, however, a slight nuance between this and my "optionality hypothesis" (I am not so presumptuous to call it a "Law," which is actually defined as a fact which has been observed through scientific method always to be true in the stated conditions). The Law of Attraction states that whatever you believe becomes true, in other words, that thought materializes in the external world. The optionality hypothesis states that whatever you choose becomes true, in other words, that one's wishes materialize in the external world.

This is certainly a significant difference. But the Law of Attraction appears to have one weak point: if all our expectations became true, how come that we are ever surprised by what happens to us? Usually, it is argued that our subconscious expectations often differ from our conscious expectations. Our conscious being but a "tip of the iceberg," our subconscious is always more determining. Whether it be true or false, this does seem to put the Law of Attraction safe in the region of unfalisifiability.

The argument that our subconscious is more determining seems solid enough, but there are plenty of cases in which even the subconscious is convinced of something which is wrong. Psychosis is the most extreme example of this. Some schizophrenics often live in the complete certainty that they are involved in a conspiracy. It is easy to assert that somewhere in the depths of their minds, they still have some vague idea of reality. It is hard for a sane person to understand the conviction with which they believe in their delusions. To them, it is as real as
if it had already happened, because in their minds it already has, and it terrifies them as much as if it would have happened to a sane person in reality. Often, their daydreams are as lifelike as anything that happens to them in reality, so that they believe they have paranormal abilities. It becomes impossible for them to deny their delusions. But their certain deaths, abductions, conspiracies, whatever it is they think will happen or is happening, never happens in reality, contrary to what the Law of Attraction would predict. Yet, often they cling to their delusions for many years, without even wavering in their certitude.

It becomes even more real to them if aside from delusions, they also have hallucinations which confirm their delusions. A psychotic may even experience hallucinations which actually physically hurt them, upon which they may feel actual physical pain and see physical wounds, but after they've forgotten their hallucinations, the wounds are gone.

There is no way anyone could fully understand what it means to be delusional except for someone who has had past delusions, and it is easy to keep on repeating that there must, after all, be some degree of subconscious doubts. But if that is so, then the Law of Attraction is quite irrelevant, because it is almost impossible to match the conviction with which a psychotic believes in his delusions as a sane person. In other words, as it is very hard to believe in something more than a psychotic believes in his delusions, the Law of Attraction would be quite ineffective if one considers that it doesn't work even for a psychotic.

One may argue that the Law of Attraction works only after many years, since one's subconscious is formed throughout one's life, by a lifetime of thoughts which each contribute to one's future. However, here we face the same problem, as delusions are more common among children. Many young children believe in fairy tales, yet they never come true for them. Hallucinations are not abnormal in childhood, yet even in more extreme cases, the hallucinations never leave traces in reality. In addition, children sometimes confuse nighttime dreams with real events -- but again, they do not manifest in reality.

Also, one may think things about the external world of scientific nature, for instance, which turn out not to be correct. It was held for about two thousand years that the earth was the center of the universe until Copernicus gave such convincing arguments that over time the world had no choice but to believe him. Where did he get those arguments from, if after everyone had believed in a flat earth in the center of the universe, according to the Law of Attraction everything should have pointed in the direction that it was correct?

One could say that something stops being true when one stops believing in them, but this argument as well is a dead end: often we stop believing in something when they prove to be incorrect, which often comes as a complete surprise to us. Moreover, and more importantly, if something is true only for oneself, then it is a delusion. If something manifests only in one's mind and not in reality, they are not really manifestations at all but rather dreams. It is certainly possible to control one's own mind with one's will, but there is nothing paranormal about this. This phenomenon has been known for a long time, and is called hypnosis or suggestion. This is, however, as far as the Law of Attraction appears to work.

One could say that this is because I do not myself believe in the Law of Attraction, and because of this attracted a world in which the Law of Attraction does not work. In that case, however, I can but suppose that no-one who believes in the Law of Attraction is real in my world, or else that no-one else really believes in it, since their opinion would otherwise interfere with my own.

In fact, no two opinions could coexist in the same world because they would attract two mutually exclusive things and so interfere with each other. Anyone who would have beliefs other than my own could not really exist in my world, because due to the Law of Attraction I would attract a world in which everything I would expect would happen to be correct (at least, everything I would expect in my subconscious). Since everyone else in my world actually has beliefs at least slightly different from my own, I could therefore but suppose that none of them were real. This would mean I would live in a solipsistic reality, which has been more or less refuted earlier. One can hardly say without making a fool of oneself that deep inside, we actually all believe the same, and that what we all believe made this world.

Neither is it possible that the Law of Attraction only works for beliefs others do not disagree with: aside from the fact that many people disagree with the Law of Attraction, there are also very few opinions, if any at all, which no-one at all disagrees with. Aside from that, how about tastes? Many people say, for instance, that certain music is bad, not just that it does not fit their taste, yet those people who listen to that same music do not think it is bad at all. Obviously, opposite opinions can coexist.

Otherwise, one could say that the Law of Attraction disabled itself as soon as I stopped believing in it, but even if that is so, this would not explain what would happen to people who do believe in the Law of Attraction. Anyone who would believe in the Law of Attraction would disappear from this world if it would work: people who would really believe in the Law of Attraction would attract a world in which the Law of Attraction works, and therefore, a world in which no-one interferes with the things they attract. In such a world, everyone would have to have exactly the same beliefs, in fact, exactly the same thoughts, even at subconscious level. In other words, one would be all alone because if anyone else existed, they would have a different subconscious. Such a world exists, but it is one's own imagination.

Finally, there then remains one final counterargument as far as I can see, and it is that the Law of Attraction considers the sum of all thoughts of all individuals concerned, and for the individuals concerned attracts that which is conceived by the sum of all thoughts. In other words, those who believe strongest win, as though believing were an arm wrestling. First of all, one must realize when one states this that this is only possible if there is some kind of external agency which computes the sum of all thoughts, such as a God.

This probably disqualifies the Law of Attraction as a candidate for a "Law," as it could not happen through some kind of natural law: the "Law" of Attraction would require some kind of computation. One could then ask what would determine this sum, and how the amount of conviction with which one believes in something can be measured. If such measurement is possible at all, then certainly it would require Godlike omniscience, but what silly game would God be playing to turn life into a contest of who believes hardest? A more plausible but abstruse argument is that belief is much like a physical force: two equal forces in the opposite direction will counteract one another.

This would mean that although the most influential factor in one's life would be one's own thoughts about one's life, the thoughts of other people about your life would be influential as well. The people which are closest to oneself, such as one's spouse, family or best friends, would be most determining, although one's own beliefs would be primary.
People's thoughts about life in general would also have some influence. In this way, society as a whole, through the sum of all its thoughts, would lay a basis for reality. That is to say, the world as a whole would determine what is at all possible and what is not. Since most people do not believe in flying pink elephants, if people in delirium believe in them, they will still merely be hallucinations rather than real flying pink elephants. In this way, society would prevent delusions from becoming reality because they do not themselves believe in these delusions.

At first glance this seems to be a solid argument, or so the open mind would have to admit. However, when one thinks about it, this argument has the same problem as the one discussed earlier, that of delusions. True enough, the delusions of single individuals might not become reality because the rest of the world does not believe in them, but what about delusions of society in general? If society was meant to lay a basis of reality, what kind of messy reality would we be in?

Like individuals, civilizations have their false beliefs in their infancy. Back in the ancient era, practically everyone believed in gods or even in mythological creatures, yet they have never shown up. There is no way one could plausibly declare that those few heretics made the difference for those millions of believers. Nor is it probably that all peoples negated each others' beliefs by believing them to be wrong, as there was often no to little contact between them. The little they did care to think about each others' mythologies in those days could hardly matter when one considered how complicated they were.

A last defense could be that the laws of reality is immutable through the Law of Attraction and that it can only change the statistics of things that are possible according to the laws of reality, through apparent coincidences. But consider that everything is effectively possible through the laws of reality in some way or other. There is, for instance, no reason why at least some mythological creatures could not have existed, as for many of them it is a biological possibility (even if it is not very high).

In addition, the delusions of a psychotic do not always seem very improbable. Sometimes, they could quite fit into the laws of reality. For instance, it could always be that someone is for some reason involved in some kind of mind control conspiracy; this has already occurred before in the fifties and sixties, and was known as Project MK-ULTRA. This CIA project subjected unsuspecting citizens to experiments which attempted (unsuccessfully) to control their minds. Many schizophrenics are convinced that such a thing will happen or is happening to them, but it never occurs; in contrast, the victims of MK-ULTRA probably had never thought of such a bizarre thing happening to them in their wildest dreams, consciously or subconsciously.

If delusions can sometimes be perfectly possible in reality, why do they (almost) never come true? One could say that they do sometimes come true, and that in this case they are simply not seen as delusions but as reality, but either how, this still leaves many delusions which are effectively false, yet could have been quite possible.

With so many things happening to people that they did never think of, and so many things people think will happen that never do, adherent of the Law of Attraction resort to the reasoning that in our subconscious people did believe in the things that would happen to them, and they subconsciously did not believe things would happen which did not happen, even if in their conscious they did.

The latter may well be possible as long as one is not deluded; the former, however, is actually quite unlikely: if one believes something will happen in one's subconscious strong enough, then it will simply pass the threshold of the conscious, so that it is not possible that one subconsciously believes in something strong enough for it to become true without becoming conscious of believing in it. It's not that subconscious thoughts can't override conscious thoughts, because they can; but thoughts that have never been conscious cannot override conscious thoughts.

The subconscious is derived from two elements, past and present. The latter is the sum of the perceptions (which may be thoughts, feelings, or just sensory input) that one has currently but are too weak to become fully conscious; the former is the sum of the perceptions that one formerly had, both conscious and subconscious.

Past conscious thoughts have an equal impact on the whole of the subconscious to that which present conscious thoughts have; but the impact of past subconscious thoughts on the subconscious is much smaller than past conscious thoughts.

Thus, if one had once had the subconscious thought that one could be involved in a conspiracy, for instance, but later had the conscious thought that nothing much happened in one's life, then the thought of the conspiracy is repressed in the subconscious. The same happens if one has repeatedly had the subconscious thought that nothing much happened in one's life.

One could say that the Laws of Reality were written not by humanity, then, but by the whole of all life in the entire universe. But if that were so, why on Earth is the Earth round, instead of flat? Why are planets round, if any species would naturally assume it to be flat until it found it to be otherwise?

It would appear that if anything, one's beliefs can only slightly increase the probability of something happening. But why, then, are so many things so unpredictable, so contrary to all expectations, even our subconscious? There is one phenomenon which seems almost always to go against all expectations: the stock exchange. Just when people are most euphoric about economy, things start to go wrong; just when they are most pessimistic about it, things start to improve. No-one had expected the stock market crash in 1929, or that after the Fabulous Twenties would come the Great Depression.

Humans have made mistake after mistake about what is true and what is false, and making those mistakes have not made that which is false any more true. Time and time again, mankind has gone from one delusion into the next, and yet they always proved to be wrong in the end -- and most often of all, this was because some playing scientist happened to stumble upon evidence which flew in the face of what people had generally held to be true for centuries, or even millennia. If the Law of Attraction worked, then "paradigm shifts" could never happen - and yet, all of human growth has been a perpetual succession of paradigm shifts, without which we would never have grown at all.

Darwin, for instance, did not even himself believe in evolution at first. Until he found evidence in favor of the contrary, he was a "fixist," believing that all species today were the same as they have been billions of years ago. In fact only a few mavericks believed in evolution at that time, and before archeologists chanced upon fossils of dinosaurs, practically no-one believed in the concept of evolution. Almost through coincidence, men found evidence which proved that life had not been created some thousand years back, and this after almost everyone had believed this to be true. Clearly, the Law of Attraction could not possibly be a fundamental law of the universe.

If like attracts like, then how come that we keep swinging from one extreme into its opposite? This phenomenon is called enantiodromia. Although it does sometimes occur that like attracts like, it also occurs often that opposites attract. Look at twentieth-century Russia, for instance: first despotism, then communism, and then back again into despotism posing as communism. What about the perfect peace and harmony there followed in Western Europe following the Second World War? If like attracted like, how could anything at all ever change?

If the predominating world views were true, this would also, for instance, make Arians superior and black people and Jews inferior, as this was what was generally held throughout most of the world by intelligentsia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (even in America). Yet, it has been shown that there is only very little genetic difference between human races, and that the little difference there is is not relevant on mental level. One could state that the beliefs of the race in its own adequacy might negate racism from other races since races are themselves of considerable size, but how about Jews, which before the Second World War numbered only 18 million, compared to dozens of millions of antisemitists throughout the millennia?

If anything, the constant racism might even have increased the intelligence of Jews through natural selection. Some studies have contended Ashkenazi Jews to have a higher IQ test score than any other ethnic group, although these findings have been contentious. Either how, the entire concept of evolution is about the attraction of opposites and not likes.

It turns out that neither on individual nor on global scale, the Law of Attraction really has any effect, at least not in the definition that whatever one believes becomes true. Note, however, that this is only one of the definitions of the Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction is a vague concept and has been interpreted in various ways.

A hypothetical "Law of Choice" does seem more intuitive, as there is nothing which is not in some way desirable. As someone who has gone through years of clinical depression, I can declare without much doubt that it is in human nature to need suffering. It gives us self-respect, it keeps us from feeling empty, it pushes us to our limits, it gives us a challenge, it helps to motivate us, it often makes us better people, and, ironically, it makes us feel safe because if we are already suffering, there is less to lose. It seems clear that because of these reasons, and probably because of many more, we are all to some extent masochistic.

Even the most painful experiences can in some strange way be enjoyable, and they can certainly be enlightening. In an infinite universe, there were always be some souls which would subconsciously choose for them.

But the fraction of beings that seeks for suffering here on earth does not have to be the same elsewhere in the universe. Nothing is a constant over a large enough time and space, and therefore the suffering there is here on earth does not have to be a sample of what there is elsewhere in the Universe. There is no average in an infinite universe because infinity divided by infinity does not compute. We live in a world of suffering because we choose too. We are here because we are masochists, at least to some extent.

More importantly, in an infinite universe percentages are irrelevant: whatever fraction one multiplies by infinity will still equal infinity. There are therefore always infinitely many things of whatever kind, and therefore too infinitely many souls which would choose to live as we do.

However, regardless of the problems we have in our life, our real suffering (just as our happiness) comes from within. We might not choose as such to suffer, but simply suffer because we do not know what we want. Part of us may long for the safety of ignorance and emptiness, while another part of us may long for the light of truth and beauty. The only real suffering lies not in pain, but in our fear of pain. Suffering arises when love and fear are in conflict within our hearts; we can then choose to carry on and follow the light in our hearts, or succumb to the darkness which keeps us safe.

The optionality hypothesis might explain many conundrums in the universe in some trains of thought. For example, if there is indeed a God or godlike entity or just an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence which is watching us, the question is why there is so much suffering in the Universe, and why they - or it - do not interfere. If there is anything in the Universe which comes even close to having godlike power, why does it not unify ourselves with it, so that all our flaws and problems and suffering might be abolished?

One answer might be that if such entity would change the rest of the Universe, nothing else would be left of it. Perhaps this entity has learned, in its wisdom, to see the value of those things which we condemn. However, if that is so, why does it not teach us to achieve that same enlightenment to appreciate ugliness and suffering just as much as beauty and happiness with impartial and unconditional love?

For such entity, there would be nothing that would keep it from doing so if it wanted to. If God is omnipotent, then, it could unify the entire Universe with itself, and all that would be left is infinite unconditional love. The Universe would still exist, but it would have become fully aware of itself.

In other words, we, and every other being in existence, would have become detached from ourselves so as to become conscious of everything else that exists, outside of our own, current, lives, and would have learned, one way or another, to see its beauty. Nothing in the Universe would have to be lost; it would simply continue to exist within our minds, but connected to everything else. Our consciousness would encompass every possible quale there has ever been in the Universe, but would embrace it with infinite love.

This unconditional love for everything in the universe is more than a castle in the air. Neuroscience has already shown to be able to manipulate our emotions. Deep-brain stimulation has already instantaneously turned mental patients' mood from depressive dysthymia to manic euphoria, and back again to healthy euthymia as the electrode was adjusted. Suppose that neuroscience were a thousand times more advanced than today, as would be the case for a godlike race or entity, it would almost certainly be possible to control someone's emotions enough to enable them to enjoy any experience at all. Since yogis have been able to endure even the most negative experiences after decades of meditation (for example, there was a Buddhist monk called Thich Quang Durc who immolated himself in padmasana upon which he did not move an inch until he died), it must be possible, at least in theory, to enjoy anything at all in the Universe given that one had learned how to do so. Given its power, a godlike entity could teach us this ability almost instantaneously.

The only reason why this would not happen appears to be our own choice. Perhaps we will and cannot be unified with infinity because we choose not to be. Who is God to interfere with that choice, and make us love that which we hate? We choose to remain within our bodies because we attach importance to them. There are, quite simply, things we do not want, things we are unable to love, things we fear and this is what keeps us from uniting with the infinite. Fear is the sole reason why there are limits in our lives; without fear, we would be infinite. Perhaps our existence is but a path to learning to love everything and everyone in the universe.

See also:

A Dualistic Universe?

Law of Attraction

The Innerverse

Modal Realism

Consciousness, the Greatest Mystery of the Universe

The God Theory - Part I, Analytical

The God Theory - Part II, Holistic

The infinity Principle

The Meaning of I

The God Theory - Part II, Holistic

The infinity Principle

The Meaning of I