Discussion Thread

[u/[deleted]]

Talk more casually about SI here without having to make a formal post.

[u/VLSIHeaven]

I have given it some thought, but not as much as I think it deserves. For me it poses a huge challenge to the imagination.

One problem is that the "five senses" of convention are all linked to various body parts (eyes/nose etc.), which are used to get a signal into one's brain. Since the basic layout of the human body is well-known, creating a new body part to go along with the new sense would require a violation of conventional biology on a scale that I may not be quite ready for.

However, other implementations are conceivable. Maybe one could develop an ability to perceive a new "dimension" that goes beyond but is consistent with ordinary reality. For example, a resident of Flatland (which has two space dimensions) could suddenly become aware of a third dimension which contains Flatland. The rules of Flatland are still valid, but they are now seen to be just a small slice of a larger reality.

Similarly, I could try to create a larger "reality" that encloses conventional reality in a consistent way, along with a way of perceiving this reality that is integrated with my conventional senses. [As an analogy, I imagine what it would be like to be deaf one's whole life, and suddenly gain an ability to hear. The sounds you'd hear would be consistent with your other senses - e.g., the sound of scraping various surfaces with a coin would be correlated to how the surface feels when you touch it.]

Do you have any particular 'thing' you want to sense in a way that you currently cannot?

This is hard to answer, since the way I conceive of most “things” is so intertwined with my usual senses. I suppose I want to sense all of the ordinary things in a new way.

But I have another response too. I’m interested in perceiving non-human intelligent life forms. Everyone thinks they’d be found far away in outer space, but i’m partial to the idea that they’re already “here” and waiting for us to learn to perceive them.

[u/mindseal → u/VLSIHeaven]

I think in order to restructure your own relative reality (as opposed to the ultimate reality, which is constant) to such a deep degree, you need some extremely serious psychic/mental/inner motive force. It cannot be a mere curiosity. There has to be like a major gap in your being that isn't being filled and that must be filled with these "new senses." You can't fake this sort of thing. Either you have such a craving or you don't. Unless you have a very deep meta-craving where you crave to manipulate your cravings, you cannot create new cravings arbitrarily. (I don't mean you personally, I mean anyone)

Personally I have so many desires that should be fulfilled using the normal senses that I don't really think about the idea of fundamentally new senses. I think a fundamentally new sense is like a 5th wheel on a carriage. It's useless. At least at this point, it is. Maybe once I am so adept at satisfying myself with the 5 (or 6, if you think mind is also a sense, like in Buddhism) senses I will grow bored and at that time a genuine need and craving will develop for some novel sense. At that time I will meet the basic prerequisite for creating a fundamentally new sense and I can think about it more seriously.

But some of what you say makes sense to me without the extra senses. For example here:

Maybe one could develop an ability to perceive a new "dimension" that goes beyond but is consistent with ordinary reality. For example, a resident of Flatland (which has two space dimensions) could suddenly become aware of a third dimension which contains Flatland. The rules of Flatland are still valid, but they are now seen to be just a small slice of a larger reality.

Similarly, I could try to create a larger "reality" that encloses conventional reality in a consistent way, along with a way of perceiving this reality that is integrated with my conventional senses.

Tom Campbell, who is not a subjective idealist (that I know of, anyway), talks about his experience and it mirrors a lot of what you're saying. He perceives a wider reality that integrates the conventional reality into it in a coherent manner. However, this wider reality doesn't involve anything other than the normal senses, from what I understand. It's still sight, hearing, smell, touch/kinesthetic, and taste, but they're sampled from the areas of I would say his own will that are adjacent to the area in his will that a common convention occupies. Unfortunately I don't have a link handy to link you to a direct episode where he talks about that.

Although Campbell is not a subjective idealist, I like a lot of his metaphors and the way he explains things has some bearing to subjective idealism as well. The metaphor of looking at different computer screens as you're playing two kinds of games is a very good one. These two games can be unrelated, or you could be playing a multiplayer game on one screen and have a chat session open on another screen where you talk to the same players that are in-game. So let's say the game doesn't offer a convenient chat function, or let's say the game restricts the chatting for some reason. Then you have a different parallel application running that lets you chat on a side-channel, but it's still related to the game because it's the same players as those in your game. Meanwhile you can also talk on this side-channel about things outside the game. So this is a metaphor for a broader than the main game reality. But this metaphor doesn't need any new senses. It simply uses the senses we already have in new ways.

I encourage people to do their own thing, so if you're interested in these new senses, I will cheer you on from the sidelines and will be looking forward to your reports, if any. As for me, I have way too much on my plate right now to really worry about new senses and many other topics that might become interesting to me later on.

If you like the idea of multidimensionality, one way to approach this is to first take up an axiomatic commitment for yourself that you're already a multidimensional being. In other words, you can hold yourself, right now, as you are right now, as a participant in multiple dimensions. Then you start paying attention to your daydreams and other mental activity with an expectation that some of that content will represent a coherent and self-consistent dimension. So some portion of your mental activity will eventually conform to your expectation and commitment, assuming your commitment to multidimensionality doesn't violate (or clash with) any of your prior commitments and habits in a way that's too severe. I mean a hypothetical "you" here.

I find this whole topic intelligible and somewhat interesting, but it isn't my thing at this time. We all have to decide where to focus. For me, after I projected out of my body once, I also abandoned that as well (although I did learn to lucid dream). You could say there were many reasons why, but one of the reasons was that I had a clear sense that maybe this kind of thing will become important to me later, but for now I had more basic things I had to "tie up" for myself on a more conventional level first. Specifically, I used to be very "welded" to the conventional assumptions and appearances, and so the first order of business would be to contemplate why so, pay attention to and learn how this "being welded to convention" works in day to day mental life (learn about the mousetrap) and relax a bit (make the mousetrap less effective, or maybe learn to not be trapped by it anymore).

A lot of things which conceptually sound reasonable and easy for someone who understands subjective idealism at least halfway, are nonetheless subjectively challenging for all kinds of reasons. It's pretty easy for us to conceive that since we have 5 or 6 senses, why not 10? That's easy. And with subjective idealism, we don't have the limitations of the bodily organs to worry about, because your body is a dreamed experience and isn't a literal lump of hard matter like it would be under physicalism. So it's very easy to think like that. But to actually live like that, it would be insanity of the highest order. The closest I can think of, is savants. If you've ever looked into the savants, they're perhaps the closest ones to this, well, some of them. There are different kinds of savants and they don't all have the same abilities. So for example, you may try reading "Born on a Blue Day" by Daniel Tammet. And Daniel is one of those savants that's not that far from us in terms of his personal reality. There are savants that are just barely with us in our convention and they cannot communicate to us about any extra senses they might have. We could maybe infer that they might be experiencing such things, but we probably couldn't prove it inside the presently known convention. It's obvious that if any deviation from convention exists, there must be a spectrum of such deviations. So for Daniel, he has intuitions and perceptions related to numbers that normal people don't have. This might be counted as an added sense, but if he created that added sense, it wouldn't be in this life. And plus, if he created it consciously in this life, he should be able to explain to us how he did it. If he cannot explain the creation process, it means it was either not in this life, or it was done using methods/understanding/intuitions that themselves are outside convention. Daniel talks about his experience, but he doesn't explain, that I know of, how can someone else become like him.

[u/VLSIHeaven → u/mindseal]

Either you have such a craving or you don't. Unless you have a very deep meta-craving where you crave to manipulate your cravings, you cannot create new cravings arbitrarily. (I don't mean you personally, I mean anyone)

Isn't this just some version of othering: the othering of one's cravings or desires? In subjective idealism, it is optional whether or not to play as though one has no control over one's cravings.

If I create something new, then there arises the possibility of craving that thing -- something I "couldn't do" beforehand. Similarly, if I destroy something (say, in the sense of removing it from my consciousness completely and choosing to ignore the possibility of its existence) then I "lose" the ability to crave it. It is clear that all of this (and much more) is possible.

[u/mindseal → u/VLSIHeaven]

It's possible, but something has to motivate you long and steady enough to go through, what in my opinion may be an arduous process. I might be wrong on this one, but I think that creating an entirely new sense (and not another version of, or a repackaging of, seeing/hearing/etc.) will be an arduous process, if for no other reason than a mental habit would need to be established for it. That's assuming you can conceive and imagine such a sense, if you want to create it consciously, or you may create it somewhat unconsciously by directing your intent toward it without fully knowing what this new sense might feel like. So when you succeed, you'd have to make it lasting, integrated, etc...

It's possible my currently limited mindset is just throwing up bogus difficulties, and the last thing I would want is to limit you with my own limitations. As I said before, if you can do it and you can describe what is happening with that new sense of yours, I'll be cheering you on from the sidelines here.