Well, I just saw this thread as an opportunity to share my beliefs, as crazy as they may seem to, well, many. Of course I could preface each sentence with "IMO" but thats a rather superficial difference and I'd assume that everyone already knows it is implied.

P.S. By "beliefs" I actually mean "conclusions". I don't believe blindly in most things, but to me, it seems the glaring evidence as to this world's nature is right in front of everyone's eyes.

That wasn't what i was getting at and you would have no need to do what you suggest. I was merely trying to open up the discussion from 'this is how it is' to 'how do we know this is how it is?'. You stated things with such clarity and conviction that i wanted to know your reasoning for this - and also question your denouncing of those people who are 'asleep'... when it could be yourself who is delusioned.

We live in the world of chances and probabilities. I can not say that I am convinced 100% of my conclusions, because I do not possess any powers that would let me actually see outside the virtual machine, should it exist. If it doesn't exist, and I am just a bunch of chemicals, I need not worry about it either, because my entirely meaningless existence will at some point end, and I will not have to go through the existential ponderings like this.

However I find the evidence toward external, procedural design to be rather overwhelming. People just ignore it and treat it as a fact of life. We've grown conditioned to accept that smaller elements consist of smaller elements ad infinity and not find it strange. We've grown conditioned that science calls it "Big Bang" without being able to explain what was before it (what was going on inside your computer before you turned it on ?).

We've grown conditioned that there's a RULE which makes random mutations graduate into improved versions of the lifeform through procedural interaction, but we don't actually question who made the RULE, because, like many other RULES, it was always there, a natural part of our world's laws. We see things such as the design of a female body, and attribute their aesthetics to evolutional need to be attractive to a male. But who defined "attractive" to be this ? Did this work of art happen out of a random void ? Do we merely see it as a work of art because we are conditioned to it being this way ?

We see the infinite creative realization that resulted in an amazing variety of lifeform designs throughout the planet, many of which were procedurally generated, of course - figure it out, if you were the programmer, would you really want to design each subspecies of a frog by hand ? But who designed the procedures themselves ? Who, through programming the nature of these procedures, allowed for the very fact that life was allowed to born out of specific chemical interactions ?

Why is the seeming end result of our procedural evolution process is a self-aware entity, a human ?

We see our own designs continuously mimic the superior designs presented to us. The methods with which we control our man-made virtual machines continue to move toward direct brain control. Who's to say we will not find a most immersive MMORPG of the future to actually be one to temporarily encase our minds within the thrills and limitations of its world ?

I can ramble on and on, and I'm sure this thread will be moved to P&C anyway, so I'm stopping now before I get consumed with an avalanche of exchanges which will eat away 2 days out of my life and lead to an eventual lock.

Just a shift in perception, mostly. A mental split where I had a realization (although that implies some sort of "truth" and that's a whole 'nother can of worms) that the "vehicle" me is not necessarily the "driver" me. I'd say body and soul, but the latter term is steeped in expectation and association that don't necessarily reflect my thoughts.

You're welcome, and I take no offense at people "picking it apart". Being a teacher, I expect a certain amount of discussion around it, and I wouldn't have typed it up if I was afraid of what people thought. This is only the tip of the iceberg, as far as my experiences go.

I find myself in agreement with most of what Shiho says, but there are semantic issues. I think that our perceptions are definitely limited by our experiences. I see things directly in relation to my interests and experiences. Ask me directions and I'm liable to tell you in relation to book and game stores. "Go past the Best Buy and turn right at Border's!"

The experience I had tore aside all perception issues and allowed me to look at the world in a more "objective" fashion. (Although, once again, it's how I perceive it now, so that's a catch-22). It was very much like what people describe as a "no-mind" state where what you experience is pure experience.

My best guess goes something like this: Over time our identity, our personality, our overall model for the world and our place in it is always changing. A "No man can enter the same river twice" kind of thing. But this change does not necessarily have to be at a constant rate. The change is driven by our external stimuli and internal musings, but some stimuli are going to be considerably more impactful than others.

That "Oh, sh*t, who the hell am I?" sensation is how we perceive peaks of change, whether initiated by a single, life-changing event or by the sum of many subtle inputs reaching a critical mass. The sensation is easily masked by the single events, because they tend to be traumatic or very emotional. It seems right in those situations to feel like a different person, seeing things in a new light; but when the change is the result of many different ideas coming together to have massive repurcussions on how we see the world and self, that's really weird.

I came to this tentative conclusion by keeping track of what I had recently done before the sensation occurred. It almost always happened about half an hour after taking in information I found very interesting, almost profound, so engrossing that I couldn't stop working out the ramifications and piecing together how the new insight related to others.

The feeling of not quite being familiar with your own body struck me as the result of the insight being so changing that the default worldview going into the insight was incompatible with the new to the point that it was easier to chuck it completely and start over from scratch rather than worry about amending all that worldview's previous conclusions. The result is an identity that is practically new, though probably very similiar to the old one. That's why you feel like you're in a stranger's body, because the identity that's driving it around now wasn't driving it around five minutes ago.

The other correlation was that tended to be in transit during these sensations, usually driving or walking.

It could be that the sensation is really just a malfunctioning of the spatial awareness function, or maybe I'm more apt to be thinking about something while in motion so the previous conclusion is more likely to happen then. In retrospect, it does strike me as odd that when people have profound experiences, they say that they have been, "moved." I'd never really thought about why that word is used in that way before.

I'm not dead set on these conclusions. They fit the observations and are elegant. I can't help but wonder now, especially right after the sensation, about the previous identity. It's dead, right? How long before the next radical change? How long does this new identity have to live? Two months? A week? In a corrupted sense of self preservation, should I actively be avoiding all new information? How much time would that buy the me inside?

EDIT: And for what it's worth, if I had to bet money on the origins of the observable universe I'd put it on Shiho's general conclusion of the world as a simulation. I wonder what we'd be simulating

Danjo, because these sensations are associated at times with actual physical brain functioning, I was wondering both at what point it becomes serious (ie, is it a symptom of epilepsy?), and also how much of this kind of "glitching" is normal. There are theories that precisely this kind of experience of brain aberrations that change perceptions are the font of religious and mystical experiences. We are all essentially susceptible to low-grade perceptual faults that we may take for supernatural occurances.

Our brains are a lot more complicated than they may seem, especially to people who don't really like reductionism. At the same time, being "inside" them, we have a tremendously uninformed and naive view of how they actually work, and are likely to credit our own perceptions more than we should. For example, if you think your "self" was actually projected several feet outside your body, bear in mind that brain waves barely penetrate the skull. It's far more likely that the spatial center of the brain messed up, and the rest of the brain simply rewrote it's observations taking that into account, until the unusual situation passed. And that's pretty cool. It's certainly more interesting than a wave-hands account of spiritual wanderings, life after death wish fulfillment notwithstanding.

My mother was in the hospital once after an operation and admits she was having trouble breathing and feared she would die. After a few minutes of this, her mother and I think another dead relative appeared floating in the corner of the room, talking to her and shining with a bright light in the center of her field of vision. She was comforted by this as she passed out and when she awoke, her belief in an afterlife was strengthened.

She's also aware that visions of dead people, auditory hallucinations and a bright light are verified symptoms of serious anoxia. So... Which is it? Anoxia or a visit from heaven? Religious sending or imminent brain death? She picks the account which comforts her. I wish I could, but that's not how I think. (As many here could have guessed; thank you, John Calvin).

Again, I'll recommend Connie Willis' "Passage" as a fantastic book for people interested in what recent research has shown on the topic. It's very thought-provoking and emotionally gripping.

I had some thoughts the other week that put a bitter taste in my mouth towards playing video games. I am not sold on the concept but it did throw me for a loop for a bit.

Nature can, has and will take control of itself despite humanity's best efforts. The more we control and the more we thrive and overpopulate, nature will not cease to act beyond our perceptions in mysterious and destructive ways.

Yet, at the same time, the natural order of things can work subtly and effectively too. Video games is a hobby that attracts societies best and brightest in the most addictive way. In a sense, we have naturally created a hobby that pacifies and lessens the accomplishments of our most mentally talented. Not only that, but we have created an industry around it where people, uncommonly gifted in both the creative and logical, can thrive in an industry that doesn't proportionately advance society with respect to the talent driving it.

Sure video games have become mainstream. But that only strengthens their influence and their ability to pacify and "neuter" productive members of society. There is a stereotype about game geeks and their lack of social graces. This leads to questions about what demographic is procreating more effectively.