Translating: question log

Response

The laws of physics continue to apply, within our bodies and outside of it. They are part of objective reality, which holds no matter who is looking: every neural firing obeys them, and we'll be seeking a viable physical explanation that enables everything we're describing. (More to say here in future posts.)

In contrast to physical constants, meaning is always subjective: our system translates the incoming signal's meaning for us. This is the core of the dichotomy between inner and outer: the moment our system interprets signals in terms of what they mean for us, inside vs. outside comes into existence.

Within us, each domain is its own coordinate system, and translation projects a message from one system into another, reshaping it through resonance. With strong resonance, what is conserved across a translation is the pattern itself. (What happens to signals that don't resonate? There is a lot more to say there as well.)

So the predictability of the physical world does not disappear, but the lawfulness of cause and effect becomes personal, guided by what resonates for us. And the traffic runs both ways. Patterns that carry enough weight within us are translated back into actions: physical events, which the world receives on its own terms again.

Response

The above answer about conservation/ predictability leaves open the question of where agency fits in. In the framework we're exploring, determinism and agency are not in conflict, but they live in different lenses. I expect we'll explore the agency lens more fully in a future post. For now, the resonance lens gives us one way to see it, named in the response just below this one.

Response

Our ability to translate across domains helps us in several ways: Most immediately, it allows signals coming in from our different senses to be combined and compared. This lets us prioritize different inputs, letting us address the most urgent and important matters first. On a deeper level, it plays a role in the functions of consciousness: memory, thought, and emotion all run on the ability to turn a signal we receive into something different.

A downside we experience is that receiving more input does not always make our lives easier: the more we have to consider, the more difficult it is to prioritize. We can only focus on 1 thing at a time, and the knowledge that there is so much we are not doing can be a bummer. Which translations are acquired versus inherited, and which help and which hurt us, are great questions to keep asking ourselves on an ongoing basis.

Here is where a version of agency shows up. You may have noticed that the examples and invitations in 'resonating' often offered up more than one path to go down. We absolutely have the ability to address our own translation habits, when we observe which paths we take, and the effect they have on us.

Response

Agreed! Differing interpretations of the meaning of words and actions are at the root of so many of the conflicts I experience. And because conflict drives me into a defensive mindset, I temporarily become less flexible in my beliefs and interpretations - not more. It's impractical, to say the least.

Response

You are on the money: translation doesn't run just one way. When resonance within us runs both ways, a signal received in one domain from another can be reflected, crossing back into the previous domain, and eliciting a response that resembles the original signal. Crossing domains can help signals stabilize within us, even after their original inspiration has disappeared from view.

What is real depends on your definition of 'real'. If I take it to mean 'reflective of physical reality', then imagination, dreams and hallucinations may not be real yet when they first appear in our awareness, but they can become real if we act to make them so.

Response

I had been wondering about the structure underlying my experience for a long time. One evening as I was meditating I noticed a shape behind my eyelids, that I thought I might have seen there before. I decided to paint what I saw, in watercolor. As the painting took form, I found myself imagining what it might mean.

That was just over a year ago. Since then, it has helped boost my awareness of what is happening within me, and what the causes might be.

Response

With each of these posts, we look at consciousness through a different lens: translation across domains is one lens, resonance is another. We use prompts that connect to lived experience as a way to affirm how it shows up in our lives. The ultimate goal is to access a shared understanding of consciousness that is both practical and holistic, and a language/ set of terms that we can use to describe or explain our subjective experience to each other. Ambitious perhaps, but well worth a shot. So the sense of incompleteness you flagged is accurate: each post is only a part, and this log is how we keep track of what remains open.