The Light Beyond The Mountains

Chapter 12: The Interface

(Cover image © Tristan Maduro)

(Note: Chapter 12 follows Chapter 11 of The Light Beyond The Mountains posted on 8th June, in which I outlined the way in which the revered remote viewer Ingo Swann had come to view the swirling energy and data underpinning reality as he saw it - and how the human psyche plugged into this far deeper universe than that most of us perceive)

Chapter 12: The Interface

It was strange just how often computers and computing had come up as a motif.

There was Jacques Vallée and the work that he had conducted on the early Internet at SRI – work that he was able to transpose into the remote viewing programme when he suggested that viewing targets might be thought of as having an IP address, an idea that led to the breakthrough of giving them map coordinates.

Then there was Ingo’s idea of reality being ‘matrix-like’, which, as I’d recently discovered, wasn’t poles apart from what physicists like John Wheeler and Paul Davies had formulated: the concept of a universe that was built on information.

But my issue was visualising all this – literally getting my head around it.

We are so used to the idea of the universe being physical, I found it next to impossible to conceive of it as anything else, until – a short way into the research I’d been philanthropically funded to do - I came across the work of Donald Hoffman, a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Hoffman likens our experience of reality to the relationship we forge with the graphical user interface of a computer - its screen.

In the classical physics model, everything we perceive involves illusion. What we see is not a direct representation of the objects in our vision; it is a translation formed by our brain’s interpretation of the light reflected off the objects.

This is high school physics and well understood. The reality represented by those objects - and the meaning we attach to that reality - will be different depending on who is doing the observing.

In Hoffman’s ‘conscious realism’ model, we don’t need knowledge of the ‘guts of the machine’, aka reality - its hardware and its software (to stick with the computer analogy) – to interact with it. Instead, we forge a relationship with the icons (and apps, if you like) that it (reality) displays on-screen. At heart, conscious realism states that consciousness is primary and the physical world – our world of matter - emerges from it.

This, Hoffman says, gives rise to the idea of ‘conscious agents’. “The way one agent in a network perceives, depends on the way some other agents act,” he tells us. In this world, our brains function as ‘reducing valves’ to give us ‘just the reality we need’ – no more, no less.

To take this a step further, we agree on reality, because, as a species, we’ve evolved the same ‘reality-user interface’.

It is this interface that, over centuries, millennia, has allowed us to play the same game. It is also the process that provides us with our perception of consensus, objective reality.

What Hoffman wants to do is develop an algorithm to allow him to unpick the ‘source code of the game’ – leading, potentially, to technologies by which we can access the ‘greater reality’ in parts of the machine we don’t normally experience.

Meantime, ‘crude methods’– methods we might loosely refer to as ‘tech’, including meditation and psychedelic drugs (even though it might be hard to think of these things as technologies) – give us a limited capacity to do the same thing.

So, where – and what - is this ‘interface’?