/**
 * file: karbytes_11_october_2024.txt
 * type: plain-text
 * date: 07_OCTOBER_2024
 * author: karbytes
 * license: PUBLIC_DOMAIN
 */

Approximately three nights ago, I took a 250-milligram psilomethoxin pill before dozing off to sleep while camping along a trail which loops through vast shallow ponds and which is surrounded by such bodies of water on both sides of the trail (with another outer loop trail to the east of my location). I noticed that microdosing psilomethoxin within an hour of going to sleep correlates with me having especially vivid and/or eventful dreams. The dream I had which I, at first, thought was too simple to write down took place beneath a clear blue sky at what looked like between 10AM and 3PM in a setting which was very similar (but not exactly identical) to where I was sleeping while having that dream.

It was a very simple dream and the sights, smells, sounds, and tactile sensations seemed to blend in with my accumulated memories of being at that location along the pond trail (within line of sight of the Levi stadium in Santa Clara, the Top Golf poles and nets, and various other buildings which all are illuminated with artificial light at night and look like glowing pieces of gold and gemstones whose light is reflected on the bodies of water at the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area bay). Many airplanes fly through that region from the nearby San Jose airport and the even closer Moffet Field airport (which is bordered by Lockheed Martin, NASA Research Center, and a two-way VTA light rail trolley track).

Anyway, the dream did not feature much of anything other than what looked like a desolate expanse of shallow water which seemed to blend in with the blue sky with mountains faintly visible in the distance (but I do not remember seeing vehicles, humans (other than myself), nor human-made infrastructure other than the trail, pond, and a few obsolete-looking structures next to the water). I was pulling a string out of the water which was strung with many small red glass beads and was surprised by how long the string was as I was pulling it out of the water. On the end of the string was some slightly larger anchor which might have been some kind of bolt and there was a brown spider riding on that anchor. I was trying to put the anchor on the dry ground so that the spider could crawl off of it and so that I did not have to touch the spider (because I have moderate arachnophobia).

As soon as I was making motions to do what I described inside of that dream, I was aroused from my slumber and heard pig_gorl yelling at me because she apparently thought I was awake that entire time instead of sleeping because what I was dreaming about seemed, to her, indistinguishable from my waking life while I was stationed at that location (both in time and in space). It’s the commentary from pig_gorl (and whoever or whatever the other “disembodied voices” were) that made me think this incident was philosophically/epistemologically interesting enough to write down.

The “disembodied voices” said that I completed some kind of otherwise unfinished process (or closed some kind of loop which was priorly left open and not getting closed despite my efforts and the efforts of whoever the “disembodied voices” represented). Apparently, being able to maintain continuity of thoughts between various states of consciousness (or perhaps realms within the multiverse) seems to be requisite for me being able to attain immortality of the ego I refer to as karbytes.

While reading a few forum posts on Actualized dot Org today, I was pleased to see that people other than myself had relatively novel (and non-religious and non-anthropocentric) things to say regarding their experiences using psychedelics and playing with altered states of consciousness. People talk about being able to anticipate things happening with extreme accuracy within a few seconds of those things happening while high on something DMT-like (and many people apparently having the same apparent experience of “realizing” that all of reality is a hologram being dreamed up by the same immortal mind). What stood out to me today was people hinting that what enabled them to attain novel states of consciousness and metaphysical insights was becoming aware of how many events occur as a result of the experiencer having repetitive thought loops (and I cannot help but think that recurring information processing loops are the underlying mechanism for giving apparent stability to seemingly solid and enduring qualia (given the worldview I currently hold that human minds are fundamentally computers which, like their electronic human-engineered counterparts, render (relatively permanent) qualia through a succession of (indefinitely many) temporally consecutive (and temporally finite) computational “clock cycles” at the neuronal and/or neuronal-network level of the human brain)).

What really made me want to write this note was coming up, seemingly for the first time ever, with a coherent description of what I hypothesize “free will” to be (which is ultimately a compatibilist definition more so than a strictly hard deterministic one): that free will exists only at sufficiently small loci of attention while zooming out to become aware of a larger expanse of reality reveals that free will is merely an illusion confined to a smaller locale (and that all things occur rather involuntarily due to all of reality being an interconnected web of causality which forces all activities to happen in a way which is ultimately synchronized (rather than activities happening as isolated and causally independent processes)).

Of course, this is mere speculation based on scant empirical evidence. One of the main things I live for (if not the main thing) is delving deeper into my explorations of how reality works (and, of course, doing the best I can to document my insights in a format which I hope to be able to preserve eternally and transmit across various realms within the multiverse (whether the multiverse is a static block containing all phenomena simultaneously or else is a dynamic object spouting novel phenomena (and perhaps expanding as time elapses rather than merely staying the same size or shrinking))).

Clarification: when I said that my current worldview (with respect to free will especially) is more compatibilist than hard deterministic, I meant to imply that only “the Godhead” has control over anything which happens within reality (but, according to modern metatphysics as I understand it, I and every other seemingly finite puppet-like sentient information processing agent is ultimately that Godhead (and there is presumably only one of such Godheads throughout all existence and which is always busy generating and/or experiencing content within itself)).