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Field experiments going InstaLIVE from Iceland in Nov 2024

 Bellow is a topdown of how it started. Unperishables are important. For current developments check:

(7) Routledge, P, (Oct 2013), Science Fiction, Literary Criticism
(8) Refers to the “functions” of the body, unlike “physical” which refers to its anatomy

Further – is a sci-fi speculation based on research cross-referenced and accepted by the scientific society and narrated with elements of an informal interview where “What if” preempts a sci-fi speculation. It traces back the stages of creation and the principles behind the structure of R1RA.

What if enhanced sensitivity to the details of minor leaps of attention, ability to distinguish the “otherness” of attentional illusions in relation to what we understand as objective waking life, could allow us co-create these insufficiencies of perception into a reality of its own? This would mean fragmentation of perception of the external world in a way that embosses the multiple borders which attentional illusions are. This fragmentation would mean we would transition and navigate across them in a way we are convinced of the difference between physical and virtual worlds. This means that the borders between “truly” perceived, illusive and virtual realities, would become embossed and reveal their multiplicity, rather than blur into a single reality as Technological Singularity suggests. While speculated effects on perception might be similar to ones from technological augmentation of our brains, it would happen for different reasons and would involve a wider spectrum of factors. An example of similar contrast is one world government (blurring of borders of perception) vs multiple micro societies (R1RA).

According to Perceptual set ⁽⁹⁾, the main psychological factors determining our perception of environment are expectation and context. The vision of Reality 1 Reality A (R1RA) is a result of an inquiry into neurophysiological and psychological structures of perception regulating expectations, and presently incipient socio-cultural advancements.

(9) “– the tendency to perceive or notice some aspects of the available sensory data and ignore others”

Affirmation of expectations happens in a process called consolidation (of memories). Once experiences are selected to be remembered depending on how worthy they seem to be – the brain triggers to produce accordingly worthy amount of new proteins to strengthen connections between neurons and to accumulate fragile traces of these experiences into stabilised memories. This chemical process of stabilisation can be disrupted by an interference of a new experience. Thus, incoming visual information of the world we are physical participants of, is subject to multiple filtering processes which leave us with leftovers, which in their turn, hold even less potential to become memories (i.e. expectations) but are also possible to manipulate.

– What does R1RA literally consist of? What is its substance?

Expectations could be described as learned experiences of the world which become memories, only to come back into the dimension of our vision as unconscious visual and auditory hallucinations but perceived as “objective” experiences. They regularly occur “on the surface” during any perceptual uncertainty or lack of attentional capacity inherently due to the limits of brain processing capacity. In this way, expectations could also be referred to as direct expressions of our perception of the external world. Understanding the mechanisms of their flexibility on a social scale could allow to make more informed speculations about possible conditions of natural trans-realities such as R1RA. Expectations operate by neurophysiological and neuropsychological mechanisms of attention and memory.

Social perception is an exchange of personal perceptions which are products of a process in which a single agent filters the image of an active experience of the external world, feeding off previously built up and stabilized partially unique expectations. These are dispersed among other agents of the external world. Their visual attention is not rhythmically aligned and their perceptual apparatus is equally unfit – to receive the complete volume of the incoming stimuli. The byproduct of this arhythmic exchange of leftovers of collective hallucinations – is the collectively formulated perception of the external world.

The knowledge about the self, its relation to the external world and the external world itself; which biologists, neuroscientists, quantum physicists and mathematicians share to society, is too radical to be permitted as tolerable by our habitual logic brought up by Newtonian physics.

What if the findings about neurophysiological and psychological structures behind the plasticity of perception – become socially dominant? To the extent that we “truly” accept that physical experience of life is result of the internal process of the brain or that the implications of quantum mechanics exist? To extent this knowledge becomes our expectations and perceptions of the external world? For this knowledge to accumulate enough density of popularisation, it will have to push out and dominate presently prevalent expectations about possible and impossible.

The “practice-based” socio-cultural factors contributing to the metacognitive utopia of R1RA would be the extensive use of VR and presently developed electronic telepathy. We are beginning to witness VR spilling its depersonalization and derealization effects into behaviors during physical waking life. Neuralin    k and Facebook, contesting to become forefronts of brain-to-brain communication. If it indeed becomes a part of our lives, present socio-politically contradicting dilemmas between privacy and comfort could propagate in closer proximity to our minds, oxidize and liquify our expectations of social space and private mind, to the extent that there we might re-envision their purpose

While the scenario is set in the future, I looked for examples of dramatic effects on social perception of a younger generation, who is bound to direct the progression of the presently conceived technological advancements and co-formulate the social perception of physical reality.

One example of how the density of social perceptions can nurture the concept of “believing is seeing” and shape the  understanding of personal ability to distinguishing gradations between reality and consciousness, is the last year’s statistical study into lucid dreaming. The pursuit of the practice is reported with a prevalence of 70% from youth whose “individual beliefs and cultural norms are in line with cultures of communities with an interest in the lucid dreaming they are part of”. Interestingly, it also detects “significant parallels” between lucid dreaming and gaming. It is argued that both lucid dreaming and gaming "are grounded in similar spatial skills, require resilience to motion sensitivity and focused attention." This opinion isn’t unique. A growing number of observations of peculiar behavior of heavy gamers outside the virtual worlds, signify yet uncommon treatment of borders between physical, virtual and intrapersonal worlds.
A saturation of these indicators could be seen in the cross-examination of two young subcultures - cyborgs who are involved in the physical and cognitive self-augmentation and psychonauts, who endeavour to natural development of out of body experiences (OBE).

The first practice transitioning between gradations of the external world through extreme physical experiences while the second – through extreme detachment from the experience of physicality. Set on opposite sides of the pendulum of extremes, they achieve similar perceptual effects which could contribute to a widening pallette of communication between debated gradations of the waking life. The quantitative rise of both of the movements, could also signal an acceleration of this pendulum of perceptive sensitivity.

What makes R1RA very improbable is not as much the contents or the number of factors, as the impossibility of their simultaneous motion. Rhythm coordinates formation of memories (which consist of expectations). Expectations and context can favour R1RA only through their motion, their rhythmic coordination during the multiplication of density.

What if rhythm of our perceptual apparatus can assist us in distinguishing the detailed gradations of the external world (i.e. difference between the illusions and “true” active visual stimuli)?

The sheer sense of rhythm aids effectively making sense of the world, improves impaired cognitive functions and motor control, increases prosociality, empathy, social bonding, coordinating social action in time and captures attention.

It’s rhythm by which we have the capacity to grasp and could cumulate in the density of the gradations of a waking reality, set between experiences of external stimuli, stabilized expectations and perceptual illusions. Put on a temporal line, these mental events and intervals between them exhibit their rhythm of coinciding e.g. “any sensory experience, regardless of the modality of the stimulus – is defined within a temporal interval.”

Neurotransmission (synaptic transmission) directs transmission of an electric current from one neuron to the next. Neural oscillations (simply, brainwaves) are the rhythmic activity of its neurons driven by their internal events or by communication with other neurons.

Their rhythm reveals much about consciousness. It coordinates information and transfer mechanisms, and attention, perception, coordinates which memories become permanent or vanish. Conscious awareness itself is defined as “synchronous neural oscillations occurring globally throughout the brain rather than from the locally synchronous oscillations that occur when a sensory area encodes a stimulus.” Some studies show “associations between the dynamics of the brain and cognitive processes.”

Atentional illusions can too be manipulated by intentional efforts against socio-cultural influence e.g. through attentional exercises, meditation and gaming – activities implying sequential repetitive training of attention. Repetitive training results in rise of temporal expectations not only in behavior which constitutes personality traits. Neurons learn sequential intervals which causes them to pursue a developed style of behavior. Their dominant rhythm too can be disrupted by an unexpected stimuli.

Art is predominantly a visual filter for perceived reality and artists explore the possible uses of the rate of blinking to enhance viewers’ experience of their artworks. Acclaimed film editor Walter Murch in his book, 'In the Blink of an Eye', theorised that the rates and rhythms of blinking relate to the rhythm and sequence of thoughts and emotions. Experiments in simultaneous blinking during movie watching, where participants would gradually inter-adopt each others’ rhythms of blinking – advance movie editing. These and other revelations about the importance of rhythmic properties of our perception contributed to my reasoning of organising the communication within the network on the basis of simultaneity.

What if the interweaving of rhythmic properties across the factors contributing to the envisioned social enhanced ability to see into the details of gradations of the waking life might resolve in its fragmentation into multiple recognisable realities?

Attentional blink is the perceptual phenomena by which presentation of visual stimuli in a rapid sequence causes a failure to detect the subsequent target of vision. Being a physiological expression of the divide between internal and external events, attentional blink “provides an optimal situation to study the fate of stimuli not consciously perceived and the differences between conscious and nonconscious processing” and helps us distinguish which of images is in our head or is part of external world.

To elaborate, once the first target is detected, the eyeballs roll back into their sockets. When we shift focus, upon returning, they don't always come back to the same spot. To avoid a nauseous jumpy image, the brain stitches the gaps between the stacks of seen images divided by blinks into a smooth motion video with expectations. When the second stimulus appears too quickly - the insufficiency of brain attentional resources causes a failure of its processing.

In dissecting the perceived imagery by blinks, I recognised three streams of actively experienced external events, already stabilized expectations and active illusions.

Consciously unseen – the external reality which is unawaringly missed by first-person viewer and thus is not a part of his/her future expectations Partially consciously seen – the external reality which is seen by first-person viewer in a smooth transition and thus is perceived as objective and whole but in fact is only a fraction of the whole image which consists of overlaps of hallucinated expectations and actively experienced external stimuli.

Seemingly seen but in fact unconsciously hallucinated – the external reality which is seen as objective but consists of multiple overlaps of hallucinated expectations and external stimuli which is a mixture of your and others’ expectations which others see and contribute their expectations to because they saw it

What if in further multiplications of simultaneously unseen moments caused by the 28,000 daily blinks made by growing amount of synchronizations, the volume of missed reality is so vast that it could become a whole parallel reality that we are unaware of despite being physically active and wakeful? This “other” reality isn’t dramatically distinct in day-to-day life because this multiplicity of blinks happens in asynchrony. The streams of attentional gaps are too temporally dispersed throughout their agents, so the pattern of this reality they make up, isn’t dense enough to be seen. Seemingly minor attentional leaps of missing out about 10% (e.g. 15 minutes out of 150 minutes of a movie) of shared reality during blinking, are rooted in the nature of perceptual illusions which might hold a latent capacity to flip over our understanding of the physicality of the world in which the density and scale of perceived “otherness” is right. In a similar way to how regardless of whether a pendulum sways right or left - as long as it sways extreme enough - that is where you get to see outside of the environment it sways you within.

What if the denser the blinks are (e.g the more of us are blinking at same time or the more of us don’t see the “other waking reality” simultaneously) - the stronger the gravity of these gaps and their contents (i.e. expectations) becomes - the more volume they take out of “all of the waking reality” - the more apparent they and their expectations become - the higher velocity of their growth - the higher its the multiplication rate - the more forks of events this process produces - the more our physiology and culture adapt to them - the more consciously involved we become in it.
 

A focal role of rhythm in behavior of expectations (results of recurrence of learned intervals) arises in the subject of attentional blink. “For two decades, this robust attentional phenomenon has been a major topic in attention research because it is informative about the rate at which stimuli can be encoded into consciously accessible representations.”Some experimental data provides evidence to “the existence of temporal expectations at the time points of the trained (visual) targets post-training.” According to another study on accuracy in determination of the second target, a critical factor is not only the time elapsed between the first and second targets but the frequency e.g. the rhythm of the entrained targets. This research ties visual perception and cognitive processes where the accuracy in detecting the second target (the one that is missed in cases of attentional blink) increases for entraining streams that are in the oscillation frequencies of alpha-beta range. These are directly associated with the control of human attention and consciousness.”

What if in accumulation, the above could imply the possibility of manipulating formation of expectations (i.e. memories) through embedding them in alignment with the rhythm of blinking? Could tapping into the threshold of ¼ - ½ seconds ⁽³⁴⁾ of detachment from socio-physical constructions provide access to R1RA?

In this network R1RA finds its physical expression and thus becomes a simulated reality meaning it becomes ”to a degree indistinguishable from true reality” or virtual reality. The purpose of this technological setup is to retrain visual expectations in humans by coordinating an intentional condensing of circumstances of a rhythmic simultaneity of private and social visual expectations of the collectively perceived reality.

The wearables shoot first-person gaze photos each time participants blink simultaneously and reveal the imagery none of them would have seen otherwise on screens of their wearables. Thus the network persistently substitudes their expectations of the external world which accumulate density through their rhythmic alignment to evolve into a distinguishable reality.

The network captures and makes them persistently reoccur as participants' expectations of the external world, so that overtime they become consciously detected, accumulate their density through their rhythmic alignment to evolve into a distinguishable reality.

– Why is it not videos but photos that cameras make?

– The choice of a static image over a motion recording responds to the brievity of a regular blink. This network is the first stage of R1RA prototype. By “multiplying” the unseen reality of its users, it gives “weight” to the “borders” of external world. By showing it to the users – it allows them to “re-affirm their existence”. Gradually “pushing out” natural expectations by the growing quantitative density, changing the rhythm of private formulation, which increases the proximity of reaching at a qualitatively new peak of simultaneity.
In the spirit of experiments on quantum entanglement , the main experiment will 35 involve durational use of an AR version of the glasses in an unpopulated location. The minimization of the amount of agents of the external world per distance will create circumstances under which the participants circulate a selected type of expectations and generate new perceptions which “will evolve” into R1RA.

An example of the technologically advanced implementation of this project could be smart contact lenses recording everything their wearer sees and replays it on a screen inside their eye lids. Such lenses are rumoured to appear on market under Samsung’s 2014 patent called “Gear Blink”. Their purpose is to overcome the limitations in image quality of AR glasses. While it is unknown if or when they will appear on the consumer market, it allows us time to speculate about the implications of their durational use.

In even further scaling up, such environment can potentially be created with the use of TMS neuroimaging decoding technology developed by researchers of UC Berkeley University and Tokyo University. Similarly to Ai machine learning and more related technology of e-telepathy, its protocol is based on collecting descriptive feedback about what a subject is viewing and mapping associations onto actively reacting brain regions. The essential difference of this method to AR lenses would be in indistinguishably realistic quality of visual experience. The images of expectations would be embedded directly into the “mind’s eye”. This could potentially mean, witnessing a real rather than a metaphorical network’s effect on visual perception.

Scenarios involve subjects each wearing the glasses - either in same or different location, either aware or unaware of each other. Once they simultaneously blink within a range of 0.4 seconds - the cameras of all the subjects shoot photos from first person’s gaze, forward them to their mini displays and to their Instagram or Snapchat which are in turn used to collect the data about temporal, location and visual correlations and from there to database website which provides spec to track and analyse the received information.

– Aren’t there other ways to become enhance sensitivity to the borders of the perceived worlds?

– Somewhat similar abilities to those described in the R1RA scenario, are being achieved by a famous cyborg Moon Ribas, whose electronic implant gives him the ability to feel the Earth's seismic activity. The method of external augmentation doesn’t align with my understanding of the holistic principles of the rearrangement of factors affecting our perceptual capabilities and feels somewhat outdated once cross-examined with a prospect of self-sufficient forms of interaction with the realities we share. At the same time, such attempts to enhance perception have no choice but to be mechanic because they choose to contribute to the “today” where they impact a single agent of reality rather than in a fantasised metacognitive utopia. The example for popularization they are set for, is empowering in the face of having to contest with the artificial intelligence. From the perspective of R1RA, limitations into social expectations about flexibility of perception seem to be embedded.

– Does the location of participants matter? Or is this about quantum-like entanglement?

The Zone - a phantasmagoric space depicted by Andrey Tarkovsky in his 1979 movie Stalker, has many interpretations. One is that it’s a metaphor for the postulates of life where causes and effects of events are apparent by being temporally condensed and thus sensorially exaggerated. Both mental and physical events have equal densities which inter-flick in such close proximity that one can hear the thoughts of another. The temporal bending of the space makes perceived distance from point A to point B impossible to determine and imaginings instantaneously imprint in physical reality. If these features of the Zone are physical translations of the simple rules of life, they are irresistibly reminiscent of superposition principle of quantum mechanics. In this sense, the Zone reminds me of R1RA. The multiplicity of particles is orchestrated by a single wave function (rhythm in R1RA) which allows quantum entanglement to happen. It then by multiplication can form new wave functions and result into a Hilbert space (R1RA). It’s as if the Zone is a colide of gradations of perceived natural realities similar to R1RA but existing outside space and time, rather than racing to become like R1RA does.

Experimenting with simultaneity of blinks in relation to location

Attend to experimental protocols which allow to collect data about the amount and frequency of simultaneous blinks in relation to distance between the participants:
Participants in different locations (precise location TBD) which at this point are settled by available arrangements rather than metaphoric ratio overlays of the amount of participants and their distance: (e.g. equal amount of participants per each highly populated cities.

– Wouldn’t it make sense to create this network in a virtual reality?

– The avoidance of VR technology is deliberate. In the scenario of R1RA, virtual worlds are elements equal to natural illusions. Hence, embedding R1RA into fraction of the external world which “is” its equal - would contradict its logic and limit public understanding of it. It is detrimental for the network to be experienced within our “habitual” environment which consists of the whole spectrum of gradations. “Habitual” experience of external world is fragmented and the purpose of the network to amplify not its single element but the borders between all of the gradations.

Ongoing developments