Great idea, EKUMA1981!

Is it just me or would more of you like to see this hypnosis experiment replicated? I find it so intriguing.

I wonder what the test was that the hypnotist used initially to choose the subject. What cued him that Tom was the right man for the show? I'd love to see it replicated, but that subject was special, I suspect. Special in what way?...If we could only perform the experiment 100,000 times and study the results. How about, "OK. Now you see your daughter completely normally. From this moment forward, you will see right through anything you want - at your will. You now have a very special gift. On the count of three, you will wake up. One. Two. Three." Now you have superpowers for life. That's a cool hypnotist - a Master, I would say. One with a little foresight.

It's ultra cool if Tom wasn't a plant and really did manifest the ability to read the writing on the face of a wristwatch from a distance away and through a human body. But for that hypnotist to have happened upon a subject so completely and miraculously suggestible to the point of demonstrating miracles, it would have been a marvelous opportunity to cast a more permanent spell. Granted, you could have woven removal circuitry into the spell so that it could be removed at a later date if necessary. But shit, being a programmer of a mind that can read a wristwatch through a body, why not take the opportunity to do some more serious programming while the window of opportunity is open. Give the guy total situational awareness for life, for example. I'm sure that's not a violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Surely hypnotists have a moral and ethical code of some sort. If that's against their rules, their rules suck. If you're an entertainer in the mind over matter business, you'd better be prepared for mind over matter.

Not to be too cynical. I mean, theoretically and intellectually a quality response would be to assume that it is a true story filled with honest characters, then to try to imagine the fabric of the universe or the mind that would make it all possible. Like Jim does. I suspect Michael Talbot's father's friend Tom may have left the room never knowing what lifelong impact his innocent little magic trick had on poor suggestible young Michael. That kid took that magic show very seriously. The most suggestible man in the room may not have been Tom at all, but rather, innocent and trusting and inquisitive and brilliant little Michael.

Not quite the theory of everything, but a little bit of fodder for technology-inspired magical thinking. I like the mind as not localized to the brain. My contribution would be to suggest too-small-to-see intercommunicating sensors in invisible networks that extend throughout the environment and into our brains, ultimately forming the fabric of our consciousness. Inter- and intra-personal meta beings that interact with the brain, allowing brains to experience awareness. But that's just a food-for-thought suggestion because it's fun to think about. Instead of omniscient super-sentience, you have earthly nano-sentience. Like the Midi-chlorians that make up "The Force." :) My meta-beings are a conceptual stepping stone to more abstract versions that exist outside of space. They may have mass and structure, and they aren't necessarily the oldest forms in the universe, so they came later after the primordial stuff, so CONSCIOUSNESS is not the root cause of it all, but something emergent that came later. But it is fun to imagine consciousness as something that preceded our particular Big Bang, as though our timeline is one of infinitely many, and that timelines can be traversed from the outside by some form of sentience, but "outside" being a realm unfathomable to humans at our current levels of complexity. Hypothesizing that ours is a synthetic universe fits that model. I enjoy magical thinking when it suits me. Makes death much less scary. Rather than dematerialize into oblivion, you just change your timing, memory and point of view.

Techno-mysticism is fun. Transport me into the pattern buffer through a destructive atomically-precise scan, wait a week, then transport me back out a few times over a few days. Ask each instance where it has been, each instance will say the same thing: "I was just standing over there, now I'm here, I haven't been anywhere else." So much for death. It's just information, memory and the illusion of continuity. Take each neuron of your brain and put it in its own little liquid biosphere with computer-controlled neurotransmitter densities and quantum communication to other neurons that are a distance away. So now you have neural signals propagating over a distance with no macro-scale body. You have a functioning brain that covers a large geographic area with lots of empty space. Does that brain have the ability to experience the same kinds of conscious fields as one where the neurons are all contained in the same container? Someday we'll have the ability to make brains like this. When we reach that physics milestone, how will we know that we're the first to reach it? What will it feel like to establish a telemetry link between the neurons of our brains and the distributed network of neurons that make up the larger distributed brain? Your sense of location would be entirely dependent on the location of your sensory inputs. But what if you are dreaming? Then where are you? How much of the structure of the distributed neurons needs to be identical to the structure of the human neurons? Do you really need the same structure? Are the neurotransmitters essential, or are they just factors that affect the timing of the firing of the neurons? What is it about the neuron that generates the microscopic qualia of consciousness? Could you produce the same physical qualia with something solar-powered or not carbon-based, being careful to preserve the essence of the physical substrate of consciousness so that you haven't just created a zombie that reports consciousness where really it has none?

I know diddly about the fabric of consciousness. When I look at a pixel of light on my LED computer monitor, after that light hits the retina and gets converted into electrochemical signals, at any point along it's signal path, does it ever get converted or synthesized back into physical light, on *any* scale? When I am experiencing a wavelength, am I experiencing a wavelength or a model of a wavelength? What is the structure of the model? What processes have access to those synthesizers? Just what are the inputs to the imagination? Where in time and space is "the visual field?" How is it experienced? What experiences it? What ELSE experiences it? These are such fundamental questions but ones we don't have answers to at the moment. Now back to hypnosis. I'm still trying to figure out where on Earth my vivid dreams come from. The graphics, cinematography, choreography, casting and special effects are just slightly beyond my skill set. Most recently a blue colored block-headed alien held my hand at the top of a cliff while we stepped over the edge only to fall at 1G about 80% the way down, only to slow down for a controlled landing in some kind of warehouse-based factory at the bottom. My stomach felt the butterflies of acceleration during the fall. It was fun as Hell. Earlier in the dream things were vanishing by modifying causality using time-travel. You don't make the object vanish by disintegrating it here and now, you send a signal back in time and prevent the object from ever being created in the first place, and at the instant you do that, it disappears from the present with a lightning fast flash of light. All in the theater of dreamland. You know you're outside of the simulation when you remember that the object was there in the first place. That violates one causality, but not the other. The OBSERVER in the dream gets to remember the scenes of the dream in its imagination within the dream and after the dream, so the fabric of the dream is different than the fabric of the imagination. Yes, it's visual and VR-like, but it is different than the imagination. It's a rendering system with access to the imagination. What else has access to this rendering system?