What to do with the potential "Mirroring Dashboard Problem"?

What I call the "Mirroring Dashboard Problem" is the varied accounts that what we see of reality is a reflection of our own internal states. To give some examples:

- The claims that figures of light or other entities seen in transcendent experiences are figures from one's own religion or at least experience with religion. This is a big issue IMO for NDEs and Psychedelic experiences, where IIRC there are few - maybe just one - anecdote of someone experiencing a divine entity with traditional symbolism they had to be later informed of. (Thinking of Gabriel Robert's psychedelic experience with the goddess Tara.)

- The challenge of the Philip Experiment, and other claims of manifesting tulpas, where it seems we can create entities from our own psychic projections. 

- Madden's argument that UFOs/aliens are attempted representations of entities beyond our own interface ("dashboard"). The oddities of these entities, especially when - for example - they resemble Nordic humans or clowns is not due to their true nature but rather people's mind/brains projecting an image onto something far outside our "cave" as Madden puts it.

- Shushan noting that a portion of Survival evidence suggests what we see of the afterlife is driven by what we want to see, to the point that there may even be a "first layer" in which our own beliefs and desires are mirrored back to us. 

- These entities themselves may choose to project a "glamour" or "costume" to deceive people about who they really are, as per the claims of "screen memories" - for example the claims of seeing oddly sized (tiny or overly large) owls during claimed alien encounters. 

I say this is a "problem" because it seems we may be caught in a veil of our or others' making, and as such cannot really ever say what is true about reality. 

Of course there is a point where this enters into "hyper skepticism" territory, where we just adopt an overly conspiratorial mindset. 

I don't have a particular stance, just been musing about this issue so figured I'd make a post about it.

- These entities themselves may choose to project a "glamour" or "costume" to deceive people about who they really are, as per the claims of "screen memories" - for example the claims of seeing oddly sized (tiny or overly large) owls during claimed alien encounters. 

Just to add - I get this isn't exactly a case of self-deception or self-creation since these entities are claimed to be projecting the illusion but I think it relates because - for example in the case of the owl screen memories - what is shown is drawn from our own experience with animals around us.

Though this is also interesting because of the commonality. Why owls, or mantises, and not a random assortment of animals?

[Laird]

@Sci, this is a belated response because I set this thread aside given all the reading that following up on its reference required, and then lost track of it, only accidentally but fortunately rediscovering it a few days ago. I've now done the necessary reading. Incidentally, I'd had Mike Clelland's essay Owls and the UFO Abductee down on my to-read list from years ago, so this was a good prompt to finally read it, and I'm glad that I did (I haven't - yet? - watched the videos in that thread though).

On terminology, I'm inclined to use the simpler and more conventional term "projection" for what you've termed "mirroring dashboard" (and you do use "projection" and variants of it three times in the body of your post, suggesting its applicability). Is there a theoretical or conceptual reason why you preferred "mirroring dashboard"? I ask because "dashboard" is the sort of term used by Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup to describe their idea that we perceive reality in terms of utility rather than veridicality, and thus it is linked to their idealistic perspectives. In turn, on an idealistic perspective, projection (or mirroring dashboard) seems both more expected and easier to explain than on other candidate perspectives, so perhaps that's where you're going with this terminology.

More generally, I do think that you've pointed out something real and problematic, and it's occurred to me too, but I hadn't broken it down into as many examples as you have, let alone posted about it. Until your post, I had thought about it mostly in terms of NDEs and (lucid) dreams.

In short, my opinion is: projection does sometimes occur in the context of these phenomena, but it doesn't explain all perceptions of them. It is problematic, and not just because it brings into question what (we can know about) objective reality, but also because it complicates the analysis of situations in which it might occur, and we might not always be able to determine whether or not it is occurring.

I suspect that you'd agree with that assessment.

Here are some further thoughts.

It seems to me that we can roughly (and arguably; there might be better divisions and/or terms) divide your examples into three broad classes of projection (mirroring dashboard):

1. Passive projection, in which a percipient privately projects (overlays) a personal perception upon a presumed objective reality which differs (as expected to be perceived) in a meaningful way from the projected overlay (as actually perceived). This covers your transcendent-figures-of-light (especially in NDEs and psychedelics), UFO/alien-perceptions-per-Madden, and afterlife-conformance-to-expectations-per-Gregory-Shushan examples.
   
2. Receptive projection, which is as for passive projection except that the percipient's overlay is influenced or forced upon him/her by an external entity. This covers your "screen memory" example. It might in some cases be not just a personal projection but one shared by multiple percipients of the same event.
   
3. Active projection, in which a percipient or group of percipients actively affect(s) a presumed objective reality in such a way that the effects are generally perceptible to all who are capable of perceiving that objective reality: a form of psychokinesis, at least partially and/or in a sense. This covers your example of tulpas and the Philip Experiment.
   

I'm not sure though how helpful - if at all - this is.

(Lucid) dreams seem worth considering as an analogous or at least related phenomenon, because they also involve ambiguity re what's subjective versus what's objective.

These days dreams are commonly understood as entirely personal and private, and thus entirely subjective: "pure" projection in a sense (a fourth class).

This seems to be at most a half-truth though, because some people share dreams (see also Ed Kellogg's personal account and our own @Mediochre's report); some people spend months or even years - in an ostensibly overnight dream - in alternate realities that are as complex and full of independent agents as our waking reality (as in @Mediochre's Loderunner); some people can even deliberately create(?) such dream realities which are persistent enough that they can seamlessly return to them night after night; and some people receive veridical after-death communication in dreams.

I'm not offering any conclusion nor even ending with a firm opinion, despite thinking that I might arrive at one when embarking on this post; I am instead simply choosing to end by highlighting something that Ed Kellogg wrote in that account to which I linked above, which might help to inform further discussion on the projection - aka mirroring dashboard - problem:

In my experience, dreams, like plays, occur on at least three qualitatively different levels. First, the structural level, that consists of the stage settings and props, the raw dreamscape before we project meaning onto it. This level makes up the substratum of the dream, dream phenomena qua phenomena. Second, the meaning level, in which symbols, feelings, and the relationships of the dream characters and objects predominate.. And finally, and most superficially, the labeling level, where we verbally interpret and identify what happens during a dream.

Written and oral accounts usually focus on describing the labeling level of dreams, where we often boil down a multilevel experience into a few simplistic identifications. Many dreamworkers probe deeper and focus on the underlying meaning level of the dream. The structural level of the dream, the substratum, usually remains either unnoticed or ignored, but it may prove the least idiosyncratic level of them all. As such it may hold the key to providing the best evidence for dream mutuality. For example, although both Harvey and I dreamed of ourselves in almost identical desert dreamscapes, I identified it as Mexico, whereas Harvey first identified it as the Holy Land in Israel. Those who wish to investigate the possibility of mutual dreaming may need to pay more attention to descriptions of the structural level of dreams, rather than to the identifications made by the dreamers on the labeling level. A similar effect exists in "remote-viewing" experiments, where researchers find that when subjects focus on the structural content of their perceptions, as opposed to the verbal identifications made from that content, that the probability of their achieving a "hit" on a remote-viewing target improves markedly (Swann, 1991).

[Laird]

- The challenge of the Philip Experiment, and other claims of manifesting tulpas, where it seems we can create entities from our own psychic projections. 

The upcoming SSE talk by Jack Stucki might shed some light on this. I wonder whether it will be recorded and viewable online afterwards.

@Sci, this is a belated response because I set this thread aside given all the reading that following up on its reference required, and then lost track of it, only accidentally but fortunately rediscovering it a few days ago. I've now done the necessary reading. Incidentally, I'd had Mike Clelland's essay Owls and the UFO Abductee down on my to-read list from years ago, so this was a good prompt to finally read it, and I'm glad that I did (I haven't - yet? - watched the videos in that thread though).

On terminology, I'm inclined to use the simpler and more conventional term "projection" for what you've termed "mirroring dashboard" (and you do use "projection" and variants of it three times in the body of your post, suggesting its applicability). Is there a theoretical or conceptual reason why you preferred "mirroring dashboard"? I ask because "dashboard" is the sort of term used by Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup to describe their idea that we perceive reality in terms of utility rather than veridicality, and thus it is linked to their idealistic perspectives. In turn, on an idealistic perspective, projection (or mirroring dashboard) seems both more expected and easier to explain than on other candidate perspectives, so perhaps that's where you're going with this terminology.

I was drawing from the language of Hoffman and Kastrup but wasn't really trying to suggest an Idealist metaphysics. I think we can also see how the "dashboard" applies to what Gallimore is saying regarding how DMT potentially gives us a view into a facet of reality the brain has to make a construct for, just as it has to make a construct for reality that is our everyday mundane experience.

"Mirroring" I feel is more based on Shushan's work on how a good number of afterlife accounts seem to - at least at first - present something that is based on our expectations or at least on aspects we are familiar with. This also gets into the concept of the Umwelt, that when we encounter whatever "aliens" are our brain/mind is drawing on what we already know to give us an image of what such beings look like.

Madden puts it well in Unidentified Hyper Objects:

"That is The Problem: the conditions of our ordinary human existence impose on us a kind of ignorance about what is beyond our everyday world, and there are dangers in settling for that ignorance, but it is hard to see how we can ever get past our dependence on the very conditions that bind us to this ignorance."

More generally, I do think that you've pointed out something real and problematic, and it's occurred to me too, but I hadn't broken it down into as many examples as you have, let alone posted about it. Until your post, I had thought about it mostly in terms of NDEs and (lucid) dreams.

In short, my opinion is: projection does sometimes occur in the context of these phenomena, but it doesn't explain all perceptions of them. It is problematic, and not just because it brings into question what (we can know about) objective reality, but also because it complicates the analysis of situations in which it might occur, and we might not always be able to determine whether or not it is occurring.

I suspect that you'd agree with that assessment.

Well stated, and definitely agree!  

Especially the part where we can't always determine when it *isn't* occurring. One example I recall is from Madden's aforementioned book:

What the two witnesses saw (and since there are two of them and they made their reports independently, there is every reason to take their testimony seriously) really is beyond merely strange. They encountered a giant jet airliner, though it wasn’t entirely like any conventional airplane, flying dangerously close to a freeway in Long Island (they thought it was going to crash into them), a billboard that eventually takes off as if it were some sort of alien craft, and a cadre of unsettling clowns and other sundry carnivalesque characters engaged in truly distressing and outright threatening behavior. All of this is the stuff of nightmares, and they both soberly claim to have seen these things (though, of course, they have slightly different perspectives), and remember that one of the witnesses is an academic expert on distinguishing veridical perception from hallucination.

The content of their experience is curious enough, but the uncanniest thing about it is its context: these events occurred on a busy freeway, but only these two witnesses (as far as we know) saw any of these distressing phenomena. You would think a plane nearly crashing into a busy highway interchange, the launching of a billboard into the sky, and the insidious presence of a circus of threatening characters would have made the news, but we only have these two men to attest to the event.

Madden, James. Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World (p. 47). Ontocalypse Press. Kindle Edition.

Madden seems convinced, as the book goes, that both people saw something born of their own minds layered upon whatever it was that actually occurred. But is this the right interpretation? 

What if reality really has weird clown planes? After all, there is the curious issue of clown-like entities being seen on DMT.

It seems to me that we can roughly (and arguably; there might be better divisions and/or terms) divide your examples into three broad classes of projection (mirroring dashboard):

1. Passive projection, in which a percipient privately projects (overlays) a personal perception upon a presumed objective reality which differs (as expected to be perceived) in a meaningful way from the projected overlay (as actually perceived). This covers your transcendent-figures-of-light (especially in NDEs and psychedelics), UFO/alien-perceptions-per-Madden, and afterlife-conformance-to-expectations-per-Gregory-Shushan examples.
   
   
2. Receptive projection, which is as for passive projection except that the percipient's overlay is influenced or forced upon him/her by an external entity. This covers your "screen memory" example. It might in some cases be not just a personal projection but one shared by multiple percipients of the same event.
   
   
3. Active projection, in which a percipient or group of percipients actively affect(s) a presumed objective reality in such a way that the effects are generally perceptible to all who are capable of perceiving that objective reality: a form of psychokinesis, at least partially and/or in a sense. This covers your example of tulpas and the Philip Experiment.
   

If I understand this correctly, active projection goes beyond presentation and conjures something? So it would be roughly classified as PK/summoning/creation as opposed to the first two which deal solely with perception?

Need to think more about Kellog's three levels...

[Laird]

Understood re the origins of your terminology.

It seems that there's a bit of an analogy to some of what you're suggesting in the idea that language constrains our ability to think about reality: in a similar way, you're suggesting that our mind's perceptual habits and abilities constrain our capacity to perceive radically different objective realities. Just as when confronting a concept that is difficult to express in our language, we are forced to use words that don't quite describe it, when confronting an objective reality that is difficult to perceive accurately given our general perceptual habits and abilities, we are forced to perceive it in ways that don't quite reflect it.

Madden seems convinced, as the book goes, that both people saw something born of their own minds layered upon whatever it was that actually occurred. But is this the right interpretation?

I haven't read his book, so I don't know the full context, but based on what you've shared, the idea that the minds of two people would independently layer the exact same, very specific scene on top of what actually occurred seems implausible - short of some sort of psychic connection.

What if reality really has weird clown planes?

Assuming that they really were the only two people on this busy freeway who saw them - which is an assumption that Madden does seem to make given the parenthetical "as far as we know" - then we'd probably have to posit that these two people were "tuning in to a different channel" of reality that exists in parallel with this one. This is believable to me given that I too experience aspects of reality that others at least claim not to - and so do others, such as mediums, or participants in shared-death experiences in a room in which others do not participate.

After all, there is the curious issue of clown-like entities being seen on DMT.

Indeed.

If I understand this correctly, active projection goes beyond presentation and conjures something? So it would be roughly classified as PK/summoning/creation as opposed to the first two which deal solely with perception?

Yes, you understand correctly. It's in that way qualitatively different to the first two.

Need to think more about Kellog's three levels...

They might or might not be applicable and useful here - I just found them interesting in this context.