Note: How Many Speakers Can There Be?

This note was originally written to go with Testing / Improving MSL.

How many Speakers can there be? There must be at least one. This one consists of "experience bodies", units of experience. Currently, as I type this in my bedroom, I am experiencing one field of experience. I hear a helicopter outside and feel the chair I sit in. This is all one experience body. It's the whole world I live in, and I know of outside things because of what happens in it.

When the Speaker experiences all other beings in order to speak the word of the universe to us, it may be the case that it incorporates all experience bodies into itself. In that case, it is the universe, but in a sense is distinct from many parts of the universe. In that case, there is only one universe, and one Speaker.

Or, it may be the case that the Speaker only contacts, but does not incorporate, all other beings. How would that connection work? I think that contact (mere touching rather than incorporation), between conscious beings, would involve the two beings having experience bodies with identical contents (one being's experience body being reflected by at least one of the other being's), that would necessarily track each other. The will of one being could affect the contents of both experience bodies.

In the case that the Speaker only contacts, rather than incorporates, everything that exists in the universe, then it contains its own experience bodies (those peculiar to it) as well as a reflection of everything else. A second Speaker has to contain its own experience bodies, as well as a reflection of everything else -- which includes the reflections made by the first Speaker. But once the second Speaker makes those reflections, the first Speaker has to reflect all of the second Speaker's new reflections. This rapidly increases the number of experience bodies that have to exist.

Is there an infinite supply of experience bodies? If not, then the supply would rapidly run out, and one or both Speakers could not speak the universe to people. I tend to think there are no actual infinities, and that the burden of proof is on people who want to say that there are, or could be.

So this gets us to lean toward saying there's only one Speaker, but doesn't get us all the way, since someone may show that actual infinities exist, or could exist.

Do Speakers constantly speak the word of the universe? Or could they just take breaks from it? I feel like I have an intuitive sense of the whole of reality, whatever that cashes out to. In my most "in the moment" moments, it might just be my own experience body that I'm in with its present experiences. Other times that whole of reality image expands to include things I don't see at the time, perhaps even to the distant past and future, stars, quarks, all other minds. But I always relate in some way to the whole of reality, no matter how I construe it in the moment. I think this is a fundamental part of being a conscious being, that you see what you see, sensorily, noetically, and imaginally, and see that it is everything. The word of the whole of reality is being spoken to everyone, which connects to all that there is -- the word of the universe.

Another thought: imagine that there are two Speakers who speak the universe to people. How different could they be? They would experience each other, and thus have the exact same thoughts and feelings. If they did, how could they intend different things? What else is there to a person other than their experiences? Perhaps the decisions that those experiences make (their free wills). In other words, if there are two experience bodies that are contacting each other and thus have identical contents, they differ by having different wills, and these two wills negotiate depending on their power to determine the experience within the two experience bodies. So if there were two persons who had exactly the same experiences, who contacted each other, but had opposing wills, what would that look like? Maybe the two wills would be like adding two vectors, and reduce to one new vector, one new will. In that case, any two Speakers who speak the universe at the same time would automatically merge into one person with the same experiences and will. Maybe there could in some sense be internal conflict in them due to the two non-aligned wills that make up the one resultant will, but like any person with internal conflict, they could relate to the outside world as one person, and experience themselves as one person albeit with inner conflict. Or it may be the case that two free wills that merge leave no conscious trace of their conflict.