There's nothing personal about it - what I describe is a non-personal
approach to reality. I hope you don't take my comments personally
either. They are not meant that way - none of it is personal! I seek
to clarify understanding rather than just defend beliefs, that is how
I operate and I hope others do so too.

But on a personal note: thanks for providing this feedback :)
You bring up some important issues for people who are first
approaching these ideas. I think many people would encounter these
problems when reading the discussion for the first time so I address
them in detail below. Thanks!

BTW how much did you read? Because the issues you raise are actually
addressed in the discussion if you persevere. You give some insightful
comments but you mainly seem to interpret things from the old-
paradigm, which is unavoidable to begin with, but it leads to great
confusion. People are generally used to simple extensions of the old-
paradigm and a paradigm shift is a difficult process to comprehend and
navigate.

I think want you are wanting is neat pre-definitions but such a thing
is impossible in this context because it is a paradigm shift and not a
simple extension of the old-paradigm. Any pre-definitions would have
to be in terms of the old-paradigm but the old-paradigm is not
meaningful in this context. The whole discussion is the gradual
creation of a context of understanding in which things are redefined.
Only then can neat definitions be given in terms of the new-paradigm.

One has to approach this much like mathematics, which many people have
trouble with. When they encounter the variable 'x' in an equation they
want a neat pre-definition of what 'x' actually means. But in most
mathematical cases the meaning of a variable has no simple definition
but rather it arises as a function of how that variable participates
in the holistic context. In this way if you read the discussion and
discern the meanings of things from how they relate within the
discussion you will come to understand the subtle meanings. However if
you apply pre-conceived ideas you will become very confused. It would
be like trying to understand y=x^2 when you think that 'x' means "x
marks the spot" or "generation x" - such interpretations would lead to
endless confusion.

So regarding "further investigation" I think you will find that if you
are careful about pre-conceived ideas and you read the discussion
carefully you will see that there is exhaustive investigation and re-
definition of things.

Streamlining the presentation is very important - I'm a thinker not a
writer so any help or advice is much appreciated. So please give me as
much advice as you have time for...

But what many people call delicacy is simply avoiding certain issues -
and any attempt to confront those issues will be perceived as in-
delicate. This cannot be helped if those issues need to be confronted.
Most people will not accept or like what is said, but some will gain
something from it. Furthermore I am not delicate when dealing with
people who have very overdeveloped egos, simply because they are not
ready for this discussion and it is safest for them if they are turned
away early before they encounter ideas that they are unable to
comprehend and would only confuse and agitate them.

As for cutting things out - I would love to simplify this - I could
express it all in a single sentence IF there was a common
understanding. But given that people are coming from the old-paradigm,
then everything needs to be clarified and re-contextualised within the
new-paradigm. So it is a complicated process whilst the underlying
idea is very simple. Overtime as people show understanding I could
present simplified versions but only when there is some degree of
common understanding.

Please explain how this weakens things? One of the main confusions
that this discussion seeks to clarify is the relationship between
subjective and objective - there are fundamental low-level confusions
regarding these that most people simply accept as reality - this
creates a false foundation upon which all of their later knowledge
rests. Most people assume that we have direct sensory access to
objective reality but this is TOTALLY FALSE. Even people who
intellectually state that they know we don't, still much of their
thinking is based on ideas and language usages that enshrine the
assumption that we do. All the talk of "the physical universe" as if
it is a commonly known and commonly experienced objective reality is
totally false. (There's a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy later that also addresses this issue)

All we have are subjective experiences and these experiences generate
ideas based upon our pre-conceived ideas and we communicate our
subjective experiences and come to believe in the idea of an objective
reality that is essentially the same as our subjective experience.
People do not enquire into the nature of subjective experience. If
they did they would realise that shared subjective experience differs
both subtly and radically from the actual objective reality, which we
cannot ever 'see' directly but only perceive its effects in the world
- such as consciousness, present moment existence, coherence on both
micro and cosmic scales, causality, intuition, psy-phenomena, quantum
entanglement, quantum non-locality, the quantisation of all aspects of
reality, relativistic constraints and so on.

I accept that is how it seems to you (it is after all a paradigm
shift) but please explain or give some examples from the discussion -
otherwise I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this.

If there is anything that you consider to be vague, nonfactual,
incomplete or inaccurate then PLEASE tell me and I will look into
them.

I deliberately create a 'word salad' because there is NO other way. If
I could state things directly I would, but only old-paradigm ideas can
be expressed directly in old-paradigm terms. If I was to speak openly
and directly to begin with I can guarantee that you would totally
misunderstand what it was I was trying to say. This happens all the
time when people with different paradigms try and communicate; it
leads mainly to confusion and agitation. So here I use a word salad,
which most people will turn away from out of apathy and the underlying
assumption that I am probably just a ranting crackpot. Such things are
unavoidable, but some people will hopefully persevere and reap the
benefits.

How can one hope to address them without metaphysics????????????
Is there any other way?

Are we talking about the same thing when we say 'metaphysics'?

Quoted from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics)
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the
nature of reality, being, and the world.

Metaphysics addresses questions such as:

What is the nature of reality?
What is humankind's place in the universe?
Are colors objective or subjective?
Does the world exist outside the mind?
What is the nature of objects, events, places?

A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into
what types of things there are in the world and what relations these
things bear to one another. The metaphysician also attempts to clarify
the notions by which people understand the world, including existence,
objecthood, property, space, time, causality, and possibility.

---- end of quote ----

Perhaps you are thinking of the more modern usage of the word:

Quoted from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics)
More recently, the term "metaphysics" has also been used more loosely
to refer to "subjects that are beyond the physical world". A
"metaphysical bookstore", for instance, is not one that sells books on
ontology, but rather one that sells books on spirits, faith healing,
crystal power, occultism, and other such topics.
---- end of quote ----

I expressly DO NOT mean this meaning of 'metaphysics'!!!!!!!!!!!

It seems to me that you assume that there are different realities that
are totally separate? The separation exists only in our knowledge of
reality. There are countless disciplines of knowledge that seek to
understand reality and every one of them rests upon a metaphysical
foundation and an ontology - even the ones that claim they don't -
they just don't realise that they do - they enshrine certain
metaphysical beliefs and do not question them. Naive realism is a
classic example of this - it makes extreme ontological and
metaphysical statements but doesn't consider them to be a position
that can be questioned, instead naïve realists jthink that it is just-
the-way-things-are. Another important example is empirical science -
by its reliance on perception as its ontological foundation it
excludes all aspects of reality that are not directly perceptible.
This makes an extreme ontological position but empirical science does
not question this position - it just keeps to a positivist belief
system.

By the very fact that we have such fragmented and antagonistic
disciplines, this indicates that there are serious flaws in the
metaphysical foundations of our collective knowledge. There is only
one reality and that is the actual foundation for all our knowledge,
but we fragment that into artificial categories based upon assumptions
and then build separate disciplines upon the fragmented foundation.

In what manner do you think it doesn't work? I guess you are talking
about the modern (popular) usage of 'metaphysics' but that is not what
I am talking about. Metaphysics is in fact the foundation of ontology
and seeks to explain the arising of all phenomena. One cannot
comprehend ontology or phenomenology except within some metaphysical
context - so it is good to question and understand one's metaphysics
rather than just conducting one's enquiry atop of an unquestioned set
of beliefs and assumptions.

One could assume 'perception' as a given and then build an empiricist
theory atop of this but it ultimately rests upon assumptions about the
nature of perception. Because of these assumptions many paradoxes
arise and much of reality is incomprehensible. To overcome the
confusions we need to question the nature of perception and then
renovate our metaphysical foundation and propagate these changes
throughout the entire structure of our knowledge otherwise we are only
dealing with a belief system and not a skeptical science. But the
world is so entranced by the empiricist belief system and people have
an irrational aversion towards questioning these beliefs. Because of
this a paradigm shift such as this one will be VERY difficult for many
people.

This issue is addressed at length in the essay. I discuss exactly how
the experience and the idea of 'physicality' arises and how it relates
to information and illusion. Only if you interpret the words
'illusion' and 'physical' in the old-paradigm is there any word
conflict. The paradox arises because of fundamental confusions that
distort the metaphysical context of common language and common sense.
The language enshrines the paradox because it relies upon the
confusion. But once the confusion is clarified one can see how
'illusion' and 'physical' fit seamlessly together. The idea of
'physicality' arises due to the voracity of certain systemic
perceptual illusions that are reinforced by our empiricist bias toward
perceptual phenomena. By assuming that the perceptions represent the
reality we end up with many confusions and paradoxes within our
language and common sense. But once one separates out the confusions
there are no paradoxes at all. There are just many subtleties that
arise due to the nature of information, communication, perception and
so on.

Please tell me which metaphors aren't metaphors? I'm not sure what you
mean by this. Do you mean that they could be more accurately described
as analogies? Or do you mean something else?

And as for metaphors - when the language is built upon a distorted
metaphysics and it enshrines many confusions then I simply CANNOT
state things directly. The language inherently lacks the capacity to
express them and any expressions tend to reinforce the enshrined
confusions. So it is very difficult to express these ideas at all - it
is like trying to talk about 'peace' and 'freedom' in an Orwellian
'newspeak' language. Hence I must work around ideas but cannot
directly approach them and metaphors are essential for this. They help
present the basic structure of an argument or phenomenon by drawing
parallels with other similar structures, but one must look past the
surface ideas and discern the underlying structure otherwise one is
simply looking at the finger when the finger is actually pointing at
the moon. I discuss metaphors at length later in the essay and explain
how they are useful and how to use them.

That may be good advice; it is a relevant field, but it is such a vast
field that is very unfamiliar to me. Can you point me in some
direction? Perhaps the name of a person who's work touches on this?
But currently in my mind it seems that using phrases like 'the space
of the moving image' would just be using euphemisms. They might be
less confronting but also less accurate. Because what is 'space',
'movement' and 'image'? To whom does the image appear? By what process
is the image formed? What exactly is the image of? What relationship
do we propose between the image and reality? All these issues arise
within the virtual space and all are ultimately illusion. But you
should ask yourself, what does 'illusion' mean in the new-paradigm -
what am I actually saying by using that word?

I would recommend this article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy:
Epistemological Problems of Perception
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/

Below is a quote from it:

The historically most central epistemological issue concerning
perception, to which this article will be almost entirely devoted, is
whether and how beliefs about physical objects and about the physical
world generally can be justified or warranted on the basis of sensory
or perceptual experience -- where it is internalist justification,
roughly having a reason to think that the belief in question is true,
that is mainly in question (see the entry justification, epistemic:
internalist vs. externalist conceptions of). This issue, commonly
referred to as "the problem of the external world," divides into two
closely related sub-issues, which correspond to the first two main
sections below. The first of these issues has to do with the nature of
sensory experience and its relation to the physical world; it is
typically (though as we shall see not altogether perspicuously)
formulated as the question of what are the immediate objects of
awareness in sensory experience or, in a variant but essentially
equivalent terminology, of what is given in such experience. Perhaps
the most historically standard, though not currently the most popular
answer to this question has been that it is sense-data (private, non-
physical entities actually having the experienced sensory qualities)
that are the immediate objects of awareness or that are given. The
second issue has to do with the way in which beliefs about the
physical world are justified on the basis of such sensory experience.
If it is concluded that physical objects are not themselves given, the
two main answers to this question are representationalism (the view
that the immediate objects of experience represent or depict physical
objects in a way that allows one to infer justifiably from such
experience to the existence of the corresponding "external" objects)
and phenomenalism (the view that physical objects are reducible to or
definable in terms of the occurrence and obtainability of such
experience). A third alternative view that has received attention in
recent discussion is direct realism: the view that physical objects
are after all directly or immediately perceived in a way that
allegedly avoids the need for any sort of justificatory inference from
sensory experience to physical reality...
....

The Argument from Illusion
(Or, perhaps better, the argument from illusion/perceptual relativity/
hallucination.) This very widely advocated argument (first offered
explicitly in Berkeley [1713]) appeals to the immense variety of cases
in which: (i) what is immediately perceived or given has different
qualities from different perspectives or under different perceptual
conditions, even though the relevant physical object does not change
(perceptual relativity); or (ii) in which qualities are immediately
experienced that the relevant object clearly does not possess
(illusion); or (iii) in which qualities are experienced in a situation
in which there is no physical object of the relevant sort present at
all (hallucination). Some fairly standard examples: viewing a circular
coin from different angles, resulting (allegedly) in the experience of
a variety of elliptical shapes; viewing a white or colored object
under different kinds of lighting; feeling the temperature of a luke-
warm bucket of water with a hand that has previously become inured to
water of substantially higher or lower temperatures; viewing a
straight stick that is immersed in water and so looks bent;
hallucinating a non-existent object such as pink rat or a dagger.

The basic claim is that in cases of illusion or hallucination, the
object that is immediately experienced or given has qualities that no
public physical object in that situation has and so must be distinct
from any such object. And in cases of perceptual relativity, since
objects with different qualities are experienced from each of the
different perspectives or under each of the relevant conditions, at
most one of these various immediately experienced or given objects
could be the physical object itself; it is then further argued that
since there is no apparent experiential basis for regarding one out of
any such set of related perceptual experiences as the one in which the
relevant physical object is immediately experienced, the most
reasonable conclusion is that the immediately experienced or given
object is always distinct from the physical object (or, significantly
more weakly, that there is no way to identify which, if any, of the
immediately experienced objects is the physical object itself, so that
the evidential force of the experience is in this respect the same in
all cases, and it is epistemologically as though physical objects were
never given, whether or not that is in fact the case).
---- end of quote ----

So when I say 'illusion' I mean it in the sense that colour is an
illusion. It is a perceptual phenomenon that leads us to believe that
objects possess colour when in fact they don't. There are frequencies
of light but this light has no colour. Only when a very narrow range
of frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum stimulate our senses
and are interpreted by consciousness does colour arise. So one could
say that colour exists only in 'the space of the moving image' but it
is more accurate to say that it is an illusion. It is a phenomenon
that arises in consciousness but which has no exact correlate in
objective reality. In this same way the experience of objects in space
and time that arises in a virtual reality is an illusion because there
are no objects that ontologically exist and ontologically possess the
perceived attributes - they only arise when perceived from a
particular perspective (within the simulation). In this respect they
are illusion, but they are not meaningless fantasy, they are very
loosely based on some aspect of reality so I call them virtual.

Thank you so much for this feedback. I think many people would
encounter these problems when reading the discussion for the first
time. I hope I have help clarify things for you. If you are up to it I
would recommend keeping these issues in mind and re-reading things,
you may see it in a different light... If you persevere and read further
you will see that things are re-defined and investigated and that very
compelling and startling realisations come out of this re-imagining of
the holistic context. The world is not what it seems and neither are
we.

Best wishes :)
John