Part of The exploration series
EXPLORATION 06 · INFORMATION
What if consciousness can sometimes receive information that does not arrive through the ordinary sensory route? Intuition, dreams and unexpected insights can have ordinary explanations. My Big TOE adds a larger possibility.
Thought experiment, not an HSP premise. The question is not whether every unusual experience comes from a larger system, but how we can keep source, experience, interpretation and feedback separate.
Exploration 06 · information
Intuition, dreams and unexpected insights can have ordinary explanations. My Big TOE adds a larger possibility: what if consciousness can sometimes receive information that does not arrive through the ordinary sensory route?
That is a larger claim than HSP requires. Human System Protocol™ describes what happens in the human system when input is detected, assigned meaning, activates predictions and ultimately influences choice space and behavior.
This exploration asks a question that comes even earlier: where can the input come from?
Thought experiment, not an HSP premise. An intuitive feeling, vivid dream or OBE does not by itself prove that information came from a larger system.
Source and processing are different questions
HSP does not need to know the ultimate source of a signal in order to examine how the human system processes it.
An event may arrive through sight or hearing. Your body may signal a state. A memory may be activated. Your system may recognize a pattern before you consciously know which details you picked up. An image may appear spontaneously in a dream or meditation.
For HSP, what happens next becomes relevant:
MBT asks an earlier question: could some input also become available through consciousness itself, without the ordinary sensory route?
Ordinary explanations first
Not consciously knowing where an impression came from does not mean there was no ordinary route.
A human system processes far more than appears in conscious reasoning at any one moment. Previous experience, implicit learning, subtle social signals, body state, expectations, memory, associations and pattern recognition can combine into an output that subjectively feels like: “I just knew.”
Your system can detect regularities without you being able to consciously list the cues it used.
Tension, energy, pain, breathing and other internal signals can acquire meaning before you consciously analyze them.
An earlier experience can color an impression or prediction without the memory being consciously foregrounded.
Much intuition therefore needs no larger model.
Unexplained by conscious reasoning is not the same as unexplainable through the human system.
A larger possibility
The technical MBT terminology is explained once on the overview page. Here we keep it simpler.
My Big TOE models consciousness as more fundamental than physical reality. The player is consciousness; the human is the interface through which that player experiences this physical reality. Everything is part of a larger system in which data can be exchanged.
Within MBT, that creates an additional possibility:
Not all data that become available to consciousness would necessarily have entered through the avatar's physical senses.
Within this thought experiment, the information source is not just a vague “cloud.” It connects to the same information architecture used in Exploration 01:
Information about what actually happened within the shared virtual reality.
Alternative possibilities that once existed but did not become the actualized history.
Possible future states and their relative probabilities before an outcome becomes actualized.
Within MBT, Intent can then have two very different roles: querying information from the larger system and, as a separate hypothesis, influencing relative probabilities before a future outcome becomes actualized.
Campbell uses this larger model to account for intuition, remote viewing, information about the past or possible futures, telepathic communication and OBE-like experiences, among other phenomena.
In other traditions, a comparable idea is sometimes called Akasha or the Akashic Records: a larger information field that consciousness might under some conditions be able to access. MBT does not model this as Akasha, but in terms of a larger consciousness and information system, the past database, probable-future database and Reality Wide Web.
Within that model, remote viewing, precognition and some forms of intuition can be understood as querying information, while Intent influencing an uncertain future outcome would be a different interaction: influencing probabilities.
That is an MBT hypothesis. It is not an established HSP mechanism and not a generally established scientific information channel.
No automatic source label
This may be the most important reading rule in this article.
A sudden thought may be correct and still come from ordinary pattern recognition. A dream may strikingly resemble something that happens later and still involve chance, memory or reconstruction. A strong intuition may later prove wrong. An OBE may feel completely convincing without thereby proving that consciousness actually obtained information outside the body.
The quality or intensity of an experience is not the same as knowledge about its source.
So these are three different questions:
Jumping from question 1 to question 3 without seriously examining question 2 makes an experience larger than the evidence allows.
A useful MBT–HSP connection
MBT itself makes an interesting distinction: data can be received or transmitted; information arises when consciousness interprets those data and gives them meaning, value or relevance.
That is not an HSP definition, but its structure resembles an important HSP distinction:
Even if we assume for the thought experiment that data can become available from a larger system, a second problem remains: what does the human interface make of them?
A raw impression such as “tension, distance, something is off” can quickly become “she is lying to me.” The first may be a signal. The second is already meaning-making.
A potentially clean signal can still be interpreted through expectation, fear, belief and previous experience.
Do not start with the source
Intuition is a useful example because the same subjective experience can have several possible sources.
Your system recognizes a pattern, combines earlier experience with subtle cues or responds to body signals before you can consciously explain why.
According to MBT, some data might also become available to consciousness from the larger system.
Within the thought experiment, the two would not even have to be mutually exclusive. An intuitive impression might contain ordinary processing and, if MBT is correct, perhaps other data as well.
The problem is that the experience itself does not distinguish between them.
A sensible stance is therefore: treat intuition as input worth noticing, not as truth that must be obeyed.
Feedback can then determine how much trust you give particular intuitive signals over time.
Another mode of experience
Dreams can already contain a great deal without MBT: memory fragments, emotional processing, associations, expectations, worries, imagination and new combinations of these.
That does not make a dream “fake.” The experience is real as an experience, even when its content is entirely constructed by the person's own system.
MBT adds another possibility: some dream-like or non-physical experiences might also arise when consciousness processes other data or another experiential stream than ordinary body-centered reality.
But even then the source question remains open: dream content, another information stream and personal interpretation may feel subjectively very similar.
Lucid dreaming at least shows that awareness and metacognition can become partly available during dreams. That does not automatically support the MBT explanation, but it does make dreaming an interesting environment for training and observation.
Start with what we can reasonably say
Meditation can train attention. Research on mindfulness and attention training finds small-to-moderate average effects on several cognitive functions, including aspects of attention; results vary by method, population and study.
That is already relevant in itself.
If less attention is automatically consumed by distraction, internal commentary and reactivity, subtler input may become easier to notice — even when that input comes entirely from ordinary body, memory or pattern-processing routes.
MBT adds the hypothesis that quieter, more stable attention might also make data from the larger system easier to access.
That latter claim does not follow from meditation research. “Meditation improves attention” and “meditation opens access to non-sensory information” are two different claims.
Information without a known sensory route?
With remote viewing, the question becomes more specific: can a person describe information about a hidden or distant target without having ordinary sensory information about that target?
Within MBT, this fits directly into the larger information model. The player could use Intent to request or receive relevant data without the avatar being physically present at the target location.
That makes remote viewing more investigable than a vague feeling because, in principle, there can be a target and independent feedback.
But its scientific status remains contested. There are studies and literatures reporting positive results, but also null findings, methodological criticism and replication problems. A recent critical review of neuroimaging research on ESP concluded that findings are heterogeneous, seldom replicated and do not yet support definitive conclusions.
So: remote viewing is a testable information claim, but not an established mechanism that proves MBT.
The experience is real; the explanation remains open
An out-of-body experience can feel subjectively very convincing: the viewpoint seems to be located outside the physical body.
In ordinary language the experience sounds as though “I left my body.” Within MBT, a more precise interpretation is possible: according to the model, the player was never literally inside the avatar. Body-centered experience is one information stream; during an OBE, another experiential stream might become dominant.
Within MBT, OBE therefore becomes more like a change of information/viewpoint than literal spatial travel with a second body.
Scientific research recognizes OBE as a genuinely reported experiential phenomenon. A recent scoping review found spontaneous and self-induced OBEs as well as links with sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming. That research does not thereby establish whether an OBE contains genuinely non-local information.
Here too, the form of the experience and the source of the information are two different questions.
Psi is not one mechanism in this model
If you use MBT as a thought experiment, intuition, remote viewing, precognition, telepathy and OBE do not each require a completely separate theory. They can be seen as different forms of interaction with a larger information system.
Larger information system → consciousness. Can consciousness obtain data that were not available through the ordinary sensory route? Remote viewing and information about the past or possible futures fit here.
Consciousness ↔ consciousness. Can data be exchanged directly with other consciousness? Telepathy or experienced guidance would fit here within the MBT model.
Different information source → experience. Can another experiential stream become dominant? Dreams, lucid dreaming and OBE fit within this question.
Intent → probability distribution. Can Intent do more than receive information and slightly shift the relative probability of a still-uncertain future outcome? That is the separate psi hypothesis from Exploration 01.
Synchronicity fits less neatly into one box. A striking coincidence may involve attention, ordinary causality, chance, meaning-making or — within MBT — an information or probability effect.
In this taxonomy, “psi” is therefore an umbrella for different claims: obtaining information, exchanging information, receiving another data stream or influencing probabilities. The taxonomy does not prove that the underlying MBT architecture actually exists.
No fast metaphysical conclusion
An unusual experience can remain unusual without its explanation becoming larger than the available information.
What does the human system do with the input?
Whether a signal became available through perception, memory, pattern recognition, a dream or — hypothetically — the larger system, HSP can ask the same practical questions afterwards.
For example:
“Something is off.”
“I am in danger.” / “He is lying.” / “This is a sign that I must do X.”
The second does not automatically follow from the first.
HSP does not determine where information came from. It helps examine what the human system does with it.
That makes HSP useful precisely when the source remains uncertain.
Curiosity without obedience
You do not need to rationalize away an intuitive or unusual experience. You also do not need to believe it immediately.
A useful middle position is:
Input may open a question. It does not have to become a command.
How such information can be tested as honestly as possible is the subject of the next exploration.
One additional question, not a new HSP mechanism
HSP describes how the human system processes input. MBT adds the hypothesis that consciousness may be able to receive more data than are available through the ordinary sensory route.
Intuition could then be fast local processing, additional information or a mixture. Meditation can affect attention and noise without thereby proving a non-sensory channel. Remote viewing makes the information claim more testable. OBE can be understood within MBT as another experiential stream, while the experience itself does not establish the source.
Information appearing in your experience does not tell you where it came from. But once it appears, you can carefully examine what you do with it.
MBT sources and ordinary science kept separate
For the MBT model:
For the ordinary research boundary:
The scientific sources support intuition/implicit processing, meditation effects on attention, lucid dreaming and OBE experiences as legitimate areas of research. They do not establish the MBT explanation — information from a larger consciousness system — as the mechanism behind them.
Continue the thought experiment
Once you ask whether information can become available beyond the ordinary sensory route, method becomes more important than belief.
How do you investigate such information without fooling yourself? →
Thought experiment: exploratory, not an HSP premise.