What is Real?

am I even real?
Met the wonderful Lucy Hawking at TEDxSalford by chance (Science and Storytelling, The Consciousness of Reality). This led to an amazing opportunity allowing me to contribute a science essay to her newest children's book:

George and the Blue Moon
Lucy and Stephen Hawking
Penguin, 2016

Staying true to my little hobby, it was called:

What is Reality?

And it started like this:

Every day you wake up. Returning from the wonderful adventures you may have been having in your dreams, you become you again. The memories of who you are and what you have been up to in your life come back. And you also realize that there is a world that lies outside of yourself, simply called reality. Then you get up.

This all seems very ordinary and not very exciting. However, all of this is linked to the hardest question that humans have ever asked themselves: What exactly is reality? What is this thing, made up of space, time and objects, we live in?

And ended like this:

But for the moment we can comfort ourselves with two answers to the question, ‘What is reality?’

One is that reality is a much bigger, richer and more complex thing than we ever dared to dream.

Or a short answer could be, ‘I create my reality!’

The Consciousness of Reality / The Illusion of Knowledge

back in the game;)
The following is another iteration of my little hobby (see the "Evolution Section" at the end):




This talk is basically based on Parts II and III of the book I'm currently writing, with the working title:

The Illusion of Knowledge:

Why Uncertainty is Woven into Any Description of Reality—And Why It Does Not Matter

Part I focusses on formal thought systems, mathematics, and physics---in great detail, as witnessed by the over 140 equations introduced to the reader. In essence, Part I is a testimony to the human mind's unprecedented understanding of the workings of the reality it finds itself embedded in. Then, in Part II, notions of certainty are deconstructed, with respect to knowledge, truth, and reality. The subjective, context-dependent, and ambiguous nature of every experience and belief is emphasized.

So where does this leave us? Do we really live in a cynical universe, which reveals itself to the human mind just as far as it awakens the false hope in its comprehensibility and leaves us forever in a state of epistemological nihilism? I sincerely believe otherwise: enter Part III. With brave, radical, out-of-the-box thinking, I believe we can advance our knowledge of the most fundamental questions relating to our existence and existence itself. Some such ideas are: the information-theoretic and information-processing foundation of reality (universe as computer, reality as a simulation) next to the primacy and/or universality of consciousness (consciousness creates reality).

The TOK so far:

The book will be an open access publication with Springer. Yes, at one point I will try and crowd-fund the costs;)



The slides are found here and the transcript of the talk reads:

What is real? Well, all of this obviously. But what exactly is it? OK, so you all woke up this morning.

A sense of self kicked in. [break] Memories returned. [break] And you became aware of an external world. So, you are an entity that exist in a physical reality.

But this begs three questions. [break] What can we know about these things? [break] What is the true nature of reality? [break] And what is an “I” anyway? OK, so let’s start with the question of knowledge.

“The more you know, the less you understand.” [break] “I know that I know nothing.” To be fair, these quotes are quite old. Surely today people are less uncertain. Well…

“Those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt.” This is from the great philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. [break] “While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.” Karl Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of science. And in the same vein: [break] “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” Daniel Kahneman is the father of behavioral economics and a Nobel laureate. OK, so let’s agree that from a philosophical point of view the notion of certainty is a bit tricky. But we have science, which is a knowledge-­‐generation machine. Or not?

Ever since the Pythagoreans, people have realized that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Or in the words of the great mathematician David Hilbert: [break] “Mathematics is the foundation of all exact knowledge of natural phenomena.” But this raises a very profound question.

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” [break] So, basically, “Two miracles confront us here: the existence of laws of nature and the human mind's capacity to divine them.” You all know Stephen Hawking and Eugene Wigner received the Nobel prize in physics in the 60s. Physicists have o]en been puzzled about the general nature of science, because

“Fundamentally, we do not know why our theories work so well.” [break] And “The deeper an explanation is, the more new problems it creates.” David Deutsch is one of the pioneers of quantum computing. But the bewilderment does not stop here.

“There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition can reach them.” [break] “Perhaps it is culture rather than nature that dictates the content of scientific theories.” Now intuition and culture don’t usually spring to mind when thinking about science. And are also not really ideas one would associates with these two great physicists.

So, yes, science works and gives us the amazing gift of technology. But what science exactly is and why it works no one really knows. And surprisingly, Kurt Gödel and Gregory Chaitin showed us that at the heart of mathematics lurks incompleteness and randomness. OK, to summarize: What we have been talking about is called epistemology. It is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge. But just because our knowledge of reality turns out to be a bit elusive doesn’t mean that reality itself should be suspect. Now ontology is the word philosophers use when dealing with the nature of reality. OK, so, let’s move on to this question, what about the nature of reality? Well…

“Modern physics has conquered domains that display an ontology that cannot be coherently captured or understood by human reasoning.” Ernst von Glasersfeld was a distinguished philosopher who coined the term “radical constructivism”. This is the idea, that all knowledge is always subjective. But what exactly is he talking about here?

Let’s zoom into the fabric of reality. In other words, let’s enter the quantum world. [break] These are symbols from the book of nature. This equation describes the birth of quantum physics. Something no one saw coming. Indeed, Max Planck introduced it in an act of despair. [break] And it turns out that this new realm of reality is a truly bizarre place. Particles behave as waves and vice versa, depending on how you look at them. [break] There is an intrinsic limit to the amount of information you can have. [break] And everything is instantaneously connected to everything else. This is called entanglement and you can use it to encrypt information. But things get worse. Some quantum experiments are truly mindboggling: they appear to alter the past or break causality.

OK, let’s look at the universe. What is out there? [break] Well it turns out that of all the stuff there is, only 5% is ordinary matter. 26% is called dark matter, and no one really knows what it is made of. And 69% is dark energy, some mysterious force in the vacuum making our universe expanded faster and faster the bigger it gets. This was discovered in 1998 and was awarded with a Nobel prize.

And even things as innocuous as time, can be very problematic on closer inspection. So much so, that some physicists suspect it doesn’t really exist. [break] “The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains.” [break] And what about emergence and self-­‐organization. This is a map of the internet. It is as though there is a fundamental force in the universe driving it to ever higher levels of complexity and structure. Just look at ants: where does this collective intelligence come from that allows them to become such an amazingly clever super-­‐organism. And why can’t we humans achieve this?

OK , so reality is indeed a very weird place. But perhaps we can find a sanctuary of clarity and regularity within ourselves.

Let’s look at our brains and how we perceive the world. [break] “Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.” [break] “You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.” [break] “What we call normal perception does not really differ from hallucinations, except that the latter is not anchored by external input.” Wow. But at least I am in control of my mind. Or not?

“The conscious mind is not at the center of action, but on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.” [break] “The exact levels of dozens of neurotransmitters are critical for who you believe yourself to be.” [break] “Beliefs about logic, economics, ethics, emotions, beauty, social interaction, love, are all products of the biologically evolved ‘hardwiring’ in the brain.”
These are the words of David Eagleman. He is a neuroscientists and writer. And yes, things get worse.

These two books are an embarrassment to any human being who believes in rationality. Countless experiments show how easily we can be manipulated. Without ever suspecting a thing. And don’t fool yourself. We all fail equally at this.

Other experiments have shown that the simple expectation of an experience changes how you perceive it. For instance, tasting wine you thought was expensive results in neural activity in your pleasure center. This does not happen for the same wine if you are told it is cheap. The same is true for how you feel pain. And then there are the placebo and nocebo effects, where your beliefs shape your reality. Like overdosing on sugar pills and nearly dying because you thought they were antidepressants. Then there is this phenomenon called false awakening, where you dream that you wake up. To experience this can be quite unsettling. [break] “To wake up twice in a row is something that can shatter many of the intuitions you have about consciousness: [break] that the vividness, the coherence, and the crispness of a conscious experience are evidence that you are really in touch with reality.” Thomas Metzinger is a philosopher of the mind interested in neuroscience. He asks: “Well how do you know that you actually woke up this morning?”

And then things can go terribly wrong in the mind. This book on psychopathology is a frightening 800 pages thick.

Jill Bolte Taylor studies brain anatomy. When she had a golf-­‐ball sized blood-­‐clot in her le] hemisphere due to a stroke, this is what she experienced. [break] My consciousness shifted away from my normal perception of reality, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience. [break] I can no longer define the boundaries of my body -­‐ I can't define where I begin and where I end. [break] I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there. Now these aren't really worlds I would expect from someone who’s left brain is being damaged, but rather from someone like…

…this. This is Christian Rätsch. He is an anthropologist specialized in ethnopharmacology. His book, called “The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants” is nearly 1’000 pages thick. And remember what Eagleman said about hallucinations: they are just as real. Perhaps this realization prompted the next quote. There are these extraordinary other types of universe. Aldous Huxley was talking about his experiences with LSD.

So what does this all mean? Where does it leave us? Well, if we are really honest, the answer is [break] We don’t know. Basically we are back to René Descartes. “I think therefore I exists”. So, the only thing I cannot deny, is that I am having a subjective experience now. That’s all. But perhaps we can do better. Perhaps if we are willing to abandon some of our cherished beliefs about reality we can start to understand more. And there is a glimmer on the horizon.

Information is physical. [break] All things physical are information-­‐theoretic. John Wheeler helped develop general relativity giving us the word black hole. And Rolf Landauer made important contributions to information processing in the 60s.

“The universe is made not of chunks of stuff, but chunks of information — ones and zeros.” [break] “Quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality.” Seth Lloyd and Anton Zeilinger are currently pioneering the field of quantum information. They are helping us build quantum computers.

A second theme is that we are in fact involved in creating reality. This is an idea going back to Immanuel Kant and is also found in Buddhism. [break] “This is a participatory universe.” [break] “Reality is something that comes into being through the very act of human cognition.” [break] “Consciousness is all that exists. Space-­‐time and matter never were fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been among the humbler contents of consciousness.” Richard Tarnas is a historian and author of the book “The Passion of the Western Mind”. An epic journey looking at All the ideas that have shaped our modern world view. And Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist. So, continuing with this idea:

“Our belief that there is a single universe shared by multiple observers is wrong. Instead, each observer has their own universe.” [break] “This cosmic solipsism turns on all of our common sense notions about the world; then again fundamental physics has a long history of disregarding our common sense notions.” Amanda Gefter is a science journalist and author. And solipsism is the view that only one’s own mind exists. Her idea can perhaps also be summarized as follows:

Objectivity is the illusion that observations are made without an observer.” Heinz von Foerster was a physicists and philosopher and one of the pioneers of cybernetics.

But finally, a word of caution. Although these last quotes come from very sober and keen thinkers, they still could be wrong. In fact, everything I have been saying could be wrong. But if we all really are in charge of our own universe, made of pure information, it is essential for us to look for wisdom and truth within ourselves. Perhaps looking for reality outside of the mind is the wrong way to go. Thank you.


Index under construction (mostly just people for now):

Evolution:

• I don't really recall when this all started. Ever since I was 15 I wanted to study physics. After graduating in 1999, I had more questions than answers relating to reality and consciousness.
• In 2001: "On the Structure of the Vacuum and the Dynamics of Scalar Fields" (here) looking at some of the limits of modern physics.
• My first job (which would last for 12 years, where I was developing trading model algorithms for the FX market at Olsen Ltd) was an intuitive transition from fundamental physics to complex systems. "A New Kind of Science" by S. Wolfram.
• In 2005 I was looking for a new challenge in addition to my work and googled  the Chair of Systems Design by chance.
• Applied for a PhD there (50% next to my finance job) and had to give a talk that summer where I started to think about the analytical/algorithmic and fundamental/complex paradigms;  "Alternate Realities: Mathematical Models of Nature and Man" by J. Casti: science as the art of encoding reality domains into abstract representations.
• In the summer of 2006 I read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by R. Pirsig in a hammock on one of the Andaman islands after visiting Delhi and Varanasi for our charity noon.ch.
• I consolidated a lot of stuff between 2006 and 2009. These blog posts at Olsen Ltd and stuff on my old webpage: 1, 2, 3, 4.
• It all got more serious when I took a course on the philosophy of science during my PhD in 2008: G. Brun and D. Kuenzle, ETH Zurich.
• All of this now fuelled the contents of Appendix A of my dissertation (2010, PDF) which got updated and published in Springer's Theses series (2013): Laws of nature; paradigms of fundamental processes and complex systems; epistemological and ontological challenges; postmodernism, constructivism, and relativism.
• Which then prompted these blog posts about certainty, reality, and perception: 1, 2, 3,  (2011 - 2012).
• Sometime: "Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos" S. Lloyd.
• 2011: "The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View" R. Tarnas, "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" D. Eagleman.
• Ideas which also flowed into this Ignite talk in 2011 (or as blog post), which represents a rough sketch of the current talk. 
• 2012: "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self" T. Metzinger.
• Not sure when the ideas of  consciousness entered the picture, but happy to see such crazy ideas also being espoused by scientists and philosophers today.
• In 2013 I started negotiating with Springer and started writing... 
• 2016: Contributed a chapter called "What is Reality?" to Lucy and Stephen Hawking's children's book "George and the Blue Moon". See more.

inspirational people...

quote of the day...
Elyn Saks is Associate Dean and a professor of Law, Psychology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and an expert in mental health law [Wikipedia].

She also suffers from schizophrenia. The following quote is taken from her recent, moving TED talk, embedded below.

Let's start with the definition of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a brain disease. It's defining feature is psychosis, or being out of touch with reality. Delusions and hallucinations are hallmarks of the illness.

Delusions are fixed and false beliefs that aren't responsive to evidence and hallucinations are false sensory experiences.

This makes me wonder. How many of my own beliefs are in fact slightly delusional? How can I know my sensory experiences are faithful representations of the world? In other words, if we could measure the state of people's minds in increments, wouldn't in fact very many people qualify by this definition to some extent?

And what exactly is this reality that people experiencing psychotic episodes are said to be out of touch of? Respectively, what reality are they experiencing?

Especially contemplating the following:
fabricating reality, the brain: alien processes running under the hood (part i), the brain: our two cognitive minds (part ii).

the brain: our two cognitive minds (part ii)

mind shattering...

When you hear a person proclaim the following, what do you think:

And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person [...] having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.

I can no longer define the boundaries of my body - I can't define where I begin and where I end.

And in that moment my brain chatter [...] went totally silent [...]. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. [...] I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to loose 37 years of emotional baggage. I felt euphoria.

A drug induced psychedelic experience? A religious revelation? A state of mind achieved by years of mediation practice? A manifestation of a manic or psychotic episode? No. This is what happens when a golf-ball sized blood-clot is messing with your brain circuitry...

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist. The above quotes are her recollection of the reality she experienced while suffering a stroke:

A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. In the course of four hours I watched my brain completely deteriorate.

And then I realize, oh my gosh, I'm having a stroke. And then the next thing my brain says to me is: 'Wow, this is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?'

The stroke nearly killed her, and it took eight years to recover from:

I curled up into a little fetal-ball, and, just like a balloon with the last bit of air just out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just felt my spirit surrender.

Jill wrote a book about her life-changing experience: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. In 2008, she gave a very personal and moving account of the stroke during a talk at the TED conference (see embedded video below).

She describes the brain as follows: The two hemispheres of the brain are two independent cognitive minds. The right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while the left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. As a result, the right brain focuses on the present moment, the here and now. It thinks in pictures and constructs an enormous collage of this eternal moment; how it looks, smells, tastes, feels and sounds like. We are all connected through the consciousness of the right hemisphere.

The left brain is into linear thinking, methodical, focused on the past and future. It takes the collage of the present moment, picks out details, which it categorizes and organizes, and associates them with everything learned in the past to project all possibilities into the future. It thinks in language, creating the ongoing brain chatter. It is responsible for creating the sense of self, the "I am", which lets us become separate.

The experience of this day in 1996 transformed Jill, giving her rational outlook on life a distinct spiritual spin, a generic spirituality which could be argued to be inherent in our brain circuitry:

But then i realized: but I'm still alive. I'm still alive and I have found nirvana. Then everyone who is alive can find nirvana. And then I pictured a world with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew they could come to this space at any time. And that they purposely can choose to step to the right of their left hemisphere and find this peace.

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemisphere, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be.

What a stroke of insight this could be.

See part i: the brain: alien processes running under the hood.

the brain: alien processes running under the hood (part i)

mind-blowing

"In the same way that the cosmos is larger than we ever imagined, we ourselves are something greater than we had intuited by introspection."

In his recent book Incognito - The secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman looks under the hood of the brain and exposes its alien circuitry. The revealed insights have a distinct constructivist and postmodern taste (more on these issues from the philosophy of science on my science blog here), perhaps surprising coming from a scientist describing experiments.


THE BIG PICTURE:

The brain is "the most complex material we've discovered in the universe."

It is "an alien kind of computational material."

"The machinery is utterly alien to us, and yet, somehow, it is us." "Almost the entirety of your inner universe is foreign to you."

"Humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent."

"When the brain finds a task it needs to solve, it rewires its own circuitry until it can accomplish the task with maximum efficiency."


THE CONSCIOUS ME:

"Our brain runs mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs that runs below it."

"The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity."

"The unexpected part of the news is that the conscious you is the smallest bit-player in the brain."

"Almost all of our actions are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems."

"We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood."

"Fabrication of stories is one of the key businesses in which our brain engages."

"Consciousness seems to be about setting goals for what should be burned into the circuitry, and it does little beyond that."


ON PERCEPTION:

"You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you."

"We do not see with our eyes but rather with our brains."

"Waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you."

"What we call normal perception does not really differ from hallucinations, except that the latter are not anchored by external input."

"You're perceptual world always lags behind the real world."

"What you are able to experience is completely limited by your biology."

"Our brains sample just a small bit of the surrounding physical world."

This is all why we would never "stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense."

"Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it."

"There are thoughts you cannot think."

"Consider that you probably would not want to discover the alien subroutines that lurk under your own frontal cortex."

"The exact levels of dozens of neurotransmitters are critical for who you believe yourself to be."


BELIEFS:

"Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true."

"Deeply held beliefs about logic, economics, ethics, emotions, beauty, social interaction, love, and the rest of your vast mental landscape" are all products of the biologically evolved "hardwiring" in the brain.

"Each individual believes his way is reality."

"Minds seek patterns." "They are driven to 'patternicity' - the attempt to find structure in meaningless data."



FREE WILL:

"The drives you take for granted depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery. Although acting on such drives is popularly thought to be a free choice, the most cursory examination of the evidence demonstrates the limits of that assumption."

"The behavior of the patient cannot be be separated from his biology."

"Our choices are inseparably married to the tiniest details of our machinery."

"So we see that the invisibly small molecules we call narcotics, neurotransmitters, hormones, viruses, and genes can place their little hands on the steering wheel of our behavior."

"So in our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer."

"After centuries of debate, free will remains an open, valid, and relevant scientific problem."



NEUROLAW:

"Many 'pathogens' can influence how you turn out; these include substance abuse by a mother during pregnancy, maternal stress, and low birth weight. As a child grows, neglect, physical abuse, and head injury can cause problems in mental development. Once a child is grown, substance abuse and exposure to a variety of toxins can damage the brain, modify intelligence, aggression, and decision-making abilities."

"How you turn out depends on where you've been."

"When modern brain science is laid out carefully, it is difficult to justify how our legal system can continue to function without it."

"Blameworthiness is the wrong question to ask." "The concept and word to replace blameworthiness is modifiability, a forward-looking term that asks, What can we do from here?"


BRAIN ANATOMY:

The brain is best understood as "two separate realms of conscious awareness."

"The origin of consciousness, argues Julian Jaynes, resulted from the ability of the two hemispheres 'to sit down at the table together and work out their differences'."

"Amazingly, as long as the surgery is performed on a child before he is about eight years old, the child is fine." The mentioned surgery is called a hemispherectomy, in which an entire half of the brain is removed, to treat Rasmussen's encephalitis. "He can do anything that a child with two hemispheres can do."



ON THE HORIZON:

"Do human minds interact with the stuff of the universe?" "What is it about observation?". I.e. the measurement problem in quantum physics.

"Why did artificial intelligence become stuck?" "If we hope to invent robots that think, our challenge is not simply to devise a subagent to cleverly solve each problem but instead to ceaselessly reinvent subagents, each with overlapping solutions, and then to pit them against one another."

how the brain works...

fascinated

"the brain creates a version of the universe and projects this like a bubble around us."

"99% of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes, it is what you infer."

"reality emerges out of the fabric of the brain."

"how could we possibly create a reality that we can even understand each other [as every brain has a different fabric]?" although the brain circuitry can change, the pattern of reality that emerges does not.

the first glimpse of simulated neuron activity in a supercomputer: the raw electrical activity creates "ghost like structures"

"the universe [possibly] has evolved the brain to see itself. which may be a first step of becoming aware of itself."

some little things life has taught me...

mood: inspired depending what your personal goals are in life, some strategies work better than others...

you are not the center of the universe

• be critical towards your cultural and religious imprintings: they could be far from ideal, and simply represent idiosyncratic artifacts from the past
  
• don't take yourself too seriously: a little distance to ones own ego can work wonders (and besides, the universe existed for roughly 14 billion years before your birth, and the last discernible structure in it will probably cease to exist after 10 to the power of 23 years after your death)
• don't expect your perception of reality to be too representative of reality itself (psychopathology, cognitive biases, psychedelic drugs)
  
• don't expect your knowledge and understanding of things to give you more than a glimpse of reality: you cannot possibly know and understand everything
• reality is perhaps more bizarre than anyone ever guessed (non-locality, quantization, measurement, duality, uncertainty, entanglement, time dilation, arrow of time, dark matter and energy, self-organization, emergence, life, death, consciousness, etc. without even mentioning multiverses and possibilities of higher dimensional space and/or time)
  
• allow for the possibility, that all your opinions and points of views could be wrong
• dogmas have never and will never work
• the best way to appreciate the arbitrariness of your socio-religious background and respect other takes is by traveling

you are the center of your universe

• take responsibility: don't expect others to think for you
• learn to accept and respect yourself
  
• your mind creates your experience of reality: you have total freedom in your mind
  
• you can always choose your inner reactions to impulses from the outer world
• appreciate the enigma of existence: every day you wake up in a structured and self-organizing reality, and rediscover yourself, a thinking, sentient entity full of memories from the past
  
• appreciate the improbability of existence: changing the values of fundamental physical constants just a little would most probably result in unstructured mess
  
• everything in the universe expresses the universe

getting into the right state of mind

• get a sense of humor
  
• once in a while, stop and think about how you are living your life, and if it's what you really want
• happiness is a state of being/mind: your only chance of finding it is within yourself
• modesty, honesty, sincerity can get you a long way
• let go: you can't control everything anyway
• be aware of your own mortality: relax and accept the only thing you can know for sure
  
• open your mind to change: conservatism and paranoia about new things doesn't get you far in a universe where everything is constantly changing
• good/bad or right/wrong are very relative attributes and often in the eye of the beholder
• there is no absolute evil
• assume that all people act to the best of their possibilities (even if the outcome of their decisions are disastrous), and that you would be the same, given their biography and neurochemistry
• relax, kick back and chill out once in a while
• dream of a better future
• be the change you want to see in the world
• don't be ignorant

interacting

• respect other opinions
• don't take stuff personal
  
• it is very easy and rewarding to be nice/helpful/compassionate to other people
• listen more, talk less
• respect every aspect of life: from plants, to insects to animals, to human beings of other faith/race/...
• the strong should protect the weak
• value friendship
• don't worry about what others think about you
• violence is really the very last resort; and mostly, just your inner commitment to defend yourself to the very end, prevents you from having to actually do this

lifestyle

• have fun
  
• resist the temptation to blindly follow the masses: many people doing stupid things isn't a justification for anything
• limit addictions
• you don't have to be evil to make money, or be a bastard to get ahead in life
• a more or less healthy lifestyle helps: a little movement, a somewhat balanced diet, and a (pragmatic) optimistic mindset can work wonders
  
• materialism is a bad strategy if you're looking for happiness
• as already mentioned, go travel
• the more you spend time getting educated, the better you can approximate the big picture
  
• did you know, lifestyles don't necessarily come pre-tailored: you can choose and combine elements from any pop- or subculture you like
• ever think about ecology and sustainability, i.e., your footprint?
• ever consider vegetarianism? (update over 7 years later: how about considering veganism? you know, from a sustainability, ethical, and health perspective?)