Research Program / Claims / alternate-focus-7

Multiple alternative presents exist; your attention is focused on only one, and when attention wavers you may glimpse another.

存在多个替代的现在，你的注意力只聚焦于其中一个，注意力摇摆时可能瞥见另一个

Concept alternate focus · Domain Consciousness States and Attentional Dynamics · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)

Adjudicating experiment

Supplementary question 3 can serve as a cognitive experiment: approximately 300 people in a 2×2 within-subject VR task, manipulating same-location cross-period scenes vs. different-location scenes, and attention-shifting dual-task vs. difficulty-matched control task; measure immediate order judgments, delayed source memory, and confidence, pre-measure DES and test continuous variable interactions, plus state dissociation and VR sickness. Each person 2 sessions, 1 week apart, project about 12 months. To touch the original ontological claim, unimplemented and non-inferable hidden scene targets must additionally be included; increased error rates alone have no adjudicative power.

Suggested paper title

Attentional Switching and Dissociative Traits in Temporal Source Monitoring Across Virtual Environments

What it would overturn

Only repeatable acquisition of unimplemented, non-inferable scene information would challenge the assumption that 'scene reports are generated from available sensory information, memory, and inference'; increased order errors would not.

Candidate labs / funders

Martin Eimer；Anna Grubert：视觉注意与时间顺序加工研究; Dalena van Heugten-van der Kloet：解离与VR相关研究; [University of Virginia School of Medicine, Division of Perceptual Studies](https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/)：异常体验研究

Specificity of Seth's formulation

Proposes that attention wavering may trigger experience but does not define which alternative present, how to observe it independently, or accuracy criteria; erroneous reports can be simultaneously explained by memory interference models.

Note

This search found no paper fully matching the proposed VR × dual-task × DES design; DES is a dissociative experiences scale, not a measure of accessing other realities, and experimenter-generated VR branches cannot be treated as ontological alternative presents.

Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)

A dissociation between selective attention and conscious awareness in the representation of temporal order information — Martin Eimer；Anna Grubert (2015), Consciousness and Cognition
实验显示注意处理可利用的时间顺序信息不一定可供有意识顺序判断使用，为时间判断误差提供普通认知解释。[论文](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.01.001)
Out-of-body experience in virtual reality induces acute dissociation — Dalena van Heugten-van der Kloet；Janina Cosgrave；Joram van Rheede；Stephen Hicks (2018), Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice
VR身体视角操作可诱发急性解离体验，支持体验可被操纵，没有证明替代现实存在。[论文](https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000172)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim alternate-focus-7, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/alternate-focus-7