210 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
  2. Sep 2024
    1. the inside and the outside

      for - adjacency - inside / outside - complexity / simplicity - multi scale competency architecture - black box - example - human consciousness

      adjacency - between - inside / outside - black box - multi scale competency architecture - complexity / simplicity - adjacency relationship - inside / outside complexity /simplicity relationship articulates - the black box phenomenal prevalent in design and also - what Michael has been talking about with the complexity naturally found at lower levels of multi scale competency architectures - As he noted earlier, in this lab experiments, - it's practical to make use of the higher level signals in the living system - and virtually impossible to make use of trying to manage the lower level system signals - I like to think of human consciousness in the same terms - What appears to consciousness are signals like intero-ception signals of hunger that creates the thought ' I'm hungry, I want to get some food ' - whilst countless lies level signals that operate all the cells in our body are invisible

    1. Michael Pollan quit caffeine for 3 months. He says that your relation to caffeine becomes clear when you come off it. He said that he felt a veil between him and reality when he was not having caffeine. Essentially, we have "... caffeinated consciousness".

    1. hard problem proposed here has been suggested by David Chalmers as satisfying the following requirements

      for - David Chalmers - hard problem of consciousness - citation - Federico Faggin - Giacomo Mauro D'ariano - Hard Problem and Free Will: An Information-Theoretical Approach

      Comment - Federico Faggins, in other talks emphasizes that - consciousness is not an epi-phenomena of materalism, but rather - consciousness is a foundational experience and materialism is derived from it -

    2. Privacy principle

      for - definition - privacy principle - quantum informational panpsyichism theory of consciousness - Federico Faggin - Giacomo Mauro D'Airiano

      definition - privacy principle - experience isnot shareable, even in principle

    3. Psychoinformational principle

      for - definition - psycho-informational principle - P1 - quantum informational panpsyichism theory of consciousness - Federico Faggin - Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano

      definition - psycho-informational principle - Consciousness is the information system's experience of its own information state and processing

    4. Psycho-purity principle

      for - definition - psycho - purity principle - quantum informational theory of consciousness - Federico Faggin - Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano

      definition - psycho-purity principle - the state of teh conscious system is pure

    5. for - Giocomo Mauro D'Ariano - Federico Faggin - Hard Problem and Free Will: An Information-Theoretical Approach - consciousness research

      reference - youtube discussion of this paper by Giocomo Mauro D'Ariano - https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDb1XyS8gTo

    6. The ontology derived by accepting consciousness as fundamental would be that objectivity and classical physics supervene on quantum physics, quantum physics supervenes on quantum information, and quantum information supervenes on consciousness.

      for - quote - classical physics supervenes on quantum physics, which supervenes on quantum information, which supervenes on consciousness - Federico Faggin - Giocomo Mauro D'Ariano

    1. So there has to be a reality, deeper reality, out of which these spacetime reality that we call reality emerges. So so therefore the model to think of the model in your following way, consciousness is a quantum field.

      for - quote - consciousness - model of - as a quantum field - Federico Faggin - question - about Federico Faggin's quantum field theory of consciousness - Is it neo-dualistic?

      quote - consciousness - model of - as a quantum field - Federico Faggin - (see below) - Think of the body as a structure in space and time - It is both - classical - cells are made of particles, atoms and molecules that interact quantumly in space and time - AND fields - The body is a bridge between consciousness and the classical (objective spacetime) world - The body reports to the conscious field - and creates quantum states inside the cell

      potential future dialogue - Michael Levin and Federico Faggin - To unpack quantum states at cellular or subcellular level, it would be good to see a dialogue between Michael Levin and Federico Faggin

    2. the problem here is that physicists am never worried about consciousness because that's the problem of neuroscientists. And neuroscientists don't know quantum physics. So what the hell then? You know, there is a hole in the middle right?

      for - consciousness - incomplete knowledge of science - hole in understanding - physics - neuroscience - quantum mechanics - Federico Faggin

    3. there is something in physics that cannot be copy. Quantum state, quantum state. Quantum state. There is the no cloning theorem, says do not copy. Not only that, but the maximum information that you can get if you make a measurement of the quantum state is one bit per quantum bit. Olivas theorem, Olivas theorem says that and we have or Labor's theorem ourselves. What I can say about what I feel is much, much less

      for - quote - no cloning theorem - quantum mechanics - extended to consciousness and qualia - Frederico Faggin - hard problem of consciousness - no cloning theorem and private inner world of qualia - Frederico Faggin quote - no cloning theorem - quantum mechanics - extended to consciousness and qualia - Frederico Faggin - (see below) - What I feel what I feel is private. - What you feel is private. - You cannot transfer it to me - In order to tell you what I feel, I must translate that private feeling into classical information bit saying what I say. - The symbols must be this. - They must be sharable. - They must be copyable to share. You need to copy. Yeah. - My inner experience cannot be copied. And there is something in physics that cannot be copy. - In Quantum state, there is the "no cloning theorem", which says do not copy. - Not only that, but the maximum information that you can get if you make a measurement of the quantum state is one bit per quantum bit. - Olivas theorem says that and we have or Labor's theorem ourselves. What I can say about what I feel is much, much less

    4. Our ancestors knew better because only in the last 200 years have we abandoned. The idea that there is something that survives. Death of the body. Death of the body. Okay. Only the last 200 years, science has grown to the point where they think they know everything and they have forgotten that they may not know something about what they cannot test.

      for - mortality salience - consciousness survives the body - ancients were right, contemporary science is inconclusive - Frederico Faggin

    5. Now we understand why there has to be an inner reality which is made of qualia and an outer reality which is made a lot of symbols, shareable symbols, what we call matter.

      for - unpack - key insight - with the postulate of consciousness as the foundation, it makes sense that this is - an inner reality made of qualia - and an outer reality made of shareable symbols we call matter - Federico Faggin - question - about Federico Faggin's ideas - in what way is matter a symbol? - adjacency - poverty mentality - I am the universe who wants to know itself question - in what way is matter a symbol? - Matter is a symbol in the sense that it - we describe reality using language, both - ordinary words as well as - mathematics - It is those symbolic descriptions that DIRECT US to jump from one phenomena to another related phenomena. - After all, WHO is the knower of the symbolic descriptions? - WHAT is it that knows? Is it not, as FF points out, the universe itself - as expressed uniquely through all the MEs of the world, that knows? - Hence, the true nature of all authentic spiritual practices is that - the reality outside of us is intrinsically the same as - the reality within us - our lebenswelt of qualia

    6. it has to be taken as a postulate

      for - answer - It has to be taken as a postulate - Federico Faggin - to question - how can we test that consciousness is the foundation of reality?

    7. you've mentioned the word theory a lot of times. How can we test this?

      for - question - how do you test the theory that consciousness is the foundation of reality? ( to Federico Faggin)

    8. for - Federico Faggin (FF) - analytic idealism - consciousness - Deep Humanity

      summary - This is an good talk that introduces Federico Faggin's (FF) ideas about consciousness from the perspective of analytic idealism, the idea that consciousness is the most fundamental aspect of reality and that materialism is an epiphenomena of consciousness, not the other way around - Bernado Kastrup's organization, Essentia Foundation invited FF to the Netherlands to give a talking tour of his new - book "Irreducible" - https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/essentia-books/our-books/irreducible-consciousness-life-computers-human-nature - and they visited the prestigous semiconductor design company ASML' facilities, - https://www.asml.com/en - where this insightful talk was delivered - FF reconciles scientific explanation with the hard problem of consciousness and our ordinary, everyday experience of consciousness - FF's theory offers - a good western, science-based explanatory framework that is consistent with - the experiential and theoretical framework from the east - from - Tibetan Buddhist - Zen Buddhist - Vedic - and other ancient ideas of emptiness<br /> - This framing heals the divide between science and religion that has created a meaning crisis in modernity - and by so doing, also addresses a core issue of the meaning crisis - mortality salience

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  3. Aug 2024
    1. this suffering that we feel as a result of empathy with another who is suffering doesn't come from ignorance of our true nature on the contrary it is an expression of our understanding that we share our essential nature with the other and as a result of that we feel both their joy as our own joy and their suffering as our own suffering

      for - empathy - deep meaning - universal consciousness perspective - Rupert Spira

    2. in the ultimate analysis i think it is the impulse in us to revert to our natural state it is the impulse of a finite mind to divest itself of its limitations and revert to its natural condition of infinite consciousness

      for - quote - claim - natural impulse of finite minds - to revert from finite mind back to infinite consciousness - Rupert Spira

    3. when infinite consciousness localizes itself in the form of each of our finite minds and becomes entangled with the content of experience it overlooks the knowing of itself in favor of its knowledge of objective experience and therefore the finite mind has to perform this activity of reflecting back on itself in order to arrive at the recognition i am pure consciousness

      for - duality - infinite consciousness - mistaking itself for finite counsciousness - entangled with the content of experience - Rupert Spira

      duality - infinite consciousness - mistaking itself for finite counsciousness - entangled with the content of experience - Rupert Spira - What does this really mean? - What does it mean to be entangled? - What does it take to get dis-entangled? - It would seem that falling into suffering through unbalanced - self-identify and - self cherishing - is what he is getting at

    4. ultimately dissociation doesn't really happen it's um it's a model i think it's a an accurate a very useful model but the best way i can i can describe this is using the analogy of going to a 3d imax cinema

      for - metaphor - analogy - dissociation - Bernardo Kastrup - to - 3D imax cinema - localize Rupert Spira - terminology - dissociate - Bernado Kastrup - terminology - localize and contract - Rupert Spira - universal consciousness contracts to finite human consciousness - question - meaning of dissociate - Bernardo Kastrup

      metaphor - analogy - dissociation - Bernardo Kastrup - to - 3D imax cinema - Rupert Spira - At 3d Imax cinema, we wear a pair of special glasses - that make the otherwise fuzzy image to acquire a 3rd dimension - In the same way, our raw universal consciousness is like the fuzzy pattern we see on the 3d Imax screen when we DON'T have any special glasses on - When we perceive and think, it is like putting on the 3D glasses in the Imax theatre and suddenly we see objects with great clarity - Spira talks about universal consciousness "localizing" within its own activity - in the form of a finite mind of a human being

      question - meaning of dissociate - Bernardo Kastrup - Does Kastrup mean that we infinite / universal consciousness dissociates from itself into the finite human consciousness? - answer - It appears so, as at time 45:50, Spira summarizes Kastrup's views on dissociation

    5. this localization process enables consciousness to perceive itself as the universe because infinite consciousness cannot perceive its own activity directly because it would have to do so from if infinite consciousness were to perceive the universe directly it would have to do so from every single point of view in the universe it would be the deepest darkest black image you could imagine so in order to perceive an object consciousness must localize itself as an apparently separate subject so this localization of the apparent localization of our self or the dissociation of ourselves as finite minds out of infinite consciousness enables um perception

      for - adjacency - key insight - quote - localization enables (infinite or universal consciousness) to perceive itself - Rupert Spira - discerning single voice at a busy party metaphor - existential isolation - umwelt

      adjacency - between - key insight - quote - localization enables (infinite or universal consciousness) to perceive itself - Rupert Spira - discerning single voice at a busy party metaphor - existential isolation - adjacency relationship - quote - localization enables (infinite or universal consciousness) to perceive itself - Rupert Spira - This localization process enables (infinite) consciousness to perceive itself as the universe because - infinite consciousness cannot perceive its own activity directly - because if infinite consciousness were to perceive the universe directly - it would have to do so from every single point of view in the universe - It would be the deepest, darkest black image you could imagine - So in order to perceive an object - (infinite) consciousness must localize itself as an apparently separate subject so - the apparent localization of our self or - the dissociation of ourselves - as finite minds out of infinite consciousness enables - perception and - thought

      • There is a metaphor that applies here:
        • At a busy dinner party, many people are talking at the same time
        • As the number of people approach infinite, the signal becomes more difficult to detect
        • In the same manner, as the activities of the universe are seemingly unbounded, how could infinite consciousness possibly observe its own infinite entirety?
        • Existential isolation is deemed depressing because it makes us feel intrinsically separated and disconnected from others, yet
          • it may be very necessary
        • Can you imagine hearing and understanding the voices of every human being, much less every living being?
        • An individual human does not have the capacity to process all that information
        • In the same manner, the body of every living organism is fine tuned for only one specific set of unwelts
        • How would we process the unbound amounts of information if we had an infinite number of different detectors?
    6. when consciousness puts on the glasses of a finite mind a human mind it puts on the glasses that consist of thinking and perceiving it is that activity which seems to localize consciousness within itself as a separate subject of experience from whose perspective it views its own activity as the outside universe

      for - key insight - universal consciousness contracts to localized human consciousness - experiences its own activity as the outside universe - Rupert Spira

    7. amazon prime castle rock which is based on the work of stephen king

      for - comparison - Amazon Prime - Castle Rock - Stephen King - compared to - Michael Levin caterpillar to butterfly metamorphosis - adjacency - universal - vs localized consciousness - empathy - Michael Levin - caterpillar to butterfly

      adjacency - between - Stephen King movie "castle rock" - universal consciousness - localized, individual consckousness - empathy - adjacency relationship - Bernardo compares the Stephen King movie series "Castle Rock" with ghostly beings taking over the identify of an existing physical body. - Universal consciousness is in all of us - but we strongly identify with the localized consciousness - In Michael Levin's caterpillar to butterfly process, - the living being has memories of a caterpillar but what happens when it becomes a butterfly? Those memories don't confer any meaning to the butterfly - But beneath both the butterfly and the caterpillar, the universal consciousness is at the ground layer - When we experience others as ourselves, because we have the same universal consciouness, - then we can truly enact empathy as an expression of recognition

    8. reality lies behind the multiplicity and diversity of appearances and is concealed by them

      for - quotation - Rupert Spira - reality lies behind the multiplicity and diversity of appearances and is concealed by them

      quotation - Rupert Spira - reality lies behind the multiplicity and diversity of appearances and is concealed by them - A subset of this claim is that the same universal consciousness is in the multiplicity and diversity of appearances of human INTERbeCOMings

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    1. for - Federico Faggin - quantum physics - consciousness

      summary - Frederico Faggin is a physicist and microelectronic engineer who was the developer of the world's first microprocessor at Intel, the Intel 4004 CPU. - Now he focuses his attention on developing a robust and testable theory of consciousness based on quantum information theory. - What sets Frederico apart from other scientists who are studying consciousness is a series of profound personal 'awakening'-type experiences in which has led to a psychological dissolution of the sense of self bounded by his physical body - This profound experience led him to claim with unshakable certainty that our individual consciousness is far greater than our normal mundane experience of it - Having a science and engineering background, Faggin has set out to validate his experiences with a new scientific theory of Consciousness, Information and Physicality (CIP) and Operational Probabilistic Theory (OPT)

      to - Frederico Faggin's website - https://hyp.is/JTGs6lr9Ee-K8-uSXD3tsg/www.fagginfoundation.org/what-we-do/j - Federico Faggin and paper: - Hard Problem and Free Will: - an information-theoretical approach - https://hyp.is/styU2lofEe-11hO02KJC8w/link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-85480-5_5

    2. that's why the computer can never be conscious because basically he has none of the characteristics of qualia and he certainly doesn't have free will and Free Will and conscious must work together to create these fields that actually can can direct their own experience and create self-conscious entities from the very beginning

      for - AI - consciousness - not possible - Frederico Faggin

    3. the second book irreducible you have many quotes at the start of each CH chapter and and it's kind of incredible when you realize how many physicists back in the day like Schrodinger Max plank all these people have these amazing quotes on Consciousness being such a fundamental aspect of reality

      for - consciousness - primacy of in physics - quotations from famous scientists

    4. I was betrayed by physicalism

      for - hard problem of consciousness - Federico Faggin

    5. a big part of the book and a big part of your previous book as I've read both of them is your joury because you describe your life going into different phases

      for - Federico Faggin - personal journey - profound awakening experience - reorientation of consciousness - from materialist - to idealist

    6. Consciousness is the perfect instrument to explore the inner reality which is exactly what we have been done all our lives when we think and when we understand the meaning and so on we are actually doing that in that Quantum reality we are not doing that in the brain

      for - consciousness - takes place in quantum reality

    7. what you call CIP B which is the Consciousness information and physicality and how it links to opt which is operational probabilistic Theory

      for - definition - Consciousness Information and Physicality (CIP) - definition - Operational Probabilistic Theory (OPT)

    8. it's evolution of this state of this Quantum state in hilber space which then will allow us to compute the probabilities of what you might measure in space and time it will not tell you generally what you will measure he only tells you the probability what you can measure and that's crazy in a sense right because classical objects you can actually described trajectory so that at any point in time you can tell position momentum and so on but not for Quantum Quantum system so so this fundamental difference will will see that is essential to describe why the Consciousness and Free Will must be must be Quantum phenomena

      for - consciousness - quantum explanation depends on - difference between - quantum physics - and classical physics

      consciousness - quantum explanation depends on - difference between - quantum physics - and classical physics - quantum state evolves in Hilbert space - enables computation of probabilities of what one measures in space-time - but doesn't tell you what you will measure - This difference is critical for describing consciousness as a quantum phenomena

    1. As a result we reach a quantum-information-based panpsychism, with classical physics supervening on quantum physics, quantum physics supervening on quantum information, and quantum information supervening on consciousness.

      for - quantum-information-based-panpsychism - consciousness - relationship - quantum information - to consciousness

      consciousness - relationship - quantum information - to consciousness - classical physics supervenes on quantum physics - quantum physics supervenes on quantum information - quantum information supervenes on consciousness

    1. every figure of consciousness is followedand replaced by a new figure of consciousness, until eventuallyabsolute knowledge is attained. Every figure of consciousness issooner or later confronted with its own incompleteness and in-ternal contradictions.

      Everchanging nature of identity seen in the everchanging nature or fragments/figures of consciousness, replacing one another until harmony is reached between contradictions and duality, into full knowledge

    2. Thus the stoics, for example, believed in a purely internal free-dom that is in no respect related to external reality. The interior-ity of consciousness and the external determination of reality arehere thought, as it were, independently of each other. However,this is an untenable position,

      Consciousness HAS to adapt to the environment

    1. the brain is Islam Islam is it is lousy and it is selfish and still it is working yeah look around you working brains wherever you look and the reason for this is that we totally think differently than any kind of digital and computer system you know of and many Engineers from the AI field haven't figured out that massive difference that massive difference yet

      for - comparison - brain vs machine intelligence

      comparison - brain vs machine intelligence - the brain is inferior to machine in many ways - many times slower - much less accurate - network of neurons is mostly isolated in its own local environment, not connected to a global network like the internet - Yet, it is able to perform extraordinary things in spite of that - It is able to create meaning out of sensory inputs - Can we really say that a machine can do this?

  4. Jun 2024
    1. 06:30 Reaching goals isn't the point. Goals structures one's consciousness (give direction, perspective, clarity). Wanting certainty for a goal doesn't matter as much.

  5. May 2024
  6. Mar 2024
    1. temporal conscientization” (becoming conscious of historical

      for - definition - temporal conscientization - adjacency - temporal conscientization - Deep Humanity - poly-meta-perma-crisis - terror management - denial of death - Paolo Freire - denial of death - Ernest Becker - terror management - book - Critical Consciousness

      definition - temporal conscientization - introduced by Paolo Freire n his book, temporal conscientization means becoming conscious of historical change, our - past, -present and - futures - For people to intervene in the movement of history, - people need to understand - how they got to where they are now, - the era that they are coming from, but as well to understand - the movements and potentialities of change that are leading to different futures.

      adjacency - between - temporal conscientization - Deep Humanity - poly-meta-perma-crisis - terror management theory - denial of death - adjacency statement - Deep Humanity has always elevated the idea of knowing the past, present and future in order to frame meaning for navigating our future. - This is precisely the awareness of temporal conscientization. - Deep considerations of death, - and subsequently what meaning we can derive from life - is an integral part of the Deep Humanity exercise - A major theme of religions is the afterlife, or some continuation of consciousness after the process of death - In the context of temporal conscientization, - looking and - imagining - what our - individual and - collective future - looks like - the proposal of an afterlife is a terror management strategy to cope with our denial of death - Perhaps the emergence of the present poly-meta-perma-crisis is - a cultural indication to the collective intelligence of the human social superorganism that - the time has come to develop a mature theory of life and death that is - accessible to every member of our species so that - we can put the fragmenting, isolating existential question to rest once and for all

    1. Samuel Hartlib was well aware of this improvement. While extolling the clever invention of Harrison, Hartlib noted that combinations and links con-stituted the ‘argumentative part’ of the card index.60

      Hartlib Papers 30/4/47A, Ephemerides 1640, Part 2.

      In extolling the Ark of Studies created by Thomas Harrison, Samuel Hartlib indicated that the combinations of information and the potential links between them created the "argumentative part" of the system. In some sense this seems to be analogous to the the processing power of an information system if not specifically creating its consciousness.

    1. 53:00 Sleep is a state of consciousness. You can't apply techniques to sleep.

      Similarly, flow is a state of consciousness. It is something that happens to you. Create an environment that is conducive for sleep or flow to emerge.

  7. Feb 2024
    1. 09:00 Body and identity disappears — how I feel, what other people think — when in flow/ecstasy. We can't process more information when we are fully engaged with one task. "Existence is temporarily suspended"

  8. Jan 2024
    1. what all the myths have to deal with is transformation of consciousness

      16.57 Trials give revelations, which then transform consciousness

    1. Kevin Mitchell says in one of his books free agents he talks about I 00:27:10 move therefore I am is that yeah yeah no that's that's that's that's exactly right and all the work on um uh uh active inference

      for - definition - consciousness - active inference

      definition - consciousness - active inference - In Levin's opinion, one important aspect of defining consciousness that seems generally overlooked is outputs - actions - active inference is a field that deals with the actions that result from intelligence - currently, there is a greater focus on the input / perception side of consciousness but not as strong a focus on the output / action side

  9. Dec 2023
    1. Mind1, which refers to the neurocognitive activity that allows you to behave in the world.
      • for: hard problem of consciousness - UTok, question - consciosness - UTok mind 1a, Gregg Henrique

      • comment

      • question - consciousness - UTok mind 1b
        • This is a great diagram and conveys a lot in a succinct manner.
        • However, I have a gut feeling that the Mind 01a is not quite the right representation
        • If language and analysis is in the Mind 3 domain, then it is combined with Mind 1b as neurocognition is itself a mental construction, rather than an object
        • All this addresses that there is a deep entanglement between many scientifically analytically rich "objects" and constructed ideas
          • Scientific objects are spoken about and mixed with non-scientifically-laden objects in the world as if they are one and the same. They are not. Scientifically-laden objects have a huge amount of analytic theory behind them. Without familiarity with that theory, the object loses its validity, especially to the lay person.
          • This could be a possible explanation of why scientists are losing their credibility in modernity and giving rise to alternative facts, misinformation and fake news
      • annotate
      • for: evolutionary biology, big history, DH, Deep Humanity, theories of consciousness, ESP project, Earth Species Project, Michael Levin, animal communication, symbiocene

      • title: The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

      • author: Joseph LeDoux
      • date: Jan. 2023
      • doi: 0.1080/09515089.2022.2160311

      • ABSTRACT

        • The essence of who we are depends on our brains.
        • They enable us to think, to
          • feel joy and sorrow,
          • communicate through speech,
          • reflect on the moments of our lives, and to
            • anticipate,
            • plan for, and
            • worry about our imagined futures.
        • Although some of our abilities are comparatively new, key features of our behavior have deep roots that can be traced to the beginning of life.
        • By following the story of behavior, step-by-step, over its roughly four-billion-year trajectory,
          • we come to understand both
            • how similar we are to all organisms that have ever lived, and
            • how different we are from even our closest animal relatives.
        • We care about our differences because they are ours. But differences do not make us superior; they simply make us different.
      • comment

        • good article to contribute to a narrative of the symbiocene and a shift of humanity to belonging to nature as one species, instead of dominating nature as the apex species
      • question
        • @Gyuri, Could indranet search algorithm have made the connection between this article and the symbiocene artilces in my mindplex had I not explicitly made the associations manually through my tags? It needs to be able to do this
      • Also interesting to see how this materialistic outlook of consciousness
        • which is similiar to the Earth Species Project work and Michael Levin's work on synthesizing new laboratory life forms to answer evolutionary questions about intelligence
      • relates to nonmaterial ideas about consciousness
    1. softness is not the kind of thing that's generated in my brain okay 00:06:36 softness is a word that describes how I am currently interacting with a sponge it's a mistake to go looking in the brain to understand why I feel it is soft rather than hard because it lies in 00:06:48 what I'm doing and the same for these other accompanying fields thinking this way about softness is a way of escaping from the explanatory Gap 00:07:01 because it it's a way of escaping from the idea that we need to find a brain mechanism that's generating the softness
      • for: hard problem of consciousness - sensory motor theory, explanatory gap
    2. there may be a little bit of a mystery is in the quality of the redness of red or in this case the quality of the felt softness and this is where 00:04:56 sensory motor theory has an original contribution
      • for: hard problem of consciousness - sensory motor theory
  10. Nov 2023
    1. let's assume that the price of oil uh is at least at the uh 75 range which keeps us out of trouble Keith is at least floating in Alberta maybe even 80 bucks 01:00:56 a barrel maybe even 85 so that we've got some extra money so uh we're going to appoint you and you get to look around for a female and uh 01:01:10 the two of you have to then look around for uh people who are uh indigenous male and female and the four of you are going to be a group and we're going to give you 01:01:22 um uh uh a hundred billion dollars to spend over 10 years which means that you've got uh 10 billion 100 million no we're going to do more 01:01:37 we're going to give you a billion dollars so you've got a hundred million a year and you're going to be able to give it away in 10 million dollar tranches
      • for: interesting idea - project to shift consciousness in Alberta

      • comment

      • interesting idea: project to shift consciousness in Alberta
        • When there is a surplus use it to spend a billion dollars over the next 10 years, 100 million each year given away in 10 million dollar tranches
        • communities of approx. 15,000 people can apply for the 10 million dollar grant to raise consciousness and understand the modernity frame they currently unconsciously live within
        • in order to change the system, you have to first be aware of it and how that system is in you
        • This is an evolutionary experiment because nobody has tried to change a complex system like this before
    1. In the West we talk about how matter—body and brain—might be the necessary conditions for the emergence of the mind. That is the scientists’ assumption. However, there is another hypothesis, which is that consciousness itself is the basic stuff of the universe and that we are the emanation of that consciousness as opposed to the origin or the evolutionary source of it. Of course, to accept that we would have to give up the idea that everything is based on some material property
      • for: materialism Vs panpsychism

      • comment

        • Husserl's phenomenology, especially his views on epoche in his later years lean more towards panpsychism although they are different in a nuanced way.
        • there is direct, pure biological phenomenological experience ,- Epoche may give us a taste of it, interment meditation may go further and the deepest meditation of decades of intense practice may re-immerse us in it.
        • Feral children who grow into feral adults, an extremely rare occurrence, may have an immersive experience of it
        • social conditioning of language bind meaning tightly to our construction and experience of objects in our sensory field
        • it is extremely difficult to disentangle our conditioned meaning with prelinguistic phenomenological experience of reality
        • spiritual awakening or enlightenment would appear to show that it is possible
        • When we attach such strong meaning to ideas, such as to scientific ideas, "material* objects, in spite of their attached, implicit symbolic complexity, appear to have a natural, autonomous and obvious existence.
        • in this way, our conscious constructs become solidified and mistaken for concrete, autonomously existent objects. Consciousness then comes to mistaken variants of consciousness itself with autonomously existent objects
    1. Phenomenologyexplains that consciousness, treated as an object, limits this pretension: human subjectivity is thefoundation of all scientific knowledge. Therefore, there is a logical error in trying to explain thefoundation through what it has founded.
      • for: scientific naturalism - circular argument, logical error, subjectivity - explanation, quote, quote - studying consciousness

      • quote: consciousness

        • Human subjectivity is the foundation oof all scientific knowledge. Therefore, there is a logical error in trying to explain the foundation through what it has founded.
      • author: Doris Elida Fuster Guillen

      • comment

        • Alternative way to state it
          • Human subjectivity is the foundation oof all scientific knowledge. Therefore, there is a logical error in trying to explain the foundation through what itself.
    2. The phenomenological approach projects a radical criticism of scientific naturalism,which assumes that the object of science is to find laws that govern reality, where the person isconceived as another object of nature.
      • for: scientific naturalism - critique, scientific naturalism - phenomenology, consciousness - objectification of, SELF-consciousness

      • comment

        • Good observation that is quite salient to the hard problem of consciousness. Language can be used to describe any observable pattern.
        • Our own bodies are an observable pattern. As we associate our consciousness with our body, It is a small step to observe our own consciousness. SELF-consciousness is what allows us to be observer and observed at different times.
    1. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be muchless interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless
      • for: quote - consciousness, quote - mind body problem, quote - hard problem of consciousness, quote - Thomas Nagel

      • quote

        • Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.
      • comment

        • consciousness is primordial and
        • stable, observable patterns that emerge in our field of consciousness is also primordial
        • the primordiality of these two, awareness and stability of observable patterns WITHIN awareness itself, are the two pillars that constitute the mind-body problem
        • in particular, the pattern of "other consciousnesses" is also another pattern that arises from within consciousness itself
        • The brain is a construction, a synthesized idea that emerges out of a dynamic amalgamation of countless accumulated patterns
        • In this respect, it is no different in quality than other complex constructed ideas we humans create, it only differs by degree and by kind
        • Were we to purely sense a human brain, for instance when a surgeon opens the skull in an operation, without the vast associative network of ideas associated with it, could we even consider how brain and mind are connected except in the most naive way?
        • Language is deeply encoded in every culturally conditioned modern human. Then advanced education in a specific field of knowledge encodes even more esoteric and deeper types of language conditioning.
        • Husserl's idea of phenomenological reduction, or epoche taken to its logical conclusion results in an impossible task, for we cannot severe the deeply entangled nature of meaning that our entire lives of cultural conditioning has enculturated into us.
        • The symbolosphere is now a part of us. We cannot undo such deep conditioning easily. You cannot simply dissociate meaning from the letters and words of your native and learned languages. Indeed, it is this deep symbolic conditioning that spans the decades of our childhood and adolescence that allows us to observe a symbol and effortlessly associate meaning to it.
        • Epoche, no matter how carefully crafted cannot uncondition such deep conditioning
        • It can, however, give us insight of the unconditioned from the perspective of the conditioned consciousness
        • We cannot become feral people even if we wanted to, nor, I suspect, would we want to experience reality permanently in that state
        • This brings up the question of what the process of spiritual enlightenment is designed to achieve
        • Is it a temporary suspension, an incomplete epoche that provides us with sufficient insight to lead to some kind of permanent shift where the insight stays with us and affects our lives in a beneficial way?

      .

    1. I 01:00:30 think that a proper version of the concept of synchronicity would talk about multiscale patterns so that when you're looking at electrons in the computer you would say isn't it amazing that these electrons went over here and 01:00:42 those went over there but together that's an endgate and by the way that's part of this other calculation like amazing down below all they're doing is following Maxwell's equations but looked at at another level wow they just just 01:00:54 computed the weather in you know in in Chicago so I I I think what you know I it's not about well I was going to say it's not about us and uh and our human tendency to to to to pick out patterns 01:01:07 and things like but actually I I do think it's that too because if synchronicity is is simply how things look at other scales
      • for: adjacency - consciousness - multiscale context

      • adjacency between

        • Michael's example
        • my idea of how consciousness fits into a multiscale system
      • adjacency statement
        • from a Major Evolutionary Transition of Individuality perspective, consciousness might be seen as a high level governance system of a multicellular organism
        • this begs the question: consciousness is fundamentally related to individual cells that compose the body that the consciousness appears to be tethered to
        • question: Is there some way for consciousness to directly access the lower and more primitive MET levels of its own being?
    2. we've talked a lot about zooming in down and back on the evolutionary ladder like there's no obvious point at which intelligence emerges and there's a nice Elegance to pan psychism like it's 00:39:53 all always there and it's just on a continuum and maybe there's some bare minimum unit of Consciousness but if you scale it upwards again past humans even past social 00:40:06 networks at the at the most extreme level you would have okay treat the entire universe as a single system you get this kind of pantheist Cosmos psyche mind of God in Spinoza's terms what do 00:40:19 you think of that
      • for: panpsychism, Spinoza, universal consciousness
    3. you can train them it has memory you can train it you can take a a trained one and a naive one and fuse them they 00:39:24 they'll fuse together and then the memory sort of propagates and the naive one will now remember you know have the memory that that the other one had um no nerves no no brain um single cell
      • for: Michael Levin - slime mold experiment, question - new theory of consciousness from a single cell

      • question

        • is it possible that a theory can be constructed to explain consciousness from the behavior of a single cell organism such as a slime mold?
  11. Oct 2023
    1. so I will explain in more details all these three premises the first one is that consciousness according to the theory is a specific process 00:05:34 while mind is a specific structure and if there is no such structure there is no such process
      • for: structure first, process second, mind first, consciousness second

      • comment

        • claim
          • strictly speaking, all structures are processes. Those structures that seem stable over long periods of time are very stable processes. Pragmatically, however, we can distinguish.
          • example
            • molecules are made of arrangements of atoms but atoms themselves are composed of subatomic particles and these have a particle/wave duality
      • summary
        • Konstantin Anokhin proposes a theory of consciousness based on the concept of the cognitome and consists of three principal claims:

          - the study of the structure (mind) must precede the study of the processes that take place within the structure (consciousness)

    1. If you look at George Ellis’s Google Scholar, it’s clear that he has gone down the deep end a while ago. What is it with these cosmologists? (Ahem, Penrose). Suddenly they discover quantum physics and it’s the solution to consciousness. Or gravity makes wavefunctions collapse.

      quote from Christoph Adami at https://twitter.com/ChristophAdami/status/1711583362647814485

      Re: George Ellis https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03061-y

      Physicists and quantum mechanics as solution to consciousness.

      See also: Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner R. Loewenstein

    1. I'm going to kind of give you my 00:04:56 take on what I believe to have been the natural history of or what I believe is the natural history of awareness a sort of a sequence of innovations that occurred that facilitated the appearance 00:05:09 of consciousness on Earth
      • for: key claim, key claim - natural history of awareness leading evolution of consciousness, natural history - awareness leading to consciousnessn
      • for: interspecies communications, animal consciousness, animal consciousness - octopus

      • summary

        • Dr. David Edelman presents on the subject of the natural history of the awareness of the octopus
        • The octopus is one of the most complex of invertebrates and its study can give clues about how sensory awareness and consciousness developed in animals
    1. .

      Some experiments which involve conscious perception of external stimuli with reports/tasks have shown activation of prefrontal areas, but this activation may have been related to the reports/tasks rather than the conscious experiences (not indicative of content-specific NCC). Other experiments which involve conscious perception of external stimuli without reports/tasks showed more posterior activation than anterior activation (indicative of content-specific NCC).

    2. .

      Within-state paradigms comparing conscious individuals to unconscious or minimally conscious individuals have revealed posterior area activity to show the most difference between consciousness and unconsciousness or minimal consciousness (there is a "posterior hot zone" which may be indicative of the NCC).

    3. However, neuroimaging experiments can sample brain activ-ity systematically and noninvasively in healthy volunteers (Pol-drack and Farah, 2015) and, with appropriate methodologies,they can also provide valuable information about the functionalspecificity of brain regions (Moran and Zaki, 2013; Poldrack andFarah, 2015).
    4. .

      Compared with case studies (lesions) and electrical stimulation studies, neuroimaging studies are less accurate in determining the exact brain regions that contribute to consciousness. Neuroimaging often covers multiple brain areas, some of which may not be directly involved in modulating content-specific NCC.

    5. C

      bottom-horizontal fMRI images of someone wo experienced anoxic lesions to their posterior corpus callosum, resulting in permanent coma following head trauma.

    6. F

      Sagittal fMRI image of an individual who displayed content-specific changes in experience (feeling of intention to move) following electrical stimulation of the temporoparietal cortex.

    7. D

      Mid-sagittal fMRI image of an individual who displayed content-specific changes in experience (intrusive thoughts) following electrical stimulation of the ACC.

    8. E

      Bottom-horizontal fMRI image of an individual who displayed content-specific changes in experience (inability to perceive faces) following electrical stimulation of the fusiform gyrus.

    9. Together, stimulation studies support the idea that some pos-terior cortical regions may contribute directly to specific contentsof experience, but the evidence for prefrontal regions is scarceand indirect.
    10. .

      Many studies have demonstrated that electrical stimulation of the posterior cortex induces discrete changes in the content-specific NCC more reliably than electrical stimulation of the anterior cortex. Hence, most evidence suggests that posterior regions of the brain contribute more to the content-specific NCC than do anterior regions of the brain.

    11. .

      For the most part, electrical and TMS stimulation of the frontal cortex does not elicit content-specific changes in experience. Stimulation of the ACC and MCC (posterior areas), however, does elicit some content-specific changes in experience, suggesting that posterior area stimulation is more likely to excite content-specific NCC than frontal area stimulation.

    12. .

      Several studies have shown that electrical stimulation and EEG activation of posterior cortical areas is effective at restoring consciousness in subjects where it is impaired, demonstrating that the excitability of the full NCC can be modulated through arousal systems.

    13. Electrical stimulation during neurosurgery is an important source ofevidence for a direct contribution of different brain areas to con-sciousness (Penfield, 1959; Desmurget et al., 2013), as indicatedby its superior value in predicting postoperative deficits com-pared with fMRI or diffusion tensor imaging (Borchers et al.,2011).
    14. diffusion tensor imaging

      A technique that detects how water travels along the white matter tracts in the brain.

    15. Figure 2.

      anatomical images depicting clinical evidence for the full (A, B, C) and content-specific (D, E, F) NCC.

    16. Although frontal injuries can slightlyincrease the threshold for perceiving some brief (16 ms) andmasked visual stimuli, patients still experience them (Del Cul etal., 2009), suggesting that these frontal regions may modulate theNCC (i.e., act as background conditions) rather than contribut-ing directly to consciousness (Kozuch, 2014).
    17. By contrast, there is little evidence for loss of specific con-scious contents after frontal damage (Penfield and Jasper, 1954).
    18. prosody

      Patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry.

    19. With regards to content-specific NCC, there is abundant neu-rological evidence that lesions in the posterior cortex can cause aloss of specific contents of experience (Farah, 2004).
    20. B

      mid-sagittal fMRI image of someone who experienced anoxic lesions to their posterior corpus callosum, resulting in permanent VS following head trauma.

    21. .

      traumatic lesions to the posterior corpus callosum appear to permanently cause states of VS (coma, or impeded consciousness), whereas traumatic lesions to the frontal lobe do not seem to do this.

    22. VS

      Behavioral state similar to coma.

    23. A,

      Bilateral view of the left and right frontal lobes of someone who experienced extensive prefrontal lobe damage without a noticeable change in consciousness, with certain anatomical regions labeled (top). Lateral view of the left and right hemispheres of that same individual, with certain anatomical regions labeled (bottom).

    24. .

      There are many examples of people who have experienced bilateral lesions to the frontal lobe and still retained most, if not all aspects of consciousness. These instances lend credence to the idea that the anterior cortex may not account for the full NCC. Even when such damage causes deficits in cognition, perception, or executive function, consciousness does not appear to be significantly altered and effected individuals still seem capable of living normal lives.

    25. Figure 1.

      The NCC and related processes represented in a diagram of the brain. Content-specific NCC are represented in red, full NCC are represented in orange (as a union of all content-specific NCC), neuronal activating systems and global enabling factors modulating full NCC activity are represented in green, processing loops modulating some content-specific NCC are represented in beige, sensory pathways modulating some content-specific NCC are represented in pink, and outputs from NCC are represented in blue.

    26. For content-specific NCC, experimentscan be carefully designed to systematically investigate possibledissociations between the experience of particular conscious con-tents and the engagement of various cognitive processes, such asattention, decision-making, and reporting (Aru et al., 2012; Kochand Tsuchiya, 2012; Tsuchiya et al., 2015; Tsuchiya and Koch,2016).
    27. Several complementary methods can be used to distill the trueNCC. For the full NCC, within-state paradigms can be used toavoid confounds due to changes in behavioral state and taskperformance as well as to dissociate unconsciousness from unre-sponsiveness
    28. .

      Recent research has placed emphasis on distinguishing "background conditions" that indirectly generate consciousness from neural processes that directly generate consciousness (or distinguishing consciousness itself from its precursors and consequences). Some neural processes, such as processing loops involved in executive functions, activity along sensory pathways, and activity along motor pathways may tangentially affect the full NCC via modulation of the content specific NCC.

    29. The full NCC can be definedas the union of all content-specific NCC (Koch et al., 2016a).
    30. scious percept (Crick and Koch, 1990). Content-specific NCCare the neural mechanisms specifying particular phenomenalcontents within consciousness, such as colors, faces, places, orthoughts.
    31. The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are defined as theminimal neural mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one con-
  12. Sep 2023
    1. these guys are lemurs 00:19:09 taking hits off of centipedes so they bite centipedes literally get high and they go into these trance-like states I'm sure this is not at all familiar to anyone here 00:19:24 um they get super cuddly uh and then later wake up and go their way but they are seeking a kind of transcendent State of Consciousness Apes will spin they will hang on Vines and spin to get dizzy 00:19:37 and then Dolphins will intentionally inflate puffer fish to get high pass them around in the ultimate puff puff pass right many mammals seek a Transcendent 00:19:57 altered state of being and if they communicate they may well communicate about it
      • for: animals getting high, animals seeking altered state of consciousness, lemurs - getting high, dolphins - getting high, apes - getting high
    1. i find it very hard to imagine if we if somebody claimed to have a a good theory of consciousness and i 00:29:43 were to ask them okay well what is the prediction of your theory in this particular case i don't know what the format of the answer looks like because numbers and the typical things we get don't do the trick they you know they're sort of third person descriptions
      • comment
        • Michael does not know what the format of the answer to the hard problem would be
        • Attempting to explain the experience of consciousness begs the question
          • what is explanation?
        • The explanation often attempts to rely on measurable 3rd party observations and the scientific theories and models behind those observations
        • However, as Michel Bitbol points out, the models themselves emerge from the same awareness of consciousness
        • In spiritual teachings, it is often claimed that the observer is actually an expression of the universe that see's itself
        • Seeing itself - what does this mean in scientific terms? Could it mean resonance, like the kind used by musicians to tune string instruments like guitars?
        • Do all the patterns that we sense become sensible precisely because they are all an intrinsic part of us, and vice versa?
    2. as andy clark puts it quite succinctly is why do we spend so much time puzzling about why we are aware
      • paraphrase
        • Karl Friston takes Andy Clark's perspective
          • the real problem is a meta problem
            • why do we spend so much time trying to make sense of our sense-making?
        • Karl talks about futures and different pathways to the futures
        • Humans seem to have this unique property to plan futures, some of which are counter-factual
    3. what do you think about the so-called hard problem is there in fact a hard problem
      • for: hard problem of consciousness
    1. we were once just physics all 00:02:27 of us were not just in an evolutionary sense but really in a developmental sense and you can watch it happen in front of your eyes so from that perspective i think developmental biology is is uh you know it's why i switched from doing computation in in sort of silicon medium to computation 00:02:40 and living media but i am fundamentally interested not just in questions of cells and why they do things but in morphogenesis or or pattern formation as an example of the appearance of mind from matter that's really right to me developmental biology is the most 00:02:53 magical process there is because it literally in front of your eyes takes you from from matter to mind you can see it happen
      • for: question, question - hard problem of consciousness, question - Micheal Levin - Michel Bitbol

      • question

        • What would Michel Bitbol think of what Michael Levin claims here?
        • What does Michel Bitbol think about Michael Levin's research and the hard problem of consciousness?
    1. In order to solve this paradox, we need to explain two aspects of consciousness: How there could be natural phenomena that are private and thus independent of physical processes (or how come they seem private), and what the exact relationship between cognitive content and phenomenal consciousness is.
      • for: key question, key question - hard problem of consciousness
      • key questions
        • how could there be natural phenomena that are private and thus independent of physical processes
          • or how come they seem private?
        • what is the exact relationship between cognitive content and phenomenal consciousness?
    2. The zombie has functional consciousness, i.e., all the physical and functional conscious processes studied by scientists, such as global informational access. But there would be nothing it is like to have that global informational access and to be that zombie. All that the zombie cognitive system requires is the capacity to produce phenomenal judgments that it can later report.
      • for: AI - consciousness, zombies, question, question - AI - zombie
      • question: AI
        • is AI a zombie?
        • It would seem that by interviewing AI, there would be no way to tell if it's a zombie or not
          • AI would say all the right things that would try to convince you that it's not a zombie
      • for: nonduality, non-duality, duality, dualism, hard problem of consciousness, explanatory gap, relativistic theory of consciousness, human INTERbeing, human INTERbeCOMing, Deep Humanity, DH
      • title: A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness
      • author: Nir Lahav, Zahariah A. Neemeh
      • date: May 12, 2022

      • abstract

        • In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this elusive phenomenon.
        • Yet, despite critical development in our understanding of the functional side of consciousness, we still lack a fundamental theory regarding its phenomenal aspect.
        • There is an “explanatory gap” between
          • our scientific knowledge of functional consciousness and
          • its “subjective,” phenomenal aspects,
        • referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness.
        • The phenomenal aspect of consciousness is the first-person answer to “what it’s like” question, and
          • it has thus far proved recalcitrant to direct scientific investigation.
        • Naturalistic dualists argue that it is composed of a primitive, private, non-reductive element of reality that is independent from the functional and physical aspects of consciousness.
        • Illusionists, on the other hand, argue that it is merely a cognitive illusion, and that all that exists are ultimately physical, non-phenomenal properties.
        • We contend that both the dualist and illusionist positions are flawed because they tacitly assume consciousness to be an absolute property that doesn’t depend on the observer.
        • We develop a conceptual and a mathematical argument for a relativistic theory of consciousness in which
          • a system either has or doesn’t have phenomenal consciousness with respect to some observer.
        • Phenomenal consciousness is neither private nor delusional, just relativistic.
          • In the frame of reference of the cognitive system, it will be observable (first-person perspective) and
          • in other frame of reference it will not (third-person perspective).
        • These two cognitive frames of reference are both correct,
          • just as in the case of
            • an observer that claims to be at rest
            • while another will claim that the observer has constant velocity.
        • Given that consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, neither observer position can be privileged,
          • as they both describe the same underlying reality.
        • Based on relativistic phenomena in physics
          • we developed a mathematical formalization for consciousness which bridges the explanatory gap and dissolves the hard problem.
        • Given that the first-person cognitive frame of reference also offers legitimate observations on consciousness,
          • we conclude by arguing that philosophers can usefully contribute to the science of consciousness by collaborating with neuroscientists to explore the neural basis of phenomenal structures.
      • comment

        • This is a promising approach to solving the hard problem of consciosness
    1. Movies as portraying limited existence, but sometimes “signs” of consciousness

      • In my opinion, well made movies, show a lot of signs of consciousness. See, for example, LOTR, with the rhoririm charge where there is a collective consciousness forming, or the scene in which Shanks stops Akainu.
  13. Aug 2023
    1. It was after he heard a BBC interview with Marvin Minsky, a founding father of artificial intelligence, who had famously pronounced that the human brain is “just a computer made of meat.” Minsky‘s claims compelled Penrose to write The Emperor‘s New Mind, arguing that human thinking will never be emulated by a machine. The book had the feel of an extended thought experiment on the non-algorithmic nature of consciousness and why it can only be understood in relation to Gödel‘s theorem and quantum physics.↳Minsky, who died last year, represents a striking contrast to Penrose‘s quest to uncover the roots of consciousness. “I can understand exactly how a computer works, although I’m very fuzzy on how the transistors work,” Minsky told me during an interview years ago. Minsky called consciousness a “suitcase word” that lacks the rigor of a scientific concept. “We have to replace it by ‘reflection’ and ‘decisions’ and about a dozen other things,” he said. “So instead of talking about the mystery of consciousness, let‘s talk about the 20 or 30 really important mental processes that are involved. And when you’re all done, somebody says, ‘Well, what about consciousness?’ and you say, ‘Oh, that’s what people wasted their time on in the 20th century.‘ ”↳But the study of consciousness has not gone the way Minsky had hoped. It‘s now a cottage industry in neuroscience labs and a staple of big-think conferences around the world. Hameroff is one of the driving forces behind this current enthusiasm. For years he and Chalmers have run the biennial “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference that features dozens of speakers, ranging from hardcore scientists to New Age guru Deepak Chopra and lucid dream expert Stephen LaBerge. Hameroff‘s connection to Penrose also goes back decades. He first contacted Penrose after reading The Emperor‘s New Mind, suggesting he might have the missing biological component that would complement Penrose‘s ideas about the physics of consciousness.

      人工智能之父马文·明斯基(Marvin Minsky)曾经提出过一个著名的说法,人类大脑只不过是「一台用肉做的计算机」。

      明斯基这一论断迫使彭罗斯很快写出了《皇帝新脑》,并在书中指出人类的思维永远不可能被机器模仿。这本书给人的感觉就好像跟着作者进行了一次关于意识非算法性质的脑内实验,以及为什么我们只能通过理解哥德尔定理和量子物理学来理解人类的意识。

      已故于 2016 年的明斯基代表着另外一种截然不同观点,与彭罗斯对意识根源的探索形成了鲜明对比。在很多年前的一次采访中,明斯基曾经告诉笔者,「虽然我完全搞不懂晶体管的工作原理,但我能准确地理解计算机的工作原理。」

      明斯基曾经将意识称为一种「皮包词语」,正因为它缺乏科学概念所必需的严谨性。「我们必须要用反思(Reflection)或者决定(Decisions)这样的词来替换意识一词,」明斯基说,「这样一来,与其讨论意识的神秘面纱,我们不如讨论一下意识过程中涉及到的 20 到 30 个重要的心理历程。当你真的完成了所有这些工作后,如果还有人问道,『那什么是意识呢?』你就可以回答说,『那玩意不过是 20 世纪时人类浪费时间的一种方式。』」

      中文译文来自微信公众号「利维坦(liweitan2014)」2020 年的推送「意识无法被计算吗?

    2. Penrose‘s theory promises a deeper level of explanation. He starts with the premise that consciousness is not computational, and it’s beyond anything that neuroscience, biology, or physics can now explain. “We need a major revolution in our understanding of the physical world in order to accommodate consciousness,“ Penrose told me in a recent interview. ”The most likely place, if we‘re not going to go outside physics altogether, is in this big unknown—namely, making sense of quantum mechanics.“↳ Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now. He draws on the basic properties of quantum computing, in which bits (qubits) of information can be in multiple states—for instance, in the “on” or “off” position—at the same time. These quantum states exist simultaneously—the “superposition”—before coalescing into a single, almost instantaneous, calculation. Quantum coherence occurs when a huge number of things—say, a whole system of electrons—act together in one quantum state.↳It was Hameroff‘s idea that quantum coherence happens in microtubules, protein structures inside the brain’s neurons. And what are microtubules, you ask? They are tubular structures inside eukaryotic cells (part of the cytoskeleton) that play a role in determining the cell‘s shape, as well as its movements, which includes cell division—separation of chromosomes during mitosis. Hameroff suggests that microtubules are the quantum device that Penrose had been looking for in his theory. In neurons, microtubules help control the strength of synaptic connections, and their tube-like shape might protect them from the surrounding noise of the larger neuron. The microtubules‘ symmetry and lattice structure are of particular interest to Penrose. He believes “this reeks of something quantum mechanical.” ↳Still, you‘d need more than just a continuous flood of random moments of quantum coherence to have any impact on consciousness. The process would need to be structured, or orchestrated, in some way so we can make conscious choices. In the Penrose-Hameroff theory of Orchestrated Objective Reduction, known as Orch-OR, these moments of conscious awareness are orchestrated by the microtubules in our brains, which—they believe—have the capacity to store and process information and memory.↳“Objective Reduction” refers to Penrose‘s ideas about quantum gravity—how superposition applies to different spacetime geometries—which he regards as a still-undiscovered theory in physics. All of this is an impossibly ambitious theory that draws on Penrose’s thinking about the deep structure of the universe, from quantum mechanics to relativity. As Smolin has said, “All Roger‘s thoughts are connected … twistor theory, his philosophical thinking, his ideas about quantum mechanics, his ideas about the brain and the mind.”

      对于意识的本质问题,彭罗斯的理论提出了一种更深层的解读。他的理论基于一个前提假设,即意识无法被计算,而且它绝非神经科学、生物学和物理学现阶段能够解释的问题。

      在 2017 年的一次采访中,彭罗斯告诉笔者,「为了理解并认知意识,我们首先要经历一次对于物理世界的巨大认知变革。至于那个可以研究意识本质的领域,如果我们不打算完全脱离物理学范畴的话,那么该领域最有可能一直存在于那个巨大的谜题中,换句话说,我们首先要解开量子物理的谜题。」

      彭罗斯将量子计算的基本特性吸收到他的理论中,即每一比特的信息,即量子位(Qubit)可以同时表现为多种状态,比如同时既是「激活」的,又是「未激活」的。在一次几乎是瞬间完成的计算之前,这些量子态(Quantum States)并未聚合(Coalescing),而是同时存在的,即叠加态(Ssuperposition)。而量子相干性(Quantum Coherence)只有在大量事件在量子态下同时发生的时候才会出现——比如某系统中的大量电子相互作用。

      对此,哈默洛夫认为量子相干性发生于微管(Microtubule)中,这是一种大脑神经元内部的蛋白质结构。也许读者会好奇所谓微管到底是什么东西:它们是存在于真核细胞中的管状结构,可以把它看成是细胞骨架(Cytoskeleton)的一部分,它们可以在细胞活动时发挥决定性作用,这些细胞活动也包括细胞分裂在内,比如在有丝分裂时决定染色体的分离。

      哈默洛夫认为,这些微管就是彭罗斯一直在为自己理论寻找的一种「量子装置」。在神经元中,微管可以帮助控制突触的连接强度,而它们管状的结构可以帮助它们免受周围更大的神经元带来的噪音影响。这些微管的对称、晶格结构恰恰是彭罗斯最感兴趣的。他相信这样的特征「散发着某种量子物理的气味」。

      不过,想要对意识产生任何影响,你需要的不仅仅是随机且持续发生的量子相干性事件。这个过程首先要经过某种方式重组,或者重新经过精心的编排,人类正是因为这一重组过程才能做出有意识的选择。在彭罗斯与哈默洛夫提出的协同客观崩现(Orchestrated Objective Reduction,简称「Orch-OR」)理论中,他们认为人类大脑中的微管会精密编排、操纵这些有意识的瞬间,而正是这样的瞬间给了人脑处理信息并存储记忆的能力。

      所谓「客观崩现」的概念则要涉及到彭罗斯对量子引力——即叠加态如何应用于不同的多个时空几何结构——方面的观点,他也把该理论视为目前物理学尚未发现的理论。然而所有这一切都是一个不可能被验证的、野心勃勃的假说,这个假说不过是借鉴了彭罗斯在量子力学领域和相对论领域对宇宙深层结构的思考。正如斯莫林说过的另一句话:「罗杰的所有观点都是相互勾连的扭量理论(Twistor Theory),无论是他的哲学思想、那些关于量子力学的观点,还是关于人类大脑与心灵的观点。」

      中文译文来自微信公众号「利维坦(liweitan2014)」2020 年的推送「意识无法被计算吗?

      • for: entanglement, consciousness
      • comment
        • interesting question to ask:
          • based on quantum theory, how does consciousness explain quantum mechanics?
  14. Jul 2023
    1. In the West, the primary impact of the idea has been on literature rather than science: "stream of consciousness as a narrative mode" means writing in a way that attempts to portray the moment-to-moment thoughts and experiences of a character. This technique perhaps had its beginnings in the monologues of Shakespeare's plays and reached its fullest development in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, although it has also been used by many other noted writers.[184]

      Using stream of consciousness for writing, as a narrative form (for me, this portrays more authenticity, maybe even a way to communicate inspirations as it first strook the person, without filter).

    2. Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence.[1]

      Definition of consciousness

    1. Has anybody or could anybody ever have   the experience of consciousness emerging?
      • question
      • has ANYONE ever experienced consciousness emerging from matter?

      • comment

        • what Spira is getting at is that there is a fundamental category confusion
          • deep down, matter is an abstract concept
          • matter is NOT a phenomenological experience
          • from this perspective, a phenomena cannot emerge from a concept
          • in fact a concept ALWAYS emerges from consciousness, not the other way around
          • the claim that consciousness emerges from brains is a fundamental category error that makes an impossible claim
            • that phenomena emerges from a concept
      • Title
        • consciousness is not in the brain
      • Author
        • Rupert Spira
      • Description
        • Rupert Spira takes the interviewer on a BEing journey to experience awareness directly and answer the question
          • how does consciousness emerge from brains?
    1. we're beginning to demonstrate is that actually contrary to our perceptions Consciousness does not become annihilated just because a person has just died and in fact Consciousness 00:04:49 appears to continue at least in the first period the early period of death the first minutes or hours after death
      • claim with evidence

        • Consciousness does not become annihilated just because a person has just died
        • Consciousness appears to continue at least in the first period the early period of death the first minutes or hours after death
        • Explanation
          • death is a biological process
          • when you stop blood flow to brain cells they undergo certain changes and will eventually become damaged
          • however the first thing that happens is that you stop oxygen delivery to the areas inside the core of the brain that modulate your sense of being awake and alert
          • the reticulate activating system various other parts and so it's very similar to the effect of giving a general anesthetics to somebody
          • if you give a high enough dose of general anesthetic to a patient or person then you basically shut down those areas of the brain
          • the person's consciousness looks like it's lost
          • it flips out of sight but we wouldn't say that person's Consciousness has become annihilated forever
          • we just realize it's gone temporarily and so when people first die what's happening is that oxygen is stopping to those parts of the brain and it's essentially taking Consciousness out of you and making it disappear but it doesn't necessarily disappear Forever
      • comment

        • could this be the reason in Tibetan Buddhism, there is the Thukdam meditation practice as well as dream yoga practice?
  15. Apr 2023
    1. Iain McGilchrist for my book, he shared that he views matter as ‘a phase of consciousness’ in a similar way to how ice is a phase of water

      Quote - matter is a phase of consciousness

      Author - Iain McGilchrist

    2. He began a process that would move past merely separating mind and matter, and toward a worldview that saw only matter as real. A contemporary of Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, went further and suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical processes happening in the brain. In doing so, Vervaeke points out, he was laying the ground for artificial intelligence:…what Hobbes is doing is killing the human soul! And of course that’s going to exacerbate the cultural narcissism, because if we no longer have souls, then finding our uniqueness and our true self, the self that we’re going to be true to, becomes extremely paradoxical and problematic. If you don’t have a soul, what is it to be true to your true self? And what is it that makes you utterly unique and special from the rest of the purposeless, meaningless cosmos?

      Quote - Descartes created the mind / body dualism - Thomas Hobbes reduced consciousness to physicalism - by claiming that thinking was an epi-phenomena of atomic interactions

  16. Mar 2023
    1. it is a mental construct

      Good explanation of what self-consciousness attempts to do:

      Self-consciousness is not something obviously "self-existing" it is a fiction, - it is ungrounded because it is - a mental construct.

      Rather than being selfsufficient, - consciousness is like the surface of the sea: dependent on unknown depths ("conditions," as the Buddha called them) that it cannot grasp - because it is a manifestation of them.

      The problem arises because this conditioned, and therefore unstable, consciousness wants to - ground itself, to make itself real.

      But to real-ize itself is to objectify itself - meaning to grasp itself, since an object is that-which-is-grasped.

      The ego-self is this continuing attempt to objectify oneself by grasping oneself, something we can no more do than a hand can grasp itself.

    2. The Buddhist doctrine of no-self implies that our fundamental repression is not sex (as Freud thought), nor even death (as existential psychologists think), but the intuition that the ego-self does not exist, that our self consciousness is a mental construction.

      // SELF CONSCIOUSNESS IS A MENTAL CONSTRUCTION

  17. Feb 2023
    1. around that same time i got a call from my daughter you know leave it to your kids and she said you know mom it's 00:03:48 just that all the problems we're dealing with in the world right now are insidious and um you know it came up last night siva was talking about the insidiousness 00:04:01 of the facebook problem and and this was an unlocker for me of what what does it mean for something to be insidious so i looked it up and i started to 00:04:14 explore and it turns out that insidious is defined and i think this is from the you know the oxford on the internet not the original but um that there's proceeding in a gradual 00:04:27 subtle way but with very harmful effects in other words there's something that's that's gathering combining in an unseen way that's leading to danger
      • comment
      • this is an example of how granular social learning, the evolution of consciousness and entangled and individual and collective learning takes place in a mundane way
        • another person relays an idea to us
        • it resonates with us by connecting to some point
        • in our salience landscape
        • in this case, caused Nora to look up the word "insidious" that appeared in the words of her daughter
        • and caused her to think of the meaning as something that starts out small and apparently harmless,
        • but gathering and combining in an unseen way to become dangerous
  18. Jan 2023
    1. Those who hold the second position, usually called panpsychism or panexperientialism, agree that all this may be true but argue that emergence is not enough.

      panpsychism: the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.

      panexperientialism: The doctrine, related to panpsychism, that all matter is capable of experience.

    2. Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating. It’s unpleasant to throw a struggling creature in a pot of boiling water; one needs to be able to tell oneself that the lobster isn’t really feeling it. (The only exception to this pattern appears to be, for some reason, France, where Gérard de Nerval used to walk a pet lobster on a leash and where Jean-Paul Sartre at one point became erotically obsessed with lobsters after taking too much mescaline.)
    3. Dennett’s own answer is not particularly convincing: he suggests we develop consciousness so we can lie, which gives us an evolutionary advantage.
    4. Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.”
  19. Sep 2022
    1. I'm going to just try to tell you as quickly as I can and in fairly straightforward way the story of how the human mind especially the modern mind 00:00:58 came into being it's a it's a it's a complex story but I think the the bare bones can be exposed rather rather straightforward matter rather quickly 00:01:09 my basic message is that what makes humans so different from other species from all the other species in the biosphere including our very close relatives the great apes is that we 00:01:21 build distributed cognitive networks

      !- defining feature : modern humans - we build distributed networks and we do not solve problems to adapt to our environment individually, but collectively - most creatures solve adaptive problems individually - some species form superorganisms

  20. Jul 2022
    1. i think we must bear in mind that any any sort of verbalization about reality um is dependent on consciousness it's not possible to have a discussion about what is real 01:33:02 and not have consciousness in the discussion uh especially when we are to verbalize it i mean of course any reality that is independent of consciousness is not dependent on consciousness 01:33:15 is beyond verbalization and i think the buddhist position is very clear on that and i think arjuna if i read him correctly it's very clear that the when it comes to the ultimate reality to um 01:33:28 it's something that actually we cannot talk about and basically all discussion all this course is very much uh within the level of conventional the conventional real 01:33:42 uh so this is a very interesting i think um a point that i wanted to make that i think i can also raise it as a point for the two of you to respond uh from your respective uh 01:33:54 perspectives um because if consciousness from my understanding is primary to this discussion of what is real uh and if consciousness does not inherently exist 01:34:07 right well at least i mean barry also talked about the different kinds of minds um then how does all this discussion about 01:34:20 what is real what kind of claims can we ultimately make about what is reality now i think i have a feeling that carlos comes from a different perspective 01:34:31 then barry in answering that question so i'd like to really point to this question about can we make any claims about reality and if so based on what 01:34:44 from your respective disciplines so that's my um my question and comments

      The question raised here is how can we talk about ultimate reality unless consciousness is involved? All discussions about ultimate reality must, as Nagarjuna pointes out must take place within conventional reality.

      Perhaps a shorter question is this: Does objective reality exist?

    2. the question you were asking was what is mind or consciousness so here we're using the words synonymously um and from a buddhist perspective uh there are 01:11:50 six what we call primary minds and then there's a whole slew of secondary minds and some of the more common systems include 51 in the secondary minds now please understand that mind like 01:12:04 everything else that exists in the world doesn't exist permanently it exists there are a few exceptions okay but essentially everything that exists in the world um is not permanent therefore 01:12:18 it's changing moment to moment therefore everything exists as a continuum including mind so that means there'll be a moment of mind followed by a next moment of mind etc 01:12:31 and the next moment of mind is determined primarily but not solely by the previous moment of mind so from that we can extrapolate a continuum an infinite continuum and mind is an 01:12:43 infinite continuum from perspective of buddhism and that means that we've had that implies suggests rebirth and it suggests we've had ultimate we've had infinite rebirths there's been no beginning 01:12:56 and so this then comes up again with the notion of a beginning creator if you will a so-called you know god there are some some problems here to resolve this um 01:13:07 and so mind is a continuum it's infinite now each moment of mind is made up of a primary mind and a constellation of secondary minds these six primary or the five as you read from nagarjuna the five 01:13:22 sensory minds of seeing hearing smelling tasting touching tactile right these five plus what's sometimes called the mental consciousness and that has live different levels of subtlety on the 01:13:34 grossest level is thinking if we go a little bit deeper a little bit more so little subtler we have dream mind which seems like these senses are active but actually 01:13:46 when we're sleeping the senses are inactive so it's just something coming from our sixth or mental consciousness it seems like the senses are active in dream mind that dream mind is a little more subtle than a wake mind awake 01:13:59 thinking mind and then if we go more subtle we're talking now again about awake mind we we talk about intuition when we're in intuition we're not thinking right it's a non-conceptual 01:14:11 mind uh in that sense and deeper yet our minds we call non-conceptual and non-dual where there's no awareness of a subject or an object so subject object non-duality so 01:14:25 that's kind of the rough sort of you know lay of the land

      Barry provides a brief summary of what the word "mind" means from a Buddhist philosophy perspective and says that there are six primary minds and 51 secondary minds.

      The 6 primary minds are the 5 senses plus mental consciousness, which itself consists of the coarse thinking (conceptual) mind, the intuitive mind (these two could be roughly mapped to Daniel Kahnaman's fast and slow system respectively), as well as the dreaming mind.

      Barry also conveys an interpretation of reincarnation based on the concept that the mind is never the same from one moment to the next, but is rather an ever changing continuum. The current experience of mind is GENERALLY most strongly influenced by the previous moments but also influenced by temporally distant memories. This above interpretation of reincarnation makes sense, as the consciousness is born anew in every moment. It is also aligned to the nature of the Indyweb interpersonal computing ecosystem, in which access to one's own private data store, the so-called Indyhub, allows one to experience the flow of consciousness by seeing how one's digital experience, which is quite significant today, affects learning on a moment to moment basis. In other words, we can see, on a granular level, how one idea, feeling or experience influences another idea, experience or feeling.

    3. let me comment on your quantum physics i have only one objection please i think it's uh uh it's 01:01:21 what you said about the two uh sort of prototypical uh quantum puzzles which is schrodinger the double slit experiment uh it's uh it's perfect um my only objection is that in my book 01:01:34 i described of course i had a chapter about schrodinger cat but i don't use a situation in which the cat is dead or alive 01:01:46 i prefer a situation in which the cat is asleep or awake just because i don't like killing cats even in in in in mental experiments so after that 01:01:58 uh uh replacing a sleep cut with a dead cat i think uh i i i i completely agree and let me come to the the serious part of the answer um 01:02:10 what you mentioned as the passage from uh the third and the fourth um between among the the sort of the versions of 01:02:25 wooden philosophy it's it's exactly what i what i think is relevant for quantum mechanics for this for the following reason we read in quantum mechanics books 01:02:37 that um we should not think about the mechanical description of reality but the description reality with respect to the observer and there is always this notion in in books that there's observer or there are 01:02:50 paratus that measure so it's a uh but i am a scientist which view the world from the perspective of 01:03:02 modern science where one way of viewing the world is that uh there are uh you know uh billions and billions of galaxies each one with billions and billions of 01:03:14 of of of stars probably with planets all around and uh um from that perspective the observer in any quantum mechanical experiment is just one piece in the big story 01:03:28 so i have found the uh berkeley subjective idealism um uh profoundly unconvincing from the point 01:03:39 of view of a scientist uh because it there is an aspect of naturalism which uh it's a in which i i i grew up as a scientist 01:03:52 which refuses to say that to understand quantum mechanics we have to bring in our mind quantum mechanics is not something that has directly to do with our mind has not 01:04:05 something directly to do about any observer any apparatus because we use quantum mechanics for describing uh what happened inside the sun the the the reaction the nuclear reaction there or 01:04:18 galaxy formations so i think quantum mechanics in a way i think quantum mechanics is experiments about not about psychology not about our mind not about consciousness not 01:04:32 about anything like that it has to do about the world my question what we mean by real world that's fine because science repeatedly was forced to change its own ideas about the 01:04:46 real world so if uh if to make sense of quantum mechanics i have to think that the cat is awake or asleep only when a conscious observer our mind 01:05:00 interacts with this uh i say no that's not there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that go in that direction they require either am i correct to say the copenhagen 01:05:14 school does copenhagen school uh talk about the observer without saying who is what is observed but the compelling school which is the way most 01:05:27 textbooks are written uh describe any quantum mechanical situation in terms okay there is an observer making a measurement and we're talking about the outcome of the measurements 01:05:39 so yes it's uh it assumes an observer but it's very vague about what what an observer is some more sharp interpretation like cubism uh take this notion observer to be real 01:05:54 fundamental it's an agent somebody who makes who thinks about and can compute the future so it's a it's a that's that's a starting point for for doing uh for doing the rest i was 01:06:07 i've always been unhappy with that because things happen on the sun when there is nobody that is an observer in anything and i want to think to have a way of thinking in the world that things happen there 01:06:20 independently of me so to say is they might depend on one another but why should they depend on me and who am i or you know what observers should be a you know a white western scientist with 01:06:32 a phd i mean should we include women should we include people without phd should we include cats is the cat an observer should we fly i mean it's just not something i understand

      Carlo goes on to address the fundamental question which lay at the intersection of quantum mechanics and Buddhist philosophy: If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear? Carlo rejects Berkeley's idealism and states that even quantum mechanical laws are about the behavior of a system, independent of whether an observer is present. He begins to invoke his version of the Schrödinger cat paraodox to explain.

  21. May 2022
    1. The parade is simply a display of collective consciousness, which Le Guin describes as Jung's term for the lowest common denominator of all the little egos added together, the mass mind... all the hollow forms of communication and 'togetherness' that lack real communion or real sharing. The ego, accepting these empty forms, becomes a member of the 'lonely crowd.

      Public life on Gethen is essentially godless, its official rituals having rigidified into lifeless, uninspired, static forms.

    Tags

    Annotators

  22. Mar 2022
    1. Psychologists call this mechanism activeinhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007

      Active inhibition is the filter that prevents our minds from being constantly flooded with memories and allows us to focus. It acts as a barrier between our long term memories and our immediate present.

      Is the filter behind active inhibition really active or is it passive? What is the actual physiological mechanism?

  23. Jan 2022
    1. Here, the card index func-tions as a ‘thinking machine’,67 and becomes the best communication partner for learned men.68

      From a computer science perspective, isn't the index card functioning like an external memory, albeit one with somewhat pre-arranged linked paths? It's the movement through the machine's various paths that is doing the "thinking". Or the user's (active) choices that create the paths creates the impression of thinking.

      Perhaps it's the pre-arranged links where the thinking has already happened (based on "work" put into the system) and then traversing the paths gives the appearance of "new" thinking?

      How does this relate to other systems which can be thought of as thinking from a complexity perspective? Bacteria perhaps? Groups of cells acting in concert? Groups of people acting in concert? Cells seeing out food using random walks? etc?

      From this perspective, how can we break out the constituent parts of thought and thinking? Consciousness? With enough nodes and edges and choices of paths between them (or a "correct" subset of paths) could anything look like thinking or computing?

    1. Simone de Beauvoir said that when she became an atheist, it felt like the world had fallen silent.

      source?

      Is there a link to religion and the connection and potential conversation provided by it that provides an evolutionary advantage? Is there a psychological change in attention or self-consciousness?

  24. Dec 2021
    1. But Wanberg sees no contradiction in fighting gadgets with gadgets. “Can you sit down for three hours and just think about one thing deeply?” he asked me. “Because I can’t. And this device helps me.”

      This feels like it relates to the ideas of extending self-consciousness in dialogue and dialectic from the other day: https://hyp.is/bBIVHmFPEeyvFMtzXQYYWA/docdrop.org/video/EvUzdJSK4x8/

      Is being in dialogue with oneself via their writing or notes an innovation that has moved humanity forward.

    1. the really insidious part about it is not the idea of the noble savage actually there is no noble savage in Russo's 00:54:51 discourse because his state of nature involves creatures which are like humans but actually lack any sort of philosophy at all because what they call do is project their own lives into the 00:55:05 future and imagine themselves in other states they're constantly inventing things and chasing their own tails or rushing headlong for their own chains as he puts it they invent agriculture but 00:55:18 they can't see the consequences they invent cities but they can't see the consequences so we're talking about no imagination

      Rousseau was perfectly describing the intelligence and politics of Donald J. Trump when he described creatures which are like humans, but are "rushing headlong for their own chains". Trump was able to govern, but completely lacked the ability to imagine the consequences of any of his actions.


      Not sure what name Rousseau gave these creatures. Which book was this in? Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men?

    2. there's an exception ah yes indeed there is an exception to that which is largely 00:08:28 when you're talking to someone else so in conversation and in dialogue you're actually can maintain consciousness for very long periods of time well which is why you need to imagine you're talking 00:08:41 to someone else to really be able to think out a problem

      Humans in general have a seven second window of self-consciousness. (What is the reference for this? Double check it.) The exception is when one is in conversation with someone else, and then people have much longer spans of self-consciousness.

      I'm left to wonder if this is a useful fact for writing in the margins in books or into one's notebook, commonplace book, or zettelkasten? By having a conversation with yourself, or more specifically with the imaginary author you're annotating or if you prefer to frame it as a conversation with your zettelkasten, one expands their self-consciousness for much longer periods of time? What benefit does this have for the individual? What benefit for humanity in aggregate?

      Is it this fact or just coincidence that much early philosophy was done as dialectic?

      From an orality perspective, this makes it much more useful to talk to one's surroundings or objects like rocks. Did mnemonic techniques help give rise to our ability to be more self-conscious as a species? Is it like a muscle that we've been slowly and evolutionarily exercising for 250,000 years?

  25. Nov 2021
    1. We report the first neural recording during ecstatic meditations called jhanas and test whether a brain reward system plays a rolein the joy reported. Jhanas are Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) that imply major brain changes based on subjective reports:(1) external awareness dims, (2) internal verbalizations fade, (3) the sense of personal boundaries is altered, (4) attention is highlyfocused on the object of meditation, and (5) joy increases to high levels. The fMRI and EEG results from an experienced meditatorshow changes in brain activity in 11 regions shown to be associated with the subjective reports, and these changes occur promptlyafter jhana is entered. In particular, the extreme joy is associated not only with activation of cortical processes but also with activationof the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in the dopamine/opioid reward system. We test three mechanisms by which the subject mightstimulate his own reward system by external means and reject all three. Taken together, these results demonstrate an apparentlynovel method of self-stimulating a brain reward system using only internal mental processes in a highly trained subject.

      I can find no other research on this particular matter. It would be helpful to have other studies to validate or invalidate this one. This method of reward requires a highly-trained participant and involves no external means.

    1. Some would go as far as to say and for at least the last twenty years, work is no longer a means to an end for us, it is our collective intellectual power that has driven the companies, societies, ecologies forward and it has come at the expense of our individual wellbeing.
    1. get the consciousness book by Rupert Glasgow for free

      Rupert Glasgow

    2. The original function of consciousness was probably to direct a mobile self that was short of energy to a fresh supply of food. On the smaller scales of life, you don't need to be aware to find food. Trichopax adhaerens - one of the simplest of all animals moves around haphazardly. 00:02:54 It slows down in the presence of food, and speeds up in its absence. This is highly effective, and makes the tiny creature spend more time where there is food spend more time where there is food than where there is not. But it never moves in a particular direction towards a particular target, and there's no need for it to be conscious of its environment.

      Primitive form of consciousness - Trichopas adhaerens had consciousness but no awareness.

    1. We are like someone who knows that a fever, a cough, and loss of smell are all symptoms of something, but has no idea about the virus that causes them.

      Metaphor to illustrate that we don't know the cause of depression.

  26. Oct 2021
  27. link.springer.com link.springer.com