LastThursday

Some thoughts on consciousness. I periodically philosophise about this sort of thing. For me it's an odd exercise much like trying to paint a scene without being much of an artist. But much like an artist I have my cherished set of paints and brushes and my own style. Nobody else is any different in this respect, that is to say nobody can explain consciousness. And yet infuriatingly there it is in your face 24/7. My own particular style revolves around some heuristics I've stumbled upon over time. I'll cover the main points briefly: The word consciousness is just that. It's a placeholder for something that is actually indescribable. Much like using the word "river", most folks think they know what it means, but the actuality is not the word, nowhere near. In fact I can probably bet with high certainty that "consciousness" will mean different things for different people. It seems to be impossible to know if other people are conscious. Even if you could telepathically communicate or "see the world through their eyes", this would be no different from talking to someone. You would still be perceive their world through your consciousness; if you didn't then it would no longer be you. But all of this is moot, reports of this actually happening are zero. Say "I" became person X for a period (and I somehow went into some weird unconscious stasis), and then regained myself, I still could not prove the consciousness of person X. Even if I had person X's memories, they are now mine. It seems possible that there is only one conscious experience: mine. I alluded to this in my previous post. This also sort of follows from the previous paragraph as it would provide a solution to the paradox. In which case it's possible this is all for my entertainment. It also seems possible that consciousness is uncountable. What I mean by this is that counting implies subdivision, but conciousness itself is probably indivisible. One is in contrast to two and so on. So saying there is one consciousness doesn't have a logically sound base. So what then? Indeed. The upshot is that consciousness must be everything. If it is indivisible then it must represent some sort of totality. If there is another indivisible thing out there that isn't consciousness then it must be completely unknown to consciousness - and is itself another totality. Maybe consciosness is divisible and there are many versions of it. This would square more with our intuitions about what's happening here. Every person is (or living being perhaps) is conscious in some way to different degrees and aspects. In which case it's very hard to define what consciousness is, because it could be cheese to Mary and chalk to John. In fact may not even make much sense to have a word like "consciousness" as everyone's experience could be incompatible and utterley incomprehensible to anyone else. This seems counterintuitive, but could be true. Is the content of consciousness separate from consciousness itself? That's a tricky one. I believe, no. If consciousness is a totality, then even the content of consciousness is consciousness. Maybe consciousness is just content, much like the painting of the Mona List is just brushwork. This would make it nearly square with materialism which is just about content. Except materialism throws the baby out with the bathwater: it believes measurement and maths is the content. There is no observer and observed, they are redundant. Is there anything that is not consciousness? If it's indivisible then no there isn't. If it's divisible then potentially yes. Maybe you are not conscious, because what you call "consciousness" is no part of my consciousness, i.e. they are orthogonal and only interact through bodies. Maybe there is some sort of Nexus between what you have and what I have, which we both call the real world. If consciousness is insepearable from content, then is everything that could be recognised as content in fact a different thing? Is everything to the left of my field of vision a different consciousness to everything to the right? Are all these types of consciousness co-existing and interacting with each other? Is hearing a different consciousness from seeing? Could it be that consciousness is "tuning in" reality? This would be like getting a radio signal from all the static, i.e. finding structure and order in chaos. Maybe consciousness is that organising factor that cherry picks order out of the chaos of reality. Earth and people and animals and nature and all this could just be the organised parts of chaos that have coalesced from that original spark of whatever consciousness actually is. Everything else in that chaos has been "tuned out" and essentially doesn't exist, save for the occasional glitchy intrusion. Dreams are very much more in the realm of chaos and nebulosity: consciousness de-tuned.

Those things wouldn't even exist without other people. Anyone who says they don't need other people (in any senses) are utterly deluded.

Some sayings come to mind: Do not cast pearls before swine. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Do not give a gift to someone who is not ready to receive it. It's not the fault of anybody. It's just if you're lacking context or experience for what you're being told the natural thing to do is either to ignore it, to rubbish it, or to re-instate your own point of view. Human nature. Very very few people will actually try to understand you.

The way attraction works is that on average you will attract someone with the same level of beauty or handsomeness as you. This is regardless of how attractive or ugly you think you are. There will be outliers and this will be through luck or bad taste or some other exceptional attributes - but it's not the norm. The most handsome men will always attract more attention (from all levels), however they will in turn be attracted to the most beautiful people, so the net effect is that the most attractive people will be more likely to end up with each other and so on down the ladder of handsomeness.

That's it exactly. We have a huge pool of potential identities that we can develop already available. Most of the time we're just in our most developed and default identity, because it feels comfortable and familiar and our neurology is most attuned to it. To use a clothing analogy, say we have a huge wardrobe of clothes we could wear, but we only choose to wear a couple of outfits because we like them and they're familiar and we feel comfortable in them. We did we get all these clothes from? We borrowed (or copied) them from the people around us. Blush. We Brits can be notoriously badly behaved abroad. Sorry.

My take is that identity is nothing more than storytelling. Some of the stories we've embodied unconsciously over time, picked up from culture or experiences of pain and joy. Beliefs are stories we think are true. Identity is like a character in a novel, it works in the same way except the character is you and the novel is your life. The character doesn't exist outside the novel and we're a lot freer than a character in a novel. We're freer than we want to believe. Identity has a weight to it, it's hard to push around and shift, because that is what an identity is a thing that resists change. I'd say it's not so easy as just willing yourself to change, a big weight needs a hard push, or many small pushes over time. My feeling is that to shift identity requires not better storytelling (although that helps), but for the identity to become more flexible and playful. Part of our identities are also maintained by the expectations of the people around us - the social matrix - so there's also the resistance of that weight to overcome. We can consciously practise being flexible. We can be morose and quiet one day, joyful and extrovert another day and so on. That way eventually we can pick and choose which identity to "wear" that best suits a situation or our disposition or just for the fun of it.

I had better luck. ChatGPT says: "The lengthy passage explores a philosophical and metaphysical view of reality, suggesting that physical 3D space does not exist. Instead, it posits that everything is a series of ideas or concepts overlaid and interconnected in a complex, multi-dimensional way. Key points include: Ideas as Reality: Everything we perceive, such as walls, colors, or relationships, are merely ideas layered upon each other. Our brain and senses process and integrate these ideas, creating a seamless experience of reality. Dimensional Overlay: These ideas exist in different dimensions, overlaid exponentially, making it difficult to comprehend and navigate beyond our perceived 3D space. Brain Function: The brain is described as a hyperfractal structure that automatically integrates and makes sense of these dimensions, enabling new behaviors and insights. Stress and emotional responses arise from the brain's efforts to maintain consistency. Ego and Consciousness: The ego and self-awareness are seen as constructs that help us interact with this multi-dimensional reality. Fear, coping mechanisms, and the quest for understanding are all part of this process. Belief and Reality: The text suggests that belief can influence physical reality, and that ideas have objective existence as dimensions. The interconnectedness of ideas and the physical manifestation of neurons in the brain are highlighted. Spiritual and Mystical Elements: The passage touches on themes of awakening, enlightenment, and the possibility of higher dimensions beyond physical existence. It suggests that love, belief, and imagination play crucial roles in navigating these dimensions. Integration and Expansion: The integration of experiences and ideas leads to self-expansion and unity with a larger, infinite consciousness. Psychedelics and other experiences can facilitate this process by disrupting old patterns and creating new ones. Infinite Possibilities: The narrative embraces the infinite nature of ideas and consciousness, proposing that everything is interconnected and continuously evolving through fractals and patterns. In essence, the text is a complex exploration of the nature of reality, consciousness, and the interplay of ideas and dimensions, emphasizing the power of belief and the infinite potential of the mind."

Instead of moving hands I prefer thinking about breathing. Seemingly I can willingly control my breathing, but it also happens without my will. Maybe will is a manifestation or signal that something is perturbed from its "natural" action. If I breathe without will, then it adjusts itself automatically to the situation, but any perturbation from that automatic behaviour results in me thinking that "I did it"?

I like to think about this sort of thing in terms of a triangle of causation. The points of the triangle are the events, the edges are the direction of causation. Each edge can have a direction which implies that one event causes the other. If two events don't cause each other, then there is no direction of causation. An event is something like: hand moving or conscious intent or automatic imagination. So, how many ways are there to draw this triangle? Quite a few, and each represents a different way of seeing things. Some combinations are: Conscious Intent (CI) causes the hand to move (HM) - automatic imagination (AI) does not cause anything. AI causes CI which causes HM. HM causes CI (i.e. you move your hand and attribute it to conscious intent after the fact), again AI does not cause anything. AI causes HM which then causes CI. AI causes both CI and HM simultaneously - this is interesting because it gives automatic imagination all control. AI, CI and HM are all independent and do not cause each other. My favourite case. This implies that reality is simply one big coincidence. Maybe every time your hand moves and you have a conscious intent, they just so happen to line up by luck not by causation. So as you can see you could argue for any one of these triangles of causation as being true.

If I had more than 24 hours, I would like to go and sit in a small sandy cove on Rakiura and watch the sea and dig my fingers into the sand. But I've only got 2 hours - in which case I'd like to listen to some beautiful music and write a small personal note to each person I know and why I love them. Call me a (dead) soppy romantic.

For sure it's a gross simplification. Still it's a interesting exercise to try and come up with some sort of explanation, I find it totally fascinating. To use an IT analogy: I see it like software (soul) being on hardware (body). For most people, there's one integrated program running albeit it's made up of lots of different parts. But in the video there are two well delineated programs running simultaneously. The operating system engages one or the other program mutually exclusively, although the two appear to share some information between them. They're definitely not acting in my opinion - although I would say there are strong parallels with acting. We are well able to learn to take on different personas. The fact that we can do this at all (i.e. the average person), indicates that different personas can inhabit the same body or at the very least different traits are expressed in different situations. I just think the video shows an extreme case of this. I do think that the social pressure to be "one person" shouldn't be underestimated. But you're right even in the privacy of my own home I'm still feel like one person, even if I were to express different things than I would in public. Cool post, I'll watch the rest of the videos.

I totally agree. I walk daily at least a couple of miles. I find walking forces me into a different mental state because my surroundings are constantly changing, and I'm using my body differently. I can then begin to focus outwards instead of inwards and I can be more present and meditative. I've also used walking to shut off my internal dialogue completely when I want to. And there's the obvious health benefits too - win win.

@aurum it's striking in that it's unusual for sure. My working theory is that the feeling of being one undivided individual is only a "convenience" for others socially, and so it is more habit than anything else. I think we're born without much of an identity and we grow an identity over time by copying others: mostly parents and siblings to start with. In that sense we are a pastiche of others identities' filtered through our own biology and perceptions (nothing is really ours). All those bits of identity get strung together and we say we have a "soul" or more rightly a "unique identity" that belongs to us. But there is no limitation in practice that says we must have one overarching identity, and so we get the situation in the video. Indeed, we can have bits of our identity that are in constant conflict with each other. I think the social aspect of identity has a strong influence here. People expect us to be consistent and roughly the "same person" over time because it makes for a lot smoother social interaction - we need to maintain mental models of others' identities and personalities and this is cognitively very difficult. It's a lot lot simpler if each person has one unique identity.

It's hard not to take the (my) conscious experience personally. It's all so very real isn't it? Deadly serious in fact. I seem inseperable from it too like the very notion of me is actual consciousness itself. Conventionally and according to others I end and begin between my head and my toes. However the closer and closer I look the less so it seems like that - others are wrong - it just simply isn't my experience. If I put on coloured glasses then the world seems yellow, no matter where I look. Likewise everywhere I look, touch and feel, the world is tainted and tinted with my essence. Maybe it's all the time I've spent in my own experience without others to tell me where I am constantly. It's allowed me to expand outwards and ooze into everything - where I always was - and I have resettled somewhat back into my natural state. The question naturally arises: is this world of my own doing? If I'm diffuse and absorbed into the very fabric of (my) existence then I must be existence iself. Like a nearly forgotten dream I remember the first time I became aware of this world, the first thing I saw was my mother. I strongly suspect I was the last person she saw before she passed away. The world I see around me is one of beautiful reflective symmetry. People and places, sounds and memories keep reappearing reflected in uncountable ways and juxtapositions. What makes this world familiar, and mine, are those reflections. They're all from that first image fractured and splintered indefinitely. That first image was always me. I often idly wonder what it would be to play a practical joke on a friend. One day in idle chit chat I stop time itself - only for me and him to still be animated. What would be his reaction? Would it occur to him that I was source of reality itself, or would he think some lesser thought? Would I terrify him for ever more and fracture his reality. Would he think me the best thing since sliced bread, some sort of trickster or angel. Why him? Because he is the most atheistic person I know. Idle daydreams only. I would only be terrifying myself in the end, and so the world keeps having its order and balance - whilst I keep up the prim pretense that I'm only in the world and not of it. If the tables were turned and I was approached by Jesus himself would I likewise point and call him a trickster or worse an imposter or simply just wrong? What if all this were a trick of the light and I was invented by this so called Jesus because he is the sole progenitor of my reality? Surely I'm deluded: I have no powers to speak of, other than to type with my fingers and create worlds that way only. There is no proof I am reality itself. It's possible there will be a break in this continuity of reality and when I finally die, this reality will die with me, only to be replaced with God knows what. Only then will I stop being intertwined with reality and the new reality it can go its own way.

Time and space are similar. Without space everything would be concentrated into a point or a singularity if you want. There would be no "room" for anything to exist in. The same for time. Without time everything would happen at once. There would be no "room" for stuff to happen in. I imagine that is what being God would be like: a singularity without space or time, everything would be "known", but it would also be a kind of "nothingness".

I had a few nitpicking epistemology questions: This presuposes that a mind is the product of the body. Is it? Is the mind in the body? How does the body convert itself into mind? How is it possible to know this? What experiment could you conduct to find out? Is there anyone alive that doesn't have this epiphenomenon and how would we know it? If you lose consciousness, how would you know this? If you regain consciousness and have missing memory, why would you attribute it to "loss of consciousness"? After all, I can't remember what I ate for dinner last week, did I lose consciousness last week? How would I know if I did? Isn't it true that we can only ever have a proxy for consciousness, since we can't directly experience the consciousness (or not) of an AI? The same applies to the consciousness (or not) of other people. We only assume they are consciouss because they behave like we do (i.e. a proxy). Only because the proxy we use for plants (movement, growth etc) is less similar to how we behave, so we must conclude that plants are not conscious like us (if at all). Have we proven that more complex things are more conscious? Why should complexity be connected to consciousness? Are there? Isn't it the case that we can only know one mind exists for definite (our own), the rest is unknowable? This is the crux of everything you're talking about. We need to know what consciousness actually is before we can recognise it. What exact does the word "consciousness" refer to? When I use the word, is it even referring to the same thing as when you use the word? If not then we can't proceed at all. What is this? Are there different types of consciousness? If so, why? How should they be categorised? Is it possible there is something outside of the different consciousnesses?

Great example. Also, thanks for introducing me to Gebser's ideas it's good stuff. If I was in a similar position, I would start investigating all about health just for the sheer interest of it. And if medical intervention were necessary then you would already have a base of understanding or you may realise that you need medical intervention. There could also be a solution already and you just need to go find it. Adversity is the best place for polymathy.

In my experience this can be subtle at times. It can be as simple as making a decision, and having prior knowledge changes what you decide to do - even if you thought you'd never use an idea or concept you'd picked up. Sometimes ideas from one area transfer over to a different area.

We are not just our thoughts, we are far far bigger than our thoughts. You may have heard that thoughts are like the weather, always changing, coming and going. Like the weather we don't really control our thoughts, thoughts just arise from nothing and disappear back into nothing. Sometimes it rains and we get our umbrellas out to stay dry - we should treat our thoughts in the same way. Instead of trying to control our thoughts, we should find better ways to react to them, take care of that. In the end the ego is also just a thought.

Even the nunchuck table tennis being fake doesn't lessen his mastery.

This is absolute insanity. I especially like the nunchuck table tennis. Are there another people with this level of mastery in any discipline?

There's a kind of presupposion here that it's a problem, it's a sort of odd question. I have multiple interests so: I follow them(?). But. As mentioned in the video I do find employment a problem, mostly because I spend a great deal of time being corralled into specific areas, and I'm not always "up" for churning out or thinking about software on any given day - in fact I'm mostly not. The edge is taken off a bit because creating software is varied and is largely problem solving, two things which I thankfully enjoy. Of course software is also one of my interests. The only other "problem" I see is in sharing my interests, I basically don't - because most people are not like me. Although there is the occasional overlapping interest from friends in one subject or other. I think the tone of this is wrong. You can learn as well as do and be - probably all at the same time. I find great joy in learning and that sensation when I finally understand something. And I would say a lot of what I've learnt has had real life use and given me deep understanding of how the world works. That's something to cherish. @Rafael Thundercat do you find it a problem?

I feel as though I should not let myself off the hook. That is I feel a compulsion to get my life fixed. I don't really know what this fixing entails, but there is a definite constant nagging anxiety that isn't going away. However, the sensation is complex. I've always been a "fixer". As a kid I loved to take things apart and sometimes put them back together again. I was curious about the mysterious stuff inside mundane objects: TVs, alarm clocks, computers, washing machines and on and on. And of course when stuff broke, I could sometimes fix it, because I wasn't afraid of that complexity inside stuff. What's inside me? Well, it's definitely not cogs and levers and wires and components. The last ten or more years I've had an insatiable appetite to understand people in the same sort of way as I understand a toaster say. Naturally, understanding people is really nothing at all like understanding a toaster. In a way understanding people is completely alien to my way of thinking, and yet I have an itch to scratch. Some of it is the fault of my Dad who has been into the people thing a long time. Early on in my teenage years I started to absorb this stuff by osmosis - NLP and models of behaviour and improving communication and personal development - but I never really cared much for it. Anyway. My modus operandi has always been that if I have a problem, I fix it. Until that problem is fixed I feel a constant nagging anxiety. This is one of the traits that makes me think I'm on the spectrum. It's both a blessing and a curse. When it comes to myself however, it's quite possible that I'm working from the wrong paradigm. It's possible that in fact I don't need to or can't really "fix" my life as I would fix a toaster. No doubt there are low hanging fruit and if I paid enough attention those things, it would be easy enough to resolve in my life: girlfriend, buy a house, live somewhere I want to. Those things are "fixable" even if they're not particularly minor. When it comes to fixing ordinary objects it's really a matter of assessing the problem and then reducing the problem to its components. It's then a matter of identifying which components are faulty and fixing those one-by-one. There are components to my life but the difference is that they're all intimately connected to each other and bleed into each other; changing one thing here affects everything else. So I get this sensation of overwhelm whenever I think about fixing or changing any part of my life, there's too many variables and subtlety going on. One thing I feel strongly about myself is a dissonance between the parts of my life. For example if I were to stop doing the job I do tomorrow, I would not miss it all or the people I work with. That lack of emotion tells me that I am in fact doing the wrong thing. I spend an inordinate amount of time pandering to something I couldn't care less about - and yet it is keeping me alive. I spend a lot of time following my interests which are hugely varied. One reason I'm attracted to this forum and to Leo's stuff in general is because of the polymathic nature of it. I've been the same since I was small. Again my Dad is a bit of a polymath, but I've definitely surpassed him in that department! My sister too. Being this way excites me, there's so much stuff to learn and get to know about. I find very few other people are this way, it's kind of a sad and so I tend to not share my interests, people honestly just don't care. I try on occasion but soon give up. Sometimes people are even suprised by my depth of knowledge on a subject, people that know me well. Another component is precisely the people in my life. I half heartedly maintain a set of friendships. I find inserting myself into their lives difficult, that is to say that they are less flexible than I am. If I give it any thought it's a strange dynamic I have with my friends and my family. I think the source of that strangeness is me (this is another trait which makes me think I'm on the spectrum). I can find people exhausting and difficult to handle, my introvert nature shining through there. And yet a lot of the time I feel most relaxed, happy and connected when I'm with people. I also spend a lot of my idle time watching people via YouTube for example. In that sense I'm fairly extroverted. So there is a constant tension I have to navigate between these two poles. (It's not lost on me that I should do an NLP parts integration process here, as I've suggested to someone else on this forum.) That self imposed lack of connection to people is causing me sadness and it's ridiculous. When I went travelling all I did was spend time with other people, albeit with the odd bit of me time, and I was happy on the whole. I love my friends, but they are super conventional and normal. I've ended up being super conventional, and yet I'm 51 not married, no kids, no pets etc. Again I feel a very strong tension between wanting to be super conventional and not being conventional at all. I blame my parents (why not?). My Mum married a foreigner and moved to another country, my Dad is 78 doesn't want to retire and wants to go live in China (FFS). Anyway, these shenanigans by my parents have rubbed off on to my way of being. In some way, I'm playing pretend at being conventional when my very being is rebelling against this. Some of the reasons I'm standoffish with my family is that their unconventionality irks me (very big LOL here). My sister married an American and lives in Delaware and left her three kids in the UK with their father (grrrr). Another polarity in my life is that between my mental and physical self. I'm very much thought heavy in my being and this is strongly connected to my introversion. I get a lot of enjoyment out of thinking and learning, by myself. But I do also like to use my body, I hike, I play some sports, I play musical instruments - and it gives me a lot of joy too. I feel a strong imbalance however, I'm very much in a sedentary mental space most of the time. The balance needs to be redressed. In an odd way I also associate being physical with my more extroverted side. So. Some of the things I need to fix are all these bloody opposing tensions in my life, they're exhausting and keeping me in limbo. Some of things are to do with purely re-aligning things: the way I earn money should be connected to the things that make me happy: people and polymathy and physicality. But I feel I also need to live somewhere that allows me to express those things more easily, a rainy cold country such as the UK is not conducive to going out and being physical or wanting to go outside the home; it doesn't fit my more extroverted nature. I need to escape this conventionality, lack of alignment and disconnectedness it's killing me slowly inside.

I'm arguing for either/both. I don't in fact know if spontaneity of a particular type is inscrutable or uncaused. Conceivably, given enough information the causes of a spontaneous event could be elicited (scientifically or otherwise). But the nature of spontaneity makes this difficult. In general it is unknowable which it is. The above is just my opinion as to which of your points is which type of spontaneity. Except there is no particular reason why gravity is associated with matter. You either treat the system as a unity (as you have or Einstein did), or treat them separately and say that gravity is the spontaneous effect of matter on space itself (even possibly vice versa). Spontaneity here not meaning novelty as much as an effect that tracks the change in matter causing it (i.e. movement etc) in an immediate kind of way. This still doesn't explain why gravity happens, just what happens. Side note: gravitational waves are caused by a lag in this spontaneity - because the effect of spontaneity itself cannot be faster than the speed of light. There is an "active" kind of process happening between matter and gravity. Because you mention "sufficient similarity/proximity between experience and memory", suggesting that memory and experience are two different things albeit similar. I'm saying that they are the same, and if the essence of the mechanism is to be spontaneous then potentially it could be the source of all spontaneity.