Xonas Pitfall

To clarify, I'm talking about the relative self (lowercase self), not the total Self or total consciousness. I feel like there's a lot of debate around questions such as: "Is a fetus conscious?" "Are animals conscious?" "Could AI develop consciousness? If not through electronic hardware, what about AI built using organoids or biological neurons (wetware)?", "When does a baby or child become conscious?" "When was the first time you felt your relative self or ego forming?" When would you say a relative self, ego, or sense of "I" forms, and why/how? Is it dependent on specific areas of the human brain, or is it more about higher-order complexity, information processing, and the capacity for self-reflection? For example, let's say you could connect a fly's brain to a second brain that significantly increases its processing power, memory, and capacity for self-reflection. Would the fly then develop a sense of "I"? Would it become self-aware in a way it wasn't before? How would you even create, define, or measure that? I'd be really curious to hear people's thoughts on this!

Dude, I'm just being curious, calm down

Thank you! This is awesome

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with discussing science intertwined with spirituality on this forum. You could call the way you inject 5-MeO-DMT and other chemicals for spiritual practices a "scientific approach" and "discussing science." Science is useful in its "essence"; it's a methodological approach. Science is only not useful when it's filled with dogma.

There's really no need for comments like this 😅 I read Leo's comment, and it's good. However, I was simply hoping to have an interesting conversation about the possible processes behind this experience. For instance, what structures or processes in the brain might give rise to this particular sense of being a localized "me"? Is it something exclusive to organic life? Does metabolism play a fundamental role? Could it have something to do with our skin acting as a sensitive, adaptive interface between ourselves and the environment? Or perhaps the default mode network and the integration of different brain regions somehow construct and maintain this continuous sense of self? I certainly don't remember consciously "imagining myself as a human creature." I'm sure that understanding developed at some point, but I'm curious about the underlying mechanisms that allow this particular subjective experience to emerge in the first place. I'm also interested in whether similar experiences might arise in other forms of life, or even entirely different substrates. I was just looking for an open, curious discussion about these possibilities. There's really no need for hostility.

I guess I haven't quite clarified what I meant in my original question. I'm referring to that sense of consciousness or awareness of "Hey, this is me. This is who I am. This is my name X" More specifically, I'm wondering about the moment when "God consciousness," so to speak, chooses to localize, fragment, or embody itself as a particular individual, experiencing this specific identity for the 80 or so years of a human life. I remember having some sense of "me" around the age of 3 or 4, but that sense of being a consistent, continuous self seemed to become much stronger around age 7, or perhaps even 10. I suppose what I'm really curious about is why this happens, what processes might be involved, and how that sense of being a particular "me" develops. That's also why I originally asked what "parts," "partitions," or types of substrates, whether organic or non-organic, we should examine to determine whether this particular experience of localized consciousness exists. I'm specifically referring to metacognition and the subjective experience of being a distinct "me". For example, in people with dissociative identity disorder (DID), we observe distinct identity states or senses of self. Similarly, with conjoined twins, even though they may share parts of a physical body, they can still have distinct individual perspectives and senses of self. So I'm wondering what actually determines the boundaries of an individual conscious experiencer. Is it the brain, particular neural networks, memory, metacognition, some form of information integration, or something else entirely? And could a similar kind of localized subjective experience exist in other biological organisms or even non-organic systems? I hope that makes sense! Thank you, everyone, for all your answers! It's been genuinely insightful reading through them.

Super interesting! It keeps reminding me how intelligent nature is. Millions, billions of human "scientific" minds are researching, and yet we're still deeply invested in modeling and copying what we see in nature. I think I also saw researchers having to add actual muscle tissue to a robotic arm to make it move more fluidly and flexibly for its tasks, or even using a dead spider as a more efficient and flexible version of a claw machine, haha It's possible you might even see more "wetware" organoid neurons being used in AI to optimize energy efficiency and reduce power consumption.

I guess it's a slippery slope 😅; a lot of humans also just "copy," yet people find their songs deeply emotionally moving. I'm not going to argue that humans aren't more creative than AI. I was just saying that some AI songs can feel "as moving," and a lot of humans do just "copy" too.

You can test this theory by finding niche YouTube music channels and seeing if you can tell what is AI-generated. I've been fooled a decent number of times

To be honest, you can just flip the circle order, and then at the outer end have another circle layer called "MIND/GOD".

Happy birthday!!! 🥳🎂 🥳🎂 🥳🎂

I think another way to describe it is through the experience of having a genuine insight, "OH, THAT'S WHAT IT MEANS!" Imagine struggling to understand a complex problem. You can't quite grasp the connections or recognize the underlying pattern. Everything feels murky, fragmented, and unclear. The information is all there, but something about it doesn't quite make sense. You're trying to piece it together, yet the whole thing remains shrouded in this strange mental fog. Then, suddenly, you encounter a piece of information or have an insight that makes everything fall into place. CLICK. "OOOH! AHHH! NOW I SEE! NOW I GET IT! OH MY GOD! EUREKAAAA!" 💡💡💡💡 In that instant, everything that previously seemed confusing becomes astonishingly obvious. The pieces were there all along, but you couldn't see how they fit together. Nothing about the information itself necessarily changed. What changed was your ability to perceive the connections; to see the whole picture. I think you could compare absolute awakening to that very moment of insight, except amplified to an almost unimaginable degree. You could almost call it the ultimate Eureka moment. The biggest "AHA!" moment you could ever experience in your entire life. It also reminds me of those scenes in movies where the main character has somehow lost their memory. They've forgotten who they are, who their family is, or some fundamental part of their past. Then something happens that suddenly triggers their memories, and in a single moment, everything comes flooding back. They experience this overwhelming download of memories, connections, and realizations, all rushing back into place at once. "OOOH! OOOOH! NOW I REMEMBER! NOW EVERYTHING MAKES SENSE!" Suddenly, everything they previously couldn't understand becomes perfectly clear. All the disconnected fragments of their experience fall into place. Or imagine a movie where the villain has secretly been manipulating everyone from the very beginning, disguising their identity and orchestrating events behind the scenes. Then, at the climax, the villain's true identity is finally revealed. And in that single instant, everything clicks. "OOOOH! THAT'S WHY THAT HAPPENED! THAT'S WHAT THEY WERE DOING! NOW I GET IT! NOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE!" That's the quality I'm trying to describe with absolute awakening, except taken to an almost inconceivable extreme. The greatest plot twist, the greatest recovery of memory, the greatest 4th wall break "movie". Everything right in front of you has finally become unmistakably clear.

Agreed! +1

I don't know if there's an easy way to describe this, but I'll throw some words out there and hopefully something sticks. Extremely swirly, squirrely, hypnotic, almost seductive. Yet the trance isn't one that makes you less conscious or puts you to sleep. Quite the opposite. It makes you progressively more sober, more alert, more awake. Perhaps the best way to describe it is a trance that sobers you. When that wakefulness happens, it feels as though all the air has suddenly been sucked out of the room, a TRUE PURE vacuum. If you could try to imagine what a PUREST TRUEST, EMPTIEST VACUUM is. That would be it. Your entire visual field remains unchanged, yet the underlying "state" or "overlay" of the mind and ego, that swirly, distorted layer of perception, has been completely stripped away. A perceptual vacuum? The closest comparison I can think of is when your ear has been ringing or feels clogged with water, and then suddenly clears. That immediate sense of relief, when everything becomes perfectly clear and unobstructed, without any residual noise. Except here, it's happening to perception itself. Everything feels utterly raw and unfiltered. The words that constantly come to mind are purity, light, clarity, rawness, truth, and absolute unfilteredness. CLEAR CLEAR TRUE TRUE THERE'S NOTHING NOTHING. No filter whatsoever. There's this overwhelming sense that anything unreal is being cleared away. I'd associate these qualities more with the state of consciousness itself. - The mind, however, has an entirely different character. It's far more swirly, seductive, hypnotic, and almost mischievous. Constant reframing or recontextualization. It's as though the mind can endlessly shift the context through which something is perceived. I'll try to find a video that illustrates what I mean: You begin with one thought, but somehow it transforms into something entirely different. Before you can settle into that new interpretation, the context flips again, and then again, endlessly rearranging itself. The mind is playing tricks on you, constantly fucking with your sense of what anything even means, Mind fucking itself and then fucking you, yourself. - There's also a distinctly jester-like quality to it, deeply self-referential, recursive, and playful. A loop that continually folds back on itself, pointing right back at you. For instance, whenever you experience an emotion, the mind somehow produces a visual representation that captures it with uncanny precision. But it isn't quite mockery either. There's a strange ambiguity to it, as though the mind is simultaneously expressing the emotion, observing it, playing with it, and making fun of the entire process. Everything seems to refer back to itself, looping endlessly through different perspectives and interpretations, with this peculiar jester-like playfulness running through it all. - Another quality I've noticed is the mind's seemingly infinite ability to assign meaning and context to absolutely anything and everything. I remember one particular experience while tripping when a song started playing that, for whatever reason, I genuinely didn't enjoy and wanted to turn off. However, because I'd taken such a high dose, my motor coordination was severely impaired. Something as simple as reaching for my phone and pressing the pause button on YouTube felt extraordinarily difficult. What made it so strange was how my mind began constructing entire narratives around this otherwise trivial action. As I struggled to figure out how to stop the music, it started transforming the experience into some grand conquest. At one point, I felt as though I were a wounded soldier, desperately clinging to his last breath, trying to deliver some final message before it was too late. Every tiny movement of my hand became part of this enormous journey, filled with struggle, significance, and an almost absurd sense of purpose. The simple act of reaching for a button had somehow become an entire lifetime's worth of experience. I think this was the moment I "grasped" the relativity of meaning. And then, the moment I finally pressed pause, I snapped out of it and realized how ridiculous the whole thing was. Holy fuck. This was something that would've taken me a single second in my normal state, completely easy and meaningless; I wouldn't even bat an eye at it, yet my mind had somehow divided that one action into millions upon millions of tiny fragments of time, consciousness, meaning, and context. The mind can infinitely subdivide experience, stretching a single moment into an entire universe of narratives, interpretations, and significance. Each fragment can become its own world, with its own context and meaning, which can then be subdivided and reinterpreted all over again. Yet the moment you zoom out of it, you realize that this entire elaborate construction was built around something utterly "mundane." The ability to make meaning out of anything and nothing. More duality and paradox. Relativity of everything you find meaningful and making you question what meaning even is. There's this extraordinary sense of infinite intelligence, flexibility, and fluidity. Fluid, a lot of fluidity. Overwhelming fluidity. The mind can generate entire worlds of meaning out of absolutely anything, reshaping and recontextualizing whatever happens to arise. It has no bias about what will get "swirled" into its "trance/loop/spiral". Black hole. White hole. Anything and everything.

One way to define moving up is seeing connections in everything. Seeing Mind = Reality = Truth = Solipsism = Love = God = Infinity = Purity = Lack of bias = Selflessness = Nothing = One. The bottom approach would mean deconstructing each concept down to nothingness, but both approaches are essentially leading you to the same connection: All = God = Nothing = One. (If you're doing it correctly) Either you merge everything together into one through union, or you deconstruct everything down into one through emptiness, not-knowing, etc.

Exactly this. To give an example of a good contrast, think of a religious person who only follows, quote-unquote, the word of God in the Bible and sees everything in black and white. Either you're wrong, or you're right. Either it's this or that. There's no room for anything in between. You would call this a very rigid way of thinking. For example, "My child is only ever successful if they become a doctor," or "I'm only ever successful if I have children," or "I'm only ever going to be happy if I achieve this." Or making generalizations like "All Asian people are like this," "People only deserve certain things if they do this," or "This is always the best way for a government to rule," regardless of the time period, context, or historical circumstances. This type of thinking is very black and white, and you could describe it as more rigid or "stupid" or "dumb." If we take that definition, then the extrapolation would be that the opposite, which is the ability to recognize variety, context, complexity, and nuance, could indicate greater intelligence. And to a certain extent, that is actually true. Because you're recognizing that reality is fundamentally infinite in its complexity. And in order to account for that complexity, you have to consider a wide range of contexts, perspectives, and nuances. You also have to recognize that you can't simply assume things are a certain way, because you rarely have enough information to make absolute judgments. The more intelligently you approach reality, the more you recognize how much context matters, how many variables influence an outcome, and how limited your own understanding might be. Intelligence can be associated with cognitive flexibility, the ability to tolerate ambiguity, the ability to tolerate TRUTH / INFINITY. A lot of the time, people aren't necessarily dumb or incapable of understanding complexity. It's more that their own biases blind them to such an extent that they become unwilling or unable to confront truths that challenge their existing beliefs or sense of identity.

Heavy on this! Here: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/162bjhg/best_youtube_extensions/

It can work as a business model, but what a lot of these influencers are doing is nothing "genuinely new". We've seen it before with dropshipping, print-on-demand, crypto, selling courses, etc. All of these are viable business models, but these videos make everything seem much simpler than it is. He himself is not making his money from this specific business model. He already has plenty of products, has built his own brand, and has established a trustworthy audience that is willing to buy whatever he puts out. He's making these videos because they generate a lot of clicks on YouTube. They seem easy, appealing, and new, which is, once again, a classic marketing strategy. That's how a lot of these so-called "grifters" actually make their money. They'll promote different business models because those topics generate views and clicks, but you have to pay attention to what they're actually doing and where their money is coming from. You can see the same thing in most industries; take, for example, weight loss. People already know the fundamental principles of losing weight: calories in, calories out. But from a psychological and marketing perspective, people don't always respond to these simple concepts. They constantly feel like there's something missing, some sort of secret or missing piece that will finally make everything click. They believe that once they discover it, they'll finally achieve their goals and lose the weight. That's what the marketers prey on. They'll introduce a new diet, a new version of keto, or whatever the latest trend happens to be. The goal is to make people believe that this new approach is the missing piece they've been looking for. And yes, for some people, a new angle or approach might work, while for others, it won't. But the underlying principles don't change. The same applies to business. If you want to build any kind of successful business, the fundamentals remain the same: building a brand, understanding your market, establishing authority and trust, and creating a good sales funnel that converts. Whether you incorporate AI to accelerate your progress is entirely up to you, but these core principles aren't going anywhere.

I guess the notion of "higher purpose" is tricky here, because we're filtering everything through a human perspective. For all we know, we serve "a small" purpose just as insects do when filtering through corpses and decomposing organic life. Yet, in human eyes, we'd probably try to put a neat ribbon around it and call ourselves "cleaners" or "healers." For all we know, our energy and intellect are somehow being harvested, and in a hundred years, we'll look back and interpret our role in an entirely different way. There is nothing inherently "higher" if you look at things from any perspective other than the human one. If anything, to many animals and other forms of life, we're just parasites causing damage. I suppose that, relative to our own minds, we do offer a deeper understanding of existence than less conscious animals might. But relative to some alien species, assuming one exists, our level of consciousness might be laughable. The idea of a higher purpose or meaning is, after all, quite a human filter. It is meaning to its relative self, to humans, to you.

I'd love for someone to realise alien consciousness with bananas

I guess this is true of a lot of pop music as well, where artists flaunt materialistic values, conformist status symbols, status-seeking behaviour, or their desirability. It's all very red-orange in terms of the lyrical themes.

Exactly! I was just challenging this claim in particular, but yes, I completely agree.

Yes, agreed! But I suppose my point isn't just about having enough power to influence society on a large scale. It also applies to very ordinary human desires, like wanting to be attractive, desired, admired, have some wealth, often just to impress others: "I'll show it to my friends, my ex, my family!", gain validation, feel superior, etc. All of these desires can be done deeply egoically and selfishly, yet pursuing them successfully can still require tremendous discipline. For example, many people want to be fit, attractive, and alluring, not necessarily out of love or care for their health, but because they want attention, to captivate and manipulate others. Yet they often lack the discipline to achieve even that. The same applies to pickup artists. Someone might want to seduce and manipulate others for selfish reasons, yet lack the courage or discipline to even approach anyone. Plenty of people desire selfish things but lack the discipline to acquire them. Consequently, those who do have the discipline are using the discipline to be "evil". I guess the broader point is that discipline isn't necessarily evidence of goodness, just as a lack of discipline isn't necessarily evidence of good intentions. Someone can have deeply selfish, manipulative, destructive desires but simply lack the discipline to act on them effectively.

Some evil definitely requires discipline, I think? For example, if someone is building a cult, they will most likely still need to put in a lot of work and discipline to maintain it and turn it into a stable structure that can sustain itself over time. A lot of the time, discipline and hard work simply mean consistency and the effort required to create and maintain some form of stable structure. It's just that the ego is often associated with a lot of evil, and because of that, it can be very motivated to create and maintain stable structures that serve its own selfish interests. But that doesn't mean all evil actions are easy to carry out or that they don't require hard work, discipline, and consistency. Something can be incredibly selfish and ego-driven while still requiring enormous amounts of effort and discipline to build and maintain.

Discipline is neutral. Discipline just means consistency. You can be consistently good and truthful or you can be consistently evil and untruthful.