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Through meditative and other techniques, I have learned that-- at least for myself-- that "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call entities, personalities, archetypal emotions, drives, and other things I am not yet able to classify.
My consciousness-- the surface most of us have access to, tries to make sense of these conversations and form them into a cohesive illusion/narrative in which I am a single "thing" of which I am in control.
A few times I've reached states where I can connect or disconnect these entities for a few minutes, or have a conversation with them directly.
Have you experimented with dimethyltryptamine before? I would be interested to know if a commitment to meditation could induce similar effects. What you have described sounds similar to common effects from chemicals such as N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Alternatively, could those effects be reached more easily through sensory deprivation?
> "I" am the result of a conversation of a number of what you might call entities
Prior to attending a week-long ayahuasca retreat in Peru, a psychiatrist friend decided to use ketamine to induce a controlled state of dissociative identity in which one detached aspect of her psyche could observe the machinations of another. Curiously, after returning from Peru following a mentored DMT regimen she reported experiences similar to those reported by oceanghost. Buddhist mystic types contend that one's psychology is a function of 'atmanah' (some sort of co-minds) interacting with a individual's 'prajnatma' (one's self) [Dhammapada text]. Interesting. IF valid (BIG IF) then nobody would be what they seem.
I've taken high doses of LSD and definitely experienced very similar entities ... Normally there are many types of forces and drives that are each "speaking to us" constantly... we just never perceive them as personifiable or distinct -- it's just "our inner voice".
My thought is that the brain stores something analagous to a kind of a big fuzzy hierarchical hash table between sensory inputs and nervous system response (pleasure/pain). LSD/DMT allow us to traverse these hashtables in ways that are not usually possible. (DMT especially...)
I have but I don't like psychs in general. I've had the best luck personally with arylcyclohexylamines.
A friend of mine who did meditation seriously told me he had heard of this as an "advanced technique", but I really don't know. :)
if the body produces dmt (precursors or sumsuch), then yes.
Carl Jung has written extensively about these "parts" of the mind. His process of "individuation", which is modeled on the alchemical spagyric -- take apart and reintegrate -- process,
can be used by people today in order to achieve similar results.
Moreover, what you describe can also be found in western mystery schools and traditions that go back hundreds of years. Terms such as "knowledge and conversation with the holy guardian angel", "crossing the abyss", "ego death", "ascending the Tree of Life" refer to profound, iconoclastic experiences that can forever shatter one's assumption of being a monad in space-time. Realizing that in one's mind exist various superintelligences, normally inaccessible, with their own motives and goals, can be quite distressing to say the least.
That sounds pretty scary, oceanghost. It sounds like you haven't actually confirmed yet what you come to know through your practice of meditation and how you are changed by it.
There is a huge, polar gap between the process and results of the meditation taught in modern spiritual practices (such as Zen Buddhism) and what Gautama Buddha taught to his students.
"Prayer is merely the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view" - Emerson.
I don't know why people experiment with bizarre techniques and experimental drugs. Western Europeans could just follow the Christian tradition to achieve better results more safely. People have been studying this stuff for millennia. Unfortunately we're so confused nowadays that people are gonna think of Jesus Camp and jumping around and shouting when they think of Christianity.
Interesting! I am not a nueroscientist, but I think about this sort of thing a lot (a very self referencial activity!)
One thing I've come to believe is in line with (what this article presents as) the paper's thesis, and that is the following:
Consciousness is best described as a highest order observation process that is non-continuous. Somewhat like a serverless or virtual instance, it can pop in and out of use as needed, any maybe many times a second.
These brief 'flashes' of highest order observation, when observed by the person, blend to form a continuous experience, but it's really just a smoothing function, and an illusion.
Consider how you can be tricked into believing something was there in a memory that helps explain a story, even when it wasn't. The mind is not as precise as we want to believe!
Consciousness is therefore not the root, and persistent experience! It's weird, but it actually ends up explaining a lot of personal life experiences a little better.
Listen to what you said... the highest order observation, "when ovserved by the person" is an illusion.
This implies that there is someone ("the person") observing the highest order observation -- making it not the highest order.
And to be an illusion there needs to be someone to fool in the first place.
Try to get that language out of your stataments and then see if you can say ANYTHING AT ALL about consciousness! :-)
It's funny how on one hand consciousness may be the only thing you can be sure exists (Cogito ergo sum), but on the other hand, results from neuroscience suggest it's basically an illusion and is not persistent.
What is the empirical reason to believe it's discrete rather than continuous?
"I do not believe in freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's words: "Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills" accompany me in all situations throughout my life."
Albert Einstein
This is the first time I've seen a quote of a quote. You just squared my hatred for quotes.
We're free to choose according to our desire but not free to change what we desire
I had an interesting experience once when I regained consciousness after fainting.
My first memory of that experience was a cacophony of noises, specific images, and what I can only describe as colored static. Then, over what subjectively felt like 10 seconds, I realized at some stage that I was ‘awake’ and the various sounds and images sort of faded until I had one coherent thought and then started to get awareness of my surroundings and then finally opened my eyes.
It was a very unsettling, but also very interesting experience and sort of made me curious to investigate if this is what people experience with hallucinagens.
Another time when I had to make a trip to the ER they gave me nitrous oxide when they tried to reset a broken bone and I had very interesting aural hallucination where sounds became chopped up/echoey. When the gas stopped I asked the nurse how long it had been and she said about 5 minutes but it had felt like 30 mins.
Both of experiences left me fascinated how malleable our perceptions are :)
I've fainted a couple times and I've done hallucinogens. The experiences aren't anything alike to me.
Your first experience illustrates neatly my thoughts about the article.
The 'cacophony of noises, specific images' (which you refer to) were generated by the 'fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in [your] brain' (which the article refers to).
But when you woke up fully the cacophony was joined up into the 'coherent whole'. That's what consciousness is, I think: the joining of things or processes together so that they interact and new things (new patterns) can emerge. These things can now be adopted and utilized by 'the narrative' and as a result the narrative itself changes.
So, though it works indirectly, consciousness is really immensely powerful. It's misleading to think of it as 'passive'. The mind may be driven by desires and fears, but without consciousness there'd be no material to work with.
Here are my experiences which seem to match what you describe:
> We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated “behind the scenes” by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains.
My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.
Another section of the article for a TLDR:
"we don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them."
> My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.
Maybe you should rather say "My awarenes is aware of thoughts about myself being the one in control, and it is also aware of feelings of discomfort that accompany ideas about myself not being the one in control".
Honestly, it feels more like we are slaves to our brains. It releases various chemicals(emotions) to push us to do stuff. Everything that can be automated already is - image processing, manual tasks, memory retrieval, face recognition.
Experience/qualia is only involved when brain wants to think. This seems to suggest that free will indeed exists(otherwise why bother with all this machinery), but it is pretty limited.
I wonder why we evolved with that feeling
If you enjoy this article you might also enjoy the novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, which is available for free under Creative Commons and has some interesting ideas about consciousness vs. intelligence.
Came here to say the same thing! Link: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
In philosophy of mind this view is broadly construed as 'Epiphenomenalism'. The idea being that consciousness (any mental activity that shows up for us) is like the steam coming off of a locomotive, just a by product of underlying physical events. Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of the train (brain).
Though this view is certainly odd, I've always struggled to see how it isn't true. How could our behavior not be entirely determined by the physical state of our brain? In some ways this strikes me as obviously true, if unintuitive at first.
Well, one reason to believe otherwise is the simple fact that we are talking about consciousness.
If consciousness were just a by-product (like steam in your example) then there would be no physical drive to talk about it.
Another common objection (just to mention), is the distinction between good and bad feelings, suffering and pleasure, etc...
If ephiphenonalism is true, those categorizations should be purely learned: otherwise it is hard to explain why (evolutionary) harmful things usually cause bad experience and suffering, while useful things usually cause pleasure.
For example: I could feel intense pain and suffering eating a cake, it would not count if my unconscious decision was to eat it. So either it is pure luck that I enjoy it, or I learned to enjoy a lot of (otherwise neutral) feelings.
>Our thoughts have no real impact on the underlying operation of the train (brain).
You mean your experiences have no real impact. Your thoughts are not necessarily qualia.
>Though this view is certainly odd, I've always struggled to see how it isn't true. How could our behavior not be entirely determined by the physical state of our brain?
Who says your consciousness isn't physical?
I tend to agree. I think of the conscious mind as more like an executive at the top of a huge organization, with like 10 different layers of management and tens of thousands of mostly unseen people beneath it in the org chart.
Every time you go up a level of management, the information that flows upward becomes more high-level and abbreviated, because that information is flowing to people that have to make very high-level decisions about things. The executive that everything ultimately flows up to is still exposed to a tremendous amount of information, but it's an almost comically simplified view of the whole picture. Everyone involved (including the executive) can only hope that every layer of simplification always retains the most important and most accurate information, to maximize the executive's ability to make good decisions.
Likewise our minds have layers upon layers of processing, from raw sensory input that gets collected into perceptions of discrete objects, up through the instincts and memories that decide which of those objects are threats (and if so, which of those threats should trigger the fight-or-flight response, etc.). That's not even getting to the more abstract processes that contribute to feelings of tribalism, thoughts on economics, religion, existentialism, and so on. Most abstract of all (IMO) is how the brain puts everything together to trick us into thinking that we can sense what's going on within other people's minds (empathy, basically, which gives us reasonable educated guesses about how other people are responding to us, while tricking us into thinking that we understand other people far more than we really do).
The conscious mind can only make decisions about high-level data that the endless layers of the subconscious prepares for it, like managers presenting their executives with high-level status reports condensed from mountains of low-level data. The quality of the executive's decisions are capped by both the the executive's own rationality, as well as the quality of the condensed data that gets passed up the chain.
A real life example is someone who feels threatened when they see someone of another race or religion. Such a person might be being rational in their own way, in that they're making decisions based on what they think are facts about the world and their place in it. But such a person doesn't realize that fear or other human flaws are causing garbage data to propagate up to their conscious mind. A racist's problem, for example, is that they're often just rationally responding to the garbage data that is being given to them by their subconscious. They fear people that look different from them because that's what's in the status reports that their subconscious prepares for them every week, but they haven't figured out yet that their own mind is an unreliable narrator for the world around them. We all are unreliable narrators for ourselves, and there's no way to avoid it- the best we can do is try to understand it and make our best effort to maintain a healthy level of skepticism and rationality about everything.
I don't pretend to know anything about any of this stuff on an academic level, this is just a view that I've come around to over the years. I'm just a lifelong armchair philosopher, and this is the best I've been able to come up with so far.
But why would the brain be the only factor? What about the rest of your body, and the universe beyond?
A lot of this devolves to discovering that you can't remember more than you can remember, that you do indeed "feel" your mood just as we've talked about since the dawn of time, and other ways in which what we think is limited by the machinery we use to do processing.
Shockingly, I neither chose to forget to send my sibling a birthday card, nor chose to have a song from Moana lurking at the back of my head. Both of these have had strong causative influence on my subsequent conscious actions.
In other news, when I consciously try to catch a ball, I am limited by the length of my arms. This does not imply that consciousness is an emergent property of my arm bones.
As Ramesh Balsekar once said "as long as you believe you have free will, then live your life as if it's true" (otherwise "no freewill" is just a belief and it's doing more harm then good)
Does it really ? I don't believe in free will, to a large extent, and this doesn't stop me from trying to do good. And doesn't the idea of "free will" also do harm ? Such as when people just discard mental health issues as "just matter of will" ?
Why do you think a believe in no free will is doing more harm than good?
Revenge and feeling good when 'justice' is served are seen in a completly different light if we come to terms with our biology.
I think a society that treats someone who behaves badly as sick and not evil is a better place for everyone.
Reminds me somewhat of the Sankhya school of Indian philosophy, which was strongly dualist but (unlike Cartesian dualism) considered thought processes as part of material reality, and spirit as some sort of "consciousness capability" which worked mostly as an spectator.
Right, with 'consciousness' reported behaving as 'sakshin' or 'witness' and the sense of 'I' (and subsequent not 'I') as a synthetic product of the nervous system called 'ahamkara' ('I' maker) supervening within the 'sakshin'. The Vedantin's goal was 'neti neti', or I'm not-that (empirical) and not-this (human-animal cognitive operating system engineered to interact with the empirical), recognition of which purportedly catalyzed a subsequent 'recollection' of a 'transcendent' cognitive operating system. If interested, see 'Advaita Vedanta - A Philosophical Reconstruction' (Deutsch) for a comprehensive overview of the subject.
There's long been good evidence from various experiments that consciousness is merely the publicity office of the mind; as Robert Trivers said using other words decades ago; but it's always good to see more.
What would be role of the consciousness if it does not have a manager role? Just justifying our behaviours to the others?
By the way - people have already argued that is not conscious, but meta-conscious that makes us different: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/consciousn...
It is argued that meta-conscious may reflect upon state of the conscious and attempt to readjust works in the other parts of the brain.
The experiments about people with their brain hemispheres separated indicate that conciousness is an effort of many mental areas to create an integrated and coherent mental state. For example, consider subjects whose verbal area is separated from their visual area, when the subject tries to explain what he saw he tell us an imaginary story. This strongly suggests that our brain is working hard to integrate all the information that it receives. At this moment, I can't recall any concrete experiments, but they are something like this: one of your eyes see a message telling that you kid is crying, then you begin to try to phone home, when asked what are you doing, you gives some explanation like my kid was acting a little strange this morning, I need to call to see what is happening at home. More on split-brains and dual conciousness theory at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_consciousness
But where is the science? It looks like shooting in the dark and out of frustration coming up with more stories and pretending that what? progress?
At least it makes for good sci-fi like Peter Watts'.
Mind is just one of the many sheaths of consciousness. Mind is a very negligible entity with respect to the vast concept of consciousness.
Anyone interested in this thread should read Godel, Escher, Bach, or at least it's preface
Any tips on how to approach G.E.B.? I have tried a few times now, but it seemed simultaneously too dense and abstract.
Also hormones.
Sounds like mimicry of the great Sam Harris.