Scientific studies grasping for explanations to spiritual things always give me a smile. This is the way. It’s about opening up to the energetic experience being conveyed through the medium (art, music, whatever). Has nothing to do with individual variations in biology or physiology.
> scientific studies grasping for explanations to spiritual things always give me a smile.
There are no "spiritual" things. Everything we experience is based upon biology and chemistry. Where do you think the "chills" come from if not synaptic firing?
They are the result of an infinite and ever expanding cosmos; absolutely no magic thinking or beliefs are required. I don't need to pretend that magic exists just because processes are complex.
What I'm getting at is the difference between subjective experience ("chills") and any theory describing it. ("Qualia", "no amount of simulating water will make anything wet", etc.)
Although personally I prefer scientific theories to describe reality (they are still the best/most useful), our experience is never "based" on theories.
I don't really have to interrogate why the term "spiritual" has absolutely no meaning wrt the genetic underpinnings of the effects discussed in the study. The study was scientific. It isn't complicated.
They were created by magic Gaia energy spirit beings,
obviously. Or God, if that is your desired flavor. Or the beings in control of the simulation we're living in.
I didn't know Sogno di Volare. It does work very well, quite intense.
I got me thinking... I've never taken any mind altering drugs, so I wonder how the experience compares. I guess that even if not in the same league, being "free" and without apparent side effects this is quite the "feelgood" bang for the buck.
The assumption that neuron activity == consciousness is incorrect.
A lot of neurons in our brain are doing visual processing. How much of it is conscious?
Writing this comment, I have very little insight into how I am able to create this sentence and then read it. Makes me wonder what's the point of being conscious anyway.
Blindsight, by Peter Watts, is a good, sci-fi fiction meditation on the pitfalls / dubious value of consciousness / self awareness.. if you haven’t read it, I would recommend it - it’s a dense, perhaps ‘dry’ read for some - but very rewarding nonetheless IMO.
Seconding this. I recommend Blindsight whenever the subject of consciousness—specifically lack thereof—comes up. It basically asks the question "What would it mean for there to be an intelligent species that was not conscious?"
Even more relevant now with LLMs (not that they're an "intelligent species." But a lot of people seem to think they are)
The extended mind theory takes the “neuronal activity is not the mind” (which seems trivially true to me) slightly further: not only it is not happening merely in the brain, it might not even be technically limited to our bodies and extends into the surrounding physical world.
So far whenever I read summaries about it I can’t say EMT exactly “clicks” with me, though I would at least lean towards our consciousness necessarily involving/extending to people in our lives whom we are in contact with.
Btw, from the threads's article, the personality change over transplant it's literally an episode from The Simpsons, but you, know, creators are actually PhD people, as it shows off under Futurama.
How do we know if the visual cortex isn't conscious? There are conscious parts of our brain that we aren't aware of, just as we are alive, but we can't be aware of how all our cells are also alive.
I think quantifying consciousness is a problem we are absurdly far from solving yet. Most we are able to do is philosophize about it.
You're doing that "we just don't understand the brain" thing that everyone apparently loves doing, I guess because it makes them sound smart? Asking questions like "How do we know if the visual cortex isn't conscious" is not the same as actually knowing anything about cognitive neuroscience.
> Asking questions like "How do we know if the visual cortex isn't conscious" is not the same as actually knowing anything about cognitive neuroscience.
Can you explain me how neuroscience proves the visual cortex can't be conscious? Why is it so wrong of me to ask that question?
You can invent an arbitrary number of meaningless questions, but it's not the same as actually knowing anything about the subject you're inventing questions about. Nobody has any obligation to prove or disprove any of your questions. You have the obligation to prove your claim (if you were to actually make one).
If I walk into a city council meeting and start yelling "Why haven't you greened the fish sun???" all I'm doing is wasting everyone's time, and yet I can then say "Hey, I'm just asking questions! They won't answer my questions!" as though I'm some kind of victim and the city council is some kind of mysterious evil cabal.
Similarly, the phrase "Do your research" is designed to signal that I'm the smart one, the one in the know, the one who knows what's REALLY going on, even though I know nothing about x, y or z.
We don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows us to tell whether a single electron is conscious or not, so literally anything can be „conscious“.
Well, I can provide a thought experiment I did back in high school... imagine a universe identical to ours, except that nobody was conscious. There would be "no one there" to experience it, by definition. So would such a universe exist?
These kind of trick questions are variations of the tree falling when no one heard it. They aren't asking "did it generate soundwaves?", they're asking "if sound included perception, did it make a sound?". It's weird to ask questions like these outside quantum mechanics, where observation actually affects the result.
> The most pronounced associated differences were observed with intake of approximately 2 to 3 cups per day of caffeinated coffee or 1 to 2 cups per day of tea.
Weird, tea is supposed to have half the caffeine of coffee.
Anecdotally, I never feel more awake when having coffee. I can drink coffee at night and sleep great. On the other hand, if I try to sleep too soon after tea I feel very mentally awake and can’t sleep for restlessness. Maybe Qi is real!
I was born to this world at a certain point in time. I look around, and I see environment compatible with me: air, water, food, gravity, time, space. How deep does this go? Why I am not an ant or bacteria?
Being forced to work is not much different from slavery, I would rather roll the dice than keep the status quo.
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