I have this fixation that our minds, including hearing. sight, taste, smell and vision our not purely the function of biological brain activity. For example, I am sitting here on the couch listening to music on my headphones, and I am convinced that there's no way the grey mushroom-like mush of my brain could produce these sounds in all their complexity, richness and depth. I muse to myself that consciousness and all its contents are beamed from someplace else, and the brain is merely a receiver. Now I know there is a correspondence when parts of the brain are cut out, and this can deteriorate specific functions, but that could be down to certain parts of the receiving apparatus malfunctioning. And no it's not true that science has explained consciousness. Far from it. My notion here is wacky, and I know I'm not the first person to think it - thus the expression "You must be out of your minds!"
My head makes one noise that I can hear constantly. Tinnitus. PNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG x every second, of every day of every year of my life. PNGGGGGGGGGGGG
Okay so anyone reading this will think I'm nuts but I've had out of body experiences that were real, utterly shake you to the ground stuff, and I know there is an astral cord connected to the ethereal plane. The material body can connect with the soul body and you can fly through the Universe. I think this is somehow connected to the mind and its temporal dislocation. These states can be achieved through Kundalini meditation. It's totally free and just takes a little patience and desire to get there. I am dedicated to disproving gross materialistic reductivist explanations for life. I'm not anti-science or technology but think it is essential to let go of some of the attachment we have all built up, and to foster a more harmonious system and grounding for life.Harrumph!
Far out man. I think one of the limitations of science is that it encapsulates and describes the world in objective terms, whereas our experience of the world is subjective. For example science can tell you what the wavelength is of the colour purple, but it can't tell you what it looks like. There is a gap there which science cannot bridge. A lot of people seem to have out of body experiences, which obviously can't be explained by the materialist view of mind. I think science likes to brush these phenomena under the carpet because they are so problematic for its' world view.
while wishing for something might make it suspect, to assume its reverse is equally unfounded. if there is an afterlife, or serial mortality, or whatever else there might be, then clearly the self is an end user outside of the brain+mind system.
You sound like a dualist, which is a philosophy of mind position that has been around for millennia. But Isn't the headphones you have on producing the sound? Your brain is processing the sound. I lean towards materialism/physicalism, but I think AI based on a map of the human brain would probably persuade me fully one way or the other. Actually being slightly concerned with human level AI, I even find that experiment they did with bees brains inside drones pretty persuasive.
That would be Descartes, right? I think I am more of a sophist if anything. Of course the brain interprets external stimuli such as sound waves, but maybe this information is stored in a kind of cloud as used in computing to store files, and are then downloaded when given the correct stimulus. Maybe some cosmic intelligence knows everything that is going to happen next, and plays reality out in sequence. Maybe some aspects of our mind-function are shared with the cosmic cloud, and can only operate in tandem.
Thus far I've always sided with Occam's Razor when it comes to consciousness. I'll concede that there is still a lot that is not known about how the brain and consciousness works but from what is known from study and experiment, has only been discovered within the past ~80 years. So this has not been an area of experimental inquiry for very long at all. There's practically no limitations on what "could be" conceptually, when it comes to consciousness. I've presented the idea before that there could be some alien controlling all my thoughts and essentially making me hallucinate this world and this experience that I'm currently having of the internet, such an alien is undetectable to any current means we have to detect it, whose to say this is wrong? There's various other ideas suggesting there could be simulated realities and stuff as well. I think all of these types of ideas inherently shield themselves from investigation or experimentation, because the object that we project control of our minds is beyond our grasp in any way from reliable study. So to an extent, it probably comes down to what a person values, if I take Magic Mushrooms do I baselessly think my mind is somehow connecting to a consciousness cloud, and then presumably a different part of the consciousness cloud causing me to get moving patterns and stuff just because I can conjure it up ? or is that the Mushrooms I ate are being metabolized, then effecting my 5ht2a receptors (which is known) and then eventually this alteration is likely effecting my V1 and V3 visual receptors and changing their regular functioning effecting my vision. (which afaik I'm hypothesizing this connection). I realize you are suggesting a kind of synthesis of the 2 notions here but what I'm getting at is at what point do we turn to the "magical" reasoning if there is a definite trajectory of understanding with the physical reasoning but it has yet to be fully verified? It seems to me that reducing the mind to the physical is almost a scary thing for some, I'm not quite sure why this is... maybe it's the degree of responsibility this leaves the individual with ? maybe it's isolating in a sense ? maybe there's a diminished sense of control or seeming lack of free will ? but... It's like as if you conceptualizing that you cannot wake up on Jupiter tomorrow is more difficult than actually going through the process and understanding why your body could not wake up on Jupiter tomorrow. Granted the brain is finite in size and sitting in our skulls which may make it seem somewhat insignificant, but I think it's difficult to comprehend a lot of stuff about it, such as the fact that if I were to count numbers out loud each second for the rest of my life, that I would die before I reach the number of neurons in the human brain, it would actually require several lifetimes.
Descartes popularized and structured Dualism but the gist of it had been around since Ancient Greece.
You should read Rupert Sheldrake, assuming you haven't already. Personally, I'm about 99% convinced that consciousness can and does exist outside of the physical.
I haven't read Sheldrake. I will investigate. Please note,I was listening to a lot of Hawkwind when I made these posts...I am often pretty quotidian too.
'A New Science of Life' is brilliant. Probably you may have heard the idea of 'morphic fields' which is introduced in this book. His last book 'The Science Delusion' is excellent and poses many questions. Many videos of Rupert on youtube, he also did conversational pieces with the late great Terrence Mckenna. Always surprised by the longevity of Hawkwind's music.
Yes am vaguely familiar with morphic fields. I want to know more. Hawkwind constantly changing. Dave Brock the original and remaining member. A constant inspiration for me.
Saw Hawkwind twice back in the 70's at the old Stonehenge festival. A very different era in a very different Britain. Sometimes, wish I had my time machine........
Consciousness exists outside of the physical yet is locked in the temporal? What a devilish thing to do.
If it does exist outside the temporal, that isn't to say we have much access to that level. Seems to me that other than claims of yogis etc, drug experiences, or randomly occurring OBEs we're pretty much stuck here in time and space.
