5 ms·

Counting the Components of My Consciousness

73 points by lermontov 8y ago

oceanghost 8y ago
This is something that interests me intensely. I had a drug experience once that "I" was a story I was telling myself about a conversation between a number of distinct drives or entities in my head, and that I could "uninvite" them from the conversation, or with discipline create or destroy them. I've always wondered if this had any basis in reality.
- iscro 8y ago
  That's interesting. I've never done drugs, but I'm very interested in consciousness and neuroscience. Both modern philosophy and neuroscience appear to be converging towards the idea that the "I or the self" is an illusion and that consciousness is a predicting machine. So the drug caused your consciousness or brain to create multiples illusions ( or multiple "I's" ).
  - theaeolist 8y ago
    Some fashionable philosophers and futurologists share this view, but it is not backed by any new factual findings. To me the statement "the self is an illusion" is borderline oxymoronic: who is it that is having the illusion, if there is no self? An "illusion" is by definition an incongruence between objective reality and subjective perception. And subjective perception requires, necessarily, a self.
  - oceanghost 8y ago
    This felt more like the splitting of an atom to me-- something that was previously thought was indivisible. You should alter your consciousness if you want to understand it :)
- schoen 8y ago
  You might want to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/28/book-review-the-mind-illuminated/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/28/book-review-the-mind-i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
  - oceanghost 8y ago
    None of these were exactly analogous, but they show that others are thinking along the same lines. Thank you, fantastically interesting.
Viker 8y ago
This reminded me of Jill Bolte Taylor talk and experience of her stroke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU
- kempbellt 8y ago
  Fascinating concept: watching your own brain have a stroke. "Oh, there goes my control of my left arm. Oh, there goes my sense of smell. Oh, language is nextgsnghghqfnvjznv" Also sounds terrifying
  - mettamage 8y ago
    This sounds similarish to a psilocybin trip, not the paralyzing part but seeing mental faculties (or likewise things) being 'disabled'. "Oh there goes my ability to speak English, and there goes my ability to remember, oh reason gone, what? Yay, whoooo, huh? What's going on?"
  - girzel 8y ago
    I had a migraine a couple of months ago that I thought was a stroke. I didn't even really have a headache, just suddenly had tingling in my hands, and limited vision. I pulled by bike to the side of the road and sat down on the grass, then called my wife. I realized during the conversation that I couldn't remember basic words like "library" (where I was going) and "numb" (what I was experiencing). I felt just like me, but I had like 60% vocabulary. That was one of the scariest experiences of my life -- not pain or disability, but simple loss of words.
    - kempbellt 8y ago
      I had a similar experience recently. It was also one of the scariest experiences of my life. Afterwards I spoke with my doctor about it, and they used the terms "anxiety attack" or "panic attack". In my case, it was brought on by a combination of eating poorly, drinking too frequently, sleeping irregularly, and letting myself become stressed out about work in my off hours. It was bad enough that I spent the following week in-patient at a hospital. That said, having three structured meals a day, sleeping regular hours, and not having my phone - I felt like a new person by the end of the week. Not sure if this relates to your experience, but the lesson I learned was: Take real vacations. Where you are not tethered to your phone, social media, work calls, PagerDuty, social calls, etc. You can just eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and take in the moment. Even if it is just for a day, take time to remember what it means to be human. Edited: for tone
carapace 8y ago
> ... how to build an artificial observer. Can't be done, not even in principle. > how to prepare my observer for the dissolution of my own mind and body. The observer is unaffected by death or birth. If you can give up attachment to the impermanent aspects of your being then death is a change not an ending. (This is the whole point of human life, everything else is kind of a sideshow. Less than one in a thousand ever even think about this stuff, of those less than one in a thousand will take it seriously and seek. Which is really really sad, because the path, though narrow, is not particularly hard. Avoid BS, seek Truth with persistence and sincerity. Do it every day. Eternal life guaranteed or triple your money back!)
- mirimir 8y ago
  Do you refer to ren or ka?
  - carapace 8y ago
    You're using Egyptian terms, yes? I'm not referring to either.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Yeah. Sorry. I mean no disrespect. I only know that stuff from Burroughs' The Western Lands, which is his take on a "book of the dead".
      - carapace 8y ago
        No apology needed, I didn't feel your question was disrespectful. :-) FWIW, this is a decent description of what I'm talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi#Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi#Self > Ramana considered the Self to be permanent and enduring, surviving physical death. "The sleep, dream and waking states are mere phenomena appearing on the Self," as is the "I"-thought. Our "true nature" is "simple Being, free from thoughts".
mirimir 8y ago
Excellent article! I've never had a mini-stroke, or at least, not one dramatic enough to act on. There are little lapses in consciousness, especially at times of stress, but whatever. Maybe just some subsystem crashing and rebooting. But his stuff on LSD matches my experience exactly. For some years, I got into the habit of taking maybe one or two milligrams, just before going to sleep. Usually a little drunk, and very stoned, with a full stomach. So I'd wake up, perhaps 3-4 hours later, in the middle of the peak. I clearly remember just being the observer. There was no self-talk. No language at all. Just observing. But not observing external reality, because those systems were also hosed. What I was observing, I think, were internal states. Maybe comms traffic among subsystems. But I really have no clue what I experienced, in any detail, because it was timeless, and memories are timelike. All I remember is being very calm and happy. And the amazing hallucinations, a mix of geometric and periodic (but less so than with peyote) and "organic" and flowing (but less so than Psilocybe spp). I also remember the process of coming down from peaking. As TFA notes, subsystems came back gradually.
- rabidrat 8y ago
  one or two milligrams?? that's about 10 hits. but you can't mean micrograms, since one or two mcg is below even micro-dosing levels. So I'm curious if it really was 10 hits (which seems like an expensive way to sleep!), or if you meant something else.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Yes, what you may call ten hits. But this was a long time ago, and I was buying LSD by the gram, for reselling. So it wasn't such a big deal. Maybe $10 worth. And yes, $10 was worth a lot more then. On the other hand, it was arguably a business expense, in that megadosing is a good way to check for purity. I was the quality-control partner :) Also, I didn't take that much of a lot before testing smaller doses, progressively.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
abeppu 8y ago
I have no objection to the idea that consciousness is made of many components. However, I think the interesting jump the author makes, which I'm not fully prepared to follow, is to presume that careful phenomenological observation will give us the insights needed to create a new observer. He mentions that in the course of meditation, you learn to "distinguish all the components of your consciousness." I think that might be "many" rather than "all". There's a lot we can learn from meditation, but I think these lessons are mostly about how to work with the minds we have, rather than how to create new minds. It's not as though centuries of serious Buddhist meditators arrived at a recipe for creating new consciousness. Why might the subjective, internal, phenomenological approach not be enough? Having a body, feeling your body, and using your body might let you learn deeply what it means to have a body. But if you want to build a new body, you'd better spend some time looking in microscopes and analyzing proteins and a thousand other things. The experiential view isn't enough. Objective exploration of the real world is needed. And setting aside how one should go about acquiring information about how minds work, is the question of whether we're equipped to arrive at an operational conceptualization given that information. He talks about animals, drugged or impaired humans and heathy humans as all having fundamentally different cognitive capabilities. I can do addition in front of a dog with an abacus, a chalk board, etc, but it won't conceptualize addition. It's not obvious that just because we have language and tools and symbolic reasoning and social cognition that our particular ape brains are going to be able to hold the concepts of how minds work.
ejz 8y ago
"It’s then you realize that your thoughts are not you. Thoughts are language and memories, including memories from sensory experiences. If you watch yourself closely, you’ll sense you are an observer separate from your thoughts." Wow.
unao 8y ago
Very interesting read indeed. Not sure if observer is needed at all to have efficiently functioning system, though. Rather contrary: it _feels_ the impact of the observer on external world or even internal states is at most very limited, if not totally negligible. Not sure as well if observer goes away in case of sleep or anesthesia. Maybe, just maybe the subcomponent responsible for forming memories is shut down and therefore there are no memories from that period. The observer could be still present, patiently observing the _void_ and/or snoring and/or _anything else_.
- raducu 8y ago
  Or maybe there is no observer at all, the observer is just the way the brain coordinates/integrates all the rest of the sensations -- a sensation itself.
superasn 8y ago
A little OT but this notion that the observer is not you can be a great revelation for many people who are suffering from depression. Because sometimes it's easy to confuse the voice in your head to be actually you and since it's you, it must be right! But when you disassociate it as a third person and maybe give it a name and treat it as a seperate entity that though lives inside you (or your head) but it is not you, you can start giving it the same treatment as you would give a negative or positive comment made by a third person about you and actually apply rational logic to what is being said by it (your observer) and even defend your position instead of just taking everything on face value or trust.
- ZenPsycho 8y ago
  Not that I agree with the article but that is literally the opposite of what it said. The article says the voice is NOT the observer.

73 points by lermontov 8y ago

This is something that interests me intensely. I had a drug experience once that "I" was a story I was telling myself about a conversation between a number of distinct drives or entities in my head, and that I could "uninvite" them from the conversation, or with discipline create or destroy them. I've always wondered if this had any basis in reality.

iscro 8y ago
That's interesting. I've never done drugs, but I'm very interested in consciousness and neuroscience. Both modern philosophy and neuroscience appear to be converging towards the idea that the "I or the self" is an illusion and that consciousness is a predicting machine. So the drug caused your consciousness or brain to create multiples illusions ( or multiple "I's" ).
- theaeolist 8y ago
  Some fashionable philosophers and futurologists share this view, but it is not backed by any new factual findings. To me the statement "the self is an illusion" is borderline oxymoronic: who is it that is having the illusion, if there is no self? An "illusion" is by definition an incongruence between objective reality and subjective perception. And subjective perception requires, necessarily, a self.
- oceanghost 8y ago
  This felt more like the splitting of an atom to me-- something that was previously thought was indivisible. You should alter your consciousness if you want to understand it :)
schoen 8y ago
You might want to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/28/book-review-the-mind-illuminated/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/28/book-review-the-mind-i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
- oceanghost 8y ago
  None of these were exactly analogous, but they show that others are thinking along the same lines. Thank you, fantastically interesting.

Viker 8y ago

This reminded me of Jill Bolte Taylor talk and experience of her stroke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

kempbellt 8y ago
Fascinating concept: watching your own brain have a stroke. "Oh, there goes my control of my left arm. Oh, there goes my sense of smell. Oh, language is nextgsnghghqfnvjznv" Also sounds terrifying
- mettamage 8y ago
  This sounds similarish to a psilocybin trip, not the paralyzing part but seeing mental faculties (or likewise things) being 'disabled'. "Oh there goes my ability to speak English, and there goes my ability to remember, oh reason gone, what? Yay, whoooo, huh? What's going on?"
- girzel 8y ago
  I had a migraine a couple of months ago that I thought was a stroke. I didn't even really have a headache, just suddenly had tingling in my hands, and limited vision. I pulled by bike to the side of the road and sat down on the grass, then called my wife. I realized during the conversation that I couldn't remember basic words like "library" (where I was going) and "numb" (what I was experiencing). I felt just like me, but I had like 60% vocabulary. That was one of the scariest experiences of my life -- not pain or disability, but simple loss of words.
  - kempbellt 8y ago
    I had a similar experience recently. It was also one of the scariest experiences of my life. Afterwards I spoke with my doctor about it, and they used the terms "anxiety attack" or "panic attack". In my case, it was brought on by a combination of eating poorly, drinking too frequently, sleeping irregularly, and letting myself become stressed out about work in my off hours. It was bad enough that I spent the following week in-patient at a hospital. That said, having three structured meals a day, sleeping regular hours, and not having my phone - I felt like a new person by the end of the week. Not sure if this relates to your experience, but the lesson I learned was: Take real vacations. Where you are not tethered to your phone, social media, work calls, PagerDuty, social calls, etc. You can just eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and take in the moment. Even if it is just for a day, take time to remember what it means to be human. Edited: for tone

carapace 8y ago

> ... how to build an artificial observer. Can't be done, not even in principle. > how to prepare my observer for the dissolution of my own mind and body. The observer is unaffected by death or birth. If you can give up attachment to the impermanent aspects of your being then death is a change not an ending. (This is the whole point of human life, everything else is kind of a sideshow. Less than one in a thousand ever even think about this stuff, of those less than one in a thousand will take it seriously and seek. Which is really really sad, because the path, though narrow, is not particularly hard. Avoid BS, seek Truth with persistence and sincerity. Do it every day. Eternal life guaranteed or triple your money back!)

mirimir 8y ago
Do you refer to ren or ka?
- carapace 8y ago
  You're using Egyptian terms, yes? I'm not referring to either.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Yeah. Sorry. I mean no disrespect. I only know that stuff from Burroughs' The Western Lands, which is his take on a "book of the dead".
    - carapace 8y ago
      No apology needed, I didn't feel your question was disrespectful. :-) FWIW, this is a decent description of what I'm talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi#Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi#Self > Ramana considered the Self to be permanent and enduring, surviving physical death. "The sleep, dream and waking states are mere phenomena appearing on the Self," as is the "I"-thought. Our "true nature" is "simple Being, free from thoughts".

mirimir 8y ago

Excellent article! I've never had a mini-stroke, or at least, not one dramatic enough to act on. There are little lapses in consciousness, especially at times of stress, but whatever. Maybe just some subsystem crashing and rebooting. But his stuff on LSD matches my experience exactly. For some years, I got into the habit of taking maybe one or two milligrams, just before going to sleep. Usually a little drunk, and very stoned, with a full stomach. So I'd wake up, perhaps 3-4 hours later, in the middle of the peak. I clearly remember just being the observer. There was no self-talk. No language at all. Just observing. But not observing external reality, because those systems were also hosed. What I was observing, I think, were internal states. Maybe comms traffic among subsystems. But I really have no clue what I experienced, in any detail, because it was timeless, and memories are timelike. All I remember is being very calm and happy. And the amazing hallucinations, a mix of geometric and periodic (but less so than with peyote) and "organic" and flowing (but less so than Psilocybe spp). I also remember the process of coming down from peaking. As TFA notes, subsystems came back gradually.

rabidrat 8y ago
one or two milligrams?? that's about 10 hits. but you can't mean micrograms, since one or two mcg is below even micro-dosing levels. So I'm curious if it really was 10 hits (which seems like an expensive way to sleep!), or if you meant something else.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Yes, what you may call ten hits. But this was a long time ago, and I was buying LSD by the gram, for reselling. So it wasn't such a big deal. Maybe $10 worth. And yes, $10 was worth a lot more then. On the other hand, it was arguably a business expense, in that megadosing is a good way to check for purity. I was the quality-control partner :) Also, I didn't take that much of a lot before testing smaller doses, progressively.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

abeppu 8y ago

I have no objection to the idea that consciousness is made of many components. However, I think the interesting jump the author makes, which I'm not fully prepared to follow, is to presume that careful phenomenological observation will give us the insights needed to create a new observer. He mentions that in the course of meditation, you learn to "distinguish all the components of your consciousness." I think that might be "many" rather than "all". There's a lot we can learn from meditation, but I think these lessons are mostly about how to work with the minds we have, rather than how to create new minds. It's not as though centuries of serious Buddhist meditators arrived at a recipe for creating new consciousness. Why might the subjective, internal, phenomenological approach not be enough? Having a body, feeling your body, and using your body might let you learn deeply what it means to have a body. But if you want to build a new body, you'd better spend some time looking in microscopes and analyzing proteins and a thousand other things. The experiential view isn't enough. Objective exploration of the real world is needed. And setting aside how one should go about acquiring information about how minds work, is the question of whether we're equipped to arrive at an operational conceptualization given that information. He talks about animals, drugged or impaired humans and heathy humans as all having fundamentally different cognitive capabilities. I can do addition in front of a dog with an abacus, a chalk board, etc, but it won't conceptualize addition. It's not obvious that just because we have language and tools and symbolic reasoning and social cognition that our particular ape brains are going to be able to hold the concepts of how minds work.

ejz 8y ago

"It’s then you realize that your thoughts are not you. Thoughts are language and memories, including memories from sensory experiences. If you watch yourself closely, you’ll sense you are an observer separate from your thoughts." Wow.

unao 8y ago

Very interesting read indeed. Not sure if observer is needed at all to have efficiently functioning system, though. Rather contrary: it _feels_ the impact of the observer on external world or even internal states is at most very limited, if not totally negligible. Not sure as well if observer goes away in case of sleep or anesthesia. Maybe, just maybe the subcomponent responsible for forming memories is shut down and therefore there are no memories from that period. The observer could be still present, patiently observing the _void_ and/or snoring and/or _anything else_.

raducu 8y ago
Or maybe there is no observer at all, the observer is just the way the brain coordinates/integrates all the rest of the sensations -- a sensation itself.

superasn 8y ago

A little OT but this notion that the observer is not you can be a great revelation for many people who are suffering from depression. Because sometimes it's easy to confuse the voice in your head to be actually you and since it's you, it must be right! But when you disassociate it as a third person and maybe give it a name and treat it as a seperate entity that though lives inside you (or your head) but it is not you, you can start giving it the same treatment as you would give a negative or positive comment made by a third person about you and actually apply rational logic to what is being said by it (your observer) and even defend your position instead of just taking everything on face value or trust.

ZenPsycho 8y ago
Not that I agree with the article but that is literally the opposite of what it said. The article says the voice is NOT the observer.