I was thinking just this morning that I should write a book: Metaphysics for Computer Nerds & Computers for Metaphysicians. I am lonely in the intersection bet

I was thinking just this morning that I should write a book: Metaphysics for Computer Nerds & Computers for Metaphysicians. I am lonely in the intersection between mysticism and hard mathematical science. > And the fact that the hard problem has persisted for so many decades, despite the advances in neuroscience, has caused some scientists to wonder if we’ve been thinking about the problem backward. Rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, is it possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that it was there all along? Why do folks present this idea like it's new and radical? It's literally thousands of years old. Aldous Huxley wrote "The Perennial Philosophy" in 1945. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy > However, it seems to me that the obstacle one faces here isn’t a combination problem but the confusion of consciousness with the concept of a self. ... And this concept of the self is an illusion. Recapitulate the basic finding of Buddhism, This has been known for thousands of years. > it may be more accurate to instead talk about the content and quality of conscious experience at any given location in spacetime, determined by the matter present there. Now we're gwtting somewhere... > would two brains wired together produce a new, integrated mind? In a word, yes. You don't even need to connect them with a corpus callosum, the bandwidth and latency of our built-in hardware is sufficient: "Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual hypnosis." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106 - - - - Gurdjieff presents a world system wherein (I am paraphrasing and condensing wildly and inaccurately here) the human isn't born with a soul but must construct one during it's mortal lifetime or "die like a dog" leaving nothing behind. There are (in this world model) three kinds of matter: terrestrial matter (of the Earth), stellar matter (of the Sun and solar system) and interstellar matter (which is stable outside the Sun's heliopause.) The process of constructing a soul proceeds in two stages. First one "coats" the physical body through and through with a stellar matter to make the "second being-body", and then again with interstellar matter to make the "third being-body" or soul. This third body is stable beyond the solar system and, importantly, beyond the death of the original physical body. The second being-body is not stable on it's own without the first or third bodies. I bring this up because it's a fascinating (IMO) third concept besides "humans do not have souls" and "humans do have souls": "humans are born w/o souls and must make them themselves before death". It also makes a kind of sense that, in order for your human consciousness to survive the death of the body, the material matrix within which and through which your human experience carries on, you need another nearly-identical body made out of more durable stuff.