4 ms·

Someone ought to trick analytic philosophers into taking some of the more popular psychoactive substances, so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciou

by cess11 3y ago

Someone ought to trick analytic philosophers into taking some of the more popular psychoactive substances, so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciousness is to the matter in the nervous system and stop their embarrassing search for Holy Spirit. Also, the sun is clearly an anus: "The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun." https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/georges-bataille-the-solar-anus https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/georges-bataille-the...

taneq 3y ago
That's what put the final nail in my ability to accept Cartesian dualism. (Edit: The way psychoactives deeply affect the working of a mind, not the prospect of the sun being a butthole, of course.) Psychoactives don't just filter your senses, they change reality (your own subjective reality, of course.)
- cess11 3y ago
  There's still a lot to figure out but we can phenomenologically and cognitively grasp the structures of consciousness by the use of drugs and modern science, which leaves very little room for the remnants of christian dualism, whether as 'the hard problem', 'panpsychism' or the trans-/consubstantiation of the eucharist. Maybe there is a demon in my head giving me the illusion of reality being perceived as a projection on the cerebral cortex, and it's reliable malleability under caffeine, MDMA, LSD, cannabis and so on. If so, I find this model of better utility than going with vibes and prayer and belief in eternity and so on that comes with the descendants of christian dualism in liberalism, 'panpsychism', analytic philosophy, &c. Edit: Kierkegaard wrote quite interesting texts about the structures of consciousness, I'd recommend The Sickness unto Death as a start. It has some of his best jokes.
  - fylham 3y ago
    You might be interested in this well-written paper on this subject: https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/24/8/615/6275567?login=false https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/24/8/615/6275567?login...
    - cess11 3y ago
      Thanks, a skim says it's a pretty good overview of where the lab folks are at. I'll read it more closely later. Science moves very slowly and very fast in this area, slowly with regards to psychoactives due to stuff like politicians, fast in neuroscience where new technology has allowed leaps for decades, since the eighties or so.
  - taneq 3y ago
    > Maybe there is a demon in my head giving me the illusion of reality Me too! And yeah and if it weren't for that guy I could be a perfectly adequate automaton instead of dealing with this 'consciousness' nonsense. :P
  - knotthebest 3y ago
    I’m not sure how this would solve the hard problem. Could you please elaborate on that?
IshKebab 3y ago
Yeah I would think anyone that has got drunk or experienced post-wank clarity should realise that consciousness isn't a separate thing to the brain's physical processes. Still, consciousness definitely exists and is definitely weird. And I don't think it's futile to try and learn about it. It's just not going to be philosophers that give us any answers (as usual).
- cess11 3y ago
  Not sure why you'd want answers, that's the domain of religion rather than philosophy. I'd like to suggest comparing observations from Merleu-Ponty and late modern neuroscience, perhaps Bear et al, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain (pick a previous edition to get it cheap).
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    > Not sure why you'd want answers, that's the domain of religion Ha perhaps I should have been more specific - I want correct answers! And I want answers because a) I'm interested, and b) answers to scientific questions tend to let us make new cool things!
    - cess11 3y ago
      Are you familiar with the writings of Paul Feyerabend?
- edgyquant 3y ago
  You are making an uneducated assumption here. This is not a thought lost on philosophy or theology, for instance in Dharmic religions it is believed you are attached to a brain and your perception and thoughts arise from the brain: your eternal self is the awareness. Your thoughts, your “post nut clarity,” does not require that awareness (or consciousness) to exist and if anything the two are at odds with one another more often than not.
  - cess11 3y ago
xotesos 3y ago
I think it is even beyond this. Most of the time humans are talking about the wonders of polywater to each other. A giant game of telephone telling each other complete nonsense. "The soviets have found a new form of water that freezes at –40°F, pass it on!".
edgyquant 3y ago
I’d say most of them have and these substances prove nothing close to what you’re suggesting. Yes they hint that the whole universe, at least our ideas of it, being an illusion made up by your brain. This isn’t consciousness though, your awareness remains the same it is simply your perception that is changed by mind altering drugs and none of these philosophers would argue your perception isn’t a product of the body. Awareness != perception. A lot of people itt are mixing up consciousness, experience, with brain activity like trains of thought or external perception. Try meditating for a bit and you see that these are not what you are, you are not your thoughts.
- cess11 3y ago
  Aware is germanic, perceive is latin, it's the same concept. Maybe meditation doesn't have the results you think it has? As for what drug experiences can tell us, I didn't claim they say anything about "the whole universe". They can however tell us other things. For one, LSD causes parts of the brain that usually work in a synchronised manner, like a system of cooperating parts, to loosen from each other, which is probably why one can experience a loss of coherence in perception of self and the immediate surroundings. At the very least it tells us that this molecule interacts with the biological foundation for experiencing the world as coherent, understandable, and when we're under its influence this experience is distorted or dissolved. This tears into the feelings foundational to big religions, the perception of the universe as created, ordered, having a telos, can easily be temporarily disrupted, and hence we know that this 'wisdom' is contingent on us ignoring the possibility that it is a product of evolution rather than a divine gift or insight gained through spiritual exercise. You could of course project magical thinking onto such molecules and consider them demonic or whatever, but good luck keeping that up under capitalism without being victimised by conspiracy theory grifters, marketing specialists and so on.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    Psychedelics are very likely the basis of many religions, including Christianity. Having magical religious experiences on LSD is practically a meme, so I am not sure what would lead you to suggest otherwise.
grishka 3y ago
> so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciousness is to the matter in the nervous system and stop their embarrassing search for Holy Spirit How would that explain out-of-body/near-death experiences? They happen to people, it's a fact. Sometimes people gain new information during them that they couldn't have possibly hallucinated by themselves, like being able to repeat a conversation that took place in another room while they were clinically dead. Within the framework of the modern science, the experience itself can be explained by the dying brain hallucinating it; the obtaining of new information from physically inaccessible parts of the reality, however, can not. Then there's also the phenomenon of people suddenly waking up, or having dreams about it, when someone close gets into an accident while they sleep. This can not be explained by modern science at all. It happens too often, to too many people, to be a simple coincidence. Then there's the phenomenon of heart transplant recipients receiving the memories of, and sometimes the ability to communicate with, their donors. This can be explained by some memories being stored in the heart cells, or in its nervous tissues. Now, I'm not really into pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, but because of how unexplained and under-researched the subject of nature of consciousness is, I try to keep an open mind. Those field theories in particular sound appealing. They haven't been proven, but they haven't been disproven either.
- amatic 3y ago
  I don't think it was ever proven in an experiment that an out of body experience or an NDE got some information from the real world, as opposed to information originating in the person's "brain". I don't know, but before there is confirmation in a controlled experiment, I just don't believe them. Much more likely is that their information is imagined and their certainty is a feeling they should not trust.
- addaon 3y ago
  > Then there's also the phenomenon of people suddenly waking up, or having dreams about it, when someone close gets into an accident while they sleep. This can not be explained by modern science at all. It happens too often, to too many people, to be a simple coincidence. I'm curious how you would estimate the number of people it should happen to by simple coincidence. Is enough data about the rates of the major expected causes (false memory formation after the fact, selective memory of dreams conditioned by conditions of waking) to provide a reasonable baseline? I honestly have no intuition if I would expect this number to be 0% or 50%, since I have no self-measurements (by definition) of how often I have dreams that I forget, and what portion of those dreams can be interpreted to match an external event if remembered.

by cess11 3y ago

taneq 3y ago

That's what put the final nail in my ability to accept Cartesian dualism. (Edit: The way psychoactives deeply affect the working of a mind, not the prospect of the sun being a butthole, of course.) Psychoactives don't just filter your senses, they change reality (your own subjective reality, of course.)

cess11 3y ago
There's still a lot to figure out but we can phenomenologically and cognitively grasp the structures of consciousness by the use of drugs and modern science, which leaves very little room for the remnants of christian dualism, whether as 'the hard problem', 'panpsychism' or the trans-/consubstantiation of the eucharist. Maybe there is a demon in my head giving me the illusion of reality being perceived as a projection on the cerebral cortex, and it's reliable malleability under caffeine, MDMA, LSD, cannabis and so on. If so, I find this model of better utility than going with vibes and prayer and belief in eternity and so on that comes with the descendants of christian dualism in liberalism, 'panpsychism', analytic philosophy, &c. Edit: Kierkegaard wrote quite interesting texts about the structures of consciousness, I'd recommend The Sickness unto Death as a start. It has some of his best jokes.
- fylham 3y ago
  You might be interested in this well-written paper on this subject: https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/24/8/615/6275567?login=false https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/24/8/615/6275567?login...
  - cess11 3y ago
    Thanks, a skim says it's a pretty good overview of where the lab folks are at. I'll read it more closely later. Science moves very slowly and very fast in this area, slowly with regards to psychoactives due to stuff like politicians, fast in neuroscience where new technology has allowed leaps for decades, since the eighties or so.
- taneq 3y ago
  > Maybe there is a demon in my head giving me the illusion of reality Me too! And yeah and if it weren't for that guy I could be a perfectly adequate automaton instead of dealing with this 'consciousness' nonsense. :P
- knotthebest 3y ago
  I’m not sure how this would solve the hard problem. Could you please elaborate on that?

IshKebab 3y ago

Yeah I would think anyone that has got drunk or experienced post-wank clarity should realise that consciousness isn't a separate thing to the brain's physical processes. Still, consciousness definitely exists and is definitely weird. And I don't think it's futile to try and learn about it. It's just not going to be philosophers that give us any answers (as usual).

cess11 3y ago
Not sure why you'd want answers, that's the domain of religion rather than philosophy. I'd like to suggest comparing observations from Merleu-Ponty and late modern neuroscience, perhaps Bear et al, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain (pick a previous edition to get it cheap).
- IshKebab 3y ago
  > Not sure why you'd want answers, that's the domain of religion Ha perhaps I should have been more specific - I want correct answers! And I want answers because a) I'm interested, and b) answers to scientific questions tend to let us make new cool things!
  - cess11 3y ago
    Are you familiar with the writings of Paul Feyerabend?
edgyquant 3y ago
You are making an uneducated assumption here. This is not a thought lost on philosophy or theology, for instance in Dharmic religions it is believed you are attached to a brain and your perception and thoughts arise from the brain: your eternal self is the awareness. Your thoughts, your “post nut clarity,” does not require that awareness (or consciousness) to exist and if anything the two are at odds with one another more often than not.
- cess11 3y ago

xotesos 3y ago

I think it is even beyond this. Most of the time humans are talking about the wonders of polywater to each other. A giant game of telephone telling each other complete nonsense. "The soviets have found a new form of water that freezes at –40°F, pass it on!".

edgyquant 3y ago

I’d say most of them have and these substances prove nothing close to what you’re suggesting. Yes they hint that the whole universe, at least our ideas of it, being an illusion made up by your brain. This isn’t consciousness though, your awareness remains the same it is simply your perception that is changed by mind altering drugs and none of these philosophers would argue your perception isn’t a product of the body. Awareness != perception. A lot of people itt are mixing up consciousness, experience, with brain activity like trains of thought or external perception. Try meditating for a bit and you see that these are not what you are, you are not your thoughts.

cess11 3y ago
Aware is germanic, perceive is latin, it's the same concept. Maybe meditation doesn't have the results you think it has? As for what drug experiences can tell us, I didn't claim they say anything about "the whole universe". They can however tell us other things. For one, LSD causes parts of the brain that usually work in a synchronised manner, like a system of cooperating parts, to loosen from each other, which is probably why one can experience a loss of coherence in perception of self and the immediate surroundings. At the very least it tells us that this molecule interacts with the biological foundation for experiencing the world as coherent, understandable, and when we're under its influence this experience is distorted or dissolved. This tears into the feelings foundational to big religions, the perception of the universe as created, ordered, having a telos, can easily be temporarily disrupted, and hence we know that this 'wisdom' is contingent on us ignoring the possibility that it is a product of evolution rather than a divine gift or insight gained through spiritual exercise. You could of course project magical thinking onto such molecules and consider them demonic or whatever, but good luck keeping that up under capitalism without being victimised by conspiracy theory grifters, marketing specialists and so on.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Psychedelics are very likely the basis of many religions, including Christianity. Having magical religious experiences on LSD is practically a meme, so I am not sure what would lead you to suggest otherwise.

grishka 3y ago

> so they finally discover how tightly coupled consciousness is to the matter in the nervous system and stop their embarrassing search for Holy Spirit How would that explain out-of-body/near-death experiences? They happen to people, it's a fact. Sometimes people gain new information during them that they couldn't have possibly hallucinated by themselves, like being able to repeat a conversation that took place in another room while they were clinically dead. Within the framework of the modern science, the experience itself can be explained by the dying brain hallucinating it; the obtaining of new information from physically inaccessible parts of the reality, however, can not. Then there's also the phenomenon of people suddenly waking up, or having dreams about it, when someone close gets into an accident while they sleep. This can not be explained by modern science at all. It happens too often, to too many people, to be a simple coincidence. Then there's the phenomenon of heart transplant recipients receiving the memories of, and sometimes the ability to communicate with, their donors. This can be explained by some memories being stored in the heart cells, or in its nervous tissues. Now, I'm not really into pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, but because of how unexplained and under-researched the subject of nature of consciousness is, I try to keep an open mind. Those field theories in particular sound appealing. They haven't been proven, but they haven't been disproven either.

amatic 3y ago
I don't think it was ever proven in an experiment that an out of body experience or an NDE got some information from the real world, as opposed to information originating in the person's "brain". I don't know, but before there is confirmation in a controlled experiment, I just don't believe them. Much more likely is that their information is imagined and their certainty is a feeling they should not trust.
addaon 3y ago
> Then there's also the phenomenon of people suddenly waking up, or having dreams about it, when someone close gets into an accident while they sleep. This can not be explained by modern science at all. It happens too often, to too many people, to be a simple coincidence. I'm curious how you would estimate the number of people it should happen to by simple coincidence. Is enough data about the rates of the major expected causes (false memory formation after the fact, selective memory of dreams conditioned by conditions of waking) to provide a reasonable baseline? I honestly have no intuition if I would expect this number to be 0% or 50%, since I have no self-measurements (by definition) of how often I have dreams that I forget, and what portion of those dreams can be interpreted to match an external event if remembered.