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Matter is Paint
I cannot help pondering whether this “persistent consciousness” would continue after physical “death.” Matter is a substructure, not a superstructure. Material existence is the “atomic” basis of a higher reality, and really only one such basis. Yes, so material death doesn’t end it. Matter is paint, a mirage over the underlying reality. Yes, it’s invisible and…
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Before Matter
Like an endless kaleidoscope of being, each nexus of potential being is a being unto itself just as each cell of your body is a being unto itself. The reason they are now able to write algorithms that lets them predict market behaviour, and fairly accurately, is that there is a cohesive being behind the…
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We Are Mutable
There is a lot of enthusiasm over the recent findings of neuroscience and its specialty known as social neuroscience which focuses on trying to understand social reactions through the neuroscience methodology. The idea is that everything you experience arises out of an identifiable process of the brain. Now the formation and behavior of the human…
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Two Way Flow of Information
Shall we go into neuroplasticity? Your brain takes on the configuration your experiences induce in it. What you experience, actively imagine and habitually think, is the shape your brain takes. So add this mutable brain to the rather wide range of chemical shifts a person can experience, and is it easy to say exactly who…
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Novelty Seeking Creatures
Now the brain under analysis… They seek to understand the “mind” by watching the brain function. There are some easily traced circuits in the human brain – those connecting our eyes and other sense to our brain – and so you can clearly identify that when the eye is stimulated a specific part of the…
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Ignorance is Sleep
The brain can read more in its own make-up than science is giving it credit for. It seeks more than just to be content with a social paradigm, a consistent consensus reality, and it moves us sometimes not just to learn something new, but to reconnect with the original drive that brought it into its…
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How to Control
So how to control rather than be controlled? It’s a simple matter of context and again would seem crazy until you practice it. It involves interrupting your internal dialogue, not just the words in your head, but the entire pattern of visual search, internal narrative, the whole mess, and how you do that is either…
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Running Fantasy
I read an article yesterday that mentioned they’re studying the effects of product labels on people’s brains using fMRI. I’ve been wondering why so many labels are changing lately and that explains it. Yes, they are trying to brain hack you that way, like the pet toy my wife bought our cat. It has been…
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Hack The Social Persona
I’m comfortable I can hack their hack. Yes, you can. You can even hack people’s social persona. For me, someone who is aggressive usually appears to have an enlarged and twitchy eye, and based on which eye it is I can even tell what the nature of their aggression would be. It’s just an “illusion”…
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Dream it Differently
So perhaps a thought in parting… Your habitual dream now, that thing they would detect as they watched the patterns that show up in an fMRI while you look at stimuli, does it put you fully in touch with reality? Is it as useful as you might need it to be? It’s more of a…
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Enjoy the Simulator
Are we talking about differing “states” of mind? Or are we talking about different “styles” of thought? Or any, or all of the above? Or are we talking about mechanical/neural processes? We are talking about something people don’t normally talk about, the “self” behind states of mind. This self can function within the environment of…
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Without Words
Can you think without words? Maybe that would depend on the sort of thinking it is. I often think in images and then would have to translate that into words. I think so, but we’re not practiced at seeing it well. Sometimes I think in images, but it’s usually a flash. Some would say that…
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Special Effects
The order is illusory, but when I speak of things being illusory, that’s not a criticism. Illusion is pragmatic. We function not in the real world, but in a virtual reality even when nowhere near our computers. We need our perceptions to be real enough to be functional, but we cannot make them perfectly accurate.…
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Coherent Structure
Is the medium the same thing as the information? Is the map the territory or information about the territory? The map is neither of those things. But the medium can shape and change the perception of the information. We have to distinguish between perception as we know it and perception of a more elementary level. How…
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An End to a Means
At the early stage of consciousness, you experience time and space as complex event matrices, and by referring to it as a stage I don’t mean to imply a temporal sequence. This is all atemporal. As you sort through the various event matrices (and by event I mean something more along the lines of a…
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Intentional Channel
Everything on our planet has a language, either passive or dynamic. From whale song to human speech, every living thing on this planet expresses patterns of intention. Even plants have a dynamic language, it’s just very slow from our point of view. Observe what roots do! The same thing our neurons do. It is really…
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Personal Narrative
Shall we get into personal narrative? Your autobiographical memory is not autobiographical. Professionals say mine is poor because it doesn’t conform to the structure they expect in a “healthy” person, but your autobiographical memory, as they call it, was written by other people, encoded in the language of the social brain which reacts naturally and…
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Our Other Mind
There is a whole domain of consciousness that has been evolving alongside this that has come to dominate out current world. There is a theory that roughly amounts to the notion that humanity used to have a “bicameral” mind, and that all those encounters with gods and angels and demons were just as real to…
Category: Metaphysics of Science
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that focuses specifically on the concepts we use to understand reality itself, rather than what might be the best way to do something. Science was originally classified as a philosophy, in my opinion it still is, but many object to the notion that science is still a philosophy. They point at what they feel is proof that science possesses substance that philosophy doesn’t.
There is a schism between science and metaphysics that I believe would be well served by being bridged rather than having the bridge burned. Would you say that working toward a better and clearer metaphysics is without merit in today’s world?
“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.” Albert Einstein
“Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions” Vera Rubin