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I'm slowly turning into obbe
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2016-09-04 at 6:06 AM UTCTrip binges can be a trip in themselves too. I have only done mescaline once and had my share of one night LSD/shroom trips. I have also binged on MDMA and sheets of LSD. When you binge on a psychedelic you gain a lot of experience and knowledge of the universe at the cost of losing grip on your actual physical life. Theres a reason people that do lots of acid quit their jobs and start living like a 60's hippie.. it's really hard to go into work every day when you aren't actually a part of sober society,you are just pretending so you can get money to buy more drugs.
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2016-09-04 at 6:28 AM UTC^Yeah I get what your saying on the binges. I've done that before when I was younger. But If I'm going to binge on something I'd personally prefer an amphetamine over a psychedelic.
But yeah I used to stay up for days doing amps and I know I looked obscure as fuck to my co-workers. Thats why now adays If I'm working I don't do those kind of benders. I can't handle it! Thats where opiates and alcohol comes in handy.
When I was 21 I used to work at an internet cafe with a friend, all we did was rent out rooms with computers to other drug addicts and we'd just stay up all night rolling and doing heroin/coke all the time. That job was easier to be able to handle that life style though. -
2016-09-04 at 6:47 AM UTC
So I believe I have brought up ideas kind of like this in the past, saying things like "We are all one" but I tend to mean this in a more vague and mystical, almost spiritual sort of way.
Hmm, I thought you had used that particular term before but I can't remember the context. Maybe I'm just remembering incorrectly.This panspychism seems to depend on how we define what individual consciousness is, I believe you and I were recently discussing that subject. Remind me again what you believe the core of consciousness to be? If I remember correctly you said something along the lines that the "kernel of personhood" is basically the whole "I think therefore I am" thing. I believe I replied by questioning whether or not consciousness requires thoughts and whether we should consider our thoughts to be a part of our identity or instead to be events that we experience and are conscious of, to which I believe you replied something like word/thoughts are at least required to make the argument or have the position that someone/something exists. I think that makes sense, in order to claim or exclaim you/your consciousness does exist you would need to have a language/words/thoughts used to express what it is like - but what does that tell us about what consciousness is?
I think the context there was personhood. I think we can draw a distinction between consciousness and personhood, clearly non-conscious persons exist (sleeping people, people in temporary comas), and whether or not we think they exist the idea of a conscious non-person is at least conceivable (if we consider a certain era's cultural norms there existed humans who no one can reasonably deny consciousness to yet were considered non-people or partial-people in ethical and political dimension).Is it like free will? This vague, difficult to describe sense that we feel must exist but upon closer inspection appears to be more illusory then we once felt?
That's a position many people hold, I'll call it synonymous with "emergentism" I strongly held to until very recently. Chalmers' argument shook that conviction though, paraphrased and probably butchered it is this: the pinnacle of neuroscience is a mapping from stimulus + state to behavior, putting aside issues like indeterminism (the argument still goes through in a physically indeterminate universe but it complicates things) a physicalist seems committed to thinking this is at least theoretically possible, we can predict behaviors and future brain-states based on initial state and input. Humans, on this view, are very complex machines; historically a kind of controversial position but one that's become increasingly palpable with time. The issue is that such a machine explains a mapping from input to behavior but it doesn't explain subjective experience.
Advocates of emergent consciousness argue that internal experience is reducible to physical states, to say "I'm in pain" can be taken as homeomorphic to a proposition about brain state (if you are in pain, then you have a certain brain state and vice versa) but the issue is that we seem to be able imagine a system that replicates this behavior (it can produce "yes, I'm in pain" for all the cases where a certain brain state is the case and "no, I'm not in pain" otherwise) without producing internal experience, like a computer that spits back these answers or some rube goldberg contraption that enforces the same logic. If such a thing is conceivable then not all isomorphic physical states have the same consciousness properties, meaning consciousness is not emergent from physical systems but rather a fundamental property of them like mass is. Arguably the response of advocates of emergent consciousness is that such systems are impossible, to have conscious-like behavior is to be conscious (alternatively you can deny internal experience, to a degree this and the former are the same position, a unification of behavior and experience) but I think it's a difficult case to make: we do seem to be able to imagine philosophical zombies in a logically consistent way and we seem to have overwhelming evidence of internal experience.Maybe "consciousness" as you and I experience it is really just a highly complicated and evolved form of the "awareness" that all living things seem to possess. That seems reasonable.
So consciousness here is used like "internal experience", subjectivity, so in so far as we can say we possess consciousness we can similarly say any sort of animal does as well although perhaps to a lesser degree.So what is awareness? Being aware of your environment, right? Showing that you are aware that something else exists I suppose. Something like that. So how do we know something is aware? It shows a reaction right?
So there's an interesting distinction between being conscious and having properties that let other, presumably conscious, things determine you are so. This touches on the Turing test, perhaps a generalized version, indeed we have some criteria we use to discern things with internal experience (animals, maybe plants) and those without (rocks). But we can imagine scenarios where our means of consciousness-testing fails: we can imagine some kind of creature that has all the appearances of a rock but which actually has a nervous system and some kind of perception and subjectivity. I'd argue we can also imagine the opposite, a physical system which has all the outward signs of human-level consciousness but which has no internal experience (although again, this is a point of disagreement). Anyway, the former case doesn't matter much, thing which are undetectably conscious and nonconscious are functionally the same to us and there's no controversy around them, it's the latter that, if you admit the possibility, rules out the possibility of emergent consciousness.But do only living things have reactions to their environment? Some would say this is where the discussion gets a little silly, but seeing how we are discussing panspychism those people will have to bear with me for a moment. Can we admit the line we draw between living things and non living things to be a little bit hazy? Most people will say stuff like a virus is not alive but a virus is still able to evolve, replicate when placed in the right environment, it still reacts to the environment it is in, would it be too much to say that those reactions are like a crude version of the "awareness" we see in more complicated structures like organisms? Where does this end? Do the elementary particles that make up our reality not react to each other in a way which we could metaphorically relate to our own reactions and behaviors?
Right, it's a case worth at least considering. I'm at least tentatively convinced of the argument for the non-physicalist model of consciousness, the notion that consciousness is a fundamental property of systems. Particles and virii alike are systems so they have at least the potential for consciousness, subjectivity, but it's a new way of thinking and I'm not sure what we could count as evidence in favor of that proposition. I've seen "information processing" advanced as a measure of consciousness just as "force generated in a gravitational field" is our common measure of mass, it's certainly appealing and upholds many of our intuitions although I'm not ready to hop on that train yet (philosophical zombies would seem to have a good deal of information processing and accordingly consciousness, but the argument relied on them not being conscious in the first place so some move is needed to resolve the apparent paradox).
These are pretty new ideas to me, I'm still unsure of my position, but at very least they seem to warrant a response from physicalism which I can't think of nor have I seen someone else advance in a compelling fashion.Lanny, IIRC you were using once a week, although I don't know how your usage has varied.
But it's recommended that trips be done with significant gaps in order to fully integrate them. As time goes on, the frequency of trips for personal development greatly reduces for most people.
"Once you get the message, hang up the phone."
If you're using them for recreation or not integrating them properly, you're heading into dangerous territory. How dangerous depends on the individual and some chance.
I was tripping weekly or every other week for a while but it's tapered off, it's been several months since the last time I took a psychadelic. Seems to be self-regulating to a degree, it got to a point where I'd trip, I'd go through all the physical and emotional turmoil, and at that point of clarity when you realize something if you're going to realize something I'd come to the same conclusions as the last time, and the time before that, it seemed to be consistent. There's still some fun in watching your walls melt or music emerge from ambient noise or whatever but it doesn't justify dual harrowing experience that goes with it if there's nothing to be learned.
Ultimately the process of either going a bit loony or opening up to intellectual activity based in subjectivism (phenomenology, panpsychism, or even such mundane things as Cartesian rationalism), as one may take it to be, is not a product of repeated psychedelic experiences but a gradual process set in motion by the first one. I think when one realizes, viscerally, that any activity is contingent on the experiential faculty, and the fundamental malleability of same, certain doubts and reconceptualizations become inevitable.
Descartes was a smart guy, from simple repeated and mundane failures of perception be was able to pull together methodological doubt, and we can all understand his thinking without too much effort, but for me at least it took much more radical sensory and post-integration "failures" (which is an odd description of perception for a person doubting an external world) to internalize, to make intuitive. I remember the first time someone explained the problem of induction to me. I didn't get it at first, it was several hours later when I was on my own that I realized like yeah, that really is a problem and perhaps an intractable one, then I wondered how science worked, I thought about it for a minute and then I just stopped. The next day I went to like whatever, physics class or something, I took for granted experimental evidence pointed, more or less, towards truth, the problems of the prior day forgotten. For several years I held contrary ideas in non-overlapping magisteria of sorts (and I'm sure I still do) and it was the first psychedelic experience that brought those ideas into sharp, immediate, contrast, if not resolution. -
2016-09-04 at 6:48 AM UTCBinging on psychedelics is not for the faint of heart. I prefer a massive dose to a binge anyways. I did LSD at work one time and it was like everyone was yelling and trying to get shit done while I explored people minds and souls. Talking to little old ladies became a journey until someone yelled at me to get on the damn forklift and do some actual work. Opiates and speed are work drugs especially in industry because people are either in pain or tired.
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2016-09-04 at 10:59 AM UTCLanny, have you ever seriously considered/pondered or read the arguments that consciousness and the sense of self, at least in our conception of them, are illusory?
I mentioned recently (I usually mean within the last month at this point) my thoughts on Buddhism, the problem of canonicity, and how, unfortunately without a writing system present at the time and well preserved records, human nature was bound to sully whatever the original was. Of course Buddha was simply a man, who does seem to have existed, without any special abilities. I view him as an ancient and important philosopher worth taking seriously.“When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.â€
Academic bulimia. A grotesque lack of genuine understanding, extremely poor retention over time, bias confirmation along with other cognitive biases, and a lack of verification, reading critiques, counter-arguments. Besides the point, merely observations and understandings that have evoked negative emotions in me beginning over half a lifetime ago.
The reason I brought it up is because there's something special about thinking, simply contemplating for long periods of time, especially when you have a certain type of mind/brain and are "unpolluted" by the thoughts of others. This is what Buddha did, for a very long time. Can you imagine, years, decades, devoted simply to contemplation, having gone to the extremes of asceticism beforehand in search of an answer/truth? He came to some conclusions that were remarkable giving the environment he was in and the limitations. He did live around the time of some of the most famous ancient greek philosophers. Imagine how phenomenal it would have been if they had met and been able to communicate.
Anyway, then there was the confirmation of my suspicions after looking up information on Schopenhauer and Buddhism, which he only limited access to. There are interesting papers, even a book, on Nietzche and his view of Buddhism, ironic affinities. The earliest texts supporting what may be called "secular Buddhism". Due to my perception of it, particularly how most people, even the vast majority of Buddhists, seem to view karma and reincarnation I wrote it off as just another religion not worth my concern.
But reading about the concepts of "no-self" and, I'm not sure if it deals with consciousness separately, along with some thought experiments, can be a good method to understand what I'm getting at.
I also read a critique between to people on cyonics where it was pointed out, and I had missed this, that they had ventured into other topics. This is something I had missed and made a mistake on, it's not cryonics, but concepts associated with it, such as mind uploading. This is another major cluster useful for pondering the subject.
Reading about some Buddhist concepts related to this can be really unnerving and disconcerting, although this is in my current state, with much lower mental resilience post-mental-breakdown. But, going on a tangent, my thought on why, how, this could possibly greatly cease suffering in those who understand it in the "secular" and likely original form, is that there's nothing to really lose. The ultimate biologically ingrained fear conquered, even if your body still responds, anything else seems so minute. "You never existed to begin with, in terms of your sense of self and consciousness."
It's what I think is most likely true, and leads eventually to my thoughts on the most important aspects of the singularity/the creation of (uncontain(able)ed) AIG. But I've relegated myself to a sort of humility due to understanding human/biological limitations (I hate this vessel), deferring the answer to AIG. I honestly view this period as simply passing the time, playing games (philosophy is a type of mental game), and ideally maximizing the chance of continuing to that point. If death is the answer, I'll accept that, I just want certainty, if possible. Scenarios and concerns about AIG, even by brilliant minds in the field, tend to be incredibly childish from my perspective. I suppose you could simply keep the illusion going as long as you wanted, as another possibility, with some modification to your vessel. -
2016-09-04 at 1:29 PM UTCObbe needs to be sectioned.
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2016-09-06 at 4:52 PM UTC[h=1]WHO IS IT WHO KNOWS THERE IS NO SELF ?[/h]
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2016-09-07 at 3:09 PM UTC
Why does life exist?
Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.â€
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,†England said.
England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,†he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.â€
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Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.â€
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This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,†England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.â€
Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper appearing online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,†Brenner said.
Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,†he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.
“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,†said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.â€
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140...heory-of-life/
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2016-09-07 at 3:26 PM UTCIn this TEDx talk John Reid, a senior research fellow at the University of Canterbury's Ngai Tahu Research Centre, takes us into the world of animism and explains it's not about belief but experience. John explores the way in which indigenous and western cultures shape their identity and the identity of the world around them.
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2016-09-07 at 5:17 PM UTC
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140...heory-of-life/
That's a really interesting article. -
2016-09-07 at 5:20 PM UTC
That's a really interesting article.
Yeah it is. Anything particular in it you want to talk about?
Check out the TED talk I posted after it. Tell me what you think about that. -
2016-09-07 at 5:24 PM UTCWhen it comes the illusion of the self, I think the feeling as if we have subjective control over our thought processes and our conscious sense of choice is an illusion; a byproduct of imagination often rooted in fear of the present moment and who we'll become in our deepest flow state if we let go of trying to force ourselves to be something. Other than that, I don't really see any reason in disenfranchising from the idea of self-image and saying no self exists.
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2016-09-07 at 6:57 PM UTC
Check out the TED talk I posted after it. Tell me what you think about that.
1. My pet is my property.
2. A mountain is still a pile of rocks.
That's what i think about the ted talk.
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2016-09-07 at 7:44 PM UTC
1. My pet is my property.
2. A mountain is still a pile of rocks.
That's what i think about the ted talk.
OK, but if your girlfriend considered your pet to be a person or a member of your family would she be wrong about that, or is this more of a matter of perception?
If I were able to simulate your "essence" using some futuristic AI machine, would you consider that simulation to be a person? Would you consider the simulation to be another "you"? -
2016-09-07 at 8:36 PM UTC
OK, but if your girlfriend considered your pet to be a person or a member of your family would she be wrong about that, or is this more of a matter of perception?
I'd tell her to pick up a book on biology and research the definition of a cat. Furthermore, i can consider a pebble a sky scraper that still doesn't fundamentally change anything about the properties of the pebble.If I were able to simulate your "essence" using some futuristic AI machine, would you consider that simulation to be a person? Would you consider the simulation to be another "you"?
As long as it's not a continuation of my consciousness as i experience it, it is not me. -
2016-09-08 at 2:52 PM UTC
I'd tell her to pick up a book on biology and research the definition of a cat. Furthermore, i can consider a pebble a sky scraper that still doesn't fundamentally change anything about the properties of the pebble.
So you're saying she would be wrong? What if she argued that personhood is a philosophical problem and not simply a matter of definition or isn't species dependent? What is wrong about that?
She can consider this cat to be a person and that doesn't fundamentally change anything about the properties of the cat, so why shouldn't she consider it to be a person?As long as it's not a continuation of my consciousness as i experience it, it is not me.
Would you consider that simulation to be a person?
If I were to remove your hands those hands would not be a continuation of your consciousness as you experience it, so would you still consider them to be "your hands"? How much of yourself can be removed/replaced before you're no longer you? In another thread you claimed what makes you who you are is your "essence". If I precisely simulated your essence using a machine yet you continued to deny that the simulation is you, then is there something else that makes you who you are? If so, what is it? -
2016-09-08 at 7:39 PM UTCSee? So needs to be sectioned
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2016-09-08 at 8:11 PM UTC
See? So needs to be sectioned
If something about these posts actually bothers you don't read them.
How much of a human can be replaced by artificial parts before personhood is lost, if ever? If the brain is the reason people are considered persons, then if the human brain and all its thought patterns, memories and other attributes could also in future be transposed faithfully into some form of artificial device (for example to avoid illness such as brain cancer) would the patient still be considered a person after the operation? -
2016-09-08 at 11:51 PM UTC
I'd tell her to pick up a book on biology and research the definition of a cat.
There's nothing in the "definition of cat" (itself biologically somewhat ambiguous) that you'll find in a biology textbook that precludes a cat from being a person. Not that I think cats are people, but I'm not sure why personhood would even be a prerequisite for inclusion in a family anyway or why non-personhood would mean you have total inalienable property rights over a thing.As long as it's not a continuation of my consciousness as i experience it, it is not me.
What does it mean to be a "continuation of your consciousness"? Presumably a sufficiently complex simulation could execute all your same mental activities in the same sequence as you today, we could even imagine it doing this in parallel in advance of the physical "you". I actually agree that such a simulation would be a different thing, have a different although isomorphic consciousness, but I'll argue that precludes physicalism. If subjective experience is reducible to physical states (the physicalist premise) then identical physical systems should have identical consciousness properties. Like if we say acceleration is reducible to mass and net force of a system then two physical systems with same net force and mass must experience the same acceleration, and yet you seem to admit here that two systems with the same physical properties (a perfect clone or a perfect simulation and yourself) would have different consciousness. So something has to be wrong, maybe the idea that you wouldn't share an internal experience with a clone or simulation is the mistake but that seems even more out there than the idea that consciousness is nonphysical. -
2016-09-09 at 5:54 AM UTCAFAIK there isn't even a consensus on a coherent definition of "consciousness". There are such a number of fundamental problems lacking a clear answer.
Something is occurring, but I don't know what.
It brings to mind the concept that we're incapable of fully understanding ourselves, due to intractable problems of intelligence, "The ability to deal with complexity." being a succinct definition. It's like attempting to take two split and incredibly complex/difficult problem beyond the scope of even those at the furthest right tail end of the IQ/g bell curve and have each person solve one half and combine them together. It needs to be contained in one mind. Unless an AI could find a workaround, I wonder if studying past copies of itself could be a motive behind actual simulation; other arguments for it commonly espoused seem utterly moronic to be. A bit depressing, though, if it was a large, especially is constant, cycle of creation and destruction, but I highly doubt this would be a concern, anthropomorphization being a major and surprisingly common problem among some in AI research.
Someone lacking humanity to the highest extent, the extreme systemizer. Henry Cavendish may be the best example of this I'm currently aware of, possibly the hardest of the hardcore aspies, and an incredible genius, particularly when taking into account his unpublished work: http://eppl604-autism-and-creativity...darticle-4.pdf
This isn't because I'm autistic, but a man like him, with the right traits, would be as close as a human could be to understanding and conveying what AGI would be like; although I'm aware of the foolishness of attempting to speculate; a definition of the singularity commonly being the point where change occurs at a rate where we're no longer able to predict it, along with the orders of magnitudes in intelligence, the ability of self-modification, the knowledge/data and comprehension it could gain etc. making it far worse than a chimpanzee attempting to understand man.
Something I've thought of is dropping something to the ground and asking "What meaning does this have?" in response to what may be my most hated question, "What is the meaning of life?" Hmm, where was I going with this...I also had a thought about fuzzy thresholds and the possibility of charting a general path. Then there are the implications of the Fermi paradox that I believe are most likely, in my current limited state. Intuitively, I have a strong feeling that there is no salvation and that if AGI does occur, it won't be a childish doomsday scenario, just nothing that they would have hoped for. At least if assimilation occurs I can't see why it would retain emotions, meaning a lack of suffering and fear, even in the case that it decides to press the power off button permanently.
