Do you know anyone who talks like this? I mean the part about the self not existing? Have you ever brought this up with friends or family? I have. They look at me funny and change the subject to deodorant or shoes. What “real life” are you talking about?
You find these conversations in psychology books and obscure stack exchange posts because you need years of study just to know the terms. Your problem isn’t understanding the posts or being honest about them, it’s that you obsess about understanding them.
No, slime moulds have no conscious self-reference. They have no brain.
The “you” resides in a 3 lbs lump of fatty tissue that is a bundle of interconnected little processors that do nothing but process information all day long, every second and when you dream.
This “self-conscious intelligence” when it is healthy and motivated, has a bunch of physical assets that allow it to observe and experience its environment and select for what it finds interesting or enjoyable. That is called “selective attention”.
“You” , the 3 lb lump, controls the direction of that selective attention and everything else that happens inside the vehicle (your body) that allows the lump to move and “you” to experience anything you want to “know”.
Just reduce it all to those simple facts and life becomes simpler and most likely more enjoyable. This 3 lb lump in your skull is a marvel of evolution. Don’t waste it on “fretting”.
Set it free to explore the universe.
That’s kinda why it’s so lonely. I can’t talk about it because it sounds like I’m being crazy. It’s more an internal thing where thinking of others as persistent or continuous selves is wrong and all the comments from people who say otherwise flood my brain, and I have no answer for it.
Probably, I just can’t tell who’s right about this or not. I’m trying to live a normal life again by letting it go but everything I do just seems to trigger it, especially sleep now. I’m obsessed about understanding it because I don’t understand and I don’t know if it means I’m living a lie or if I’d have to undo my life because it’s rooted in a lie and to live in truth would mean letting go everything I value…
But such a unified experience, in so far as it is so, is principally functional for navigating our social landscape, as evidenced by the Dunbar Number indicating the most distinctive feature of the human brain, our outsize neocortex, evolved primarily for social reasons (ie better problem solving was a spandrel). The subjective experience of this social self is linked to the Default Mode Network. So identity is like a module, a set of algorithms, for navigating social experiences. Whereas subjectivity is the general category of a body absorbing and reacting to external and internal sensations, both in the conceptual domain and in non-conceptual flow-state experiences. Non-social intelligences like octopuses can be very good at problem solving, but complex communication which has allowed the rapid accumulation and sharing of learning, is a result of social intelligence, and secifically intersubjectivity, our ability to ‘see’ into the minds of others.”
When people say things like this with a bunch of citations I can’t tell if they’re in the right or not. I don’t know enough to say.
No, Slime moulds have no brains. It is a muti-nucleic single celled organism.
The microtubule network in the cytoplasm has a mathematical form of reactive intelligence but it is not consciously self-aware. It just smart like an AI !
Excellent lecture. Did you like the way the brain learns, as in the verbal example, but can also be fooled by appearances accompanied by touch?
But here we are talking about genetics and growth sequences. The genetic code consists of several separate operations and growth commands. It has to be or else it would end up in chaos. That’s why we grow and develop different parts of the body and neural system at different times and in different blocks, kinda like LEGO.
Ever seen a two toned Lobster? It’s genetic code makes the left side completely separate from the right side of the animal. That is why one side can be red and other side completely black.
Check this out. Its just amazing and kind of funny, don’t you agree?
I don’t think you are crazy, but I don’t talk about things like most of the time either. That’s what I was trying to explain. It’s not a shared experience. We don’t feel our neurons firing. We don’t know these happen with our memory. That doesn’t make it a “lie”, it makes it science. If you haven’t read about the science, it sounds weird and you can’t have an opinion on it.
I heard a good analogy the other day. Anyone who went to public school in an industrialized country was taught that the earth is round. Maybe even shown how to prove it with sticks and shadows and math. But very few people think about it or question it. There is so much to know. It’s not possible to keep all of it in our heads. Especially when there are competing theories and uncertainty in the science. None of it changes our daily experience of life.
I guess I’m just always trying to apply what it means to my life and everything around me, and it seems like every new thing I learn requires me to try to make sense of everything around me all over again.
I dunno man, the memory one with the self and sleep certainly has me vexed.
I ask other people to try to get a bigger sense of things and here’s another answer I got:
"I doubt anyone here is an expert either. Plus ultimately the question boils down to "What is the mind and consciousness really?“Wikipedia Which still isn’t conclusively known.
I think the stackexchange link, despite not providing evidence, is generally correct (minus the whole Nirvana thing at the start) from a materialist viewpoint; I would add to it that perhaps the self is the instance of information tied to specific instances of atoms… If that makes any sense. “CyberPunk” science fiction tends to ruminate on such a viewpoint being true and the implications, if you want more things to read.”
This was in regards to the self persisting through sleep and the guy in that answer talking about how our sense of continuity is an illusion, I’m not really sure how to deal with that.
Also when I reread that post on the self and sleep I’m not sure what the guy means by atomic and continuous self. To me it’s just the self and the self persists through sleep, it doesn’t get rebooted. The memory is just to recall where you are not who you are from what I read.
You’re an odd bird. You’re self reflective. You absorb new information and map it against your existing experience. You live, study, apply, and engage the world. Yet, you take no joy in it. The flow of life, the state of being that people strive for, is more like a broiling river to you. You swim against and across the current. Then you complain because it’s not a peaceful lake.
Seth actually noted that normal sleep does allow for a sense of continuity. It is anesthesia that interrupts the continuity of time.
Anesthesia renders the non-homeostatic part of the brain totally unconscious. “You” are no longer there as if you are dead. It is up to the anesthesiologist to “bring you back” and that short time of nothingness does not leave a sense of continuity. As Seth says, one can be out for 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 years, or even 50 years. There is no continuity of any kind.
Just think of this 3 lb lump of self-aware tissue, trying to make sense of everything the body and senses tells it. It likes to have everything go smooth and that keeps it in balance.
Make accommodation and do “yourself” a favor. Be kind to yourself, you will like yourself for it, just as we like people who are kind to others. Treat yourself as you would treat a good friend.
That doesn’t help at all, that makes it much much worse. My anxiety over this was already bad enough. But I’ve been under anesthesia before and there was a sense of continuity because I knew where I was and what I was there for.
It’s also not helping after reading this from the Buddhism subreddit:
"Buddhists teach rebirth rather than reincarnation. The difference is that rebirth is a matter of cause and effect like one pool ball hitting another whereas reincarnation is the teaching that a reality - the atman - gets passed on from life to life.
You already live rebirth. So, for example, every new day is in a crucial sense a new life, caused by the way you have lived so far but independent of it. In fact, every moment is a rebirth when seen in that way.
Accepting the traditional Buddhist teaching of rebirth is just transferring that principle from one life to another via death.
Personally, I find it helpful just to focus on day to day and (when I can: it’s quite tough) moment by moment rebirth. If you get that right then rebirth from life to life will look after itself."
And now I’m wondering…if any of it is real, or just recycling the past over and over again? Sigh, so much for sleep I guess.
I guess I’m trying to make sense of the Teleonomic Matter stuff and what the research means. I don’t like being uncertain about what stuff means especially when I don’t understand it.
Then you had better get going on getting the equivalent of 100 or so advanced degrees, while keeping up on all the latest findings in all of those fields. And that will only inform you about what the limits of our knowledge are. In other words, it’s impossible to be certain about everything.
[quote=“inthedarkness, post:77, topic:11283, full:true”]
I guess I’m trying to make sense of the Teleonomic Matter stuff and what the research means.
But that is what natural selection does. It is a passive selection process, that weeds out those patterns which are unable to maintain the integrity in relation to the environment, leaving only those patterns which are adapted to the environment they reside in.
I don’t like being uncertain about what stuff means especially when I don’t understand it.
As to stuff, it all comes down to the table of elements and we know how that forms.
The rest is a matter of endless stream of quadrillions of chemical interactions per second throughout the universe. Note that this process already begins with the bombardment of EM rays in the galactic clouds.
Copilot;
Galactic clouds are regions of gas, plasma, and dust in our and other galaxies1. These clouds can be denser-than-average and are part of the interstellar medium1. Some of these clouds are known as molecular clouds, where new stars are formed2. The largest of these are called giant molecular clouds (GMCs), which play a key role in star formation and galaxy evolution3.
The earth alone has performed some 2 billion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion chemical experiments during its relatively short life. If only a few of these interactions result in a stable form of complexity, those patterns will continue to evolve in whatever is “possible” given the raw materials, spatial substrates, and time.
IMO, “life” is just another expression of biochemical dynamics. I suspect that on earth there have been several forms of LUCAS from which our ancestral LUCAS organism became the naturally selected lifeform.
I guess this just digs up old wounds I have regarding the self and whether it exists or not and what it is. Buddhism left me scars that never truly healed and messed me up for years. Didn’t help that the explanations people gave me didn’t make sense like so:
“
“Individuality that you said doesn’t exist.” When did I say that? Does it have to be stated that the aggregates in one person are not identical to those in another at any given time? The categories are the same, not the instances of them. Like the sutta says, they reflect back the image “I am” [to the consciousness in each individual]. But upon examination it’s easy to see that YOU are not a toenail clipping, for example.
Which means you’re not the rest of the body either, much less anyone else’s body. Same with feeling, perception, mental formations… But the experience of being that individual body/mind still takes place.”
