Tag Archives: consciousness

How LSD affects consciousness

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Researchers have published the first images showing the effects of LSD on the human brain, as part of a series of studies that are examining how the drug causes its characteristic hallucinogenic effects. (More at Nature)

“Within some important brain networks, such as the neuronal networks that normally fire together when the brain is at rest, which is sometimes called the ‘default mode’ network, we saw reduced blood flow — something we’ve also seen with psilocybin — and that neurons that normally fire together lost synchronization. That correlated with our volunteers reporting a disintegration of their sense of self, or ego. This known effect is called ‘ego dissolution’: the sense that you are less a singular entity, and more melded with people and things around you.”

The Big Picture

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The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. By Sean Carroll

Life is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary.

For a long time, there has been a shared view that there is some meaning, out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered and acknowledged. There is a point to all this; things happen for a reason. […] Gradually, our confidence in this view has begun to erode.

“Life” and “consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems.

At a fundamental level, there aren’t separate “living things” and “nonliving things,” “things here on Earth” and “things up in the sky,” “matter” and “spirit.” There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many different forms. […] We will ultimately understand the world as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself. That’s a big deal.

The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing it. Continue reading →

Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

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Interview with Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality.

“Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.” — Physicist John Wheeler

A finite amount of attention

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“Perceptual Load Theory states that we have a finite amount of attention and that once that capacity is maxed out, we cannot process anything else. To test whether paying attention to radio traffic reports can be bad for our driving, Gillian Murphy asked 36 people to drive a route in a full-sized driving simulator while listening to a traffic update on the radio.”

Listening to the radio could impair drivers’ concentration

Maya by Ray Alez

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“The only thing that I have ever known was void. You could say that it surrounded me forever since there was no time before I created it. At first all I was was awareness, just the sense of consciousness with nothing else. Gradually, I started to think thoughts in the midst of this void. I’ve made up time and space. And once I was thinking in this emptiness I got horribly bored. So I’ve turned my thoughts into figures and images. I’ve imagined light, which turned into stars and galaxies and later – planets. And thus Maya was born.”

“On one of the planets I have created animals and humans, just in one whim of my desire. I could simulate the whole history of this universe starting with the Big Bang, but I didn’t bother, waiting for billions of years would be too boring, besides the time was made up anyway, so I’ve just skipped right to the interesting part – the year 1983, the moment my imagined humans invented the internet, and started their race towards singularity.”

“After a few years I got bored of observing this planet from the outside, so I’ve decided to jump in and play. I’ve made myself a human body, I’ve put it in front of the computer. There was no need to go through the whole process of birth, I’ve just made a grown man, and reedited the history retroactively, filled his head with memories and experiences, so that it would seem more realistic.”

“And I was still bored, horribly-horribly bored. As much as I’ve played with these ideas in my imagination, as realistic as they’ve seemed, I was always aware of the void. I knew that it all was just smoke and mirrors, just a very realistic lucid dream, and I knew that at any moment I could stop imagining it, and it would all disperse like a smoke, leaving only a point of consciousness drifting amidst the timeless spaceless thoughtless void.”

“So I’ve made a decision. I’ve decided to forget of the void. I’ve reedited my thoughts so that it would seem like my consciousness is just a property of my brain, and I’ve made my brain to forget about the void. Consciousness dimmed, my powers to change my imagined reality have disappeared. All that was left were thoughts, thoughts and memories inside of a brain, which believed in the reality of an imagined world.”

“And I have found myself staring at the computer, going through my daily routine, not knowing about the void, not knowing that it all was made up, just living in a physical body I’ve believed was real.”

“And I cared. I was finally not bored, I thought I’ve existed. I was engaged – I remembered my future and worried about my past. I had goals and memories, I had enemies and friends, I had family and loved ones, I had fears and dreams.”

“I was alive.”

On Not Being There

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A few excerpts from a fascinating article by Rebecca Lemon in The Hedgehog Review:

Almost daily, we encounter people who are there but not there, flickering in and out of what we think of as presence. A growing body of research explores the question of how users interact with their gadgets and media outlets, and how in turn these interactions transform social relationships. The defining feature of this heavily mediated reality is our presence “elsewhere,” a removal of at least part of our conscious awareness from wherever our bodies happen to be.

I recently spent 90 minutes in a video Hangout with +Steve Brown. He was in Tucson and I was here in Jefferson City, MO in a coffee shop. That’s were our respective bodies were but I’m not sure where my awareness or consciousness was. In the cloud? Cyberspace? Somewhere other than that coffee shop. Back to Ms. Lemon’s article:

Mark Carranza—[who] makes his living with computers—has been keeping a detailed, searchable archive of all the ideas he has had since he was 21. That was in 1984. I realize that this seems impossible. But I have seen his archive, with its million plus entries, and observed him using it… Most thoughts are tagged with date, time, and location.

“clickworkers, gold farmers, porn zappers” – Many of them based in suburban Manila in former elementary schools and other unlikely sites, the content moderators perform the unsavory job of repeatedly adjudicating whether images posted to Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, or other social networking sites are sufficiently offensive to be eliminated from view. Moderators at PCs sit at long tables for hours, an “army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us.” By some estimates, the content-moderating army is 100,000 strong, twice the size of Google’s labor pool, and many of its members have college degrees.