Psychic Shit Happens All The Time

there is a class of conscious experiences that come with a degree of lucidity uncommon in normal life. By and large, their mere existence was denied by science until the last century, and their study was consigned to the intellectual hinterlands of psychology, at the intersection of spiritualism, the paranormal, and the esoteric. But they are nothi

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It is, however, a matter of historical record that people have been impacted by their extraordinary experiences, discovering the biblical "peace of God that passeth all understanding," altering their way of life. Thus a more nuanced approach is to accept these reports as authentic and honest descriptions. They teach us that our central ne

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The first citation given concerns the “uniqueness problem,” which emphasizes a result long known by those of us who worked on IIT: that in systems that have mathematically perfectly symmetric interactions (the specifics are complicated, but just imagine this like a geometric shape), IIT gives conflicting answers as to the boundaries of the consciou... See more

Melanie Boly, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is painstakingly collecting EEG data from long-term Buddhist meditators during a state known as pure presence, an experience with no self, no discursive thoughts, and no perceptual content except for a luminous expanse, an empty mirror. Att

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