updated 8h ago
Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It
When prefrontal regions are either surgically removed or fall prey to some calamity, patients continue to see, hear, and sense. Deficits affect the higher mental faculties, resulting in apathy, a lack of curiosity about the world, and a disability in planning, introspecting, reasoning, and regulating emotions. Patients perseverate or consistently m
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Debbie Foster added 2mo ago
The experience of self is as real as any other conscious experience, such as pain or pleasure. What is illusory, as emphasized by Buddhism, is the idea of a permanent and fixed essence that constitutes the "true self," the "real me."
from Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It by Christof Koch
Debbie Foster added 2mo ago
One common observation is that psychedelics destabilize longrange cortical communication patterns and reduce activity in the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus in the posterior regions of the neocortex. This is the compatible with our knowledge of the brains of people trained in mindfulness. It appears that the less these midline structures a
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Debbie Foster added 2mo ago
…transformative experiences achieve transcendence, conveying a sense of equanimity, a feeling that everything is as it should be. They transform the life of the experiencer to the extent that the sense of self is extinguished. Experiencing the world with the "I" out of the way--an "I" that always wants something, desires somethi
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Debbie Foster added 2mo ago
Due to inherent and unavoidable randomness in nature, toggling tiny synapses on and off does not always lead to the same, reproducible result each time. Thus, a more general approach is to consider conditional probabilities: if ten synaptic inputs are activated, the neuron turns on 75 percent of the time and remains off the other 25 percent. The ou
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Debbie Foster added 2mo ago
The fourth axiom is exclusion. It states that every experience is definite. It has the content it has, neither less nor more. It could not be otherwise. Consider that you don't see outside the border of visual space. It is not part of your visual experience. It is neither grey nor black. Rather, it simply does not exist. Or consider experiencing &q
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Debbie Foster added 2mo ago
IIT
Between intrinsic and extrinsic existence passes the most fundamental of all divides: the Great Divide of Being. This is the unbridgeable chasm between what exists in an absolute sense, in and of itself—namely conscious, intrinsic entities—and what exists only in a lesser sense, for others.
Once this Great Divide of Being, between existence for itse
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Debbie Foster added 2mo ago
All quality is a structure, not a function, a process, or a computation. One implication is that consciousness is nonalgorithmic; it is not (Turing) computable.
from Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It by Christof Koch
Debbie Foster added 2mo ago
These observations refute the myth that consciousness simply arises from neurons doing their thing. Here are billions of cerebellar cells doing what comes naturally to them, firing action potentials and releasing little squirts of neurotransmitter, yet without any feelings. What matters is not the constitution of brain tissue but the way it is wire
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Debbie Foster added 2mo ago