Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

It is known that the likelihood of long-term therapeutic gains increases with the likelihood of the subject having a mystical experience, prima facie evidence favoring a critical role for subjectivity. It is precisely the high emotional impact of the memories of the vivid and highly unusual psychedelic experience that serves as the primary source o

From the point of view of an external observer, a silent cortex and a silenced cortex resemble each other, as neither lights up with electrical activity. Yet, while a silent cortex retains its full causal power but chooses not to speak, a silenced cortex has lost its voice and is unconscious.

The axioms are about essential properties of experience. Many articles and my last book have dealt with these, so I will be brief.

The first axiom is intrinsicality. This means that any experience is subjective, existing for itself, not for others. It exists from the intrinsic perspective, from within, not from an outsider's perspective.

The second a

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

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

…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

The sum of the phi’s of all distinctions and relations is the integrated information of the circuit in this state, symbolized by the uppercase letter phi, Q. This number measures the irreducibility of the substrate. Something with no integrated information does not exist as an integrated entity, as it can be reduced to two or more subsystems withou

IIT accounts for subjective experience via five axioms of phenomenal existence. These axioms are indubitably true for any and all human experiences, are consistent with but independent of each other, and are complete; that is, there are no other axioms that hold universally true for all experiences.

I want to reemphasize the miraculous existence of any form of consciousness by paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein: Not how consciousness is, is mystical, but that it is.

That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation.