Debbie Foster

For a taste of this mystery, simply close your eyes, calm your breathing, and try to still your mind. This will be next to impossible; thoughts and feelings will come up regardless. The calmer your mind is, the more disconnected and arbitrary will be the thoughts that arise. Images will appear out of nowhere, things you had long ignored or

if you believe in computational functionalism, then a sufficiently accurate simulation of your connectome will be conscious (whether it will be your mind, let alone a sane rather than a mad mind, is a different matter). If you believe that consciousness is a structure of causal relationships, an essential aspect of reality tied to its physical

Reality is something qualitatively different from fiction, and fiction is only dangerous when we don't respect that difference—when we forget that it serves a fundamentally different purpose and appeals to different needs.

Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues have argued that the Freudian primary process is characterised by high levels of entropy. The primal, infant brain state is disorganised; however, as the infant matures, organisation is the inevitable by-product of a system in which free energy is minimised. The ensuing (low entropy) 'structure' that emerges

The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and, although nothing does, we continue inside that dream.

Neuroses are jailbreaks—not out of a prison but into one. Today neurosis takes the place of the monasteries, Freud wrote, which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it.

… the more foreign a state is from normal behavior, the more it demonstrates special powers and supernatural contact. A shaman who chitchats with an audience in their everyday voice is likely to be considered a fraud. One who thrashes violently, speaks in a strange voice, and then doesn't remember anything afterward is more conceivably doing

paranormal phenomena are essentially pieces or parts of ourselves that we have projected outward, usually in a traumatic situation or because of a previous trauma and its dissociative nature. These things are projected outward so that we can read them and

The path back to sanity begins by acknowledging that intelligence is more than logic enriched with generative bursts of randomness. Randomness is capricious and wasteful—while intelligence is purposeful and prudent. This is why the human brain is not random…