6 Reader Responses

1. pmp Says:
   December 8th, 2006 at 4:02 pm

   To me all of these reveal important information about the purposes and methods of meditation and trance.

   Yes! Please elaborate on those thoughts, if you get the chance. This stuff fascinates me. It sure seems, subjectively, like we’re free-willed entities, but nearly all the evidence points to the subjective experience being an post-hoc, illusionary confabulation of the wetware. Yet, ’spiritual’ exercises really do seem to be (mostly) just a way to hack in some real ‘free-will’ or at least decondition enough of one’s genetic and (primarily random) environmental-upbringing programs for solutions to be computed in an unbiased manner. Or, maybe true free-will comes into play when the light of consciousness shines through a truly decoupled ecosystem of integrated neural networks (human brain.)

   If you’ve never read about it, make sure you check out Steven Thaler’s ‘Creativity Machine’ right now! Here’s a great introductory article:

   http://www.mindfully.org/Technology/20.../Creativity-Machine-Thaler24jan04.htm

   I’ve seen even hard AI proponent computer programming geniuses get freaked out by this stuff when I point out how it completely deconstructs the illusion of creative free-will even in their very own skulls! The really slick thing about this stuff is that biological neural architecture is set up in a way that the noise can be added and neural-networks can be ‘killed’ (as described in the article) in a non-destructive manner! Neurotransmitters can antagonize (result in the destruction of the neural network processing) in a temporary manner by changing the weighted parameters of their firing, but once the antagonist is gone, the neural network goes back to it’s normal firing parameters! Tryptamine hallucinogens especially make this clear with their selective 5-ht2a antagonism. Well, there’s endogenous versions of those, and while many look to them for explaining mystical states of consciousness, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were just as much, or more, responsible for the perturbations and noise the system relies upon to ’simulate’ creativity which we then perceive after the fact as our own free-willed decisions.

   And what the hell is this noise anyway? Nothing’s ever truly random in any system, random just means too complex to model so the noise is really the artifact of a vaster, more complex system than the one it is manifesting in.

   When I get into a serious conversation about this stuff, most materialists think I’m a freakin nutty occultist (or they realize their own mystical biases and that I’m even more frighteningly materialistic than they are,) and most nutty occultists think I’m a soulless materialist (or they realize their own materialistic biases and that I’m even more frighteningly mystical than they are,) so it always pleases me to run into thinkers who can overlay such normally incompatible metaphysics without cognitive dissonance and really apprehend the soul of the machine. It’s just as foolish to ignore the last five hundred years of empirical scientific data as it is foolish to discard the perennial philosophy.

2. Luke Says:
   December 8th, 2006 at 4:03 pm

   I’ve read in some places that the optic nerve completes various “filters” before it even delievers all the information to the brain. It explained our ability to be able to look at something and miss the totally obvious, but “unexpected” change in whatever it is we’re looking at.

   Or the research that sohws taht we’re able to reconstruct sentences and words without actually focusing on every single letter, character, and word. Or when listening or speaking to someone we only actually pay attention to the “important” words and allow context to fill in the rest based on history.

   So it sounds like not only does the brain delay the inputs but has very powerful “filtering agents” in place. If we didn’t filter so much would we operate like a computer with too many inputs and not enough memory or processing power to handle all of them simultaniously? (i.e. you type 15 words, but the computer is only currently showing the first 10 and it catches up)

3. pmp Says:
   December 8th, 2006 at 4:23 pm

   If we didn’t filter so much would we operate like a computer with too many inputs and not enough memory or processing power to handle all of them simultaniously?

   heh, totally! don’t want a buffer overflow WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!

4. Tim Boucher Says:
   December 8th, 2006 at 4:39 pm

   It’s just as foolish to ignore the last five hundred years of empirical scientific data as it is foolish to discard the perennial philosophy.

   Extremely well put! Let me try and formulate my thoughts on this more… Still kind of haphazard right now though.

   You’re right though - few occultists recognize it, but something like yoga is *extremely* materialistic, even to the point of materializing and manipulating energy directly, rather than sort of wishing or guessing about how energy works, which seems to be more common nowadays

   Check out this video for more on the brain’s ability to filter out visual signals:

   http://video.google.com/videoplay?doci...91461205783871229&q=derren+brown

   Who knows how “real” it is, but interesting nonetheless.

   Also check out this post on “23″ and runnning conceptual filters in your mind to modulate sensory experience and hook it directly into thought patterns

   http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/11/16/explaining-the-23-phenomenon/

   I think once you’re able to do that you can start realizing that when you perceive things in the world, what you tend to really perceive is your own thought patterns.

   That book I’m reading, “Body of Myth”, is really good because it talks about how myths are not (just) symbolic but they describe using pictorial imagery proprioceptive states achieved during trance - that is, awareness of one’s own body and the experience of sensory information directly from the substrate underlying all experience: the ever-present background noise of your own body. He argues that zen koans like “whats the sound of one hand clapping” are soluble and refer to the sound your ear is always hearing/making. He also compares proprioception to putting your television on channel one or some other channel with “no” signal. We think of it as having no signal, but its not true. The signal is just an all black screen and a base hum.

   As to Narby’s first quote, I think it’s fairly supportive of an idea I plan to explore more in a couple days: that we actually exist inside of a collective mind-sphere - which is not terribly original, but thats not the point.

   The second quote for me says that we can use stories and sequential patterns of imagery to intentionally light up sequences of brain activity. And if we know what we are doing when we do that, perhaps we can use stories, etc to trigger altered states - which I think is already the case. But I want to more deeply explore the mechanism of how this works and how to control it.

   The third quote about tape delay and brain editing simply says to me that the brain’s function isn’t to show us reality accurately but to protect us from it. It’s like how in mythology, if the Gods show their true form to mortals, the mortals have a nasty habit of dying.

   My understanding of how this all fits together is still only dawning I think.

5. Matthew Angel Says:
   December 8th, 2006 at 11:50 pm

   So it sounds like not only does the brain delay the inputs but has very powerful “filtering agents” in place.

   Quite the opposite, the brain adds a lot of information to the inputs. In the case of vision, for instance, it takes two bitmaps, basically, and does edge finding, maps them onto a 2 1/2D picture of the world, flags faces, identifies movement, all before it passes it of to our concsious mind. Some things it sends directly to other parts of the mind, like when you flinch away from something flying at you long before you notice it. It’s called ‘poverty of stimulus’ in the jargon, and it’s what inspired Fodor’s Modularity of Mind thesis. Those quotes put me vaugely in mind of it. Fodor’s original book is quite short, and I don’t recall it being terribly technical, I got through it in one sitting, unfortunately after my essay was due, but he only deals with the sensory processes. Massive modularity, in which the higher mind was also a collection of modules, came later, from evolutionary psychologists.

6. alistair Says:
   December 9th, 2006 at 11:34 am

   we filter by editing, deleting and distorting. our greatest capacity is one of denial. it`s what makes our species unique……………………..
   without that capacity we would still be living in grass huts.

   “poverty of stimulus”……..most athletes live in that world of unconsious responses, as do artists, while the technocrat denines it`s existance.