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Invisibler72rock
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Mind-Body, Consciousness, and Awareness
    #15621747 - 01/05/12 06:49 PM (12 years, 1 month ago)

I have been somewhat obsessed with the mind body problem and the idea of consciousness for over 2 years now. It's lead me into some really weird areas and ideas put forth by philosophers, theologians, biologist, neuroscientist, physicists, and more. Some of them I buy and think they may be probable, others I think are off the mark.

While doing this, I've readily noticed that everyone has a different definition of consciousness, but for the most part, everyone has a general idea of what each other are talking about. (Qualia or subjective experience) I'll touch back on the whole definition of consciousness later. What I've also noticed is that, we currently have no idea what consciousness is, and as of now, I say there is neither evidence for monism and materailism nor evidence for dualism and this "otherworldlyness."

For myself, I subscribe to dualism. I feel that there is a huge gap in monism and a fatal flaw in a materialist paradigm in trying to account for qualia. I draw my conclusion to dualism from personal experience and this gap in materialism.

From my experiences, I can't help but think there is something more. I draw from some drug experiences, namely DXM, Salvia, and Mushrooms. There's a quality to an experience that I feel is explained away in monism. For example, the feeling of Red or the feeling
of terror. If we weren't conscious, then I feel this problem wouldn't arise. There would be no experiencer of pain, pain would just be. It's the idea that there's something that experiences pain, and this is what leads me to reject monism. Why aren't we just zombies or computers that calculate things in a completely deterministic universe? Personally, I think that'd be much more hassle free as no one would suffer. :grin: But because there is something experiencing these computers calculating things, I have say there is something more than just a brain. I'm also not saying we have free will. I don't know if we do or don't. That's not (currently) what I'm interested in. I think it's epiphenomenon, in where we just experience things. We may or may not be able to control our actions, but to be quite honest, I think it'd be comforting if all was determined, and we just experienced life. More like, going with the flow of it all. :smirk:

I also think about the definition of consciouness. It's interesting. When I'm listening to researchers in the field of consciousness they usually start with a definition: and it is always off the mark of what I'm trying to understand about consciousness. I'll take for example Giulio Tononi. He's a rising star in the field of neuroscience, and rightfully so. He's developed a theory for consciouness called Integrated Information Theory. I think it's pretty interesting, and definitely worth checking out. But while watching him lecture, he started off with a definition of consciouness. He said, "It's the thing you lose when you're in deep dreamless sleep. It's the loss of a continuation of a self."

This is where I lose him. As much as I appreciate his work, and the rest of the lecture, I feel like he's missing a point. (Or, more realistically, I'm missing the point of his lecture.) Maybe consciouness is the wrong word. Maybe that's not what I'm interested at all. Maybe it's awareness. I'm interested in awareness, because that never seems to cease. I think about deep dreamless sleep. When I ponder this, I agree with Tononi. It does go away. I there is no subject, no self-reflection, no "I" - Nothing. But there's still awareness. Honestly, out of all the drugs I've had, the ecstasies I've felt, the highs of my life, nothing comes close to the blissfulness of deep dreamless sleep. There's no subject to suffer, no I; yet, there's awareness. Nothing just is, and there's awareness of itself. Now it's starting to sound a bit eastern, which is why I'm posting this in the S&M.

I also think about what awareness was like before I was born. It's the same thing. It was just a moment of nothingness. And then out of no where, I was spontaneously just placed into this existence, which is just another moment, and I honestly expect life afterwards to be the same. A moment of nothingness. I also think about the one time that I was placed under anesthesia. "I" ceased to exist, yet there was nothing. Nothing still had a characteristic: nothingness! I was nothingness.
I say I believe in an afterlife, but when I'm nailed on it by others, they correct me, and say I don't believe in one. I don't believe in any personal continuation. I don't believe that there's a soul that transmigrates to another plane or existence. But I do believe that this "awareness" doesn't cease. Subjective awareness always is. There was a moment of nothingness before existence where I wasn't troubled, and afterwards, I think it'll be another moment of nothingness where I won't be troubled. These are all just moments. :peace:

When I'm asked about the afterlife and I explain this, they say, "So, you believe there's nothing after life?" I'm kinda inclined to say yeah, but really, I don't think it'd be like an awareness of nothing for eternity. It's just a moment, like anesthesia or deep sleep. There's no subject to experience nothing. Nothingness just is. :strokebeard:

But in all honesty, I have no idea. :tongue: These are just some ramblings and musings after reseraching the mind-body problem everyday for nearly 2 and a half years. I'm sorry if it's all over the place. I just recently realized that I'd been doing this for a long time and I'm trying to understand a bit of it in retrospect.


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Invisibletribesman
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Re: Mind-Body, Consciousness, and Awareness [Re: r72rock]
    #15622003 - 01/05/12 07:38 PM (12 years, 1 month ago)

I enjoyed reading that, as I'm really starting to delve into some aspects of duality at the moment. I find it makes for some interesting perspectives. :thumbup:


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Offlinekyguy
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Re: Mind-Body, Consciousness, and Awareness [Re: tribesman]
    #15622226 - 01/05/12 08:14 PM (12 years, 1 month ago)

I also enjoyed reading it.

My sister showed me a lecture on DVD today that was all about the law of attraction, awareness and manifestation. It was very interesting.

Then I come home, log onto the shroomery, and click on active topics and this is the first post that came up.

Thanks for sharing!


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Invisibletribesman
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Re: Mind-Body, Consciousness, and Awareness [Re: kyguy]
    #15622597 - 01/05/12 09:22 PM (12 years, 1 month ago)



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Offlinesoldatheero
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Re: Mind-Body, Consciousness, and Awareness [Re: r72rock]
    #15623186 - 01/05/12 11:33 PM (12 years, 1 month ago)

Quote:

For example, the feeling of Red or the feeling
of terror. If we weren't conscious, then I feel this problem wouldn't arise. There would be no experiencer of pain, pain would just be. It's the idea that there's something that experiences pain, and this is what leads me to reject monism.




So you are implying that the experiencer has to be separate from the experience?


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Invisibler72rock
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Re: Mind-Body, Consciousness, and Awareness [Re: soldatheero]
    #15623531 - 01/06/12 01:47 AM (12 years, 1 month ago)

Well I'm glad some people enjoyed it. :laugh:

Quote:

soldatheero said:
Quote:

For example, the feeling of Red or the feeling of terror. If we weren't conscious, then I feel this problem wouldn't arise. There would be no experiencer of pain, pain would just be. It's the idea that there's something that experiences pain, and this is what leads me to reject monism.




So you are implying that the experiencer has to be separate from the experience?




Yeah, that's what I was saying initially. That there are two separate spheres: one that is the case of the world and the other which experiences it (awareness). It's awareness that experiences a conscious being and has a "stream of consciousness." If we were just robots with no awareness, it'd just be a robot processing suffering to process suffering. If I grab a stuffed animal and stab it, I don't feel bad about it because it doesn't experience anything (at least as far as I know). But if I knew that it was feeling each stab, then I'd feel terrible about it because it's experiencing suffering.

I think originally I was driving home this idea that I've ultimately divided it up into 3 things now: [Body + Mind + Awareness] rather than just [Body + Mind]. Because, as a thought experiment, couldn't we imagine that a machine that can self-reflect? It could look over it's code and program, figure out what's wrong with it, and rewrite itself to fix itself and understand how it works; yet, just because a program can do that and is "self-conscious" doesn't mean that it's experiencing it.

Towards the end though, I started saying that the experiencer isn't separate from the experience as awareness just is.

I'm still thinking about all of this though. I'm sorry my OP was kind of just a ramble of my thoughts on the matter. I was kind of just trying to get all this pent up thought out of me. :lol: Typing this out really helped me lay my thoughts down and now I'm getting some good reflection and cohesion of what I've been reading and thinking about. Any discussion would be awesome.


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Offlinehatsom_gotem
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Re: Mind-Body, Consciousness, and Awareness [Re: r72rock]
    #15623762 - 01/06/12 04:12 AM (12 years, 1 month ago)

i think it may be just Mind/Body + Awareness.

the mind is of the body, brain/thoughts/ego, all in the same bag because it's not part of the  awareness.
unless you wanna just consider everything that isn't awareness just a tool for awareness to use in it's exploration of the self and what is/isn't, possible/impossible, good/bad, sour and sweet.
everything is a tool for awareness to use to affect the balancing act of life that takes place on flat ground.

we are already traveling through time.:syringe:

i'm just a statistic.


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Invisibler72rock
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Re: Mind-Body, Consciousness, and Awareness [Re: hatsom_gotem]
    #15625447 - 01/06/12 01:20 PM (12 years, 1 month ago)

I like that distinction that you made. It could be [Mind/Body + Awareness]. I think I subconsciously make that distinction that the problem of consciousness should be broken up like that.

To put it in Chalmer's terms, I think you could break up the "easy problem of consciousness" as the Mind and the "hard problem of consciousness" as Awareness. I think that makes consciousness easier to define as two points. Within the Mind-Body philosophy, I feel a lot of people say their tackling consciousness, yet they only are really focusing on the easy problem (of the mind) and ignoring the hard problem (awareness).


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Invisiblecateyes
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Re: Mind-Body, Consciousness, and Awareness [Re: r72rock]
    #15625777 - 01/06/12 02:46 PM (12 years, 1 month ago)

happy new year dude! i put up a thread in music on a website called TasteKid... check it out and tell me what U think, K?

first off let me start by saying it always seems to be mind body... through my own personal experience my real struggle turned out be body mind. about 8+ years ago i was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder bipolar type... i spent many years on fucked up meds and received very little relief. during that time i was in CBT and went through 5 psychologists... then i hooked up with a young psychologist that practiced somatic psychology. the very first day we met she handed me a sheet of paper with clear simple instructions on how to reprogram my subconscious mind. in 3 months i became extremely motivated, changed my lifestyle and in about 3 months my anxiety, depression, and mania disappeared. things were still off though... hallucinations, delusions, paranoia...shit like that, the negative and positive symptoms of schizophrenia, only there were occurring less frequently and were less intense... buy this point i stopped my meds, which they themselves were tripping me over. i finally found 2 MD's who really new their shit and they discovered i had a severe vitamin d deficiency, mild hypothyroidism, low adrenal function and a pretty significant case of metal poisoning... elevated levels of cadmium and nickel... high levels of arsenic and very high levels of copper.... during he previous years i'd been seeing two MD's who drew blood all of the time and completely missed every single one of my underlying health issues... and because i had these health issues, it tripped my mind real hard!@!! it doesn't much worse then schizophrenia and bipolar mix!!! so U C, in mine and many many others, it was the body that did in the mind!@@!!@!@#!@ :lol:

and the mind over body can be demonstrated merely through pavlovs dog... ring the bell... salivate.. another example is i received a PM from another member here on this server... he's a bio chemist and he was telling me about tests they ran on lab rats where they gave the rats a flavored compound that stimulated immune response. and they did this over and over and over. then they gave the rats just the flavor and it triggered a response!!!

i love watching Utube vids where philosophers and physicists get together and talk about the universe being conscious of itself. half the fu**ing time i have no clue where some of them come up with some of this shit! i mean i can follow it, but i am never buying it, at least not the way they try to present it, even fifth voice laughs her ass off. through my own crisis i can assure you there are multiple levels of consciousness, but when i think about it you're probably already well aware what i'm talking about by your own experiments with it.

awareness boils right down to living in the moment. there's no projecting into the past or the what if's of the future, although doing this can bring on a whole new level of consciousness... but we're talking awareness now. i'm going to post a video on mindfulness meditation. practicing mindfulness forces you to live in the moment, giving you a real advantage when under any form of internal or external pressure. practicing mindfulness involves the brain much more deeply in the present. i try to do it when ever possible but i find it most productive when i'm out in the woods just walking around with my dogs. mindfulness practice really involves the mind more deeply, focusing in on input from every sense that's called into play. 8 steady weeks of mindfulness has been found to increases cognition... i listened to a show by a guy named gary null just this week where he spent about 20 minutes talking about it before he brought on his first guest and his guest said it sounded fascinating and didn't mind the wait.

i'll have to look into this giulio tononi dude... just the sound of it i already have a good feel i'll buy into it... the integrated information theory of consciousness. you know why i say this? because even though there is a clear distinction between upper consciousness and lower consciousness they are always in communication with one another unless the upper mind has been completely sedated. as in anesthesia... i feel i felt no pain because my upper mind was detached from all senses, including nerve pain or tactile. but don't confuse complete sedation with deep sleep, because when we sleep our upper conscious mind just goes idle. some people go deeper then others... like just two days ago i was working on some of the writing i've been doing and the smoke alarm in the hallway started to chirping... i heard it from rooms away, but i just ignored it yet my wife, who can easily get 10 hours in each night if she hits it early was woke up from a sound sleep. she responded to the chirp because she's deathly afraid of fire and this because in her early teens one of her friends entire family died in a house fire during christmas time. her upper consciousness, even though it was idle responded to a sound she's afraid of. when you sleep upper is idle like i said but a sound, a smell, a touch, a light turned on in the room or placing several drops of lemon juice on the tongue if the subject sleeps with the mouth open. it's the upper conscious mind that says Hmmmmm lemon, it's the upper mind input that brings it on.

and the subconscious is pulling all of the strings and it's doing it constantly. from what i've come to know, i don't believe it's never truly idle. the entire nature of your dreams seem to be  the byproduct of subconscious experiences and fantasies... in a serial killer, subconscious fantasies rise to the surface... many people actually think about killing, it's very common, buy well connected, adjusted people can easily suppress these thoughts... but if these thoughts remain consistent(intrusive thoughts) severe mental issues will eventually occur through guilt...why am i thinking these thoughts these people say to themselves... it becomes a truly spiritual crisis at that point, especially if they're religious, religious in the sense of a moral god... like i said, the sub mind is king... it tells you who you are, how to respond to any given situation, how to perceive your world along with hundreds if not multiple thousands of reactions and they are all based on past experiences... and the weird thing about he sub mind is it can not tell the difference between an actual external experience or a thought... here's a very powerful book... probably one of the best books i've ever read. in this book the author shows you how an animal in the wild can over come the most traumatic event very rapidly, where our own higher level sense of self and surroundings trip us over very hard... this book is widely used by psychologists in the know to help treat PTSD, and not many people apply this book which is a complete disgrace in my opinion. i'm not even sure i've touched on all of your points or if half the things i've said are relevant.

and one more thing... i'm a theistic agnostic in the big picture. how can an atheist tell you with any certainty there is nothing else after this is over? have they checked it out already. did they get a sneak peek? an atheist can not convince me there is no god  just as a theist can define the true nature of something they've never seen... shit past down to them through corrupt scriptures... bro, they say there are approximately 200 billion galaxies out there. what if a civilization developed a mere 25,000 years ahead of us? where will we be in 25,000 years of advanced science and engineering. who the fuck knows if the new agers are right!!! :lol: maybe we were seeded!!!:laugh: but can we really dismiss this entirely though? no we can't, we can't disprove it any more then they can convince others. there's a guy named michio kaku... very intense dude... i listen to his radio show all of the time and he has a cable show on the local science channel.. he's one of the two creators of string theory. he was asked in an interview, if he believed in god and he said something to the effect that he believed in something, he just wasn't really sure of its real nature. he did say he could bring himself to look at it in simplistic terms if he had to, by reasoning the universe made earth and the earth made us, through a perfect evolution. and who can say for sure there isn't something more behind it. over 80% of all drugs made are nature molecules, but in order to sell and make huge coin it has to be patented. when they tweak these molecules they can become ineffective and in some case dangerous. how is it a lowly mushroom evolved in such a way that it can react on a specific receptor in our brains? how did early man discover this? through trial and error foraging? maybe... but why a receptor that can induce hallucinations? why not just slow death like most in the wild or edible like some? this was a question raised by an honest atheist when scientific american ran an article of a 64 year old woman's experience with a very high dose of psilocybin. there were over 60 responses and all but one were pissed that scientific american had the balls to run an article like that. one guy was appalled!!!!! and then he listed his three reasons why and after going off like did he said all it ever did for him was bring him closer to a true understanding of the universe, that he felt a sense of being more in connection with with it!!!!!! when i read that i said, Hmmmmmm, sounds like we got ourselves a closet new age scientist!!! :lol: the friggin guy couldn't connect his own absurd comment... not that i personally think it's absurd, it's just that he was pissed off that some old woman met her personal god in person. she turned out to be a christian scientist, at least i think she was based on who she reached out to before her dose kicked in. i looked the guys name up... don't ever allow anyone to trip you over... let your imagination take you where you'll let it. this is what fifth voice has said to me many times before... she's revealed things that i won't buy into completely and she's cool with it... she knows after what i have been through, that i need to exercise my imagination after being trapped inside my head for almost 8 years... do not allow anyone to force you into a box with high sides because you might not ever see the real possibilities.


this is Mindie Kniss... i have a skype session set up with her later this month... she offered all who subscribe to her news letter to pay her what ever we could afford or felt it was worth.. she gets 250.00 per hour... at the end of the session she sends off a blank paypal invoice.. i couldn't pass up that offer... she is an incredible human being... the video below it is her fiance'... he's a very unique psychologist... he treats patients in one session, one session lasted 12 hours... he allows them to call him when needed afterwards... they've never called more then 4 times and their issues are behind them completely... his name is shawn...





Kensho :psychsplit:


Edited by cateyes (01/06/12 03:40 PM)


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Invisibler72rock
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Re: Mind-Body, Consciousness, and Awareness [Re: cateyes]
    #15629981 - 01/07/12 12:59 PM (12 years, 1 month ago)

Wow, that was quite the post. I enjoyed reading through it. Thanks for the input. :cheers: I'll also go check out your thread in the Music section as well.

Well, to start I totally agree that the body takes precedent over the mind. The brain is a bunch of neurons that are determined how a mind may feel purely by neurochemistry. It's also interesting, as you pointed out, how much of our action is unconscious and dictated by our subconscious. What I was trying to get at though, was this awareness that may be different from the body and mind.

Quote:

love watching Utube vids where philosophers and physicists get together and talk about the universe being conscious of itself. half the fu**ing time i have no clue where some of them come up with some of this shit! i mean i can follow it, but i am never buying it, at least not the way they try to present it, even fifth voice laughs her ass off. through my own crisis i can assure you there are multiple levels of consciousness, but when i think about it you're probably already well aware what i'm talking about by your own experiments with it.




I'm not sure what you're talking about here. :tongue: Could you elaborate a bit? I think the arguement that the universe is conscious of itself can be spun in many ways. From a materialistic stand point of evolution creating humans so the universe can be conscious of itself to panpsychism where the universe is consciousness.

Quote:

awareness boils right down to living in the moment. there's no projecting into the past or the what if's of the future, although doing this can bring on a whole new level of consciousness... but we're talking awareness now.




This is what I was saying. Awareness is a subjective experience of a moment. It's all a moment. Whether it's now, before we were born, or after we die, it's all just that - a moment of awareness.

I hope you reply back to this because I'm kind of confused on this upper and lower consciousness business. :nut: But I'm interested. :smile:

Otherwise, thanks for your input! I'll have to check out that book, it sounds very interesting. And also, I really appreciated those videos, especially the one about self forgiveness.


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