The end of 'The Great Beauty': "It's all a trick."
But about the quote from your earlier piece. I don't think I quite grasped what you were saying at the time, but reading it now it seems close to what i have come to think. Why can't there be separate neural nets (with different inputs) for each of what you call "levels" or "contexts"? Older philosophers called them "senses" or "faculties" - but however we characterize them the point is that the brain has to implement these operations _somehow_.
I’d highly recommend reading W.F. Hermans’ The Darkroom of Damocles, a wartime resistance thriller by the only Dutch author worth recommending. It deals with similar themes of reality unravelling, and how the narratives we tell ourselves to make our lives meaningful affect how we see the world.
We use the noun 'consciousness' as if it were a static 'thing' but actually it is a dynamic synthesis of many consciousness streams converging and vying for recognition. Our conscious mind is a 'funnel' choking down the flow of the stream of information filtering for that which is most relevant to physical survival. Anyone who has tried psychedelics experiences a much grander scale of 'consciousness' than what is socially acceptable. What is 'real' or 'magic' is a mere matter of momentary perception.
I am reading a book by body worker Philip Shepherd called "Radical Wholeness." He mentions that we have two physical brain centers - our head-brain and our gut-brain. Our head-brain primarily processes on making 'rational' judgments linking past memories to possible future outcomes. Yes, it is a massive heuristic designed to bypass having to actually experience something to know if it is life-affirming or threatening. Our gut-brain, located in our pelvic bowl region and linked to our head-brain via the vagus nerve, is more sense-connected and grounded in the present moment. It operates more on intuition rather than logic having deep primal insights encoded in the DNA of our cells. Our Western culture favors the logical head-brain over the messier gut-brain but a balance of the two consciousness centers would be ideal.
What blows my mind is the latest research on the human microbiome - the colonies of microbes that co-inhabit our bodies digesting our food and fighting pathogens. "Bacteria in an average human body number ten times more than human cells, for a total of about 1000 more genes than are present in the human genome."
We literally are a universe of consciousnesses acting as an individual. Recent studies find that if our gut biome is distressed, our psychology is affected. Who knows how many 'consciousness centers' make up a single human body? https://www.hmpdacc.org/overview/
Haha, yeah, it’s nested deep! That’s Dennett quoting Siegel relaying a conversation with a normie. Siegel says he’s writing a book about magic. His normie interlocutor says “A book about real magic?” Siegel says, “No, a book about trickery.” And then Siegel observes that when a normie says “real magic” they mean things that cannot be real — they mean the supernatural. And what actual existing “magic” is, is trickery — not “real” magic in the normie understanding of the term.
The end of 'The Great Beauty': "It's all a trick."
But about the quote from your earlier piece. I don't think I quite grasped what you were saying at the time, but reading it now it seems close to what i have come to think. Why can't there be separate neural nets (with different inputs) for each of what you call "levels" or "contexts"? Older philosophers called them "senses" or "faculties" - but however we characterize them the point is that the brain has to implement these operations _somehow_.
I’d highly recommend reading W.F. Hermans’ The Darkroom of Damocles, a wartime resistance thriller by the only Dutch author worth recommending. It deals with similar themes of reality unravelling, and how the narratives we tell ourselves to make our lives meaningful affect how we see the world.
i’ll save the consciousness stuff for later but you should try out the chinese tv adaptation of 3 body
I'm hooked on the book, it's going quick. May try the Chinese series after I'm done.
"I sense I am a verb." ~ Buckminster Fuller
We use the noun 'consciousness' as if it were a static 'thing' but actually it is a dynamic synthesis of many consciousness streams converging and vying for recognition. Our conscious mind is a 'funnel' choking down the flow of the stream of information filtering for that which is most relevant to physical survival. Anyone who has tried psychedelics experiences a much grander scale of 'consciousness' than what is socially acceptable. What is 'real' or 'magic' is a mere matter of momentary perception.
I am reading a book by body worker Philip Shepherd called "Radical Wholeness." He mentions that we have two physical brain centers - our head-brain and our gut-brain. Our head-brain primarily processes on making 'rational' judgments linking past memories to possible future outcomes. Yes, it is a massive heuristic designed to bypass having to actually experience something to know if it is life-affirming or threatening. Our gut-brain, located in our pelvic bowl region and linked to our head-brain via the vagus nerve, is more sense-connected and grounded in the present moment. It operates more on intuition rather than logic having deep primal insights encoded in the DNA of our cells. Our Western culture favors the logical head-brain over the messier gut-brain but a balance of the two consciousness centers would be ideal.
What blows my mind is the latest research on the human microbiome - the colonies of microbes that co-inhabit our bodies digesting our food and fighting pathogens. "Bacteria in an average human body number ten times more than human cells, for a total of about 1000 more genes than are present in the human genome."
We literally are a universe of consciousnesses acting as an individual. Recent studies find that if our gut biome is distressed, our psychology is affected. Who knows how many 'consciousness centers' make up a single human body? https://www.hmpdacc.org/overview/
“Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real…” (I assume these are Dennett’s words?)
This makes no sense to me🧐
Haha, yeah, it’s nested deep! That’s Dennett quoting Siegel relaying a conversation with a normie. Siegel says he’s writing a book about magic. His normie interlocutor says “A book about real magic?” Siegel says, “No, a book about trickery.” And then Siegel observes that when a normie says “real magic” they mean things that cannot be real — they mean the supernatural. And what actual existing “magic” is, is trickery — not “real” magic in the normie understanding of the term.