Physiology[edit]Physiological studies have tended to concentrate on hypnagogia in the strict sense of spontaneous sleep onset experiences. Such experiences are associated especially with stage 1 of NREM sleep,[44] but may also occur with pre-sleep alpha waves.[45][46] Davis et al. found short flashes of dreamlike imagery at the onset of sleep to correlate with drop-offs in alpha EEG activity.[12] Hori et al. regard sleep onset hypnagogia as a state distinct from both wakefulness and sleep with unique electrophysiological, behavioral and subjective characteristics,[22][13] while Germaine et al. have demonstrated a resemblance between the EEG power spectra of spontaneously occurring hypnagogic images, on the one hand, and those of both REM sleep and relaxed wakefulness, on the other.[47]
To identify more precisely the nature of the EEG state which accompanies imagery in the transition from wakefulness to sleep, Hori et al. proposed a scheme of 9 EEG stages defined by varying proportions of alpha (stages 1–3), suppressed waves of less than 20μV (stage 4), theta ripples (stage 5), proportions of sawtooth waves (stages 6–7), and presence of spindles (stages 8–9).[22] Germaine and Nielsen found spontaneous hypnagogic imagery to occur mainly during Hori sleep onset stages 4 (EEG flattening) and 5 (theta ripples).[23]
The “covert-rapid-eye-movement” hypothesis proposes that hidden elements of REM sleep emerge during the wakefulness-sleep transition stage.[48] Support for this comes from Bódicz et al., who note a greater similarity between WST (wakefulness-sleep transition) EEG and REM sleep EEG than between the former and stage 2 sleep.[7]
Respiratory pattern changes have also been noted in the hypnagogic state, in addition to a lowered rate of frontalis muscle activity.[6]
I’ll have to really give this some thought as I try to digest it all and/or search further along.
The brain is a magnificent wonder.
What truly IS the final frontier - the brain or spaaccccceeee
Yours is a mess of ideas. My perspective is true, yours is not. Yours is rather incoherent, even relative to itself.
“Do you mean that nothing necessarily becomes something because, for some reason, it needs to be conscious of itself, and this forces (causes) it to become something?”
Nothing does not need to be conscious of itself, nothingness by definition, is unconscious, and cannot become conscious of itself, or else it will stop being nothing. The cause>effect is nothing becoming something, and consciousness neccesarily needing something to be conscious, not nothing becoming conscious of itself.
“instead of ghost in the brain, consciousness was a product of the brain”
That distinction is almost meaningless. A ghost in the brain, could also be construed as a product of the brain, but as I explained earlier, creativity is a myth.
“consciousness is generating the contents of reality, cause precedes effect”
Once again, your present the notion that consciousness is something outside the bounds of reality, and generates reality, which is the same as saying there is a ghost in the brain, even though you say you are saying the opposite of that.
Consciousness cannot exist without substance in it (reality), and reality (substance) cannot exist without consciousness to percieve it.
“How do you transfer your reality into someone’s body?” you seem intent on mixing up concept and definitions.
The general idea is transferring consciousness into someone else’s brain, to experience their brains flavor of reality.
Their brain and body is the flavor of reality.
“Unless you mean the reality which you already experience, but then that would be same reality regardless of whose body you experience it from.”
No it is not the same reality, it would have a different flavor and perspective based on the brain and body associated with that reality.
“if ghost were an appendage of a functioning brain, could it really detach itself from that brain and survive?” Clearly it already has, because you are not my brain, and you are sentient, unless you are not.
I can only take this as an appraisal of my ideas on a first impression. But do you really think my ideas are incoherent to me?
You must realize I haven’t given you a full exposition of my ideas as that would require an entire book (which I’ve written BTW, here: mm-theory.com).
If you want, we can go through it step by painful step, but I gotta warn you, you’d have to be in it for the long haul.
If not, at least acknowledge that your first impression of my ideas (that they are a mess of ideas and incoherent) is most likely based on the fact that I haven’t given you enough to connect all the dots in a logic, coherent way. Of course, that would require positing perspectives in other people’s minds of which you are not yet privy, and so far it seems like “other people’s minds” is an almost impossible concept for you to grasp.
Got it. But why do you think nothingness causes somethingness? Is it because that’s what happened in the past? The moment of the Big Bang, I mean?
Yes, a ghost qua product of the brain would still be a ghost in the brain, but not all ghosts in the brain are products of that brain (possession for example). The point I was making is that consciousness as a product of the brain doesn’t necessarily possess the ability to leave that brain and enter another.
How did you come to that conclusion? I explicitly said that consciousness is reality, not outside reality. It is the boundary (plus the contents). How can this imply that consciousness is a ghost in the brain? The brain is one of the contents of reality, and thus it too is a form of consciousness (projection from visually beholding a brain, conceptualizing brains, feeling brains with your fingers, etc.–whatever form of consciousness, whatever qualia, project as that which you recognize as “brain”); the closest this comes to a ghost in the brain is that the “ghost” (i.e. consciousness) is the brain (at least in part).
I know this probably doesn’t make sense to you, but that’s your cue to ask: what do you mean by this gib? How can consciousness be the brain? And then I will proceed to try to answer your question. You can make a commentary about how that just doesn’t make sense to you, and of course you’d be right (relative to your understanding), but don’t just leave it at that. Inquire further! It’s how philosophical discussions unfold. Unless of course you’re satisfied taking your first (limited) impression as objective reality plane and simple, and that this first impression is all there is to it, but if the possibility exists in your mind that maybe there could be more to my theory than you’ve gleaned (and that I’ve divulge), then why don’t we have a meaningful, and maybe even pleasant, discussion?
This last part–that reality can’t exist without consciousness to perceive it–sounds like Idealism, which is exactly the camp my theory falls in. Of course, it doesn’t mean consciousness is reality–it just means they are co-dependent–but I’ll leave it up to you to educate me on how you understand this.
But yes, consciousness and reality are both substance (although I have to insist that we take “substance” in the strict Aristotelian sense of: that which stands under–thus sub-stance–and supports. In other words, substance is simply that which is the most generalized “stuff”, the fabric from which all other particular stuff is cut).
Sure, and that makes sense according to your ghost-in-the-machine concept of consciousness.
Different flavors and perspectives don’t make for different realities–not necessarily–if to you, formaldehyde flavored ice cream tastes gross and to me it tastes good, that hardly means we’re living in whole different realities. On the other hand, if you believe in God and I don’t, we must be living in different realities (subjectively, according to idealism). The key is, can differences in flavor and perspective be chocked up to relativism or are the differences literally incompatible in the same reality. Whether something tastes good or bad is relative to the person’s tastes. The existence of God or his non-existence can’t be a relative matter, at least not if we’re talking about a single reality–either he exists in that reality or he doesn’t–and so to sanction both perspectives at the same time, one must posit two different realities (then one can be a relativist again).
Um… not exactly “clearly”. You seem to be suggesting that my consciousness was originally born from your brain and somehow got severed off and made its way to my brain… really???
What?!?! That’s it?!?! You’re not even going to attempt a debate, let alone a conversation?
Ok, Trixie, you disagree. That’s clear.
But please answer this for me: you are aware, aren’t you, at least of the possibility that there might be more to these ramblings of madness that I’m spewing out than what you can make of them on a first impression? I know you tend towards narcissism and solipsism, but I have to believe that on some level you at least wonder whether others have minds of their or not. Hell, just having conversations like this with others on an internet forum betrays some kind of assumption that you’re talking with real human beings with minds of their own, and you’re maybe even trying to form inter-personal connections.
No?
Not even on some level?
Why don’t you inquire when you don’t at first understand? Why do you give up immediately and assert your lack of understanding as mere ramblings of madness just because that’s all it seems to you at first? Are you frustrated? (serious question)
I understand that the size of the average male’s consciousness is about 6 inches, although now they have all kinds of chemicals and germs to alter that in selected males. Women’s consciousness is somewhat inverted, but we all knew that.
“Conciousness is be the brain”
Consciousness is not the brain, me and Amorphos already discussed this extensively. Qualia is bijective function (or injective, can’t remember which.) Bottom line is, it is not equal to the brain, but simply data transformed into something else using the brain as conduit. The fuel and reason of transformation is unknown.
If you live in Texas and eat a different icecream, we do not have the same realities.
We live in the same network with physics code, but the reality generated from the code is different.
“consciousness cannot rip from the brain it is from”
So death does not cause consciousness to cease in the brain, and I do not exist, because your consciousness will never leave your brain and experience my life.
Forgive me for not addressing your other nonsense sooner, it is tiresome.
Funny because, over here you seem to say that consciousness can leave it’s body at any time, which is the exact opposite of what you are saying here.
“Many humans hate their lives; they wish they could escape the pain and suffering. This is normal, and spirits know this. Yet we stick with our bodies; even though we could, at any moment, choose to leave it. But this choice is unconscious, held firm at a profoundly deep level of our being. Though on the surface a particular human being might whale and pine over the adversity of his life, on a deeper unconscious level, he holds on because he knows his purpose has not yet been fulfilled.” - gib
Presumably, you mean that our brain still remains, when our body dies, floating along the astral planes, brain don’t need no body!
In terms of the brain projecting from consciousness, no it is not the whole of consciousness, but it is a part.
In terms of what the brain represents, it does represent our consciousness. Our consciousness is the being of the brain.
That’s like saying: if I live in the kitchen and you live in the bedroom, we don’t live in the same house.
The kitchen may be all I’ve ever known, and the bedroom may be all you’ve ever know, but that doesn’t make the kitchen and the bedroom incompatible in the same house, and it doesn’t mean that we each assume there is nothing outside the kitchen or bedroom.
This all depends on which model of consciousness we’re dealing with. If we go with your model (ghost in the machine), then sure consciousness may go on after the body dies. If we go with consciousness qua product of the brain, then yes, death causes consciousness to cease (this is not the same as “ripping” consciousness from the brain). If we go with my view–pantheistic subjectivism–then once you die, the pattern of your subjective experiences undergoes radical qualitative changes and you most likely lose your individuality, thereby becoming one with universal consciousness. ← But this is from a 1st person subjective point of view. From a 3rd person objective point of view, others around you–your family and loved ones who are there the minute you die–will observe the decay of your brain (if they bothered looking). They will not see a ghost leave the body, but will observe the metamorphosis of your brain tissue undergoing the corresponding physical changes that match, as a material representation, the subjective qualitative changes you feel yourself undergo as you transition into the afterlife.
I’m not sure why you think I need to experience your life in order to assert that you exist–not according to your perspective at least–unless you’re speaking in terms of my perspective. Yes, idealism is often charged with solipsism, but they are not synonymous–it’s just challenging to be an idealist and not a solipsist at the same time; but really, all an idealist must do in order to avoid solipsism is to believe in the existence of other minds; a further step may be required to philosophically justify that belief (i.e. to show how your idealism doesn’t necessarily lead to solipsism), but even without that, just merely believing in the existence of other minds keeps you from being a solipsist.
That being said, I do have my justifications: for one thing, my mind certainly projects other people along with their minds, so right there I live in a subjective world that features other people with minds of their own; however, this is not quite enough as it implies that their minds depend on being projected from mine. So there is a more complicated solution to this problem and I won’t get into it now as it requires a lengthy discussion and lot of background knowledge–namely knowledge of the Kantian dilemma of the ding un sich. Essentially, this is the dilemma of how Kant can claim to conceive and know about the inconceivable, unknowable thing-in-itself–if you can solve that problem, you can solve the problem of other minds (at least to the extent that you can refrain from solipsism).
Well, I wouldn’t want you to strain yourself.
I wasn’t going with my default perspective here. I was going with something I thought Random Factor might appreciate more easily. As a relativist, switching perspectives comes natural to me. I don’t always need to assert my default one and in fact I have several.
What I was trying to offer you was an alternative perspective to the one you’re clinging to. It seemed you were struggling with a philosophical problem (or a spiritual one) and I saw the crux of the issue having to do (maybe) with your ghost in the machine model. I tried to suggest an alternative according to which that just isn’t possible, thereby maybe settling the matter and allowing you to move on.
I know you’re interested in truth. That’s because you’re an objectivist. I’m a subjectivist, which means I think truth is whatever you want it to be (although some truths have more integrity and coherence than others) and the real interesting stuff in philosophy is analyzing ideas and seeing how they tie together, maybe arriving at unexpected conclusions. This can be done with anybody’s perspective, so I have no problem jumping in and out of different people’s perspectives and arguing with them on their own terms.
But anyway, in regards to my quote above, I didn’t exactly say the soul can leave the body in the form of a ghost; I left it open ended on how to interpret that; you could interpret it to mean that one can choose, at any moment, to “wake up”–as if life were a dream, and the afterlife were the waking world. Would you describe yourself getting out of bed in the morning as rising from your dream body as a ghost? You could also think of it as choosing to unplug yourself from the Matrix–again, not quite the ghost leaving the body imagery, but a kind of “leaving” nonetheless.
What I can say for certain is that any transition into an afterlife is going to be experienced, from a 1st person subjective perspective, as a radical transformation of the qualities and configurations of one’s experiences.
The two houses would be different instances, different realities, based on an invisible parent code. The invisible parent code, generating the house templates would be the same, but it would be invisible, and so not part of reality. The actual houses which are part of reality, would actually be two different instances of reality, not the same reality.
Death is not unknowable, unless there is eternal nothingness in it. Lots of dying people have out of body experiences which can be empirically tested and verifiable, only problem is hospitals are staffed by idiots and scrubs and (to my knowledge) noone has done a proper experiment.
The afterlife may be 5d, which means a camera projection onto a cylinder or cube, rather than converging onto a single point as we are accustomed. The avatars may be dreamlike, as experiencing our bodies in 3rd person view as attached to our consciousness, while looking at ourselves.
The afterlife should be able to be remembered, because memory is outside of the brain. There is memory in the brain but there must also be memory outside the brain or we would not be sentient and events would not appear to exist.
If one of us never experiences each other’s life either in the past or future lives, then the other cannot be said to exist or be sentient. So if i never will experience your life in a past or future life, you cannot be sentient, for I would be lying and your sentience would not be true, since it never existed, cannot ever exist and there is no evidence of it existing, if am never to be you in a past or future life.
I’m not getting it. My house analogy was a response to this:
Are you speaking from the point of view of idealism? In that case, any two people having different sets of experiences might be said to be living in wholy separate realities. So it has nothing to do with being in Texas per se, or eating icecream per se, huh?
While you could say that my disliking for a cone of icecream is a different way of experiencing the icecream than your liking for it, and therefore project from two different minds which in turn constitute two different realities, there is a way of conceiving these different minds as overlapping on certain experiences. For example, even though the icecream tastes different between us, we both recognize the icecream for the same object we take it to be; we identify it: it’s the icecream we got at Joe’s Icecream Parlo five minutes ago and decided to share. The mind will make objects out of its sensory experiences, and it will infuse it with an identity, making it a “thing”. This “thing” then becomes identified as the same thing (in an objective spatiotemporal world) that everyone else sees and knows about.
There is no reason to think that just because each perception of the object, of the icecream, projects from different minds, that those projections aren’t being projected into a common or “shared” area of mind. Think of it in terms of set theory. Imagine a Ven Diagram of two overlapping circles (not completely overlapped but partially). These circles represent sets of experiences, or if you like, two people’s minds. The taste of the icecream might fall into the non-overlapping region of each mind, but the identity of the icecream as “that icecream we got 5 minutes ago” falls in the overlapped region.
See, that would falsify my theory (unless the brain is somehow capable of simulating OBEs as an elaborate hallucination, like in a dream).
Oh, I think I get you know. You believe that there is only one consciousness in existence and it takes turns occupying different people during different lifetimes. So this consciousness is now living Trixie’s life, and when Trixie dies, it will return to some “primal state” for lack of a better word. In this state, it remembers who it is. It is all that exists, all that ever did and ever will exist, and these people whose lives it jumps into and out of are the “avatars” you’ve been talking about. So now, this consciousness is living Trixie’s life. In a future life or in a past life, it might or might have lived gib’s life. If it will or did, that determines that gib is sentient.
But by this token, doesn’t it mean there are other minds besides yours? Even if those minds will be or were you? Not everybody has a mind, obviously, because, in your own words, this ultimate consciousness would not choose to be sentient of a life full of pain and suffering (it would clog up the time line, as you said).
So besides Richard Dawkins, you said your life is one of the more popular ones (obviously, since this universal consciousness chose to live it). Man, my life must be pretty interesting too, 'cause I swear to God I’m sentient. You’ll see (or you have seen). But let’s talk about you. Would you say your life is worth living? Do you find it more painful than pleasurable, or visa-versa? If you say this consciousness chose you in order to experience living your life, your life must be worth living.
