On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 19:05 +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Note that with high concentrated extract of Salvia Divinorum, people
> can "suffer" (or "enjoy") a total amnesia, where you forget not just
> your name and memories of life, but you forget even what is a person,
> what is space, what is time. Yet you remain conscious. Life appears
> as a dream, that you recall vaguely, and then forget, and then you
> forget you did that dream. Yet "you" come back. (See the reports, I
> don't encourage its consumption, but anyone interested by
> consciousness can be interested by such reports).
Many arguments or lines of reasoning that I have seen that incorporate
consciousness reply upon it's "typical" characteristics, that is, what
we would call "normal" consciousness. Yet, altered states of
consciousness can have dramatically different subjective properties or
qualia.
A review of the vast literature of the subjective effects of
hallucinogens such as salvinorin A, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and LSD
reveals 1-pov experiences that, while not corresponding to consensus
"1st person plural" reality, are still structured and internally
consistent.
In many cases, their effects go beyond mere sensory distortion, and
provide the experiencer with a direct, entirely novel "replacement" set
of qualia, reported to be like "being transported to a new reality."
And, by all accounts, the experienced qualia appear to "kick back" in
the Deutsch/Johnson sense.
In the terminology of the theories expounded on this discussion list,
what sort of observer moments correspond to these 1-pov experiences?
How are they distinguished from those that correspond to consensus
reality? Most people would dismiss the subjective experience of
hallucinogens as merely the chaos induced by chemically disrupting the
brain's operation, yet a large fraction of the reports in the literature
are anything but chaotic.
If one adheres to the consciousness-as-computation hypothesis, what sort
of computations are involved in these cases?
Johnathan Corgan
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Received on Thu Mar 19 2009 - 15:09:12 PDT