Re: Altered states of consciousness

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:43:57 -0700

Bruno Marchal wrote:
> On 30 Mar 2009, at 14:02, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
>> 2009/3/30 Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Kelly, and others,
>>>
>>> Well, thanks for your report. Did you smoke the extract? It usually
>>> last for 4 minutes. It is amazing it did last so long with you, I
>>> know
>>> only one case of an experience lasting 20 minutes. I am happy you
>>> found
>>> your experience interesting. You can consult and discuss your
>>> experience, and those of others here:
>>> http://www.entheogen.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=135
>>>
>>> Now the real question is, does that experience helped in providing,
>>> for
>>> example, an answer to my last remark to Quentin?
>>>
>>> I quote the question again. It is important concerning
>>> comp-immortality, and eventually how to derive physics from computer
>>> science.
>>> I do think such a question is difficult, and show the weakness in
>>> identifying the self with personal memories, and this justifies the
>>> necessity of the AUDA move, I think.
>>>
>>> Of course, if you enjoy dream-state-like, you can enjoy Salvia
>>> without
>>> troubling yourself with hard metaphysical questions. Yet I would be
>>> interesting if Quentin or Stathis, or anyone, could acknowledge a
>>> conceptual difficulty here.
>>>
>>> <<Hmmm...
>>> I ask you, and others, this question. What is the probability "now",
>>> that you will find yourself in Washington and Moscow the 24 december
>>> 2009, when you are annihilated in Brussels, now, (17 March 2009) and
>>> reconstituted in both Moscow and Washington the 18 March 2009, say)?
>>> The problem is that the reconstitution machine did dysfunction in
>>> Washington, so that, from the 18 March 2009 up to the 20 Augustus
>>> 2009
>>> you (the you in Washington) suffered a "total amnesia". And then,
>>> "you" recovered slowly and progressively from that through adequate
>>> medication up to a total recall, the 23 December (and none of yous
>>> did
>>> move from W or M).
>>>
>>> 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).>>
>>>
>> It does indeed present conceptual difficulties. The problem is that
>> our notion of personal identity is dependent on the world in which we
>> evolved, where these duplication experiments don't happen. The
>> conceptual difficulties vanish if we say that there is no such
>> metaphysical entity as a person persisting through time, but rather a
>> set of observer moments, each one complete in itself and independent
>> from the others, which only associate due to their information content
>> - their psychological connectedness. In other words, we all survive
>> only momentarily, but we have the illusion of persisting through time
>> due to memory, quasi-memory or partial memory.
>>
>
> I agree, but this does not answer the question. To extract the
> physical laws we have to define that psychological connectness, and it
> refers to the notion of person. It is no metaphysical than atoms
> molecules or galaxies. Those are also mind composition which can be
> considered as relative stable and useful constructs. We have to relate
> those things, to extract information from the assumptions. The point
> is no more philosophical.
>

It's here that I find problems in the idea of person as sequence of
conscious moments. During most moments I am not conscious of memories
or even of my identity, but in some sense I maintain the sequence of
experiences. I speculate that the information content Stathis refers to
is mostly subconscious. But to have a subconscious implies a
non-conscious substrate, e.g. a material brain.

Brent

>
>> I would consider a period of consciousness with complete destruction
>> of the ego, such as induced by Salvia Divinorum, as equivalent to a
>> period of unconsciousness or an unrelated person's consciousness,
>> provided there were no memory of the event as the experience was
>> resolving.
>>
>
> But the amnesic, the dreamer and the salvia experiencer have a memory
> of the events. Kelly did not dream that he disappears, but that he was
> 7 old. To eliminate the first person white rabbits, the devil comes
> from the fact that we have to use *some* notion of person.
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>
>
>
> >
>
>


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Received on Mon Mar 30 2009 - 14:44:05 PDT

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