SWIM has a confession to make, SWIM has never been to hyperspace, so he really doesn't know what he's talking about completely. Although, he has experienced many different hallucinations with mushrooms and LSD, and knows how real and significant they seem.
SWIM has only had vivid visuals once with spice, was amazing. But SWIM isn't sure that he's had a breakthrough like you guys.
One day.

back on topic, i think of consciousness like a drawing board with RAM attached, (random access memory), memory is like HDD (hard disk drive) space, because if you turned off the power in your brain (ie. stop depolarisation of neurons) you loose consciousness, but if you restart it, due to the physical conformation of the axons and their synapses, you are able to retrieve memories again.
When thinking about something, memory recalls preconceptions about whatever you are thinking about, then makes predictions on what should happen. When on a hallucinogen you loose most of your preconceptions and you see things in their pure raw form (without manipulation from the higher centers in the brain), as if seeing it for the first time after being born. That is what fascinates me psychoactive substances.

Ahh RAM and a hard disc drive...

The operating system is obviously the Ego.

So what then is the motherboard?

consciousness, or perception.
But what then is the PSU? (power supply unit)
It fascinates me that there can exist organized matter which functions for itself and gathers/processes other matter.

so does it make sense that matter is organized through interaction with morphogenetic fields?..fields of organization that are built upon past habits of nature?

I read rupert sheldrakes work and it makes sense to me..but I dont know how this stuff is viewed by his peers and whithin the scientific community as a whole..but it could explain alot if it is true.

I asked santa for morphic resonance i guess it came out a few months ago. I think its just a reprint of A new science of life though, not sure. Have you read it fractal?

I think morphogenetic fields are really interesting and sort of makes sense especially with all of the strange animal behaviors which seem to relate to some human activity similar to it.. For instance a lot of pets in ww2 started freaking out before air raids in london 20 minutes before the sirens went off and so their owners got to safety quicker. Some responded to V2 rockets germans were shooting at london which are supersonic and you wouldn't think a dog could here that. Then theres animals sensing earthquakes...homing pigeons making it home after being taken hundreds of miles away in a truck..pets going to wait for their owner at the time they set off to come home from miles away even if its a non routine time..People have premonitions and i've had many dreams that seem to come true in very similar ways or identical.

I have Ruperts book The Presence of the Past, Morphic Reasonacne and The Habits of Naute..I got it about 2 years ago though so it's not new..interesting though..is the book you are talking about written by Rupert Sheldrank as well?

Sheldrakes has done good work on other things as far as I know but his morphic field thing isn't taken seriously at all.


Anyway I don't really I buy into all this universal conscious stuff. If matter needs to be arranged in a particular way to generate thoughts feelings and consciousness then a rock is not conscious. Bacteria are not conscious etc.

I don't see any basis in believing consciousness is the root of all things. Its the root of our awareness but that's about it.


Here is a nice criticism of this kind of spirituality. I agree with it.

http://www.colorado.edu/...QuantumConsciousness.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Mo...id=1260381129&sr=8-1

Yea it says on amazon it came out in sep 2009 so maybe its something different? Not sure.

I am more interested in the prospect of nature/evolution as being habitual/organized by past habit than discussing it as being conscious..consciouness is such a finicky subject because everyone has a differnt definition of what can pass as "consciousness"..

I haven't read any of ruperts other work but i've read and listened to material on it and what i've seen is pretty good and if not true fun to imagine. I'm reading evolutionary mind which is conversations between mckenna sheldrake and ralph abraham n last night i went through a really interesting part where they seemed to link the idea of morphic resonance with the timewave and nature..I could really relate to the idea that because of our conceptual and linguistic programming we've created such a different perception of time altogether that is different from the dimension nature is in..of plants animals..which is why all of these things that appear to violate causality or action at a distance are so mysterious to us. I mean a lot of mystic traditions put a lot of emphasis on meditation, isolation, silence and focus, quieting the mind, and the result is the ability to access a large more complete spiritually holistic level of nature and living. And of course they brought it back around to the whole idea of the stoned ape theory and the falling into history. I can't describe it for crap but there was a lot of interesting things to it that made sense.

[quote=burnt]

If your definition of consciousness is the ability to generate thoughts, feelings, and consciousness (self awareness I think you mean) then I would agree with you, that a rock is not conscious. But what you are describing is consciosness as percieved by something of your level of organization. Just look at the range of consciousness just on this planet. From Dogs ad Cats, or Dolphins and Chimps. We see a wide range of consciousness but it is surely there. Among humans, you find a wide range of consciousness do you not?

So why then limit it to one small range of human perceptions?

If you take consciousness as a continumn then there are varying degrees, going up and down into infinity. So in that case, a rock would be conscious, its awareness at the very least is how its atoms interact with eachother, how they are aware of those they connect with.

It is not only you observing the mountain.
It is also the mountain being observed by you...

I know you can't see it burnt. My basis for having interest in this paradigm is because it logically and intuitively makes sense to me, would explain a lot of things, evolution fits perfectly, and there is evidence that the universe could be set up this way. We know the univserse is a set of nested hierarchies, one level of organization on top of another, from the very small, to the very large. I don't think nature broke a rule with consciousness (consciousness is not a mistake, a random mutation, it is a natural property of the universe), its just that our level of organization/awareness (in the nested hierarchies) has reached a point where we can contemplate our own existence. Awareness can finally begin to figure out how it is connected to this whole amazing array of stuff around it.

This is one of first times this has been presented in a way that makes sense to my materialistic reductionist mind.

BUT is it fair to call all interactions among all of the most discrete units of matter and space/time awareness? The infinite up and down thing is also speculative? Is it fair then to use the word consciousness because it implies so much else? Is there another word?

This is why I used the word communication..there is always information transfer it seems..

"I don't think nature broke a rule with consciousness (consciousness is not a mistake, a random mutation, it is a natural property of the universe), its just that our level of organization/awareness (in the nested hierarchies) has reached a point where we can contemplate our own existence. Awareness can finally begin to figure out how it is connected to this whole amazing array of stuff around it."

Beautifully said. On the bigger time scale it was only a blink ago that we reached a point of awareness that could contemplate its own existence. Were such a young species who knows where and what we'll end up in a million years or a hundred. I don't think were just some meaningless product of evolution..i used to. But look at the hundreds of billions of galaxies and stars.. it seems more likely than not to me that it is thriving with life, a lot of it perhaps millions or billions of years ahead of us. Maybe consciousness is just the most complex and integral expression or natural property that the universe has created so far. We really are star dust..the universe seeing itself

I guess I just prefer the word interaction and don't equate that with consciousness. Particle hitting particle is just an interaction. Its not consciousness. Consciousness requires so much more.

so would you say that in a way interaction is like the "ancestor" of consciousness

yes. but many simple interactions, on different levels .. micro, macro, etc.. often have the emergent property of very complex behaviour.
that is how I see conciousness... it is the emergent property of a multitude of simple interactions.

the way I see it.. human conciousness experiences itself on one of those levels.. we are made up of many cells that interact but we are not aware of them. in the same way, humanity is made up of many many individual people, but the majority of us to do not have a global awareness of the whole... but I believe there is a shared human conciousness.. and I believe this extends out to all of life on earth, the earth itself, the solar system, the galaxy ..... the universe!!

I would say that matter interacting with matter is a precursor for consciousness. Ancestor works too.



I guess this is where I diverge on this kind of reasoning. Consciousness is contained in our brain. Sure we can look at the sum of all human knowledge and life as a kind of global consciousness but its not really that implies something else. We can call it human knowledge but not human consciousness. I am not experiencing anyone else's own personal consciousness. I can't. I can relate to them I can feel things with them etc but I can't be them too.

I dunno, is it fair? I think so, since everything in the universe is aware of its surroundings (and how it interacts with those surroundings), they feel it in some sense...electrically, magnetically, chemically, biologically, electro-chemically, gravatationally, emotionally, etc...The universe is potentially self aware at any possible level, sub-atomic to galactic and beyond.

The infinite up and down thing is an idea based on what we see in nature. Everywhere we look there are varying degrees(hierarchies) of complexity. They strech as far up and down the scale that we can currently percieve/measure. There is no reason to believe that there are not further levels of complexity beyond what we can currently percieve/measure. There is always another layer to the onion.

Consciousness seems an appropiate word, and I'm applying more meaning to it than you are. We could use Self Aware, but methinks you'd like that less

I think interacting physically is much different then being self aware.



Yea I agree with this. There may be a limit but we aren't capable of seeing that limit.



Haha yes your correct I don't like that word either haha