

Voluntary out-of-body experience: an fMRI study - jjoe
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00070/full

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dchichkov
Interesting. I've skimmed the article and I can easily believe that some
people can consciously observe their model of the world from a physical
position different from a position of their body.

From a perspective of ML/computer vision, think this way: You take bunch of
photos and then build a 3d model. After that, you can construct the image
taken from any location within the observed area. And if the model is good
enough, you can construct realistic images even outside the visible region.

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wlievens
Yeah, and typical for the human brain is that it will fill any gaps with
something made up but plausible.

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cybernoodles
The brain is remarkably good at working with incomplete data.

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hitchhiker999
It would have to be to operate in this 'infinite' physical environment. A
place where we can only theorise about the concept of 'beginning' or 'end' or
'smallest' or 'largest'. We are literally living in an experience we don't
have the mental ability to delineate.

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geedy
Feels like a neat blend of brains ability to dream, memorize, and model
physical environments. Can anybody with some more understanding of the brain
tell me if any of the brain areas used in these activities are active during
the voluntary out-of-body experience?

If so, is it feasible that we could one day use this for entertainment of the
weirdest (coolest?) variety safely?

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dchichkov
It looks like this girl from that fMRI study can use it for entertainment
safely. Alongside with a few other tricks with her visual perception. On the
other hand, she had mentioned, that as far as the entertainment goes it is not
that much fun.

Could be of use though as a modelling environment. Or at least an awesome
memory-access hack. Might come at a cost of some other functions though. So I
wouldn't feel too bad about not having it. And would suggest to be extremely
careful playing with a single copy of an amazing giga-scale peta-synapse
neuronetwork that you have.

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hitchhiker999
This is very exciting.

I know some don't like hearing this, but it's possible that we don't
understand how we're mechanically connected to this world, or the physical
experience, or what the physical experience actually is, what 'systems' are
employed to manufacture an experience within our 'conscious' mind, or what
even the consciousness is.

The future is NOT an extrapolation of data we have today, hence our vision of
the future in the 1920s was so 1920s looking.

We are using a brain that we could not replicate, it's a complex biological
machine we don't understand. We can't pretend to know how it is connected to
the world around it. It may be a 'lens' for our consciousness to operate in
this physical environment, or just a fancy computer. We don't know.

Some feel this is a big step, we just 'know it' due to whatever network our
brain is connected to, or perhaps due to delusion?

TL;DR; we are just starting out, this is a great start.

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robobro
Really good read! Altered states are a fascinating topic.

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Executor
I wouldn't mind learning how to do this!

