
Counting the Components of My Consciousness - lermontov
https://auxiliarymemory.com/2018/11/20/counting-the-components-of-my-consciousness/
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mirimir
Excellent article!

I've never had a mini-stroke, or at least, not one dramatic enough to act on.
There are little lapses in consciousness, especially at times of stress, but
whatever. Maybe just some subsystem crashing and rebooting.

But his stuff on LSD matches my experience exactly. For some years, I got into
the habit of taking maybe one or two milligrams, just before going to sleep.
Usually a little drunk, and very stoned, with a full stomach. So I'd wake up,
perhaps 3-4 hours later, in the middle of the peak.

I clearly remember just being the observer. There was no self-talk. No
language at all. Just observing. But not observing external reality, because
those systems were also hosed. What I was observing, I think, were internal
states. Maybe comms traffic among subsystems.

But I really have no clue what I experienced, in any detail, because it was
timeless, and memories are timelike. All I remember is being very calm and
happy. And the amazing hallucinations, a mix of geometric and periodic (but
less so than with peyote) and "organic" and flowing (but less so than
Psilocybe spp).

I also remember the process of coming down from peaking. As TFA notes,
subsystems came back gradually.

~~~
rabidrat
one or two _milligrams_?? that's about 10 hits. but you can't mean micrograms,
since one or two mcg is below even micro-dosing levels. So I'm curious if it
really was 10 hits (which seems like an expensive way to sleep!), or if you
meant something else.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, what you may call ten hits. But this was a long time ago, and I was
buying LSD by the gram, for reselling. So it wasn't such a big deal. Maybe $10
worth. And yes, $10 was worth a lot more then. On the other hand, it was
arguably a business expense, in that megadosing is a good way to check for
purity. I was the quality-control partner :) Also, I didn't take that much of
a lot before testing smaller doses, progressively.

------
ejz
"It’s then you realize that your thoughts are not you. Thoughts are language
and memories, including memories from sensory experiences. If you watch
yourself closely, you’ll sense you are an observer separate from your
thoughts."

Wow.

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unao
Very interesting read indeed.

Not sure if observer is needed at all to have efficiently functioning system,
though. Rather contrary: it _feels_ the impact of the observer on external
world or even internal states is at most very limited, if not totally
negligible.

Not sure as well if observer goes away in case of sleep or anesthesia. Maybe,
just maybe the subcomponent responsible for forming memories is shut down and
therefore there are no memories from that period. The observer could be still
present, patiently observing the _void_ and/or snoring and/or _anything else_.

~~~
raducu
Or maybe there is no observer at all, the observer is just the way the brain
coordinates/integrates all the rest of the sensations -- a sensation itself.

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oceanghost
This is something that interests me intensely.

I had a drug experience once that "I" was a story I was telling myself about a
conversation between a number of distinct drives or entities in my head, and
that I could "uninvite" them from the conversation, or with discipline create
or destroy them.

I've always wondered if this had any basis in reality.

~~~
iscro
That's interesting. I've never done drugs, but I'm very interested in
consciousness and neuroscience. Both modern philosophy and neuroscience appear
to be converging towards the idea that the "I or the self" is an illusion and
that consciousness is a predicting machine. So the drug caused your
consciousness or brain to create multiples illusions ( or multiple "I's" ).

~~~
theaeolist
Some fashionable philosophers and futurologists share this view, but it is not
backed by any new factual findings. To me the statement "the self is an
illusion" is borderline oxymoronic: _who_ is it that is having the illusion,
if there is no self? An "illusion" is by definition an incongruence between
objective reality and subjective perception. And subjective perception
requires, necessarily, a self.

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superasn
A little OT but this notion that the observer is not you can be a great
revelation for many people who are suffering from depression.

Because sometimes it's easy to confuse the voice in your head to be actually
you and since it's you, it must be right! But when you disassociate it as a
third person and maybe give it a _name_ and treat it as a seperate entity that
though lives inside you (or your head) but it is not you, you can start giving
it the same treatment as you would give a negative or positive comment made by
a third person about you and actually apply rational logic to what is being
said by it (your observer) and even defend your position instead of just
taking everything on face value or trust.

~~~
ZenPsycho
Not that I agree with the article but that is literally the opposite of what
it said. The article says the voice is NOT the observer.

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Viker
This reminded me of Jill Bolte Taylor talk and experience of her stroke.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU)

~~~
kempbellt
Fascinating concept: watching your own brain have a stroke.

"Oh, there goes my control of my left arm. Oh, there goes my sense of smell.
Oh, language is nextgsnghghqfnvjznv"

Also sounds terrifying

~~~
girzel
I had a migraine a couple of months ago that I thought was a stroke. I didn't
even really have a headache, just suddenly had tingling in my hands, and
limited vision. I pulled by bike to the side of the road and sat down on the
grass, then called my wife. I realized during the conversation that I couldn't
remember basic words like "library" (where I was going) and "numb" (what I was
experiencing). I felt just like me, but I had like 60% vocabulary. That was
one of the scariest experiences of my life -- not pain or disability, but
simple loss of words.

~~~
kempbellt
I had a similar experience recently. It was also one of the scariest
experiences of my life. Afterwards I spoke with my doctor about it, and they
used the terms "anxiety attack" or "panic attack". In my case, it was brought
on by a combination of eating poorly, drinking too frequently, sleeping
irregularly, and letting myself become stressed out about work in my off
hours. It was bad enough that I spent the following week in-patient at a
hospital. That said, having three structured meals a day, sleeping regular
hours, and not having my phone - I felt like a new person by the end of the
week.

Not sure if this relates to your experience, but the lesson I learned was:
Take real vacations. Where you are not tethered to your phone, social media,
work calls, PagerDuty, social calls, etc. You can just eat, drink, sleep,
breathe, and take in the moment. Even if it is just for a day, take time to
remember what it means to be human.

Edited: for tone

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abeppu
I have no objection to the idea that consciousness is made of many components.
However, I think the interesting jump the author makes, which I'm not fully
prepared to follow, is to presume that careful phenomenological observation
will give us the insights needed to create a new observer.

He mentions that in the course of meditation, you learn to "distinguish all
the components of your consciousness." I think that might be "many" rather
than "all". There's a lot we can learn from meditation, but I think these
lessons are mostly about how to work with the minds we have, rather than how
to create new minds. It's not as though centuries of serious Buddhist
meditators arrived at a recipe for creating new consciousness.

Why might the subjective, internal, phenomenological approach not be enough?

Having a body, feeling your body, and using your body might let you learn
deeply what it means to have a body. But if you want to build a new body,
you'd better spend some time looking in microscopes and analyzing proteins and
a thousand other things. The experiential view isn't enough. Objective
exploration of the real world is needed.

And setting aside how one should go about acquiring information about how
minds work, is the question of whether we're equipped to arrive at an
operational conceptualization given that information. He talks about animals,
drugged or impaired humans and heathy humans as all having fundamentally
different cognitive capabilities. I can do addition in front of a dog with an
abacus, a chalk board, etc, but it won't conceptualize addition. It's not
obvious that just because we have language and tools and symbolic reasoning
and social cognition that our particular ape brains are going to be able to
hold the concepts of how minds work.

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carapace
> ... how to build an artificial observer.

Can't be done, not even in principle.

> how to prepare my observer for the dissolution of my own mind and body.

The observer is unaffected by death or birth. If you can give up attachment to
the impermanent aspects of your being then death is a change not an ending.

(This is the whole point of human life, everything else is kind of a sideshow.
Less than one in a thousand ever even think about this stuff, of those less
than one in a thousand will take it seriously and seek. Which is really really
sad, because the path, though narrow, is not particularly hard. Avoid BS, seek
Truth with persistence and sincerity. Do it every day. Eternal life guaranteed
or triple your money back!)

~~~
mirimir
Do you refer to ren or ka?

~~~
carapace
You're using Egyptian terms, yes? I'm not referring to either.

~~~
mirimir
Yeah. Sorry. I mean no disrespect.

I only know that stuff from Burroughs' _The Western Lands_ , which is his take
on a "book of the dead".

~~~
carapace
No apology needed, I didn't feel your question was disrespectful. :-)

FWIW, this is a decent description of what I'm talking about:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi#Self](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi#Self)

> Ramana considered the Self to be permanent and enduring, surviving physical
> death. "The sleep, dream and waking states are mere phenomena appearing on
> the Self," as is the "I"-thought. Our "true nature" is "simple Being, free
> from thoughts".

~~~
mirimir
I'd like that, and thanks :)

As I understand it from Burroughs, there are seven souls in the Egyptian
theory. Three of them are eternal. Sort of like components of Ramana's Self:
Ren (meaning, destiny), Sekem (energy, power) and Khu (guardian). Then there's
Ba (emotion), Ka (the double) and Khaibit (memory). And Sekhu (remains). The
only one left after ones death is Ka, which has the chance at eternity in the
Western Lands.

