When I used play soccer regularly, I'd occasionally experience being "in the zone". It's a blissful experience where my body is able to execute incredibly complex set of moves in perfect coordination as my mind enters a state of zen-like calm.
The sensation is almost like a being spectator in my own body. My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me. I don't know if this type of experience is related in any way to the theory of consciousness, but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime.
It could just be that our unconscious minds minds are a lot more capable than we care to believe. It’s only when we let go and have faith in the unconscious mind do we see it.
I notice this with typing. I have no idea which finger hits which key on my keyboard. If I make a mistake and then consciously focus on the characters instead of the words my typing slows down and lacks fluidity.
If you believe in determinism then we are essentially just spectators of our own life. We just don’t realise it. We think that because we have made choices it was a possibility that other outcomes could have arisen. We don’t acknowledge that everything was always going to converge at this single point i.e everything was always going to be as it is now.
I had the same experience when I was competing in eSports. I played a very fast paced and unique first person shooter that required complex and perfectly timed button sequences to dodge and attack at the same time. The game sent packets p2p so you had to predict where your opponent was about to be based on your ping to them, the shot was a hit based on where the character was when the packet was received. I played at the highest level and while I was normally not as good as my opponents, I would go into a zen state like what you described where time seemed to slow, I could predict my opponents movement easily and land shot after shot. I would either be the mvp of my team if I could get into the zone or be a non factor if I couldn’t. I never could figure out how that worked but I do feel like “flow” when coding is similar.
I used to play sports professionally at junior level and I experienced what you described quite a few times. At that time, I did not understand it in any way, but it was clear to me that some sort of "trance" was happening under certain conditions, and I would basically fully focused on the game as if nothing else mattered or even existed.
The things that helped me reach that state were motivation, being under slept or slightly tired, being sick.
I didn't have the concept of "flow" at that time, but I remember noticing that flow in important games without having the concept of it. It almost feels like you have to reduce your active conscious thoughts in order to get there, and just allow your instincts to take over.
I have very similar experiences from partnered improvized dancing, my main style being the Argentine tango. For at least last 10 years, my aim has been to find obstacles that prevent me from experiencing such a state, and experiencing such a state has become more common.
I have used almost the same words to describe my experience: although I am the leader in the couple, and everything is improvized to the music, I feel like I am the spectator, and I feel the couple is moving like a single animal, one head and four legs.
Is it just the fact that you happened to be at the tail of your performance distribution? I used to play billiards regularly and on some days I would excel and surprise myself with how good I played. I then realized that the number of those days were roughly equal with the number of the days I surprised myself with how badly I played. Then I realized that my performance is a normal distribution and I stopped being surprised.
"My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task ..."
Obviously an illusion, since your brain is doing the task. The "conscious" part of the brain is apparently unaware of most of what the brain is doing. I feel that way most of the time, actually, that I don't need to consciously micromanage everything that I'm doing, since the brain still gets it done in any case. I feel that way now while writing this sentence, I'm consciously just watching the words as they appear.
Reminds me of the soccer player Platini. A journalist asked him how come he was so good while not being so strong physically, he replied that he saw what was going to happen a few seconds before others.
> My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me.
I think this is a common sensation to many who have trained playing an instrument enough. I get into that state every now and then when playing something on my guitar, it's like I can curiously observe my fingers pick out the melody I want to play, without thinking about or taking much conscious action in it.
I've started reading books out loud in recent years. After a while I realized I could "read ahead", meaning my eyes didn't need to be on the word I was currently saying, but they could skip ahead several words, up to half a sentence.
It felt like the act of actually speaking had been relegated to a background task that was processing words from a queue, so my eyes and consciousness could operate further ahead in the text, while adding to that queue. It is actually really handy, to get a better flow and intonation, to have a bit of "lookahead" in the text.
I even realized I could start to think about the text I was reading, or even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud. It's really interesting when you explicitly notice a task being moved from the conscious to unconscious part of your brain.
I have this experience sometimes when presenting for work. I do the presentation, interact with the audience, answer tough questions and at the end I don't really remember anything of it. I will have to ask others how I did, because it's mostly a blur.
Conscious experience involves will to action and sensation. It is highly hierarchical: for instance, humans can deliberately move individual fingers (low level) or play a sonata (high level).
When we let go of low level control and pursue higher level intentions, our subconscious mind is freed to participate in a vast array of hierarchical loops of sensation and action. Symbolic verbal control is powerful, but only subconscious flow can yield the precision of high level skilled performance. It is more like an attunement of oscillators than an execution of a (symbolic) program.
It's curious to me why "the zone" or "flow" is always associated with particular expertise in skills like athletics or music or even programming when it could just as well be in walking, something 99.99% of the population are experts in. Maybe there was a point in forgotten infant/toddler memory overjoyed with being able to move from point to point subconciously, but now the bliss is replaced by sheer repetitve routine.
I cannot find it...a great article on how elite athletes, actors, racing car drivers, have an a bility 'slow down time', in order to foresee, calculate and perform complex tasks.
Your comment confirms 'it exists'.
I think i get it a bit when I'm on my bike in dense town centre traffic (europe) and having to cross lanes/ roundabouts in front of cars.
Interesting. This sounds like how our brain relegates tasks it has "learned" to the subconscious. Same thing happens with riding a bicycle or driving a car. At first you need to really focus but over time you don't need to think about it
Had noticed something similar in a couple of car crashes, time slows to a crawl, I was hyper aware, I could observe things happening, dreading the outcome, but I didn't have control to act quickly enough to avert it.
I had the experience you describe once when I was practicing diving. I was focusing on keeping my eyes open upon impact. It was truly a blissful experience I’ll never forget.
I get this situation, not in sports, but in emergency situations, like data center outages or the actually should have been scary but wasn't in-air emergencies (like engine failures - while I am the pilot). I always explain it like, time just slows down, and you know exactly what to do, like a yellow brick road leading you the right way. Neat to hear that others experience it too.
There's a great book describing how to get into that state, and explaining how that state is the key to success. Just read it last week and can recommend.
I used to play basketball, and I remember having similar "zone" experiences. It was like a combination of time slowing down, and me knowing with absolute certainty what move I was going to make and that whatever shot I would take was going to fall. The observing myself from the outside feeling was very real.
Many people experience this when in an altered state (high or drunk).
I can remember effortlessly performing inhuman acts of precision when in an altered state that amazed bystanders. It did not last very long.
I'm pretty sure consciousness is multi-layer and not just memory.
> but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime.
As in, through a peer-reviewed research paper? Probably not the shortest path to learning to communicate with the subconscious. You mentioned Zen, maybe start there?
You may already be familiar, but you might find Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" an interesting read. He studies this exact phenomenon.
There's a rumored experiment called the "precognitive carousel", supposedly run by Grey Walter, where:
(1) Subjects are told to push a button to advance a slide projector carousel, but not told that the button is inert
(2) The carousel advances based on electrical signals measured by wires on the subjects' scalp.
(3) Subjects supposedly report the uncanny feeling that the projector advances "just before" they were about to push the button -- 300-400 milliseconds before, a pretty long time.
I read about this a long time ago in a since-deleted post on an old timey internet forum (everything2).
The writer suggested this research supports the idea that your body chooses what to do, then informs your brain, and your consciousness convinces itself that has decided to do what the body is about to do on its own.
Now I'll throw out another completely unprovable thought...
Perhaps consciousness has the ability to affect how wavefunction collapse occurs, perhaps it even has the ability to influence the observed outcome.
I'm not going to try to prove these two ideas but together they can help form an idea that perhaps observations on the past actually influence the past and perhaps despite this 'observation after the fact' there's still free will.
It's not provable but then neither is the "there's no such thing as free will" arguments that this sort of research leads to. The point of the above is to highlight that there's still a way out for free will.
I'm not a psych expert, but I thought this was long established. I mean we've known about the delays in processing for quite some time and thus the system can't be "real time". I mean everyone has experienced things where they are doing something, walk by, then turn around to check what they just saw because the process delay (not everything is put on the fast track).
Or am I misunderstanding the novelty of the research here? Hoping someone can help me understand better.
We know consciousness is not "real time" if for no other reason than eye saccades. Our consciousness is essentially off while our eyes move, and when they stop we guess at what we think happened and our consciousness catches up. We don't experience the lost time.
Seems that not only is our conscious mind a passenger, it lies to itself to pretend it is in control, by rationalizing decisions made by the unconscious. Quite jarring when your subconscious decides decides to do something your consciousness can't fathom, like attempt to catch a falling knife.
I highly recommend this book from 30 years ago. It was based on works from much earlier, but I think some part of the field kind of still haven't caught up to it yet (I agree with you).
I'm not a psych expert either. But I was put-off by the use of phrases like "mind-bending".
It's old-hat that the experience of intention/will follows the "willed" action. It's not surprising that our "real-time" experience is really a replay. That's how I've supposed it worked for 20 years. I'm not expressing a view about free will, just that our awareness of our mental states seems to have the benefit of hindsight.
I think the key area of novelty here is the relationship to consciousness and thus the great unsolved questions over what precisely consciousness is and what purpose it serves.
I fail to see the helpfulness of describing or defining something we do not understand in terms of something related we equally do not understand, „understand“ here in the sense of „have a clear theory that gives meaning to the words we use“.
In relation to the problem of how qualitative self-aware experiences can arise in a biological information system this article does not seem to help at all.
Is the statement really „consciousness“ in the sense just vaguely described is just „memories“? Then what are memories? How can they have qualities and where does the self awareness come from? How to model it mathematically?
I feel we’re still in the age of the humoral theory of consciousness.
I have an analogy that for me defines the difference between conscious and unconscious.
I imagine myself sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee in front of me. I wonder how that cup makes it to my mouth and eventually the contents to my stomach? What part of me does the work of picking up the cup, guiding it to my mouth, swallowing and ensuring it does not end up in my lungs and finally ensuring that the cup returns to the table.
All I do in that instance is consciously think to myself: "I want a drink of coffee" (not even politely). The rest is done by the unconscious. The next morning I attempt to get out of bed conscisously, trying to remember in which order, which muscles need to be triggered to move my legs. Eventually I just give the command "I want to get out of bed" and in an instant I'm out of bed.
Riding a bike: how times to I conscisously think to push down my right leg while pulling up my left and reversing that order for the next stroke?
I find it fascinating what the unconscious does: muscle memory, instinct, reflex, feelings etc are all things that are controlled by the unconscious. I try to do meditate as a way to connect to that unconscious, to obtain some of its advice - since I believe that the unconscious is not just the muscle-driver, there is a lot more intellectually that my unconscious does.
New theory? You can find this claim at the Encyclopedia, in Condillac, in La Mettrie, in last Descartes’ works, etc. Imagination and Memory has been pivotal to explain consciousness for a long time…
The phenomenologists, most notably Husserl, had this figured out about a hundred years ago.
What the authors did here was reground it in neuroscience (scientific materialism) rather than the generic philosophical primitives of phenomenology (which in this case fade into the background a bit, although they remain relevant to all empirical work per se), and draw out some of the impacts of that shift.
This reminds me of Bergson's theory of memory and present consciousness. In his essay "Memory of the Present and False Recognition", he argued that memory and present consciousness are the same, and what changes is a sort of "past tag" that is associated with the memory flow. He saw déjà vu as a mistaken tagging of the present flow, which we then perceive as past
I heard before that consciousness thinks it's the president, but is actually the press secretary.
When I think about why I did something, I always have an answer. But, like the press secretary asked about the president, maybe its just a confabulation based on the evidence at hand?
Is consciousness just retroactively rationalizing the things that take place and thinking it did them?
I'm not even sure how to process that.
Stranger To Ourselves is a fascinating book about the ways experiments have shown that many things happen outside conscious control.
I might be missing something, but this feels like a nothingburger to me. Obviously our understanding, reasoning and perception of reality is a kaleidoscope of memories and previous perceptions.
We couldn't ever "manually" or "consciously" parse raw sensory input and craft the proper neural responses to everything. It has all been pre-processed to hell way before it reaches our conscious little guy in the high tower.
Same thing the other way, the decisions of our mind are mere nudges to more autonomous systems. Even now, you aren't consciously and methodically scanning these words. You decided to read it, and the actual physical and mental operation of reading takes care of itself more or less. It has been delegated.
Likewise, it seems logical that these autonomous systems could act on their own if the input is too dank or if you are trained enough. I'm thinking of panic responses, reflexive behavior, flow states, etc. Sometimes it's not optimal to wait for the little guy to make a decision.
Isn't it obvious that our consciousness sits on top of a layer cake of abstractions? You could call it an "inner simulation" or a "hall of memories" if you want, it's all the same.
This reminded me of the Bicameral Mind - where (in humans pre-conscious state) memories in half the brain got triggered by experiences and were presented to the other half as commands/words of god.
A (probably insane, ill-conceived) question I’ve been entertained by for as long as I can remember is whether or not “qualia”, which I understand to be “the experience itself of consciousness”, is a physical phenomenon that could ever be directly engaged with on physical terms. I suppose it’s basically a mix of relativity and Descartes. For instance, I can “feel myself here in my mental space”, however where is that mental space in relation to the physical world I’m using it to observe, what would be the SI units for such a measurement? If we assume consciousness itself is a physical phenomenon, wouldn’t the reality from the perspective of consciousness be equally as… how do I say this, “mechanically relevant”?
I doubt an answer will come in my lifetime or my great grandchildren’s but it seems like a crowning achievement for mankind to understand in physical terms if possible from whence consciousness came, and to where it goes when the body dies.
For all its use of the term time, for example “backward in time” or “does consciousness flow linearly with time,” there is no definition of time itself provided in the article. I had hoped the Definitions section would at least acknowledge some concept of time.
I suppose we all collectively agree on some generic concept of a fourth dimension with a strictly forward movement of instances, a progression toward entropy, but if the theory is going to argue temporal transcendance I’d expect a more formal thesis around what time itself is.
I’ve picked up this book but yet to read it. It’s on my list when I get the time.
My favourite consciousness theory is panpsychism, where consciousness is a property of the universe which all things have - given that a personal experience is by definition not measurable, there's no reason it's not as valid as others.
Imagine that you were given a strange job where you rode along with the sensory experiences of a mute person, writing their dialog for them. They can hear the dialog you give, including inaudible asides left only for them. You saw and felt all that they see and feel but you can't control their behavior. The job requires you to never admit the situation to anyone, you have to always pretend to be the person under penalty of death, even when talking to them. They're 20 years old now and you've been doing this job your entire life.
How could someone distinguish this setup from how we normally perceive our minds as working?
What is the premise of this first paragraph, why do people feel like they need to introduce this fluff:
> "Sitting on the Marine Atlantic ferry, I’m watching the Newfoundland skyline disappear on the horizon as I type away. I see the rocking of the ocean waves, inhale its salty breeze, feel and hear the buzz of the ship’s rumbling engine. I try to focus on writing this sentence, but my eyes hopefully scan the ocean for a rogue, splashing whale."
Nice, you took a boat once and you wanted to see some whales, not what I came here for.
[+] [-] educaysean|3 years ago|reply
The sensation is almost like a being spectator in my own body. My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me. I don't know if this type of experience is related in any way to the theory of consciousness, but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime.
[+] [-] CTDOCodebases|3 years ago|reply
I notice this with typing. I have no idea which finger hits which key on my keyboard. If I make a mistake and then consciously focus on the characters instead of the words my typing slows down and lacks fluidity.
If you believe in determinism then we are essentially just spectators of our own life. We just don’t realise it. We think that because we have made choices it was a possibility that other outcomes could have arisen. We don’t acknowledge that everything was always going to converge at this single point i.e everything was always going to be as it is now.
[+] [-] ryanar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocgf|3 years ago|reply
The things that helped me reach that state were motivation, being under slept or slightly tired, being sick.
I didn't have the concept of "flow" at that time, but I remember noticing that flow in important games without having the concept of it. It almost feels like you have to reduce your active conscious thoughts in order to get there, and just allow your instincts to take over.
[+] [-] kukkeliskuu|3 years ago|reply
I have used almost the same words to describe my experience: although I am the leader in the couple, and everything is improvized to the music, I feel like I am the spectator, and I feel the couple is moving like a single animal, one head and four legs.
[+] [-] erfgh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incompatible|3 years ago|reply
Obviously an illusion, since your brain is doing the task. The "conscious" part of the brain is apparently unaware of most of what the brain is doing. I feel that way most of the time, actually, that I don't need to consciously micromanage everything that I'm doing, since the brain still gets it done in any case. I feel that way now while writing this sentence, I'm consciously just watching the words as they appear.
[+] [-] jffhn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f1refly|3 years ago|reply
I think this is a common sensation to many who have trained playing an instrument enough. I get into that state every now and then when playing something on my guitar, it's like I can curiously observe my fingers pick out the melody I want to play, without thinking about or taking much conscious action in it.
[+] [-] m12k|3 years ago|reply
It felt like the act of actually speaking had been relegated to a background task that was processing words from a queue, so my eyes and consciousness could operate further ahead in the text, while adding to that queue. It is actually really handy, to get a better flow and intonation, to have a bit of "lookahead" in the text.
I even realized I could start to think about the text I was reading, or even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud. It's really interesting when you explicitly notice a task being moved from the conscious to unconscious part of your brain.
[+] [-] donkeyd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|3 years ago|reply
When we let go of low level control and pursue higher level intentions, our subconscious mind is freed to participate in a vast array of hierarchical loops of sensation and action. Symbolic verbal control is powerful, but only subconscious flow can yield the precision of high level skilled performance. It is more like an attunement of oscillators than an execution of a (symbolic) program.
[+] [-] dirtyid|3 years ago|reply
It's curious to me why "the zone" or "flow" is always associated with particular expertise in skills like athletics or music or even programming when it could just as well be in walking, something 99.99% of the population are experts in. Maybe there was a point in forgotten infant/toddler memory overjoyed with being able to move from point to point subconciously, but now the bliss is replaced by sheer repetitve routine.
[+] [-] InCityDreams|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athul7744|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerash|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsego|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maCDzP|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SomeHacker44|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrich|3 years ago|reply
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/905.The_Inner_Game_of_Te...
[+] [-] fatnoah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Supermancho|3 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure consciousness is multi-layer and not just memory.
[+] [-] Nuzzerino|3 years ago|reply
As in, through a peer-reviewed research paper? Probably not the shortest path to learning to communicate with the subconscious. You mentioned Zen, maybe start there?
[+] [-] adamhp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulWaldman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sabujp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] empathy_m|3 years ago|reply
(1) Subjects are told to push a button to advance a slide projector carousel, but not told that the button is inert
(2) The carousel advances based on electrical signals measured by wires on the subjects' scalp.
(3) Subjects supposedly report the uncanny feeling that the projector advances "just before" they were about to push the button -- 300-400 milliseconds before, a pretty long time.
I read about this a long time ago in a since-deleted post on an old timey internet forum (everything2).
The writer suggested this research supports the idea that your body chooses what to do, then informs your brain, and your consciousness convinces itself that has decided to do what the body is about to do on its own.
[+] [-] AnotherGoodName|3 years ago|reply
Delayed-choice experiments demonstrate the seeming ability of measurements in the present to alter events occurring in the past. eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser
Now I'll throw out another completely unprovable thought...
Perhaps consciousness has the ability to affect how wavefunction collapse occurs, perhaps it even has the ability to influence the observed outcome.
I'm not going to try to prove these two ideas but together they can help form an idea that perhaps observations on the past actually influence the past and perhaps despite this 'observation after the fact' there's still free will.
It's not provable but then neither is the "there's no such thing as free will" arguments that this sort of research leads to. The point of the above is to highlight that there's still a way out for free will.
[+] [-] godelski|3 years ago|reply
Or am I misunderstanding the novelty of the research here? Hoping someone can help me understand better.
[+] [-] stubish|3 years ago|reply
Seems that not only is our conscious mind a passenger, it lies to itself to pretend it is in control, by rationalizing decisions made by the unconscious. Quite jarring when your subconscious decides decides to do something your consciousness can't fathom, like attempt to catch a falling knife.
[+] [-] comboy|3 years ago|reply
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2069.Consciousness_Expla...
For a shorter read, "Fame in the brain":
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Multiple_drafts_model
[+] [-] denton-scratch|3 years ago|reply
It's old-hat that the experience of intention/will follows the "willed" action. It's not surprising that our "real-time" experience is really a replay. That's how I've supposed it worked for 20 years. I'm not expressing a view about free will, just that our awareness of our mental states seems to have the benefit of hindsight.
[+] [-] whakim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbrkbr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatic|3 years ago|reply
That is a great way of putting it. I feel like most if not all the consciousness research is in that category.
[+] [-] fluxinflex|3 years ago|reply
I imagine myself sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee in front of me. I wonder how that cup makes it to my mouth and eventually the contents to my stomach? What part of me does the work of picking up the cup, guiding it to my mouth, swallowing and ensuring it does not end up in my lungs and finally ensuring that the cup returns to the table.
All I do in that instance is consciously think to myself: "I want a drink of coffee" (not even politely). The rest is done by the unconscious. The next morning I attempt to get out of bed conscisously, trying to remember in which order, which muscles need to be triggered to move my legs. Eventually I just give the command "I want to get out of bed" and in an instant I'm out of bed.
Riding a bike: how times to I conscisously think to push down my right leg while pulling up my left and reversing that order for the next stroke?
I find it fascinating what the unconscious does: muscle memory, instinct, reflex, feelings etc are all things that are controlled by the unconscious. I try to do meditate as a way to connect to that unconscious, to obtain some of its advice - since I believe that the unconscious is not just the muscle-driver, there is a lot more intellectually that my unconscious does.
[+] [-] everybodyknows|3 years ago|reply
https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/Fulltext/9900/Consci...
[+] [-] mercacona|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nav_Panel|3 years ago|reply
What the authors did here was reground it in neuroscience (scientific materialism) rather than the generic philosophical primitives of phenomenology (which in this case fade into the background a bit, although they remain relevant to all empirical work per se), and draw out some of the impacts of that shift.
[+] [-] dantondwa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamgordonbell|3 years ago|reply
When I think about why I did something, I always have an answer. But, like the press secretary asked about the president, maybe its just a confabulation based on the evidence at hand?
Is consciousness just retroactively rationalizing the things that take place and thinking it did them?
I'm not even sure how to process that.
Stranger To Ourselves is a fascinating book about the ways experiments have shown that many things happen outside conscious control.
[+] [-] mekkkkkk|3 years ago|reply
We couldn't ever "manually" or "consciously" parse raw sensory input and craft the proper neural responses to everything. It has all been pre-processed to hell way before it reaches our conscious little guy in the high tower.
Same thing the other way, the decisions of our mind are mere nudges to more autonomous systems. Even now, you aren't consciously and methodically scanning these words. You decided to read it, and the actual physical and mental operation of reading takes care of itself more or less. It has been delegated.
Likewise, it seems logical that these autonomous systems could act on their own if the input is too dank or if you are trained enough. I'm thinking of panic responses, reflexive behavior, flow states, etc. Sometimes it's not optimal to wait for the little guy to make a decision.
Isn't it obvious that our consciousness sits on top of a layer cake of abstractions? You could call it an "inner simulation" or a "hall of memories" if you want, it's all the same.
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
[+] [-] raydiatian|3 years ago|reply
I doubt an answer will come in my lifetime or my great grandchildren’s but it seems like a crowning achievement for mankind to understand in physical terms if possible from whence consciousness came, and to where it goes when the body dies.
Like I said, insane.
[+] [-] rajman187|3 years ago|reply
I suppose we all collectively agree on some generic concept of a fourth dimension with a strictly forward movement of instances, a progression toward entropy, but if the theory is going to argue temporal transcendance I’d expect a more formal thesis around what time itself is.
I’ve picked up this book but yet to read it. It’s on my list when I get the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_of_Time_(book)
[+] [-] jakey_bakey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullc|3 years ago|reply
How could someone distinguish this setup from how we normally perceive our minds as working?
[+] [-] smitty1e|3 years ago|reply
For a quick skim, this looks like a rehash of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
[+] [-] gavinray|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|3 years ago|reply
You are either anticipating it(future) or looking back on it (past).