An average person normally spends at least 90 min to 2 h per night dreaming. Nevertheless, memories of dream events are not retrieved while awake unless the person awoke shortly after a dream. It is hypothesized here that schizophrenic delusions initially arise because a system that normally inhibits the formation of memories of dream events is defective. Therefore, memories of dream events or fragments would be occasionally made and placed in the normal memory store. The only reason that we really know anything happened to us in the past is that we have a memory of it, and having a memory of an event is sufficient to really believe it. Therefore, the schizophrenic would believe that the dream events actually happened. It is proposed that this is the basis of primary delusions [...]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9667811/
PubMed
Defective inhibition of dream event memory formation: a hypothesized mechanism in the onset and progression of symptoms of schizophrenia…
An average person normally spends at least 90 min to 2 h per night dreaming. Nevertheless, memories of dream events are not retrieved while awake unless the person awoke shortly after a dream. It is hypothesized here that schizophrenic delusions initially…
Afterword (The Best of Greg Egan)
This collection contains twenty stories that I consider to be the best of those I’ve published in the last thirty years.
If there is a single thread running through the bulk of the stories here, it is the struggle to come to terms with what it will mean when our growing ability to scrutinise and manipulate the physical world reaches the point where it encompasses the substrate underlying our values, our memories, and our identities. While the prospect of engineering our minds might still seem remote, anyone who has read a few case studies by the late Oliver Sacks will understand that we have already confronted the materiality of the self in the starkest terms. In its details, a story like ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ might not describe a real affliction or a technologically feasible cure, but in essence it does no more than acknowledge that the kind of radical distortions of perception, personality and identity that Sacks observed all had physical causes, and the corollary of that is the possibility of equally radical physical cures.
This collection contains twenty stories that I consider to be the best of those I’ve published in the last thirty years.
If there is a single thread running through the bulk of the stories here, it is the struggle to come to terms with what it will mean when our growing ability to scrutinise and manipulate the physical world reaches the point where it encompasses the substrate underlying our values, our memories, and our identities. While the prospect of engineering our minds might still seem remote, anyone who has read a few case studies by the late Oliver Sacks will understand that we have already confronted the materiality of the self in the starkest terms. In its details, a story like ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ might not describe a real affliction or a technologically feasible cure, but in essence it does no more than acknowledge that the kind of radical distortions of perception, personality and identity that Sacks observed all had physical causes, and the corollary of that is the possibility of equally radical physical cures.
A fundamental difference between feelings and emotions is that feelings are experienced consciously, while emotions manifest either consciously or subconsciously
"Key to beat depression is to accept reality exactly as it is"
— Someone on the Internet
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In his 2012 memoir Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, Koch implies that personal factors influenced his professional judgment. He acknowledges that his quest to solve the mind-body problem has always been emotional as well as intellectual. He describes himself as “not only a dispassionate physicist and biologist but also a human being who enjoys but a few years to make sense of the riddle of existence.”
For most of his life he “forcefully denied that either the Freudian unconscious or traumatic memories that I didn’t know I had… were influencing my behavior.” A mid-life crisis made Koch appreciate Freud’s insights. “I learned over the past years how powerfully my unconscious inclinations, my beliefs, and my personal strengths and failings have influenced my life and the pursuit of my life’s work.”
For most of his life he “forcefully denied that either the Freudian unconscious or traumatic memories that I didn’t know I had… were influencing my behavior.” A mid-life crisis made Koch appreciate Freud’s insights. “I learned over the past years how powerfully my unconscious inclinations, my beliefs, and my personal strengths and failings have influenced my life and the pursuit of my life’s work.”
https://paulvanderklay.me/2012/05/14/the-romantic-solution-from-earnest-beckers-the-denial-of-death/
Leadingchurch.com
“The Romantic Solution” from Earnest Becker’s “The Denial of Death”
This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. In this section Becker describes the consequences of modernity to the meaning seeking person. From Chapter 8 The Romantic Solution Once we realize what the…
There is more information in one thimble of reality than can be understood by a galaxy of human brains. It is beyond the human brain to understand the world and its environment, so the brain compensates by creating simpli-fied illusions that act as a replacement for understanding.
When the illusions work well and the human who subscribes to the illusion survives, those illusions are passed to new generations.
Neurons "talk" to each other using molecules like serotonin, but "think" internally using electricity. It’s like Morse code being transmitted as sound waves between telegraphs but stored as electrical pulses inside the machines.
“The human brain is a delusion generator. The delusions are fueled by arrogance—the arrogance that humans are the center of the world, that we alone are endowed with the mag-ical properties of souls and morality and free will and love. We presume that an omnipotent God has a unique interest in our progress and activities while providing all the rest of creation for our playground. We believe that God—because he thinks the same way we do—must be more interested in our lives than in the rocks and trees and plants and animals.”
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html
Science fiction influences everything this century, both our media and our physical environment. Media first: about 30% of the big budget movies coming out of the US film industry these days are science fiction or fantasy blockbusters, a massive shift since the 1970s
Meanwhile the influence of science fiction on our environment seems to have been gathering pace throughout my entire life. The future is a marketing tool. Back in the early 20th century it was anything associated with speed—recall the fad for streamlining everything from railway locomotives to toasters, or putting fins on cars. Since about 1970 it becme more tightly associated with communication and computers
Your brain doesn’t show you reality as it really is. Instead, it creates a simple version that helps you survive. There’s too much information to take in, so your mind picks out what’s useful and ignores the rest.
And it’s not just happening in the moment. Every time you see something, your brain uses memories to fill in the details. When you look at a tree, you’re not seeing it exactly as it is—you’re seeing a mix of what’s in front of you and what your brain remembers about trees. Over time, your mind gets better at guessing, so you don’t have to process everything from scratch.
And it’s not just happening in the moment. Every time you see something, your brain uses memories to fill in the details. When you look at a tree, you’re not seeing it exactly as it is—you’re seeing a mix of what’s in front of you and what your brain remembers about trees. Over time, your mind gets better at guessing, so you don’t have to process everything from scratch.
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Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see due to lesions in the primary visual cortex. As originally defined, blindsight challenged the common belief that perceptions must enter consciousness to affect our behavior, by showing that our behavior can be guided by sensory information of which we have no conscious awareness
Delusions offer rare access to private motivations, into the secret minds of others. We can’t know on a day-to-day basis how other people are within themselves but when a person maps out their delusion for us we glimpse a whole world, designed entirely by them. We might be allowed inside for a tour, but only on the condition that we play by the rules as they set them out. It’s invitation only and the by-laws of the land are non-negotiable. That is where they live. On the other side of the glass.
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God is now personal and in your pocket. You can have a personal relationship with it and it doesn't even demand praying. It knows everything, or seems to know everything, but does it really matter? You wouldn't know the difference unless you bothered to search and no one ever wrote in the bible that God would always tell you the truth.
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"Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us." —Ted Chiang
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The default consensus reality it's just the brain's most statistically stable model under normal sensory constraints.
Psychedelics dissolve the framework that defines desire. They deconstruct the self that wants, the objects it wants, and the space in which wanting happens.
One can feel fulfilled and transcendental during these states because the needs themselves become unlocatable.
One can feel fulfilled and transcendental during these states because the needs themselves become unlocatable.
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You’re bound to a resonance, and she happens to carry its current frequency.
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