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I think our conceptions of consciousness are stories that we wrote to describe something we experience as beings-in-the-world, I personally find the most satisfaction in the picture of consciousness painted by Douglas Hoffsteader which is basically that consciousness arises as a result of complex processes (i.e. loops) and I look at myself as an entity as this almost infinitely complex process that's always going, cycling, cells are born and die, memories are recalled, mutated, corrupted by being conjured up, stained with the mark of what I am at that second, and I feel my soul as this kind of loop with-in a greater loop with-in a greater one extending to the universe itself, I can basically throw things into this loop that is me by doing things from taking my medications in the morning to reading something, having an experience, coming to a breakthrough, listening to or playing music, writing in my journal etc. and this is integrated into me as a part of the cycle, even things we remember, I think we remember them through repetition, there's a really interesting phenomenon I forget the name of where basically the pattern of neurons firing in certain parts of your brain that basically store the information for things you observe like scents shift over time to completely different part of the brain, I think indicating that it's this kind of cycle, I see it profoundly in learning an instrument, I remember starting day one picking up a bass, I had seen people play it I knew how but I couldn't do it, but then slowly day after day I practiced every single day and after a couple years I could play well but what happened? Day after day I reminded myself, I brought myself back up to speed, and could improve from there, but if I slacked on my practicing for a few days and came back I was noticeably worse, sure some level of understanding is more or less etched into your brain, but the fine motor skills required to play at the highest level (as an example not to say I do yet) have to be almost constantly refreshed, it's why I've kept a periodic journal for almost 10 years now to continue to keep the drama of my life fresh in my mind, it helps me view it as a story, like I said almost like a work of art done from the inside out, and now more than ever I'll see these inexplicably striking scenes that will make me feel these emotions I can't begin to put into words, it'd be like trying to describe a color that doesn't exist, it'll be like you know in film and photography in order to give the viewer the best impression of reality from the work, from your perspective there has to be some unreality to it, because seeing a picture or watching a movie isn't actually experiencing it, so you need to trick the brain, it feels sometimes like what I see in the real world is like that, as if it's all been carefully orchestrated, everything set up exactly right like the set of a play
I feel a very strong mind-body-soul connection, I think we've barely scratched the tip of the iceberg in terms of our understanding of the universe and there are plenty of so-called supernatural phenomenon that have a natural explanation as of yet undisclosed to us or perhaps completely unknowable to us forever, and we can interface with these things with the same traditional means even though we know in our heads it's a metaphor, that when I talk about my "soul" I mean to say I'm looking at things that I can only see through that lens, not that it is fundamentally distinct from my body, in a way you could say I'm a theistic materialist, I tend to refer to my beliefs as a kind of gnostic postmodernism, I think a key thing that brings about a lot of the benefits of religion is certainty of belief, and since the only thing I'm certain of is that there can be no one grand narrative that has all the answers and no truths that once discovered are understood absolutely and binding to all, so in order reclaim that benefit that was lost under the hyper-rationalization of modernity, that peace that comes from certainty of belief, I focus on taking in as much as possible, always coming back to that central belief that there are no real answers to be found, but at the same time I derive meaning from that futile search, and I take a lot of comfort in this never-ending process of philosophical investigation and look at it almost like house work
I took a lot of influence in… Comment too long. Click here to view the full text. |
