Saturday 27 July 2019

Nancy Trivellato on Disembodied Consciousness

This is a fascinating talk.


It would be interesting if cultural anthropologists could look for evidence of conscious recognition of these kinds of phenomena in indigenous cultures. For example, the Kolla people living in the Puna de Atacama have some practices which seem to indicate some sort of an underlying idea that one person is a composite of many potentially separate spirits. See from 31 minutes 30 seconds


And here are some accounts of "seers" from Tibet and Kenya who have reported phenomena similar to those Nancy Trivellato described, but regarding future events:


Here John Reid talks about animism in cultures of the South Pacific, and New Zealand in particular.


And here is an account of animistic philosophy from the Amazon


See also On Psychobotanics and Neurology, and listen to Olaf Blanke talking with brilliant clarity about embodied consciousness and how much neuroplasticity there typically is our physical sense of embodiment.  It's interesting to compare these kinds of sensory-perceptive illusions Blanke creates in laboratory conditions, with the kinds of hallucinations produced by ayahuasca. See Adam Oliver Brown on Why Ayahuasca is Seldom Abused For "Recreation"


At 13 minutes 34 secs, on localising sensory stimulus, you might find some amusing insights into the mathematical ideas of metric spaces explored here: On The Difference, or Not, Between 0° and 360°, in particular the last paragraph on page eight, which starts like this:
Now consider how one could translate the time and location of an event in, say October 1962, reported by a Soviet submarine via a relay station to Moscow into the co-ordinate system used by the United States Navy. There was no GPS system at that time and the Soviet and US military each used different co-ordinate systems with different geodes to model so-called ‘spheroidal oblation’ in their maps. What empirical measurement can one make to establish the correspondence? There is no empirical measurement one can make of the relative offset between two different co-ordinate systems or geodes. As far as one is concerned, the other point may be 750 m away at a heading of 10◦, and 10 m below sea level. The other may regard the offset to be 13 feet above sea level and two miles away on a heading of 185◦. The reason such discrepancies are possible is that each system uses a different datum and they are typically thousands of km apart, and one cannot make any empirical measurement at two different locations at the same time. ...
Another application for neuroprosthetics may be in developing exercises of the type Barbara Arrowsmith-Brown uses to develop neuroplasticity.


Claudia Aguirre on some amazing connections between peripheral and central nervious system consciousness.



Australian athlete Janine Shepherd talks about her near death experience in intensive care and her experiences afterwards in a spinal ward, and then alone at home. A recurrent theme in this story of recovery is neurological connection with other people, and the physical world. This shows that communication, at various different levels, is an extremely important part of any healing process.


At 2 mins 31 secs, Peter Fenwick collected over 2,000 accounts of recalled Near Death Experiences from people in the UK, and was able to abstract from these accounts an ontology of the world experienced by people at the point of death. Nancy Trivellato identifies this as a crucial problem in making scientific accounts of subjective phenomena (9 mins 46 secs).


At 5 minutes 46 secs Fenwick reports on a study in which 9% of heart attack victims reported NDEs and that there is no clinical evidence that these experiences occurred during times when the victim's brain was functioning. It is important to remember that the reports people make of their subjective experiences are always indirect, in that what they are reporting is always what they recall. This is important because it is possible that what they experience as recall, is in fact the creation of the recalled event. There may even be accounts of pathalogical liars who have some conscious experience like this when they invent an event during the act of recounting it to someone else. Thus it is possible, say, that the enteric nervous system is what experiences the event and this has the effect on the conscious brain of a memory. For example, I have personally experienced conscious thoughts about food I ate, which seemed to me to be vivid memories I recalled, during subsequent illness caused by food poisoning. These impressions left me averse to those particular foods, but not others eaten around the same time, for years afterwards. The experiences recalled could even have their origin in the gut microbiome. See


In this talk Eneran Mayer gives many experimentally observed instances of gut microbiome having specific effects on brain function.



See also the discussion in Integrated Information Theory in this post: FT Illustrating The Problem With Modern Medicine. Making people aware of the shared reality of these types of subjective experience is an important part of building any stable, adaptable society. In this, the first serious attempt I ever made to describe my ideas, written in 2006, I explain the view of reality being what human beings create together, through shared descriptions of actual subjective experience. On The Objective Nature of Time.


So when Nancy Trivellato talks at 10 minutes 24 seconds about investigating the nature of non-physical reality, I think we would be creating that reality by developing, together, a vocabulary and an ontology as a basis for sharing, i.e. interpreting together, our subjective descriptions of direct experience, just as we create together the objective physical reality through shared descriptions of subjective personal experience in carrying out experiments in a physical, chemical or biological laboratory. See Relational Semantics subtitled "The Evils of Lego".

This is the dynamic kind of reality which, unlike any concrete reality, actually changes as we learn more through interpreting each others' descriptions of common human experience. At 17 mins 58 seconds, Nancy Trivellato speaks about the possibility of further human evolution.  I think it is already happening, as I try to explain in FT Illustrating The Problem With Modern Medicine, human beings long, long ago, "took cognitive evolution into their own hands", and I argue there that this process is what we call education, and the essential nature of human beings is something we ourselves create. In other words, I claim that the essential nature of human beings is synthetic: it is something that we create ourselves. However, to have a justifiable claim to be an objective reality, this process of sharing descriptions must be a global one, because otherwise there is a very grave risk of some group or culture constructing an entirely imaginary solipsistic reality, which they may never be able to effectively share with everyone else. The world we live in now has been shattered into millions of tiny pieces by this fissive process, caused by compound failures of communications between cultures, races, communities and in extreme cases, individual people, who then lose their essential nature as human beings. See What is Socialist Economic Development? for some ideas on how to go about repairing this damage.

So I think this is the sort of software that the broken robots in Lori's New Book are waiting for, .... the software upgrade is education, and education is always through communication. See Why is Telecommunications Security Important?

Now listen to Jade on modern cosmology, or cosmogeny, or something:


No comments:

Post a Comment