Philosophical Speculations

I think Bernardo has compared alters to Markov's blankets. This isn't a term I am not a huge fan of, although maybe there is some technical reason for its usage. Personally I just think of these things as systems with boundaries, controlled inputs and outputs, and some sort of internal representatio...

Reber also has a book out. I review the theory in two separate posts. The second is specifically the book. I think BK has thought of cells as alters which would be the idealistic corresponding equivalent. https://broadspeculations.com/2021/01/18/cellular-basis-of-consciousness/ https://broadspeculat...

When these feelings erupt within an ayahuasca session, they can manifest as overwhelming sensations and emotions that seem unrelated to any known circumstance. Arising in disconnected, incoherent form, they’re unaccompanied by any sense of meaning. The chaotic nature of certain difficult ayahuasca ...

You're conflating a chaotic experience with a chaotic brain state here. You could present a jumbled mess of something and I could percieve it as an image while my brain is completely fine meanwhile my brain could be in a jumbled state and I'd probably be in a state similar to anesthesia. I don't th...

Even more precisely, there is a brain, which is the image (as interpreted by evolved senses) of a dissociated mind. I think the questions raised in this thread are relating more to science than metaphysics and your response with others is more about metaphysics. It is possible to discuss science fr...

Most people on this forum think that even completely dead brains are conscious. Nonsense, as according to BK's model not even a living brain is conscious, but a phenomenal representation of 'ideation' appearing within consciousness, and no more conscious than the textual forms playing on this scree...

You might want to tell everyone who might not know what CBF is. Cerebral blood flow? Is that what you mean? My opinion is EEG is telling more about brain function but CBF can isolate better where in the brain the activity is occurring. Anyway, sorry to tell you, but you are wasting your time with th...

That is exactly the point of the Eastern non-dual philosophy of consciousness (Advaitic/Buddhist). The subject/object distinction is only a concept, a hypothesis, a model. We habitually use it in our everyday life as a simplistic scheme to model or explain the patterns of phenomena, but we have no ...

Bernardo's idea of a mind at large in the way I understand really makes no sense. Normally when we are talking about mind, there is something that experiences and something that is experienced, or a subject and object. This makes perfect sense in common language when we talk about seeing or feeling ...

I think this is fatal flaw in the parsimony argument that idealism makes. To get around this problem there needs to be an assumption of a mind at large that is perceiving what you feel as the chair while you are unconscious. Or that the chair you perceive is composed of little excitations of conscio...