this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
356 points (89.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
638 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is an interesting idea for sure. However, we have some evidence to support the existence of the systems beneath our minds. What evidence supports the existence of a greater awareness within ourselves? Do we have anything beyond reports from people under the influence of drugs?
I prefer to take an evidence-based approach, taking non-existence to be the null hypothesis here.
One example would be when people move around in large crowds. Their behavior can be misspelled by following fluid dynamics equations. It's as if thousands of people share a consciousness that they don't understand/notice.
Taoism teaches us that the it true consciousness is universal. We are essentially waves of energy, all bound together/connected by empty space. So we share a consciousness that can be tapped into his meditation and being in the moment.
I don’t think that really follows. Would you say molecules of fluid have a collective consciousness?
We might be picking up on things we don’t consciously notice that guide our movement but it’s still a local thing that doesn’t require a collective consciousness
Good to know we can just "teach" any imaginary thing we want. It sounds like it'd be neat? Fuck it, let's teach it.
Relax. It just some mildly funny idea to entertain that we are not all there is. Such as imagining the collective conscience of all humanity and animals makes up the real God. We just can't perceive it being inside the experiment.
There are anecdotal stories of people entering higher states of consciousness during near death experiences, extremely deep meditation, holotropic breathing exercises, etc.
Really creative people describe their most proud acts of creation as if the idea came from somewhere else. As if the concept arose independently and they tried their best to relay it into the real world.
As for the people on psychedelic drugs, they usually speak of the higher state of consciousness as being more real than the real world... which would make sense if our usual consciousness was a subset of something bigger.
Damn. All that is relatively common knowledge, yet you're getting some weird downvotes.
They're inconvenient to people with world views that depend on this being all there is.
I think that is the point. Does a cell have any evidence of something above it?
A cell doesn’t have evidence of anything and is incapable of pondering such a thing. So the very idea of a cell having evidence is absurd.
The idea of a person having evidence is not absurd. And I would argue that there is evidence that there is not a higher consciousness in our bodies. There is no bodily system that behaves in a conscious way other than the brain.
Except you can not prove that we are capable of pondering this higher level of consciousness just like a cell is unable to ponder anything as we understand it. For all we know, this higher level of consciousness also has a Reddit equivalence and has provided the same response as you in that they argue our own level of consciousness has no capacity to ponder anything. Or at least it's definition of what it is to 'ponder'.
Maybe we are a single conscript in an infinite number of alternate universes that together with an infinite number of related and connected conscripts create some higher level of consciousness. Have you considered that?
You also technically can't fully know that the cell has no awareness, ability to ponder, etc...because you are presuming those things stem from attributes that are exclusively human, when that might not be the case.
That is why I said ponder anything... as we understand it.
Well no I can’t disprove it because it’s not falsifiable. But there’s no evidence for it so in my opinion it’s not worthy of much consideration beyond a half-hearted musing.
I haven’t considered those things but again I would want to see evidence for them before taking them seriously. The first step would be proving that alternate universes exist. I’m not a physicist but I know this has been theorized. Is there any evidence for it yet? Then you would need to demonstrate that communication between these universes is happening in our brains somehow. At that point you might start to wonder about such things.