The recent links on psychedelics are interesting. If correlation in the brain is reduced then local areas, sensory in particular are enhanced. In a dim room you see phosphenes in your eyes as if they are actual visual objects. In light you are aware of everything in your visual field and it's periphery. You are essentially distracted by sensory overload.

Now that implies we are conscious of these primary sensory areas. We simply are not highly focused on them in unstoned everyday life. Awareness tends to concentric-ate as it concentrates. Mostly we are aware of more conceptual aspects or thoughts.

Now I took acid over two hundred times and mushrooms about 20 times. I spent most of my late teens and early twenties trying to be LSD-stoned while I was not. I trained myself to be more fuzzily aware of everything. I may have damaged my brain if you want to call that damage. I call it fixing my brain. But I may well perceive things very differently from you Graham and that has occurred to me many times in these talks.

I was just cutting up tomatoes for a salad. I was thinking about the posts here but most of what was in my mind was how my body felt and the red tomatoes and the sounds around me. I had no singular experience of thinking. In fact the thinking part was almost like a persistent whisper. Not central even though it was what I was concentrating on.

But consider that consciousness may be different for each of us. we each have more or less developed introspection skills and we all have different ways of classifying what is happening in our minds.

SpeedOfSound wrote:...I call it fixing my brain. But I may well perceive things very differently from you Graham and that has occurred to me many times in these talks.

I was just cutting up tomatoes for a salad. I was thinking about the posts here but most of what was in my mind was how my body felt and the red tomatoes and the sounds around me. I had no singular experience of thinking. In fact the thinking part was almost like a persistent whisper. Not central even though it was what I was concentrating on.

But consider that consciousness may be different for each of us. we each have more or less developed introspection skills and we all have different ways of classifying what is happening in our minds.

I see nothing contentious in that. If your attention is on tomatoes it can be less on thoughts. Graziano's model of attention can handle that. I used to refer to 'salience filter' that prioritised activity related to survival or recent activity. If you have a sharp knife in hand your attention is probably more focussed on dexterity than your next forum post, and your recent forum post raises the salience of thoughts about C.

A significant point, that I find compelling, is that the self model (model of mind) idea has all conscious content as modeled of some actual work that is not done by a subject mind. We associate thinking with consciousness as if a subject mind both forms and experiences thoughts. In the self model scenario that is not what's happening. The model of attention, what is being experienced, is a rough sketch of hat the brain is doing to form associations, guide your hand, monitor sounds, posture etc.

For something to move in or out of consciousness is merely a small shift in interpretative context.

How do competing ideas handle the coming and going of experienced content? It looks like a problem for QC, which seems to assume conscious 'bing' is integral with cognitive function.

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:...

I call it fixing my brain.

I call it damaging your brain.

But I may well perceive things very differently from you Graham and that has occurred to me many times in these talks.

I was just cutting up tomatoes for a salad. I was thinking about the posts here but most of what was in my mind was how my body felt and the red tomatoes and the sounds around me. I had no singular experience of thinking. In fact the thinking part was almost like a persistent whisper. Not central even though it was what I was concentrating on.

But consider that consciousness may be different for each of us. we each have more or less developed introspection skills and we all have different ways of classifying what is happening in our minds.

I see nothing contentious in that. If your attention is on tomatoes it can be less on thoughts. Graziano's model of attention can handle that. I used to refer to 'salience filter' that prioritised activity related to survival or recent activity. If you have a sharp knife in hand your attention is probably more focussed on dexterity than your next forum post, and your recent forum post raises the salience of thoughts about C.

A significant point, that I find compelling, is that the self model (model of mind) idea has all conscious content as modeled of some actual work that is not done by a subject mind. We associate thinking with consciousness as if a subject mind both forms and experiences thoughts. In the self model scenario that is not what's happening. The model of attention, what is being experienced, is a rough sketch of hat the brain is doing to form associations, guide your hand, monitor sounds, posture etc.

For something to move in or out of consciousness is merely a small shift in interpretative context.

Exactly. Route-switching by the thalamus.

How do competing ideas handle the coming and going of experienced content? It looks like a problem for QC, which seems to assume conscious 'bing' is integral with cognitive function.

Not necessarily. Just route-switching is a simpler explanation.

SpeedOfSound wrote:The recent links on psychedelics are interesting......

There's a full section on the topic in the Scientific American anthology "The Secrets of Consciousness" -
http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Conscious ... sciousness

Some of the articles are slightly dated, but worth the read.

SpeedOfSound wrote:.... I spent most of my late teens and early twenties trying to be LSD-stoned while I was not. I trained myself to be more fuzzily aware of everything. I may have damaged my brain if you want to call that damage. I call it fixing my brain.......

Beginners Mind is the best way to approach any issue....this is exactly what Michio is attempting to do with his investigation/book and the thoughts he expressed in the O.P. video.

DavidMcC wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:...

I call it fixing my brain.

I call it damaging your brain.
.....

Miss-attributed....

kennyc wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:...

I call it fixing my brain.

I call it damaging your brain.
.....

Miss-attributed....

Sorry, Kenny! This was a mis-edit by me that made the quote come out for the wrong person.
EDIT: If I had noticed the mistake, I would have corrected it myself.

I know..it's easy to do......if you want edit and fix, you can.

kennyc wrote:I know..it's easy to do......if you want edit and fix, you can.

He wont. I have no idea why but he wont fix things like this.

kennyc wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:.... I spent most of my late teens and early twenties trying to be LSD-stoned while I was not. I trained myself to be more fuzzily aware of everything. I may have damaged my brain if you want to call that damage. I call it fixing my brain.......

Beginners Mind is the best way to approach any issue....this is exactly what Michio is attempting to do with his investigation/book and the thoughts he expressed in the O.P. video.

Exactly! I have to wipe my mind clean over and over on this subject. Too many traps in our conventional thinking. I must keep reminding myself that I am a blob of protoplasm trying to understand itself. Very humbling.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

kennyc wrote:I know..it's easy to to......if you want edit and fix, you can.

He wont. I have no idea why but he wont fix things like this.

Oopsie, fixed my "to to" -> "to do"

SpeedOfSound wrote:

kennyc wrote:I know..it's easy to do......if you want edit and fix, you can.

He wont. I have no idea why but he wont fix things like this.

Actually, I tried, but it was a mess. Now, it's too late.
Also, it looks like you have a touch of paranoia, there, yourself, even though it is Graham who should be concerned.
As the mistake has been discussed, I don't think it is still a problem, anyway. If Graham wants it removed, I'll have to ask the mods to do it.

I can still edit my post before yours, so I don't know why you can't fix the quote.
You should try. It'll be good practice.

GrahamH wrote:I can still edit my post before yours, so I don't know why you can't fix the quote.
You should try. It'll be good practice.

Good etiquette too.

But it looks like he doesn't understand the basics of posting here at all. I guess that's sort of an excuse.

GrahamH wrote:I can still edit my post before yours, so I don't know why you can't fix the quote.
You should try. It'll be good practice.

Is that in the FUA?
Like I said, I dealt with the issue by apologising to the whole site for the mistake.
Isn't that good enough for you? It seemed to be good enough for THWOTH, at least.

Can we stop making this a thread about me, please?

CharlieM wrote:...

Professor David Nutt, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London, the senior author of both studies, said: "Psychedelics are thought of as 'mind-expanding' drugs so it has commonly been assumed that they work by increasing brain activity, but surprisingly, we found that psilocybin actually caused activity to decrease in areas that have the densest connections with other areas. These hubs constrain our experience of the world and keep it orderly. We now know that deactivating these regions leads to a state in which the world is experienced as strange."

The intensity of the effects reported by the participants, including visions of geometric patterns, unusual bodily sensations and altered sense of space and time, correlated with a decrease in oxygenation and blood flow in certain parts of the brain.

This is contradictory evidence for brain activity being the source of consciousness.

No, it isn't, if the deactivated regions are inhibitory. Thus strange mental activity would be the result of inhibition of inhibition!

Some comments of testable predictions on Graziano's Attention model in Being in time

My own interpretation of the large-scale co-ordination of neural signals in the brain is that it depends not on the quantization of space, but on the long axons projectiong from the thalamus to the various cortical regions. It has been suggested that these are fast because they rely on electro-mechanical effects rather than electro-chemical ones.

BTW, Kenny, your impressive display of your editting prowess was something of a cheat, because it was only spelling correction (which I also do all the time), not editting of the non-printing characters determining the structure of the post, OK. These are easy to get wrong (as manuy posts from various people show), and far less trivial to fix.
I had to get that off my chest, because there seemed to be litle understanding here.

DavidMcC wrote:My own interpretation of the large-scale co-ordination of neural signals in the brain is that it depends not on the quantization of space, but on the long axons projectiong from the thalamus to the various cortical regions. It has been suggested that these are fast because they rely on electro-mechanical effects rather than electro-chemical ones.

BTW, Kenny, your impressive display of your editting prowess was something of a cheat, because it was only spelling correction (which I also do all the time), not editting of the non-printing characters determining the structure of the post, OK. These are easy to get wrong (as manuy posts from various people show), and far less trivial to fix.
I had to get that off my chest, because there seemed to be litle understanding here.

Get with the plan. Quit whining.

The lack of understanding is clearly on your part. If you make a typo and have the opportunity to fix it you should.

If you brush that sort of thing aside, what else are you brushing aside, or leaving out, or failing to correct, in the content of your postings?

DavidMcC wrote:My own interpretation of the large-scale co-ordination of neural signals in the brain is that it depends not on the quantization of space, but on the long axons projectiong from the thalamus to the various cortical regions. It has been suggested that these are fast because they rely on electro-mechanical effects rather than electro-chemical ones.
...

Do you mean gap-junction electrical synapses? Where are they? Give me a link on this if you can.