Very excited to start turning pages on this one (after his How to Change Your Mind, Botany of Desire, Shedbook, cannot remember fourth rn).
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For the brief period my half braindead mother was conscious, it was interesting to play my own Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat -clinician. Watching videos of corpus-collosum -severed people, interacting with worlds/hemispheres... is quite an interesting take on being-whole-braint.
Near every thought in your head is an abstracted away primal urge. Hunger, fear, security, etc - We justify and express these urges with our actions and thoughts and interactions each day. This mesh of impulses eventually creates patterns of behavior that form our identities.
We go about our lives viewing the world through the lens of this identity, with even our most selfless actions being driven by a reason derived from the rule set of the identity. This rule set is the "ego"
Ego death then is the temporary dissolution of the guiding ruleset of the identity. It is a self, without the self. You exist, but, often for the first time in your life, your mental and emotional rule set does not.
Often, without the blinders of the ego blocking a view of the world, a person experiencing ego death feels the unimportance of their existence - not in a bad way - but in a universal matter of fact state, shared by everything else. This is often the "awe" of ego death
Well put. There is a wealth of world literature, poetry and song, in various cultures from Buddhist, Christian mystics, Sufism, etc., that celebrate this state of being free from your "self".
It's called "death" because it can be scary as f to experience the dissolution of what you thought was yourself, it can feel like the end of the world. Sometimes it's described as a "surrender" to a higher power, though the latter is beyond words and religions often prohibit pointing directly (HaShem). Why surrender? Because the ego and the little self will go to great lengths to prevent from losing its dominion, including emotional and psychological tricks from outside your conscious view - so you don't even know what your "self" is doing. This is why people say, "Your worst enemy is yourself." But of course you are your best friend also.
My favorite is how this transcendent experience is called "love". How do I love Thee? Let me count the ways. When you get it, you see how so much of poetry and music is singing about this.
There's this TED talk from someone knowledgeable in the brain science field who happened to experience loss of function temporarily to one side of the brain that had the affect of attenuating the self identity but widen the spread of parts belonging to the whole
I just picked up my fifth Michael Pollen book, A World Appears: a Journey into Consciousness
https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousn...
Very excited to start turning pages on this one (after his How to Change Your Mind, Botany of Desire, Shedbook, cannot remember fourth rn).
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For the brief period my half braindead mother was conscious, it was interesting to play my own Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat -clinician. Watching videos of corpus-collosum -severed people, interacting with worlds/hemispheres... is quite an interesting take on being-whole-braint.
> In effect, these different cognitive processes together give rise to our self.
I think this describes what happens in Simondon’s ‘psychic individuation’.[1]
[1]https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-indi...
We think, therefore I am.
From a beekeeping POV:
They don't think, yet they are [supra].
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Ubuntu concept: "I am because we are" [intra-connection]
What do you think is inside AI?
If that's true, what is "ego death?"
Dissolution of a myth.
I will try my best here...
Near every thought in your head is an abstracted away primal urge. Hunger, fear, security, etc - We justify and express these urges with our actions and thoughts and interactions each day. This mesh of impulses eventually creates patterns of behavior that form our identities.
We go about our lives viewing the world through the lens of this identity, with even our most selfless actions being driven by a reason derived from the rule set of the identity. This rule set is the "ego"
Ego death then is the temporary dissolution of the guiding ruleset of the identity. It is a self, without the self. You exist, but, often for the first time in your life, your mental and emotional rule set does not.
Often, without the blinders of the ego blocking a view of the world, a person experiencing ego death feels the unimportance of their existence - not in a bad way - but in a universal matter of fact state, shared by everything else. This is often the "awe" of ego death
Well put. There is a wealth of world literature, poetry and song, in various cultures from Buddhist, Christian mystics, Sufism, etc., that celebrate this state of being free from your "self".
It's called "death" because it can be scary as f to experience the dissolution of what you thought was yourself, it can feel like the end of the world. Sometimes it's described as a "surrender" to a higher power, though the latter is beyond words and religions often prohibit pointing directly (HaShem). Why surrender? Because the ego and the little self will go to great lengths to prevent from losing its dominion, including emotional and psychological tricks from outside your conscious view - so you don't even know what your "self" is doing. This is why people say, "Your worst enemy is yourself." But of course you are your best friend also.
My favorite is how this transcendent experience is called "love". How do I love Thee? Let me count the ways. When you get it, you see how so much of poetry and music is singing about this.
There's this TED talk from someone knowledgeable in the brain science field who happened to experience loss of function temporarily to one side of the brain that had the affect of attenuating the self identity but widen the spread of parts belonging to the whole
Excellent. Now do “superego death”.
Yeah, extreme and pointed departure from the default mode network, with prefrontal engagement. Well said.
If you mean this in a psychedelic context, my theory is the temporary dissolution of this “society” in recognising the “self” as “self”
Molyneux's mecosystem
Ubuntu: I am because we are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy