Where do you think our sense of awareness comes from, Jow Forums? Like, I feel like my brain is processing information, and then I'm aware of it; but those feel like two separate steps. As in, FIRST my BRAIN parses information, and THEN "I" am made aware of the result.
It seems like "I" am the observer of what my brain pieces together. It doesn't feel like my brain and "I" are the same thing. Am I alone in this?
The problem is I'm not religious.
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Your post raises some interesting philosophical questions relating to ideas of identity, free will, and time.
Awwwwyou're just saying that
>It seems like "I" am the observer of what my brain pieces together. It doesn't feel like my brain and "I" are the same thing. Am I alone in this?
That might be an illusion. This "I" is an observer but this observer is also created by the brain.
Imagine it like this, your brain processes information and sends it to your consciousness but this consciousness is also part of the brain, but where it's processed, how it comes into being, and how it has this "subjective" feel to it (qualia) noone fucking knows.
Honestly it's better not to think too much about this sort of thing because it may make you paranoid.
You should read this. It takes a scientific approach to answering philosophical questions very similar to yours.
lol I actually did read... MOST of that. It was very interesting, but I've also read that it has been largely discredited by now, so I feel like I don't really know what to believe.
>Honestly it's better not to think too much about this sort of thing because it may make you paranoid.
Uh oh, because yeah, it's all I can really think about anymore. I started paying attention to the sensation and man, shit has been weird ever since.
Fuck dude. I've been the same for 2 months and I kept asking myself "Where does this consciousness come from?" and "How conscious am I?", "How real is this?", "How much in reality am I?", "What is the defining property of consciousness?", and I try to grasp consciousness and not make it go away but the more I try finding what makes me conscious the less I understand and the unhappier I become because I can't find anything. It unironically stops you from living. In everything you wanna know what makes this be "real" and you end up not enjoying life and letting it pass by. Just forget this as soon as you can OP and thank me later.
"I" is just a word or a thought. it doesn't refer to anything specific. just another thought
Wow man, that is just 100% exactly how I'm feeling, said better than I ever could have. Sitting here in my head wondering how it is that I could possibly "be."
I'm worried that if I STOP thinking about it, I'm giving something up, like I'm letting go of something important that I'm on the cusp of grasping. I'm scared to allow myself to be willfully ignorant, you know?
Also, man, these captchas are making it really difficult to maintain a conversation.
There's definitely a discrepancy between the physical matter of the brain and our consciousness.
Case in point: en.wikipedia.org
You can get surgery to remove an entire hemisphere of your Brain and still live and function normally.
>I'm worried that if I STOP thinking about it, I'm giving something up
You gotta be fucking kidding me dude. I did the same exact thing and the fucking thing with me is that I had been through some weird fuckingexperiences with a drug withdrawal and haven't been able to stop thinking about consciousness since.
Basically I will all the time keep thinking about comparing my conscious reality with that I had before and during what happened and what scares the shit out of me is that I will never know what it "felt like" to have been me before all that weird shit that happened and that "taste" of consciousness I will never be able to reconstruct in its intact form. Basically at every moment that passes your conscious mental state goes away and you will never get it back exactly how it used to be and you'll never even KNOW what it used to feel like because there's no defining thing we can ever grasp about consciousness.
I've gone really deep the rabbit hole and I've obsessed over this for a good time and what ended up happening is that you end up living life in the "3rd person" if you know what I mean. Stop wanting to know what is this thing you feel and just FEEL it. Be in the present. Don't try knowing what makes this consciousness your consciousness but JUST BE.
Let me tell you something, I thought also that I couldn't let this go because I'd be losing or letting go of the knowledge that was making me be "me", but let me tell you something, you won't find the answers to your questions ever. I've looked fucking everywhere and it's nowhere to be found. Just live life and BE, in the her and now and don't ask these sorts of questions because then you start thinking in the 3rd person and it only gets worse.
Regarding these sorts of things, the best advice would be one with a quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein:
>"Don't think, but LOOK"
Godspeed.
>You can get surgery to remove an entire hemisphere of your Brain and still live and function normally.
I'm suspicious about this, though. Say (for a really inaccurate oversimplified example), the left side of the brain was responsible for vision, and the right side was responsible for hearing. The left side doesn't know anything about what hearing is; the right side knows nothing about the "seeing" that's going on.
So you get the "hearing" side of your brain removed, and the remaining "seeing" part of your brain goes "yeah I can still see everything just fine! I'm still all here!"
Sounds like Liberation Unleashed. Or Ruthless Truth. What are you doing here?
This is an obscure picture. Depending on how you drive on the street, the demon can be smiling or frowning. To not see the demon, do not stare into the abyss.
How would it work WITHOUT consciousness? It's the only way for this shit to work.
Thanks for the advice. It's very reassuring to know that there's someone else out there who understands what I'm saying.
I think you're right about the solution being to stop examining this "asymptote" so closely and just let it happen. I'm worried that means I'm letting myself become some sort of p-zombie, but really I should probably just give up on it.
What if like, he lost his consciousness but he became kind of like an NPC and didn't tell anyone about it. Or his consciousness has never been really the same since then, but he acts as if it was, because he isn't able to conjure up in his mind what it felt like before the operation? I mean, he knows he's different but he can't quite put his finger on it, and it's very much possible his consciousness is never gonna be the same again, but he doesn't even know that because
A) he has lost the memories of his prior qualia of consciousness
B)He may have become like an NPC but he won't show it, his part of the brain responsible for qualia feeling is gone, but his working part of the brain responsible for executive functions is still there intact
>It seems like "I" am the observer of what my brain pieces together. It doesn't feel like my brain and "I" are the same thing. Am I alone in this?
I am the same. I feel like I'm reading a story (although a shitty, boring one) and I can't get emotionally implicated because I feel like an outsider.
All the normalfags I asked are not the same though.
>I'm worried that means I'm letting myself become some sort of p-zombie, but really I should probably just give up on it.
I understand where your worry comes from fully but I have to tell you that it's a fruitless preoccupation because you won't find the answers to consciousness. Noone knows what really is making the World be "real" and our consciousness still is a mystery. You can analyze it all you want you'll find nothing. Besides, what you do end up finding is only harmful. It's really fucking harmful because your preoccupation ends up leading to paranoia, and not only that, but your thoughts are directed from outward to inward and it messes up your concentration. When we are alive and in the present we never ask if this is real or try to grasp what is being felt and processed in the brain, but we just feel it and are present in the moment. When you beging analyzing it, you distance yourself from the experience you're having right now in favor of analyzing the experience instead of just experiencing it and enjoying it. Basically you turn your concentration of doing things in the World into an overly worried mindset that analyses itself and gets absolutely nothing out of it. You are basically turning your mental effort inwards instead of outwards, instead of trying to solve problems, experience, learn new things you overanalyze what's going inside your brain and the qualia right now instead of actually living it. You end up distancing yourself from the experience you're having by thinking over it instead of being and doing. Think about it like this, it's like instead of having your mind working outwards into problem-solving, it is turned inwards into brooding into its own essence even though there's nothing to be found and consciousness is still unknown to us.
In summary, you have to stop thinking about this sort of thing because you depersonalize everything by thinking about your consciousness as separate, by analyzing it you fuck yourself up because it just wasn't meant to be. We were meant to be and the brain was made to process my hats outside of it, not itself. Your consciousness was made to process what is presented to it, not to analzy itself, for that you'd need another consciousness, and that's obviously never gonna fucking happen.
Think it like this, the eye wasn't made to see itself but only to see OTHER things. the same is with the mind, it can never see itself, but it was always made for seeing other things, but NEVER itself.
Answer me, what do you know about Ciaran Healy?
>was made to process information outside itself*
I can't believe how exact you are at knowing what this feels like for me, and what's going on. "Inward" thoughts is exactly correct, and I've never understood what that was until you just said it. Are you me, seriously? How is it we both felt this way?
>the eye wasn't made to see itself
bruh
Unironically never heard of these. Gonna check them out.
this isn't "spiritual" bullshit from crazy stonerheads, is it?
>Answer me, what do you know about Ciaran Healy?
Literally who?
They say the exact same things as that user. Ciaran is the guy who started it like 10 years ago but now it's run by 2 "spiritual" women. But it's the same thing. That quote where he emphasised the word "LOOK". I thought it can't be a coincidence
The inward thoughts are really the worst because it really does mess your focus and even thought-processing in general. It's really harmful, your concentration goes to shit because it never is looking at doing things but only trying hard at finding what's unknowable. It's not healthy, TRUST ME.
>Are you me, seriously? How is it we both felt this way?
I don't fucking know dude, but I also thought the same thing, we are really similar regarding all of this, holy shit.
>The mind was never meant to see itself
Yeah, always remind yourself of this whenever thoughts about consciousness comes up and stops you from living life. What we're doing is like trying to force the eye to see itself. It's like pushing your fingers into your own eyes and it's really unhealthy. Regarding this analogy, it tells us that all the knowledge that we even have that the World is made of a consiousness that is created by the brain, is like when we discover that our vision is created by the eye, when we look at ourselves in the mirror. but nothing really infers that vision comes from the eye before we discover that. The same is with the mind and consciousness, we know it must come from the brain, but it never will have the ability to look into itself. If we know that our eye can't even look into itself then it's just a waste of time trying to make the mind interpret and know itself either.
This analogy comes from the Tractatus Logico Philosophical by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
do you like this model I post?
>That quote where he emphasised the word "LOOK". I thought it can't be a coincidence
That quote is by Wittgenstein. Kek
I can see that, but why that specific quote? seemed too uncanny
>but why that specific quote?
Because it was the one I knew and the one that best fitted the fucking situation.
oh so it was you then. I'm sorry, at first you were user but now you have a trip so I thought it was someone else
Read Everything You Need To Know But Have Never Been Told by David Icke.
This is a really stupid quote.
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