карточный домик

May 21

What you experience is not reality but virtual reality, a possibility. Strictly speaking, and on the level of conscious experience alone, you live your life in a virtual body and not in a real one. Thomas Metzinger, “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”

The being must stay anchored in the real world; if you lose yourself in daydreams, sooner or later another animal will come along and eat you. Thomas Metzinger, “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”

Many things you can express by way of music (or other art forms, like dance) are ineffable, because they can never become the content of a mental concept or be put into words. On the other hand, if this is so, sharing the ineffable aspects of our conscious lives becomes a dubious affair: We can never be sure if our communication was successful; there is no certainty about what actually it was we shared. Thomas Metzinger, “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”

May 20

The conscious brain is a biological machine—a reality engine—that purports to tell us what exists and what doesn’t. It is unsettling to discover that there are no colors out there in front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky; a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all. It is just as your physics teacher in high school told you: Out there, in front of your eyes, there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation, a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths. Most of them are invisible to you and can never become part of your conscious model of reality. What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich physical environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color. Phenomenal color. Appearance. For your conscious eyes only.
Still, this is only the beginning. There is no clean one-to-one mapping of consciously experienced colors to physical properties “out there.” Many different mixtures of wavelengths can cause the same sensation of apricot-pink (scientists call these mixtures metamers). It is interesting to note how the perceived colors of objects stay relatively constant under varying conditions of illumination. An apple, for instance, looks green to us at midday, when the main illumination is white sunlight, and also at sunset, when the main illumination is red with a lot of yellow. Subjective color constancy is a fantastic feature of human color perception, a major neurocomputational achievement. On the other hand, you can consciously experience the same physical property, say, the hot kitchen stove in front of you, as two different conscious qualities. You can experience it as the sensation of warmth and as the sensation of glowing red, as something you feel on your skin and as something you project into a space in front of your eyes. Thomas Metzinger, “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”

May 15

Over the centuries, the theories we have devised have gradually changed our image of ourselves, and in so doing they have subtly altered the contents of consciousness. True, consciousness is a robust phenomenon; it doesn’t change simply because of the opinions we have about it. But it does change through practice (think of wine connoisseurs, perfume designers, musical geniuses). Human beings in other historical epochs—during the Vedic period of ancient India, say, or during the European Middle Ages, when God was still perceived as a real and constant presenceа—likely knew kinds of subjective experience almost inaccessible to us today. Many deep forms of conscious self-experience have become all but impossible due to philosophical enlightenment and the rise of science and technology—at least for the many millions of well-educated, scientifically informed people. Theories change social practice, and practice eventually changes brains, the way we perceive the world. Through the theory of neural networks, we have learned that the distinction between structure and content—between the carrier of a mental state and its meaning—is not as clear-cut as is often assumed. Meaning does change structure, though slowly. And the structure in turn determines our inner lives, the flow of conscious experience. Thomas Metzinger, “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”

May 13

The idea of an Ego Tunnel is based on an older notion that has been around for quite some time now. It is the concept of a “reality tunnel,” which can be found in research on virtual reality and the programming of advanced video games, or in the popular work of nonacademic philosophers such as Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary. The general idea is this: Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our “reality tunnel.” We are never directly in touch with reality as such, because these filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is. The filtering mechanisms are our sensory systems and our brain, the architecture of which we inherited from our biological ancestors, as well as our prior beliefs and implicit assumptions. The construction process is largely invisible; in the end, we see only what our reality tunnel allows us to see, and most of us are completely unaware of this fact. Thomas Metzinger, “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”

Apr 7

It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda. Doris Lessing, “The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire”

Apr 1

We became conscious that we were learning, and of how we learned … and this was at the same time as we saw the substance of our bodies, and found that it vanished as we looked, and knew that we were a dance and a dazzle and a continual vibrating movement, a flowing. Knew that we were mostly space, and that when we touched our hands to our faces and felt flesh there, it was an illusion, and that while our hands felt a warm solidity, in reality an illusion was touching another illusion. Doris Lessing, “The Making of the Representative for Planet 8”

It is not easy to allot grief or self-reproach fairly and properly in this business of calamity, when it affects people so variously and insidiously. That the individual victims of a murder or a casual looting made us more uneasy and angry than when twenty people died because of a sudden snowstorm was not reasonable. Was it because we felt we were responsible for the violence, even though there had been no violence or acts of terror before this new time of nature’s cruelty to us? Looked at like that, no one was to blame for these killings, which were, obviously, part of the general worsening of everything. Once any death was a public grief, and a genuine one. We knew each other. It was not possible for a face to be unknown, even if names were.
But the change had begun some time back: when Nonni died in the cold, we did not suffer very much. We were too cold and too threatened ourselves. Alsi mourned for him, but not as she might have done once. No, death had a new quality, and one that made us ashamed. We could not care as once we had … that was the truth of it. Was it that the cold was chilling our hearts, slowing our blood, making us less loving and responsive to each other? A child died, and we all knew we might be thinking secretly: So much the better; what horrors is it going to be spared, this unfortunate one! Almost certainly more fortunate than we the survivors! And we knew we were thinking: One less mouth to feed. And: It would be better if children were not born at all, not in this terrible time. And, as I have already suggested, when a species begins to think like this about its most precious, its original, capacity, that of giving birth, of passing on an inheritance, then it is afflicted indeed. If we are not channels for the future, and if this future is not to be better than we are, better than the present, then what are we? Doris Lessing, “The Making of the Representative for Planet 8”

Our ‘ocean’ was always a marvel to us. Was precious. Our lives depended on it, we knew that, for it helped us to make our atmosphere. It seemed to us to represent distant and rare truths, was a symbol to us of what was hard to attain and must be guarded and sheltered. Those of you who live on planets where liquids are as common as earth and rocks and sand will find it as hard to imagine our cherishing of this ‘ocean’ of ours as we found it to visualize planets where water masses bathed the whole globe in a continuous living movement, speaking always of wholeness, oneness, interaction, of rapid and easy interchange. For the basis of our lives, the substance which bound us in continuity, was earth. Oh yes, we knew that this soil and rock that made our planet, with water held so shallowly in it, and only in one place, except for the streams and rivers that fed it, was something that moved, just as water moved — we knew rock had its currents, like water. We knew it because Canopus had taught us to think like this. Solidity, immobility, permanence — this was only how we with our Planet 8 eyes had to see things. Nowhere, said Canopus, was permanence, was immutability — not anywhere in the galaxy, or the universe. There was nothing that did not move and change. When we looked at a stone, we must think of it as a dance and a flow. And at a hillside. Or a mountain. Doris Lessing, “The Making of the Representative for Planet 8”

Mar 24

Our technological development had reached a peak and had been established long enough for us to understand the problems it must bring. The chief one was this: there was nothing for billions upon billions of individuals to do. They had no purpose but to exist, and then die. That this would be a problem had not been foreseen. I shall at this point hazard the statement that it is usually the central, the main, consequences of a development that are not foreseen. What we had seen was the ending of drudgery, of unnecessary toil, of anxiety over the provision of the basic needs. All our efforts, the expenditures of energy of generations, had gone into this: a double or two-branched advance: one aspect of it to do with the conquest of space; the other, with the devices that would set us all free from toil.
We did not foresee that these billions, not only on our Home Planet but also on our Colonised Planets, would fall to depression and despair. We had not understood that there is inherent in every creature of this Galaxy a need, imperative, towards a continual striving, or self-transcendence, or purpose. To be told that there is nothing to do but consume, no work needed, nothing to achieve, is to receive a sentence of death. The hapless millions, offered by their triumphantly successful leaders plenty, leisure, freedom from want, from fear, from effort, showed every symptom of mass psychosis, ranging from random and purposeless violence to apparently causeless epidemics and widespread neurosis. Doris Lessing, “The Sirian Experiments”

Mar 20

Наше восприятие мира — это фантазия, совпадающая с реальностью

Глава из книги нейропсихолога Криса Фрита «Мозг и душа».

Feb 27

Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: without the sting of otherness, of — even — the vicious, without the terrible energies of the underside of health, sanity, sense, then nothing works or can work. I tell you that goodness — what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent — these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sides. Their hidden aspects contained and tempered. Doris Lessing, “The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five”

Feb 24

Вещество с умами: Вкус

Трудно найти вещество, более страшное в глазах простого потребителя, чем глутамат натрия, он же усилитель вкуса, или E621. «Популярная механика» решила разобраться, насколько правдивы эти «страшилки».

Feb 5

Оливер Сакс: Что галлюцинации говорят о мышлении

Невролог и писатель Оливер Сакс обращает наше внимание на синдром Шарля Бонне, при котором у пациентов с расстройством зрения случаются галлюцинации. Он в ярких деталях описывает опыт своих пациентов и рассказывает о биологии этого малоизвестного явления.