#mind body problem

[thebardostate]

Where Does Consciousness Come From?

(This is Part 2 of a three part series on consciousness. Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here.

A 25 year bet was settled last week when two rival scientific explanations for consciousness - Global Workspace Theory (GWT) and Integrated Information Theory (IIT) - both failed to discover any neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC) in the human brain. Neuroscientist Cristof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers agreed that neuroscience can't yet explain how our brains produce consciousness.

I say "yet" because it is an article of faith among the disciples of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett that consciousness (if it exists at all) will eventually be shown to be a mere illusion or "epiphenomenon" generated by biochemical activity in our brains. They argue that the mind is only what the brain does, so consciousness ceases when the brain dies. They dismiss as pseudoscientific "woo" fantasy any notion that consciousness might survive the physical death of the brain.

(source: @myjetpack)

Materialist neo-Darwinism appears to enjoy broad support across the physical and biological sciences, in medicine, and from science popularizers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan. It can fairly be called the orthodox scientific view.

And yet, we see from the results of the wager that the origins of consciousness remain an open question. It is considered one of the greatest unsolved problems in science. Thus far, scientific orthodoxy has gotten us exactly...nowhere.

What is it Like to be a Bat?

Enter Thomas Nagel, a marquee name in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In 1974 Nagel published the widely influential essay "What is it Like to be a Bat?" in which he argued that there's a lot more to being a bat than just hanging around upside down in the dark. Bats perceive their world thru echo location. Nothing in human experience prepares us for what that must be like: bats don't "see" their homes because they're in pitch darkness, nor do they "feel" their way along in the dark because they're flying thru the air. We can speculate, but we humans don't have a clue what it feels like to be a bat. And yet, science knows a great deal about bat brains.

In his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos Nagel argues that the materialist neo-Darwinist conception of reality is almost certainly false, with far-reaching implications for evolution and quantum physics. He is incredulous at the just-so story that Dawkins, Dennett, et. al. are expecting us to swallow:

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naive response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.

However, Nagel is no sock puppet for religion, as some of his materialist critics have insinuated. In fact, he is an atheist:

I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them. I believe that these two radically opposed conceptions cannot exhaust the possibilities.

Back to the Drawing Board

So if consciousness doesn't come from the brain, then where does it come from?

In Nagel's estimation it's high time science started looking for alternative explanations instead of continuing to double down on materialist neo-Darwinism, which by now has had ample time to put up or shut up (Karl Popper called these breezy we'll-solve-it-someday assurances "promissory materialism".) Nagel critiques the three basic approaches that materialists have pursued thus far:

Treat consciousness as a black box, and infer what might lurk inside the box by carefully observing its behavior from the outside. This is the behaviorist approach, whose sterility was so evident by the late 1960s that it sparked the cognitive revolution in psychology.

Systematically trace all mental events to physical counterparts "somewhere" in the brain. This is the approach that GWT and IIT take, using medical techniques like functional MRI to observe the brain as we carry out various activities. One of the problems with this approach is brain plasticity, the ability of the brain to rewire itself (e.g., after a stroke); plasticity makes it difficult to pin down exactly where in the brain mental events occur (to say nothing about how the brain pulls off the plasticity trick in the first place.) Another problem is that mental activities can interact and overlap, such as when we drive a car and talk on the phone at the same time. Sometimes we can multitask, and sometimes we can't. Where do those complex interactions play out in the brain? What about things produced by the brain itself but not experienced by the senses like imagination, the placebo effect and hallucinations? And finally, there is a world of difference between images from fMRI and the actual, subjective, first-person experiences we have when performing those tasks. They're just not the same. I'll have much more to say about this approach to consciousness research in Part 3 of this series.

Deny that there is any such thing as consciousness - this is eliminative materialism aka illusionism, whose most prominent proponent is Dennett. But if we buy into this, why should we stop at questioning our own consciousness? Why don't we just deny that anything exists at all, and go full-on nihilist atheist? Philosopher Galen Strawson called illusionism "the silliest claim ever made" while philosopher John Searle called it an "intellectual pathology." (Plus which, when you get down into the weeds of eliminative materialism, you find that it's just reheated behaviorism anyway.)

Nagel believes these materialist accounts are all incomplete because each in its own way fails to explain the familiar first-person experience of being alive and conscious. But even setting that aside, he points out a further problem for the neo-Darwinists.

Why Did Consciousness Evolve?

In its own way, materialist Neo-Darwinism is a "theory of everything" in so far as biology goes. As such, it must be able to explain why consciousness evolved in the first place.

It's quite plausible that natural selection could have produced organisms that adapt and reproduce without being conscious. We can imagine robot-like zombies that carry out a series of evolved instructions and reproduce without ever having experiencing first-person subjective consciousness, like little automatons. And yet, we are conscious. Why? What evolutionary purpose could first-person awareness have served?

A standard materialist explanation is that consciousness emerged as a byproduct of evolution (a "spandrel" as Steven Jay Gould called it) rather like junk DNA. If we are not satisfied with the just-so story that the mental comes as a free bonus to the physical, then we will have to look for our answers elsewhere.

Opening the Window on Consciousness

We landed in this situation because science has sought to explain nature entirely in physical terms, without invoking theism. It has been spectacularly successful - particularly in the physical sciences - but the cost has been excluding consciousness along with the gods. Eventually this exclusion was bound to be challenged. We cannot have a complete picture of the world without understanding our own consciousness that makes that picture possible. If consciousness isn't generated by the brain, the implications for evolution and quantum physics will be far-reaching. (Nagel, 2012)

In the concluding part of this series we'll take a fresh look at the medical evidence for certain so-called 'paranormal' phenomena. These have been systematically excluded from mainstream scientific consideration because, if they proved true, they would undercut materialist explanations of consciousness. What do medical anomalies like Near-Death Experiences and Terminal Lucidity imply about the nature of consciousness?

#consciousness #philosophy #materialism and its discontents #cognitive science #philosophy of mind #global workspace theory #integrated information theory #artificial consciousness #neuronal correlates of consciousness #richard dawkins #thomas nagel #daniel dennett #spiritual atheism #atheist #atheism #agnosticism #agnostic #theism #mind and cosmos #mind body problem #what is it like to be a bat? #brain #consciousness series

[houseofallegories]

"Even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience - perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report - there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?"

-David Chalmers (On Consciousness)

#ideas #philosophy #politics #sociology #quote #consciousness #mind body problem #david chalmers

[mindbodyproblem]

^ photos taken just before successfully getting a massive crowd of normies at your school to open up a pit

(this is what got them raging)

#mind body problem #mind-body problem #mbp #metal #metalcore #post hardcore #emo #screamo #trans #transgender #queer #queercore #trans band #mcr #my chemical romance

[c-schroed]

"You've read those science fiction stories where humans manage to digitize the consciousness and upload themselves to some computer network. We do that, and our bodies will be nothing but antiquated dead media as far as our souls are concerned. It's not hard to imagine a few soulless bodies lying around between the piles of magnetic tape and flash memory cards in my office once we evolve our consciousness beyond the need for the flesh." "Really?" I asked. "I always thought it was the other way around. That the soul was just a function of the body—a means to keep it alive. Once our bodies find something more suitable to propagate themselves and are able to trade in these old souls, then it's we who become the dead media." That caught him off his guard. The professor sat with a blank expression on his face for a few moments. Then he laughed out loud. "True enough! A very radical idea at first blush, but from the perspective of evolution, I'd say yours is more correct. Perhaps it is I who was caught up in an antiquated notion of the human soul as something sacred and unique."

"Harmony" by Project Itoh, 2008

This. "Harmony" by Japanese Author Project Itoh is, in my eyes, the best book ever written since Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein". Because of discussions like this.

Because of thoughts that take a turn into a direction I have never heard of before. Because of conclusions that are at the same time absolutely novel, weirdly fascinating and devastatingly uncanny. Because of masterful foreshadowing.

Gosh. I really love this book.

#he's a genius #project itoh #keikaku itoh #harmony #project itoh harmony #book recommendations #science fiction #mind body problem #mind body connection #free will #schroed's thoughts

[itsnotquitepoetry]

I'm not fucking stupid. I know it's not real. But my brain doesn't know. My body doesn't know. They really feel those things no matter how hard I try to convince them otherwise. That's the only thing that makes me believe that there is a distinct mind that isn't my body but tethered to it. I am not the synapses firing in that brain, I'm just subject to them.

#not quite poetry #thoughts #maladaptive daydreaming #nightmares #mind body problem #on some Descartes shit #philosophy

[dusksmote]

guess who's already on their third art piece for their next fic???

#muh fanfic #mind body problem #i'm churning them out boiz #only like 7 more to go 🥲 #lol jk #unless 👀

[redshift-13]

What if mind is matter?

Who are we to insist that the cosmos accept our ideas about it?

Consider the psychological shift of realizing that matter dreams, that matter loves, that matter hurts, that matter desires and likes to play with colors.

#mind body problem #psychology #ontological ruminations

[mushroomjar]

What rituals must I perform to make everyone start listening to Mind-Body Problem

#i don't care that they only have one song okay IT'S A BANGER #they describe themselves as transgender metalcore ksksks but they also take influences from deathcore and it's sooo good #their lyrics are also great #just a content warning for body horror and heavy religious themes in both the title of their song and the lyrics if you do look them up #mind-body problem #mind body problem #metalcore #trans #musicposting #cat rambles

[sourweather-fics]

A new Fic just dropped on my patreon called 'Mind Body Problem'! The prompts for it were 'sexting, smut, spacedogs'! here's a little preview for you ;) (NSFW text below)

hope you'll come over and check it out!!!

#fic preview #hannibal extended universe #heu #spacedogs #adam raki #adam 2009 #nigel charlie countryman #charlie countryman #mind body problem

[diaryofaphilosopher]

The lemon is extended through all its qualities, and each of its qualities is extended through each of the others. It is the sourness of the lemon which is yellow, it is the yellowness of the lemon which is sour. We eat the colour of the cake, and the taste of the cake is the instrument through which its shape and its colour are revealed to what we might term the alimentary intuition. Conversely, if I poke my finger into the jar of jam, the sticky coldness of the jam is a revelation to my fingers of its sugary taste. The fluidity, the tepidity, the bluish colour, the undulating restlessness of the water in a pool are given at one stroke, each quality through the others; and it is this total interpenetration which we call the this.

— Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness.

Follow Diary of A Philosopher for more quotes!

#synesthesia #mind body problem #sartre #jean paul sartre #book quotes #dark academia #being and nothingness #philosophy #existentialism #gradblr #studyblr #quote #quotes

[meinemung]

It was a dark and muggy night at the frat castle, a stately red brick building surrounding by ancient live oaks and a lawn littered with beer cups. The campus is semi-deserted as it’s the night before a long weekend.

Three college-aged boys, close friends, are in the common area doing bro things. Basically drinking beer and talkin’ sportsball. Close friends since they met at prep school, the trio are tall and generically handsome in a “my dad’s a lawyer” way.

Teddy, the tallest, has his long hairy legs stretched over the couch. He’s shirtless, wearing only his pineapple boxers, a healthy bulge showing through. He’s sipping on a cold one, as are all of the guys.

Christopher, the next tallest, sits next to him. Sandy haired, long-legged, with a ready grin framed by waspy good looks, he has an intense expression on his face as he focuses on the game on the flatscreen.

That leaves us with Harrison. A pre-med, he’s the shortest at six foot even, although if you ask him he’ll say he’s 6’3”. While Teddy and Christopher’s attention is consumed by the video screen, Harrison is leafing nervously through his textbook. As a pre-med, and a chronically neurotic person, he cares about his GPA to the hundreth point.

“Men, you have have got to try this new noot from my stack. It makes addy seems like skittles.” Harrison said enthusiastically, referring to a substance he purchased on the internet that would supposedly boost his cognition.

Christopher and Teddy exchanged a glance. The three were super tight, but Christopher and Teddy had to acknowledge that Harrison said a great deal of eye-roll worthy things.

Teddy belched loudly. “Thanks but no thanks. I have enough Adderall to get me through a million finals. Just read up the WebMD on attention deficit disorder, and my irrresitable heart melting looks at the female doctor sealed the deal.”

Harrison scoffed and made mock vomiting gestures.

Christopher looked concerned. “Teddy, are you sure that stuff doesn’t have any long term effects? I have trouble studying too sometimes, but I just get by with a latte or a Red Bull.”

For a second Christopher kept his concerned look. Looking into each other’s eyes for a second, they burst into laughter. They were at a university with high academic standards, complete with endless finals, theses, and projects. Other more pressing concerns, such as date events with lots of sorority girls in sunddresses, fantasy football, and beer, made it difficult to meet those academic standards, and thus prescription stimulants were ubiquitous.

“That stuff’s way better than any normie drug like Adderall,” Harrison remarked disdainfully. Harrison went on raving about this new substance, about how it upregulated some obscure neurotransmitter, while Christopher and Teddy belched, loud and long, in unison and high-fived each other. Ah, brotherhood.

“It takes a few weeks to take effect. But you know that patience is a virtue… I’ve found myself breezing through tests and not having to hit the books that much. I suppose this will help me with the boards .. and getting the right residency…” Harrison had a far-off expression, no doubt having grand visions of himself as a super moneyed physician.

His reverie was broken by a series of loud barking belches from Teddy. “As of now, it just affords me more quality free time,” Harrison laughs and picks up a controller to join in the game.

But he was excited and could not resist talking more about the substance, and going in depth. Harrison enjoyed sounding smart, and now was a good time to show off all he had learned in Neuropharm 101. Christopher and Teddy were used to such conversations, and they were used to making the “mmms” and “yeahs” that conveyed that you wanted to zone out in a semi-polite way.

But something caught Christopher’s attention.

“Do you think that all our thoughts, our memories, are experiences, are just … neurotransmitters? … chemicals?” Christopher said, taking a deep sip of his brew.

“… Well, yeah. There’s nothing to suggest otherwise,” Harrison said. “Science is just too good at predicting things.”

“I really want to know what chemical is it when you let out a huge belch, or a fart, that you’ve holding in a long time. That’s better than sex. Well maybe not really, depending on who it’s with,” Teddy said grinning and holding up his beer.

Harrison chuckled. “Well… technically it’s not the chemicals themselves that are the specific happy feelings. Dopamine. It’s probably dopamine. But that wasn’t my point. Feelings are a complex emergent property of the topology of the neurons, the pattern of activation gradients, and yes, the specific chemicals in the brain.”

Christopher looked thoughtful. “So everything, the whole world you’ve ever known, can be reduced to the arrangement of matter..? My first kiss, the sadness of our Golden Retriever dying, getting the acceptance letter, our friendship? That’s just … molecules, atoms, particles, whatever sloshing around?”

“Well, I don’t know if we can say definitively. Even if we can scan the brain perfectly to an arbitarily high degree of accuracy, we would have no way to scan what it feels like to be that brain. But yeah, it seems like that’s the most reasonable answer. Because what’s the alternative? There’s some invisible ghost living in your body, controlling your physical body, that will go frolick in paradise with the spirit in the sky after you die?”

“Well, maybe? It seems better than saying we’re just molecules. And both are equally unprovable. As you said yourself, even if you knew and could predict the exact arrangement of atoms that make up my brain, you couldn’t know exactly what it’s like to *be* me.”

“I don’t know about ‘equally unprovable’… But it seems like the better option of the two…”

Teddy looked thoughtful. “You guys remember the Matrix? Maybe everything’s not real. Maybe everything’s an illusion and we’re all in a simulation. That’s the third option.”

Harrison chuckled. “Beer is great, beer is awesome, but you’ve had too much, my friend.”

Christopher laughed. “Maybe we are living in a computer. But doesn’t that just delay the question. We just push things to the more “fundamental” layer of reality, in which this simulation is being run.” He sat up with a renewed focus toward the game, which had reached a pivotal point, and he and Teddy whooped and clapped each other on the back as the opponent’s defense was clobbered.

“Well, technically we’re not the molecules. I guess we can say that “we,” or our consciousnesses, or awareness, what have you, are the emergent properties that arise from these molecules. The aggregation of a large number of simple elements can form systems of unimaginable complexity. The gigantic number of proteins and their diverse behavior comes from simple chemical properties of amino acids which each individually are just simple hydrocarbons. Ant colonies have very complex behaviors that an individual ant just doesn’t. An individual neuron has no consciousness, but arranged in a sufficiently complex way, consciousness arises.”

“Bro, I know what emergent properties are. But that just doesn’t seem like a good enough explanation for me, for why when physical entities, defined solely in terms of numbers like mass, charge, and spin, put together in just the right way, does an entirely new, unmeasurable dimension just *emerge*: That just seems fishy to me, just as fishy as claiming the same god who created the world in seven days hates gay people.”

“Well, most things in science are not obvious. The obvious answer to ‘what caused life’ to early scientists was some invisble vital force, but that was before the process of abiogenesis was discovered. The process of natural selection is less ‘obvious’ than an almighty deity creating us as subjects and playthings. But time after time for disparate phenomena we’ve found natural selection does well in explaining our observations. Therefore we now take it as fact.”

“I don’t have anything against natural selection. It makes complete sense to me. I don’t have anything against the connection of the body and the mind nor neuroscience. What makes no sense is why there has to be something it feels like to be me. I could react to stimuli, do I want I do, get horny, et cetera, without being aware of any of it. Just like how I assume a robot feels - nothing. It’d probably be more efficient to boot if I had no inner life.”

Harrison wrinkled his nose. “Once you get to a certain level of information processing and integration, I assume, it just appears.”

“Do you think supercomputers are conscious?”

“That’s different! Maybe one day… but… Human life is way more complex than some computer. But… I did read something about this. I don’t want to say it since it sounds kinda dumb but maybe… consciousness is an illusion.”

Teddy, who turned out was actually listening after all, laughed whole heartedly. Harrison turned a bit red. “Now hear me out, dude. I think — I think that the brain sort of tricks itself into feeling that all the disparate processing, all of the disparate subsystems, are one continuous consciousness…”

Teddy let out a long belch and whistled. “That’s just a *little* hard to believe, hoss.”

Christopher thought for a second. He didn’t want to reject Harrison’s argument out of hand. But something still seemed a bit off about his line of reasoning. “But… I’m asking why does it feel like anything at all? Uh, doesn’t there need to be *someone* to be fooled by an illusion?”

Harrison grew slightly red. “There just is. We’ll know eventually. Science has not progressed to the point where we can make any firm conclusions yet. I’m sure with more work in the field we will unravel the mystery of the origin on consciousness, qualia, psychedelia, whatever. Science hasn’t failed us thus far…”

Teddy whistled. “Not so sure about that, broski. Science brought us bad tan jobs and TikTok. And Therac-25 and fracking. Anyway, isn’t science about challenging your assumptions? Including that conciousness is an emergent property of matter.”

“Well, what else could consciousness be? If natural selection holds, we must have originated from the non-conscious primordial hydrocarbon soup, which I assume isn’t sentient. And we’ve observed that damaging the brain has major effects on consciuosness. Just cutting a few nerve bundles can change a person’s entire personality…”

“Well, what if there was already primitive sentience in that hydrocarbon soup? What if every single particle in the universe had some degree of sentience?” Teddy said.

Harrison scoffed. “Evidently beer and neuroscience aren’t exactly the best combination. But… Come on now, Teddy. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a carbon atom, and I don’t think it’d be a hoot. And how exactly do the dull experiences of things like molecules come together to form the rich experiences of you and me? That doesn’t get us any closer to a solution.”

“I gotta give it to Harrison for this one,” said Christopher.

Teddy shrugged. “I was just throwing ideas out there. Hey, the game is coming on in ten minutes. Their new starters are going to be crushed!”

The boys chatted enthusiastically about sports, as guys usually do. Teddy gave some interesting insights about the other team’s coaching strategy, while Harrison said some choice words about the rival school, including casting aspersions on its academic quality and on the integrity of its female student populace.

But it soon drifted back to the original topic at halftime. Christopher had thought a bit more and his position on the topic had begun to solidify.

“You know, I’ve been thinking, that the only thing we can really be sure of is our own consciousness. We can’t even say for certain other people have minds. All we can know about them is second and third person; while we usually operate under the assumption that there’s a ‘first person’ we can’t really prove it, you know, definitively…” Christopher said thoughtfully, taking a sip of his longneck and scratching the barest hint of stubble on the side of his jaw and burping softly.

Harrison thought for a moment, blowing on his beer bottle casually. “That’s true. I think I said something about that.”

“Wait, there’s more. If something can evolve to respond to its environment, why would it need to feel anything? What effect would it have on its survival?”

“Well, maybe it’s inevitable. Who knows. It’s probably not any one factor, but a whole host of them. I think I read something about this, but the agent needs to represent itself and to manage its attention to prevent from being overloaded by information. I guess it evolved because animals needed a way to represent themselves, and crowd out competing impulses…”

Christopher shrugged. “Maybe. But my goddamn 4Runner has a navigation system and it represents itself with a little arrow icon; I’m not sure whether that has anything to do with you know, being able to have experiences, being able to feel something. And it seems like consciousness may even be maladaptive. If we were all tidy little biological automatons, we wouldn’t feel things like pride, depression, any moral scruples. We wouldn’t be able to stop and ahem, … admire a girl in a nice sunddress. We’d be hunting, fighting, and baby-making machines, and we wouldn’t be aware of any of it. It just seems so unnecessary, this capacity for subjectivity, yet it’s the only thing we really know….”

“So what are you saying? That natural selection is not valid? Are you one of *those* people? I never took you for one of them.”

“No, I definitely think natural selection is a, uh, thing. But I don’t know if it’s the whole story. And I question why you focus so much on matter as a means to explain consciousness.”

“As I’ve said, I’m wouldn’t exactly call myself zealous, but I think it’s better than believing in things like mind-matter duality. And I can’t stand the thought of being with all of those fundie nutters in heaven. Or going to hell for simply enjoying the finer pleasures of life.”

“Are those the only two options for explaining … things? Either we are nothing but matter sloshing around, deluding itself that it has feelings, or a wrathful and capricious god watches and cares about each and every dumb thought? There’s gotta be another option, something better.”

Harrison raised an eyebrow. “Got any other options? I’m listening.”

“Uhh… maybe as Teddy was saying… maybe we are in something like the Matrix…”

“That’s the best you can come up with?” Harrison smirked. “I thought you were a pretty rational guy, Topher.”

“Not the stuff about the aliens stealing our energy. I meant that maybe thought, experience, or some form of mentation is the … I don’t know, fundamental ‘stuff’ of the universe.”

“How does anything get processed … without a computer?”

“Well, first of all you’re assuming that matter creates mind. Isn’t debating that the whole point of this conversation?”

“I meant that information is always about something. If what you’re saying is true and the universe is fundamentally information, information can exist without there being anything the information could possibly be about? Isn’t data always ‘about’ something?”

“Uh, I don’t know if the ‘information’ would need to be ‘about’ something. But that brings up another point: if thoughts are just physical states, how can physical states be *about* anything? A chair, or a mountain, isn’t ‘about’ anything. And there are axioms and theorems in pure math which are not about anything physical.”

Harrison thought for a moment before replying. “We create the meanings. They don’t exist objectively. And I sort of disgree with that. But… I do think that mathematics and music, maybe a sign that …. the objectively measurable world may not be the whole picture…”

“Exactly. Dude, for a time, I was convinced that everything was just chemical, and we were just a speck of dust in the void. But I just don’t get how things like math can be physical. The time we’ve spent together, our friendship. I just don’t believe this is the result of the chance collision of subatomic particles.”

“Yeah… I get where you’re coming from. But I’m not agreeing with you, Christopher. I still believe that there are a ton of unanswered questions that science hasn’t matured enough to tackle. But I do have faith that science will address them anyway.”

“Fair enough.”

“It’s kind of funny.”

“You need a lot of faith to believe that insentient matter comes together and forms *you*: everything you are and will be is matter. Because matter is just a model, a helpful mental tool for explaining what our consciousnesses interacts with. It comes from our minds. The fact is that we only know one thing for certain: it’s our own mind.”

“That faith is justified by results. You know what they say: ‘science flies you to the moon…’”

Christopher’s conviction grew at a fast clip, and he spoke more confidently. “The results come from the scientific method as practiced by a number of individuals. Not some monolithic entity called ‘Science’, and certainly not the unproven ‘we are chemicals bumping together in the void’ shit, which is more dogma than anything. I think there’s sort of a false dichotomy here: either you are a hardcore materialist, or you are a fundamentalist nutjob.”

Harrison laughed. “Fair point. But it isn’t a false dichotomy. You’re forgetting about the new age wackjobs.”

Teddy suddely demonstrated that he was at least paying partial attention to their conversation. “You know how some people have multiple personalities? I think I dated a chick like that once; it was some ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ meets ‘Freaky Friday’ shit. Maybe we’re like multiple personalities, of like the Universe, or whatever.” Teddy piped up after a long period of focus on the game.

“I’m all for microdosing it for nootropic purposes, but taking LSD has never really apppealed that much to me,” Harrison sniffed.

Christopher was tempted to scoff, but bit his lip and thought for a second. “Why would the universe need to split itself into multiple personalities?”

Teddy shrugged. “Maybe it was lonely. You know that by definition, there is nothing else but the universe. Dude, I don’t know.”

Christopher thought for a long time and his eyes lit up as if he come to a fundamental realization, or got possessed. “I get it now. I get it. Everything just makes sense noThere are individualized minds deriving from the universal mind, individual drops from a stream. All so called physical phenomena, including blunt forces and drugs, are within universal mind, which can affect the state of dissociation. That’s why a blow to the head can change your personality…. …. If what I suspect is true, and mental ‘stuff’ is the fundamental ‘stuff’ of the universe, and mentation is fundamental… that means some form of cognition was always present. You see it in the well-behavedness of the universe, unreasonable effectiveness of the mathematical universe, regularities of the stars, whatever. But it was only with the evolution of mankind that the universe gained sufficiently concentrated consciousness to… think about itself, to experience, to love… And science, the practice of science… the universe or God or whatever has all this abstract knowledge, but you need subject object duality in order to appreciate and build on that knowledge, create and test hypotheses, and stuff… And a byproduct of that duality is the capacity to experience more reified and intense sensations and emotions. So we’re here to allow the universe to experience … itself to the fullest, to give it the full gamut of experiences, and to allow it to learn about itself through the self-awareness we provide it. And the learning comes a lot faster because having multiple sub-personalities allows for dialectic, the best way to generate new ideas and thoughts. Because what does a mind do but think? We are each the universe, and our job here is to provide it with experiences and more knowledge. The universe is a mind. What does a mind do but think? And how does it think? Through every one of us.”

Christopher looked surprised, eyes widened, after this dialogue, not knowing whether whether he was a genius, going insane, way too drunk, or all of the above. He snapped out of it after a few seconds of reverie, scratched the side of his jaw and took a deep swig of his beer.

Harrison shook his head. Then he thought for a moment. “I mean that it’s fair to question physicalism, but as a man of science I will not accept any woo woo nonsense. Soon we’ll be talking about the healing energies of Libra crystals.” he said, standing up, showing off his tight swimmer’s build with the hint of a beer tummy. “I need some more beer after that conversation.”

“A man of science? A man of sucking up to the biochem 101 professor in office hours for a rec letter, at least,” Teddy laughed.

Harrison grew red. “Shut up, Theodore! At least I’m not an econ major!” He huffed and stormed out of the room to get another six pack from the cellar. Teddy beamed.

“That’s deep, bro,” Teddy looked at Christopher.

“You didn’t think that I had gone off the deep end or anything?”

“Oh, I definitely did, bro. But I still respect you immensely.”

Christopher paused for a bit. He seemed like he was about to say something to defend his newfound views and then decided against it. He took a swig of his beer: “Hey, that new QB is absolutely going to change the dynamic for us. Going off how the season is going so far, we have a shot at conference champs.”

“Hell yes. That arm. That golden arm. That guy is such a goat. I would marry him. But not really. Because I’m not gay.”

“At least you’d let him live rent free in your house.”

“That at least.”

#bromance #mind body problem #college

[bene-darkmans]

Every philosophy major is subordinate to mentally ill bitches with autoimmune disorders

#mind body problem #chronic illness

[mindbodyproblem]

on february 23rd we dropped our debut single "flesh and blood (ephesians 6:12)" - it's a 4.5 minute metalcore adventure about the experience of coming out as trans to an unsupportive family. we wrote, recorded, produced, and released it entirely by ourselves and we're super proud of it!! also shoutout to our friend camille calegari for the kickass cover art :D

stream it everywhere right now and stay tuned for more to come very soon!!

#mind-body problem #mind body problem #mbp #metal #metalcore #post hardcore #emo #screamo #trans #transgender #queer #queercore #punk #my chemical romance #mcr #flesh and blood #ephesians 6:12

[spaciebabie]

oh so you wanna fuck that monster huh. make sexy art of them without giving them muscles and/or making them look human

#spacie spoinks #this doesnt apply 2 monsters that are already humanoid #also its just a personal thing but muscles on male characters largely turn me off #hjdfkjsdf LIKE WHY IS STILL THE ONLY 'SEXY' MALE FORM IN FANDOM MUSCULAR AND/OR SKINNY #IM SOOO TIRED #yall be giving muscles 2 muh fuckers who DO NOT NEED THEM SHITS #IF YOU NEED 2 HUMANIZE A MONSTER IN ORDER 2 FUCK IT..............YOU AINT A MONSTERFUCKER DAWG................ #''wow this character is really sexy 2 me b/c of how human it looks now!!'' #you'll see the original design be some hulking beast who's shape isnt humanoid in the slightest and then some guy #will come along and be like ''hahaha yeah i wanna fuck this thing'' and then take the characters head and put it on a muscular human body #what is the point dawg. #this can also apply 2 robots #i dont caaareee if you have a humanoid design for 'x' robot/monster character #the problem is when you just. take a stereotypically attractive human body slap the character's head on here and then go crazy over that #and like the original character design does nothing for you. #dude. you dont want 2 fuck these characters you want 2 fuck a human wearing an object/animal head 😭 #true monster/robotfuckers want that thang in its canon form. you cant ride w/us if you're like that dawg #dont mind me this is just a pet peeve i have #its even worse when its female characters oh my godddd #these muh fuckers dont want 2 fuck monsters they wanna fuck a human woman cosplaying as one #good LORD

[crimeronan]

i swear to god i've seen an exactly equivalent number of posts recently with the premises "it's gross to talk so much about how you wanna fuck trans people, can't you be normal about people you don't wanna fuck" and "it's gross to act like trans people are unfuckable and that we're only attractive as a fetish, actually i'm a girl with a great dick and it's fine" & i'm like. rubs my eyes. maybe the truth is that human experience is varied and different people wish to be desired/perceived/discussed in different ways and what's validating to one person feels yucky to another. maybe if someone's form of validation isn't for you then you don't need to immediately assume the worst faith possible interpretation of their words. i mean this in the most constructive way possible bc i do this too and i frequently look back at assumptions i made and realize i'm insane. Just Because It Felt Bad To You Doesn't Mean It Feels Bad To Everyone.

#and just because it felt bad to you doesn't mean it's inherently bad. #i hate being hit on and desired sexually but as long as ppl go 'oh never mind then' when i say so... it's fine if they wanna smash #as long as theyre not making it my problem. theyre not wrong for wanting to fuck me! just leave me alone about it! #people finding girldick hot are not inherently chasers who only like hyperfemme trans girls & #people not wanting to fuck are not inherently finding a person's body to be lesser/other/gross/etc. #like oh my god. please relax. it's okay. we're on the gay and trans sex and celibacy website

[doki-doki-imagines]

You never show your face to him during intimate moments.

Bachira Meguru:

-No way he is okay with this, he needs to see your eyes to understand what is going on.

-They are also the first trait that pulled him to you, so covering them ruins all the fun.

-“Ohi, what’s wrong?”

-There is no way Bachira will let this topic go, he’ll cage you under him and he’ll stare until you break.

-Bachira can be pretty intimidating when he wants.

-So you break, you tell him you don’t want to see his disgusted face when he’ll look at your body, how you are scared shitless of your low appeal, and…damn you can’t talk anymore between sobs.

-Bachira treats you with the delicacy that only someone in love could have. He is still caging you under him, but his expression is much softer like his embrace.

-“You can be so dumb at times. Don’t know how those thoughts got into that silly head of yours, but I’ll make sure to push them all away”

Rin Itoshi: -Why do you always hide your face, why do you always turn the other way around, why, why, why

-So Rin thinks he is the problem, you don’t want to look at him because you are disgusted by him, maybe you prefer to think of someone else…

- As often happen Rin's green monster crawls under his skin, ready to vomit venom on you at the first sign of hiding.

-But this time, when you cover your eyes for the nth time Rin notices something new; are your lips trembling? Are you gonna cry? Is he so disgusting?

-So with his usual gentlemanly ways, he grips your wrist to push your arms out of the way and whispers “What the hell is wrong with you”

-The atmosphere is so tense you think it is gonna kill you soon if you don’t spill your insecurity and that’s what you do, chest heavy, but trying to maintain at least a bit of dignity

-“Never heard such dumb shit ever in my life”

-If the situation wasn’t so dramatic, you have kneed his kidney.

-So you think to be the problem…this change the entire situation! He doesn’t know how to deal with this situation anyway, but he feels relieved!

-A little less relieved when he looks at your face, eyes watery and ugly pout.

-Rin for sure doesn’t know how to express himself with words, so he’ll do it physically. Will it take more time? Probably, but it is the easiest way for him while trying to make you understand how pure shit those intrusive thoughts are.

Oliver Aiku:

-With a guy like Oliver the issue came out way sooner than with the others guys.

-And for you, the issue got even worse since it was way easier to imagine him going with someone else if you aren’t good enough.

-With someone else, Oliver wouldn’t have given two fucks in all honesty.

-But he is serious about you?? So he at least wants to try, he doesn’t want to give up so easily.

-It was during a normal indoor date that Oliver asked you about this.

-You were watching a film together, your head lying on his chest, his arm around your waist, so it was easy to stop your probable runaway.

-And he was so good at making you relax. It’s not like it was easy to talk about the topic, but at least Oliver put you at ease.

-But his ass is burnt. Do you trust him so little? Damn it hurts. He jokes about it with you, laughs even, but the pain is real.

-Oliver will try anything in his capabilities to make you understand that more often than not brains can come out with fucked up shit that aren’t true.

-But now you also have to demonstrate you trust him; it still stings you know?

#bllk imagines #blue lock imagines #bllk x reader #blue lock x reader #bllk headcanons #blue lock headcanons #bachira meguru #bachira meguru x you #rin itoshi #rin itoshi x reader #oliver aiku #oliver aiku x reader #often read over confident reader with their body and since I'm not I decided to make a trope for reader like me #even if honestly I hope nobody has my same problem #Overconfidence in this case I think it is a blessing LOL #I had so many characters in mind but went for them #I love you Oliver #did I put him in the ship post...I think I have to edit it ouch #what a girlkeep girlboss gaslight thing to do not adding him to keep Oliver all for myself AHAHAAH