Still, consciousness definitely exists and is definitely weird. And I don't think it's futile to try and learn about it. It's just not going to be philosophers that give us any answers (as usual).

I'd like to suggest comparing observations from Merleu-Ponty and late modern neuroscience, perhaps Bear et al, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain (pick a previous edition to get it cheap).

Ha perhaps I should have been more specific - I want correct answers!

And I want answers because a) I'm interested, and b) answers to scientific questions tend to let us make new cool things!

This can easily be undermined, e.g. with strong psychedelic disassociatives such as salvinorins which can brutally alter this sense of self and bodily consciousness through very localised, very specific central receptor action. Another example could be the use of mirror images to treat phantom limbs in amputees.

To some it might be frightening to realise one has never been outside a very small part of the brain and never directly experienced anything but projections sent there from a collection of slimy mammal parts that aren't conscious at all.

Take chemistry and astrology as examples. Why do we consider chemistry more valid? It's not because chemistry steps outside of physics' boundaries; it's that it gives us useful answers based on physics. Anything in chemistry that doesn't fit with physics we see as a mistake. But this doesn't mean chemistry doesn't have its place. It tackles parts of the world physics covers in broad strokes, just as physics uses math to detail its findings. Saying physics could exist without math, or implying a problem in physics could be solved outside of math, goes against the whole idea of what physics is.

Saying 'philosophy is dead' ironically shows how successful philosophy has been. We don’t need to constantly refer back to philosophy for everyday scientific questions because those frameworks are already well-established. Philosophy comes into play when we’re faced with truly strange or new questions that challenge our current understanding.

I swear that the administrative convenience of treating domains of science as distinct subjects rather than subsets and supersets and entirely separate from philosophy in K-12 has caused confusion and dogmatic rigidity on a global scale.

No, they grew from experimental evidence. I'm not aware of any scientific knowledge that came from pure thought experiment without experimental validation. Pretty much the only thing you can use that for is maths.

You can say "but lots of discoveries came from medieval philosophers", but that's just because they didn't have a separate word for scientists. I'm using the modern definition of the word, which really makes my argument almost tautologically true. By the modern definition if any philosopher actually provided and answer to a question then people would call it science.

To name a few, modern physics, chemistry, and psychology are rooted in alchemy and astrology.

A major problem is that people accept the literal interpretations of those practices to either discount or credit them. Ironically, this stems from the self-imprisonment in material existence, the bonds of which occult studies seek to cut.

That's ironic, because this is the most popular theory of consciousness among analytic philosophers: physicalism. It says that consciousness is identical to some physical process.

The problem with this theory is the knowledge argument. Mary grew up in a room without colors. Inside the room, she did learn everything about the brain. For example, she knows exactly what physical process is associated with the experience of "red". One day, she goes outside for the first time, and sees a rose. Does she learn something new? Something she didn't already know from knowing everything about the physical correlate of having experiences of red?

> In other words, if physicalism is true, then Mary’s complete knowledge of all the physical facts will include knowledge of what it is like to experience color. When she does have the actual experience for the first time, there should be no surprises. If there are, then she didn’t really have all the physical facts.

Most of the time humans are talking about the wonders of polywater to each other.

A giant game of telephone telling each other complete nonsense.

"The soviets have found a new form of water that freezes at –40°F, pass it on!".

Psychoactives don't just filter your senses, they change reality (your own subjective reality, of course.)

Maybe there is a demon in my head giving me the illusion of reality being perceived as a projection on the cerebral cortex, and it's reliable malleability under caffeine, MDMA, LSD, cannabis and so on. If so, I find this model of better utility than going with vibes and prayer and belief in eternity and so on that comes with the descendants of christian dualism in liberalism, 'panpsychism', analytic philosophy, &c.

Edit: Kierkegaard wrote quite interesting texts about the structures of consciousness, I'd recommend The Sickness unto Death as a start. It has some of his best jokes.

Science moves very slowly and very fast in this area, slowly with regards to psychoactives due to stuff like politicians, fast in neuroscience where new technology has allowed leaps for decades, since the eighties or so.

Me too! And yeah and if it weren't for that guy I could be a perfectly adequate automaton instead of dealing with this 'consciousness' nonsense. :P

Awareness != perception. A lot of people itt are mixing up consciousness, experience, with brain activity like trains of thought or external perception. Try meditating for a bit and you see that these are not what you are, you are not your thoughts.

As for what drug experiences can tell us, I didn't claim they say anything about "the whole universe". They can however tell us other things. For one, LSD causes parts of the brain that usually work in a synchronised manner, like a system of cooperating parts, to loosen from each other, which is probably why one can experience a loss of coherence in perception of self and the immediate surroundings. At the very least it tells us that this molecule interacts with the biological foundation for experiencing the world as coherent, understandable, and when we're under its influence this experience is distorted or dissolved.

This tears into the feelings foundational to big religions, the perception of the universe as created, ordered, having a telos, can easily be temporarily disrupted, and hence we know that this 'wisdom' is contingent on us ignoring the possibility that it is a product of evolution rather than a divine gift or insight gained through spiritual exercise. You could of course project magical thinking onto such molecules and consider them demonic or whatever, but good luck keeping that up under capitalism without being victimised by conspiracy theory grifters, marketing specialists and so on.

If you find that so insensitive that you can't continue the conversation that's fine with me.

Having magical religious experiences on LSD is practically a meme, so I am not sure what would lead you to suggest otherwise.

There might be traces of cannabis in the hebrew Bible but it's not a common theme and pretty much every word this idea is usually based on could be a reference to something else.

There are religions using psychedelics, some of them probably quite old, but none of the big, popular ones do. In part this is explained by european (and similar) traditions surrounding government, which tends to be very suspicious of strong feelings and competition from drug use when it comes to the loyalty of their subjects, so for a religion to become a societal institution it has to get rid of the drugs if there are any.

Edit: As for modern interpretations of e.g. LSD as a religious experience says more about cultural poverty and millenia of ideological subjugation than the experience itself.

Dionysian festivals, although not proven (it's hard to find samples of ancient ritual wine), are strongly suspected to mixed something psychedelic (probably ergot) into wine as part of their ceremonies. Of course, that trance inducing wine was the blood of Dionysus. And how could it not be? You drink it and feel the essence of a god right after (the trip).

It is fairly firmly established that roman mystery religion shaped some of early christianity, in particular the Mithras mysteries.

What do you mean by "the Church would actively integrate local cultural iconography into the bible to make it's spread more palpable", can you give some examples of such iconography?

How would that explain out-of-body/near-death experiences? They happen to people, it's a fact. Sometimes people gain new information during them that they couldn't have possibly hallucinated by themselves, like being able to repeat a conversation that took place in another room while they were clinically dead. Within the framework of the modern science, the experience itself can be explained by the dying brain hallucinating it; the obtaining of new information from physically inaccessible parts of the reality, however, can not.

Then there's also the phenomenon of people suddenly waking up, or having dreams about it, when someone close gets into an accident while they sleep. This can not be explained by modern science at all. It happens too often, to too many people, to be a simple coincidence.

Then there's the phenomenon of heart transplant recipients receiving the memories of, and sometimes the ability to communicate with, their donors. This can be explained by some memories being stored in the heart cells, or in its nervous tissues.

Now, I'm not really into pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, but because of how unexplained and under-researched the subject of nature of consciousness is, I try to keep an open mind. Those field theories in particular sound appealing. They haven't been proven, but they haven't been disproven either.

I'm curious how you would estimate the number of people it should happen to by simple coincidence. Is enough data about the rates of the major expected causes (false memory formation after the fact, selective memory of dreams conditioned by conditions of waking) to provide a reasonable baseline? I honestly have no intuition if I would expect this number to be 0% or 50%, since I have no self-measurements (by definition) of how often I have dreams that I forget, and what portion of those dreams can be interpreted to match an external event if remembered.

OOBE is a common side effect of dissociation. You can cause it through NMDA-antagonism, meditative practices and so on. If it was anything but a projection of perspective within the experiential system in the brain intelligence services and military would use it, and the lack of people in vegetative states around embassies tells us they don't.

I treat those kinds of stories the same way I'd treat an alien abduction or bigfoot story. humans are unreliable narrators. have there been any successful reproducible experiments on it?

IIRC he said he invariably got sidetracked between leaving his body and going downstairs, or would be attacked by entities of some kind. He suggested perhaps some kind of subconscious resistance to the experiment.

He listed several times where he claimed to have gained knowledge without trying to while OBE but I wasn't entirely convinced by any of them, so who knows.

The fact he claims to have had hundreds of OBEs and couldn't conclusively prove he could gain knowledge makes me sceptical that he wasn't just in a replica of reality generated by his mind. Anyway, they sound fun/scary/ real to the experiencer.