pagan heart

Dear Diary

It is the experience of communing with nature that provides the foundation around which all I have learned about the science and philosophy of mind has sort of
coalesced. The experience is well known, I suppose. Oneness, connection, the boundary between oneself and the world disappears. Peace, satisfaction, correctness. Blah blah, yadda yadda. Just psychology, of course.

But if there is group mind and we exchange information with it, exactly how should we expect that to manifest other than as a psychological effect?

Originally posted by apathist
Dear Diary

It is the [b]experience of communing with nature that provides the foundation around which all I have learned about the science and philosophy of mind has sort of
coalesced. The experience is well known, I suppose. Oneness, connection, the boundary between oneself and the world disappears. Peace, satisfaction, correctness. Blah blah, yad ...[text shortened]... ion with it, exactly how should we expect that to manifest other than as a psychological effect?[/b]

Butterflies and rainbows and pain and misery. That's part of the Darwinian struggle. Terra doesn't pretend to be omni-good. She's doing the best she can, and she needs our help.

People know this, even without knowing she exists. That's why we will win.

The Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness by Baars and McGovern accounts qualitatively for a large set of matched pairs of conscious and unconscious processes. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons all busy generating mental content, but at any given time, only some of that output actually enters into a human's consciousness.

So I make the assumption that a neuron provides sort of the "atom" of mind. Visualize the brain as producing 100 billion little minds or sub-minds, like a froth of bubbles.

From split-brain studies we know that each hemisphere is capable of producing an independent mind, only one of which directly enters into the consciousness of the patient. Normally, those two half-brain minds would combine into one regular-sized human consciousness.

So the froth of bubbles combine, dissipate and recombine in various ways, forming minds of various sizes that saturate the brain. There is a lobe, section, or network that likes to scan the visual input and flag all the right angles, for example, and sometimes their work makes it into the global workspace.

I make another assumption that a human may be to a group mind, as a neuron is to the CNS mind.

As above, so below.

This gives new perspective on things like mob psychology, tribal gods, family bond, school spirit, national identity, and so on.

I call it eppism, or emergent poly-pantheism, or the MNOE theory, claiming that minds are many, nested, overlapping and emergent.



Btw, I like this echo chamber here. I like graveyards, too.