The Mystery

What is the neuroscience of consciousness, from which perspective not only trees but lizards, amoeba and even rocks can be said to think, but what is thought as a human experience? Our answer must include the observation that that thought involves a relationship between a felt sense of an inner reality and an outer one—an awareness of a difference between one who is aware and something of which that one is aware. Yet if the blunt sense of an inner and an outer is human, the way in which inner and outer are imagined is social and particular. These judgments are so intimate that we may not recognize that that they have a cultural dimension. But they do, and the way people define mind has real consequences for the way that we understand what is real. The Anthropology of Mind sets out to explore the way these cultural dimensions affect basic human experience. Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Psychol

I have left around a number of (what I would call) psychedelic books, which you will notice consist very largely of photographs of pattern in nature: crystal structures, shells, bone structures, leaf structures, animalcules, erosion patterns, patterns in marble, all kinds of pattern in nature. Because, for some reason or other, one of the strongest effects that I had from the use of psychedelics was a vastly renewed appreciation of this dimension of the natural world; a kind of perception that the whole world is pattern. This is a very strange feeling, because our common sense normally bases the world on substance. We think of primordial and more or less solid stuff, which is found in dense forms as in granite or a ball of steel, and found in very refined forms such as a gas. And we think that all the world is shapes of, forms of, this primordial stuff. But one of the extraordinary consequences of using psychedelics is that everything suddenly turns into transparency. I think that’s wh

Our eyes continually move even while we fix our gaze on an object. Although these fixational eye movements have a magnitude that should make them visible to us, we are unaware of them. If fixational eye movements are counteracted, our visual perception fades completely as a result of neural adaptation. So, our visual system has a built-in paradox — we must fix our gaze to inspect the minute details of our world, but if we were to fixate perfectly, the entire world would fade from view. Owing to their role in counteracting adaptation, fixational eye movements have been studied to elucidate how the brain makes our environment visible. Moreover, because we are not aware of these eye movements, they have been studied to understand the underpinnings of visual awareness. Recent studies of fixational eye movements have focused on determining how visible perception is encoded by neurons. https://drive.google.com/file/eye_brain.mp4

The waking state is becoming more dreamlike and the dream state is becoming more vivid. In the Bhagwad Gita it says that 'What is daytime for the ignorant is nighttime for the sage and what is daytime for the sage is nighttime for the ignorant.' What is meant by that is what is daytime or the waking state, from the conventional point of view, the waking state consists mainly of objects made out of matter. And objects are considered from the conventional point of view in the waking state to be the most real aspect of experience. When in fact the very word real or reality comes from the Latin word meaning the 'realis' meaning a thing. Betraying our belief that it is the extent to which something is a thing that it is real. And the extent to which it something departs from being a thing it becomes correspondingly less real. So when somebody says to you, "Oh come on, get real", they mean come out of your thoughts and feelings and come down to earth. Deal with thin

John Searle turns his attention to perception — visual perception, to be precise. Perception is both the basic way that minds connect with configurations of objects and attributes in a local environment, and an epicenter for sensory feeling and experience. That is, perception is a site of both representation and phenomenology. And since the capacities for representation and phenomenology have long been taken by philosophers to be characteristic marks of the mental, philosophical questions about perception provide a window into philosophical questions about minds more generally. When it comes to the long tradition of thinking and writing about perception, Searle takes the situation to be rather bleak. He believes that the entirety of philosophical work on perception since Descartes has been bewitched by what he calls 'the Bad Argument' and, as a consequence, is unnecessary and incoherent. Yet Searle wants to not just bury philosophical theories of perception but also praise them

  This is green. This is red. And this is blue. But how can you tell that what you’re seeing as blue is the exact same thing as what I see as blue? We’ve named the colors to give us a way to communicate and reference them, but in reality, there’s no way of knowing that what you see is the same as what another person sees. Even with the small steps and the giant leaps we’ve made as a species, there is still a lot to learn about earth, life, and the human condition. There’s still everything we don’t know. On the 26th of February 2015, one picture of a dress divided the internet. While some saw it as gold and white, others saw it as blue and black. Since then, there have been a number of repetitions of the same experiment either using the same sense, in this case, sight, or even other senses, like hearing in the famous 'yanny' or 'laurel' debate. These experiments remind us that there’s no way for us to tell that you and I sense the same things. What I call red might just