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Our evanescence

#1
Magical Realist Online
We are just barely selves. Subtle variations on an underlying electrochemical cadence. I learned on David Eagleman's "The Brain" last night that we aren't our brains or neurons. We aren't even the firings of our synapses. We are the rhythm and harmony of all those firings in one interactive baroqian symphony. When the firings are discordant and disordered. we dream. When they become rhythmic and complex, we become our conscious selves. And when there is a simultaneous pounding of all synapses together, with no interaction, we disappear into deep sleep. The slightest variation of frequency and timing is the difference between existing and not existing. Isn't that astounding? That we should ride so high on the undulating glowing surface of the deep electrical storm, barely connected to anything underneath at all? We are evanescent--just barely existing at all. We are ephemeral morphing ripples shimmering across an ocean of a trillion synaptic twinklings.


[Image: Brain_Waves.jpg]
[Image: Brain_Waves.jpg]

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#2
C C Offline
I was starting to wonder if I was the only person for thousands of kilometers around who was watching that PBS series. Or felt some excitement about its subject matter.
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#3
Magical Realist Online
(Oct 23, 2015 07:19 AM)C C Wrote: I was starting to wonder if I was the only person for thousands of kilometers around who was watching that PBS series. Or felt some excitement about its subject matter.

I've been a fan of Eagleman's since I bought his book "Sum: 40 Tales of the Afterlife." A remarkable piece of speculative eschatology, positing 40 different and imo plausible scenarios for how the afterlife may be. I'm glad he's finally made the big time. His research (and prose) deserves more attention.

“Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
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