Sep 3, 2025 07:18 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 3, 2025 08:27 PM by C C.)
Can you be aware of nothing? The rare sleep experience scientists are trying to understand
https://theconversation.com/can-you-be-a...and-263142
EXCERPTS: For western science, this state poses a conundrum. How can you be aware without being aware of something? If these reports are accurate, they challenge mainstream theories that treat consciousness as always about an object. For example, my awareness of the laptop in front of me, or the blue sky rising above my window, or my own breathing. The existence of this state pushes us to reconsider what consciousness is.
[...] Although objectless sleep experiences like conscious sleep have mainly been linked to contemplative practices, such as dream yoga, our results indicate that people without knowledge of those practices also experienced this phenomenon. In fact, the results of our online survey did not indicate an association between engagement in meditative practices and objectless sleep experiences. (MORE - details)
Can consciousness be vague?
https://petemandik.substack.com/p/can-co...s-be-vague
INTRO: Sharp Sherry says consciousness cannot be vague. There cannot be borderline cases between the conscious and the non-conscious, cases that are only vaguely conscious. Sharp Sherry says there must be a sharp cut-off between the haves and have-nots.
Does Sharp Sherry have a good argument for sharpness? Sherry says it seems to be inconceivable that there are vague instances of consciousness, and so therefore there is at least some reason to believe that there are no such vague instances. Sherry doesn’t suppose this to be a knock-down argument. But could her argument be even weaker than Sherry suspects? Yes. I humbly suggest that perhaps there’s reason to think that Sherry’s argument is egregiously question-begging... (MORE - details)
Why a classic psychology theory about vision has fallen apart
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...red-world/
EXCERPT: The idea that this simple illusion supposedly only worked in some cultures but not others compelled Amir, who now studies how culture shapes the mind. “I always thought it was so cool, right, that this basic thing that you think is just so obvious is the type of thing that might vary across cultures,” Amir says.
But this foundational research—and the hypothesis that arose to explain it, called the “carpentered-world” hypothesis—is now widely disputed, including by Amir herself. This has left researchers like her questioning what we can truly know about how culture shapes how we see the world. (MORE - details)
Consciousness can't be uploaded
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-ca..._auid=2020
INTRO: Uploading minds to computers isn’t just technically impossible—the whole idea rests on a deep misconception of consciousness and our place in reality. So argues William Egginton, whose recent book explores the relationships between the philosophies of Kant, Heisenberg and Borges. Drawing a parallel between minds and spacetime singularities inside black holes, he argues that to try to know such things involves trying to go beyond mere appearances to reality as it is in itself—a futile project, he claims. And if minds cannot be truly known, they certainly can’t be copied or uploaded to computers. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Dmitry Itskov, who aim for cybernetic immortality, are chasing a metaphysical mirage.
[...] For Zeno and Parmenides, these paradoxes are proof that change is an illusion. But even if we don’t accept their conclusion that ultimate reality must then be the opposite of change—the One, something we might picture today as the block universe, a massive, frozen slab of spacetime, existing simultaneously from beginning to end, with no outside, no before, and no after—they still have a point: a being who can measure and observe space and time can indeed conjure an infinite subdivision of space and time that seems to leave them and objects in them, even if only in theory, incapable of change.
But what kind of a being can divide space and time like that? Only a being that can relate to itself a moment earlier and project itself a moment later, or that can relate to other things which lie in one or another direction around it. Such a being can then turn that relation into an abstraction, call that abstraction “time” or “space,” and start dividing it. Without abstracting it first, though, there is no division. The division is never of the real, but only of the abstraction of the real.
[...] Armed with Kant’s “all-crushing philosophy,” as his contemporary Moses Mendelssohn dubbed it, let’s return to Kurzweil and his desire to outlive his own body. For him to become immortal in any meaningful sense, the memories he uploads would have to be accompanied by something like an experience of being the one who had those memories and continues to have them—otherwise, the immortality in question is nothing more than a more detailed version of a photo album, memoir, or video journal. In other words, the “memories” would be experienced from the outside, by someone else, rather than by Kurzweil himself. What is specific and unique about Kurzweil’s experience is not the memories he experienced, but rather the ego, which synthesizes the elements of consciousness over time, and which was the condition of possibility of having them in the first place. And this unity is, by definition, non-transferable... (MORE - missing details)
https://theconversation.com/can-you-be-a...and-263142
EXCERPTS: For western science, this state poses a conundrum. How can you be aware without being aware of something? If these reports are accurate, they challenge mainstream theories that treat consciousness as always about an object. For example, my awareness of the laptop in front of me, or the blue sky rising above my window, or my own breathing. The existence of this state pushes us to reconsider what consciousness is.
[...] Although objectless sleep experiences like conscious sleep have mainly been linked to contemplative practices, such as dream yoga, our results indicate that people without knowledge of those practices also experienced this phenomenon. In fact, the results of our online survey did not indicate an association between engagement in meditative practices and objectless sleep experiences. (MORE - details)
Can consciousness be vague?
https://petemandik.substack.com/p/can-co...s-be-vague
INTRO: Sharp Sherry says consciousness cannot be vague. There cannot be borderline cases between the conscious and the non-conscious, cases that are only vaguely conscious. Sharp Sherry says there must be a sharp cut-off between the haves and have-nots.
Does Sharp Sherry have a good argument for sharpness? Sherry says it seems to be inconceivable that there are vague instances of consciousness, and so therefore there is at least some reason to believe that there are no such vague instances. Sherry doesn’t suppose this to be a knock-down argument. But could her argument be even weaker than Sherry suspects? Yes. I humbly suggest that perhaps there’s reason to think that Sherry’s argument is egregiously question-begging... (MORE - details)
Why a classic psychology theory about vision has fallen apart
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...red-world/
EXCERPT: The idea that this simple illusion supposedly only worked in some cultures but not others compelled Amir, who now studies how culture shapes the mind. “I always thought it was so cool, right, that this basic thing that you think is just so obvious is the type of thing that might vary across cultures,” Amir says.
But this foundational research—and the hypothesis that arose to explain it, called the “carpentered-world” hypothesis—is now widely disputed, including by Amir herself. This has left researchers like her questioning what we can truly know about how culture shapes how we see the world. (MORE - details)
Consciousness can't be uploaded
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-ca..._auid=2020
INTRO: Uploading minds to computers isn’t just technically impossible—the whole idea rests on a deep misconception of consciousness and our place in reality. So argues William Egginton, whose recent book explores the relationships between the philosophies of Kant, Heisenberg and Borges. Drawing a parallel between minds and spacetime singularities inside black holes, he argues that to try to know such things involves trying to go beyond mere appearances to reality as it is in itself—a futile project, he claims. And if minds cannot be truly known, they certainly can’t be copied or uploaded to computers. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Dmitry Itskov, who aim for cybernetic immortality, are chasing a metaphysical mirage.
[...] For Zeno and Parmenides, these paradoxes are proof that change is an illusion. But even if we don’t accept their conclusion that ultimate reality must then be the opposite of change—the One, something we might picture today as the block universe, a massive, frozen slab of spacetime, existing simultaneously from beginning to end, with no outside, no before, and no after—they still have a point: a being who can measure and observe space and time can indeed conjure an infinite subdivision of space and time that seems to leave them and objects in them, even if only in theory, incapable of change.
But what kind of a being can divide space and time like that? Only a being that can relate to itself a moment earlier and project itself a moment later, or that can relate to other things which lie in one or another direction around it. Such a being can then turn that relation into an abstraction, call that abstraction “time” or “space,” and start dividing it. Without abstracting it first, though, there is no division. The division is never of the real, but only of the abstraction of the real.
[...] Armed with Kant’s “all-crushing philosophy,” as his contemporary Moses Mendelssohn dubbed it, let’s return to Kurzweil and his desire to outlive his own body. For him to become immortal in any meaningful sense, the memories he uploads would have to be accompanied by something like an experience of being the one who had those memories and continues to have them—otherwise, the immortality in question is nothing more than a more detailed version of a photo album, memoir, or video journal. In other words, the “memories” would be experienced from the outside, by someone else, rather than by Kurzweil himself. What is specific and unique about Kurzweil’s experience is not the memories he experienced, but rather the ego, which synthesizes the elements of consciousness over time, and which was the condition of possibility of having them in the first place. And this unity is, by definition, non-transferable... (MORE - missing details)
