We are like fish swimming in an invisible sea of consciousness (why we cant discover it)

I found this amazingly wise audio excerpt from a terence Mckenna video on how to discover consciousness. There are scientific way to perturb consciousness now, psycho-pharmacology is making a good headway.

At the moment the best way we can peturb it to study it is through sleep, meditation, or culturally accepted intoxicant like alcohol or tobacco.

These two quotes opitimize the idea behind the short two minute video:

"Perturbing consciousness is the only real way that we can figure out that consciousness exists"

"I don't know who discovered water but it certainly wasn't a fish"

-Mckenna



Feedback would be appreciated, thanks

Yeh I just love wimming through life

Gods sake.

reply to post by tombangelta


I like wimming too. Fwunt cwal is hard tho but not as hard as flutterbye.

reply to post by ZeuZZ


Just one point: Imagine the fish in the water gain intelligence and are pondering consciousness. They might come to the conclusion that the water they are in is consciousness, and they are swimming in it.

Well, we KNOW that the water is just water. So, why do some of us think that WE are swimming in consciousness? If there is another set of intelligent being looking at us, they would say to themselves, "We KNOW that the universe is just the universe, so why do some of us think that we are swimming in consciousness?" This cycle would repeat without end, and without an answer because there is no answer other than there is no consciousness that governs everything.

The above is 100% my opinion, seeing as I know nothing for certain about consciousness.

reply to post by jiggerj


I fully agree with you.

What if sub-atomic particles developed consciousness? Their quantum world would be very, very different from ours. We tend to assume our mental modules provide us with an unassailable version of reality.

I remember watching a TEDtalk by Richard Dawkins and he said that each organism's model of reality is regulated and adjusted by sense data dependent on the nature and evolutionary history of the organism.

Originally posted by jiggerj
reply to post by ZeuZZ

 

Well, we KNOW that the water is just water.

It was an analogy for simplicity.

So, why do some of us think that WE are swimming in consciousness?

Our ability to interact, speak, make logica consclusio9ns based on past and future events. The more time you spend in water the better you get at swimming. Thye more time you spend around people the better your social skills get. Consciousness is a field with no current physical way to test.

If there is another set of intelligent being looking at us, they would say to themselves, "We KNOW that the universe is just the universe, so why do some of us think that we are swimming in consciousness?" This cycle would repeat without end, and without an answer because there is no answer other than there is no consciousness that governs everything.

They would be swimming consciousness too. You fail to see my point, any sentient life in the universe is conscious. Trees. Animals. ETs. The earth as a whole (Gaia Hypothesis). Its the communication methods between such conscious entities and our propensity for noticing the differences in people around us that hold us back from realizing the nearly infinite ways we are like them.

The above is 100% my opinion, seeing as I know nothing for certain about consciousness.

I'd define it as the field that gives rise to life based on Penroses theories. It permeates all living things, just its impossible to notice without perturbing the brain from its normal state.

Originally posted by Nacirema
What if sub-atomic particles developed consciousness? Their quantum world would be very, very different from ours. We tend to assume our mental modules provide us with an unassailable version of reality.

The quantum split experiment. When we try to observe what atoms will do in terms of the diffraction interference patterns they dont work. Soon as we turn off the camera and look at the results retrospectively they are back to normal. This is getting pretty deep down into quantum theory.

I remember watching a TEDtalk by Richard Dawkins and he said that each organism's model of reality is regulated and adjusted by sense data dependent on the nature and evolutionary history of the organism.

Much as Dawkins hates it, old inheritance ideas have now been superseded by epigenetics. The ability of our genes to hold a memory of our ancestors lives, and even inherit personality traits from them.

He actually recently quoted this quote in a TED talk, which for him is pretty far out:

FYI, it appears that Terence McKenna worked for the dark side...

I love Terence McKenna, but thanks to the detective work of controversial author and gnosticmedia.com founder Jan Irvin, I’m wondering if the late author was worthy of my trust. Irvin has unearthed a government document that he claims may implicate McKenna as a (gasp!) Central Intelligence Agency plant. Was Terence McKenna a CIA plant?

However that doesn't mean he has not done us a huge service by outing Terence McKenna as on the CIA books. I know that will not compute for many of you. How can a man who evangelized magic mushrooms and '___' be collaborating with the CIA?

Well we don't know the full extent of his relationship but if you are mature enough to sit down with the evidence and determine for yourself, you will see without question that reason says he was promoting memes and narratives that were not always of his own choice though they may have often overlapped with his own views.

Here is the CIA Freedom of information act release that confirms the CIA had a relationship with Terence that they do not wish to share with the public.

Terence McKenna's CIA Collaboration

The ties between Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Julian, and Aldous (the Brave New World), down to Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, and Michael Coe and Theodosius Dobhzanski to Esalen, and down to Terence McKenna are incredible to contemplate, especially when considering that Aldous was a key founder of the Esalen institute, and Esalen has been a key promoter in using psychedelics for “evolution” all the while hiding the Huxley family’s deep connections to eugenics, humanism, et al. (for those who don’t know, humanism is the practice the elites use to get we the slaves to give up our autonomy to the greater religion of statism – ultimately them.)

How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute launched the 2012 and psychedelic revolutions – and began one of the largest mind control operations in history

Creepy Subliminal Messages in Terence McKenna Video

I was watching this video posted in a recent thread with interest, when I realized that there were subliminal messages being thrown in during the subway scene around 4:30. Not liking subliminal messages being shown to me without being aware of what they were saying, I did some rapid pausing and this is what I got:

Your life has no meaning
You're such a failure
You're so insignificant
Nobody likes you
What's the point of you being here
Why don't you slit yourself?
Why don't you make 2 slits?
Yeah... it's easy... go on

What the heck is up with this? Any ideas?

Creepy Subliminal Messages in Terence McKenna Video

The CIA Created the Drug Culture
The CIA’s Terence McKenna FOIA records reveal a positive Agency affiliation”

consciousness |ˈkänCHəsnəs|
noun
the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings: she failed to regain consciousness and died two days later.
• the awareness or perception of something by a person: her acute consciousness of Mike's presence.
• the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world: consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain.

"Conscious" is an adjective, meaning someone appears to be conscious. For instance: "He is conscious".

conscious |ˈkänCHəs|
adjective
aware of and responding to one's surroundings; awake.
• having knowledge of something; aware: we are conscious of the extent of the problem.
• (conscious of) painfully aware of; sensitive to: he was very conscious of his appearance.
• concerned with or worried about a particular matter: they were growing increasingly security-conscious.
• (of an action or feeling) deliberate and intentional: a conscious effort to walk properly.
• (of the mind or a thought) directly perceptible to and under the control of the person concerned.

When you add the suffix "ness" on the end, you are merely turning that adjective into a noun, implying that the way that person appears, how we perceive him, is actually a thing.

-ness |nəs, nis|
suffix
forming nouns chiefly from adjectives:
1 denoting a state or condition: liveliness | sadness.
• an instance of this: a kindness.
2 something in a certain state: wilderness.
ORIGIN Old English -nes, -ness, of Germanic origin.

The way one appears isn't exactly a thing or a substance, but merely the way one appears from a certain time to another.

So no, there is no consciousness, only things that appear conscious.

Originally posted by LesMisanthrope

consciousness |ˈkänCHəsnəs|
noun
the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings: she failed to regain consciousness and died two days later.
• the awareness or perception of something by a person: her acute consciousness of Mike's presence.
• the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world: consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain.

"Conscious" is an adjective, meaning someone appears to be conscious. For instance: "He is conscious".

conscious |ˈkänCHəs|
adjective
aware of and responding to one's surroundings; awake.
• having knowledge of something; aware: we are conscious of the extent of the problem.
• (conscious of) painfully aware of; sensitive to: he was very conscious of his appearance.
• concerned with or worried about a particular matter: they were growing increasingly security-conscious.
• (of an action or feeling) deliberate and intentional: a conscious effort to walk properly.
• (of the mind or a thought) directly perceptible to and under the control of the person concerned.

When you add the suffix "ness" on the end, you are merely turning that adjective into a noun, implying that the way that person appears, how we perceive him, is actually a thing.

-ness |nəs, nis|
suffix
forming nouns chiefly from adjectives:
1 denoting a state or condition: liveliness | sadness.
• an instance of this: a kindness.
2 something in a certain state: wilderness.
ORIGIN Old English -nes, -ness, of Germanic origin.

The way one appears isn't exactly a thing or a substance, but merely the way one appears from a certain time to another.

So no, there is no consciousness, only things that appear conscious.

Your taking the skeptical Dawkins and Dennet position of it just being an illusion? Thats really quite a dated view.

Tell me, what would you define as the difference between a living entity and a conscious entity?

Also you may like this thread I started about the sentience of planet Earth due to the now very widely scientifically accepted Gaia theory first developed by James lovelock: www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by Murgatroid
FYI, it appears that Terence McKenna worked for the dark side...

I love Terence McKenna, but thanks to the detective work of controversial author and gnosticmedia.com founder Jan Irvin, I’m wondering if the late author was worthy of my trust. Irvin has unearthed a government document that he claims may implicate McKenna as a (gasp!) Central Intelligence Agency plant. Was Terence McKenna a CIA plant?

However that doesn't mean he has not done us a huge service by outing Terence McKenna as on the CIA books. I know that will not compute for many of you. How can a man who evangelized magic mushrooms and '___' be collaborating with the CIA?

Well we don't know the full extent of his relationship but if you are mature enough to sit down with the evidence and determine for yourself, you will see without question that reason says he was promoting memes and narratives that were not always of his own choice though they may have often overlapped with his own views.

Here is the CIA Freedom of information act release that confirms the CIA had a relationship with Terence that they do not wish to share with the public.

Terence McKenna's CIA Collaboration

The ties between Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Julian, and Aldous (the Brave New World), down to Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, and Michael Coe and Theodosius Dobhzanski to Esalen, and down to Terence McKenna are incredible to contemplate, especially when considering that Aldous was a key founder of the Esalen institute, and Esalen has been a key promoter in using psychedelics for “evolution” all the while hiding the Huxley family’s deep connections to eugenics, humanism, et al. (for those who don’t know, humanism is the practice the elites use to get we the slaves to give up our autonomy to the greater religion of statism – ultimately them.)

How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute launched the 2012 and psychedelic revolutions – and began one of the largest mind control operations in history

Creepy Subliminal Messages in Terence McKenna Video

I was watching this video posted in a recent thread with interest, when I realized that there were subliminal messages being thrown in during the subway scene around 4:30. Not liking subliminal messages being shown to me without being aware of what they were saying, I did some rapid pausing and this is what I got:

Your life has no meaning
You're such a failure
You're so insignificant
Nobody likes you
What's the point of you being here
Why don't you slit yourself?
Why don't you make 2 slits?
Yeah... it's easy... go on

What the heck is up with this? Any ideas?

Creepy Subliminal Messages in Terence McKenna Video

The CIA Created the Drug Culture
The CIA’s Terence McKenna FOIA records reveal a positive Agency affiliation”

I know this is a conspiracy site but really? Just google someones name and post whatever nonsense that comes up?

Terrence is probably one of the most public counter culture icons of the 1980-2000's. He gave public talks daily, lectures and sometimes spoke for 12 hours a day. He hated authority, corporations, culture and industry.

reply to post by ZeuZZ

Your taking the skeptical Dawkins and Dennet position of it just being an illusion? Thats really quite a dated view.

You're taking the Cartesian view. That's over 500 years old. Dated? You don't even know what consciousness is but nonetheless we're "wimming" in it? Sure thing. Let me guess, it has something to do with the pineal gland? Once again, over 500 years old, yet no advancement at all on the subject.

Tell me, what would you define as the difference between a living entity and a conscious entity?

The living entity appears to be alive. The conscious entity appears to be conscious.

The living entity appears to be alive. The conscious entity appears to be conscious.

Ever heard of a tautology?

Try again.

And no im not taking the cartesian view, that would absurd. I think that consciouss is information transfer between living species subconscious below what everyday awareness can even detect. It's a hierarchical field theory, we are the Earth children, peoples cells are part of their organs conscious field, just as organs are part of the bodies field of consciousness. Which although we are not conscious of (only our mind and brains) they run on similar subconscious processes we are not in control of.

Originally posted by ZeuZZ
He gave public talks daily

SOME on ATS are more interested in truth than just "talk".

SOME truthers are actually SEEKING the truth.

Embrace ignorance or deny it, YOUR choice.

Thanks for calling me ignorant.

Now sharing what exactly I am ignorant of would make this discussion a lot more productive.

Originally posted by LesMisanthrope

consciousness |ˈkänCHəsnəs|
noun
the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings: she failed to regain consciousness and died two days later.
• the awareness or perception of something by a person: her acute consciousness of Mike's presence.
• the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world: consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain.

"Conscious" is an adjective, meaning someone appears to be conscious. For instance: "He is conscious".

conscious |ˈkänCHəs|
adjective
aware of and responding to one's surroundings; awake.
• having knowledge of something; aware: we are conscious of the extent of the problem.
• (conscious of) painfully aware of; sensitive to: he was very conscious of his appearance.
• concerned with or worried about a particular matter: they were growing increasingly security-conscious.
• (of an action or feeling) deliberate and intentional: a conscious effort to walk properly.
• (of the mind or a thought) directly perceptible to and under the control of the person concerned.

When you add the suffix "ness" on the end, you are merely turning that adjective into a noun, implying that the way that person appears, how we perceive him, is actually a thing.

It is not about you seeing someone and saying 'he is conscious'. It is the fact that you can see someone - you have to be conscious (awake/aware) to be able to see someone.
When you are asleep you can't see anything (unless you are dreaming) and when the eyes open on waking - there is consciousness. You are now conscious of your surroundings.

It is you who is 'conscious' of something happening. Something must be appearing to happen for you to be aware that you are 'conscious'. What is it that knows that you are aware that you are conscious?
Could you wonder if anything is conscious unless you are conscious (awake and aware)?

So to perturb conciousness we have to perturb the mind? Perturb means greatly disturb but doesn't sleep and more so meditation still the mind so you can perceive conciousness. Or is the stilling the mind perturbing the third eye(waking it up)? If you quiet and centre yourself you can perceive a lot,even what plants,trees and animals feel. I just don't like the term perturb he used. If you are too busy swimming you can't focus on the other stuff.

Originally posted by celticdog
So to perturb conciousness we have to perturb the mind? Perturb means greatly disturb but doesn't sleep and more so meditation still the mind so you can perceive conciousness. Or is the stilling the mind perturbing the third eye(waking it up)? If you quiet and centre yourself you can perceive a lot,even what plants,trees and animals feel. I just don't like the term perturb he used. If you are too busy swimming you can't focus on the other stuff.

Yes we have to perturb the mind to explore consciousness, the universe inside. Else we are too focussed on external realities.

When thinking about alterered states of consciousness culturally we tend to focus on episodes of intoxication, but many drugs are used in sub-threshold or maintenance doses; coffee and tobacco are obvious examples in our culture. The result of this is a kind of 'ambience of intoxication'. Like fish in water, people in culture swim in the virtually invisible medium of culturally sanctioned yet artificial states of mind. Culture is more a habit of a social group constrained by the media of choice than a reality, the fossilized version of which would be religion, which for the west is pathological monotheism.



The ways in which humans use plants, foods, and drugs cause the values of individuals and, ultimately, whole societies to shift. The effect of drink culture is all too readily becoming apparent to our health services. Eating some foods makes us happy, eating others sleepy, and still others alert. We are jovial, restless, aroused, or depressed depending on what we have eaten. Society tacitly encourages certain behaviors that correspond to internal feelings, thereby encouraging the use of substances that produce acceptable behaviors with little side effects whilst discouraging destructive compounds.

Well, why should culture imprison us, and somehow place a barrier between ourselves and our true humanness? Culture and ideology are not your friends. Culture is for the benefit of culture only.

This is a hard thing to come to terms with, because a certain kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process. On the other hand, you can’t live in the cradle for ever; you can’t be clueless for ever. So somebody might as well just lay it out for you, and say: Culture is for the convenience of culture, not you. How many times have your sexual desires, career aspirations, financial dealings and aesthetic inclinations been squashed, twisted, rejected, and minimised by cultural values? And if you don’t think culture is your enemy, ask the 18-year-old kid who is given a rifle and sent to the other side of the world to murder strangers if culture is his friend.

These extreme examples should bring it home to us that it’s a kind of a con game. It is in fact, strangely enough, a kind of virtual reality. We have been led to think of virtual realities as something on the screen of a computer, or presented through a headset, but that’s an electronic virtual reality. The primary technology for the building of virtual realities is language.

Once you start talking about race pride, loyalty, our destiny, our God, our mission, it’s like building virtual realities; and people begin to treat these things as though they had the substantiality of real objects, and to build their lives as though these things are real. And what is this? It’s a diminution of humanness. You’re choosing to limit yourself to a cultural reality; whether it’s the reality of being Huitoto or Orthodox Jewish, or whatever it is, it’s a smaller world than the simple hardware you were born into this universe with.

We have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is #-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears.

Yet we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

Interesting

reply to post by ZeuZZ

Ever heard of a tautology?

Try again.

So things that are unconscious aren't alive? I don't think you quite understand the words you're using.

And no im not taking the cartesian view, that would absurd. I think that consciouss is information transfer between living species subconscious below what everyday awareness can even detect. It's a hierarchical field theory, we are the Earth children, peoples cells are part of their organs conscious field, just as organs are part of the bodies field of consciousness. Which although we are not conscious of (only our mind and brains) they run on similar subconscious processes we are not in control of.

Actually you are taking the Cartesian view, you're just rehashing to suit your desires. Yes its absurd.

If there is any field of anything surrounding a human, it wouldn't be a field of "consciousness". The very construction of the words shows how abstract it is. If it's abstract, it means it doesn't actually exist.

Just choose a different word. Simple as that.