Fishbowl reality
post by Elo · 2020-10-04T02:16:18.595Z · LW · GW · 0 commentsContents
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This idea is about perception and reality.
Each person is wearing a fishbowl over their head. Think of the mind as being two intelligent forces. The head is the (self believing) sentient consciousness. The one that receives the information that is projected onto the fishbowl. The other one seems to be a different type of intelligence, usually barely described and left up to weird mystical description.
The human body constantly has inputs. We have 5 main sensory categories and likely quite a few more beyond that if proprioception etc are counted. There's always skin sensation, there's always visual information, even with closed eyes, and there's always sound. Even if there isn't sound echoing outside, there's ringing, or heart beats. Among that constant incoming stream, some process is decided which input to send into the consciousness.
Which input is going to keep this being alive. The smell of smoke when I'm sleeping, loud noises suddenly, quickly moving visual objects (TV's in the background of what I'm doing). Each of these are examples of information that is prioritised over other information when projecting information onto the fishbowl.
Even when there’s no urgent and survival crucial event, some process needs to be deciding what to project - visual or audio or sensation or other. Or even, which sensation within sensation, which part of the visual field to discern.
In this experience of receiving selective filtered information from a differently conscious part of the mind, there exists an argument for a (broadly speaking) panoptic process of appreciation for the collection of information that we usually would describe as our subjective experience of reality. (1) It would appear to be a beneficial process to feel the subjective appreciation for anything that enters conscious perception, to incentivise the internal part of the mind that is choosing what to project at the consciousness.
I suspect that the mind often processes and preferences various sensations and experiences over certain other experiences. I suspect that this is a real time feedback mechanism for assisting the filter to decide what contents to bring to the consciousness.
For example if the consciousness doesn't like strong political events, but keeps experientially turning towards them, giving them more attention, then it's only reasonable to expect that the fishbowl projecting process will bring more of a similar collection of sensation to the surface, any time it can. (2) This suggests that the filtering process is not working to filter like/dislike but is working to filter something else, for example attention hooking events.
It seems like the process of judging experience with negative or positive sentiment is probably less important for assisting the projector than the process of deeply resonating with the preference of the sensation.
Try this. Sitting as you are, notice in the body any sensation of negative, for example - sore and tiredness or pain.
Then try, sitting as you are, notice any sensation of positive, for example - delight, enjoyment, relaxation, comfort.
If you get similar results to me, it would appear that all those sensations are there all the time but filtered constantly so that I get a mix of them on any day. I lean towards the positive ones and have mostly positive ones, but other consciousness could lean anywhere.
Now try deciding which ones you like. For any sensation that comes up, don't just lightly think "like, dislike, dislike, like". Try to sink into the sense of enjoyment or preference. This process should feel less like it's happening in the brain or head and more like it's happening in the body. "deeply resonating" on the sensation of enjoying the experience of the sensation that comes up.
In theory, after practising this for a short period of time, that begins to signal to the projecting fishbowl that there's a preference for certain experiences over other experiences. And those are the ones that should be delivered to the consciousness more than the other experiences.
Maybe we can control the fishbowl reality more than we think...
Cross posted from my blog: http://bearlamp.com.au/fishbowl-reality/
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