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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

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Lem's work is hard to find on the internet - a lot of it is untranslated, I did find a couple of things:

The Mind's I: Chapter 19: Non Serviam

Non Serviam from A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books by Stanislaw Lem.
Copyright 1971 by Stanislaw Lem; English translation copyright 1979, 1978 by Stanislaw Lem, Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

And this amateur/original translation (with discussion of the process/motivation):

One hundred and thirty-seven seconds — Medium

@Constance what is the rule of copyright re: an original translation?

There are also a number of Horspiele on youtube ... if I can find a transcript, I may take a crack at translating from the German.

 
smcder said:
@Constance what is the rule of copyright re: an original translation?
Click to expand...

The same rules apply to a published translation of a work as apply to quotations from the original text: prior permission is generally required to quote even brief portions of the text. In internet forums we get by with quite a lot of quotations and even lengthy extracts from copyrighted works, but that's not a guarantee of legality.
 
smcder said:
Bravo!

You will love this guy ... you are ready for the next step and Peter Watts is your next Jordan Peterson.
Click to expand...
Hm, I'm not sure if you're being serious or not. He seems a bit of a nihilist for your tastes (although I watched the YouTube clip only).

Re my last post: I'm still working my way through mind and life, but so far it has really reinforced for me the way in which mind and body are integrated. Consciousness and its "contents" appear to strongly correlate to physiological/neurological processes, and yet there is no place for subjectivity in the objective, scientific world view.

I still think Robin Faichney and the dual-aspect approach as he articulated it makes the most sense. (Not sure if he did so on his website or his paper. I can try to find it if someone is curious.)

@smcder you said awhile back—and I'll never find it—the one can't say consciousness is the "inside" and objective reality the "outside," but I still think those are powerful descriptors and feel intuitively right. Subjectivity cannot be objectively explained by definition. I'm rambling now.

Re Googles hallucinating neural nets. I saw that article too.

Something I wonder: Most men become aroused at the sight of a shapely, naked female body. This arousel is automatic (but can be surpressed to some extent).

Similar to the pixelated google images; I wonder how distorted of an image of a shapely body would cause arousel? I'm sure it would vary by individual and current mood etc.

I suppose it's not much different than the fear response; flight or fight response can be triggered by very abstract stimuli if translated by the organism in such a way.

Where am I going with this? Not sure. Our subjective reality correlates to a real, palpable objective reality. They are one and the same, experience is not virtual... But experience is subjective and with it and empathy we color what-is; we are "lived" bodies.

Really rambling now but anxious for Mind in Life to discuss "pre-reflective" consciousness, with and perhaps without self-consciousness.

Can one be aware (conscious) if one is not also self-aware? Do we experience green if we are not simultaneously experiencing "I am experiencing green"?

As I've shared many times, my sense of self often fads throughout the day, whether I'm focused on a stimulating event, deep in thought, etc.

Am I conscious at those times? Seems a silly question but it's a serious one!

Why am I conscious of the fly on my arm when I'm trying to meditate, but not consciousness of the fly when I'm watching a bear run at me? Why didn't the natives "see" the green patch until they had been told it was a green patch? (Perhaps different phenomena.)

Why are some physiological processes sometimes conscious and sometimes not conscious?

What happens where and how to allow/cause my stream of consciousness—my phenomenal landscape—to differentiate into this wonderful morphology and that wonderful morphology and then, at night, to just disappear?

There are a myriad of enviro-physiological processes that allow us to be thinking, feeling, sentient beings—but there's something else as well, I'm thinking, that allows us to be conscious, self-aware beings.
 
@Constance

"For instance, both the modernist artist and the schizophrenic are characterized by a pronounced thrust to deconstruct the world and to subjectively reconstruct human experience without reference to objective reality. Layers of reality exist side by side, frequently fusing into each other, and the acute self-awareness Mr. Sass calls hyperreflexivity, as well as a profound sense of alienation from the empirical world, run rampant."

I used to experience something like this at night ... I rarely mentioned it to anyone, it was not dream or hypnagogic experiences, though there can be a flavor of it - especially going into and coming out of these states ... In these states which I did think of as schizophrenesque or schizofrenetic there was alienation, deconstruction of reality, unraveling, and logic in which premise and conclusion stood ironclad in no relation to one another.

There was a sense of the "de-conditioning" some speak of with psychedelics ... and this extended into waking experience. Layers being peeled back to reveal the dinginess of underlying reality. For example at one point deer seed dirty and shabby and "generic". This latter is present in psychotic states associated with severe depression.

At any rate I really do appreciate what he is writing - nodding my head at how he describes it and the terminology he uses.

I'll try to find some writings by persons diagnosed with schizophrenia (person first language) ... and see if it captures the experiences I've had.

It may be these experiences motivate my search for other kinds of thinking and logic ... and why I find the scope of what I've found on offer, regardless of tradition, stifling instead of a comfort.

A search for liberation (escape) in(to) madness?
 
Hi Steve. What source were you quoting in your first paragraph there?

Maybe our next best step in this thread is to explore the new research on dreaming, including Thompson's latest book, Waking, Dreaming, Being. @Wade Ridsdale started a new thread today on the subject of lucid dreaming, which has led me to some very interesting reading in a book I linked in that thread in addition to Thompson's new book. I hope you and @Soupie and @Pharoah will read that still-short thread and become interested in what lucid dreaming is adding to the project of understanding consciousness. We could discuss this question either in Wade's thread or here, but I think we need to look into the ramifications of this new research.

This link goes to a summary newspaper article I just linked {skims over the complexity of the issue}. Scroll up if the issues raised interest you and start from the beginning, ok?

In which Wade's phone tells him "There is no spoon". | The Paracast Community Forums
 
How's ramifying is this? [rhetorical question] This is an extract from the introduction to Thompson's Waking, Dreaming, Being:

"At times, however, something else happens. We realize we’re dreaming, but instead of waking up, we keep right on dreaming with the knowledge that we’re dreaming. We enter what’s called a lucid dream. Here we experience a different kind of awareness, one that witnesses the dream state. No matter what dream contents come and go, including the forms the dream ego takes, we can tell they’re not the same as our awareness of being in the dream state. We no longer identify only with our dream ego – the “I” as dreamed – for our sense of self now includes our dreaming self – the “I” as dreamer.”
 
Soupie said:
Consciousness and its "contents" appear to strongly correlate to physiological/neurological processes, and yet there is no place for subjectivity in the objective, scientific world view.
Click to expand...

It looks like the scientific world will have to expand its thinking, move beyond its reductive presuppositions, because our nature as subjectively conscious beings is not about to change -- and because what we know about the world comes to us through consciousness and mind developed from it. :)

Soupie said:
Really rambling now but anxious for Mind in Life to discuss "pre-reflective" consciousness, with and perhaps without self-consciousness.
Click to expand...

In Heidegger and MP, prereflective consciousness provokes reflective consciousness, before which prereflective consciousness already 'knows' or 'understands' that the self, the center of self-experienced being {present and moving in its environment}, exists in a world. Senses that the situational core of what-is consists in the individual's being situated within and toward a world.
 
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Coming back to this quote from the introduction to Thompson's Waking, Dreaming, Being:

"At times, however, something else happens. We realize we’re dreaming, but instead of waking up, we keep right on dreaming with the knowledge that we’re dreaming. We enter what’s called a lucid dream. Here we experience a different kind of awareness, one that witnesses the dream state. No matter what dream contents come and go, including the forms the dream ego takes, we can tell they’re not the same as our awareness of being in the dream state. We no longer identify only with our dream ego – the “I” as dreamed – for our sense of self now includes our dreaming self – the “I” as dreamer.”

To me this points to the omnipresence of consciousness in humans (and other animals) and to a driving energy in consciousness and mind to make sense of 'reality', 'what-is'. Waking consciousness is only a part or portion, and a temporary state, of consciousness as a whole, and consciousness as a whole includes the subconscious mind, the species memory contained in the collective unconscious, and that which is referred to as the supraliminal consciousness attained in skillful meditative practices and also sometimes in the middle of the day while one is thinking about other things. It seems that these other regions of consciousness flow into the vacuum of attention produced when the neocortex and language centers of the brain shut down in sleep. And it now appears that, in dreams, thinking involving the later-evolved, 'higher' capacities of mind remains available enough to produce 'lucid dreams' as described above by Thompson.

So deeply integrated consciousness in the embodied self seems to operate in dreaming. It is as if the sense of the self and its motivations in waking to connect with, apprehend, the world discovered in experience remains at the center of all consciousness and mind even in sleep, and that it cannot shut down for long before reawakening by degrees in dreams. When one falls asleep, the world of our immediate lives addressed in waking consciousness blanks out, and then the sources of other experience stored in the subconscious and other liminal regions of consciousness come forward in dreaming -- which appears to be an effortful continuation of the self at the center of consciousness as a whole striving for contact with the world and knowledge or understanding of what is and has been and perhaps will be.

We know that many dreams are precognitive. Somewhere in my reading in the last 24 hours I seem to remember someone quoting Freud saying that "all dreams are precognitive." I'll try to run down that quote and verify that it was Freud who made that statement. I've never read his study The Interpretation of Dreams. Has anyone else here read it? If I'm going off on a tangent here, let me know, and talk me down from it if you're moved to do so. I'm still buzzing with this recent dream research, but I can stop talking about it if it doesn't interest y'all. ;)
 
Constance said:
Hi Steve. What source were you quoting in your first paragraph there?

Maybe our next best step in this thread is to explore the new research on dreaming, including Thompson's latest book, Waking, Dreaming, Being. @Wade Ridsdale started a new thread today on the subject of lucid dreaming, which has led me to some very interesting reading in a book I linked in that thread in addition to Thompson's new book. I hope you and @Soupie and @Pharoah will read that still-short thread and become interested in what lucid dreaming is adding to the project of understanding consciousness. We could discuss this question either in Wade's thread or here, but I think we need to look into the ramifications of this new research.

This link goes to a summary newspaper article I just linked {skims over the complexity of the issue}. Scroll up if the issues raised interest you and start from the beginning, ok?

In which Wade's phone tells him "There is no spoon". | The Paracast Community Forums
Click to expand...

Hi Steve. What source were you quoting in your first paragraph there?
Schizophrenia - Chicken or Egg? - NYTimes.com

In the London Review of Books - our old friend Ian McGilchrist reviews two of Sass's books:

Iain McGilchrist reviews ‘The Paradoxes of Delusion’ by Louis Sass and ‘Madness and Modernism’ by Louis Sass · LRB 2 November 1995

And evokes some of what I have felt in my experiences above.

"Imagine being so constructed that this excessive consciousness pervaded everything. The most intuitive acts become the object of exhaustive scrutiny. One’s own thought processes start to appear alien and bizarre. In the extreme case both feeling and acting eventually become impossible. About 1 in 100 people world-wide lead lives shaped by this strange affliction: schizophrenia.

I am not sure of my own movements any more. It’s very hard to describe this but at times I’m not sure about even simple actions like sitting down. It’s not so much thinking out what to do, it’s the doing of it that sticks me.
People just do things but I have to watch first to see how you do things.
*I have to do everything step by step, nothing is automatic now. Everything has to be considered."

This gets closer at/to what I was trying to describe above. And this:

The phrase might be better rendered as ‘shattered mind’. Indeed, the word ‘shattered’ picks up well one of the condition’s cardinal features: the loss of the faculty of seeing things as a whole – the loss, to use the old psychological term, of the Gestalt – so that the whole of reality becomes, like Coleridge’s description of the cosmos, ‘an immense heap of little things’. Everything has to be broken down into parts. Thought processes lose their coherence; emotions are absent altogether or, similarly, fail to cohere. Most strikingly, there is an altered relationship with external reality, characterised by delusions and hallucinations: what is ‘real’ becomes uncertain, nothing can be trusted, the world becomes frightening and alien.

The first sentences of this paragraph describe what I called in my response to @Soupie "post narrative thinking" - the story of the world falls apart, as if the play you were watching calls strike and begins to disassemble the sets - the actors unsurprised, instead taking off their costumes and way of speaking and helping to pull the scenery apart. I also have experienced this as an effect of meditation ... as cognition falls apart, one sees, with Pip:

Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. - Moby Dick chpt 93 "The Castaway"
What schizophrenics experience might, then, be viewed as an extreme version of the mental world of the alienated intellectual. To understand quite how extensive, and how important, the comparison is, you need to read Louis Sass’s wholly fascinating Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought, and The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind.
 
@Pharoah

I finished your latest paper. I think its the clearlest, most concise presentation of your model yet. Well done.

I'd like to read it once more, then I'll offer some questions/comments.
 
Constance said:
Coming back to this quote from the introduction to Thompson's Waking, Dreaming, Being:

"At times, however, something else happens. We realize we’re dreaming, but instead of waking up, we keep right on dreaming with the knowledge that we’re dreaming. We enter what’s called a lucid dream. Here we experience a different kind of awareness, one that witnesses the dream state. No matter what dream contents come and go, including the forms the dream ego takes, we can tell they’re not the same as our awareness of being in the dream state. We no longer identify only with our dream ego – the “I” as dreamed – for our sense of self now includes our dreaming self – the “I” as dreamer.”

To me this points to the omnipresence of consciousness in humans (and other animals) and to a driving energy in consciousness and mind to make sense of 'reality', 'what-is'. Waking consciousness is only a part or portion, and a temporary state, of consciousness as a whole, and consciousness as a whole includes the subconscious mind, the species memory contained in the collective unconscious, and that which is referred to as the supraliminal consciousness attained in skillful meditative practices and also sometimes in the middle of the day while one is thinking about other things. It seems that these other regions of consciousness flow into the vacuum of attention produced when the neocortex and language centers of the brain shut down in sleep. And it now appears that, in dreams, thinking involving the later-evolved, 'higher' capacities of mind remains available enough to produce 'lucid dreams' as described above by Thompson.

So deeply integrated consciousness in the embodied self seems to operate in dreaming. It is as if the sense of the self and its motivations in waking to connect with, apprehend, the world discovered in experience remains at the center of all consciousness and mind even in sleep, and that it cannot shut down for long before reawakening by degrees in dreams. When one falls asleep, the world of our immediate lives addressed in waking consciousness blanks out, and then the sources of other experience stored in the subconscious and other liminal regions of consciousness come forward in dreaming -- which appears to be an effortful continuation of the self at the center of consciousness as a whole striving for contact with the world and knowledge or understanding of what is and has been and perhaps will be.

We know that many dreams are precognitive. Somewhere in my reading in the last 24 hours I seem to remember someone quoting Freud saying that "all dreams are precognitive." I'll try to run down that quote and verify that it was Freud who made that statement. I've never read his study The Interpretation of Dreams. Has anyone else here read it? If I'm going off on a tangent here, let me know, and talk me down from it if you're moved to do so. I'm still buzzing with this recent dream research, but I can stop talking about it if it doesn't interest y'all. ;)
Click to expand...

I remember a discussion about Freud admitting some paranormal beliefs, maybe to Jung? - but I understand Freud was very guarded about this.

Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes - Diana de Armas Wilson - Google Books

"catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon"

Carl Jung, part 2: A troubled relationship with Freud – and the Nazis | Mark Vernon | Comment is free | The Guardian

"A different sign of conflict came when Jung asked Freud what he made of parapsychology. Sigmund was a complete sceptic: occult phenomena were to him a "black tide of mud". But as they were sitting talking, Jung's diaphragm began to feel hot. Suddenly, a bookcase in the room cracked loudly and they both jumped up. "There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon," Jung retorted – referring to his theory that the uncanny could be projections of internal strife. "Bosh!" Freud retorted, before Jung predicted that there would be another crack, which there was."
 
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smcder said:
I remember a discussion about Freud admitting some paranormal beliefs, maybe to Jung? - but I understand Freud was very guarded about this.
Click to expand...

I wish I knew more about the relationship between Freud and Jung. There must be books and even films concerning the history of their increasingly distinct ideas, perhaps a historical 'biography' of their work together and then apart, far apart, when Jung developed a whole other way of thinking about the subconscious mind. I do remember reading somewhere that Freud stated toward the end of his life that he wished he had followed Jung's approach and explorations.
 
Sartre wrote a book about Freud and I have it somewhere here but have not yet read it. Google to the rescue -- here is a paper on the subject that looks promising. {EDIT: I've had a chance to read this paper and cannot recommend it. Will look for something better.} Here's the introductory description of the author's intention:

"One of the main objections that Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) had with both Freudian psychoanalysis and surrealism was their basic underlying assumption of an unconscious. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) thought that the unconscious drives are often undesirable to the conscious component of the mind and the inability to adequately deal with them is the source of conflict and neurosis. In a sense, one is lying to oneself through the repression of certain undesirable unconscious drives. Freud and his followers claimed that it is only through indirect analysis that one might gain access to this otherwise inaccessible area of the mind. The surrealists followed Freud in asserting that there was a part of the human mind that was inaccessible to direct human introspection and awareness. This assumption of an unconscious was a central part of the surrealist’s artistic works. The techniques that they developed, such as automatism and automatic writing, were used in order to get to the truths that supposedly lay in the unconscious. Sartre completely rejected this account of the mind, claiming instead that we have complete conscious access to all causes of our actions. Sartre attempted to overcome the conceptual difficulty of lying to oneself in his discussion of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi). As a result of this he drew his famous conclusion that we are “condemned to be free” (Sartre, 1956, p. 567). In this essay I will examine this issue in more depth. It is my task in this essay to elucidate Sartre’s main objections to the Freudian unconscious. One of my main aims is to determine whether Sartre was justified in his rejection of the unconscious. In addition, I will be examining whether Sartre’s arguments regarding the unconscious are also fatal to surrealism and whether Sartre’s theories necessitate rejecting it. I will firstly give a brief exposition of the Freudian and surrealist perspectives before turning to Sartre’s own views on the unconscious.

To narrow down this essay I will not be making heavy weather over the alleged similarities between Sartre’s early novels (specifically Nausea) and surrealism. There have been some suggestions (e.g. William Plank’s doctoral thesis Sartre and Surrealism[1]) that Sartre’s own writings have significant common ground with surrealist intentions. This similarity is not so much about the unconscious as it is about the perceived order in the world – is it in the world or in humanity, and what is to be done about it if it is the latter? . . ."

Sartre on the Freudian Unconscious and Surrealism

I think the author of this paper is correct in that underscored judgment. Roquentin, the protagonist in Nausea, is a historian undergoing a crisis in confidence concerning his/anyone's abilities to fully understand and account for what happened to and with/among individuals in the historical period he studies, a crisis expanding to include recognition of the ambiguity of his own perceptions of the world around him and of the nature of his own feelings. Nausea is a very honest and ramifying novel concerning the nature of both consciousness and perception, and I need to read it again now since it's been years since I first read it. Merleau-Ponty found Sartre's general hyper-rationalism and inability to engage the emotional and subconscious regions of consciousness to be inadequate to the exploration of consciousness. Thus the deep divergence in their philosophies, which provides fertile ground for reading and thinking about consciousness.
 
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