Consciousness and the Paranormal

[Constance]

Randall, re consciousness in sleep and dreaming, you might find the information in pp. 400-403 at this link to be interesting:

Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century - Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly - Google Books

 

[smcder]

Randall, re consciousness in sleep and dreaming, you might find the information in pp. 400-403 at this link to be interesting:

Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century - Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly - Google Books

I wasn't able to access the last page on the link above . . .

Sleep/consciousness/dreams - obviously we don't remember all of our waking states of consciousness,so it doesn't follow that because we don't remember the entire previous eight hours of sleep that our consciousness dies and is reborn every morning (although that is not a bad metaphor) . . . clearly there is brain activity at all times, right? . . . even in dreamless sleep (is it theta waves?) sometimes you remember a dream later in the morning too, so reports of not dreaming or dreamless states (or even not remembering dreams that the EEG machine said you had) are not definitive. And then there is this:

Tibetan dream yoga
If we cannot carry our practice into sleep," Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche writes, "if we lose ourselves every night, what chance do we have to be aware when death comes? Look to your experience in dreams to know how you will fare in death. Look to your experience of sleep to discover whether or not you are truly awake.

So the other part of consciousness, sleep and death is whether one can maintain consciousness to the point of death. This puts the responsibility of maintaining consciousness on the individual.

Yet another aspect is the interaction of normal states of consciousness with other levels - Samadhi or cosmic consciousness. So the loss of individual consciousness is not equal to the loss of consciousness.

In the BATGAP interview of Hagelin - he starts with the idea of a kind of universal intelligence (and this is actually defined later in a specific way, although "organized information" is a concise definition)

18:50 JH something is collapsing the wave function even if human consciousness isn't, that something isn't a thing like a molecule . . . there is apparently some kind of universal level of mind – universal consciousness who is observing when we’re not . . . the reason I would say it’s a kind of universal intelligence . . . is because we know the mechanics of the collapse of the wave function is non-local and a-causal . . . if it’s not human consciousness it’s some kind of universal consciousness

from there - he goes into the relationship of individual consciousness to this cosmic or ultimate kind of consciousness . . .

20:19. Rick Archer raises the the core mystical insight That Thou Art -

Tat Tvam Asi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and Hagelin discusses perspective in relation to levels of consciousness; normal waking consciousness compared to Samadhi “transcendental consciousness” - where awareness alone exists and the (individual) mind is not functioning – this often comes as a reflection on the experience after the fact; in established (stable) cosmic consciousness, he says there is an inner universality distant from mind/body activities . . . so that in these ultimate states of consciousness there is an understanding of how consciousness emerges into activity and then submerges back in to the silence (dreamless sleep?) - this is the "fine mechanics" of abstract consciousness manifesting into precipitated thoughts . . .

So, one succinct way to put all of that is: every night you die and are reborn as (G)(g)od.

keywords: sleep, consciousness, death, Tibetan dream yoga, cosmic consciousness

 

[smcder]

I recently had an experience of "conscious anesthesia" for a medical procedure. As they said it would happen - one moment I was talking to the doctor and the next (45 min later) he was patting me on the back saying everything had gone well. I have had occasion to lose (and have taken from me) consciousness in a variety of ways, but this was by far the slickest.

 

[Constance]

Here's a short article from Psychology Today on sleep and consciousness:

Sleep and Your Different States of Consciousness | Psychology Today

 

[Constance]

Link corrected:

This paper concerns six different states of consciousness during sleep:

www.oocities.org/octanolboy/paradigms.pdf

 

[Constance]

Non-REM sleep states are more like thinking than dreaming:

Non-REM SLEEP

 

[Constance]

This is interesting:

Eye and Body Movements Related to Dreams
In one famous case from Dement's sleep laboratory, sleep researchers noticed a series of large, up and down eye movements in a person during REM sleep. They immediately awakened the sleeper, who reported that he had just dreamed he was walking up some stairs. In a similar case report, a sleeper awakened after left-to-right eye movements said he was watching a table tennis match in a dream. In these cases, there was a clear relationship of dream content to eye movements. However, these eye movements were not the bursts or vibrations of the eyes that define REM sleep; they were slower, like normal eye movements. As it turned out, these findings were unusual. Normally eye movements cannot be related to dream content in any simple way.

What are famous examples of eye movements related to dream content? What did later studies show? What are myoclonic contractions?

Muscles often twitch or jerk during the falling-asleep process, especially after a day of heavy exercise. These twitches are called myoclonic contractions or sleep myoclonus. Myoclonus is a medical term referring to shock-like contractions of a portion of a muscle. Indeed, many people use the word "shock" or "jolt" to describe these sudden movements. Some scientists say myoclonic contractions while a person is falling asleep are the result of metabolic activity in recently exercised muscles.

In some cases there is no denying a tie between dream content and muscle activity. The relationship is especially obvious when strong imagined activity breaks through the relaxation of sleep and also awakens the dreamer. For example, a student reports:

Recently while surfing in Florida, I would have myoclonic contractions. My friend noticed that every night after a full day of surfing, I would kick my legs straight out and my arms would twitch. While these contractions were going on I was dreaming about surfing and would actually go through the motions. Whenever I would fall off my surfboard I would have one quick, violent muscle contraction and wake up. [Author's files]

What did Goleman and Engel suggest?

Goleman and Engel (1976) offered a simple explanation of myoclonic contractions. They said the strong motor responses probably occurred when a sleeper interpreted the onset of profound muscle relaxation as loss of control (like falling off a surfboard) so the dreamer responded with sudden movement.

What is the author's slightly different theory?

I suspect that Goleman and Engel reversed cause and effect. In other words, the story in the dream comes first, complete with an emergency that requires movement. If making a movement is important in the context of the dream (for example, while falling off a surfboard, when it is a matter of life or death) the great urgency of the movement overrides the suppression of muscle movement during REM sleep. Such an event is so alarming that it is likely to awaken the dreamer as well.

This second theory would also explain the origins of the myth that "you cannot let yourself die during a dream, or you will really die." Students say that is untrue. A show of hands in any introductory classroom will show that many students have died in dreams (but lived to tell about it). What is true, however, is that a life-or-death situation such as falling out of a window will often result in a defensive or anticipatory movement so urgent that it breaks through the muscle suppression of REM sleep and awakens the dreamer.

Animals also respond to a busy day with muscular activity during sleep. A student reported that after a day of hunting, her dogs had unusually active sleep.

After a day's hunt, I have often seen my dogs in the rapid eye movement state while sleeping. They will fall asleep, and I can observe every movement of their eyes. Since they are deerhounds, they often bark and act as though they are chasing a deer. Their legs make quick jerking motions as though they are trying to run. They will start breathing very hard during this period. These dreams are sometimes very short, sometimes quite long. This is good evidence that animals do dream and have rapid eye movement periods. These types of dreams probably result from their having been hunting.

Eye and Body Movements Related to Dreams | in Chapter 03: States of Consciousness | from Psychology: An Introduction by Russ Dewey


"I suspect that Goleman and Engel reversed cause and effect. In other words, the story in the dream comes first, complete with an emergency that requires movement. If making a movement is important in the context of the dream (for example, while falling off a surfboard, when it is a matter of life or death) the great urgency of the movement overrides the suppression of muscle movement during REM sleep. Such an event is so alarming that it is likely to awaken the dreamer as well."

The question is, where does 'the story' come from? I had what I took to be a hypnagogic dream experienced soon after I fell asleep, but it could as well have been a dream reached in REM sleep (past the fourth stage of the sleep cycle). In this dream, which was extremely vivid, I observed two people sitting on the open platform just beneath the top of a roofed tower (about three stories up from the ground) overlooking a street scene in the remote past judging by the age of the buildings and the clothing of the people. The people (some pushing or pulling carts) and some free-running animals, were moving about in the dirt road below, raising dust. The scene was calm and ordinary, seemed to be a 'market' or a market day. 'I' observed the scene from within the open platform at the top of building, seeing a young child sitting with his or her legs hanging over the edge of the platform in conversation with a very old man sitting cross-legged farther back from the edge. 'I' sensed that I was also this child. Although the child sat quietly, I felt apprehension that he/she would fall into the street and I awoke suddenly, feeling alarmed and fearful. I wondered whether this could be a dream recalling an experience of 'mine' in a previous life (as either an observer of the child falling or being the child falling). I still wonder about that. But in any case, this dream, like the ones described in the extract above, seems to indicate the operative interconnection during sleep between or among parts of the brain and sources of subconscious or unconscious information available during sleep. Indeed, those sources are more available to us during sleep. Dream research was pursued by the SPR many decades ago, and it is one of the paths to understanding the complexity of consciousness that should be actively pursued now imo.

 

[Constance]

I recently had an experience of "conscious anesthesia" for a medical procedure. As they said it would happen - one moment I was talking to the doctor and the next (45 min later) he was patting me on the back saying everything had gone well. I have had occasion to lose (and have taken from me) consciousness in a variety of ways, but this was by far the slickest.

Twenty years ago I awoke twice during surgery, first on overhearing a conversation between the surgeon and one of the nurses (to which I added a question or comment before being put back 'down'), later when I became conscious of pain at the cutting site and informed the surgeon that 'that hurts', whereupon he explained that he was cutting away some tissue around the area he was removing, whereupon I was again put 'down'. None of this was at all alarming; it was as if I'd been there in some sense consciously all along and twice became conscious enough to participate in what was going on. I apparently missed some of the conversation between the surgeon and the nurse, coming in on it as he was chiding her, in a teasing way, for being a "coward." I later wondered if she had perhaps become upset by signs of my waking (and perhaps speaking) before I became fully aware.

 

[Constance]

Smcder wrote: "...sometimes you remember a dream later in the morning too, so reports of not dreaming or dreamless states (or even not remembering dreams that the EEG machine said you had) are not definitive."

That's happened to me at least three times, in each case concerning very significant (personally meaningful) dreams. One of these instances occurred just before the spontaneous OBE experience I described in our earlier thread, while I was reading Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men in preparation for a class later in the day. Something I was reading at that point triggered a recollection of a dream I'd had the night before and simultaneously revealed to me that I'd masked one individual in my group of university friends behind another within that dream. This realization seems to have triggered the OBE (as you may recall, during the OBE I heard another inner voice/consciousness commenting on the 'me' that was sitting in view across the room from our shared location near the ceiling). Why did I mask the identity of the individual I was actually dreaming about the night before [in a dream in which we conversed in a coffee shop across from the university]? Months later I learned that the guy I'd masked had been a medical attendant at the surgery four months earlier when my forehead had been closed up following a traffic accident the night before, and that he had passed out in the operating room. I learned this from another person in my extended social group who was also a medical student and had been present during that surgery. I reasoned all this out to the supposition that I'd masked some memories of the surgery itself, including this normally calm individual's passing out in the operating room, and that at some level of my consciousness this amounted to a shaking loose of the perception that there were areas of my experience that I was not aware of. Then, suddenly, the OBE, in which I found my consciousness relocated to the far corner of the room just beneath the ceiling. After my conscious perception had moved along, leftward, toward the center of the wall/ceiling juncture across the room, viewing my body from behind as I sat at a desk where I had been reading the novel, the other consciousness showed up inside my head, not addressing me but commenting on me {"what a mess she is, or what a mess she is in"). My sense of this other consciousness was that she (I felt she was a she) evidently accompanied me in life and was long familiar with me, and not disturbed by the problems I was facing trying to make up three senior courses while taking an additional four. I think I was no longer using crutches at that point because I don't remember seeing them leaning against the desk; I do remember seeing the back of my favorite blue tweed coat hanging over the back of the chair.

 

[Constance]

News we can use:

"The most accurate simulation of the human brain to date has been carried out in a Japanese supercomputer, with a single second’s worth of activity from just one per cent of the complex organ taking one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers 40 minutes to calculate."

Supercomputer models one second of human brain activity - Telegraph

 

[Constance]

From Live Science re: the above:

Despite rumors, the singularity, or point at which artificial intelligence can overtake human smarts, still isn't quite here. One of the world's most powerful supercomputers is still no match for the humble human brain, taking 40 minutes to replicate a single second of brain activity.

Researchers in Germany and Japan used K, the fourth-most powerful supercomputer in the world, to simulate brain activity. With more than 700,000 processor cores and 1.4 million gigabytes of RAM, K simulated the interplay of 1.73 billion nerve cells and more than 10 trillion synapses, or junctions between brain cells. Though that may sound like a lot of brain cells and connections, it represents just 1 percent of the human brain's network.

The long-term goal is to make computing so fast that it can simulate the mind— brain cell by brain cell— in real-time. That may be feasible by the end of the decade, researcher Markus Diesmann, of the University of Freiburg, told the Telegraph."

Supercomputer Takes 40 Minutes To Model 1 Second of Brain Activity | LiveScience

 

[smcder]

From Live Science re: the above:

In Joy's article he says:

"In my own work, as codesigner of three microprocessor architectures - SPARC, picoJava, and MAJC - and as the designer of several implementations thereof, I've been afforded a deep and firsthand acquaintance with Moore's law. For decades, Moore's law has correctly predicted the exponential rate of improvement of semiconductor technology. Until last year I believed that the rate of advances predicted by Moore's law might continue only until roughly 2010, when some physical limits would begin to be reached. It was not obvious to me that a new technology would arrive in time to keep performance advancing smoothly.

But because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics - where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore's law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today - sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec."

 

[Constance]

From autopoiesis to consciousness, an extract from Evan Thompson, Mind in Life:

"On the one hand, nature is not pure exteriority, but rather in the case of life has its own interiority and thus resembles mind. On the other hand, mind is not pure interiority, but rather a form or structure of engagement with the world and thus resembles life."

See the context of this in the extracts from chapter 4 available at the google books link to Mind in Life. Scroll to page 66 at this link:

Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind - Evan Thompson - Google Books
'

 

[smcder]

From autopoiesis to consciousness, an extract from Evan Thompson, Mind in Life:

See the context of this in the extracts from chapter 4 available at the google books link to Mind in Life. Scroll to page 66 at this link:

Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind - Evan Thompson - Google Books
'

Did you have a listen to the BATGAP interview with Hagelin? I'm going to post some bits about (highly speculative) explanations of "subtle bodies" that is fascinating . . . I think you'd like that part, I may try to transcribe it all for you - I know you prefer reading transcripts.

 

[Constance]

In Joy's article he says:
"... because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics - where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore's law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today - sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec."

The best of artists hath no thought to show
which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
doth not include; to break the marble spell
is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

The irony of the juxtaposition of that Michelangelo quote with the contemporary insights of Bill Joy could produce a thread of its own. For those who have not read the Joy essay, he goes on to write:

A second dream of robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses; it is this process that Danny Hillis thinks we will gradually get used to and that Ray Kurzweil elegantly details in The Age of Spiritual Machines. (We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body, as illustrated on the cover ofWired 8.02.)

But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost.

ps: the whole idea of "downloading our consciousnesses" is of course absurd, and appeals only to people who have not yet taken the first steps in comprehending the nature of their own consciousness.

 

[Constance]

Did you have a listen to the BATGAP interview with Hagelin? I'm going to post some bits about (highly speculative) explanations of "subtle bodies" that is fascinating . . . I think you'd like that part, I may try to transcribe it all for you - I know you prefer reading transcripts.

Thank you for that consideration, Steve, but I'm willing to listen to this whole interview on your recommendation. It might still be good to highlight statements from it for the benefit of those reading here who have not listened to the interview.

 

[smcder]

Thank you for that consideration, Steve, but I'm willing to listen to this whole interview on your recommendation. It might still be good to highlight statements from it for the benefit of those reading here who have not listened to the interview.

I will do it - and for posterity's (man or machine or NSA) sake . . . ;-)

 

[Constance]

I will do it - and for posterity's (man or machine or NSA) sake . . . ;-)

Wow, if this is the interview you mean, it will take a while (1:39 min):

 

[smcder]

Wow, if this is the interview you mean, it will take a while (1:39 min):

I download podcasts to my .mp3 and listen to them on my commute and I also listen when I'm working out or at night when I lie down. It's worth listening to in full - but it is long and that's why I'm trying to transcribe the best parts and post them. Let me go back in and find the part I was telling you about in particular - the subtle bodies and give you the time stamps, I'll also try to transcribe that part.

I'm trying to find some software that will convert an mp3 into text.

 

[Constance]

I download podcasts to my .mp3 and listen to them on my commute and I also listen when I'm working out or at night when I lie down. It's worth listening to in full - but it is long and that's why I'm trying to transcribe the best parts and post them. Let me go back in and find the part I was telling you about in particular - the subtle bodies and give you the time stamps, I'll also try to transcribe that part.

Thanks, Steve.