The (Re)Mote In The Mind’s Eye – Where Is Consciousness Located?
2 September 2007 by KA
Scientists have finally been able to replicate OBE’s:
Out-of-body experience recreated
Near-death events have triggered out-of-body experiences
Experts have found a way to trigger an out-of-body experience in volunteers.
The experiments, described in the Science journal, offer a scientific explanation for a phenomenon experienced by one in 10 people.
Two teams used virtual reality goggles to con the brain into thinking the body was located elsewhere.
The visual illusion plus the feel of their real bodies being touched made volunteers sense that they had moved outside of their physical bodies.
The researchers say their findings could have practical applications, such as helping take video games to the next level of virtuality so the players feel as if they are actually inside the game.
Clinically, surgeons might also be able to perform operations on patients thousands of miles away by controlling a robotic virtual self.
Like an old DOS machine, it seems more and more likely that we can trick the operating system into believing odd, odd things.
While this is the first of many forays that has provided some insight into that weird labyrinth that we term ‘human consciousness’ (for want of a better word), this is yet another step towards a rational explanation for those items the religious proclaim mysteries.
I have written elsewhere of the experiments of one Dr. Michael Persinger – and I have spoken here of my own theory of the origin of identity (probably someone else’s as well: I’m sure the more pedantic of my brethren will be quick to point that out) – and there’s no doubt that I’m rather fond of Jaynses’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he speaks of the consciousness residing elsewhere. Mind you, it is still in the skull, but it lends one to wonder: if we, as a primarily visual species, consistently place our consciousness right behind our eyes, where does a congenitally blind person place it? The pituitary gland? Or perhaps at the ears, or nose, or even the skin entire?
It is all a chemical response. Naught else.
Yet still we can set sail on an ocean of mirror neurons, our ships sped by winds of wonder, into the deep seas of the mind.
Don’t forget to bring your fishing pole. Who knows what you might catch?
Till the next post, then.
2 September 2007, on 6:34 pm
…I resolve to call her up, a thousand times a day. And ask her if she’ll marry me, in some old fashioned way…”
What? Ah, yes, the Ghost In the Machine, animated meat. Personally, I’ve always sort of thought of consciousness, of being aware, of the capability for introspection, as essentially the result of a mind freed from constant survival duty- by agriculture, the domestication of livestock, advances in medicine and technology, and left to it’s own devices. So, I don’t necessarily believe that consciousness resides in any one particular place in my skull but, rather, that it’s an amalgamation of memory, sensory input, and environmental irritants, that it’s wrought by an inherited genome and the waning reptilian, instinctual drives millenia in the making, and that it winks out like a snuffed candle at death.
“O, Death. O, Death, won’t you spare me over til another year?
Well what is this that I can’t see
With ice cold hands takin’ hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I’ll open the door to heaven or hell…”
And, while I’m not eager to embrace death, it doesn’t scare me- at least not enough to make me peddle my philosophical ass on the street for a little insurance, dig?
I mean, is it necessary for me to contemplate existence or my place in it? Not really, but it can be a lot of fun so long as I don’t stop and settle for the first “answer” that comes along- in the form of a black-robed snake oil salesman, generally. And, after all…
“Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And reolving at nine thousand miles an hour.
It’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
‘Round the sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at fourteen thousand miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred million stars;
It’s a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it’s just three thousand light-years wide.
We’re thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go ’round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, that’s the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!”
2 September 2007, on 8:06 pm
Check out The Mystery of Consciousness by Steven Pinker in Time magazine. On NDEs:
So, it seems that it is still wishful thinking arising out of fear of death…
2 September 2007, on 10:38 pm
Thanks for the text version of the Python’s “Galaxy Song”, RDZ…
I know we’ve had several links to it (the video) here on GifS…one being mine…Here’s a somewhat interesting visual variation; with Eric Idle’s rendition as soundtrack:
“The Galaxy Song (Monty Python)”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2JU4gX6rg8
3 September 2007, on 8:10 am
A head wound has left me with a mixed siezure disorder, and when I have the temporal lobe type, this often includes visual and auditory, well, I’ll say disconnects and unreality. Yet another part which is not involved in seizure recognises this and the best (but not really accurate) discription I can make is that it’s like watching a split screen TV which is overlapping one on the other. Gets interesting sometimes.
People who ask my wife about it are told about the hallucinatory things (?) and when asked about the “voices” (in most cases, undiscribable, they really aren’t, but it’s the best way to explain it) she says they’re the usual, burn that, kill, them, burn the town down, rape, kill, kill, kill, the usual thing. They usually ask, in a horrified voice, if this doesn’t CONCERN her. She says, not particularly…I never listen to anyone else, why would I listen to a bunch of stupid voices? For her it’s the Witzlsucht syndrome she REALLY hates. She kinda has a point.
I’ve heard this in the hospital in Viet Nam, and from others
at the VA. Some people who had been badly wounded told me that they were unconscious after their injury and their first awareness was of sound. then they identified it as someone screaming, wondered about it. Then irritation, wishing that someone would help the screamer, or shut him up somehow. Then it hit them that THEY were actually doing the screaming, and in short order, WHY.
3 September 2007, on 11:06 am
RDG – that was quite a consciousness stream. Wow.
Naomi – thanks for the link, quite enlightening.
Sarge:
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. Sorry, too funny.
3 September 2007, on 12:16 pm
My own voices have been quiet of late.
I have a t shirt that says: The voices may not be real, but they do have some good ideas.
3 September 2007, on 12:25 pm
Well, KA, it’s true, but I did inject it to maybe get a laugh. Glad you enjoyed it. I only wish I could convey the look I get when she says it, you’d wonder why she wasn’t in stand-up. The fact it’s true makes it all the more enjoyable.
3 September 2007, on 2:21 pm
Now then, can we have your liver?
3 September 2007, on 6:35 pm
I dreamed last night — seemed real as all get out — I was partaking of something I long to partake of but probably never will… oh to keep that dream — so real — so beautiful and wonderful to me — but as a famous canzone napoletano says “L’alba separa della luce l’ombra”
Dreams man – they happen.. EVEN TO ATHEISTS — but not braindead ones I bet!!
3 September 2007, on 10:26 pm
But, Sarge, surely you realize that those pseudoscientific explanations- the head injury, the TLE seizures, are but Satanic trickery that the American Medical Association uses to dissuade you from the truth; that you are being touched by Gwod, that TLE stands for The Lord’s Epiphanies, and that, though you may be currently pulling a Jonah shirking Nineveh with your avowed atheism, you have been chosen by The Lard for some sort of double secret, tyrannical mission known only to you and Pipe Been-A-Dick XIV.
But you didn’t hear it from me…
4 September 2007, on 8:17 am
Believe it or not, I’ve actually been told pretty much that by some people who I would have thought knew better. Seriously. I had a grand mal seizure in a, well, mall, and a very kind gentleman from Africa asked me if when I saw ‘them’ they had anything to tell him. He thought I must be a shaman.
Some relatives think I should go through a ‘laying on of hands’ to end it. I hesitate because:(a) I don’t believe in such flummery, and (b) they’ve all thought I should undergo a “laying on of hands” in other ways: ie: “Kid, when I get my hands on you…!” If someone says I deserved (b) on occassion I don’t say “no”, but I think I’ll pass as long as I can. I’ve been prayed over, and I’ve even been given the card of a Powow Woman who is said to have some competence at curing “fits”. Again, no thanks.
Then again, have you ever seen someone doddering down the street, talking to themselves quite vehemently? I have, and every now and then (I am a reader of science fiction) I have the odd thought that what if in the next town there’s another old geezer doing the same thing, answering him?! Nah.
4 September 2007, on 7:25 pm
I’ve had at least two OBE’s. Once, when whatever it is that is “ME” drifted out of me and- in some sort of fucked up tribute to Moroni’s Angel, Joseph Smith- up into the tophat that I’d covered my face with to shield my eyes from a glaring streetlight. There was a Mexican Restaurant decorated like the Screaming Trees’ “Invisible Lantern” LP cover- except in Turquoise and Burnt Sienna. I don’t remember looking back down at my husk of a body, mainly, because I’d forgotten there was anything back there to look for. The second time, I was confined to our ratty couch by the unfortunate laundry accident that turned my loam brown proletariat work pants a vivid pumpkiny orange. Which so perfectly and beautifully matched the upholstery that I was certain to disturb such harmony of light reflection by moving at all. It was such a sight that, with no mirror to see it by, I simply rose up to the corner of the room where walls met ceiling and perched there like a spectral spider, watching my unoccupied eyes blink in arbitrary intervals.
Did I mention there were many, many little squares of paper involved?
6 September 2007, on 8:17 am
I’m having an OPE [out of post experience] because I thought I posted in this thread but now… I see I didn’t.
Maybe I did it in another life?