Tag: consciousness
The curse of reason, the true origin of suffering. The thought that analyzes the ego itself.
The paradox of the nature of human consciousness, qualia and co.
Links about the concept of Wahnstimmung. Here, too, beyond the context of schizophrenia, in the sense of a state of dissociation and free-floating anxiety. Continue reading
About the “hard problem” of consciousness. Read the full page
Pantheon (2022) – On the uploading process
Discussing the uploading process as portrayed in the anime. Read the full page
u/defectivedisabled, r/Pessimism
Suffering when seen as a metaphysical force is just like a perpetual machine. It runs on the fuel that is suffering and generates suffering as the byproduct, which it then uses to fuel itself further and continue the cycle. There maybe some peak and trough in the amount of suffering but suffering can never be fully eradicated. Suffering is self sustaining and is basically like a pantheist “God”. We are all part of it and it and it only exists through our suffering. Suffering is the essence of life, it is the reason for everything we do what we do. Suffering makes us perform actions to relief itself but would then create new forms of suffering as a result. A lion kills and eat a zebra so it may stay alive and procreate to further perpetuate this cycle in an ever increasing scale until the zebra population collapses and the lion population collapses as well. This cycle would then start afresh, it is an endless cycle with no end in sight.
We are all parts that made up of this “God” and it is our suffering that gives “life” to it. What this means for we is that we are created to suffer and perpetuate suffering. All for the manifestation of this “God” into the world. You can only do what is allowed within the limits of being a cog in this ungodly machine and any attempts to fight against the will of this “God” is futile. An end to this metaphysical force is nothing to grieve for indeed.
Why do we want to create an ASI
Perhaps, at least in part, the quest to create an artificial consciousness is part of a longing that comes from the human unconscious. We long for entering into communion with other minds different from our own. We do not want to suffer alone in a high degree of knowledge and for this we are willing to create an artificial consciousness. The same impulse may serve as the basis for those who seek to find other intelligent consciousnesses in the stars, through the discovery of intelligent alien life.
Fernando Olszewski, https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/01/the-mistake-of-rokos-basilisk.html[🡕]
And what do those philosophers who oppose our resenting life propose? The forging of new myths such as the übermensch or the deification of human history. However, changing gods won’t make a difference, just as returning to medieval or ancient times won’t make a difference. Eventually, these new myths will die, too, because some of us are intelligent enough to see through them. Read the full page
r/Schizoid, u/Concrete_Grapes
Schizoids are somewhat in a unique place as far as personality disorders go. We are inward facing, self-validating, self-reliant (on thinking through things, not always financially or housing), etc.
So, we frame the world, usually, as if everyone else is or should be this as well. To us, this is ’the norm’—and we literally cannot gain something good, or new, from interactions. We don’t need to interact with someone to validate an experience, or ’move on’ from some emotional attachment or slight.
However, normal people do not exist like this at all. Ever. Not even a little. Not for even a handful of minutes a year.
They are always outward facing in searching for validation. They feel they have no value, unless it’s measured by, or against someone else. Their emotions literally exist only as a function of social validation, or as an attachment to others. If they are mad, they are mad at someone. If they’re sad, they need to process it with others, and reference stability and coping mechanism off the ’other’… they cannot do this on their own.
That’s why virtually everyone that goes to therapy, goes to deal with their emotions, and the severe control emotions have over their actions.
That’s why a schizoid often gets nothing from most therapists, it’s not emotions for us, we’re stuck internally, conscious, and intellectualizing emotions away if they do happen, or forcing them to appear when we lack them. Hyper-aware of this, usually.
Other. People. Never. Do.
So they’re reaching out to process and connect—they’re unfulfilled, or some door isn’t closed, and they feel an internal emotional sense that they ’must’—some how, reference off you to complete the task.
To you, that’s nonsense.
I mean, I’m saying it in an extreme way, and one can argue it’s not always like this—and it’s not.
But go read what ’mindfulness’ is—the thing where people struggle to do it even a few minutes a day, after months of trying, on purpose, and tell me—if, to you, that sounds like horse shit, because it’s describing a state you’re in 99 percent of the time as default.
That’s what I mean.
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/09/excess-lucidity.html[🡕] Continue reading
Is it actually possible to assert anything?
Is it actually possible to assert anything with 100% certainty? Read the full page
If one thinks about the (obviously made up) religious scenarios, or any other kind of hellish stories invented by humans, it’s obvious that most real lives don’t even come close to that. Continue reading
Andrew McIntosh – On the Drive Towards Death and the Drive Away From Death (Ineffectual Whinging)
Just throwing a hodge podge of ideas I’ve read about and find interesting together in the hopes of coming up with a synthesis that doesn’t mean much in the end anyway. It’s not like I believe there are such things as “Death Drives” and “the Will” and all that, they’re more metaphorical for what is probably more mundane, neurobiological stuff going on in our stupid brains. Read the full page
SMBC – This life is a prison
Applying “that’s subjective tho” to that rings very, very hollow. To criticise them, you have to take the claims apart; […] Read the full page
Why is living a constant torture?
Rant on Reddit, with good comments. Read the full page
Andrew McIntosh – The Point of Pointlessness (Ineffectual Whinging)
[…] that whole insane “get up and go” mentality, starting with the obscenity of the work ethic, squirming as it did like soft stool out of the arsehole of Christianity, condemning us to mindless labour and activity simply for its own sake. Work for its own sake – what kind of fucking numpty thought that was a good idea? Read the full page
Two diametrically opposed things, pushed to their extremes, end up looking very much alike.
An obese person who eats until he explodes and an anorexic who fasts until he implodes, both die.
Bright light that blinds you to nothing is the same as absolute darkness.
Some of that discouragement for me (ed. in advocating) comes from seeing this world lacking in a plethora of metacognitive skills. Even the institutions themselves that discuss mental health – papers, researchers, those that present themselves as being scientifically minded, unbiased, and focus entirely on a description of the nature of certain things regarding mental health and neurodivergency – are constantly lacking so much metacognition that the very papers, the very pieces of research I read make that very apparent. And the people doing such work in the therapeutic world and otherwise don’t have any idea it’s happening. They don’t even know. So much so that I’ve seen forms of therapy that are attempting to instill metacognition in many of those that suffer with psychosis and many of those that are considered schizo-spectrum… When metacognition is the reason those people are sometimes crippled, mentally crippled by the world that they inhabit. But still, they try to produce more of it, only in a direction that would make them more functional, more available, more compliant to a society that they already oftentimes perceive as being run by mad men, and supported by cowardice, fear, death, fear of worthlessness, fear of invalidation. And in name of those things, the banality of evil grows and grows and grows.
Schizoid Angst – Schizoid Ramble: Emptiness and Advocacy
Philip Goff – Breaking Through the Consciousness Stalemate – The Institute of Art and Ideas
But there’s an important difference here: in all other cases we postulate unobservables to explain what we can observe. In the unique case of consciousness the thing we are trying to explain is unobservable. Read the full page
r/Pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered
Too much ignorance, and we have absolutely no respect for the potential for suffering that exists here. We are far more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot (so to speak), cause others as well as ourselves more pain than we ever thought possible, only to eventually decay and die.
Too little ignorance, and you become completely frozen by fear. You fully recognize the fragility of your body, the consciousness resting in it, and the fragility of all individual life forms.
[…]
A certain level of solipsism is required for a decent quality of life. A certain level of ignorance and delusion are required for a decent quality of life.
[…]
The sweet-spot of delusion. That’s where it’s at.
[…]
Meditation has helped me in very gradually lifting the veil of safety/security. And then psychedelics rip the veil off of your face all at once and it’s just WAY too much. We are biologically programmed to be reproducing machines, and there are many mechanisms in place that keep us from completely losing our very complex human minds.
Reality is in your head. Read the full page
My personality with the pills from The Matrix
Memez are fun. Read the full page
For people with social anxiety disorder, everyday social interactions cause irrational anxiety, fear, self-consciousness, and embarrassment.
From Wikipedia.
The irony. Thinking is bad. Having a consciousness is bad. You have to be dumb and live the illusion.
It’s like when you have a toothache and you curse yourself for all the times you felt fine and didn’t fully appreciate how great it was not to have a toothache, and you promise yourself that if there’s ever another day in your life when you don’t have a toothache, you’ll spend at least half of every day you have left reflecting on how great it is not to have a toothache, and you certainly won’t complain about stupid things anymore, like, I don’t know, noisy neighbors or not being able to find a parking space – my God, how wonderful it is to not find a parking space without a toothache!
Astutillo Smeriglia in his blog “In coma è meglio” (“Being in a Coma is Better”) – Il famoso asteroide (“The Famous Asteroid”)
There is no magical third act
I just… I just cannot believe this is it. This is life. There is no magical third act where I am the star in some fantasy adventure. I won’t suddenly gain superpowers and fight cartoonish villains. This is it. This is all it will ever be. The rest of my life, quiet and drab. Our one shot at consciousness is spent on something so unimaginably boring. My curse of sentience is spent wageslaving, consuming media, messing around with hobbies that will never fill the void, shitting, cleaning. That’s all it will ever be. Sad and pathetic.
Popular chans’ meme/copypasta
When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real. Read the full page
Beyond the Sad Passions – Miguel Benasayag
Everything happens as if the permanence of his suffering were the undisputable proof of his identity in the sense of its singularity: “I suffer, therefore I am.” Read the full page
Suffering is not just an intellectual game
https://reducing-suffering.org/the-horror-of-suffering/#Suffering_is_not_just_an_intellectual_game[🡕] Continue reading
I told him, at that time already, that my “not living” was dissolving the fear of dying… Read the full page
People think that life is something else, but that’s not true, life is not your coin collection, it only is by illusion, once you have a wife by your side. What about after? Afterwards, everything around you is as if it didn’t exist and never existed, it has less value than a turd. Continue reading
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
It takes two to have a child, but you think alone.
Alessandro Bergonzoni
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race – A Contrivance of Horror – Thomas Ligotti
The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Read the full page
Nothing happened this month. Nothing relevant, really. I wonder what’s relevant right now, though. Continue reading
Once that which is in fact an illusion has fallen, you will suddenly find yourself thrown into reality. Read the full page
(At the zoo.)
– What do you see?
– Animals.
– Prisoners, held in a cage like us in a world without risk, or struggle, or danger. The only difference is that they are able to see the bars, and that takes away any hope of escape.
Choke / Soffocare
Why is there something rather than nothing?
https://skepticalinquirer.org[🡕] Continue reading
Excerpts of interviews to Thomas Ligotti
Three interviews. Read the full page
Umberto Galimberti – The success of philosophy
But for those who, adapted to the world, and with a moderate self-awareness still do not find a meaning of their existence, and therefore come into contact not with this or that pain, but with the essence of pain, for those there is no remedy in the pharmacy and perhaps not even in psychotherapy. Read the full page
The age-old development of consciousness Drives us away from the essence of life We meditate too much so that our instincts will fade away They fade away
What’s the point of life And what’s the meaning if we all die in the end? Does it make sense to learn or do we forget everything?
Epica – The Phantom Agony
Chance doesn’t exist But the path of life is not totally so predestined Time and chronology show us how all should be In the ways of existence To find out why we are here
Being conscious is a torment[🡕] The more we learn is the less we get Every answer contains a new quest A quest to non existence, a journey with no end
No one surveys the whole, focus on things so small But life’s objective is to make it meaningful Only searching for this That which doesn’t exist Although our ability to relativize remains unclear
I’m not afraid to die I’m afraid to be alive without being aware of it
I’m so afraid to, I couldn’t stand to Waste all my energy on things that do not matter anymore
Our future has already been written by us alone But we don’t grasp the meaning of our programmed course of life Our future has already been wasted by us alone And we just let it happen and do not worry at all
We only fear what comes And smell death every day Search for the answers that lie beyond
Epica – Sensorium; lyrics by Mark Jansen
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals – John Gray
r/Pessimism, u/historyismyteacher Continue reading
Waking Life – Richard Linklater
A thousand years is but an instant. Read the full page
God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment – Scott Adams
The subconscious is an odds-calculating machine. Read the full page
– You live in the uncertainty of freedom, we live in the eternal confinement. But what can be seen once the barriers of the ego are destroyed, isn’t the same for both sides?
A Shumi at the Shumi village, Final Fantasy VIII (in the marvelous Italian version, re-translated to English by me)
Original English version:
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.” Read the full page
The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it. Read the full page
And so with just a touch of our fingers We could make our circuitry explode All we ever wanted Was just to come in from the cold
[…]
We really thought we had a purpose We were so anxious to achieve We had hope The world held promise For a slave To liberty
[…]
When I thought life had some meaning Then I thought I had some choice (I was running blind) And I made some value judgments In a self-important voice (I was outa line) But then absurdity came over me And I longed to lose control (into no mind) Oh all I ever wanted Was just to come in from the cold
Joni Mitchell – Come In From The Cold
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn’t thinking isn’t thinking of
They Might Be Giants – Where Your Eyes Don’t Go
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves.
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
Life is a state of mind.
Being There
If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. Read the full page
The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.
Bruce Lee – Tao of Jeet Kune Do (posthumous)
When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page
[…] human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.
Tom Robbins – Another Roadside Attraction
Man was invented by water to carry itself uphill.
Simplified version circulated across the Internet
It’s not important “how true” this is or isn’t: it should be taken as a thought that attempts to summarize a wide range of theories, from the black smokers as the origin of life, to possible connections between quantum mechanics and consciousness.
What you are basically […] is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
Alan Wilson Watts, Out of Your Mind: The Nature of Consciousness (posthumous, 1998)
Let’s suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream; and you would – naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams – you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure, you see, and after several nights you would say, well that was pretty great!
But now, let’s have a surprise: let’s have a dream which isn’t under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that i don’t know what it’s gonna be. Then, you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream… where you are now.
Alan Wilson Watts, Out of Your Mind: The Nature of Consciousness (posthumous, 1998)
New age bullshit of course, but great emotional effect, especially in the following music piece:
The schizoid individual (and this applies still more to the schizophrenic) does not bask in the warmth of a loving self-regard. Self-scrutiny is quite improperly regarded as a form of narcissism. Neither the schizoid nor the schizophrenic is narcissistic in this sense. As a schizophrenic put it, she was scorched under the glare of a black sun. The schizoid individual exists under the black sun, the evil eye, of his own scrutiny. The glare of his awareness kills his spontaneity, his freshness; it destroys all joy. Everything withers under it. And yet he remains, although profoundly not narcissistic, compulsively preoccupied with the sustained observation of his own mental and/or bodily processes. In Federn’s language, cathects his ego-as-object with mortido (ed. the death drive).
A very similar point was made in different terms when it was said earlier that the schizoid individual depersonalizes his relationship with himself. That is to say, he turns the living spontaneity of his being into something dead and lifeless by inspecting it.
R. D. Laing – The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness
In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.
Jacques Lacan in an interview for “L’Express”
Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. Read the full page
The great problem is how to live without being conscious of the fact that we have got to live; how to divert ourselves without thinking of why we should seek diversion; not only to escape the spectre of Ennui, but how to act as though we did not know of its existence. We are all playing near a great fearful Presence, and our object should be to rivet our gaze so completely on our work and busy ourselves so closely with our toys that we shall not have time to look up and see the Thing. The Thing—stark, nude, sleepy-eyed, ghastly Thing—is always right there over our shoulder. The most active beings are those who are trying, unconsciously, the hardest to dodge Its gaze. Man has no mission in life except to escape the “Black Man who will come and get you,” as we tell the children.
Benjamin De Casseres – Saint Tantalus, chapter “Disenchantment: Behind the arras”
The Last Messiah – Peter Wessel Zapffe
«Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.» Read the full page
Health doesn’t analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.
Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud
Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness. Read the full page
In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) – Marcel Proust
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Read the full page
As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her [Anne’s] fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.
Helen Keller, in her autobiography “The Story of My Life”, recounting her experience as a deafblind child.
With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.
Søren Kierkegaard – The Sickness Unto Death
O Julie, what a fatal present from heaven is a sensible soul! He who has received it must expect to know nothing but pain and suffering in this world. Lowly plaything of the air and seasons, his destiny will be regulated by sun or fog, fair or overcast weather, and he will be satisfied or sad at the whim of the winds. Victim of prejudice, he will find in absurd maxims an invincible obstacle to the just wishes of his heart. Men will punish him for having upright sentiments on every subject, and for judging by what is genuine rather than by what is conventional. Alone he would suffice to his own misery, by giving himself over indiscreetly to the divine attractions of honesty and beauty, whereas the weighty chains of necessity attach him to ignominy. He will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is a man: his heart and his reason will be endlessly at war, and unbounded desires will set in store for him eternal deprivation.
Julie or the New Heloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau