A (not very widely accepted) theory on how human consciousness developed. I think it goes something like: Once we had a split mind where one side had a god-like voice that gave orders/ideas/directions in the form of auditory hallucinations to the other side of our mind, which acted on them. We were intelligent but had no real consciousness or ability to reflect until the bicameral mind broke down a few thousand years ago, which is when ancient texts began to show self-consciousness and self-reflective concepts, and when religions transitioned from pantheons of smaller (maybe personal) deities to larger and more abstract ones. Schizophrenia in modern humans would be a vestige of all this.Â
It seems insane to me, but it’s fun to read about older scientific theories that either fell out of favor, were debunked, or were just destined to be on the fringe. Â
Jun 26, 2024
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Everything above 100% is true btw^
All things considered I think I have a pretty normal interior landscape. Songs get stuck in my head. I daydream & I fantasize & I ruminate & I contemplate. Sometimes my mind is busy, sometimes it is totally quiet. Memory is something that constantly fails me-- it's closer to propaganda than documentary to me. And the projectionist who plays the propaganda to me is this blind, deaf, volatile schizophrenic intent on making me, the rememberer, as deluded & ill informed as possible. Sometimes I'll have this strange feeling that I've received a memory from the future in a dream, even more rarely I'll get this sort of memory in the waking world. To understand what I'm talking about, click the link I've supplied.
But really, honestly, outside of that I like to daydream a lot. Today I was thinking about visiting Georgia & daydreaming about being a young Russian nobleman in the 19th century, the son of some diplomat or something, laid out in some Tblisi opium den. I'm faded as fuck & I'm staring at the rug and the ceiling & then rolling over facedown in the naked breasts of some Georgian woman. She is perfumed & her arms are fat & she pets my hair and coos-- this is incredibly disgusting to me of course.
Sometimes I think that Consciousness is a curse. Free will was given to us by God, but Knowledge of Good & Evil was something that we were tricked into taking up by the serpent (ouroboros). Not a coincidence that all great sages exhort those who seek wisdom to cease with their perception & their perception of perception & their perception of perception of perception. Meta-cognition is the flattened out ourobouros (serpent) that traps the thinker in Hell.
Feb 14, 2025
insane amount of material in here. You‘ve got rockets, the Great Depression, L. Ron Hubbard, polyamory, Aleister Crowley, the FBI, the forming of multiple cults, cocaine/weed/morphine, Marxism, etc etc
Feel like you could do a lot more weird & random shit in the 20th century, but maybe I just need to expand my mind
Oct 14, 2024
🫂
The thing that constitutes the "I" that you are is just patterns of ideas and thoughts and behaviors in the form of electrical / chemical impulses in a brain. You spend your whole life transmitting those patterns to the people around you by communicating with them. When someone "gets to know you" they are building a simulation of you in their mind. The more time you spend communicating and observing each other, the higher fidelity that simulation becomes. Importantly, there is no true difference in "kind" between the patterns-and-thoughts-and-behaviors you hold in YOUR brain and call "I" and the patterns-and-thoughts-and-behaviors others hold in THEIR brain and give YOUR name. It's not a perfect copy, but it's also not NOT a true version of YOU. That means when you die, you *literally live on* as a distributed simulation inside the brains of everyone who ever met you and came to know and love you.
(This is my poor paraphrase. Check the link for relevant excerpts)
Mar 17, 2025
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