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POPSThe Duplicates Paradox Personal identity is perceived as continuous through time. Yet this perception cannot be instantaneous, and must be based on memory. Given the fact that memories can be forgotten, altered or even fabricated, the question arises as to whether memories are essential for personal identity. Certainly no specific memory seems necessary for identity, but a perception of a continuity of the memory process is often believed to be. Subjective experience involves not just memory, but thoughts, desires, feelings and personality. Even when subjectivity is focused on the "outside world", this focus necessarily has a point of view. Any attempt to describe personal identity impersonally will lose an essential element. A self has both sensation and will.
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POPSTo be Interesting and Interested Let Go of Mind <<<The practice of mindfulness – in its psychologically Buddhist sense – has been described as a kind of detachment, dis-identification, i.e. dis-interest from one’s own thoughts, which, as Snelling points out in his “Buddhist Handbook,” are “not us” (3). Notice Snelling's italics: our thougths are "not us." This Buddhist proposition that we are not our thoughts would imply that any real communication beetwen us (and not between our respective fleeting states of mind) would have to be non-verbal... So, then, it would seem that in order for us to show inter-est in others’ thoughts, for us to inter-exist, we need to lose interest in our own thoughts. To co-exist, it seems, we need to never mind our own minds. With no thoughts to stand in the way of understanding, there is nothing between us, there are no gaps of misunderstanding to bridge…>>>
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POPS Self models There is no such thing as a substantial self (as a distinct ontological entity, which could in principle exist by itself), but only a dynamic, ongoing process creating very specific representational and functional properties. Self-consciousness is a form of physically realized representational content
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POPSSlavoj Žižek on the Matrix This is Žižek's famous 1999 essay, "The Two Sides of Perversion." I'm clipping it because I intend to read it; the bits I've looked at are very good.
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POPSGlad to see someone else mentioning it... Too many people seem to believe science gets hard objective answers. It doesn't. And even if it did, the interpretation of the communicated results would necessarily be subjective, based on the previous experience of the recipient.
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POPSRational Mysticism Just a brilliant piece from 2005. My experience with meditation would be of much the type Sam describes. It is just plain good for all of us, and religion has no monopoly on "spiritual experience" ....only some don't seem to know that yet, lol.
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POPSAlex the parrot, zeros, and death Dr. Pepperberg reported the result with appropriate understatement: “That zero was represented in some way by a parrot, with a walnut-sized brain whose ancestral evolutionary history with humans likely dates from the dinosaurs, is striking.” In a well-known essay, “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel speculated about the elusiveness of subjectivity. What was it like to be Alex that last night in his cage? We’ll never know whether there really was a mind in there — slogging its way from the absence of a cork-nut to the absence of Alex, grasping at the zeroness of death.
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POPSPEAR: Anomalies Research - Publications (Online) ... much more @ source ... The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program was established at Princeton University in 1979 by Robert G. Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, to pursue rigorous scientific study of the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes common to contemporary engineering practice. -- It was Jahn's decision to close the lab. He set out to prove the existence of the effect and, at 76, believes the work is done. But such tiny deviations from chance have not convinced mainstream scientists, and the lab's results have been studiously ignored by the wider community. Apart from a couple of early reviews , Jahn's papers were rejected from mainstream journals. Jahn believes he was unfairly judged because of the questions he asked, not because of methodological flaws.
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POPSKilling the Buddha a fascinating and interesting read:from the article: "It is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every facet of our culture—and even our biology itself—remains open to innovation and insight."
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POPSPerceived risk - vs - Real risk Living your life to the fullest. Question - challenge ideas that cause you to stop doing what your sense of inner energy is ready to experience.
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