Here’s a possible way in: I’m doing a lot of noting practices right now, where you try to precisely label the state that you are currently in (for example, which sensory event is currently most salient, got these purposes treating thought as a sixth sense). 1/n
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @onemorebrown and
One thing you quickly experience, especially if you are verbalizing you’re notes, is that the state you are in has changed by the time you apply the label. What you are saying is not what you are experiencing, even if it was when you started to say it 2/n
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @onemorebrown and
You can try to speed up if you want to, but what you will find is that every attempt to label or even to orient is always a step behind what you are actually experiencing. And the reason for that is that experience is impermanent and constantly in flux 3/n
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @onemorebrown and
Why is that relevant? When we say things like “everyone knows what it’s like to see red”, we are ignoring the continuous unfolding dynamics of experience. Visual experiences feel like they are wicked stable, because our visual system is constantly sampling and refreshing 4/n
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @onemorebrown and
But unless you have done a lot of training, my guess is that you aren’t able to hold on to a single experience long enough to pull apart all of the complex interactions that are unfolding between distinct sensory events, which will shape the way the experience of “red” in a 5/n
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @onemorebrown and
specific context feels. I am not claiming that there’s nothing there, but I am claiming that the decision to lump a bunch of experiences together and call them the “red” experiences is a simplifying and clustering decision. It’s useful for languaging creatures, and useful for 6/n
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @onemorebrown and
things like remembering and imagining. But it’s not giving you insight into what you are experiencing at any particular moment. Last claim, I tend to think that when you get to the basic constituents of sensory experience, they end up being far less mysterious 7/n
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @onemorebrown and
changes in temprature and pressure, the urge to drink or consume sodium, flows of air across the hair in your nose, all feel like exactly what they are in the body. Visual processing is likely to be harder, as you need to understand how colors, shadows, blur, etc are 8/n
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @onemorebrown and
Being produced through the interactions with distal objects, and there will be some aspects of smell and taste that are just as complicated. But my guess is that careful tracking of experience only leaves us with so-called “easy problems” 9/9
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @onemorebrown and
this was a really helpful thread for me. also, to me this is very much akin to a phenomenological reduction of perception. but i would never call the useful clumping illusionary. not like you can wish it away. or get by without it. (some limits also there; flux is not the whole)
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How do you think about the emergence of meaning within this paradigm?
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Replying to @SpeakingSubject @svateboje and
This is a big part of the book I’m working on...
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