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MU FOLKS- FINAM FEELING IS NOT ALWAYS MUTUAL -UNDERTSATEMENT
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“What a lark! What a plunge!”
-- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
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Pareidolia is seeing meaning in an object, pattern or shape when there is none.
Face pareidolia is the common experience of seeing faces in the moon, in clouds or even in a lake seen from space.
It is a type of pareidolia, which is seeing meaning in an object, pattern or shape when there is none.
Face pareidolia is so strong that even vague patterns of shadows can appear to contain faces, such as the pictures of the region of Mars called Cydonia (see below).
While seeing faces in all kinds of objects was once thought a sign of psychosis or a type of disorder, nowadays pareidolia is viewed as a normal part of human experience.
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“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ~Joseph Campbell
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B
(Allan Lokos)
“Don't believe everything you think. Thoughts are just that – thoughts.”
(Allan Lokos)
Everything looks and feels solid because the experience of solidity is a genetically adaptive kind of consciousness. On the African savannah, an intelligent ape who paused to reflect that the advancing lions within her world-simulation were phantoms of her mind didn’t pass on her genes to a new generation of budding philosophers. Contrast the perceptual naïve realist, who lived to reflect another day.
Physical objects can look and feel solid in a dream, too. If you have a lucid dream, then you can recognise that solid-seeming material objects – and your solid-seeming physical body – are modes of consciousness, i.e. facets of your mind and the phenomenal world-simulation it runs. Your world-simulation plays out within a theoretically-inferred transcendental skull, as distinct from the empirical skull whose contours can be felt with your virtual hands. Unlike during waking consciousness, you can mentally manipulate the furniture of lucid dreams in defiance of the laws of physics. Or rather, the vehicle of simulation remains lawful, but the contents of your simulation can be miraculous. Of course, most dreams aren’t lucid, just psychotic.
What happens when you wake up?
If naïve realism is true, then your awake mind-brain now perceives its local environment. Once again, everything looks and feels solid. Yet how your mind-brain is supposed to penetrate its enclosing meninges and burrow though the walls of its encasing skull is mysterious.
For better or worse, naïve realism is a pre-scientific myth. Your mind-brain runs an autobiographical world-simulation. “Waking up” robs the simulation of its autonomy, not its nature. A realistic interpretation of the mathematical formalism of our best scientific theory of the world, quantum mechanics, is inconsistent with perceptual direct realism. So too is modern neuroscience – and even armchair reflection. Mind-independent reality may be theoretically conjectured via an inference to the best explanation – it’s not perceived. Inferred external reality partly selects the solid-seeming contents of your world-simulation, indirectly, via the peripheral nervous inputs that bombard your awake mind-brain. Yet all you ever know are some of the intrinsic properties of matter and energy.
Inferential realism about external reality should not be confused with solipsism. A host of egocentric virtual worlds exist akin to your own, most of them nonhuman. These skull-bound and no less solid-seeming virtual worlds differ primarily in the identity of their protagonist. Selfish DNA gives each of us a starring role in our own virtual world – a genetically adaptive illusion, to be sure, but a flattering incentive to overestimate one’s role in the great scheme of things.
Inferential realism should not be confused with idealism. The intrinsic nature of the mind-independent universe that the equations of physics also describe may be either experiential or non-experiential. Science doesn't know. I don’t know either, although I explore the possibility our materialist intuitions may be wrong. If our materialist intuitions are right, then we face the impossible Hard Problem of consciousness.
So is life an illusion?
Well, recognising that you are running a world-simulation populated by zombies can be disconcerting – even if you believe (as I do) that the zombies of your waking consciousness are the cartoon avatars of sentient beings in a wider reality. Natural selection didn’t design human primates to regard interpersonal relationships as a branch of speculative metaphysics. A much harder illusion to fathom, let alone dispel, is semantic realism and magical theories of reference. Together with memory, logico-linguistic thought and the tools of mathematical physics allow one – seemingly at any rate – to transcend solipsism-of-the-here-and-now and glimpse the multiverse revealed by modern science.
How is semantic meaning possible? The existence of abstract objects such as propositional content seems impossible to reconcile with naturalism.
Alas, this mystery has defeated me.
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Everyone Is a Complex Web of Factors – Don’t Take Anything Too Personally-Handel
My spiritual practice is very easy and can be done by anyone.
A spiritual master was asked the same question and his reply was mesmerizing and eye-opening both.
He replied, “Whatever I do, I am present there.”
Result - it establishes you immediately in this moment. It's not tedious, boring. Actually it is full of awareness.
Whatever I do, I am present. If I am eating, I am fully focused there, if I am walking, I am present there. If I have entered into deep silence, I savour it.
Whatever comes in life, I enter into it but with a great understanding and awareness.
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If we sit quietly, making no effort,life expresses itself clearly; it simplyhappens on its own. There's nothing elseto get. The great truth is obvious. The heart beats; the breath comes and goes.~ Darryl Bailey
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