Bakker's Blind Brain Theory

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Francis Buck

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« Reply #15 on: July 29, 2015, 11:09:11 am »
As a child and indeed through most of my teenage years I subscribed to the idea that I was the only real "conscious" and all else was illusory - part of the holographic world. At the time I was and am still fairly convinced of the holographic theory.

Anyway it took me a long time before I began to understand this extreme form of Solipsim and to come to terms with it both personally and academically.



That's actually super interesting. Holographic theory is something I've never been able to really grasp, though I've tried to read about it numerous times with little success. The mentioning of solipsism in particular caught my eye, since I don't ever recall seeing that mentioned when reading theories of a holographic universe (which is probably just because I haven't read much past cursory "explanations" I never understood). I'd love to hear you expand on that if you don't mind. How do you feel BBT fits into your model, if at all?

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« Reply #16 on: July 30, 2015, 05:15:45 pm »
Some time ago I used to meditate on different koans(or something similiar) and I almost went crazy at times. I mention this here because it might have something to do with the brain being "blind".

For example, have you ever wondered what a thought is? It is a weird thing when you start to look at it, and it is not even a thing since a "thing" is a thought. Anything we can know is within thought activity, but what is a thought?

I don`t think there is a rational answer to it, because any rational answer would only be more thought and that doesn`t lead one outside of thought.

So whatever how much you try, you are still inside thought, and I wonder if that has something to do with the brain being "blind"?

Francis Buck

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« Reply #17 on: July 30, 2015, 06:56:21 pm »
Some time ago I used to meditate on different koans(or something similiar) and I almost went crazy at times. I mention this here because it might have something to do with the brain being "blind".

For example, have you ever wondered what a thought is? It is a weird thing when you start to look at it, and it is not even a thing since a "thing" is a thought. Anything we can know is within thought activity, but what is a thought?

I don`t think there is a rational answer to it, because any rational answer would only be more thought and that doesn`t lead one outside of thought.

So whatever how much you try, you are still inside thought, and I wonder if that has something to do with the brain being "blind"?

From my understanding you are correct, particularly the bolded point. So to phrase it a different way, a brain as we know it cannot comprehend all of the parts of itself as a whole, and even if for example we imagined a "second" or "higher" brain that could understand the first one, that higher brain would still have an incomplete perception of itself, and so on and so forth. Thus, the inherent blindspot. 

I'm playing fast and loose with phrasing/terminology there but hopefully it makes sense. Perhaps substitute notions like understand/perception for: a brain cannot consciously experience the true illusory nature of itself, since conscious experience IS the illusion.

I actually kind of dislike the word "illusion" in these contexts, even though it is obviously useful (and so is commonly used in discussions on this or similar topics), but I'm not sure how to articulate why I dislike it in a way that makes any goddamn sense so I will just leave it for now, lol.


« Last Edit: July 31, 2015, 12:56:03 am by Francis Buck »

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« Reply #18 on: July 31, 2015, 09:49:48 am »
This is interesting.

Olaf Stapledons Star Maker posits something similar - how other consciousness may be so alien to our own as to be almost incomprehensible. Essentially externalising this argument - I mean really, how do you know your thoughts are the same as mine?

Touching on Solipsism again with this line of thought. 

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« Reply #19 on: August 28, 2016, 11:45:52 pm »
Some time ago I used to meditate on different koans(or something similiar) and I almost went crazy at times. I mention this here because it might have something to do with the brain being "blind".

Interesting. A while ago I used to meditate in a completely dark, mostly quiet room for an hour or two. Around the second hour I would get this feeling like my consciousness was spinning around its own axis if that even makes sense. Very disturbing and I am loathe to even ponder on the experience today. I am certain it is a byproduct of the brain trying to deal with a lack of appreciable inputs, but it was a very strange feeling. Almost like just existing as a single thought, completely bodiless, just spinning in existence and trying to get a grasp on it's own...revolutions I guess. Gah.
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Callan S.

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« Reply #20 on: August 29, 2016, 03:22:12 am »
Blind Brain Theory

A: What you think is happening (picking up the balls)
B: What is actually happening (the balls keep rolling out)

When consciousness is largely or entirely made up of A, what is consciousness? Consciousness is an illusion. Or say what it is as you'd put it.

Quote
What is the whole that we cannot comprehend?

The idea is that there is a whole that is uncomprehended. Surely that's the first thing to consider - just that there is X and you don't know about X.

jamesA01

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« Reply #21 on: November 16, 2016, 10:45:31 pm »
I will never be able to thank Bakker enough for elucidating BBT in the way that he did. I already understood it, at least intuitively, but it is deeply traumatic, and I could never have hoped to express it with the same technical precision that Bakker did.

The more I ponder BBT and its implications the more emboldened I become in my moral fanaticism, I want to viciously persecute the intentionalist scum as the maniacal fundamentalist I am.

We don't talk about it now, but mainstream psychological thinking, even in the 20th century, held that diseases like cancer were caused by personality failings. It is indeed a tremendous accomplishment that the state can now overrule the wishes of christians who wish to pray away disease or jehovahs witnesses that refuse blood transfusions. But the intentionalists still rule, and dissenting from them is still heretical.

The fear is that if we accept that people do not have a magical, supernatural will, then we would have to excuse them their crimes. Bakker even laments this from a pessimistic conservative perspective.

But why should we worry? The strain on intentionalism is accelerating by the day - the obesity crisis is getting so bad and we are contorting ourselves to produce the ideological fiction that there is a supernatural element to overcoming it. We will be forced to accept that everything that happens to us is due to material causes, so we'll actually be able to stop these things from happening.

We will actually be able to SOLVE issues like addiction and violent crime!

But the intentionalists don't want this, they just want to point fingers and judge, forever, because of the feelings of power and control it assuages them with. Intentionalists make claims like "anorexia is due to bad self esteem!" - well natural selection will weed out these fucking imbeciles if they try and ignore the scientific refutations of their bullshit just like memetic selection has gotten rid of the christian scientist movement.

For me, BBT is a true innovation in the war of naturalism versus religion. BBT and the implications of the semantic apocalypse and techo-science will allow us to re-engineer humanity. We will be able to destroy the sick patriarchal murder machine (and it's cuntocratic support team) that fuels the violence of this world and the boners of fantasy readers.

The eternally recurring political defeat that pacifism has suffered could, for the first time in history, be reversed if we alter ourselves in our most fundamental forms.

Every aspect of our trad biological bodies are being obsolesced by technics. This is becoming a part of our daily lives, as the rates of transexualism attest. We are experimenting on ourselves in ways that were hitherto-fore unimaginable. These are breakthroughs that can lead to MATERIAL ethical achievements, which are the REAL kind.

The potential for doom and savagery that techno-science produces and will likely deliver does not foreclose its possibility. We've managed to murder, rape, torture and cruelly destroy and savage ourselves as a species for our entire history and many humans proudly enjoyed and still enjoy it. In the age of nihilism, when everyone suffers their own pointless existence, I sometimes feel that the game we play is a kind of dare with each other - I can enjoy causing you the pain and allign myself with indifference! Doesn't it traumatize you and embolden me? I don't think that these kind of games can go on indefinitely when every human is becoming a piece of technically manipulable code. Everything about us is changing, heterosexual reproduction is even becoming non mandatory. We are mutating in ways that noone in history imagined and the only sure thing is that the past will not continue indefinitely, so i'm excited af.

And there just ISN'T a way to turn back the clock on this, extinction is not good enough since some other species will get to this level. IMO Extinction was the only moral horizon in our history until post humanism.

It's time that we burn the intentionalists at the fucking stake and dance in their ashes!
« Last Edit: November 16, 2016, 10:48:06 pm by jamesA01 »

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« Reply #22 on: November 17, 2016, 03:06:13 am »
Yea, Science and shit is great. You know, until we become space rape aliens and shit.....  :)
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Hirtius/Pansa

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« Reply #23 on: November 17, 2016, 06:34:28 am »
lol I imagine that if the Inchoroi were in an actual eliminitavist material existence they would just stay on their home planet and fuck tekne sex-dolls all day, every day, for eternity.

It's the intentionality of the universe that compels them to war against the fact of damnation and be interstellar rape-aliens.

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« Reply #24 on: November 17, 2016, 11:15:41 am »
lol I imagine that if the Inchoroi were in an actual eliminitavist material existence they would just stay on their home planet and fuck tekne sex-dolls all day, every day, for eternity.

It's the intentionality of the universe that compels them to war against the fact of damnation and be interstellar rape-aliens.

That presupposes that along the way to becoming Inchoroi they didn't fuck the environment of their home planet.  If Inchoroi are indeed something of an allegory to trans-humanism, well, it certainly seems plausible that they made their planet unlivable (whether through neglect, intentionally, or even just fucking around with the Bios too much).  Shit, we are on the fast track to that same spot and we don't even have interstellar space travel, or the Tekne.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

jamesA01

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« Reply #25 on: November 17, 2016, 11:33:40 am »
Look at ISIS, the contemporary worlds premier patriarchal rape gang. Aggressive young men in their prime, at their psychological peak for in-group identification - they did the usual thing of murdering and raping their way around, claiming territory and enslaving or killing anyone weaker than them. And of course it worked and they took power - but then they all got murdered by ROBOTS controlled by people on the other side of the planet, sitting in comfy chairs, fueling themselves with Monster energy drinks and Doritoes.

That is not something that has ever happened before in history. And who wants to be on the side of the agricultural slaver primitivists like ISIS?

We have ever growing masses of starving and potentially violent or terroristic/suicidal people on this planet and growing access to weapons. Someone will detonate a dirty bomb or hand nuke or something sooner rather than later. The surveillance state will extend into the neurological level, and people will be programming their own brains with DIY kits soon enough. IMO all points towards the obsolescence of our traditional biological bodies and thus everything that happened in our political and sexual lives as a consequence of them.
« Last Edit: November 17, 2016, 11:46:43 am by jamesA01 »

Wilshire

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« Reply #26 on: November 17, 2016, 02:48:02 pm »
Look at ISIS, the contemporary worlds premier patriarchal rape gang. Aggressive young men in their prime, at their psychological peak for in-group identification - they did the usual thing of murdering and raping their way around, claiming territory and enslaving or killing anyone weaker than them. And of course it worked and they took power - but then they all got murdered by ROBOTS controlled by people on the other side of the planet, sitting in comfy chairs, fueling themselves with Monster energy drinks and Doritoes.
Best summary of those events that I've ever seen. 

That is not something that has ever happened before in history. And who wants to be on the side of the agricultural slaver primitivists like ISIS?
Every zealot ever, religious or otherwise, right? Also, isn't the death robot angles side the same as the primitivists, just with robots?

We have ever growing masses of starving and potentially violent or terroristic/suicidal people on this planet and growing access to weapons. Someone will detonate a dirty bomb or hand nuke or something sooner rather than later. The surveillance state will extend into the neurological level, and people will be programming their own brains with DIY kits soon enough.
I agree with this vision of the not so distant future.

IMO all points towards the obsolescence of our traditional biological bodies and thus everything that happened in our political and sexual lives as a consequence of them.
I don't think I agree that because our traditional biological bodies will become obsolete that our experiences - ie what happens in our lives - become obsolete as well. Or is that not what you're saying?

Nice to see you back, jamesA01
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« Reply #27 on: November 18, 2016, 02:48:49 pm »
I don't think I agree that because our traditional biological bodies will become obsolete that our experiences - ie what happens in our lives - become obsolete as well. Or is that not what you're saying?

Perhaps welcome to Westworld?
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

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« Reply #28 on: November 21, 2016, 03:23:53 pm »
Mmmm, Westworld. Through bits in there about consciousness, the brain, sentience, and something that sniffs of BBT.

To me it seems experience is the only thing that is. Even if its just happening in our minds or whatever, its still the only thing. Without experience - there simply isn't . Like Descarte's "I think, therefore I am". Yeah?
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« Reply #29 on: November 21, 2016, 04:05:18 pm »
Mmmm, Westworld. Through bits in there about consciousness, the brain, sentience, and something that sniffs of BBT.

To me it seems experience is the only thing that is. Even if its just happening in our minds or whatever, its still the only thing. Without experience - there simply isn't . Like Descarte's "I think, therefore I am". Yeah?

Well, the further quote, "dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum" ("I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am") is a bit closer to what he really meant.  That's really an aside though.

Experience can't be all though, or can it?  Something about that seems not right to me and yet, I have no idea what...
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira