Relatedly: I would bet someone money that Greg Egan does something insight-meditation-adjacent.
I started reading his work after someone noted my commentary on “the unsharableness of personal qualia” bore a considerable resemblance to Closer. And since then, whenever I read his stuff, I keep seeing him giving intelligent commentary and elaboration on things I had perceived and associated with deep meditation or LSD (the effects are sometimes similar for me). He’s obviously a big physics fan, but I suspect insight meditation is another one of his big “creativity” generators. (Before someone inevitably asks: No, I don’t say that about everything.)
To me, Egan’s viewpoint reads as very atheist, but also very Buddhist. If you shear off all the woo and distill the remainder, Buddhism is very into seeing through “illusions” (even reassuring ones), and he seems to have a particular interest in this.
I can make up a plausible story that developing an obsession with how we coordinate-and-manifest the illusion of continuity from disparate brain-parts… could be a pretty natural side-effect of sometimes watching the mental sub-processes that generate the illusion of “a single, conscious, continuous self” fall apart from one another? (Meditation can do that, and it’s very unsettling the first time you see it.).
Relatedly: I would bet someone money that Greg Egan does something insight-meditation-adjacent.
I started reading his work after someone noted my commentary on “the unsharableness of personal qualia” bore a considerable resemblance to Closer. And since then, whenever I read his stuff, I keep seeing him giving intelligent commentary and elaboration on things I had perceived and associated with deep meditation or LSD (the effects are sometimes similar for me). He’s obviously a big physics fan, but I suspect insight meditation is another one of his big “creativity” generators. (Before someone inevitably asks: No, I don’t say that about everything.)
To me, Egan’s viewpoint reads as very atheist, but also very Buddhist. If you shear off all the woo and distill the remainder, Buddhism is very into seeing through “illusions” (even reassuring ones), and he seems to have a particular interest in this.
I can make up a plausible story that developing an obsession with how we coordinate-and-manifest the illusion of continuity from disparate brain-parts… could be a pretty natural side-effect of sometimes watching the mental sub-processes that generate the illusion of “a single, conscious, continuous self” fall apart from one another? (Meditation can do that, and it’s very unsettling the first time you see it.).