This suggests something profound about metaphysics itself: Our basic intuitions about what’s fundamental to reality (whether materialist OR idealist) might be more about human neural architecture than about ultimate reality. It’s like a TV malfunctioning in a way that produces the message “TV isn’t real, only signals are real!”
In meditation, this is the fundamental insight, the so called non-dual view. Neither are you the fundamental non-self nor are you the specific self that you yourself believe in, you’re neither, they’re all empty views, yet that view in itself is also empty. For that view comes from the co-creation of reality from your own perspective yet why should that be fundamental?
Emptiness is empty and so can’t be true and you just kind of fall down into this realization of there being only circular or arbitrary properties of experience. Self and non-self are just as true and living from this experience is wonderfully freeing.
If you view your self as a nested hierarchical controller and you see through it then you believe that you can’t be it and so you therefore cling onto what is next most apparent, that you’re the entire universe but that has to be false as well!
This is explored in the later parts of the book seeing that frees by rob burbea if anyone’s interested.
There’s a plausible mechanistic explanation: Psychedelics disrupt the Default Mode Network and adjusting a bunch of other neural parameters. When these break down, the experience of physical reality (your predictive processing simulation) gets fuzzy and malleable while consciousness remains vivid and present. This creates a powerful intuition that consciousness must be more fundamental than matter. Conscious experience is more fundamental/stable than perception of the material world, which many people conflate with the material world itself.
I think something like a similar model here is that it disrupts the controller and so you’re left with sensory input instead without a controller and so you can only be sensory input? I’m uncertain of how you use the word consciousness here do you mean our blob of sensory experience or something else?
In meditation, this is the fundamental insight, the so called non-dual view. Neither are you the fundamental non-self nor are you the specific self that you yourself believe in, you’re neither, they’re all empty views, yet that view in itself is also empty. For that view comes from the co-creation of reality from your own perspective yet why should that be fundamental?
Emptiness is empty and so can’t be true and you just kind of fall down into this realization of there being only circular or arbitrary properties of experience. Self and non-self are just as true and living from this experience is wonderfully freeing.
If you view your self as a nested hierarchical controller and you see through it then you believe that you can’t be it and so you therefore cling onto what is next most apparent, that you’re the entire universe but that has to be false as well!
This is explored in the later parts of the book seeing that frees by rob burbea if anyone’s interested.
I think something like a similar model here is that it disrupts the controller and so you’re left with sensory input instead without a controller and so you can only be sensory input? I’m uncertain of how you use the word consciousness here do you mean our blob of sensory experience or something else?
Nice! I haven’t read a ton of Buddhism, cool that this fits into a known framework.
Yeah, ~subjective experience.