| Consciousness, and how to hack it |
[Aug. 2nd, 2005|10:55 pm]
hmm..
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There's a post on dirtsimple.org which I find quite interesting. It nicely distills several similar thoughts I've been having about the nature of consciousness via an operating system metaphor. The metaphor is strained a little bit at some points, but I enjoy it overall and think it offers a neat perspective for mental self-control and improvement.
Link: http://dirtsimple.org/2005/08/multiple-self.html
An excerpt:
To really understand, you need to first understand that you are an animal. Most of us humans pretend our entire lives that we are something other than animals, and as a result we think our "animal nature" is something you can just ignore or somehow transcend -- preferably while ignoring it. We enter the false dichotomy of "man or beast", when the truth is actually "man and beast." We are not one - we are two. And the one of us who thinks he's running things is really just a recent software upgrade that runs atop a highly sophisticated operating system that's already had millions of years of performance tuning -- and can run just fine without you.
That's right. "You" are just a subroutine, and a recently-added one at that. You're like a user-mode driver that gets access to certain kernel data, but you only see and control what the kernel lets you. You have no direct access to the kernel's process space, but you can make calls into it, and you get notifications from it. The bulk of your nature as a human lies entirely outside your process space, outside your ability to directly perceive or control.
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So, don't be frustrated by your thoughts, because they' re not "you" either. Just because the kernel sends you a heap of worry, fear, anger, or other crap on sys.stdin doesn't mean you have to send it on to sys.stdout. Until I understood that, I was under the mistaken impression that fear and worry, hurt and anxiety, disappointment and regret were all real things. But they're not real! They're just data. Heck, they're not even data about real things. They're data about previous conclusions drawn about similar things! Sometimes, they're even data about erroneous conclusions previously drawn about similar things.
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You see, the real secret about command mode is that there is no command mode. It's really more like a tagging system, where the kernel acts according to the tags you put on stuff. You can tag things as "just pretending", or "not important", or any number of other things, and the kernel does whatever you've set it up to do for those tags. That means you really do need to watch what you think, and learn how to browse your own thoughts at -3. Otherwise, you can clog your kernel with an awful lot of crap. |
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