Home (ego death and self-control cybernetics)
Mental constructs are highly dynamic association matrixes, held together by some degree of binding intensity. Deep re-indexing of mental construct groups (such as concepts of "time" and "change" together) enables a wholesale mental model shift or inversion to another mode. Normally, for convenience, the mind uses linguistic and conceptual associations in a rigid, rutted, and repetitive way; debates are permanent standoffs, because the same cliched assumptions are carelessly adhered to every time words are used. Mastery of semantics enables one to release one's assumptions about every single word in an argument, not just a key term in isolation.
The dissociative cognitive state enables deep-level symbolic re-indexing of mental constructs. There are numerous triggers for the dissociative cognitive state. The absence of loose cognition preserves delusion, preserving the sense of freedom and autonomous agency. Specialized music with lyrics can provide a tangible, temporal environment which resonates with cognitive dissociation and leads up to ego death [points the way to; contains suggestive coding/ expressions].
Don't say "habit-patterns are forgotten/lost/unrecallable". They "tend to be disengaged; are made available-at-will; are made optional; are lifted, are suspended yet available to be present at will". The sense of the ability willing is always present, whether or not the will is guided by the accustomed egoic IS, or is not guided at all. The mind in loose cognition is alienated from the accustomed ego-character and its habit-patterns.
Pattern-perception becomes highly flexible and innovative in the dissociative cognitive state. Blatant perceptual distortion in the dissociative state directly presents questions about perception. All that is directly presented to awareness is mental constructs, which point to alleged referent objects which might or might not exist, or might exist in a way other than the mental constructs representing them seem to portray. Mental constructs are all-purpose representations pointing to all experienced phenomena, including sounds, scents, images, other people, oneself as an ego-entity, one's body, and oneself in the near future. Mental constructs are usually conflated with, or taken for, the objects they represent; oneself is not really the mental icon which the mind uses to represent oneself.
Meta-perception is the perception of the layer of mental constructs presented to awareness, perceiving it as a layer. In the dissociative state, conflation of mental symbols with supposed external referents stops; the representational layer mentally separates from the hypothesized object realm that the representation layer projects or points to. The perceived world blatantly appears as mental representations which are themselves frozen into the block universe; cross-time extension of objects and the controlling ego-entity across time appears to be distributed along a fixed and pre-set stream of time-slices. The vantage point of awareness can be raised, or stepped back a level, to observe mental construct processing and perception itself. Time is no longer perceived as a flow, but as a frozen expanse.
Perceptual distortion of the mental representation of oneself leads into ego death. The pronounced waviness and cartoonish character of perception causes perceptual conflation to stop. The misconstrued conflation-realm splits into its real components: the representational plane, and the purported object realm that the representational screen points to. Normally [in daily life in the egoic mode] this pointing is transparent, and is not perceived as pointing; instead, the mental representations are simply taken for the external objects they point to. Symbol and referent are conflated, collapsed together in a practical mental shorthand. But wavy and unrealistic perception during the loose-cognition mode prompts the mind to think about the conjectural nature of physical objects, including the body. Then, more abstract objects such as the inner ego entity who resides inside the mind, are experienced as insubstantial and come into doubt. [seen how time-travelling continuant self is projected independently at each point in the stream of cognition.]
Normally, when mental-construct associations are tightly bound and rigidly patterned, one senses one's personal presence, and the mind builds up an ego-system around this sense of personal substance. The perceived sense of personal existence is taken to literally be oneself. But when perception-patterns and mental-construction activities relax and loosen, mental constructs betray and reveal themselves through their fluctuation, so that entities that were felt to be directly perceived as solid and constant objects now are experienced as being indirectly perceived, through a mediating, undulating screen of mental constructs. The sense of self, which is a complex, high-level mental construct, wavers and becomes unconvincing, so the representation of oneself is accurately perceived to be split apart from the purported actual self.
Because the representational layer becomes blatantly patchy, wavy, and inconsistent, the mind becomes conscious of the inability to directly perceive oneself without an intermediate layer of representation. In the loosened-cognition mode, the ego symbol consciously splits apart from the actual person it points to. There never existed an ego-entity of the sort that conflated thinking construed. The sense of self disappears, and some aspects of oneself are seen to have been illusory. This observation is eventually secured even during the normal, deceptively stable perceptual state, when the mind understands the time-travelling, controlling ego-entity to be merely a virtual image used as a point of reference.
When exploring the realms of fringe experiencing, it is helpful to understand that even ordinary experiencing is similar to a remarkably detailed and consistent hallucination of a world. In the loose cognition state of awareness, which occurs in advanced meditation, schizophrenia, and psychedelics, the veil of perception loosens and becomes a visible patchwork or mosaic, showing clearly that the world is only present to awareness in the form of dynamic mental models made of mental constructs. Loose cognition tangibly switches on the philosophizing mode, because the mind is fully confronted with its isolation. Philosophy of Mind, which comes from the West and includes skepticism, is a recent, vital approach to studying how the mind internally represents various types of objects and entities which constitute the world. Philosophy of Mind is about to collide with Transpersonal Psychology, from the East, which is also building up models of our innermost subjectivity and studying how the mind constructs its experienced world and the sense of being a person separate from that world.
Sitting at my desk reading about the philosophy of perception, I consider its strange implications for my apparent perception of myself in the scene of my study. Because this type of scene feels natural and intimately familiar, it is a typical example of how the mind internally recreates or simulates the external world, from simple material objects such as a cup, to more complex objects such as other people, and highly complex systems, such as the minds's own thoughts about the mind.
Holding my coffee cup, I have the consistent impression of solidity and weight, but the feeling of roundness is a convincing illusion constructed entirely within my own mind. This fully compelling illusion that I am directly perceiving the cup itself is due to the perfect consistency of the mental impressions. While it is impossible to determine whether the external cup in fact exists, I can handle the cup to test its consistency within the local, subjective fishbowl of experience, but I cannot prove that there is in fact a cup out there.
I can only perceive the (alleged) external world in the indirect form of my mind's self-created subjective experiencing. As long as the impression of my desk is consistent, the mind draws a shorthand identification of the mental construct of the desk with the alleged desk itself, failing to maintain the subtle distinction between the symbol 'desk' and the hidden (alleged) referent desk. But during a schizophrenic break, the mind's model of the desk loosens and partly disintegrates, warping and rippling. The perfect consistency of the perceptual construct is broken, and like a drastic glitch in a film, the medium of representation becomes exposed and the illusion of direct access to reality is disrupted. The mental construct veil then points to itself as much as it points to the actual desk.
A book is usually experienced as a fixed, rigid object, with sentences arranged into a definite structure. But when the mind studies a book in a loosened state of cognition, the sentences and the meanings swim around noticeably, producing a cut-up effect. It is difficult to read while cognition is loosened, but the thinking occurs at a deep level, where complex meanings and possible connections can be built up, enabling the mind to seek hidden networks of significance in the most mundane books. When normal, tightly bound cognition returns, the book becomes innocent again.
I hold the book and the cup of coffee in my hands, and I move my arms and hands to turn the pages of the book. How do I experience my hand and control it? My hand, arm, and body might be substantial, but I can only experience them in the form of rich mental constructs. The relationship of my arms to my mind is essentially the same as telepresence, the control and monitoring loop between remote robotic equipment and a human operator. The mind includes a cybernetic control loop between the ego and the nerves in the arms. The ego performs the cybernetic role of the controller apparently residing inside the robot-like nervous system of the body, and once the mind gets the cybernetic feel of it, controlling the body feels as natural as driving a car.
Does my body move, or is there just a stream of shifting images and kinetic feelings? Awareness peers out from nowhere, and in information space, inserts itself into the apparent configuration or shape of a body. This convincing body with arms and legs extending out is known to me as a convention of illusion. It is only known to me as a detailed cartoon giving the impression of a 3-dimensional body. The experience of motion through spacial dimensions is a pre-programmed mental scheme to keep track of information, by constructing dynamic information structures, complex spacial models which seem to be real -- simply given and non-arbitrary. During the loose cognition state of meditation or schizophrenia, awareness can be perceived as stationary, or non-mobile, the mind merely synthesizing the convincing subjective effect of movement. It is possible to feel, or "see with the third eye", that the only place where the experiences of motion and the controller actually reside is in information space.
Ontic solipsism is the denial that other minds exist. I cannot tell whether any conscious creatures exist outside my mind. In my experience, dynamic tokens arise and act consistently like self-existent entities. They are like spirits in my head, constructed by auxiliary functions of my own mind, and kept separate from my self-construct by mental categorizing. After the experience of a love-bite from my cat, I swiftly moved my apparent arm toward the appearance of a cat, and although I heard a smacking sound as the cat-image fell to the floor, I cannot tell whether there is in fact a referent 'cat' object in the external realm. The cat-image ran away and disappeared, and is missing from the photograph I took of this scene. Maybe I never apprehended a cat at all -- but my hand has tooth marks.
I am not sure my friend exists; all I have is a picture of him. Every time I perceive this allegedly existing person, that glob of perceptions in my head acts in a consistent pattern. When I tell my friend-symbol in my mind that as far as I know, he might only be a mental image, a mere complex idea, that friend symbol jokes nervously with me, reliably. Other minds, including cats and people, might not exist at all, except as apparently self-willed images in my mind, separate from the control system that I call my self-control. My center of personal activity has a certain type of interactive control over these "other mind" constructs that arise in my thought.
As I look out into this room during a schizophrenic break, not only is the impression of the desk wavering and disintegrating into component perceptions, not only is my friend looking more and more like a cartoon created by a loose mind, but the perception of myself is splitting into two layers: a distant, hypothesized object on the other side of my wall of senses, and a mental fabrication immediately present to awareness, merely posing as that object. In loose cognition, it is easy to apprehend the self-symbol as such: a convenient cognitive self- deception. All experience is in the form of mental constructs, which serve as a cartoonish reproduction of the world, and I only know this inner dweller in the form of a mental construct, the cartoon demon of "myself".
Taking a fresh, loose look at my own cognitive functioning, it appears that the activities of my mind are themselves misconstrued, and my thinking and assumptions about my own cognition are only trustworthy when compensated by deeply pervasive skepticism. For example, I definitely perceive the experience of something called "will" or "self-control", but that perception changes during advanced meditation, when it appears that my will just emanates from within me by itself -- from a place within me that I cannot see. My willed actions then appear to emanate from beyond my awareness.
Eastern and Western philosophy have only met very recently. The work to combine them has barely begun. It's a commonplace idea in Eastern philosophy that faith in external reality is extravagant. This idea combines easily with solipsism, which is one of the core ideas of Western philosophy. In magical, pre-rational awareness, and in modern ego-consciousness, there is confusion between the realms of the mind's symbols and the objects referred to by those symbols, which leads to the assumption that mental constructs are not symbols but are the represented objects themselves. In transcendence or mastery of perception, the mind learns to be skeptical about its own perceptions and hypotheses. The advanced mind learns to draw conclusions that are always held with reservations about its ability to perceive the world, including the partly hidden, partly hallucinatory inner world and its delusional inhabitant.
A vivid theory of perception is crucial to understanding mystic phenomena, especially when you stand back from the entire stream of cognition and observe it objectively with the "3rd eye". The 3rd eye, which is actually just a certain cognitive mode, sees normal perception with acute clarity, and is not taken in by the usual ruts of familiarity and numb acquiescence to routine patterns of mental associations. The profound theory of perception is that which studies not only normal sensory perception, but also 3rd-eye perception, or metaperception.
This perceptual stepping-back from the trail of cognition is shown on the cover of a philosophy book as a man looking into a mirror. You see the back of his head directly, and in the mirror -- you see the back of his head. This cover and book probably inspired the cover of Black Sabbath's acid-influenced album _Sabotage_. On that cover, the band, with heavy crosses hanging from their necks, stands in front of a huge mirror, looking toward you both directly and in the mirror. Black Sabbath used drugs heavily, including a lot of psychedelics. Ozzy Osbourne's albums with Randy Roades -- _Blizzard of Ozz_ and especially _Diary of a Madman_ -- are among the most acid-oriented albums. _Diary of a Madman_ is the most coherent acid rock album ever made, and every single song is oriented toward the storyline which describes Ozzy's classic alchemical quest for full control-power over his thoughts and actions. On the back cover he is symbolically crucified, indicating the failure of the quest but attainment of transcendent knowledge about self-control cybernetics.
>Do you pay attention to visuals? Are they unimportant, or repetitive?
In acid-inspired rock lyrics, "ocean", "waves", "bend", and "shifting" very often allude to visual effects. But also audio effects: warping, phasing, slowing, and speeding up of sound.
Visual distortion is a major factor in exposing sensory constructs as representations generated by the mind, rather than as the actual things re-presented by the sensory constructs. Visual effects serve as a flag: "alert! this is a mental picture of a room, not the room itself. Insofar as the nature of perception is significant, visuals are important.
Visuals also are important because they are one indicator of the intensity of the altered state. There are several types of visuals:
I carried a broom out to my car one day, walking down the middle of the street. I was twirling the broom and balancing it on my fingertip. When the broom swept across my field of vision, it left a physical trail, and thus became a solid fan. This effect is similar to mouse trails, in which the moving arrow-pointer on the computer screen temporarily leaves a solid trail of arrows in its path.
The wave effect is not just two-dimensional; it is a fluctuation of depth as well as up-down and left-right shifting.
Some people also talk of literal visual hallucinations, but in a highly qualified way. There is also talk of geometrical play of shapes and mandalas, but I think these are somewhat elusive and are not common.
>Should I focus on visuals during my peak and leave analyzing and such for the come down?
You can't help but have profound insight into vision during the peak. But it is a good idea to absorb rarely experienced visual effects with your full attention while you have a chance. The peak region is fleeting, and if you stop to read and think, the couple hours go by too fast. It is easy to daydream and read during the entire peak, accomplishing little. You could have used the standard state to laboriously read, and reflect. Half or two-thirds of your attention during the peak window should go towards observation, and one-third, towards analyzing, cataloging, and looking up others' accounts. I especially warn against being inspired to look up a passage in a book, and then end up reading a mediocre passage for three hours, struggling to concentrate against the distraction of the shifting text.
Even with inspiration on tap, the problem of inspiration and timing remains. You can't force great insights and connections, either by overemphasis on observation or analysis.
The visual aspect of acid rock, the loss of shared acid-rock culture: (this comment implies the topic of raves as data-feed for visual and multi-psychedelic effects)
When the Grateful Dead go onstage, many people like to be altered. It's quite a scene then. Kind of messy but you learn to navigate the noise. The interactions are all patterned and organized, but you have to be familiar with the scene. Many other rock artists are inspired and write music to accompany the mystic altered state, but unfortunately, these days especially, the culture of tripping has been completely forgotten. People do hear this music the way it was ultimately meant to be received, but these people are only isolated individuals; there is no shared culture of listening together. Thus, there is no building up of techniques for interpretation, and no passing on of this knowledge to the next generation. So, in general, rock concerts are not a very good setting, though they were originally meant to be, in the mid-60s to mid-70s. Now, "light show" and "psychedelic" have been hollowed of their real intent: these have been reduced to a veneer of flat, literal special effects, that fails to point profoundly to the nature of perception itself.
The shifting facade of perception serves as a question mark regarding the existence of all the things represented by the mental image projector. This projector even obstructs your ability to perceive yourself 5 minutes ago. Our ability to perceive has innate limitations because it uses symbolic representation. The wall of perceptual constructs obstructs a more direct perception of the things themselves. Perception blocks perception. This material is the key to philosophy because it reveals the problematic dimension of the familiar. It succeeds at vividly, forcefully posing or exposing problems where none were seen; it renders abstract problems urgently concrete.
When you close your eyes during the peak period, you do not see objects in the room, but just as tangibly and brightly, you see things with the mind's eye. This is one example of a cognitive effect that is similar to a visual effect, but veers toward the more general realm of perceptual effect. The most obvious perceptual effect is the wiggling of visual constructs. The next most obvious perceptual effect is the distortion of the other common senses. More rarely and significantly, there is the perceptual effect of the opening of the 3rd-eye sense: metaperception, which means perception of perception. Metaperception also means perception of the stream of all cognition, from beyond, behind, or above the stream.
Almost no serious thinkers have ever believed that knowledge is absolutely sure. I agree with the great majority that all knowledge is more or less hypothetical and subject to revision. I especially formulate and put forth the view that all knowledge involves webs of conceptual associations, and these webs are always subject to growth and revision.
>Self-control cybernetics does appear to be a most interesting subject, but I will admit it to being a touch over my head right now. But, I will do some reading and such to educate myself on this topic.
The world needs a vivid picture of the most interesting confluence of topics, centered around self-control cybernetics. It needs a way of writing that is description, explanation, and portrayal. The power of the appropos phrase is remarkable. Finding the right evocative, compelling, vivid phrases and combinations of topics is more relevant than a systematic technical proof of the Theory of Transcendent Knowledge.
Many topics are relevant - determinism, religion, agency, cognitive science, and mystic perception. In philosophy books and articles, writers are too topical and specialized. Combine philosophy of spacetime, tenseless time, philosophy of mysticism, theology, determinism, and self-control cybernetics... then you have some truly mind-blowing ideas that can align into a coherent scheme.
Ken Wilber and Alan Watts write about religion and mystic phenomena, but they have written very little about determinism. It's a missing link. Watts definitely understands that his Zen implies determinism, but he did not really integrate these areas. I am vividly, fully integrating them, portraying the feeling of the full visionary and intellectual encounter with the implications of the possibility of fatedness.
Self-control cybernetics connects with other areas of philosophy besides determinism.
I also have clear, vivid ideas about the philosophy of perception. I need to integrate my theory of perception tighter with my theory of the mystic encounter with fatedness. (Fatedness is felt as divine omnimpotence together with human impotence; our power is a shadowy, passive reflection of the all-powerful cosmos outside of us, a cosmos which in turn could be subject to control by entities outside of it.)
Spend money on LSD and spend your prime time dosing and your in-between time reading non-fiction and writing and working out your insights into Fate, self-control, the nature of freedom, and the philosophy of representation. You have many books to read to begin to answer the flood of essential timeless questions that you are shown in divine psychosis.
Just reading 20 important works on ethics of drug laws, and psychedelics, and following Psychedelic Illuminations zine requires a great deal of time. But there are Western and Eastern religious works, philosophy of religion, epistemology, semantics and philosophy of language, and many other domains which I have listed before, that you must also study, to even begin adequately responding to the revealed nature of self, self-control, and the greater world. For example, alcoholism, schizophrenia, and master-slave psychology all tie in strongly. So, you don't have time to dabble with coke, crack, heroin, and pot, and X, and mushrooms and speed.
All this reading requires a quiet study and the opportunity to be alone for long hours and years. Sessions with others often serve too much to distract you from confronting your internal contradictions of logic about your self-system. Most thinking and realization happens alone, where you can work out the subtle shift of mental associations associated with self, action, and world. How can you split meanings of terms into two, such as 'could'(1) and 'could'(2), or 'I'(1) and 'I'(2), with other people lurking over your shoulder and pressing in on your thoughts? A few sessions with other serious researchers is fine, and helpful, but most sessions should be alone, with just you, your self, and an occasional divine intervention.
There is only time and money enough to establish a friendly supply, dose twice a week, and purchase and read books. If your approach is more diffuse than this, you are not responding adequately to the potential of LSD -- the most profound discovery in human history, because it raises the practical philosophical questions that lead to the highest knowledge.
It is time to get serious. Again, a key strategy is to have recourse of kneeling in humble supplication to the ruler of time and fate, at least when it is expedient to do so. If you have not apprehended your inherent inner aspect of weakness and delusion of autonomous ego-power, you have not searched vigorously enough. The highest ecstasy of rational yet intuitive vision-logic is the rapture or raping of the power of self-control or self-guidance. This is the discovery of our ultimate potential as autonomous moral agents -- the potential for self-deconstruction of self-control, in which ego power expands to the point at which it cannot control its own freedom. The will eludes itself through time. While the metaphysical theory of fate and changelessness remains hypothetical, there does exist a model of self-guidance which is remarkable in that it blows your mind in the experience of ego death (and ego transcendence).
The real value of LSD lies in its perfect applicability as a tool to systematically study and interpret the most remarkable human experience: the phenomenon of ego death, and the associated high philosophical insights, not excluding mania and despair. The other drugs are too great a distraction and are thus merely dope, the dreamy sleep of opium, the foggy darkness of regression. The key to mature self-understanding is none other than Delysid. Therefore, if your interest in self-understanding should be awakened, use this key to its fullest and shun the lower distraction of mere comfortable sleep.
Yet remember that the sacrament is to be worshipped as a door, not as a destination in itself. The microscope's value comes through the expanse of understanding that is revealed by it.
What was the kykeon beverage of the Greek mysteries? The Greeks may well have used lysergic acid.
The mystic altered state includes metaperception -- explicit perception of the wall of perceptual constructs representing self, world, and even thoughts. You watch tv in the mind. When you can see this film as such, as images created within the mind, you also clearly see other aspects of perception. You see the nature of time. You see thoughts arising of themselves. You see a single layer of control-events, with no controller-entity standing over it. You see the ego-image, that dynamic, complicated symbol that represents yourself. You see the dynamic self-symbol as a symbol. The feeling of you, of being in your body -- now this feeling is dissociated and wanders away from you, a foot away. These strange phenomena are largely perceptual. When you perceive the ego clearly, you perceive your "control" as embodied in a stream of mental constructs that arises from a hidden source beyond control. You see thoughts bubbling up and you cannot stop the thoughts, you cannot positively control your own thoughts. You see this with the mind's eye, with the third eye.
The key to integrating the theory of perception with the theory of self-control cybernetics is to discuss what is "perceived" not just with the normal senses, but with the 3rd eye too. There is strong overlap of insight into how the normal senses work, and insight into the workings of self-representation and self-control. When your powers of perception are shaken up and highlighted, when you take a giant step back from your entire stream of cognition, you observe fatedness. You see how every moment is complete and existent in itself, isolated on an island from other places in time. You perceive the flow of time as static and predetermined before you can intellectually comprehend it, but eventually, rational knowledge and theory can catch up to metaperception! The mystic-state change in perception creates hyperawareness of all forms of perception. When you are acutely, abnormally conscious of all forms of perception, you will be abnormally aware of those thoughts, or mental dynamics, involving control -- self-control. You see your usual ideas and systems of self-control, and in doing so, you interfere with your guidance system, actually becoming practically unstable.
To perceive the mental constructs used for self-control is to become unstable in your self-control. Perceiving the mental material constituting control, you build up an explicitly conscious model of your own power to control your will and thoughts, but this model has disconcerting dynamics. You see control, you model control... and you interfere with control. In doing so, you experiment with control dynamics and gain scientific understanding of the illusory aspect of the power of control. The epistemological theory of 'scientific positivism': we observe, we then theorize, and finally we have more power over the world. Applying this to the 3rd eye, as Wilber has done in an outstanding and seminal chapter of _Eye to Eye_, we cognitive scientists can say that we scientifically observe the stream of cognition while in the normal and mystic states, we build theories influenced by these observations, and finally we have more power over our own stream of cognition. But we revise our views on the nature of our mental control-power. I cannot directly, deliberately control my thoughts. When I understand why, I have higher knowledge, but I do not necessarily have increased self-control. Perceiving the wily ways and mirage-like aspect of self-control can actually destabilize self-control, throw it into a tailspin, and effectively rob you of all self-control as you realize fully and vividly that all your self-control actions can be thought of as beyond your control.
To describe that perception and insight, I must also explain how the concept and experience of time is altered in the mystic state of perception. The concept of time must change along with the concept of self-control; these concepts are adjusted most easily when the dynamics of perception are also changed. When the way of perceiving is altered and elevated, distorted and explicitly visible as perception, somehow you see time as frozen into the eternal block universe, and you picture yourself as a slave to the future that is thrusting itself upon you.
You can attempt to avoid thinking about the nature of self-control while on strong doses of LSD, but this can set up a trap. See the book White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts.
Many cognitive scientists are interested in the puzzle of the inner homunculus who appears to live inside the mind and control the thoughts and actions.
>It seems to me, at any rate, that most cognitive scientists are willing to accept some kind of theory in which mental events are explained in terms of brain events. Perhaps the pivotal work on the mind in 20th Century philosophy is Gilbert Ryle's _The Concept of Mind_, published in 1949 and still in print today. In it, Ryle argues against those who would posit mind as anything other than physical states. If you want to be even minimally well-read in the philosophy of mind, you have to have read this book.
All control actions are predetermined, including the most gratuitous, random actions you can think of. This is a logical conclusion as opposed to the normal, gullible dualism of our concept of self-control. There is only my stream of control actions, no controller entity above and beyond the entire stream of control events.
>You may want to look at the following concerning what you write above:
>Donald Davidson, "Mental Events," in _Essays on Actions and Events_ (Oxford, 1980).
>Davidson is a silent giant in philosophy: he doesn't publish much, and when he does he is short and to the point. This essay, first published in 1970, is of historic importance in the philosophy of mind. In it he describes his own theory of how mental events causally interact with physical events, and through his theory he draws some conclusions about determinism and free will, the limits of human knowledge, and appearance and reality.
>How can there be control and choice if everything is fixed?
>Two fairly recent books on freedom and determinism by philosophers:
>Ted Honderich, _A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life Hopes_ (Oxford, 1988).
>R. Weatherford, _The Implications of Determinism_ (London, 1991).
There are many implications he could potentially focus on, implications which have often been ignored. What about Jesus dying for our sins? Christian theology has a lot to say about determinism, moral agency, and the problem of evil. Is God himself subject to determinism?
>I am trying to decorate my room for maximum trippy experience and have run out of Ideas, any suggestions on lighting, wall cover, colors, art, etc.?
Prints of paintings, or original paintings. I have a Klimt that performs well. Photorealism reflects metaperception well.
Occam's razor was first applied to the issue of whether the perceived world exists, or is superfluous
Occam's Razor is both a general rule and a stance toward a particular original topic. What was the original topic for which Occam invented his razor?
Was he arguing that God is an unnecessary hypothesis? Or was he arguing that the world beyond our screen of senses should not be assumed to exist?
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