The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence

[Dionysos]

I'm posting this in case others might find it as interesting as I did. It's a google tech talk by Rupert Sheldrake about his theories about "the extended mind", as in the mind is not confined to the brain/body. It's very scientific/based in the scientific process and things like quantum entanglement/mechanics are mentioned, so I advise you not to instinctively recoil thinking "magic!".

Speaker: Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 75 technical papers and ten books, the most recent being The Sense of Being Stared At. He studied at Cambridge and Harvard Universities, was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He is currently Director of the Perrott-Warrick project, funded from Trinity College Cambridge.

[Chopium]

Magic!

[Gradius]

Very psuedoscientific in my opinion. He claims basic thought doesn't take place in the mind yet telepathy is evolutionary, thus physically taking place within the brain.

[Dionysos]

Very psuedoscientific in my opinion. He claims basic thought doesn't take place in the mind yet telepathy is evolutionary, thus physically taking place within the brain.

What? He doesn't claim "basic thought does not take place in the mind", at all... his theory says that all aspects of the mind are not confined to the brain. Like the brain being an "antenna" of some kind.

[Gradius]

I can't be bothered to search but I'm almost certain he makes the assertion that "no one has ever observed a though happening inside the brain".

[iamhoops]

Fascinating stuff, I just finished watching. Thank you for posting this. Personally, I find this type of research deeply interesting. You can believe what you like as far as HOW these experiments work, but clearly the statistical data seems to show that they do.

This also ties in nicely with a (completely unscientific) theory I've been working on related to the idea of a collective consciousness, or perhaps sub-consciousness, similar to a lot of eastern religious philosophy. For a while I've believed that we are all interconnected in some way, and here is a scientific theory that (at least partially) supports it! Hooray!

[Mr. Happy]

yummy

[Mr. Happy]

I like to think of the mind as nurdles of creation that occur when multi-dimensional arrays of multi-dimensional arrays interface to quickly causing virtual particles to pop in and our of existence thus warping the feedback loops into a different type of math space.

[coder0xff]

I'm 6 minutes in and I'm already calling shenanigans. If our perception of reality is our mind interacting with reality, and not-reconstructing it, then hallucinations don't happen.

[city14]

I think that would make hallucinations our mind incorrectly reading reality.

[coder0xff]

When you say reading reality, I think what you're considering is that there is reality, our mind reads it, and constructs our perception. But the point that he's making is that what we perceive - that "virtual" instance - isn't virtual at all. It's the actual instance. That means there's no space between perception and reality - which is easy to provide counter examples for.

[city14]

I guess I was flawed a bit there... I guess I meant, that rather than our mind interpreting change between reality and the mind, the hallucination occurs when the brain just constructs its own reality without the aid of the "true" reality. That way, if you hallucinate you are adding to reality with your fabricated one. Something like that.

[Mr. Happy]

TIME IS NOT BIDIRECTIOONAL

STOP THINKING DIMENSIONALLY

FU

[coder0xff]

when the brain just constructs its own reality

But the whole point of the topic is that this does not happen - that the brain constructs nothing. In reality though, your brain does construct your perception, and when you are hallucinating it's just doing it wrong.

[Dionysos]

when the brain just constructs its own reality

But the whole point of the topic is that this does not happen - that the brain constructs nothing. In reality though, your brain does construct your perception, and when you are hallucinating it's just doing it wrong.

I thought the point was that this "morphic field" or whatever is akin to another sense, not that the brain constructs nothing.