Post-Perceptual Consciousness? Many future intentional foci of delight (i.e. what we're happy "about") will be embedded in types of consciousness qualitatively as well as quantitatively alien to Darwinian humans.
It is chastening to reflect that a seemingly minor molecular variation in neuro-protein generates types of experience as disparate as sight and sound. Heaven knows what further incommensurable modes of what-it's-like-ness ("qualia") will be disclosed when much more far-reaching changes in the architecture of excitable cells are engineered.
For the Darwinian status quo, based on natural selection acting on random genetic variation, is poised to crumble. All but a trivial volume of (what one may abstractly conceive as) experiential weight space has hitherto been physiologically out of bounds.
There's nothing unnatural about it. But until now, DNA coding for the structures that got us there would have involved crossing genetically maladaptive dips in the fitness landscape. Desert-hopping across maladaptive dips is a process which neo-Darwinian evolution precludes. There's no mechanism that allows it.
Natural selection has no foresight. Once such new kinds of consciousness are finally accessed by design, however, their different textures need not be deployed in a traditional role of tracking, or responding to, extraneous environmental patterns.
They can first be hedonically colonised; and then artistically explored and reordered, woven into rich narrative structures and wild adventures, awarded new functional roles in the mind/brain, or perhaps just savoured for their intrinsic fascination.
Old definitions of self and reality are likely to fall apart in unpredictable ways. It's worth recalling how, at present, occurrent thought-episodes are typically decomposed into their nominally cognitive, affective and volitional aspects: "thinking", "feeling" and "willing". The mysterious trinity may prove just trifling variations, each with their own minor nuances, of a much wider phenomenological family of "serial" streams of consciousness. These new serial modes await discovery or biotechnical invention.
We're just kidding ourselves when we brag about what a rich language we've got today. For it is easy to be seduced by the indefinitely large productive capacity of the early human language-generating mechanism into making a pardonably false assumption. This is that syntax enables one to think and speak about an unlimited variety of things. Yet lying latent among previously inaccessible and maladaptive neurochemical pathways are bound to be immense reaches of experiential hyper-weirdness which - shallow semantic paradoxes aside - can't be properly thought of at all. Their alien exotica will still be cognitively closed off for a long time to come. In the case of unknown hell-states and worse, it may be hoped they will remain impenetrable for ever.
Such hypothesised new categories of experience will be empirically discovered, generated and decently emotionally encephalised only with the aid of first-personal exploration of their intrinsic properties.
Observation without experimentation is not enough. Systematic experimental manipulation of consciousness via psychoactive agents will complement the third-person perspective of physical science. Exploration will be most prudently conducted by ecstatics, native-born or otherwise, rather than by gene-disordered Darwinian minds.
This is because genetically undoctored savages like ourselves are liable to go off on worse trips than we're on at present. At any rate, a priori philosophising on psychedelia's possible nature, using our old neurochemical legacy hardware ploughing away in the same old conceptual ruts, simply won't work.
Contemporary experience and linguistic description lack the necessary semantic primitives to do the job. Only semantic primitives drawn from the new modes of experience - not mere inference-churning using our present limited repertoire of concepts - will conceivably allow a subsequent theoretical understanding of the psychedelic cosmos.
New semantic primitives will be needed as well to express genuinely novel emotions, sensations, modes of introspection and reflexive self-awareness.
This isn't yet consensus wisdom. In mainstream academia, any study of consciousness as a true experimental discipline rather than as a topic of scholastic disputation is nearly impossible. Accounts of systematic first-personal manipulation of its only accessible instance is generally reckoned unpublishable and discreditable.
Ironically, we mock the obtuseness of Galileo's clerical opponents for refusing to look through his telescope. Yet we treasure our own peace of mind no less dearly; so there is little reason for intellectual complacency. In our repressive drug laws we, too, outlaw and penalise forms of knowledge truly disturbing to the established order.
Psychedelics trigger changes of mind which are radically subversive of the existing social, political and academic power-structure and its definitions of reality. The severe penalties for publicly advocating and spreading such dangerous knowledge are not notably more merciful than those of the Inquisition - our prisons are brutal places - though likewise public recantation and penance can sometimes mitigate the full rigour of punishment.
The psychedelias of post-human ecstatics are too hard to contemplate. Predictions for the more distant future of even affective states in the universe are liable to get wilder too. Not merely are we ignorant of the newly synthesised and discovered emotions that biotechnology will deliver. We can't possibly know what neo-cortical "cognitive" processes they will saturate and enrich.
Will consciousness in its current guise of phenomenological and quasi-computational mind take on post-cellular or prosthetically enriched forms? Or, in defence of carbon chauvinism, is there a micro-functionalist argument that the unique structure of the carbon atom and its valence properties means that only organic experiential manifolds and their infused emotions are feasible?
Will there come, eventually, a post-personal era in which discrete, gene-generated superminds choose progressively to coalesce; or will the fragmented island universes left over from the depths of the Darwinian past continue in semi-autonomous isolation indefinitely?
If consciousness is ontologically fundamental to the cosmos, rather than a tacked-on "nomological dangler", do superstrings [or branes, etc] vibrating at energies orders of magnitude higher than ours support modes and intensities of experience correspondingly greater than those of the current low-energy regime? Or do they really lack what-it's-like-ness altogether?
Needless to say, we don't know the answers to such questions one way or the other. All that will be predicted here with any semblance of confidence is that one ancient, soul-polluting type of experience, the generically unpleasant, will soon go the way of the proverbial dodo.
source: http://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#cardinal
It is chastening to reflect that a seemingly minor molecular variation in neuro-protein generates types of experience as disparate as sight and sound. Heaven knows what further incommensurable modes of what-it's-like-ness ("qualia") will be disclosed when much more far-reaching changes in the architecture of excitable cells are engineered.
For the Darwinian status quo, based on natural selection acting on random genetic variation, is poised to crumble. All but a trivial volume of (what one may abstractly conceive as) experiential weight space has hitherto been physiologically out of bounds.
There's nothing unnatural about it. But until now, DNA coding for the structures that got us there would have involved crossing genetically maladaptive dips in the fitness landscape. Desert-hopping across maladaptive dips is a process which neo-Darwinian evolution precludes. There's no mechanism that allows it.
Natural selection has no foresight. Once such new kinds of consciousness are finally accessed by design, however, their different textures need not be deployed in a traditional role of tracking, or responding to, extraneous environmental patterns.
They can first be hedonically colonised; and then artistically explored and reordered, woven into rich narrative structures and wild adventures, awarded new functional roles in the mind/brain, or perhaps just savoured for their intrinsic fascination.
Old definitions of self and reality are likely to fall apart in unpredictable ways. It's worth recalling how, at present, occurrent thought-episodes are typically decomposed into their nominally cognitive, affective and volitional aspects: "thinking", "feeling" and "willing". The mysterious trinity may prove just trifling variations, each with their own minor nuances, of a much wider phenomenological family of "serial" streams of consciousness. These new serial modes await discovery or biotechnical invention.
We're just kidding ourselves when we brag about what a rich language we've got today. For it is easy to be seduced by the indefinitely large productive capacity of the early human language-generating mechanism into making a pardonably false assumption. This is that syntax enables one to think and speak about an unlimited variety of things. Yet lying latent among previously inaccessible and maladaptive neurochemical pathways are bound to be immense reaches of experiential hyper-weirdness which - shallow semantic paradoxes aside - can't be properly thought of at all. Their alien exotica will still be cognitively closed off for a long time to come. In the case of unknown hell-states and worse, it may be hoped they will remain impenetrable for ever.
Such hypothesised new categories of experience will be empirically discovered, generated and decently emotionally encephalised only with the aid of first-personal exploration of their intrinsic properties.
Observation without experimentation is not enough. Systematic experimental manipulation of consciousness via psychoactive agents will complement the third-person perspective of physical science. Exploration will be most prudently conducted by ecstatics, native-born or otherwise, rather than by gene-disordered Darwinian minds.
This is because genetically undoctored savages like ourselves are liable to go off on worse trips than we're on at present. At any rate, a priori philosophising on psychedelia's possible nature, using our old neurochemical legacy hardware ploughing away in the same old conceptual ruts, simply won't work.
Contemporary experience and linguistic description lack the necessary semantic primitives to do the job. Only semantic primitives drawn from the new modes of experience - not mere inference-churning using our present limited repertoire of concepts - will conceivably allow a subsequent theoretical understanding of the psychedelic cosmos.
New semantic primitives will be needed as well to express genuinely novel emotions, sensations, modes of introspection and reflexive self-awareness.
This isn't yet consensus wisdom. In mainstream academia, any study of consciousness as a true experimental discipline rather than as a topic of scholastic disputation is nearly impossible. Accounts of systematic first-personal manipulation of its only accessible instance is generally reckoned unpublishable and discreditable.
Ironically, we mock the obtuseness of Galileo's clerical opponents for refusing to look through his telescope. Yet we treasure our own peace of mind no less dearly; so there is little reason for intellectual complacency. In our repressive drug laws we, too, outlaw and penalise forms of knowledge truly disturbing to the established order.
Psychedelics trigger changes of mind which are radically subversive of the existing social, political and academic power-structure and its definitions of reality. The severe penalties for publicly advocating and spreading such dangerous knowledge are not notably more merciful than those of the Inquisition - our prisons are brutal places - though likewise public recantation and penance can sometimes mitigate the full rigour of punishment.
The psychedelias of post-human ecstatics are too hard to contemplate. Predictions for the more distant future of even affective states in the universe are liable to get wilder too. Not merely are we ignorant of the newly synthesised and discovered emotions that biotechnology will deliver. We can't possibly know what neo-cortical "cognitive" processes they will saturate and enrich.
Will consciousness in its current guise of phenomenological and quasi-computational mind take on post-cellular or prosthetically enriched forms? Or, in defence of carbon chauvinism, is there a micro-functionalist argument that the unique structure of the carbon atom and its valence properties means that only organic experiential manifolds and their infused emotions are feasible?
Will there come, eventually, a post-personal era in which discrete, gene-generated superminds choose progressively to coalesce; or will the fragmented island universes left over from the depths of the Darwinian past continue in semi-autonomous isolation indefinitely?
If consciousness is ontologically fundamental to the cosmos, rather than a tacked-on "nomological dangler", do superstrings [or branes, etc] vibrating at energies orders of magnitude higher than ours support modes and intensities of experience correspondingly greater than those of the current low-energy regime? Or do they really lack what-it's-like-ness altogether?
Needless to say, we don't know the answers to such questions one way or the other. All that will be predicted here with any semblance of confidence is that one ancient, soul-polluting type of experience, the generically unpleasant, will soon go the way of the proverbial dodo.
source: http://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#cardinal
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