Forms of life, forms of mind

6 responses to “Quotes to think about #3:”

1. 

   Maria Fátima Pereira

   June 29, 2024

   Citações bem adatadas às imagens!!!
   Gostei de encontrar uma citação de Fernando Pessoa.
   Bom trabalho!
   Obrigada.

   Reply
2. 

   Leah

   June 30, 2024

   Thank you!💜GEM💜

   Reply
3. 

   Rob Scott

   July 2, 2024

   These are fantastic.

   Reply
4. 

   Benjamin Schulz

   July 3, 2024

   For those who are interested in Goldschmidt’s “hopeful monster.”

   https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hopeful_monster

   Reply
5. 

   Norwegian_Lynx

   July 12, 2024

   Thanks for sharing! One quote I found particularly interesting is the one with the hallucinatory voices that told the patient where to go to have her tumor removed.
   I wondered, what do you make of this episode?
   According to the article, the audience at the conference where this was presented was split into two groups: the x-philes who thought that this was a clear example of well-meaning people using telephatic communication to help her get her tumor removed.
   The other group, the x-phobes thought she had made the voices up to get free medical treatment from the NHS (even though she had lived in Britain for sufficiently long time to be entitled to NHS treatment). A third group thought that the tumor made her feel something, which unleashed a fear in her, and that it was her fear that had made her experience these hallucinatory voices. They also thought that she might have unconciously taken in more information than she realised, and that the address to the hospital that the hallucinatory voices gave her then must have come from her memory. They thought that her mind then reproduced this information as an auditory hallucinatory experience.

   I wondered, what do you think can be the reason for this? How would you explain this? Does it fit into anything you have researched or studied?

   Reply
6. 

   Mike Levin

   July 12, 2024

   I don’t have any definitive data that speak to this, but I can guess at another possibility which I kind of like. What if, what happened is that there were subsystems of the body which recognized a problem, and in this unique case, managed to push information through the linguistic interface to make their needs known to the top-level personality. I think the body is full of subsystems like this and mostly we have to use very indirect methods to get their messages, but I like to think it’s possible to cross the abstraction layers sometimes and get the info in verbal form, hearing it as a “voice”. I think future medicine will exploit this and learn to talk to these subsystems for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes.

   Reply