[FRIAM] Man Probes Consciousness: Consciousness Probes Back (was Re: Does Dusty Love Dave, and VV)

[Stephen Guerin]

I would pay to watch this film! Student production on the dome (digital
Kiva) at IAIA, Ben Shedd? Just a rough cut as students then present their
own experiences.
__

On Sat, Jul 20, 2024, 9:57 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> dragon stories:
>
> *my very first experience with peyote, I was 12-13 and living on the Hopi
> reservation with my aunt and uncle. A group of boys were given the peyote
> as a reward for gathering cottonwood buds for use in a Hopi ceremonial
> dance. Of the five of us only one other wanted to try the drug, so I
> consumed roughly for doses. A massive thunderstorm was in progress. At some
> point, a dragon coalesced from the lightning, thunder, filtered sunlight
> and began speaking to me.*
>
> [important interjection: my brain was "making sense' of an overwhelming
> number of sensations, some detected by nerve endings, others generated by
> frantic neuron firings. Assumed/assuming this is the same kind of thing
> that happens when the brain 'makes sense' of the bombardment of
> sensations/neural firings that create the "illusion" of an external world.]
>
> *we engaged in an apparently long lasting conversation about my recent
> experiences in Hopi-land, the various Hopi stories I had been told that
> summer and how to interpret them. At some point the dragon used the phrase,
> "alarums and excursions;" an idiom I had first encountered some 8 years
> prior (pre-grade school) in a book called **David and the Phoenix**.*
>
> [interjection: till this point my interactions with the dragon were, as
> far as I could tell, pretty much identical to the interactions I might have
> had with another human being in the 'waking world'. This includes the
> implicit assumption that I was interacting with a sentient, conscious, and
> self-conscious being.]
>
> Second story:
>
> *I was exploring the use of pain as a means of inducing an altered state
> of consciousness. Four hours of enduring intense and varied pain
> administered by a sadistic dominatrix in Salt Lake City, made me very
> self-aware with a raspy voice. I began the 9 hour drive to Santa Fe to
> attend FRIAM. Along the way my body went into shock and I dealt with that
> using meditative techniques. I also was playing a CD of meditative Buddhist
> chants that I began to hum out loud with my raspy voice. The result was the
> altered state I had been seeking.*
>
> *Somewhere in Arches National Park, I stopped, stripped naked and walked
> down a dry wash where I 'encountered' a campfire and sat down. Brigham
> Young was sitting at the periphery of the campfire and we began a long
> conversation about Mormon theology and metaphysics, why blacks lost the
> right to the priesthood (there were blacks in the priesthood in Nauvoo
> while Joseph Smith was alive and that is one of the reasons the Mormons
> were persecuted by Missourians), why religions like Christianity, Islam and
> Mormonism changed from Feminism to misogyny, education, eternal
> progression, and a host of other topics.  The conversation ended when I
> realized I would be late for FRIAM unless I stopped and resumed my journey.*
>
> [interjection: both the dragon and Brigham Young were 'illusions'
> constructed "by the brain" just as the 'illusion' of ordinary reality.
> While interacting with them, they were, to me, sentient, aware, and
> conscious entities. I attributed sentience, intelligence, consciousness to
> them precisely because of the perceived interactions- the verbal (in my
> case) and the 'auditorialized' (neuron firings interpreted as sound) voices
> (of dragon and Brigham).]
>
> After the fact self analysis of the incidents conclude that in both cases,
> the "conversation" was between 'my self' and 'my memories': of the David in
> the book and his conversations with the Phoenix in the book; all of the
> writings of Brigham Young I had read years before.
>
> These stories do not, technically bear on where or not dragons are
> conscious, but they most definitely bear on whether or not domestic animals
> and Nick are conscious—by virtue of the fact that the 'data' and the
> 'interpretation of the data' are, evidently, the same.
>
> You might make an argument for 'faulty machinery' in my two stories, but
> what is gained vis-a-vis our common understanding.
>
> davew
>
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