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

[Edward Angel]

The original plan for the IAIA dome was to record stories.

Ed
_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)		 	angel at cs.unm.edu <mailto:angel at cs.unm.edu>
505-453-4944 (cell) 				http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

> On Jul 20, 2024, at 10:56 AM, Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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 <mailto: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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