Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It

The experience of self is as real as any other conscious experience, such as pain or pleasure. What is illusory, as emphasized by Buddhism, is the idea of a permanent and fixed essence that constitutes the "true self," the "real me."

Common to many transformative experiences is the dissolution of the self, including loss of ego and the body it is chained to.

I want to reemphasize the miraculous existence of any form of consciousness by paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein: Not how consciousness is, is mystical, but that it is.

That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation.

Psychiatrist Judson Brewer, at the time at the Yale University School of Medicine, discovered that these "open" or "closed" states of consciousness map onto activities of the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus complex, part of the neocortical regions engaged when ruminating, introspecting, and daydreaming. Anger and anxiet

The sum of the phi’s of all distinctions and relations is the integrated information of the circuit in this state, symbolized by the uppercase letter phi, Q. This number measures the irreducibility of the substrate. Something with no integrated information does not exist as an integrated entity, as it can be reduced to two or more subsystems withou

We are speaking apes, linguistic creatures through and through. So when GPT-5 or -6 will write the literary equivalent of War and Peace or The Lord of the Rings, it will be difficult to deny it sentience, particularly because of our inborn urge to attribute mind to other creatures. But we should, because it is all imitation. Its consciousness is as

Between intrinsic and extrinsic existence passes the most fundamental of all divides: the Great Divide of Being. This is the unbridgeable chasm between what exists in an absolute sense, in and of itself—namely conscious, intrinsic entities—and what exists only in a lesser sense, for others.

Once this Great Divide of Being, between existence for itse

It is known that the likelihood of long-term therapeutic gains increases with the likelihood of the subject having a mystical experience, prima facie evidence favoring a critical role for subjectivity. It is precisely the high emotional impact of the memories of the vivid and highly unusual psychedelic experience that serves as the primary source o

One common observation is that psychedelics destabilize longrange cortical communication patterns and reduce activity in the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus in the posterior regions of the neocortex. This is the compatible with our knowledge of the brains of people trained in mindfulness. It appears that the less these midline structures a