[ExI] heaves a long broken psi

Spencer Campbell lacertilian at gmail.com
Fri Jan 22 17:17:45 UTC 2010


I think it goes deeper than clinging to one's own worldview in spite
of the evidence, or outright avoiding possible evidence that would
contradict it. I say this because I don't meditate.

I fully believe that if a person meditate regularly over a long period
of time, they will naturally start to hallucinate in the process.
Waking dreams, cryptic muttering from the subconscious. Now,
considering the fact I enjoy my dreams and would very much like the
ability to get more of them and experience them consciously, one would
expect me to meditate every day.

But I don't, and I'm not entirely sure why. I can identify one
rationalization: I don't know how to meditate. Why, then, do I do
nothing to learn? More rationalizations pop up: there are too many
different types of meditation, I don't know which one to choose, it's
probably not the kind of thing you could learn off the Internet, I
would have to take a class. But I haven't even done the research to
know these things! They're just convenient guesses.

So, even within my own worldview I am actively avoiding the weird.
Even the weird I say that I want. I suspect it's a cultural thing, and
not an inborn tendency of the human species. It may have been useful
to bring us up to the scientific sophistication we have today, but now
I feel like it's only holding us back; we have the technology to do
just about anything we could want to do, short of molecular
reconfiguration, but we can't seem to think of anything to do with it.

Before artificial intelligence becomes a possibility, before the first
mind is uploaded, we have to understand a whole lot more weirdness. At
this rate, we have a long time to wait.



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