Comment by galaxyLogic
1 year ago
To me this suggests the possibility that we normal people could also awaken to some higher consciousness which we as yet cannot even imagine.
1 year ago
To me this suggests the possibility that we normal people could also awaken to some higher consciousness which we as yet cannot even imagine.
What she's describing is the acquisition of our ability to turn experience to story through the tool of language. Imagine a time when you were nearly black-out drunk. You were conscious, but you only existed in that moment; you lacked reflection or forethought that comes with the ability to abstract your experience.
She finally had acquired a tool most of us take for granted--and many of us still struggle to use, preferring to live in that instinctive animalistic ever-reductive singularity of "the present"--and it brought her up to the level of others who grew up with language.
It's unlikely that there's some mysterious level of self-awareness beyond that, because that's kind of what we're wired for.
Even across guman languages we see variation in thought coming from what language can express. We invent languages to describe and communicate our world, but without language tools to express and record something we don't generalize some concepts. The notorious example is societies with no language concept for zero. They still experience eating the last fruit on a bush, or there being no clouds in the sky, but tying those both back to a concept of zero doesn't happen without the word for it. We keep inventing new words. Perhaps one will allow us to make a large jump of aome sorts.
> Even across guman languages we see variation in thought coming from what language can express.
Only to a fairly limited extent. For example, there is some evidence that senses like colour and direction have a connection to language, but it's difficult to isolate this effect and say that language is causing the different senses. In other words, is language giving people a better sense of direction? Or is it that people who use their sense of direction a lot develop specialised language for that? This sort of concept is called linguistic relativism, and there's some evidence for it, but it's difficult to quantify or generalise too much.
What there is no evidence for is linguistic determinism, the idea that your language determined how you think and what you are able to think of. For example, your case of the empty bush: yes the people in question may not specifically use the word zero, but they understand what an empty bush is. In research, experiments with people who have no words for numbers showed that they could understand precise numerical quantities, albeit only to a limited extent because they hadn't learned the skill of maths. In other words, it wasn't language limiting them (otherwise they wouldn't be able to understand numbers at all), but having never learned how numbers work, they had never developed the relevant parts of their language.
3 replies →
Many people are just living in the moment and feel life is happening to them, being able to abstract your experience is not common.
That is to put it mildly fantastic. And we the normal people don't probably appreciate it often enough. We take it for granted and then a story like Heller's puts focus on it.
Here's a nice book that covers related topics, not sure if it is correct everywhere but it is discussion:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780936756363/the-ecstasy-of-commun...
There's more than a few pieces of circumstantial evidence that point to this level of higher consciousness being defined by a non-linear perception of time. Not least among those, the fact that people have been using powerful psychoactive drugs in a spiritual context and claiming to be able to do just that for just about as long as people have been doing things in a spiritual context. It's framed different ways - visions, prophecies, inspirations from the Gods, reliving the past, etc. - but bending the arrow of time is the defining universal characteristic of many, many drugs across the history of the human race. If we're going to talk about higher levels of consciousness, that seems like the obvious place to start.
I agree and "Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley seems to suggest so as well.
The biggest thing for Heller I guess was that she could all of a sudden perceive, and not only perceive but also understand language. So I'm wondering what would be the equivalent big leap between my current consciousness and the consciousness I cannot yet imagine? What would be the equivalent of "discovery of language" in that scenario? I'm just wondering I don't think we can have the answer before we get there.
That's the question I was trying to answer. I don't think we can quantify or qualify what higher consciousness actually is, but my hypothesis is the perception of time as non-linear is what leads to it, similar how the perception of communication gave rise to Keller's self awareness.
2 replies →
To consider: if you could read every book in existence, watch every movie and show, experience every path through every trail, see through the eyes of every person - as if time had all just happened at once - how would you think? What would your abstraction of the experiences be? How would you condense that into an understanding that could fit back into a single person's experience?
To some extent, this is already the experience of the internet, and of language and culture in general. We already operate at levels of empathy and understanding of possibilities at scales people even 50 years ago didn't come close to. We build many abstraction tools to try and distill these experiences down to wikipedias, reviews, analyses, podcasts. We distill even those too - with a constant meta-cultural debate on what's important, what's cool, what's political, what fits our personal identities, and what our interests and purposes are within the space of potential understanding.
We live in the space of the abstract. We build virtual worlds, games, movies, economies in the abstract. We anticipate a future where the abstract becomes even more tangible, yet also more diverse and ephemeral. We are a flowering seed on the stalk of human consciousness up to this point - just how every generation has been to the ones before it - changing each time.
While this can still all reduce to "language" - the tool used between each generation, and which Keller used to awaken to the living culture of her moment in time - it's not just language anymore. There are more mediums now. A complex story can be told with merely tacit interactions, exploring a virtual physical space with no dialogue. Practical abstractions of these spaces make operating systems. Language and abstract consciousness are embedded into new environments both virtual and real, instilling new tones of consciousness in everyone who interacts with them - just look at your phone use behavior for proof. We are learning how to shape our minds by shaping our spaces. We are learning to control the entire breadth of our experienced reality at once, so we can control ourselves (and each other).
Our limited bandwidths enforce that experiencing these perpetually crafted realities, stories, recorded experiences, journeys - be done one at a time, lest we lose parts of the whole in the abstracted summary. And so we practice witnessing a mix of short abstractions and deep dives, making the most of a variety of experiences, all while balancing a real life and profession. We maintain that bridge between the grounded experience of the now and the abstraction of the digested analyzed fiction of everything else. The limits of the human perception seem to prohibit us from anything else.
But are those limits permanent? Are we forever to experience time in such limited balanced uniform slices? Will we never manage to connect our brains to these machines which experience time so much faster, and less linearly? What would we be if we could experience all these worlds, not through merely abstracted stories and reviews, but through a direct walk - as if we were the eyes of every other person out there, in every second of experience?
Before we get to answer those questions for ourselves - and I don't think they're forever insurmountable technological challenges - it seems likely a new species of intelligence, raised from the start to think exactly like that, is being spawned in AIs. We will see how it communicates the experience back to our lower dimensional slices of experience.
I think the problem with this line of thinking is that we _know_ humanity can speak, and has some innate ability to formulate and learn from language. We don't exactly have a means of proving there's a means of consciousness beyond speaking internally and imagining sensations our nerves can comprehend. To say there may be unlocked consciousness would imply either we're capable of communicating with or feeling a sensation beyond what we can already say is reality. Like what would constitute a consciousness we can't imagine? Seeing on a broader wavelength? Withstanding higher pressures, lower temperatures? Some mention time, or the possibility we could be able to interpret others' brainwaves, but without concrete organs to connect these sensations to, it all seems far too subjective to call consciousness. And what about people that experience consciousness differently, incapable of making images or even words in their heads? Is that backwards, or are we forwards?
2 replies →
I've always seen this as simply convincing hallucinations rather than reality (the brain is able to believe some rather outlandish things after all). For example, the folks who say they live whole lives in a dream, when in reality their brain simply had a strong perception of having lived a whole life, without any of the actual experience beyond a few brief false memories, which is quite different.
Is that a meaningful difference? We are only our memories. How they were created doesn't change the experience of their recall.
2 replies →
That's probably more like going back to a primitive state, with impaired consciousness or language construction, and reflecting upon that experience with consciousness and proper language.
I think many "normal" people have already reported this exact thing, over and over.
That's called LSD.
I think this is absolutely right. I think there are many ways we can elevate our consciousness.
A profound change for me is seeing all communication and behavior of others as primarily a gradual revelation of other’s perspectives, and the logics (how they understand things) behind those perspectives - putting any judgements on their behaviors, or any ability to persuade, in a very back seat.
The actionable mirror of this perceptive stance is to avoid and distrust the efficacy of bridging differences with persuasion.
And also, to accumulate (instead of dismissing) all the alternative perspectives I can. Unanticipated combinations of others perspectives have changed my mind, long after acquiring them.
Instead of persuasion, take the half step of explaining the logic behind your perspectives, and understanding theirs. Without expecting adoption, or “belief” changes for either side.
Trusting others to change their own minds, in time or not at all, and visibly leaving the door open for one’s own evolution, is a very respectful stance.
In my experience, people feel a slow attraction to accepting and believing what they understand, in the absence of any coercive context.
But even when they don’t, they are more tolerant and less fearful of alternate perspectives when they can see the logic behind them. And feel like their own perspective’s logic is acknowledged.
Often common values behind seemingly antithetical perspectives are revealed that way. And greater willingness to collaborate toward values while appreciating continued bifurcated perspectives.
We all tend to judge behavior we don’t understand very harshly. Morally and intellectually. We judge the people who behave inexplicably harshly.
But persuasion tries too much. Two steps instead of one. It often creates tension and triggers rejections that explanations without proscription do not.
I don’t know how well this comes across, but it’s helped me as a teacher (not one by career) and to deal with difficult and ideological people much more effectively.
It is the lens I now see all social movement, in the small and large.
It is a dramatic change. I have made friends whose values I have completely challenged, and continue to do, who appreciate I understand their perspectives too.
And that our back and forth is an enjoyable and enlightening collaborative conversation, for both of us, not a fight. Each moment I understand them better, is a win for both of us. And for constructive engagement.
Probably not communicating this well. But if not parsing reality - and how all our brains actually choose what to believe, what choices to make - isn’t a higher level of consciousness, I don’t know what is.
Seperate perspective logic from beliefs, and process people’s values and actions with less judgement and more nuanced clarity of how they (we all) really operate.
TLDR; You don’t have to change your mind, or change other people’s minds to help them understand a different perspective, and to understand other’s perspectives. This is a lower bar, but stronger foundation for seeing and working with others than persuasion, an act that involves pitting ideas against ideas prematurely.
Permeating one’s view of the world as an ecosystem of perceptions, and the logics behind each of them, not beliefs, opens up profoundly better insights and results.
No [perspective] is right. [Many] are useful.
Understanding any perspective that anyone has is useful for updating one’s own model of the actual world, and one’s model of the human world.
It makes you multilingual, and a more effective and welcome “warrior priest” for peace and progress, in our untamed world of cultures, tribes, ideologies, and beliefs.