Comment by augusteo
12 days ago
The manipulation part is what fascinates me. They didn't just correlate alpha wave frequency with ownership perception. They used transcranial stimulation to artificially speed up or slow down the waves, and the subjective experience changed accordingly.
That's a pretty direct causal link between a measurable brain state and something as fundamental as "where does my body end?"
It also makes the self feel uncomfortably fragile
That fragility is something you have to come to grips with if you've ever known someone that has a brain injury.
The self changes rapidly when dementia, alzheimers, a car crash, or a concussion which rocks someone's world the wrong way.
Who we are is incredibly fragile. You are just one bad infection away from being a different person.
I agree with you and I think we're changing at every moment, all the time, but it's usually gradual enough that most people don't notice or care until it manifests as new behavior.
My life is materially the same as it was on Friday but I definitely feel different after events this weekend.
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Buddhism has bad news for you
I once read “The Joy of Living” by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. It should come with a warning. It broke me for a year. I’m actually grateful for the existential crisis it caused me. But it was a brutal experience at first.
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This technique is likely to be utilized in some government interrogation methods now.
An excellent example of research that maybe shouldn't have been pursued, although it's possible that there are a large number of potential recuperative applications as well that I'm not aware of.
I don't think we should stop learning about ourselves out of paranoia. This sort of research could end up just like many powerful tech before (ex. nukes->green energy)
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