Has it ever been conclusively stated either way? Is the Hive Mind sentient in the same was as humans or orks, capable of forming ideas and thought, and, if it so chose, it could directly communicate with other races? Sort of like how the Borg in Star Trek communicated with the Enterprise in "Q Who."

Or is it more an infinitely intelligent and adaptable animal? like a pack of border collies working together herding sheep, except there's a nearly infinite number of collies who are a trillion times better at figuring out how to best go about herding stubborn sheep?

Obviously we learn from a young age that death is inevitable. But regardless, it still feels as if my consciousness will last forever. My brain can't handle the thought that one day, my consciousness will simply turn off, and it will never turn back on again. And I won't even suffer because of it, because there will literally be nothing. I can't even properly explain the feelings, but I'm sure you all know exactly what I mean.

I stumbled upon this accidentally while posting to raid secrets a similarity I saw between DSC symbols and mind-body dualism. Where this rabbit hole led has absolutely HUGE lore implications, confirms previous theories I've had and reveals that without Clarity, the transfer of consciousness from a human brain to an exomind would be IMPOSSIBLE without breaking the second law of thermodynamics.

Not sure if this has been mentioned but one of the symbols in the Clovis Bray mysterious log book (that is also seen around the Bray installations on Europa) bears striking resemblance to René Descartes' illustration of mind/body dualism.

This is the image in question

René Descartes' (who famously said "I think, therefore I am") believed inputs were passed on by the sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit. Dualism itself differs from Monism in that it assumes the Mind and Body are distinct non-identical entities as opposed to manifestations of a single substance.

This is something known as the Mind–body problem

>The mind–body problem is a debate concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind, and the brain as part of the physical body. It is distinct from the question of how mind and body function chemically and physiologically, as that question presupposes an interactionist account of mind–body relations. This question arises when mind and body are considered as distinct, based on the premise that the mind and the body are fundamentally different in nature

So clearly this was an important problem in the field of Exo science as in Destiny there is clearly a duality between the human mind and the Exo body.

The image above stuck in my head because of the hourglass because after hearing "an hourglass counting down with infinite patience", this was actually the first reference to an hourglass in-game that I have encountered.

You can see further imagery from Descartes' papers here and here.

Now one thing I noticed is that in Descartes' image all the lines point to an arrow but in Clovis Bray's diagram they point to an hourglass.

Why do the RoboBrains in Fallout 4, specifically the Elites in Vault 118 and the pre-war Holotapes in the Research Facility under the Robco Sales Center which were recordings of the first Robobrains, keep their original personalities

Vault 118 had all the Artists, Actors and etc retain their original personalities when they became Robobrains.

Robobrains processing units are basically the Brain removed from the human body, as proven in Fallout 76 where we have to manufacture a Robobrain by using the brain from a pre-war Scientist.

There's no other organs transplanted into the Robobrain cause the Couriers brain in FNV said that the hormones produced by other organs are involved in making up a personality.

If this is the case, why does the Couriers removed brain have an entirely different personality from the Courier but the FO4 and FO76 Robobrains have kept their pre-mechanical "original" personalities?

That trapped Knight in Halo 5 looks like he remembers New Phoenix... Is that canon?

Hi Stupidpol-

I’m a high school Special Ed/ELA teacher trying time develop a curriculum based on literature and raising class consciousness.

So much of the curriculum we teach in NYC is based on identities. However bad you think you have it in your job, education is permeated with essentialism, dubbed “culturally relevant instruction.”

What I find however, is that the takeaways from these curricula for kids is that they are supposed to walk away acknowledging the prejudice that outsiders have faced (cool, fine) but also that identity-individualism is more important that societal-communitarianism. That’s the last thing we need in the USA, it’s rugged individualism, but woke.

I am looking for suggestions for fiction (especially short fiction) and poetry on grade 6-12 reading level, which has some sort of message of class consciousness and/or communitarianism. Bonus points if the work comes from some minority faction of American/global culture.

I (22M 180/70) have been losing consciousness ,feeling nauseated and dizzy after taking a shower recently. It only lasts a few seconds, so I have been ignoring it but is this something I should be worried about? I would say it happens once in a few weeks and I would say it started around a year ago. I don't have any medical conditions that I am aware of and do not smoke, drink or do drugs.

edit: Thank you to every one who has commented, I appreciate it! I am planning to mention it to my doctor in 2 weeks during my annual checkup.

I hope I'm on topic because I'm quite fascinated by these theories and Zen is also supposed to be about understanding Mind/true nature so I don't see conflict there.

I'm looking to share two scientific theories about consciousness and discuss your input about whether any of them align to the Zen view of Mind.

You can find a broad description of all approaches to the hard problem of consciousness here (including ones saying there is no such thing as a hard problem at all): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

But mainly I would like to focus on two theories as the most likely contenders (in my mind):

*Biological Reductionism https://youtu.be/H6u0VBqNBQ8

This animated video proposes a way consciousness could have emerged via evolution and since I do find the logic/evidence for evolution via natural selection quite compelling in many other aspects of living things, this sequence of events is quite plausible.

The logical conclusion of this theory is that consciousness is nothing special. In fact, it's quite ordinary. Just a (debatably) happy accident, a side effect of millions of years' worth of micro-changes fine-tuning organisms for survival and procreation.

Some reductionist philosophers go as far as claiming our conscious experience is illusory in nature.

It would jive with the whole ordinariness of ZM's teachings (think ordinary mind is the way, no mind etc.), but would not explain why ZMs took this Zen business so seriously. Also would not explain the mysticism around the topic, although that could just be chalked up to the then-current cultural environment of China.

*Integrated Information Theory https://youtu.be/Xetgy2tOo9g (watch from 7:40)

This video really provides an excellent summary and does a much better job than I ever could but the main point of the theory is that consciousness is a naturally emergent property of interconnected information, it exists on a spectrum and the more interconnected an information system is, the more conscious it is.

This is an exciting scientific theory because it entails that panpsychism is true in some form, meaning that consciousness is everywhere where any amount of interconnected information can be found.

Bonus: Sir Roger Penrose also proposed a fascinating quantum-based approach to consciousness that hinges on it not being computational therefore it needing to rely on a non-computational system. If I understood it correctly, quantum physics is the only non-computational sy

TLDR; If you don't want a summary of everything just skip to my theory toward the bottom because that's where I tie this back to shifting.

I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANYONE ON THIS SUBREDDIT SAY THEY ARE SKEPTICAL ABOUT SHIFTING UNTIL YOU HAVE CLICKED ON ALL THE LINKS, LOOKED INTO ALL THESE TOPICS, and if you STILL think this is fake you can contact some of the scientists in the research paper I linked and ask them if it's real.

Physics deals with our physical world, which we are very familiar with. In this world, we have cause and effect, and we deal with the forces involved with the physical events we observe.

In quantum physics, we deal with the randomness and uncertainty of physics, attempting to explain and understand complex ideas like how particles travel as waves of probabilities and collapse when they come into contact with certain things.

Quantum Jumps

In quantum physics, there is something called a “quantum jump.” Contrary to what you probably believe, quantum jumps are not magical or extraordinary events. They happen every day, all day.

Quantum jumping occurs on the electron level, within atoms.

In an atom, an electron can jump to different orbitals. An atom has a center, and around it are the orbitals, and on the orbitals are the electrons. Here’s a model of what that looks like, but we can also imagine that the center of the atom is like our solar system’s sun, and each electron is a planet that has a certain path that it orbits around the sun, like this.

So we know that all atoms have electrons and these electrons are on their orbitals. But as it turns out, electrons jump from orbital to orbital. They do this by absorbing light particles, called photons, which causes them to enter an excited state, and jump orbitals.

The reason that electrons undergo a quantum jump is because they cannot exist in that space in between the orbitals. The orbital is the only path they can exist on, so they have to jump between these paths instead of travelling through space like we might imagine an object to travel.

If you were to try to observe this, you would see the atom disappear, and reappear nearly instantly on the

I've been curios about if there is life after death and was recommended this sub. What are your beliefs on if there is life after death? Did astral projection change your beliefs at all.

From what I understand, the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" arises from the difficulty in reconciling physicalism with the phenomenal qualities of our experience. Now, I take physicalism to be the view that there is an external world made of matter which obeys some observable laws, and furthermore this "external" world is "all there is". In fact, under this view, it doesn't even make sense to talk of an "external" world, because it is not really "external" with respect to anything: even we observers are part of it. On the other hand, the phenomenal qualities of our experience, which I assume to be the so-called "qualia", are so unlike the kind of entities that we think make up the external world: they are immaterial, private and indescribable, although they are immediately knowable by us, we are immediately acquainted with them. We could in theory discover (and considerable progress is being made in this respect by neuroscience) a perfect, one-to-one correlation between some parts of the external world (brain states) and our phenomenal experiences, but this would be a correlation between two very distinct and unreconcilable dimensions of reality.

There are typically three attempts at resolving this contradiction.

1. Some people (like Chalmers) "bite the bullet" and accept the existence of a non-physical dimension of reality.
2. Some others (especially neuroscientists I believe) attempt to explain qualia in physical terms.
3. Finally, some people (like Dennett) deny the existence of qualia altogether, they practically say that we are tricked by our brains into believing that we have qualia.

Now, I find the second attempt metaphysically unfeasible, because it seems to me that it cannot ever go beyond correlation (or even causation, but I don't think it makes a difference here) between two ultimately unreconcilable dimensions of reality. The third view feels very awkward to me, because it denies the very thing that gives rise to it. Surely our phenomenal experience is a datum, nay, the only datum; it is the starting point of all knowledge. Only from our phenomenal experience can we postulate the existence of an external world, but we don't have to. It is just a very convenient interpretation and allows us to better understand our experiences (for example it is convenient to think that the sun keeps moving in its apparent motion on the sky when I take a nap, so that when I wake up I have a simple explanation of why the sun appears

I was raised detached from my Ijo + Edo traditions. My mother, who is Ijo from Bayelsa state, is a staunch roman catholic. She never taught me my language and neither did my father. As we all know this is a result of colonisation and the trauma of immigration to an imperial land that is still exploiting our motherland (the UK). I have been researching into the practices of my ancestors who venerated ancestors, took part in ritual and even called upon the gods of warriorship (Egbesu) to balance out the injustices when times became violent. These are things my mother looked down upon and called 'demonic' and 'not what god wants' but how can a tradition of her own ancestors be demonic and not that of praising a white jesus?

Fora long time, even before the brutalities of #endsars began, i have been wondering whether this loss of our collective consciousness and Spirit - knowing that we belong to a purpose higher than capitalism and ego - has shaped the way Nigeria has become today? A place that is now so full of violence and injustice but once housed the most beautiful kingdoms, including the Benin Kingdom that had a man made moat protecting the entire area and was bigger than the great wall of China. Until the British colonisers knocked it down.

I just really wonder how new religions and dogmas that we did not create have shaped us and whether that has made us hollow, not seeing the true meaning of what it means to be human beings. The intergenerational trauma of enslavement, genocide and colonialisn making us purely patriotic and less of humans with the capacity to just 'be'.

I would love to hear your thoughts! ❤

I'M SO PROUD OF MYSELF! I consciously experienced sleep! I've heard of people doing this but never could till today! The only time I achieved anything close was when I half woke up in the middle of the night and then put myself into a lucid dream. But it definitely was not going from being fully conscious. The hardest part for me is getting in that half-dream half-awake state where you are conscious but just in your mind and not aware of your body. BUT TODAY I SUCCEED. I was just gonna take a 10 min nap and I wasn’t gonna lucid dream, but as I felt myself falling asleep Idk how but I just kept consciousness. Then I started to dimly see my dreams. For me, my imagination and my dreams are very different. I knew if I started moving at that moment that I would move IRL so I just waited. As my dream got brighter and brighter I started feeling my dream body more and more. My dream wasn’t fully vivid yet but I started trying to move. I gained more and more control and was now able to control my dream. It didn’t last very long since my mom woke me up after 10 mins but it was amazing being able to experience falling asleep consciously.

Today a video of a black man being beaten to death by security in supermarket surfaced. if this was in the US, this market would be on fire now

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