The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind

This is the thing that mystifies me the most about the ideas of consciousness and the soul. If we are more than our mind, then how do we explain how changes to our brain, artificial or natural, can drastically change who we are. What does that mean for an afterlife, if we can't even really say who we are in this life.

I kept thinking in that last paragraph, where she describes everything as going good again, what if its still a delusion like before?

Suppose you created a machine which, in the style of Solomonoff induction (sorta), was designed to find as short or as &quot;elegant&quot; (in whatever sense of that word) of a (computation based) description of the world (so, it makes a model of the inputs it receives, and it receives many inputs, including from the internet, etc.)<p>Further, pretend that it has arbitrarily large computational resources.<p>Even if it could completely predict the inputs it receives (modulo quantum mechanics based randomness), would you expect that it&#x27;s internal model of the world includes some description of consciousness, of an internal experience?<p>I do not mean, would it have some sort of a model of agents, entities that act in a way that tends to optimize some things or other,<p>Rather, I specifically mean the internal experience of things, not just being able to predict that people would say that they experience.<p>I do not think that it would come up with a model of internal experience, And yet, I experience, and so do you.<p>So, I think an understanding of reality based only on computation about physical objects, is incomplete.

Interestingly, I could accurately describe my experience of mania due to bipolar disorder using the exact same words &#x2F; description as the author. The similarity of the subjective symptoms is overwhelming. And yet, the pathology seems very different.

Meh. I always hate these articles about neuroscientists having non-ordinary experiences. Either heterophenomenology is valid or it isn&#x27;t, whether or not you&#x27;re a neuroscientist should be largely irrelevant.<p>If her training as a neuroscientist was providing some sort of special insight into her subjective experiences then that would be one thing, but that&#x27;s never actually the case with these articles, other than intermittently having some basic awareness of what might be going on.<p>By privileging the experiences of people whose backgrounds don&#x27;t have any real epistemological relevancy, I feel like these articles epitomize the hegemonic aspects of science, which is troubling on multiple levels.