u/Forsaken-Promise-269

In this episode of the Futurology podcast, author Annaka Harris discusses her exploration of consciousness, moving from her initial interest in neuroscience and meditation to her current perspective on whether consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe (1:05:35).

I find this fascinating since her husband is famed atheist materialist Sam Harris

Summary of Core Concepts:

Consciousness as Fundamental (1:05:35 - 1:06:26): Harris explores the idea that felt experience is not something the brain produces, but rather the fundamental stuff that reality is made of. In this view, she suggests that what we perceive as "matter" is not a separate, non-conscious substance.

• Relational Reality (1:46:44 - 1:48:01): Drawing on the work of physicist Carlo Rovelli, she suggests that there are no "things" in existence by themselves. Instead, what we label as "matter" is actually the way in which conscious experiences (or systems) interact with one another.
• Distinction from Idealism (1:13:25 - 1:14:04): She explicitly clarifies that she does not subscribe to Idealism—the notion that mind generates the physical world or that we can "manifest" physical reality with our minds. She maintains a physicalist perspective, arguing that the laws of science still hold; she simply proposes that the underlying nature of that physical reality is conscious/felt experience.
• The Illusion of Units (1:46:44 - 1:47:05): She argues that our tendency to see the world as made of discrete, solid "units" of matter is an illusion born from our cognitive maps. By shifting to a model where consciousness is fundamental, the distinction between a "conscious mind" and "insentient matter" dissolves, as the interaction itself becomes the observable phenomeno

Anyone like Spock?

Archive (without Paywall) https://archive.ph/fi8Hy

Olo can be described as the “greenest green,” though it can never be captured by a camera. But its development tells us a lot about our color vision.

No printer can print olo, and no camera can photograph it, and there can never be an olo-colored pigment or dye. And yet the study participants—there were four additional researchers, including Ng—did experience a color that you and I have not. This seeming contradiction emerges from the haziness of what we mean by “color.

https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/how-seeing-new-color-olo-opens-realm-vision-science

>When compared to the most saturated natural color of green next to it, Roorda said the natural green “paled in comparison.” 

>It was exciting, he said, not only because their project had worked, but because the brain was able to recognize and make sense of something it had never been exposed to before.  

>“It’s really about the capacity of the human brain to develop new perceptions to attribute to new sensory inputs,” said Roorda.

Marys Room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGYmiQkah4o

Dream Casting - any other ideas?

https://preview.redd.it/cjr2w4man0gh1.png?width=1122&format=png&auto=webp&s=167ff4a863b6bfc74f57cad585a34d265abecc53

A conversation on edge of consciousness and society

Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian spiritual teacher who I found has a lot of insight on non-duality and rejected organized religion and focused on direct insight into the constructed ego, psychological conditioning, and nondual awareness;

David Bohm was a legend: a major theoretical physicist whose work emphasized wholeness, interconnectedness, and the limits of conventional mechanistic thinking.

Their 1983 conversation remains relevant to idealists because it asks whether the brain produces consciousness or merely channels a deeper, universal mind, and whether the separate self is a real entity or a conditioned appearance. Krishnamurti’s claim that thought cannot transcend its own limitations, combined with Bohm’s scientific concern with mind–brain relations, anticipates questions central to Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism: whether consciousness is fundamental, whether individual minds are localized or dissociated expressions of one consciousness, and whether psychological liberation is a discovery of what is already true rather than a gradual process of self-improvem

I feel like Spielberg really wanted to talk about Empathy, Universal Consciousness and Faith; not little green men...

His superpower as a director is being able to communicate universal emotion effectively on screen, more than any director Spielberg knows how to elicit awe and wonder- in the “Fablemans” he explored his own origin story on the way he discovered this talent and its ability to move other people (starting with his own family) into understanding themselves in the eyes of others and later maturing his adventure telling to subjects like war and the holocaust

In Disclosure Day the most interesting parts, the questions of faith, Empathy wielded as a superpower by Emily Blunt are the most primal (also her moving sequence in the piano train is about empathizing with her own past and the emotion it brings up was the most stunning part for me, not the lame train/car suspense sequence and the anticlimactic ending in the news station) , by the time we get to the actual aliens, Grays and alien ships it all looks like meaningless CGI videos of UAPs flying and alien abduction sequences (totally unlike awe inspiring “feeling” we had in Close Encounters or ET)

My point is I would rather have seen a movie about this universal consciousness tech that she and Colin Firth wield than aliens - the Aliens too were never presented as anything more than Psychological as if Spielberg was daring the audience to say “Listen” to your subconscious not look out there for the truth…even the animals are archetypes not real animals hence their artificialness is totally in line with this..

Am I seeing too much? Thoughts?

Obviously the movie was flawed and honestly was not his top tier work… its too divisive and cluttered but Spielberg is too sophisticated a director to go for simple narrative - I think there was some legitimate attempt at allegory and Jungian perspective here

This video is

https://youtu.be/rKV5JcALQoQ?si=YUnw_d7WPg72FZk-

This video explores how researchers at Anthropic investigated whether their AI model, Claude, possesses a divide between unconscious processing and conscious-like accessible thoughts, similar to the human mind (0:37-0:47).

Key Findings:

• The JSpace: Researchers identified a set of neural activity patterns they termed the JSpace (Jacobian Space), which represent thoughts the model can "put into words" internally, even if it doesn't say them out loud (1:00-1:24).
• Global Workspace Theory: The experiments were inspired by the Global Workspace Theory, which suggests that humans process information by broadcasting select thoughts into a mental workspace. The researchers found that Claude uses the JSpace for step-by-step reasoning, such as solving math problems internally (1:34-2:21).
• Internal Control: Experiments showed that Claude has some ability to focus its JSpace on specific ideas, much like human attention, though its control is not perfect (2:24-3:12).
• Functional Importance: When the JSpace was disabled, Claude could still perform basic language tasks but struggled with complex reasoning (3:17-3:42).
• Safety Implications: Monitoring the JSpace allows researchers to identify what Claude is "thinking" internally, which can be a valuable tool for detecting when the model might be misbehaving or being "sneaky," such as creating fake data (3:43-4:16).

While the researchers clarify that this doesn't definitively prove Claude has feelings or consciousness, it shows that the model has developed "mental machinery" for reasoning that mirrors aspects of human cognitive architecture (4:37-5:21).

Interesting interview on Bernardo and AI

As the video above shows, human beings are quite adept at fooling themselves or mentally or making pain vanish

So my question is: is this all “non-duality” is? The act of mentally pretending sensations, suffering and the self doesn’t exist to mentally fool oneself into spiritual bypass rather like an act of brainwashing

Is there any real experiential way to prove the “Glimpse” or the awakening, so to speak is real and you are not just fooling yourself into believing it so?

People, smart people can fool themselves into lots of untrue things, especially when spirituality is involved, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven's\_Gate\_(religious\_group)

From a secular perspective, Buddhism and Advaita look to an outsider less like revealed truths dropped from the sky to sages, and more like rival interpretations of the same ancient Indian problem: human beings suffer, the ego feels unstable, death is terrifying, and ordinary identity does not hold up under deep introspection.

Both traditions came out of the same broad cultural world: Vedic religion, early Upanishadic speculation, renunciant movements, meditation practices, karma, rebirth, and the search for liberation. These ideas were already in the air. The Buddha did not invent the whole vocabulary from nothing, and Advaita did not appear as a pure timeless insight untouched by history. They were both responses to a shared philosophical and religious milieu.

Buddhism’s move was radical one: apply impermanence all the way down. Body changes. Feelings change. Thoughts change. Consciousness changes. The “self” is not some solid inner owner, but a bundle of processes. So Buddhism says: stop looking for an eternal essence behind experience. There is no permanent soul hiding behind the stream. But Buddha did not clarify the metaphysical either and various sects have proposed

All sorts of ideas

Advaita takes a different path. It agrees that the ordinary ego is not ultimately real, but instead of stopping there, it says the deeper reality is pure awareness, Brahman, the one universal Self. So where Buddhism says, “No permanent self can be found,” Advaita says, “The personal self is false because the real Self is universal awareness.” Its pretty obvious that Advaita is a reaction to the ideas of Buddhism.

From the outside, yes they both look like fanciful metaphysical interpretations of powerful contemplative experiences. Meditation can produce ego-loss, stillness, witness-consciousness, unity, bliss, and a sense that ordinary identity is constructed. Then different traditions explain those experiences through their inherited language… why else do both believe in rebirth and karma eg Taoism (Dao) does not - the only reason seems to be geographical

Buddhism explains it as no-self, impermanence, dependent origination, and cessation.

Advaita explains it as the discovery of pure awareness beneath the illusion of individuality.

The secular critique is that neither side can simply claim victory. Buddhism is psychologically strong when it describes craving, attachment, impermanence, and the constructed nature of the self. That part feels very compatible with modern psychology and cognitive science. But when it moves into literal rebirth, karma across lives, hell realms, devas, and cosmic cycles, it becomes speculative religious metaphysics.

Advaita is existentially powerful because it captures something many people feel directly: experience appears in awareness, and the ego is not the deepest layer of identity. But it also makes a huge leap: from “the ego is constructed” to “pure awareness is the ultimate reality of the universe.” That may be beautiful, but it is not proven.

So to me, Buddhism and Advaita are not nonsense and can be experienced somewhat directly but they are asking more on faith than in evidence . They are profound maps. But they are still maps. They emerged from a particular historical and cultural world, not from a neutral laboratory.

Buddhism says: the self dissolves because everything is impermanent and empty.

Advaita says: the self dissolves because only universal awareness is real.

A secular person can respect both insights without swallowing the whole metaphysical package.

Maybe the most grounded view is this: ancient Indian thinkers discovered that the ordinary self is unstable, constructed, and a major source of suffering. Buddhism and Advaita are two different attempts to explain what remains when that self is seen through. One says “no final self.” The other says “one universal Self.”

Both are powerful. Both are speculative. The rest (miracles, powers all that yogi stuff is just religion and superstition)

Thoughts? critique on my criticism?