Is consciousness an illusion?

Hi,
so apparently we have a problem. Noone knows where consciousness comes from. This is quite a big question since that is what we are, right (?) the mind.

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I find this idea of consciousness very interesting, we cannot share what being mindful feels like or see that another creature is aware. We have to take it for granted from what others tell, there is no way you can tell that your friend is not just a machine, that is what I mean.

As the title suggests, I will be asking myself if consciousness is just an illusion. This might seem a bit outrageous which makes sense and I am totally open to it being wrong (which it very easily might be, see disclaimer). I think that awareness will raise as an illusion if there is enough complexity added to the system. By the system I mean of course what we perceive through our senses but also the thoughts. The thoughts might actually be the most important part, making our personality.

I am suggesting that with language and thoughts we create a fake personality, the ego which then creates a sense of existence. Through the sheer amount of information that the body receives and reacts to, arises this illusion.

Have you ever tried to notice how thoughts appear? They do so without somebody telling them anything or controlling them [1], this is why there is no one behind them but a shadow. The thoughts tell themselves that they are real but they are just a reaction to the surroundings. That is why there is no special part of the brain that cares for consciousness, it is just an emergent property of huge complexity and in the end, we truly are only robots.

Dragallur

Disclaimer: I’m not neurologist or expert on this topic, those are just my thoughts on this problem.

[1] If you think there is, think again, because those are just other thoughts.

Three year anniversary

Hi,
apparently, the three year anniversary was already yesterday though I thought that my first post became public on 21.3.2015, I guess I was living in a lie.

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What now? I have been very lazy in the past weeks, not posting a lot. I am still planning to continue to write the blog, I have no doubt, definitely.

In the three years I:

Received 2 510 likes
Wrote 126 430 words in a total of 318 posts. (Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban has 107 253 words.)
From my readers, I got 1 250 comments.

This is a small blog, it always was and will be in the future, I am not even really reading anybody else’s posts or trying to get more views. I just let go and write a post about once a week if I feel like it. Whoever reads it, cool, I hope that the posts help or you find them interesting at least sometimes, every like or extra view makes me happy and you are helping with that.

Dragallur

Mnemonics

Hi,
today I will write a short post about the power of mnemonics.

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Those are things that help you remember something. One that I used quite a long time ago was Saturn mnemonic. I was not sure if it was Jupiter or Saturn with rings but then I realized that the letter “S” is basically just circle disconnected and changed into the shape with a single movement. One could argue that this does help because “J” could work similarly and it is not foolproof but the beauty in this is that it does not need to make sense, it is enough if it helps you remember something.

Another example would be how in 8th grade at the end of the year we had to remember (in some game) two groups of words, the key to this is for me was visual mnemonic, I simply stacked the objects on top of one another. It went like this: ruler, place, hill, plant sock and the second group was a chandelier, scissors, and map (I do not remember the next two words). The first group was extremely simple because the hill would be kind of roundish in my head, so it would nicely fit on the plate, the plant would grow on top but would be hidden by a sock, does not make sense but did its job.

From my experience, it is best to be able to create your own mnemonics connected with your life. Often they are total nonsense, some kind of absurd story. For example, this is how I remembered what in your skin is responsible for that feeling:

Pacinian corpuscules – Pa like Pascal (not my invention but Pacific as a pressure in the deep ocean would work too)
Kraus corpuscules – From Vampire Diaries, Kraus was quite a cold person (corpuscules responsible for cold)
Ruffini corpuscules – ff like fortissimo in music, fast means hot so corpuscules for heat

Sadly enough I forgot to make one for Meissner corpuscules so I didn’t do that in a test.

Now you should have the idea, I recommend the following tests to try this out or just to test your memory: https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/number-memory

Dragallur