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Re: Life imitating art imitating life » Tom Grimes

Posted by DSCH on March 21, 2004, at 19:52:55

In reply to Re: Life imitating art imitating life, posted by Tom Grimes on March 21, 2004, at 14:03:33

>To me, Prozac seemed at the time to be just more information, more of the world's unorganized, or barely organized, chaos.

You might be surprised to learn that highly respected physicists have postulated that abstract information - bits or qubits (quantum-bits) - is the deepest ontological level, more fundamental than fields/waves/particles and space-time.

John Wheeler, "It from bit", in Sakharov Memorial Lecture on Physics, Volume 2, eds. L. Keldysh and V. Feinberg, Nova Science, New York, 1992

Holger Lyre, "C. F. von Weizsaecker's Reconstruction of Physics: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow", http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0309183

> And I don't think psycopharmacology has answered this question of the self. If anything, it may have confused it.

Heh. Of course not. But nobody who's not a pseudo-scientific crackpot or an adherent of some religion is claiming that they have, no?

>For eg, look in any pill book and for any drug like Prozac or Trileptal or Lamictaal the phrase "exact mechanism unknown." There are, say, eight to ten mood stabilizers currently on the market. It's guess work to say which one will work best for your if your BP. And then, if one works, exactly how it works is unknown.

Biological systems are horrifically complex. If they were not they would not "be alive". If you throw out the notion of vitalism, you need to address the idea of how any living thing can "act on its own behalf".

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/kauffman.html (cool video interview!)

> So, the book came out of my thinking about the self. Am I more me before the pill, or after the pill? More me without it, or with it?

You are you. Just different than before. ;-)

I believe most of what we refer to as consciousness is an illusory seemless screen over what is actually a very decentralized process. The purpose of the screen is to prevent us from being transfixed with the complexity of our inner perspective, seeing as we needed to hunt and gather/fight or flight rather than meditate for most of our history as a species.

H.R. Pagels, "Dreams of Reason"
M. Minsky, "Society of Mind"

> And I saw this, and felt it, as another aspect of information sickness, the melancholia that comes of having too many choices. No necessity, no truth.

Life is good...

"Yes, but good for what? Power to do what?"
- Tom Wolfe

http://www.projo.com/words/story930.htm


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