novalis — i tryed replying to your subway-diary story and couldn’t because i’m not a member, so i’ll get rid of my itch here.

“ I don’t believe in the rational. Cartesian mind; experience refutes that hypothesis“ —

We sure are irrational — as in ‘behaving in ways that are not rationally maximizing our evidence’, thus ‘evidence not being used in our best interest’. But what the cognitive sciences found (and the marketing corporations successfully exploited..) is that we’re predictably irrational. My irrationality comes from a very logical and coherent set of causes — albeit unknowable for human mind in their entirety these causes can nonetheless be averaged to give us a fairly clear picture of what animates us. In ‘the eyes of God’ even the most aberrant human behavior would look as logical as: 2+4x(6+27)=135. The more naive the observer the more random and mad and detached from causes would a schizophrenic’s behavior seem, but that same behavior becomes fairly obvious for a team of neurocognitivists, for it has the same rigorous causes as everything else in nature.

This is not a final conclusion by any means, but it sure looks like the direction in which nature’s evidence is pointing. Our limited ability to encompass this vast set of dynamical causes is the thing that’s inviting a feeling of ‘aberration’ and ‘randomness’ when we look at each-other’s (and our own) behavior. The ‘God’s eye view’ proposal on the other hand, like most scientific perspectives, will agitate a lot of egos in need of their free-will and egocentric Universe. Along with science’s success we’re bound to have a strong cultural (irrational) counteraction in the near future, caused by the cumulating socio-economic stress and the increasingly chaotic social environment, all these while the promise of an eternal afterlife (our ultimate safety valve) is endangered by science — but i’m confident there will be a new dimension of existence opened for us.. after great turmoil.. and after we realize that science wasn’t at all the source of our pain.

“ I believe in what I am: a decentralized nervous system craving inputs “ —

Don’t forget “integrated”. But than again, by saying “i am” you implied just that.

“ We use the stupid corporate buzzword ‘mindfulness’ to trick ourselves into feeling like we can cope with our hardware issues — our hijacked minds. But of course, we can’t “ —

But for every banal conscious phenomena there has to be a corresponding process in the “hardware” if we are to trust what countless experiments had shown — so, mindfulness must surely imply a hardware shift. Agreed that mindfulness is something coveted, imitated, but rarely achieved; nonetheless, once you have it it must be working! So the “hardware” is then bound to unlock a higher efficiency/ability of dealing with that very issue you mention: hijacking.

“ But you have to be able to undo the knot first. And you can only do that by admitting that what you’re dealing with is a knot: a tangle of hierarchies in the brain and really, the body, which is part of the nervous system “ —

On top of the things said in the quote above, i think that ‘the one’ doing the ‘admitting & undoing’ is the whole system itself, as a consequence of incorporating new information from the environment — and by so doing, being shifted, losing its previous dynamical equilibrium, and naturally coming up with new configurations/understanding. Of course, all ‘living wholes’ in their daily confrontations are biased towards retaining their ‘previous shape’, so, it takes a rather special interaction(s) to bring about change. That information from the environment could be a blow to the head or a psychedelic substance, but for humans it’s mostly in the form of perceived social situations, who eventually get digested by our symbolic enzymes. The latin root of the word information, ‘informare = shaped from outside’, is more suggestive of what i’m trying to say than its current popular meaning.

“ Philosophical thought is metacognitive — and what that means is that it’s a way of producing concepts or rules that help us understand the concepts or rules that we’re working with “ —

What a great “engineering” task: to be able to integrate within the operations of a system a representation of those operations themselves. Once you do it you’re bound to have a slightly different sistem in need to be represented. This snake looks like its never going to completely eat himself up, but i believe that its never going to stop trying either.. except for a few occasions in which it will ponder its effort as a possible eating disorder.

As a collective scientific and philosophical endeavor, everything of considerable value will be soon understood — but this understanding of the mind can only be integrated into the individual mind in compressed format.

“ I prefer visionary randomness ” —

This sounds more like an imaginative form of thought — more like ancient philosophy than modern analitycal philosophy. It’s valuable just the same, yet having its spectrum shifted towards art and not truth.

I’m sorry for laying out your dead and dissected post like that but i had nothing else to do.