Non Fiction Book Club
Lately I’ve been going to this nonfiction book club once a week. It’s a fantastic place to go and have really really interesting discussions. Usually we talk about history books, sometimes we talk about economics or we read economic books and talk about them.
We’ve learned to not read and talk about any books that have anything to do with politics because politics can be very very polarizing and that doesn’t really lead to very productive discussions.
There’s this guy, a member of our group, who is a biologist. He has this advanced PhD in some type of very specific biology and lately he’s been doing a lot of research on neurology and so we read this book that he recommended. He didn’t write it but I think he knew the guy the wrote it.
Nobody Understands Consciousness
It was about consciousness and the way that consciousness is is very very puzzling. It’s one of the most puzzling things in the field of neuroscience because nobody is really sure why we have consciousness. Nobody’s really sure what our consciousness is supposed to do, but one thing is certain is that our consciousness is not what most people think it is.
Most people have this idea that our consciousness rests in between our input, the data that we interpret in the world, and then are output that returns to the world. Like we have this kind of mind-body system.
Our mind-body system perceives all the stuff happening around us and then our consciousness thinks about all the stuff that we see and experience and then our consciousness formulates some kind of response and then our response is the output. The input is the data received. The output as is how we respond to that and in between the input and the output is our consciousness. Our conscious rational thinking mind.
What We Assume Is True Is Not True
The problem is this is absolutely false. In reality our consciousness doesn’t sit between the input in the output. Our consciousness sits on top of the input and the output. All that our consciousness really does is watch the input in the output. It seems that the only purpose for our conscious self awareness or realization or thinking is some type of storytelling device. Some type of hallucination device. Some type of after-the-fact rationalizer that looks at the input it watches the output.
It doesn’t choose the output. It watches the output, but it seems like one of the main functions of our consciousness is it needs to pretend that it chooses the output. It watches the input and watches are output it watches our behavior but like a split second after watches our behavior it creates this hallucination that puts itself as the decider of that behavior.
In reality we really have no choice. There really is no such thing as free will. There really is no such thing as conscious choice. Many experiments have demonstrated that up to 95% of our behaviors are automatic input output automatic cause effect responses based on a completely un-definable set of instincts.
Input Output System
These input-output instincts are extremely complicated. Way too complicated for us to understand, but nevertheless they are automatic input output systems they don’t require any conscious thought at all.
It’s just that we seem to have a need to watch this stuff happen. We seem to have a need to pretend that the we are the ones making that happen, we are the one choosing what to do we are the ones thinking about what we see and experience in the world. We are the ones deciding how to respond to that but all of that is false.
Particularly troubling is that free will, conscious choice, this is kind of the center, the most central important idea of Western society Western religion Western law, but if it turns out that consciousness is just an illusion then that means that we’re in this huge humongous society with all of these people and all these people that are surrounded by all these people that essentially make up our own external reality.
Our Reality Is Millions Of Hallucination Machines
Every single one of those people is also an automatic input output cause effect system. They have their own conscious minds that are making up their own illusions about what’s going on. This is something that is very very hard to think about because even thinking about this means that you’re thinking about something that is a hallucination.
It’s very hard for even neuroscientists to think about this. He was telling us that when neuroscientists think about this stuff it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to not be in control of your own mind body system. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to understand that what you think is happening is really just a hallucination, especially when you’re remember that we have so much attachment to the idea of our free will and our consciousness.
If you remember that your free will and your consciousness is really just an illusion, it makes you wonder, if our free will and our consciousness is just an illusion, if it’s just a hallucination made up by our after-the-fact storytelling device, who or what is the thing in our brains doing all the deciding?
Who Is Doing The Talking?
If you’re having a conversation with your friend and the words that are coming out of your mouth are not being chosen by your conscious mind rather your conscious mind is watching you speak those words and your conscious mind is making up some kind of a hallucination as to why you chose those specific words to speak, who was the one doing the speaking?
Whenever this guy talks, normally when you have a bunch of people that are talking about some type of nonfiction based subject, it’s kinda like everyone wants to participate in the conversation and everyone kind of is quite when someone else is talking, but you can also tell that while somebody else is talking, everybody is kind of waiting for their turn to their kind of listening at the same time that they’re trying to come up with how they’re going respond.
Whenever this one guy talks, this biologist, everyone just shuts up as this guys is so intelligent, he so articulate it takes all of our brainpower to understand these ideas.
Non Fiction Keeps You Tethered To Reality
The reason that I like nonfiction book clubs so much is because we have all of these discussions about nonfiction stuff and is very easily relatable to stuff when you get back when you go back your normal life you can remember this stuff and you can think about this stuff when you’re going through your day-to-day interactions and day-to-day conversations and behaviors and you can think about the stuff that we talked about before.
If you go to like a fiction book club, for example, and you talked about these imaginary ideas that are based on imaginary universes and imaginary characters, it’s not so easy to relate that stuff to the real world stuff that we participate in everyday.
Our favorite type of book to read our history books but history books that are from obscure time periods and obscure societies because what’s particularly interesting is when we read these history books from these obscure time periods is very easy to relate what happened back then was to what’s happening right now.
Rhyming Spaceships
Very much like what Mark Twain said that history doesn’t repeat but history rhymes and the more you study history the more you realize that the same stuff keeps happening over and over and over again. It’s like that what they say on Battle Star Galactica, everything that is happened has happened before and it will happen again.
The only problem, the only drawback to going to this nonfiction book club is the actual process of reading nonfiction books because if you read a nonfiction book it’s usually not that entertaining, exciting or pleasurable hile you’re reading. It is definitely a good feeling to have that information in your brain.
When you go to a book club and you have a conversation with other people that have that same information in the brains that can lead to some very interesting conversations but the process of taking that information out of a book and putting it into your brain especially if it’s about some obscure piece of history that part is probably the worst part.
Getting Info Into Your Brain The Hard Part
Once you get the information into your brain it’s interesting to have a conversation about the stuff that’s in your brain especially if that stuff is the same stuff this and everybody else’s brain and you know you can collaborate and create some meta-hallucination that you can use to apply to your life when you get back to your normal day-to-day behaviors.
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