As a human being, the kindest thing you can do to your brain is to not think.
Joined August 2022
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it has been a little bit more than three years since i first started writing on smoothbrains.net. i would like to pause blogging for now! here is a retrospective to cap things off: smoothbrains.net/posts/2025-…
still thinking about "dynamical-systems attractor-structure functionalism" (actually i was going through my twitter archive and my agent highlighted this thread as particularly interesting)
and
- meditationbook.page/#brief-l… (on unknotting and the 'parachute cloth' metaphor)
- meditationbook.page/#meditat… (on losslessness and the 'perfectly fluid steel cables' metaphor)
the philosophical stances represented on my blog are relatively far behind the things i have been tweeting for the past year or so. i am currently working with an agent to do a really big review of my twitter archive (as well as any related threads, my private notes, and other external sources that i think are important) so that this can all be more readily synthesised into something cohesive
the purpose of this exercise is so that i can formalise things well enough that i can start turning assertions based on intuition into actual experiments xitter.cf/cube_flipper/status/21…
i have been setting up my bluesky account properly, see bsky.app/profile/smoothbrain…
i am jealous of everyone who can see You Can See Everything, it doesn't come out in my country until nov 12
for those seeking a similar cinematic anti-NPD inoculation, i recommend the kiwi film, 'Mister Organ' en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister…
something like five people have sent me this paper
6/ Remarkably, when we reconstructed the image using neural activity from one of the states, it looked exactly like the conscious face, and when we did the same from the other half of time, it looked exactly like the suppressed face. This means that just from neural activity, we can reconstruct in rich detail not only something that you consciously perceive, but also something that escapes your awareness.
anyway @KanizsaBoundary @RogerThisdell how fast do you think you can flip a necker cube
Cube Flipper retweeted
I think vipassana and jhana practitioners could find this paper on consciousness interesting 👇
Some of the neural mechanisms described call to mind the kind of mental strobing effect of consciousness we sometimes see in vipassana.
And there’s some interesting potential insights into the fundamental temporal discontinuity of consciousness, which feels like some useful background for what could be going on in cessation experiences (essentially awareness seeings it’s process with enough clarity to witness its own discontinuity), and also explain why time perception is last thing to go in transition from j8 to cessation.
@psswordprotectd @WystanTBS @RogerThisdell @KanizsaBoundary @RomeoStevens76 - feels like this could be of interest to you. I already mentioned it to @algekalipso and @cube_flipper in a separate comment.
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
something i did not realise about Integrated Information Theory until recently is that Giulio Tononi did not think digital computers would experience much consciousness. from opentheory.net/PrincipiaQual…
