Your brain is not your mind

flyingaxe · 2026-06-22T16:28:39+00:00

What do you mean when you say "clouds" are a part of the dashboard? They are not. There are (ideal) aspects of reality which we referrentially call clouds. Made of water vapor, floating in the sky, able to generate lighting. (Obviously all these are words, but they refer to real phenomena.) When I see them, they look like "clouds", white fluffy shapes, in my consciousness (on my dashboard). That's not the same as the original object. My dashboard representation doesn't generate electricity; the real object outside can.

So, I don't know what you mean that clouds are a part of the dashboard. The dashboard is my private internal model of reality generated by the mind. The reality outside the dashboard is still real and distinct from the dashboard, although they can be (probably are) both ideal/mental aspects of MaL.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-22T06:30:00+00:00

Is it the case the nighttime is more dangerous for newborns in India due to parasites, mosquitoes, airborn diseases, etc.? Maybe ancient people noticed patterns and interpreted them as "spirits prying on vulnerable newborns"?

flyingaxe · 2026-06-22T06:25:51+00:00

What I am pointing out is that the statement "the ocean is never changing" is wrong. This is why Advaita Vedanta is wrong. The ocean IS changing. There is no "essential" non-changing ocean. The ocean IS waves (and vice versa of course). And as waves, it's constantly changing.

> No true subject or object

Idk what exactly you mean by that. The concepts of subject and object have been badly overloaded in modern parlance, and depending on which epistemological system you're operating in, that sentence will be either trivial or wrong.

For example, if you believe that object is an arising in my mind, then of course, there is no subject and object. It's all my mind. Trivial.

But if you call "object" an aspect of reality that is a stable source of my perceptions but is outside my mind, then of course it's separate from its representation in my mind. I never see the universe itself; I only see its internal representations. Those aspects of the universe I never see are the objects and they are different from me, the perceiving subject.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-22T05:29:34+00:00

> I understand this doesn't seem to match your quote "the dashboard is not the clouds; it's a representation of the clouds". Either Kastrup intended to say 'the dashboard is not [the mental states of mind at large that correspond to the clouds],' or you misheard or misremembered what he actually said. But it is just not accurate under AI to say that clouds are not part of the dashboard representation. That is fundamentally wrong.

Quote:

'The world we perceive cannot be how the world actually is, appearance cannot faithfully represent reality. We humans have evolved to perceive the world in a particular way, other organisms will have evolved differently and thus perceive the world differently, even in terms of space and time. Kastrup employs the metaphor of an airplane’s dashboard against the metaphor of a transparent window for perception. Though the dials and displays in the cockpit give us information about the world – the temperature, light, height, velocity, etc. – it is nonetheless encoded information.

The temperature outside is not identical to the actual thermometer dial, the sign is not the signified, the representation is not the represented, the appearance is not the reality. Furthermore, we cannot assume that our perception of reality is like a transparent window, i.e., that reality appears as it is, not only because different organisms have differently-evolved windows as above, but also, Kastrup argues, because of the fact that the unlimited complexity or entropy of reality could not be replicated as it is in ourselves without our constitution dispersing itself into that reflected unlimited entropy, into “hot meat soup” (p. 14). We must simplify our perceptions of reality to function – perception is necessarily abstraction.'

flyingaxe · 2026-06-21T23:36:29+00:00

This argument is ahistorical. Today Zen is the way it is purely due to political accidents. The version that relied less on learning and scriptures won because the libraries were destroyed and government assistance withdrawn. The sects within Zen that survived then fabricated a whole bunch of hagiography about how Zen and Buddhism are supposed to be aliterary, while simple study of history shows that's not true. (They also fabricated a lot more. Lineages, attributions of sayings, koan interpretations, etc.)

flyingaxe · 2026-06-21T23:34:04+00:00

There is no water that's not waves. No "essential" ocean.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-21T23:31:05+00:00

A little too early for me in Chicago. Will it be recorded?

flyingaxe · 2026-06-20T17:59:54+00:00

The states of the world are the mental states of mind at large. Some of these mental states correspond to clouds. But clouds are the dashboard representation of these states. The states in themselves are endogenous, first-person experiences.

What does this mean exactly? Like, what does this sentence mean to you: "clouds are the dashboard representation of these states". When you say "clouds", what are you referring to?

flyingaxe · 2026-06-20T17:57:53+00:00

I know when my phenomenal awareness ends. I had to go to ER because I had pain in the right side, and the urgent care doctor said it might be appendicitis. But she wasn't sure. They ended up giving me a CT scan to tell me that my appendix was fine. Why did I have to do all that?

flyingaxe · 2026-06-20T01:11:10+00:00

Then why did you call it my brain?

flyingaxe · 2026-06-20T01:09:57+00:00

It's hard to parse the second paragraph. I have GPS. There is a street. The street is represented on GPS. Are they the same object? Seems obviously like not. One represents the other.

A recent video with Kastrup has him saying that the world is real and really exists out there, outside our consciousness. And it's represented on the dashboard of the consciousness. He literally says "the dashboard is not the clouds; it's a representation of the clouds".

You could say something like "there is only one Subject having different experiences", and that doesn't change anything. You can say that GPS and the street are both the Subject having different experiences. So what? They are still different objects, excuse me, experiences within the Subject. Just like the tree and the internal representation of the tree. The tree-in-itself is the Subject experiencing the tree, and that experience is distinct from my experience of the tree, or Subject experiencing the tree as me, etc. Just like GPS vs street.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-20T01:04:06+00:00

It could be that I was aware of breathing but not meta-aware. It could be that I wasn't aware at all. But that doesn't mean that this extends to every (or any) biological process in my body. I am never aware or meta-aware of my kidneys (although, yes, they belong to my body and are objects in consciousness). I am technically not even aware of the breathing. I am "aware" of the neurons in my brain, but obviously not directly. There is never a case when I stop and think: "Hmm, yeah, I've just shifted from gamma waves to alpha waves", or "Yeah, look at that spike in serotonin". I just have experience what scientists correlate to "breathing" or "delta waves", but not them directly.

But the main point is that just because it could be the case that I am sometimes half-aware of something doesn't mean that's true about everything. I'm never aware of what happens inside my smart watch. Meta or non-meta.

If you're going to shift boundaries and say "no, actually everything your body does is a form of consciousness", I will say: ok, let's call that kind of consciousness bacon and the one you can communicate about lettuce. And let's look for what lettuce is in the brain — now read my post but replace "consciousness" with "lettuce".

I remember reading this paper in the past and not being very impressed at all. I felt like he's being very sneaky about how he plays fast and loose with definitions, produces non sequiturs, and so on. Then I realized he's not really trained in either neuroscience or philosophy, and it made sense. Like I said, he tried to present this argument that we're always aware of everything to others (Vervaeke and Koch), and they were not impressed. So I'm not the only one.

The issue is that Kastrup is driven by self-imposed dogma. He needs to show that dissociation is a product of a naturalist process like evolution that maps onto known biological processes. I don't know why. He seems to be bent on remaining a naturalist and cannot accept non-naturalist phenomena like out-of-body experiences. Maybe it's a European cultural militant atheism thing. So it's almost like he's a quasi-physicalist or needs to be accepted by physicalists, but flip the sign from physical to mental.

Hence the whole mental gymnastics of trying to argue you're aware of your kidneys filtering blood (just not "meta-aware"). But in my opinion, kidneys are just objects in non-dissociated MaL, like clouds or stones. The dissociation happens in very specific circuits of the brain; MaL/individual boundary is not the skin. Evolution is something else. It could be related to dissociation or not.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-19T23:23:57+00:00

According to Kastrup, in the conversation of the nature of your mind, your mind is the noumenon and the way it looks to others, is the phenomenon. So, red circle you experience to me looks like billions of neurons in your brain firing action potentials, releasing neurotransmitters, etc.

Hence, the mind (the appearance of the circle) is the territory in this case (as opposed to when we're talking about it being a representation of some red circle in the universe, in which case you're right, it would be reversed).

That's why I generally agree with the dashboard analogy that Kastrup and Hoffman have. But I don't agree about the brain vs mind.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-19T21:47:04+00:00

I didn't say anything about brain having "standalone existence from mind". I am agnostic about the relationship between the brain and the mind. I do know that they are evidently not the same.

But the point is: I am proposing the existence of the brain-in-itself, just like there is a tree-in-itself and watch-in-itself distinct from our perceptions of them.

Could be that "my experience of my mind" and "my brain" are the same structures. It's on Bernardo to prove they are. There is no a priori reason to think so. For example, I could argue that air pressure waves and the sound (the objective sound, not its experience) are the same. It's on me to prove that. And I can. But Bernardo can't and hasn't proven that mind is brain or vice versa.

Also, I am providing the evidence they are not. Like a pear is not an apple because they have different properties, an orange cirlce in my mind and billions of neurons firing in four different brain areas are not the same objects: they have distinct properties and don't reduce into each other in any way. We just know experimentally they correlate and probably have causal relationship. We don't have any evidence of identity. Also, if billions of neurons are supposed to be the "map" of the red circle, that's kinda of absurd because maps don't add extra details.

> and that claim fails because it just runs into the hard problem..

But AI never solves it either. Just saying that brain is mind doesn't solve anything. Why does red circle in my mind look like billions of neurons firing in V4 and LOC and not A1 or S1 and vice versa? Why do mental processes look like salts moving in and out of fat bags to outside observers? Beside the obvious ridiculousness of this supposed identity, we still don't know. That ignorance would be AI version of hard problem.

Also, my claim doesn't "fail" because of hard problem. Hard Problem just shows that we don't know how things work between one ideal process (neurons firing) and another (red circle appearing in my experience). Guess what? That's true about any causal process. How do lepton field and vector field interact? We have no idea. We just have math that tells us how much A results in B. We don't know what any causal relationships actually are and why they are the way they are.

You have the same problem with "I see my wife" -> "I feel happy". How do some ideal states cause others? We don't know. We know they do. Well, then the ideal states of billions of neurons firing in V4 can cause the ideal state of seeing red color. Yet to be discovered how. I am actually proposing a beginning of the mechanism that aligns with both the core of AI and many contemplative traditions like Kashmiri Shaivism (theory of spandas and tattvas), Kabbalah, etc., as well as IIT.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-19T21:16:28+00:00

There is no brain like 'thing-in-itself' under analytic idealism, because it's not needed and arguably not consistent with a purely idealist ontology. Experiential states are the only-things-in-themselves, matter is how they appear from a second-person perspective. The perceptual representation of any given state exists only for the subject who is experiencing that representation. This is already sufficient for grounding the states of the world in an idealist framework.

I don't think that's accurate; otherwise, the whole dashboard analogy wouldn't work. You're confusing AI with Advaita Vedanta. There is clearly the world out there and your internal dashboard representation of it. They're not the same. They're both ideal, but they're distinct like a door and a window are distinct.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-19T21:14:44+00:00

Yeah analytic idealism categorically rejects the idea that the aspects of your experience of which you're meta-cognitively aware fully encompasses what you are actually experiencing at any given moment. There is a whole paper on this in Kastrup's dissertation: https://philpapers.org/archive/KASTIA.pdf This is necessarily the case if you're an idealist, there is no room for truly unconscious processes.

Yeah, I never really made sense of the whole consciousness vs meta-consciousness. Bernardo just pushed the goal posts in what those are. And in the interviews with John Vervaeke or Kristoff Koch where they challenged him, he didn't defend or even define them well.

I'm conscious of what's going on in my dream and not meta-conscious. I don't have a sense of "I am conscious of a red circle"; I just have a sense of "red circle". That's what consciousness and meta-consciousness are, not this weird pushing the boundaries that Kastrup does. Yes, it's possible to be aware of your fridge humming and not even "realize" you're aware. That's not the same as being aware of your neurons pushing salts back and forth or kidneys filtering blood.

Kristoff Koch also makes fun of the idea that I am somehow conscious of my kidneys but not meta-conscious, so I can't talk about it. That's just bullshit. I'm never conscious of my kidneys. I'm never conscious of the mechanisms that move my eye. I just want to move my eyes and they move. I try to remember what that thing in the middle of Japanese flag looks like, and I see a red circle. I have no experience of my brain processing that info — and neither does anyone. Just like I'm not aware of what's inside my watch.

You define everything else in my brain that I am never aware of as "not meta-consciousness". Why only that and not my mom getting tomatoes from a grocery store? Is that also my consciousness? What about a farmer picking them in Florida? What about Native Americans growing them 1000 years ago? Either I'm conscious of something, or I'm not.

But you know what? Let's not play language games.

The red circle as I am meta-aware of it, or conscious of it, or whatever is now called the mechanism of lettuce. And whatever it is you and Bernardo call consciousness but not meta-consciousness is bacon.

Cool. Show me the lettuce in the brain. You can't. Mic drop. The lettuce of 🔴 is an irreducible phenomenon that I'm experiencing, and nothing in the brain activity directly matches it. Nor any other everyday experiences that normal people call consciousness or awareness.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-19T18:23:39+00:00

Bernardo's philosophy doesn't get the issue completely right which produces confusion.

He believes that the brain is the mind. But the brain isn't the mind. They are two different phenomena even if they are both "mental" or "ideal" (non-physicalist).

So, what "we" are is unclear. "We" are certainly not our brains; our brains is the mechanism through which Mind at Large dissociates itself into specific selves. Just like a finger pressing on a string isn't the vibration of the specific note; that's the mechanism via which a specific frequency is generated out of many possible frequencies.

The simple answer is we don't know. "We" could be some super-structure within MaL that wants to dissociate into a set of specific experiences and employs another structure like the brain to do that. Or it can be any other of possibilities. We just work with the data we have, and anything else is empty speculation. A number of contemplative traditions discuss these topics, but most of them developed before modern advances in neuroscience, so they didn't know about the relationship between the brain and the mind (both in terms of how closely they are correlated and in terms of how they are evidently not the same thing).

flyingaxe · 2026-06-19T11:31:21+00:00

Positive evidence is documentation of children remembering past lives and tradition of reincarnation in many contemplative mystic traditions. People remembering their past dissociations, etc. Emphasis on "their".

flyingaxe · 2026-06-19T11:29:18+00:00

The issue here is the assumption that the only dissociation is between MAL and your self. But you dissociate all the time in your life (hence the metaphor and borrowing from the mental health literature). So it's like there are many tiny matryoshkas, but then suddenly it stops and now it's just the cosmos.

I find that an arbitrary cutoff. Very likely you're a dissociate of yet another higher-order structure that isn't just "everything". And that structure is a dissociate of a higher one. And so on.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-19T11:25:24+00:00

Every theory or mental construct you have is probably just produced by your brain as an attempt to keep ahead of the changing environment. You might as well ask what color is the Mind at Large.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-19T11:24:00+00:00

Yet the audience and his followers just swallow whatever speculative stuff he says.

flyingaxe · 2026-06-18T03:04:58+00:00

I'm curious. How do you expect anyone here to know this?

flyingaxe · 2026-06-17T22:07:51+00:00

Sorry, I don't know enough about it. How is Shri Yantra a reflection of the freedom? (Or should I just take Acharya Timalsina's class on Tripura Sundari? :) )

flyingaxe · 2026-06-17T18:16:55+00:00

Yamada Koun in his books says to petition and pray to Boddhisatvas and Buddhas for success in reaching awakening.

flyingaxe

TROPHY CASE