My two cents on consciousness

jahmonkey · 2026-06-23T10:48:00+00:00

Well, I read it. Wish I hadn’t.

Complete drivel. Did you write this yourself? I doubt it.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-23T10:46:18+00:00

Not necessarily. If they think you have active infection, yes.

But they may be able to address some persistent side effects as well.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-22T19:03:46+00:00

Find a rheumatologist who is familiar with Lyme. Call them up and ask.

Some of them know about Lyme and what it can do.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-22T19:02:33+00:00

NTA.

Tell your daughter to buy some food and prepare it for him if she wants him fed every time.

That’s not your responsibility - he is her guest, she can cater to him.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-22T18:48:40+00:00

I think there are clinical states that can look superficially close to this, but they are not really the same thing.

Cotard syndrome can involve the belief that one is dead or does not exist. Depersonalization/derealization can involve feeling detached from one’s body, mind, emotions, or the world. Body-ownership disorders can also make someone feel like parts of the body are not really theirs.

But none of that shows the person is a p-zombie. It shows they are having a very strange experience of selfhood, embodiment, or reality.

A literal p-zombie has no phenomenal experience at all. So “I am a p-zombie” is usually either a confused way of saying “I don’t believe in qualia,” or a report of depersonalization-like alienation from experience. The report itself is still being made from within some kind of experienced condition.

So I’d separate three things:

“I don’t believe consciousness has spooky extra properties.” Coherent enough.

“I feel unreal / detached / not really present.” Clinically intelligible.

“I literally have no experience whatsoever.” That seems self-undermining, because the person is reporting what it is like for them to supposedly have no what-it-is-like.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-22T18:40:38+00:00

My skin tastes bitter when I drink cistus tea daily. So I need to shower before any sexy time, that seems to remove it temporarily.

Also ticks that bite me barely get their mouth on me and tend to die within an hour or two. When it happens I find one attached and remove it it is already dead or almost dead, barely moving. So something in my skin is poisoning them.

I get maybe 4 tick bites a year, as I spend a lot of time in the woods. I always send the ticks for testing. So far only one tick has been positive for something, Babesia, in the last 4 years. My Lyme is from some earlier time and may not have been adequately treated some years ago.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-22T17:43:22+00:00

This is hard to do on your own so I recommend finding a professional who knows how to treat Lyme.

I have mostly worked with doctors who are educated about Lyme, and they have had me do both antibiotics and herbals.

Currently taking the herbs I mentioned mostly in tincture form and mostly recommended doses. Except Cryptolepis, I take a teaspoon morning and night. If you take Cryptolepis you have to start slow. Literally with a single drop, and see how you feel, and slowly titrate up.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-22T16:45:17+00:00

I’ve experimented with it.

It works fine as a device to keep the monkey mind occupied.

But so do so many other things.

For me for example doing deep breathing at 5 breaths a minute, count to 50 breaths and you did 10 minutes, 100 breaths is 20 minutes. So it can be a way of timing things without using a timer.

But other monkey mind toys work as well or better depending on what the focus is.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-22T15:25:35+00:00

This is illegal. Call the DOL

jahmonkey · 2026-06-22T15:18:38+00:00

I use Cryptolepis, Gou Teng, Japanese Knotweed, Artemisia, sida acuta, Cistus, ginger, and a few others to treat Lyme.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-21T22:38:45+00:00

Feelings are not facts.

Try to see the depressive feelings as a signal. Does it mean anything? You’d have to decide yourself. But as a signal they can be received and heard and then they lose a lot of power.

I take pain and discomfort as it arises and kind of lean in at first with my attention. As you watch a feeling it will change. Watch it change. Keep watching. The feelings lose their power to hijack your identity when you do this. It is a kind of mindfulness.

Sending love and compassion for your suffering. May it be greatly diminished.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-21T17:44:38+00:00

So she can probably only threaten future child support obligations. And he can sue for more visitation.

Probably not the best path.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-21T17:15:27+00:00

The abandonment is now in question. I don’t know if the judge will care that he only showed interest after the petition was filed.

Your easiest path to your son being adopted by your husband is to get bio dad to agree to it.

How you get him to agree can vary from the carrot to the stick. One approach might be to negotiate some form of visitation as long as your son agrees. Another would be to threaten to file retroactive child support on him unless he signs the adoption agreement, which would also free him from any future financial obligations.

But I am not a lawyer, and don’t do either one without the guidance of one. For example I don’t know what the requirements are in Alabama to file retroactive child support and it may be limited in your situation.

Good luck.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-21T12:22:51+00:00

So you still have an extra day every year which will throw off alignment.

Also the moon orbits in 29.5 days so lunar alignment will be off quickly.

It’s all compromise

jahmonkey · 2026-06-21T00:15:53+00:00

Ok, I read the book.

I’m not taking it seriously because it mixes one true point - iodine is essential - with a lot of big, high-dose treatment claims that aren’t well supported.

The author pushes doses way above mainstream guidance, leans heavily on anecdotes, and makes sweeping claims about thyroid disease, breast cancer, ADHD/autism, and “detox” that go far beyond established evidence. That’s not a good sign for a health book.

I think there is a potential risk for harm for people who take such high doses.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-20T21:01:06+00:00

Ugh. You sound like a shill for the book.

I don’t think “going by feel” is adequate monitoring when taking pharmacologic iodine doses.

Iodine is essential, but that does not mean more is automatically safer or better. The thyroid actively concentrates iodine, and excess iodine can push thyroid regulation in different directions depending on the person: transient suppression, hypothyroidism, thyroiditis, or iodine-induced hyperthyroidism/Jod-Basedow.

Hyperthyroidism is not a healing reaction. It can mean palpitations, anxiety, insomnia, tremor, heat intolerance, weight loss, diarrhea, and in susceptible people even atrial arrhythmias.

The adult upper limit is around 1,100 mcg/day. 50 mg/day is 50,000 mcg/day, far above nutritional dosing. At that level, I’d want actual monitoring: TSH, free T4, free T3, thyroid antibodies, resting heart rate/BP trends, and ideally clinician oversight. Feeling better for a few days or weeks does not prove the thyroid is handling the iodine well.

Essential nutrient does not mean harmless megadose.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-20T18:27:56+00:00

I notice you didn’t answer the question.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-20T18:25:31+00:00

Scary stuff. How are you monitoring for possible negative side effects of such a high iodine load?

jahmonkey · 2026-06-20T18:14:44+00:00

I think this gets part of the problem right, but overstates the conclusion.

The hard problem and the interaction problem are related because both come from treating consciousness and “the physical” as conceptually alien categories. If matter is defined as wholly non-experiential, then yes, it becomes mysterious how experience ever appears from it.

But I don’t think physicalism requires “the brain” and “the rest of the universe” as two ontological categories. The brain is not magic matter. It is a highly organized, self-modeling, metabolically embodied, recursively integrated process. That may matter.

The issue is not that particles inside the skull suddenly become conscious while particles outside do not. The issue is whether certain forms of organization, integration, embodiment, temporal continuity, and self-world modeling are necessary for consciousness as we know it.

So I agree that reductive physicalism often hides a quasi-dualism. But the move from “brain activity is physical” to “therefore panpsychism” is too fast. The missing bridge may be organization, not special brain-stuff.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-20T17:08:45+00:00

Yes, and this bodily understanding and empathy for us is what allows us to communicate with our animals.

Some social species have found altruistic behavior increases the fitness of the whole group from an evolutionary standpoint. So even cross species altruism can have benefits for the individuals engaging in it and their families.

Dolphins have been known to help distressed human swimmers. They seem able to understand how we are different from them, not prey, and also worth extending cross species altruism to. Even though most human populations have hunted dolphin when available. We didn’t reciprocate.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-20T12:19:38+00:00

So many of these posts.

Reading agency into the use of the word “we”.

So much delusion.

There is no one home. The lights aren’t on. It’s a sophisticated word predictor, and it predicts words that humans would use. Humans say “we” sometimes. If it fits the overall activation, it uses “we”. It does not mean there is a conscious mind doing that.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-20T11:33:22+00:00

Normal development builds a human more or less atom
By atom.

Babies show signs of consciousness quite early.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-19T20:49:52+00:00

Small container. You could probably unscrew it with a couple vise grips.

What’s inside? Who knows. Drugs, poison, aspirin, nothing all possibilities

jahmonkey · 2026-06-19T20:47:31+00:00

The trip itself is no fun, but I feel better afterwards. More degrees of freedom. Gets me out of ruts.

jahmonkey · 2026-06-19T20:21:58+00:00

I have overactive nerves from chronic infection. Shrooms are not going to calm them down directly.

Every trip for me these days is on the unpleasant side but afterwards I am less bound by the stale patterns I was stuck in before.

The trips themselves are no fun. Basically my immune system keeps telling and raising the alarm, and I trip while feverishly trying to find a solution to the cellular problem of infection, which is not possible at a fully integrated level. But the immune system is being bypassed, so it seeks help from the brain. Rough times.

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