Sunday. Another hot, blustering day. At the time of writing, a day that is almost done, with roughly six more hours before I turn in for the day for the daily dose of being in comatose as demanded by my physiology.
I spent much of the day [so far] reading some report written in the 1980s by the Department of Army (US Army Operational Group) that attempts to provide some kind of scientific grounding for the appearance and use of induced altered states of consciousness. I'm not going to mince my words here---the report was hard to digest because of the multi-speak that was involved in attempting to marry physics of the very small (i.e. quantum mechanics) with spiritual concepts that barely had a consensus in terms of formalised language (i.e. metaphysics), with an overall effect of someone just trying their best to provide a report because it was requested, not because there was something actually worth saying. The models that are posited had some grounding in neuroscience, but then it got waaaaaaaaay out into drugged hippie land pretty quick.
Maybe it's because it's a tad too far off my domain of expertise that I am interpreting things the way they are. Or maybe it is truly hocus-pocus, Department of Army (US Army Operational Group) provenance notwithstanding. Unless I dig very deep and attempt to understand what the hippies and the scientists are trying to talk to/past each other, I suspect that I am not going to get any headway into understanding this ever. In fact, I think I have better luck making sense out of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition) than that---one reason could be that Harrison's was actually written to be a textbook that explains internal medicine, whereas the report was written to satisfy some superior officer's request, as indicated in the attached cover letter.
I'm not saying that human consciousness is unexplainable and completely mystical---I'm just saying that I cannot explain it, nor can I understand other people's attempts to do so. Maybe some of us are closer to the truth on the operation of the consciousness than others, but none of us really knows who is close to it, and more importantly, what to make of it. We say that God knows, and that's because He is Creator outside of time and space---supposing that God's powers are as limited as us, the mere fact that he exists outside time and space means that He can take an absurdly long time in His subjective time to figure it all out and still appear to know all about it ``as instantly as He may be questioned'' in our subjective time without us knowing whether He truly knew to begin with or if He took the time to ``figure it out''. Some questions are meaningless in the sense that there is no way of proving [to others] or knowing [for the self] if the answer(s) are valid---the will of God and the extent of His powers/knowledge is one such question.
Urgh... diversion again. I think my ability to control and guide my direction in writing is slowly going to the dogs over time, as I attempt to write something every day in this blog despite each day being more similar too the previous one as external stimuli from emergence through interaction slowly fades away.
I'll probably end the day with more Grim Dawn runs with some of the Hololive videos in the background. Till the next update.
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