Mallory&#39;s Camera

Definitely a Wow! moment.

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Sounds like a dream.

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No, I was fully awake and it was very strange how the memory of my dead friend was superimposed on top of the living friend. Can't quite describe the visual.

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I am studying internet medicine, so my thought is that you have a powerful subconscious, that can surface in the waking state.

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Maybe. I know when I'm deeply involved with writing something... Well. I never actually see the characters I'm writing about. But I remember their interactions with one another in much the same way that I remember events that happen in my own life. It's all very odd and I'm sure dysfunctional.

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What if you had no subconscious? Tell me your guess as to how that might play out in normal life.

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You mean if there was no distinction between conscious and subconscious?

Very difficult. Very difficult. I imagine the perceptual part of schitzophrenia might be a bit like that.

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Do you think it could manifest as something like additional senses? What if it let you see things that were real, but because our entire shared perceptual experience is contextualized into conscious and subconscious, you'd know true things alone?

I'll cut the crap. My subconscious as I know it in dreams is not unfamiliar to me it is just louder there. It is not apart from me it is me.

Sorry MC if this is too off-topic.

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No, it's interesting.

There is a kind of consensual aspect to perception, I used to look at the color green and think: Am I seeing the same color here that other people see or are we seeing different colors that we've both learned to call green?

I don't know that there's any answer to that.

I am inclined to think, however, that if only one person sees things they're hallucinations.

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Your point about green. I remember so well. I asked my teacher about it in seventh grade. My introduction to consensus reality.

Can't go with you on that last point. Would leave Planck, Bohr, Einstein, Darwin in the asylum.

Does make plain if you don't create fireworks-level verisimilitude you are a dead man, should you notice things no one else does.

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It would be impossible to function without the filter of rational consciousness. We have very different takes on reality, and my view is that seeing things that are not objectively there, is a trick of the mind. There is certainly a hidden meaning to it for Patrizia, but it's not some supernatural occurrence.

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The problem is

seeing things that are not objectively there

...statement is tautological. IF she sees it, it IS there. Empiricism cannot consider itself. This limitation forces us out of empiricism, at the last. There is no way out of it.

I'm going with Plato. Patrizia seeing Mark, was real and has an absolute meaning. It's just we can't get at it from here, we can only be humble before it.

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There you go, again making zero sense. Or maybe we inhabit different universes, and LiveJournal is the portal through which ones and zeros collide.

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You're funny when you're pinned. You're not as trapped in empirically-limited reasoning as you pretend, either, you're fronting.

The empirical basis by which we distinguish being asleep from being awake is what? Of course it is an absolute basis.

With reference only to empiricism: what is the square root of -1?

If you have a self, when you're asleep where's it go?

Ones and zeros are cheap symbols worth no more than a light switch. They allow us to communicate i.e. to share reality to an extent. If we live in different universes, that has no practical bearing on whether we are able to share reality or not. We choose to believe we can share the reality we know, or we choose to believe we can't.

The best communication I know is touch. Music is second. Words can give great kindness to others, these other things even more. There's something hilarious in looking for tribute that is set up to leave others worse off than they were: it means your price, literally, is setting out to create new pain in the world -- you need that. So the highest tribute to you, is doing to someone else what you'd be most afraid of: man is that selling yourself cheap. It'd mean you're certain you have no absolute value at all. Ugly means know only ugly ends, they fear anything more. Cruel first is pathetic.

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anais-pf.livejournal.com

Eerie!

I'm glad to see you posting, by the way. I started to worry. Just a little.

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You're sweet. :-)

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chezsci.livejournal.com

That's...disturbing.

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It was.

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This is familiar to me.

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Is it? How so?

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I haven't had the exact experience you've described. It's also a little tricky to talk about, because it puts you at risk of sounding crazy. But suppose I said something like "Mark-ness," some essential quality of your friend, wasn't limited to time and place the way we think of it. So that it wouldn't surprise me you ran into something like the feeling you already know of what it felt like to be near him.

Was it a good feeling, seeing the guy?

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Was it a good feeling,

Value neutral.

Mark was a dear, dear friend. Many, many years ago we were lovers and lived together; our friendship evolved from that. Ben is my X-husband who I seem to be getting along with reasonably well these days so equating him in this way with Mark made me wonder whether we might be developing a real friendship.

My other thought was that this was some kind of presentiment of mortality, that possibly B was on the verge of dying or something.

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OK value neutral, to me is important. I'd say, "quantum event." Which is just fancy language for saying you got to experience the reality of our lives, which is almost the exact opposite of what we call life. The only thing I know is we're getting only a fraction of what existence is. What we know, is like a five-year-old dropped in Paris for five seconds, then asked to draw a comic book of it. The world we know is compressed, splintered, misrepresenting.

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Well, I think what we can perceive is limited by our sensory apparatus. Like neurons use frequency rather than amplitude which builds a chronological aspect into our perceptions even though time, as we know it, probably doesn't exist.

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Yeah. They've run these experiments, something like a break in pool, when one player shoots the cueball at the racked-up set. Filmed the experiments. Found it is impossible to tell whether the film is being shown forwards or backwards.

Perceive ... you've found a way, here, of describing an unusual experience you had, in a way others could understand and relate to it. I have a facility with language, but that still leaves me with internal experiences I don't know how to share with others. The social space seems to weigh heavier on me all the time. Even if I had the language, there are fewer places I can even try and share meaning. I have no memory of a time when I didn't have to be very careful in how I spoke. It became obvious to me way, way young, I'm guessing 8, that others overwhelmingly preferred I NOT make the attempt to share what was on my mind. They were affected by events, sure, I doubt wiping out on your bike is all that unique an experience for anyone. But what things meant to me, how much it mattered to me, about most of life ... it stayed painful and gut-wrenching they were wired some other way. I got to college resolved other human beings weren't real. I'd need to protect them, but communication was impossible because my reality was unintelligible to others in a way far past language. Not "superior." Separate.

Here's one that made it. We used to go to summer league baseball games. Chased foul balls. I could predict where they'd go. Didn't last, but man the kids went nuts trying to figure that one out.

I think you seeing this guy again is excellent, food for thought. Not out of the ordinary to me at all. I think the best part of life is shared meaning. Also that the extent to which you ever know it, is probably a call by God. A kiss once, my friend slamming me from the back while we were dancing (female) and smirking, another friend (these being women I loved) came up and hugged me from the side -- I live those moments as though they're happening now. You saw your friend because he's still around, we just have trouble managing the perception of it. People exit shared moments though. Kills me.

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It's better to see dead people than to smell them, let me tell you.

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ch.livejournal.com

no one seems to have said the obvious: he's dead to you.

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