Being A Self: A Perfectly Ordinary, Utterly Extraordinary Experience

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Being a self—being one’s own self, in particular—is the most familiar of all experiences. Indeed it is one’s self that is experienced as having one’s experiences: one’s sensations, emotions, memories, feelings of agency, feelings of thinking, deciding and acting, the very feeling of existing. Philosophical traditions encourage us to know ourselves, but also to not take ourselves too seriously and to not get too caught up with the wanting, thinking, deciding and acting “ego” part of the self. But what is this self experience, why do we have it, and what happens if it starts to unravel? I’ll suggest that we should marvel at the experience of the self, and speculate as to why we have it.

Chris Fields wants to understand how systems exchange information, and how information exchange creates the boundaries that separate and distinguish systems from each other. He uses tools from quantum information theory, evolutionary and developmental biology, and cognitive neuroscience. Chris has become convinced that all information exchange, at all scales, can be described with a single set of simple principles. The trick is to figure out which ones. Biographical details and recent publications are available from http://chrisfieldsresearch.com.

Judaism and Psychedelics

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If you’re Jewish, there’s something about psychedelics that you might find familiar

Songs of Deep Ocean

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Listen to the mysterious sound of the deepest part of the ocean

Notes on Complexity: Neil Theise

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A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being

Spider Dreams

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Jumping spiders have REM-like twitches when they sleep, suggesting dreams may be much more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously realized

Earth’s Wild Music: Kathleen Dean Moore

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Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

Supermassive Black Holes

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This new NASA animation highlights the “super” in supermassive black holes. These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our Sun.

Connection to Source via the Cerebrospinal Fluid

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Investigate the cerebrospinal fluid and integrate new research to evolve the hypothesis of The Cerebrospinal fluid and I Am

Metamorphoses

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We are all fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis

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