= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
chaosmage comments on Identity and Death - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (56)
Something like the Monday Man already exists. In African and Afro-American religions such as Voodoo and Candomblé, people who get possessed say that whatever was moving their body in that time was not them, but some other entity. They frequently claim amnesia about the event, saying their normal non-possessed selves were "not there" to even notice what was happening. I don't know if anyone has done experiments to see whether they actually lack access to memories of that period, or whether they're merely denying them.
Of course, these religions, and particularly possession states, often involve great amounts of strong alcohol, so maybe the amnesia thing isn't so far-fetched.
A lot of the time the only language that really exists to talk about these things is the language of shamanism and occultists and ritual magic because psychology doesn't really go there much in professional medicine, and I'm not sure that the concept of 'genuine amnesia' is terribly useful in this context. These things happen, it doesn't matter that there's 'just' a material human brain and nervous system doing it, people can and do come under the control and influence of what is experienced as agency that is not 'their own' under many circumstances. I know someone who is as reductionist/materialist as they get, but through various methods has been known to channel Carl Sagan (and have interesting conversations with him about how odd it is to speak with him that way) and has been repeatedly briefly possessed by Hindu gods. She knows it's entirely coming from the operation of her own nervous system, but she thinks that if she has a complete enough identity to 'invite in' it is actually meaningful to say that something that comes from her mouth when she is in such an altered state comes 'from' that identity and not from her. To loosely quote her, "I'm pretty darn sure they're a function of my nervous system weirdness, but it just doesn't matter what the gods are when they come calling."