The Cosmic Serpent
For ten years, Jeremy Narby explored the Amazonian rain forests, the libraries of Europe, and some of the world's most arcane scientific journals, following strange clues, unsuppressible intuitions, and extraordinary coincidences. He collected evidence and researched the seemingly impossible possibility that specific knowledge might somehow be transferred through DNA, the genetic information at the heart of every cell of every living thing, to a specially prepared consciousness. Narby demonstrates that indigenous and ancient peoples have known for millennia - and have even drawn - the double helix structure, something Western science discovered only in 1953. He also suggests that DNA and the life it codes for at the cellular level are "minded."
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What Hacker News says
- In the “consciousness is the inflection of existential being” view, consciousness is massively coherent through coupling and entanglement, thus giving the illusion of a singular field (of which there are many going in and out of phase with each other.) this would work similarly to holography (instead of composite wave fronts, those entangled.)
The brain is very much an antenna, though not only an antenna. The Cosmic Serpent (book) does a good job speculating how this might work, using 2D crystalline DNA as “fractal antennas.” The brain stores it’s own information locally.
Consciousness is not computation (or intelligence). Consciousness is the carrier platform from which intelligent systems arise not the other way around.
The advantage of consciousness (other than the existential potential inflecting upon itself) is non-linear “computation”. As consciousness (through constructive and destructive interference) acts as a sieve (information is pushed into and pulled off of the “stack” by electro-chemical biotechnology.) a mechanism far more efficient than linear computation.
- Geeze, that’s not how truth works actually (not confined to the horizon of ignorance), though I accept your skepticism.
Your downvotes are your HYPOCRISY!
I have a whole long list of assertions you will fight me on for the love of your ignorance.
In this moment I cannot fully invest in exhaustive debate.
I will prattle on a little more in an unstructured form for the sake of intrigue.
There are several things going, one being this parallel discussion on quantum entanglement (and the parallel discussion for our minds being hackable for another time.)
I would like to describe to you the technology of consciousness in ways I have come to understand, yet I will expect to be scorned and badgered for the inherently abstract nature of our topic.
Neurons in isolation exhibit a telemetric awareness of one and other
The Cosmic Serpent was inspiring in my youth. The primitive ideas the author discusses relate.
Microtubul structures likely provide a substrate for our experiential being. Electrochemical processes flash these substrates, and then gently and delicately suss the state resolve as though a sieve + stack.
The sieve is the constructive /destructive aspect.
I say “stack” as resolve is apparently pushed and pulled or read/write like memories, yet I believe this is where our non-classical thought strategy arises. The outcome is more like a micro-inference rather than a faithful memory.
Constructive and destructive patterns form an analog isolated holographic “image” (though not merely a picture, in every shade and depth of every experience we are capable of having.)
Any information can be pushed into this stack, yet interference collapses to associations (or novelty) producing a primitive psycho-emotional echo, other parts of the brain process into higher level responses.
Consciousness is not intelligence. Consciousness coopts intelligence as a tool for perpetuation.
How does this not sound like consciousness: “consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of our existential being.”
Existential being is any matter, yet all cold matter is dormant without animation through life or other technology.
The potential is the hyper-dimensional capacity of the carefully arranged atoms in our neural substrate.
Inflection is any perturbation of the quantum dynamic (which is usually pure chaos.) it is the atom in the universe which exists, the living system is a technology which extends and allows the aggregate scope of potential awareness and feedback.
The quantum layer is like an echo chamber for your jelly bag brain. This echo chamber is the material universe (which you are) echoing experience upon its analog subjectively scoped potentials.
See the idea, not the comment quality.
- I thought “Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” was a pretty good book.
- "Breaking Open the Head", by Daniel Pinchbeck
"DMT: The Spirit Molecule", by Dr. Rick Strassman
"The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge", by Jeremy Narby
"The Law", by Frederic Bastiat
- Thanks for sharing this, I love reading about how different societies interact with and approach psychoactives. Historical works liek this and anthropological works like Jeremy Narby's Cosmic Serpent are so intriguing.
- I read a fascinating book called The Cosmic Serpent [0] wherein a team of biologists went to Peru to document the kinds of things that shamans have learned by taking Ayahuasca.
If you want to know more about this, I highly recommend it as basic reading.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/865516.The_Cosmic_Serpen...
