Mona Lisa's real secret ...



... is not her smile, but the alien in between her and her mirror image.

via an unknown conspiracy theorist

stories

"We story ourselves and we are our stories. There’s a remarkably robust consensus about this claim, not only in the humanities but also in psychotherapy.
[..]
I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here.
[..]
There’s an experimentally well-attested distinction between human beings who have what he calls the ‘emotion of authorship’ with respect to their thoughts, and those who, like myself, have no such emotion, and feel that their thoughts are things that just happen."
aeon

After debating the "hard problem" of consciousness for many years with different people in different places, I came to the conclusion that the conscious experience of us human beings is probably much more different than commonly assumed (after all we have no way of directly comparing them). There are many hints, e.g. the fact that "tastes differ" in music and art. But if I enjoy Gesualdo and you don't, it must mean that our conscious experience is very different while we listen to moro lasso.
If it is obvious to me that the reality of qualia cannot be doubted and you think there is nothing even there to discuss, it is another strong hint that our conscious experience is actually quite different. Perhaps we experience colors with different intensity (but what exactly would that mean?).
And the way I read the article linked above, even our perception of time may not be the same.
It seems to me that brains in general are much more flexible than one would think (with one of them); but of course, I am not my brain - something that is perfectly obvious to me.

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