http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2024-07-04T16:40:11Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#dc30f1c8e162465e5443f907b5a23558a932d48c 2024-07-04T16:40:11Z July 4. Whenever I hear about a crazy person who did a terrible crime, typically killing their family, because they heard voices telling them to do it, I always wonder: Why don't they just not do what the voices say? I mean, if I were facing a hard decision, and a voice in my head gave me advice, I'd probably follow it. But I wouldn't go against my core values. Never mind murder -- voices in my head couldn't make me litter. I'd just be annoyed at them.

Obviously something else is going on. The words "kill your family" are not where the action is. The person is being compelled on a deeper level, and the words are at most a carrier for the compulsion, and at least a residue. It could be the part of the iceberg that's above water, or the shadow, in the rational world, of a more potent sub-rational process.

Now I'm thinking, can this happen to non-crazy people, through voices not inside the head? Can a voice on the radio, or the TV, or the internet, serve as a carrier or a catalyst or a pointer for something that's happening on a deeper level than language?

If speech has persuasive force, and if the words don't hold up rationally, then the next candidate is the non-language part of the voice: the tone, the timbre, the vibration. This makes sense to me. My most transformative experience was not from drugs, but from a song, and not from the lyrics or melody, but the sound.

There still has to be something deeper, because what is it that makes a vibration compelling for one person, and repellent for another? I think this is an aspect of human identity, especially collective identity, that remains undiscovered. And my practical advice, in these crazy times, is not to use the word "irrational", but instead sub-rational. Because there's something going on in there, even if you don't know what it is.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#8ede632fa1c467e451b15bddd7036e456e9c25ad 2024-07-01T13:10:58Z July 1. Back to philosophy, I've written about the consciousness of animals and plants. But if we take psychism seriously, it opens all kinds of interesting doors. And if we take pagan metaphysics seriously, we have to wonder about the consciousness of gods. What is it like to be a god?

I can see three levels of answers. One is that gods exist purely as a behavior of human consciousness, as already understood by psychologists. So what it's like to be a god is simply what it's like to be a human believing in that god; and through known channels of communication, humans can decide what the gods are like and what they want.

If we go deeper, gods can exist in the human collective subconscious. If humans disappeared, they'd disappear too, but they can coordinate our behavior in ways that physicalism doesn't recognize, and without us being consciously aware of it. This answer seems most likely to me, and it could also apply to demonic possession.

Or they could exist on some level deeper than humans. We're an opportunity to them, but they don't need us. This is how it usually is in fiction, and you can see examples in the TV Tropes page for the Old Gods.

Notice that on all three levels, the gods are mutable. We could change our minds about them, or they could adapt to changing culture, or they could put on different masks. I tend to agree with Ezra Pound, who wrote, "The Gods have not returned. They have never left us."

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