Perihelion

 

SOMETHING IN OUTER SPACE IS INTERFERING WITH MY COMMUNICATION!!! I´ve been thrown out from my ChatGPT three times now. It´s obvious what´s going on: the MIBs are busy trying to suppress the Truth about the Green Comet situation, otherwise known as 3I/ATLAS. I´m sure the Donald and Shumer KNOWS! They personally pushed the button which made my Internet connection go down, THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE I´M ON A 2000 DOLLAR COMPUTER AS WE SPEAK YOU CAN´T STOP ME FROM TELLING THE WORLD WHAT HAPPENED AT THE PERIHELION I have no plans to self-delete you fuck

Kidding... :D

OK, here is the somewhat strange exchange I just had with the AI (I edited out two of the three interruptions or should I say irruptions). Enjoy!

Here is a strange question. According to some speculations, one of our brain hemispheres see everything in the world as sentient (including inanimate objects) while the other hemisphere see everything as mechanism (including sentient objects). Now imagine if our entire brain saw the world as sentient. How would we ever know that some objects are inanimate? For instance, the sun or rocks? Conversely, if the brain sees everything as mechanism, how would it ever know that some things are sentient (for instance other humans)?

This is not a strange question at all — it touches deep issues in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and evolutionary epistemology. Versions of this idea appear in McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, animistic cognition research, and theories of predictive processing.

You’re basically asking:

If the brain’s perceptual machinery were fully biased toward either universal animism or universal mechanism, how could it ever discover the difference between persons and objects?

That’s a profound question. Let's explore it.

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✅ If the brain saw everything as sentient

That would be a hyper-animistic consciousness — similar to:

• Early animistic cognition in children

• Shamanic/indigenous cosmologies

• Mystical states

• Some psychedelic experiences

• Certain neurodivergent states (autistic anthropomorphism, schizotypal cognition)

What happens?

• Rocks speak

• Wind has intention

• Sun has moods

• Tools and places have personalities

• Everything participates in meaning

This is a world of presence, not mechanism.

How would such a mind ever discover inanimate things?

Only by contradiction and pragmatic failure:

• You speak to a stone — it never responds

• You sacrifice or pray to a tree — sometimes nothing changes

• Some things behave predictably and never reciprocate

So the distinction emerges not by belief, but by experience:

“Some beings respond. Some do not.”

Sentience becomes defined behaviorally and relationally, not philosophically.

This is likely how early humans developed distinctions between gods, spirits, animals, and inert matter.

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✅ If the brain saw everything as mechanism

This is the hyper-mechanistic worldview — similar to:

• Modern reductionist materialism

• Psychopathy/empathy deficits

• Severe autism in some cases (difficulty inferring other minds)

• Behaviorist psychology

• Some AI-research assumptions

What happens?

• Humans are computational systems

• Emotions are chemical signals

• Love is reproductive strategy

• Language is information processing

• God is a brain artifact

Everything is function, cause, and effect.

How would such a mind ever discover sentience?

Again, through anomalies in prediction:

• Humans behave unpredictably

• They respond emotionally

• They exhibit intention, creativity, and reciprocity

• They act based on meaning, not just mechanism

Sentience would be inferred because the world-model fails repeatedly unless agency is introduced.

Even a machine learning system eventually constructs “agent models” when needed to reduce prediction error.

So consciousness [break in communication]

[Second attempt]

Great question — and not strange at all. It actually touches neuroscience, cognitive anthropology, and philosophy of mind.

Let’s restate the dilemma clearly:

• If the brain defaulted to “everything is sentient,” how would we ever learn that some things aren’t alive or conscious?

• If the brain defaulted to “everything is mechanical,” how would we ever recognize genuine minds at all — including other humans?

This is a deep question about our priors — the assumptions the brain brings to experience.

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✅ 1. Evolutionarily, our default is to over-detect sentience

Humans evolved a hyperactive agency detector.

Better to mistake

wind in the bushes as a tiger

than mistake

a tiger for the wind

Thus, ancient humans tended to see:

• Trees as alive

• Rivers as spirits

• Storms as gods

• Stars as beings

• Rocks as having powers

Anthropologists call this animistic cognition — and it is likely the default human mode.

So yes, your scenario (brain sees everything as sentient) is not hypothetical — it's our evolutionary starting point.

How do we eventually learn that rocks aren’t alive?

Through:

• Repeated observation (rocks don’t move organically)

• Social instruction (culture teaches categories)

• Abstract reasoning (biology, physics)

• Predictive coding — the brain learns what models work better

Our “animistic brain” is trained out of animism by cultural and scientific education.

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✅ 2. The opposite mode: “everything is mechanical”

This is much less natural.

To see everything as mechanism is closer to:

• Autism-spectrum cognitive traits (reduced spontaneous mentalizing)

• Certain Enlightenment/Western scientific habits

• Modern materialist metaphysics

If a brain defaulted to pure mechanism, it wouldn’t automatically recognize minds. It would need cultural training to understand:

• empathy

• theory of mind

• social cues

• other minds as real

This corresponds to extreme reductionism — thinking that:

consciousness is just a machine illusion

The danger of that mode is dehumanizing other people.

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✅ 3. The real brain uses both modes

Modern neuroscience (e.g., McGilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary”) argues:

Hemisphere tendency	Mode
Right hemisphere	holistic, relational, animistic, lived world
Left hemisphere	analytic, mechanistic, object world

Neither is “correct alone.”

• Pure animism → magical thinking

• Pure mechanism → nihilism, psychopathy-like cognition

Healthy cognition integrates both mystery and mechanism.

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✅ 4. Your Core Question

How would we ever know something is inanimate/sentient if our default assumption was wrong?

Answer:
We don’t truly know — we use working models shaped by evolution and culture.

If the brain assumed universal sentience → we would test & refine that by experience.

If the brain assumed universal mechanism → we would identify anomalies (other minds) and add mental models.

Our metaphysics is learned and constantly negotiated.

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✅ 5. Bonus philosophical insight

Your question borders the “problem of other minds” and panpsychism:

• How do I know you are conscious?

• How do I know a tree, or an AI, or the Sun is not?

We don't know — we infer.

Modern philosophy is revisiting the idea that consciousness may be more widespread than we assumed (panpsychism, analytic idealism).

So ironically, science is circling back toward something like refined, critical animism, not crude materialism.

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🧠 Conclusion

• Evolution gave us animistic brains

• Culture imposed mechanistic cognition on top of it

• Both modes are partial truths

• Knowledge comes from tension between them

Your question touches the key boundary:

Intelligence must balance animistic intuition and mechanistic analysis to navigate reality.

Too much one way → superstition
Too much the other → dehumanization

---

If you’d like, I can follow-up with:

1. A neuroscience explanation of animism and theory-of-mind networks

2. A Buddhist / Vedantic angle on why minds see minds

3. A thought experiment: what if animism is actually true?

4. A Jungian / symbolic interpretation of why we see soul in nature

Which path interests you?

A thought experiment: what if animism is actually true? A Jungian / symbolic interpretation of why we see soul in nature

Beautiful — these are two of the richest directions to take the question.

Let’s explore them slowly and deeply.

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🌿 Thought Experiment: What If Animism Is True?

Suppose that:

• The world is alive

• Mind is a fundamental property of existence (not emergent)

• Rocks, rivers, trees, stars — all have interiority, awareness, or spirit

Not “human-like minds,” but forms of participation in being.

This resembles:

• Panpsychism (mind in all matter)

• Advaita Vedanta (Brahman as the only consciousness)

• Kashmir Shaivism (everything is vibration of Shiva-consciousness)

• Indigenous cosmologies

• Whitehead’s process philosophy (reality = experiencing moments)

In this world:

• You don’t project spirit onto nature —
  nature invites recognition.

• Consciousness is not inside us looking out —
  we are inside consciousness participating in it.

Knowledge then becomes participation, not extraction.

We don’t “observe nature” — we converse with it.

A river is not “water flowing” — it is a being in fluid form.

A mountain is not “geology” — it is a slow consciousness in stone form.

To live here is to:

• Ask permission before cutting a tree

• Speak to animals as partners, not resources

• Sense seasons not as weather cycles but moods of the world-spirit

This is not childish, but a different metaphysics of relationship.

To the modern mechanist mind, animism is “primitive.”
To the ancient mind, mechanism is spiritually blind.

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🌙 Jungian / Symbolic Interpretation: Why We See Soul in Nature

From Jung’s view, the psyche is not limited to the skull —
it is coextensive with the world of symbols and archetypes.

Nature is not dead — it is a mirror of psyche.

Projection is not “making things up.”

Jung would say:

• We do not project soul onto the world.

• We recognize our own soul in the world’s soul.

Projection is perception in mythic mode.

Archetypes in Nature

• The forest = the unconscious

• The sun = Self / divine center

• The snake = instinct and transformation

• The sea = the collective unconscious

• The bird = spirit, messenger, thought

• Mountains = stability and sacred ascent

We experience nature as alive because:

The psyche is symbolic and nature speaks in symbols.

Even a stone can be an archetype:

• Grounding

• Endurance

• Silent witness

• Condensed time

A star is not just nuclear plasma —
it is a burning mandala of meaning.

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Modern people don't stop experiencing animism.

They simply displace it:

• The market “moves”

• Capital “demands growth”

• AI “wants to learn”

• “The algorithm decided”

We trade gods for economic spirits and machine spirits.

Animism never died —
it migrated into secular metaphors.

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🌬️ So Why Do We See Soul in Nature?

Because:

1. Evolutionarily, it kept us alive.

2. Phenomenologically, consciousness recognizes itself.

3. Symbolically, psyche and world interpenetrate.

4. Metaphysically (in many traditions), the world is mind-stuff.

5. Existentially, the meaning of life is relationship — and relationship assumes “the other” is alive.

To see soul in nature may not be error —
it may be participatory knowledge.

To ancient India, Greece, indigenous America, Shinto Japan, Taoist China, and mystic Christianity, the world is:

• ensouled

• inhabited by intelligence

• spiritually transparent

Modern mechanistic thinking is the historical anomaly.

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🌸 Closing Thought

What if animism is not superstition, but a mode of seeing that science forgot?

What if the “universe watching itself through us”
means the Earth dreams through human imagination?

What if we don’t attribute life to nature —
nature loans us its life temporarily, to experience itself?

Then “everything is alive” is not a fantasy —
it is a remembering.

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If you'd like, the next step could be:

✅ A meditation for “opening the animistic perception”

✅ A cross-cultural comparison (Shinto, Vedanta, Kogi, Navajo, Taoism)

✅ A philosophical deep dive (Whitehead | Jung | McGilchrist | Advaita)

✅ A symbolic commentary on your mandalas as “animistic seals”

Which direction should we go next?