Amazing neurons and consciousness -- awe

Thinking lately about the fact that we have between 300 billion to 1 trillion fucking neurons in our skull.

About the various chemical messengers: Dopamine, Epinephrine, Norepinephrine, Serotonin, Acetylcholine, Histamine, etc...

Funny that the ones I think of off the top of my head are all the monoamines (well except for ACH) according to wikipedia.

Anyways...

There's all the chemicals just floating around, loading up neurons with so many signals until BAM! it fires across the gap known as a synapes, and that leads to further chains of signals. Over and over and over.

And somehow, whatever this is, it creates a process of perception and not only perception, but relation of ourselves as a distinct entity in this thing we call the universe.

Sensory apparatuses -- input... (with eyes, hands, nose, ears) then we process... (with conscious and unconscious mind) then we act/output (with mouth, with hands).

All this from such a dense complex device floating in a skull full of liquid.

And yet it all works, for the most part. How strange is this thing we call consciousness.

Somehow correlations are mapped into the system, stored for later retrieval and compared...

But consciousness... social/egoic consciousness then adds an extra layer of perception beyond what we merely perceive onto categories and maps from the social realm. What we call morality or ethics. How we behave as social animals. We use our minds to accept or deny the social strictures that have evolved. This is something that ants, for example, don't do. Or bees. They accept their fate. But it also adds an extra element of neurosis.

(This is not to say that social animals don't get neuroses. When relationships are involved, patterns of behavior are reinforced through repetition. A sense of personal space is required. It's like when some animals start to self-injure when their owners are gone too long. Or such things. That's a sort of neurotic behavior, even if not outright bound by the social conditioning bound upon them by explicit (or in some cases implicit) contract of living in a society. It is merely the fact that social relations in this sense are more organic and unspoken, bound up in the nervous system through repeated behaviors and reinforced by a mutual reciprocity. When the reciprocation breaks down, the animal neurosis appears.)

I dunno, these are just random thoughts I'm spewing, I'm sure you could easily argue against a lot of it. I'm on lunch break ferchrisake, and it's not like I'm doing research on the topic at the moment.

But it's just amazing to me, that we have this delicate system. And yet, we can pump so many different chemicals into the mix and induce altered states of consciousness, whether to make behavior more easily conform to socially accepted standards (and perhaps more desired standards -- less depression, anxiety, for example... positive both for the individual and society) Sometimes, though, it's possible that so much of these chemicals we dump in for our own sanity are, as I've said many times before, medicating the wrong thing. Our illness is a symptom, not necessarily of us. It's indicative of a larger aggregate social dysfunction. But instead of trying to find a way to heal this dysfunction, we continue to see ourselves as the ones who are diseased.

But the mind of ours. This consciousness is so malleable. Sometimes it breaks. Other times it doesn't. Fortunately, it's rare for consumption of chemicals to actually lead to a complete breakage. Sometimes these alterations can help people to find out answers they seek. It allows one to approach the world from a different perspective. And yet, in the end they come back.

But sometimes it's terrifying. What the fuck IS a DMT trip? I don't know, I've never experienced it. But it's kind of scary to think about. And yet, if you are curious about the mind, about perception, most assuredly you want to see it. Because you know it's there. If you just push out that serotonin and other chemicals... You will see it. And then 10 minutes later, it all melts away and you are standing back where you started from. And you never left, but you went so far away.

And it's all there, connections upon connections floating in a liquid filled skull.