/lit/ - Literature

>>22921620
Why do you need a book? That's just what happens when you think about a problem hard and long enough.

>>22921620
We held a seance in my topology class and the upper level courses let you bring a ouija board for exams

>>22921620
Poincare is a really good read on his own desu.

>>22921636
What book desu?

>>22921620
bump for interest

>>22921620
I've noticed that when I'm reading a very complex philosophical book that is almost unintelligible to me, my unconscious still understands it perfectly, and the meanings of the book are slowly revealed to me in dreams, or when I'm feverish or when barely awake, about to fall asleep.

>>22923074
>philosophy in fever dreams
Have you tried getting stoned? I heard that helps with philosophy. Doesn't help with mathematics or any science though.

The Kekule Problem in Nautilus is an excellent article by Cormac McCarthy on dream intuition.

I studied math in college, I was a pretty bad math student so found myself working deep into the night trying to do proofs. I had multiple experiences of laying down for a nap and then waking up with sudden ideas or intuitions. I do not remember the dream thoughts. It is definitely a universal phenomenon.

>>22921649
I haven't read all of them but all the ones I have read were really good.

>>22923081
>It is definitely a universal phenomenon.
Yeah it's just what happens when you think hard. You don't need a special book for this, just some pop-sci article on neuroscience which I'm sure must exist.

When you're awake and think hard about a problem, by Hebb's principle what fires together, wires together. But lots of neurons wire together and there isn't a coherent understanding. (Everything firing together is epilepsy, everything wired together is equivalent to nothing wired, zero information.) Then, when you dream, these connections get pruned during the process of memory consolidation. Dreaming itself is just the brain's experience of the memory consolidation process, with different random engrams activated and arranged into a narrative (this last part is automatic whether the engrams are of your actual recent experience or random ones triggered in sleep), connections pruned, memories and understanding therefore made more long-term robust. Then you wake up, and et voilà, you have something more coherent in your brain than before you went to sleep. Sometimes this is an actual useful idea or insight.

No book of philosophical fart-sniffing required.

>>22923077
I used to smoke a lot in my teenage years but now its basically impossible for god knows what reason, as soon as I inhale its an instant panic attack and derealization.

>source? It came to me in a dream
Based

>>22921620
>gets all his ideas in the pool
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dr-nakamats-the-man-with-3300-patents-to-his-name-134571403/

Problems have to percolate-- consciousness is distributed throughout the body, just as much as the octopus' brain is.

>>22921620
The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

>>22921620
Psychotic revelations. There's a fascinating psychoanalytic study with very convincing arguments about how Nash came up with his game theory
>Nasar describes a shocking scene in which Nash talks to George Mackey, a colleague of his from Harvard, shortly after the first jagged teeth of schizophrenia had begun to tear his mind apart
>“Mackey couldn’t keep it down any longer; his voice sounded slightly whiny, but he made an effort to be friendly:
>–How is this possible? –he began to say, “How is it possible that you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical demonstration… how is it possible that you believed that aliens were sending you messages? How can you have believed that aliens had recruited you to save the world? How is it possible…?”
>Nash finally looked up and stared at Mackey, without blinking and with a look as cold and inexpressive as that of a bird or a snake; then, as if he were speaking to himself, in a reasonable tone and with his slow and gentle southern cadence, he said
>“Because the ideas I conceived about supernatural beings came to me in the same way as my mathematical ideas did, and for that reason I took them seriously.

>>22921620
you basically learn things during sleep by fixing the mistakes that lead you to fail that you unconsciously or consciously know cause you to fail, its common knowledge among people who play music, you can spend hours practicing some part on an instrument and not get it right, then you wake up, pick up the instrument and play it right in 1 or 2 tries.
when you're very obsessed or focused and immersed in something you typically dream about it aswell, happens to NEETS who play games the entire day.

>>22921649
Science & Hypothesis and Science & Method

Also check out Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, Duhem's Saving the Appearances, NR Hanson's Patterns of Discovery

>>22921620
McCarthy's essay the kekule problem isn't too long but quite interesting. Writers also seem to get their inspiration involuntarily.

>>22923105
You have no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes.

bump

Murray Gell-Mann was also interested in this, maybe he wrote something about it.

>>22921620
I was browsing/skimming some philosophy papers the other day and was looking at one on psychological epiphenomenalism, and the author mentioned that there have been many recent studies showing that, as far as the studies can tell, your unconscious brain workings can do pretty much everything your conscious mind can do, even really complex things that one might assume you would need consciousness for.
Also, as others have been saying, this has been known for a long time. Schopenhauer has a bit in one of his essays on how he believed most of our problem solving gets done unconsciously based off the fact that solutions to problems can suddenly spring to the forefront of your mind even when you're not thinking of them consciously.

>>22921620
>If what matters is to come to an understanding and to communicate, then, of course, I can only make use of human means, which are at my command because I am at the same time human. And actually I have thoughts only as human; as I, I am at the same time thoughtless. One who can’t get rid of a thought is to that extent only human, is a slave of language, this human institution, this treasury of human thoughts. Language or “the word” tyrannizes most terribly over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas. Watch yourself now just once in your act of reflection, and you will find how you get further only by becoming thoughtless and speechless in each moment. You are not only thoughtless and speechless in sleep, but also in the deepest reflection; indeed, precisely then the most so. And only through this thoughtlessness, this unrecognized “freedom of thought,” or freedom from thought, are you your own. Only from it do you reach the point of consuming language as your property.

>>22925219
The conscious self is like the mere ripples of waves on the sea of the mind. And who knows what manner of leviathans are lurking beneath.