why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[bennyboy]

Well, the way that you(we) are -is- specific to a certain chemistry.  This much we already know.  There's an entire market full of drugs that establish this point dose by dose..day in and day out.  Consciousness itself is probably better described by the former.  You(we) are not consciousness, it's something that we possess, but we also possess a whole bunch of other complicating shit, and we were designed by committee...so...lol.

I mentioned earlier the impulse for suicide, and that wasn't just tongue-in-cheek. There's this struggle between the sense of unity of all, i.e. of the self-as-part, and the sense of solipsism-- that in some absurd way, whatever is "out there," your experience of it is really just an expression of some element of the "self" which you can't identify with because you don't have conscious access to it. I cannot decide which hypothetical state is more dehumanizing (by which I mean more disillusioning of the human egocentric narrative) than the other. In general, I'd say that philosophical consideration must almost necessarily result in an experience of invalidation of the world view, and in extreme cases, whether you can bring yourself to swallow the hemlock or not, there's nevertheless a symbolic death that comes with awareness of the dialectic you are talking about.

I cannot say that I AM consciousness, because there's not enough coherence in consciousness as ideas and sensations flit from moment to moment, to really identify it as something permanent or at least persistent. Nor can I say I'm other than that (a committee of brain functions, say), because addressing that kind of mechanistic democracy in the guise of individual agency seems absurd. At best, there's some recognition of a formless spark, the "light of consciousness" if you will.

It seems to me that both the sense of consciousness, and the sense of self, are a kind of supervenient narrative-- a spontaneous mythology if you will: "Benjamin" is a conglomerate of ideas attached to a name, and while not nearly as pure as the Jesus idea or pagan god ideas, isn't really more representative of anything real than those are.