Scoopfeeds — Intelligent news, curated.
Presentfulness: Lucidity, Osmosis, and Dissociation
agentic-ai

Presentfulness: Lucidity, Osmosis, and Dissociation

LessWrong · Jun 13, 2026, 5:21 PM

When you think back to a core memory of yours, do you remember your vision being oddly good? As if you were recording with better equipment, at a higher FPS, higher dynamic range and color capture, more clearly than most memories? It's as if, for those couple of moments, you became more alive, or leveled up some stats you didn't know about. I don't know for certain that anyone else recalls core memories like this, but I would be slightly surprised if they didn't.On a similar note, have you ever had the realization that you're going to remember the moment you're in? A gut feeling, as everything around you becomes clearer, where you feel like you were shaken awake and have burst into life?[1]Welcome to my definition of Lucidity, and while we're at it, Osmosis. I have found it useful to give these states of mind names, and so I have.Defining Lucidity (and Osmosis)Lucidity is a state of presentfulness, wherein a person is actively/manually/consciously processing information, as opposed to passively processing it.[2] In my case, I've experienced things like the apparent improvement of my senses,[3] the feeling that things happening will be more easy to remember in the future, and an increase in focus.[4]This is in contrast to the other two states of presentfulness, Osmotic and Dissociative. They are all different enough to warrant their own terms, but they are not not connected. The (badly made) graph below shows how I see the three states, where you can be more or less lucid, osmotic, or dissociative.Lucidity is the most presentful state; and you usually[5] have to push yourself into a lucid state[6] or you won't enter one. OsmosisAn osmotic state is where (I think) people are normally at. You're present enough to engage in conversation, but you're not wasting energy paying attention to everything going on around you. The key difference here is that, while information is entering the front of your consciousness, you're not trying to pull that information there. You migh

Article preview — originally published by LessWrong. Full story at the source.
Read full story on LessWrong → More top stories
Aggregated and edited by the Scoop newsroom. We surface news from LessWrong alongside other reporting so you can compare coverage in one place. Editorial policy · Corrections · About Scoop