Okaaaaay, then, er, good enough. You've seen the entire universe at first-hand and I obviously haven't. Sounds about right.
Imagine busting out this kind of snide, whippersnapper jive on a scientist. As if I could tell John Gill (dr. in math) or Ed (dr. in physics), well, boys, you've seen all the prime numbers and the quarks first hand and I obviously haven't. Sounds about right. Who would ever take this as anything but hot air?
Of course I haven't seen what John or Ed have seen because I haven't done the work. I don't know the Poincaré Conjecture from Silly putty. How would I if I never put the arduous years in getting a grad degree in this stuff and since there is no other way to garner the goods but to study it hard, I don't know much about it.
Notice when we shift focus to the experiential world, the idea of work, or practice, is totally lost on most people. Or they believe that there is no real work that goes on in this realm, other than chasing fuzzy feelings, that discursive reasoning is really what the game is and if I "see the entire universe first hand," and Cintuine does not, that means I am smarter, and have a bigger discursive brain. I can just look and see that kind of sh#t, reality, glimmer out there in a way lost on everyone else.
This is bollocks, of course. If you want to see how perception works on the ground level you're going to have to spend some years sitting in the middle of it. There is no other way, and never will be.
There's a reason why you have to actually climb a route to know what it is about, otherwise you could just glance at a topo, reason out the experience objectively, and know all about it.
If you want to know how perception works BEYOND thing-making, or how our brains process and organize information, you have to sit in the subjective realm long and hard. You have to grind it. Glancing at it from without, noodling it with reason will not bear much fruit from what I have seen. If it did, who wold ever bother doing the work? We could just reason our way through the whole of it. The fact that we can't is why we call it another realm, ie, the experiential.
Aw, dude, chill out. Subjective meta experiences will always be fair game for sophomoric whippersnapper critiques, and nine times out of ten it serves them right. Like I said it all sounds awesome enough, but then so do a lot of articles of faith. To each their own; you get back on those double-digits asap, and I'll keep mucking around on my piddling 5.8 Gs in the range of ultimate truth. This illusion of antipathy is one thing I'd like to do away with if anything. I may be a devil's advocate but I'm really not a hater. So, y'know, na-ma-stay and all.
NEWSFLASH: Roadside-nesting cliff swallows have evolved shorter, more maneuverable wings, which may have helped them to make hasty retreats from oncoming vehicles, according to a study published in Current Biology.
This is bollocks, of course. If you want to see how perception works on the ground level you're going to have to spend some years sitting in the middle of it. There is no other way, and never will be.
There's a reason why you have to actually climb a route to know what it is about, otherwise you could just glance at a topo, reason out the experience objectively, and know all about it.
I resonate with most of your posts here Largo with the exception of "spending some years sitting". The reason is (I have pointed out before) why see through the illusion? What is the point? I suppose "why not" is a response that I can see the merit of.
I see the human experience and our "settled down" version of reality as a gift, and spending years peering into eternity as sort of missing the point. It is like watching a movie, yet picking apart the horrible acting and the bad effects and props. Why not just let yourself get swept away into the experience? Why peek behind the curtain?
Aww, come off it, JL. You make snide remarks all of the time. Therefore I feel completely allowed to call you a twit or to tell you to go sit in the corner with a pointy hat, which you have done throughout this thread.
I plainly said that when we see a waving flag we cannot digest the detail. We just toss it into the "Waving Flag" bin and don't worry about it. If it were a Nazi flag, we would examine it more closely.
I could also say that if we brought a primitive human and dropped him into Manhattan, or better yet, onto a trading floor with all of the noise and machines and their screens, he may very well be overwhelmed by the experience.
I don't see any practical way to approach what you are saying. That there is a "flagness" beyond our sensory perception. I don't believe that the mind operates this way.
The way that you can absolutely define the "flagness," is either to sit there for a couple of weeks staring at the flag and then having some sort of understanding of "flagness," or examining the dynamics of a flag and what causes it to wave in the first place. Then you will really understand why the flag waves. I do not think that you can define it any better than that, no matter what you keep tossing out.
That is what you seem to be talking about when you use the word reify. To take a subjective experience and then understand it in reality. I'm not sure if this notion is even possible. You could sit in front of a flag for the rest of your life and still be chained up in Plato's cave.
Plato's cave is to artificially change a person's view of what is real through fakery, and it is probably quite true, meaning possible. Our perception is indeed colored by previous experiences of flags, but if we are chained in Plato's cave, our observation can color our vision of reality. If you step back behind the people chained in Plato's cave and look the other way, it is all different.
The other way, which you seem to downright despise, is to actually study the physical flag and learn about it through physical observation and objective analysis.
You might not like it, but that is far more efficient and doesn't miss much. The only way to escape from this subjective experiential realm and share it with other's subjective experience is through quantitative analysis and the scientific method.
I think that, in a practical sense, mathematics is the most precise way to share subjective experience by manufacturing a language so precise that it is impossible to misunderstand between two people who are communicating. The language of Math and much of science is symbolic. The reason for that is that it works better when describing something than to just call up and say that "It is blue." The object reflects blue light because of either its pigment or the wavelength of the energy it emits, like a blue light.
That is how we have succeeded the most. Eliminate the subjective experiential differences, do your best to quantify it, communicate it in a way that no information is lost, as much as is possible at the time, and arrive at an objective solution.
You see the problem. What I see and experience may be quite different than what another human sees and experiences, despite our exposure to the same physical object. My idea of blue could be quite different from your definition of blue. We can get around this in a very precise way by measuring the wavelength of light and telling the other person that this wavelength is blue. You can say that it has "Blueness," but that is stopping far short of really understanding what blue really is.
Blue is a certain wavelenth of energy in the spectrum from far IR to gamma rays.
Let's say that I'm talking to a being who only sees in the x-ray spectrum. That being has never even seen blue. It is not even capable of experiencing blue. The only way to bridge that gap is through mathematics and a knowledge of the spectrum of radiation.
It goes the other way, as well. Although our atmosphere absorbs or reflects most x-ray radiation, I could sit in front of a source emitting x-ray "light." and see nothing. Even your most practiced monks would not understand x-rays. He would look at the source until he died from the harmful damage caused by the high energy of extremely short wavelength radiation.
All x-rays are is light with an incredibly blue color. It is so blue that it is well beyond what we could ever see with our senses. We know about this light through observation and reductionism. That might not be the best way to solve every problem, but it is with this one.
Do you have x-ray vision? There is an incredibly noisy physical world around you that you can't see, feel, or hear.
Yes, experience is subjective, but the best way to get around that, and to describe things that are beyond our physical senses is science. You could call it something else, but somebody had to figure out that there is a hell of a lot more going on out there than we can see or hear, simply because our senses are absolutely incapable of sensing sound and light beyond the small snippet of the wavelenght of both sound and light.
You can even study this with other animals, who have different capabilities in the sensory arena. A deer can see great at night, but it is colorblind during the day. We can now look at an eyeball and tell which part of the spectrum it can see:
So if I concentrate enough, can I see x-rays like Superman? Can you accomplish this? It seems to me that you are arguing, in a roundabout way, that we can.
With practice, you may be able to stretch your sensory system to "see" more than I can, but I bet that you can't see gamma rays, despite them being electromagnetic radiation just like visible blue.
A turkey is totally blind at night. It has given up its rods in favor of cones. The obverse is the case with a colorblind deer. I've heard that a turkey can see color far better than a human can.
Can you practice and see like a turkey?
We are all trapped into this meat body, as you say, and also trapped into the limitations of our senses, and no matter how much wha wha you suggest, I will not believe you without a demonstration. We all sit in the subjective world, and we have best escaped it is with ways to go beyond our senses. The Chandra X-Ray telescope can measure x-rays and then convert it to data that can be displayed on a visible screen. Then we can actually see with x-rays, although we had to build a special "eye" to do it. The same goes for the infrared and sounds that are either too high or low frequency than we can hear. We know that these sounds exist, because somebody built an artificial ear that could hear these sounds, which are just pressure waves moving through a substance.
Similarly, if I had been around to see 20 or so of Christ's miracles, I might have a differing view of Christianity.
My guess is that what you and I see, no matter how hard we try, is pretty much the same thing. Your senses are typically human, and you can't see x-rays. If we followed your example, we would never even know of x-rays.
If you can escape this meat body, with its limited senses, and see things that I can't, I want a demonstration.
Killing yourself is against the rules. You will wander around as a ghost.
Seriously, Suicide is terrible. Once it starts in a family or group of freinds, it tends to spread.
My point above was that it is quite easy to see beyond our sense now. Largo hates measuring things, but telescopes, electron microscopes, x-ray diffraction, partical accelerators...
They all extend our senses far beyond their natural range. Hell, we can even see x-rays now. Chandra is the x-ray equivalent of the Hubble.
Infrared telescopes can see through dust clouds, revealing what is beyond them to the other side. Firefighters use similar instruments to see through smoke. With science, we are now able to observe a large portion of the Universe, from the very large to the very small, and although a good IR telescope requires the sensor to be cooled almost to absolute zero, they can see things that eyeball telescopes can't.
We can observe throughout the electromagnetic spectrum.
Seismographs can hear the tiniest noises in the Earth. Ultra low frequency waves, for instance. Not only pressure waves, such as sound, but shear waves as well.
Does anyone care to ask why we know that part of the core of the Earth is molten? Any religious guys curious?
BAASE, no one can fault you for lack of effort. But the problem is, and I'm sure you are the first to know this, is that you are doing something that I would be excoriated for doing if I had the temerity of trying it on the objective and scientific realm, and that is you are totally guessing about what is happening per the subjective, trying to noodle it from without, and exhausting yourself with speculations.
I'm curious, if you really have an honest interest in probing the experiential, how much effort are you willing to put in, above and beyond the exact same thing you've been doing all along.
My sense is that most people are so addicted to mentalizing, and then speculating from there, that even open offers to tie in and get out on the sharp end are met with all kinds of ploys and excuses. Is it any wonder why we end up with so much foolish talk about all of this, as though we were just guessing about emptiness.
And I grew up with the Renzai tradition, and there's no coddling there. No soft touch. Open your trap with speculation - which I did a lot of - and get your ass whacked with a bamboo staff.
major revolutions are occurring in our understanding of the physical world
many of the pieces of the puzzle are already on the table, but some scientists do not see, or refuse to see the patterns
declaring these patterns to be taboo will not stop revolutions in understanding, but only embarrass those shoveling sand against the tide
until these revolutions in understanding the physical world are generally accepted, it will be very difficult to arrive at scientific understandings of consciousness, awareness, mind, and states of being
I read a consumer news piece about Watson's opposition to antioxidants. He made the point that antioxidants ,if taken during cancer treatment, actually impeded the ability of poisonous oxidant compounds from destroying cancerous cells.
This has been known for some time and did not originate with Watson.
Did he go on to suggest that the consumption of antioxidants are actually injurious for people in otherwise good health?
Am I missing something here?
Turns out that pro-oxidants can play significant roles in healing and slathering your body with excessive amounts of anti-oxidants may not ultimately be smart.
Words. Words. And more words. Fancy words about this and that.
What is reality?
Reality is a rock in the head. Thrown from whatever distance. Once hit, I dare you to to deny it's existence. F*#k your fancy words around reality. Really.
is that you are doing something that I would be excoriated for doing if I had the temerity of trying it on the objective and scientific realm, and that is you are totally guessing about what is happening per the subjective, trying to noodle it from without, and exhausting yourself with speculations.
JL, attacking you personally is an ad hominem attack, which any critical thinker should know. Merely point it out and you win among the locals on this group.
I'm sincere when I try to understand what the heck you are saying sometimes. You have irritated me a bit, because you have been holding your cards close to your chest. Meaning you know or have been taught in a formal setting. I wouldn't start going off on rocks without telling somebody that I have been looking at a specific type of rocks for most of my adult life. That seems a little unfair to me.
You do call people names, so I throw in the occasional twit comment as fair play. I don't really think that you are a twit.
I actually have a pretty long email written up in Word format that I was going to send to you directly, to take this offline and try to satisfy my curiosity.
Do you see how nice I try to be with the Christians? I try to be like that to others. You take a very strong position, and have derided science for the last two years straight, so I think we are about even Steven on that. I try not to deride you, but in a serious discussion, flaws in an argument can be pointed out by either side without making it personal, which I assure you it is not.
Hey. I'm curious. I do approach things critically, because that is the only way to protect yourself from falling into a UFO Jesus cult. A mutual friend of ours actually lost a wife to a UFO Jesus cult, but I won't name him of course. It wasn't HIS fault!
I'm curious about meditation. I always have been. I have zero problem with it because it is an observable act which has shown observable results. Now that is just a tickle of the surface of the art and I've been curious about what is really involved and what benefit it can really provide.
Why else would I be spending all of this time? I'm old enough to not be sucked into a 2 year conversation with you because of your place in climbing history or your writing, which I find hilarious. You are good at that. So why is this so hard to communicate to me and others here?
I suggest using small words and being utterly honest about it. Then we go from there.
So what did you think of my description of the problems of two different people, or two different species, understand what blue means?
Take a guy like Ghandi. He was easy to understand. I see no reason for you to have problems in the communication department.
Possibly drifting from the conversation a bit here: (I didn't check to see if this has already been posted.)
I find, in working with many young men, that just prior to puberty, the male child achieves a state sort of like that of a Bohdi in Buddhism. A kind of ethical and intellectual perfection.
I resonate with most of your posts here Largo with the exception of "spending some years sitting". The reason is (I have pointed out before) why see through the illusion? What is the point?
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I understand this. The problem is, not seeing the point is not the same as their not being a point. You want to know about Half Dome, so to speak, without making the effort to hike up the backside, expecting that if the "point" was valid and reasonable, I could be straightforward and simply tell you what it is.
When I go on and on about the objective and the experiential being fundamentally different, this is not a guess, and different approaches are needed to cover much ground in either realm. Again, if you're satisfied with the ground you've covered in the experiential by your own methods, good on you.
Like wall climbing or free soloing, it's ain't for everyone - just look at the resistance to making one move in that direction, as though our evaluating minds might dry up and blow away if disengaged for a mere half hour a day.
Do you think I'd really recommend exploring that route - being ask to believe nothing whatsoever - if there was not some gold there beyond faith, concepts and speculation?
Turns out that pro-oxidants can play significant roles in healing and slathering your body with excessive amounts of anti-oxidants may not ultimately be smart.
There is no question that ROSs and free radicals like Nitric Oxide have an important role in biological processes. They are roughly analogous to the Forest Service setting intentional fires to prevent larger conflagrations.
I'm not sure what you mean quantitatively by "slathering" or " excessive" but let us say it's an individual taking 1 gram of Vitamin C daily, which would roughly be 5 times the RDA (since only 50% is absorbed) and even more for the amount that would prevent scurvy.
Millions of people have been consuming that amount and more of Vit. C. With that amount of intake they should be violating the tadpole regeneration model of human health in droves.
Why aren't they showing up in physician's offices and ERs with a demonstrable inability to heal properly from cuts, bruises, and other ailments?
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