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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 9, 2016 - 03:29pm PT
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Ed wrote: au contraire, Largo, the verb observe, and noun observer, are much more likely to be used to describe the function in an objective sense... witness and witnessing are used in a subjective sense.
The distinction being that a witness affirms by oath the truthfulness of their testimony. Nothing else is required.
One of the things I have learned in this process, possibly due to a shift in my meditation practice, is to quite fighting and to start looking at commonalities, and to recognize my own contradictions, especially in the polarized objective and subjective camps. My biggest disconnect is that while I like to PRACTIVE subjective adventures, my thinking, and the material I mostly enjoy reading, is closer to what Fruity is onto, minus the tedious religious bashing (well deserved in most cases, but we already know that). I basically am a very physical person who thinks in tangible terms and seems logical conclusions, so the intellectual side of the mind discussion remains a fascination for me because I naturally understand the reasoning driving it. That's basically how my mind works. But I cannot ignore what I have learned in the subjective camp, which in my tradition is empirically based, though not in the way most people think. The result is that my best intuition about how to move forward is not in a straight line, or through simply boring into one or the other apparent sides: objective and/or subjective, 1st or 3rd person. My new tact is to compare and contrast, and use the age old Socratic method, and I'm liking the progress so far.
Anyway, in most if not all analysis we don't attempt to analyze the whole planet, so to speak, rather we divide up the various observable countries, states, cities, and perceivable parts and analyze those.
Per what Ed wrote above - using normal definitions (a workable starting point) - my first thought and impulse is to try and tease out WHAT is being observed or witnessed, basically the content of awareness; then, as mentioned, compare and contrast. Part of this involves trying to nail down the difference between what a thing or phenomenon DOES, and what it IS.
What a given external object or phenomenon DOES normally goes most of if not all the way in describing what it is. I wonder if any object or phenomenon can be described in and of itself without framing the noun (person, place, thing or phenomenon) in relation to other forces, objects, etc.
Subjectivity seems to be an exception to this rule, inasmuch as the objective, functional mechanics of the brain doesn't seem to tell the entire story of mind - though it's highly questionable that this is discernable from a 3rd person perspective. That is part of what makes the whole inquiry so slippery and the discussion often so wonky and contentious. And conflation so rampant. And we also simply leave stuff out. Recall how behaviorism sought largely to explain us humans in terms of observable behavior, the old stimulus response model. Some objective analysis seem mired in this old model, but that's another topic, and arguing the point gets us nowhere.
Anyway, as Ed described, we have two seemingly distinct categories of content: the 3rd person world of external forces and objects (objective) that we can see and "observe" or at any rate measure "out there," and the 1st person internal world of subjective content, such as memories, feelings, sensations, impressions, etc., that we "witness" internally but which no 3rd person can directly observe.
I can recognize an angry person by their observable behavior, and be correct to a high probability, but I cannot directly experience their subjective fireworks, all the energy and chemicals and explosions rushing through them. We all intuitively know this much. When a person claims he can externally observe a person's direct subjective process, like reading their minds, most of us cry foul. Again, we all have a natural skepticism toward anyone claiming to actually see or know the subjectivity of another person.
Even the greatest writer would be hard pressed to say what "seeing subjectivity" might actually mean, though some still do. But to my mind this is a categorical mistake, "an ontological error in which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property." An equally basic error, IMO, is to believe that if a property (sentience in this instance) IS NOT, itself, material and nothing but material, then it must through some magical process be separate and independent from the physical world. The notion that both sentience and material could coexist in one system, itself inseparable from all systems, existing in feedback loops, related to but not entirely constrained by the other property, is a concept sometimes considered only if the physical is the fundamental (primary causal agent) of the subjective. Hence we get terms like emergence and so forth. But these too present problems once we start comparing and contrasting. Allow me an anecdote.
When my biology professor in undergrad school first introduced me to brain mapping rigs (principally EEG and qEEG machines), and we could see our own electrochemical brain activity appear on a computer screen in real time, he (the prof) was quick to point out that we were not looking directly at our minds, though certain general patterns, especially low and high amplitudes, spiking, and wonky coherence in certain frequencies in certain areas were typically associated with focus, ADHD, anxiety, calm, depression, bipolar disorder, and so forth. But this was 2nd hand general, not specific, data per subjectivity itself. You could entrain (viva neurofeedback protocols) your brain to replicate, nearly or in some cases almost exactly, the brain activity of a long time meditator, say, but your subjective experience would not be his or hers nor would your view of reality change much if at all. And you had to be careful. If you tried to rail your brain into producing the high amplitude Delta waves we sometimes saw in long time meditators, you could trigger gran mal seizures.
The take away was that even though the electrochemical activity we were measuring was clearly "what the brain was doing," this objective phenomenon was not itself subjectivity, which was closely related to but not identical with the underlying neuro functioning. The freaky part was the connectivity - that entraining the brain could change subjectivity, and subjective feedback could change the brain activity. This was especially the case with galvanic skin biofeedback, where you tape a sensor (thermometer) to your finger and "try" and raise the temperature. But "trying" got you nowhere. You had to abandon trying and just hold the intention of letting your hands warm up and as you saw the temperature rise you let your body figure out how to do your bidding and with practice you could "learn" to get that temp upwards of 102 degrees.
Another peculiar thing was that if you simply taped the sensor to a subject's finger and gave them no instructions the temp would generally go down as the person wondered what they were supposed to do. What's more, even if you told a subject: Try and raise the temperature in your fingers, it would only happen when they paid attention to the process WITHOUT trying to direct or influence the outcome. Stranger still is that a person could raise the temp WITHOUT the sensor so long as they didn't get distracted and remained AWARE of the process. This brought into question the operate response idea. But it did get us wondering about what this awareness/attention process was all about.
Returning to Ed's model: observing and witnessing differ insofar as their content target is objective and subjective respectively. But there's one constant in both cases: awareness.
No one can observe, measure, or experience any aspect of objective or subjective reality for which they are unaware. The idea is absurd. In this broad sense, awareness is the phenomenon that spans both the subjective and objective worlds. Awareness is so supple and agile it can easily handle both external and internal stimuali. We might question WHAT we perceive and our interpretations about that content (data), but our basic assumption is to inherently trust our ability to perceive in the first instance. The verity of perception itself is rarely questioned. If we didn't trust in our ability to perceive, there would be no highways full of cars, for one thing, because we would question every driver's ability to perceive. We don't. We trust that everyone on the road can see the next car over and in front and behind and the ones coming in the opposite lane. Our ability to perceive the road might be compromised by trying to text while driving, but the verity of our perception of the cell phone in question is not an issue. You're a bad driver not because of perceptual problems, but rather because your attention is misdirected, or the way you handle what you perceive (the way you physically drive) is dangerous. We take it as a given that we all see the same road and the traffic thereon in basically the same way.
This distinction is worth mentioning because when, say, a staunch physicalist insists on the reality of the observable world and the illusory nature of the subjective world he is not challenging the verity of perception itself, rather WHAT (content) is BEING perceived, and our discursive interpretations of same. He might be misinterpreting the primary data, but his perception of the data is assumed to be reliable. He can't question the verity of perception itself without questioning the verity of the objective world he perceives, leaving doubt about his observations, his experiments, and his predictions, which only SEEM to be real. Pity the fellow who ever would believe this.
Count it as axiomatic that we trust our ability to perceive, but the content of our perceptions - ranging from parlor magic tricks to Fruity poking his eye and "seeing" light to the panoramic view of the valley from Tunnel Overlook - is always open to debate. And we all know that we can be fooled and greatly mistaken about WHAT we perceive. Of course man is intelligent and has devised methods to test the verity of both perception and observable content.
For external content, the game is measuring, analyzing, building models, working up theories, testing, and analyzing results - and doing it over and over again. I had to do this when writing those anchor books and got substantial help in the process from engineers and math folk (Rick Goldstone was terrific) to rig the tests, and especially with statisticians (thanks especially to Dr. Callie Rennison) to crunch the test data. This I can assure you is slow and exacting work and I learned a ton about the scientific process - though I've never mentioned as much before.
Anyway, in the subjective world, most people don't understand the paradigm, and believe that the subjective adventures are in a sense, a case of people trying to do science without instruments, representational models, testing and predicting. That is, for many, the end game is some privileged, esoteric take on external reality unknown to science, or the acquisition of special spiritual content which we cannot observe and measure from without, etc. This is what most of us call woo, and for good reason.
For most people doing subjective adventures, the content is much more mundane and does require some cleanup work during preliminary stages, and some basic psychological upkeep as the process goes forward. Zendos and ashrans and every so-called spiritual joint are all just as prone to alcoholism, sleeping with students, and the dysfunction and bullshit found in any other place where humans meet, and these things will and DO happen if the psychological game is overlooked and personal inventories are not taken and total transparency is not maintained.
However the psychological game is not the end game, though someone freighted with anxiety, anger, resentments, depression, addictions, or countless other stressors will have a hard time settling and dropping into a quiet place. And the initial obsession with content - much as a physicist is focused on particles, energy and fields - is a necessary step in the process. Many never get past it.
But as the process deepens, the ephemeral nature of all subjective content ("impermanence" is the usual word in most disciplines) is witnessed with increasing clarity till one can literally see primary experience geysering up, totally unbidden. And when left alone, for however long it takes, attachment to content fades as the geyser settles (NEVER all the way) and the preverbal world is encountered. There is nothing mysterious or esoteric about any of this basic work. When you sit still and pay attention, your sympathetic nervous system will settle, you unconscious will start to unload, and your internal white noise will start to simmer down. Then the preverbal world starts to come into focus. It is not some other world, but the same world minus our habitual distractions, with our internal talk and evaluating dialed low or for times, completely off.
Anyone can get a momentary taste of this by observing the room or the view without putting words to it. Your discursive mind can't get up to speed without words, but few, without practice, can do this for very long. Once you can, the process deepens and a cruicial shift occurs from our habitual mode of attaching to content and evaluating, to slow emersion into perception itself. That is, the slowing and quieting down is not to get a better view of content, rather to let our attachment to content fall away.
What makes this shift slippery as sh#t is that the objective world of observable things, the stuff we can physically grasp or at least measure, and the subjective world of our internal light show - we have a deep intuitive feel for both since we have been in and around them both before memory was ever formed. Our sense of the objective and subjective are so much a part of us they are often mistaken FOR us. And when this slow shift into awareness occurs, and it naturally does to most everyone who puts in the time, we have none of the normal signposts, none of the old feelings and sensations and memories and thought patterns, none of the sights and sounds and smells we are accustomed to, basically none of the content that absorbed our attention since we shot out into this world. Now we have no thing, and to make the adventure even more challenging, we can never escape awareness to observe it. More on this later, if need be.
If there is another method to directly explore perception itself, no one has found it. Some would argue, but in the paragraphs that follow, I hope to show the inherent difficulties and challenges involved, and how many of our basic assumptions are fraught with contradictions, apparent impossibilities and limitations involved when trying to get some handle on perception itself, NOT what is perceived.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to moving past the standard arguments is conflation and misrepresentation. Paradoxically, the road to discovering what mind is first involves exploring what it is not and cannot be, so far as we can tell. While it is doubtful that we pull any absolutes out of the discussion, we might eliminate a lot of drift wood and road apples cluttering up the trail.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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"If we didn't trust in our ability to perceive, there would be no highways full of cars, for one thing, because we would question every driver's ability to perceive. We don't. We trust that everyone on the road can see the next car over and in front and behind and the ones coming in the opposite lane. Our ability to perceive the road might be compromised by trying to text while driving, but the verity of our perception of the cell phone in question is not an issue. You're a bad driver not because of perceptual problems, but rather because your attention is misdirected, or the way you handle what you perceive (the way you physically drive) is dangerous. We take it as a given that we all see the same road and the traffic thereon in basically the same way."
hmmm...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 9, 2016 - 05:09pm PT
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I'm glad Ed posted that pic of the driverless car because without saying as much, my GUESS - and it's only a guess - is that he conflates machine registration with conscious awareness. And that's exactly where I'm going in the next installment. The blind spot with the machine model is tricky to expose, which is why it so rarely is.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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the machine apparently is a more aware driver and less distracted with less ego...
"There are two things no man will admit he cannot do well: drive and make love."
Stirling Moss
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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the stuff we can physically grasp or at least measure, and the subjective world of our internal light show - we have a deep intuitive feel for both since we have been in and around them both before memory was ever formed
I'll consider that as literary license, because your neurons have been remembering, in their below-your-awareness way, since well before you were born.
Or please tell me when memory began to be formed. If you can remember.
But why not take advantage of jgill's suggestion to look at our various points of view as simply different parts of the same whole? What is it that we disagree about that is open to test?
I don't understand the mathematical basis of the approach, but I do like the simple analogy with how a donut and coffee cup are the same, although it is possible to imagine a group of sentient beings whose contact with the world of external objects might be different than ours, arguing endlessly that the donut shape is NOT the coffee cup shape IN ITSELF.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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MikeL, thanks for the thoughtful critique of my topological speculation.
The freaky part was the connectivity - that entraining the brain could change subjectivity, and subjective feedback could change the brain activity (JL)
Precisely what I had in mind, JL. Looking at the joint phenomena through a homeomorphism connecting them and creating a unified entity. You have described a nascent bi-continuous relation. However, the devil is in the details.
Neural mechanisms of mindfulness meditation
Mathematical psychology
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 9, 2016 - 07:14pm PT
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I'll consider that as literary license, because your neurons have been remembering, in their below-your-awareness way, since well before you were born.
---
Neurons don't remember. "Remembering" in it's normal usage is a cognitive act of recalling something from the past. Contrasting human recall to machine retrieval of data is a deeply flawed and incomplete way of looking at it because, among other things, unlike a memory chip in a computer, "memories are not stored."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fV3jafglNo
Yes, neurons are active in memory retrieval but there is global networking going on and the data retrieved involves much more than facts and figures, it includes context and a whole lot of other processes not found in the machine.
I warned about conflation in looking at this material and the gravest conflation error here is to posit neuronal activity and memory as being selfsame.
Just wait a little bit and I'll try and make it clear. Remember what I said - you can't get the whole from one perspective. We need to compare and contrast and start asking questions.
Lastly, when a machine retrieves data, and when a human recalls a memory, those memories constitute what I earlier wrote about content. Memory of a rose or a diet coke or a slap in the face becomes the content for what, do you imagine, is NOT in the machine?
And John, keep leading the way on this one. I'll try and work my angle and read up on whatever you post per research. This is only starting to get good.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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associative memory is something that machines are capable of ...
at least in the machines that I have build.
Neural networks are certainly are certainly capable of associative memory, both biological and "mechanical" ones...
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Unfortunately, the coffee cup and the doughnut example is a far cry from what might be encountered in the context of subjective mind and objective brain. There we are dealing with radically different "objects" , and not simply a remodeling process. A homeomorphism might bridge the gap.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I have no idea how to bridge the gap, and am not even clear on what the gap is.
To further the discussion is the most I hope for. How about taking another simple example. There is a mountain which one person looks at from the east and another looks from the west. They both describe what the mountain looks like to them. They disagree on what the mountain looks like. Draw a circle which goes through both observers and slide them around the mountain. Alternatively, rotate the mountain while the observers remain in place. Would this help them to come to agreement that they are looking at the same object? Could this be re-cast as a continuous mapping with a continuous inverse function?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Largo: . . . I basically am a very physical person who thinks in tangible terms
Ah, Largo, this is what unites us here on ST. More so, . . . leads to more so. And this is why we talk about these issues on this thread. Exsperience, at the end of the day, is everything. Just what THAT is, is our basis for seeing and believing.
Strange that it could be so radically interpreted in all the ways it is. That recognition should point us to a central issue or focal point in our understanding of what we are, and where we are.
Largo: Anyone can get a momentary taste of this by observing the room or the view without putting words to it.
My teacher showed me how to sit and perceive that someone moved the door to the dojo less than an inch. Remarkably, everything changed. You could feel it.
Ed: . . . the machine apparently is a more aware driver and less distracted with less ego...
Let’s think through this. What constitutes a distraction? Something that isn’t immediately relevant to current operations? How far do you want to take that?
Without a global view of what and where you are, none of these kinds of decisions (about what's going on) will make any sense to you. (See, Damasio's works).
Jgill and Largo: The freaky part was the connectivity - that entraining the brain could change subjectivity, and subjective feedback could change the brain activity (JL)
I’m not sure what experience you have with entrainment, but let me give you an example.
Find one person to lay out a beat (let’s say with a wooden pencil in hand against a desk). Then have a second person add another repeating beat while the first person / beat continues. Keep that going.
Now add a third person and a third repeating beat. Let that settle in for a little while.
Viola, you have improvisation and entrainment.
Each person cannot go off on their own. Each of the others influence and constrain the others. Each must adjust in real time. It's a feeling. It’s a harmonic symphony that generates a life unto itself. It cannot be modeled prior to the fact. It is pretty much purely an experience. You can only see the insight from the simulated experience, better the actual experience.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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How about taking another simple example
I'll simplify even further. An observer is on a circular track around the mountain. From each position he captures an image of the mountain. There are two sets: the set of positions on the track, and the set of images so obtained. If the observer moves very slightly the image will probably change "slightly", although "slightly" in one set might not be "slightly" in the other. Still there is a non-erratic correspondence, F, between position and image such that it is unlikely a very slight change in either the position or the image would provoke a big "jump" in the other. This eliminates discontinuities and what is left is a bi-continuous and one-to-one function between the two sets.
What are the "open" sets? Well, any collection (subset) of positions on the circular track would be an elementary designation as open. The union of any of these would also be a subset of positions as would be the (finite) intersection. Similarly, any subset of the images of the mountain might be called "open" in that set. Consider the track positions the domain and the images the range of F. F:position->image.
If we choose a collection of images there corresponds a collection of positions and vice versa, and in both cases they are "open" sets. This is necessary for a general definition of homeomorphism.
Regarding the mind and the brain on a super-simple level, JL's open awareness qualia (or whatever you wish to call it) probably corresponds to certain brain waves. The question is if the brain wave changes slightly, does JL's meditative state change slightly, or does it "jump"? And the other way around. If the answer is no, then there may be a homeomorphism descriptor.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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the machine apparently is a more aware driver and less distracted with less ego...
And that's the whole point: the machine doesn't just have less ego, the machine has no ego, It can't have an ego... and that's the whole point. There is no I there.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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The use of the word aware here is proper, for it pertains more to a mechanical response that a conscious response.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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I like where you're going with this, Jgill. Nicely presented.
This kind of thinking is not necessarily connected to reality as much as it is with a sense of craft, not unlike what Largo and Ward and Syncorax are referring to, no?
For my part, things of beauty are their own rewards. An idea or concept can be beautiful.
I am not saying that what you are offering / presenting is true or not true. I honestly don't know.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Me neither, Mike. Just playing around here. Too bad Rgold and Yanqui don't participate. Their knowledge of abstract math is way ahead of mine!
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 10, 2016 - 08:11am PT
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Could there be a homeomorphism between the electrical activity in these devices we use to communicate with each other on Supertopo, and what we see on our screens? If so, what would compose the sets in the domain and range, if the previous example can be followed?
edit: Not all the devices, just pick one.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 10, 2016 - 08:48am PT
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Ed: it [a scientific field of study called, “Everything”] is referred to as physics...
:-D
That is funny.
(What a strange notion "funny" is.)
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 10, 2016 - 01:40pm PT
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Look at the painting of a single pixel. Ultimately, a certain electrical impulse or set of impulses paints the pixel. Does a separate electrical impulse set have the same effect? Those of you in computers chime in. So there may be the rudiments of a 1:1 function here. The same is not true of computer programs and images. I can write several different BASIC programs that paint the same image, say a circle. The more interesting question is the relationship between those pixel-painting impulses and what you experience subjectively looking at the image on the screen.
A metric is possible for those impulses, but is a metric possible for your subjective experiences in this regard? I doubt it. So, one topological space (TS) has as elements various electrical impulses, and the open sets derive easily from a metric. The other tentative TS is a whole other ball game and probably doesn't allow a simple metric, so that the open sets there would have to be determined some other way. A suggestion would be welcome here. Remember, all unions (of open sets) are open sets and finite intersections are open sets.
In meditation certain brain waves as measured by EEGs correspond to certain internal experiences. For instance, theta waves are associated with drowsiness and meditative states. Those waves can be characterized by their frequencies - number of cycles between consecutive peaks per second. A simple metric would simply look at the (positive) differences in frequencies. This vastly oversimplifies the situation, of course. But, again, there is the question of devising open sets of meditative experiences.
I'm kinda out of my depth here!
(If you're interested, a metric space is a set of elements and a non-negative function that mimics "distance" between elements: d(x,y)>=0,d(x,x)=0, d(x,y)=d(y,x), d(x,y)<=d(x,z)+d(z,y).
form {y:d(x,y)<r} for all x and r>0. Then take unions and (finite) intersections to get open sets.)
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