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WBraun
climber
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Dec 27, 2017 - 03:58pm PT
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I just read some more of Gazzaniga's stuff.
The guy is definitely a sterile robot conscious fool who GMO'd his conscious self into a dead stone no wonder HFCS likes him.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Dec 27, 2017 - 05:32pm PT
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Largo,
Dingbat, I'm giving you every chance to make sense,..................................... [lines and lines of Zen Preppie narrative that includes what emptiness is not.
Largo the pretentious Zen Preppie. -- there are ways other than Zen sitting to get to emptiness ... No Monopoly held by Zen. From your post, it looks like you are working your way thru the zen preppie mill and have learned to espouse some trivial stances. I suppose you learned such declarations from the phony Zen Narrative? Your measuring stick talk of emptiness reflects the likes of Preppie training .... I'm giving you every chance
... Pavlovian -- schooled on a way to respond.
The burden of understanding of my take & words on emptiness falls on you, Mr preppie. I have uttered one word. You seem unable to grasp water?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 27, 2017 - 07:47pm PT
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zBrown,
FUNNY!
eeyonkee: . . . why shouldn't I be frigging swayed one way or another after watching a lecture?
Well, because it’s all concepts and talk, that’s why. I think that anyone can see that there are mighty convincing arguments and conversations going on around us. Many of us (not me, of course) have gotten really good at being pervasive by saying all the right things and triggering all of the right emotional buttons. But IMO, that shouldn’t convince anyone of anything other than a person has heard another persuasive orator or writer. Conviction (and I would say, commitment) should be based on more than words and concepts.
What to do? Enjoin the process yourself. Get out there, gather some data yourself, and start to conduct systematic analyses. Then hang out with others who are doing the same. See what you come up with then.
(Don’t get all excited about my comment. I’m really a skeptical empiricist at heart.)
Largo: . . . there's no end of folks stumbling into meditation centers ready to set the staff straight on the fine points.
:-) That was really funny, and I’m afraid all too true. It probably described me at some point in the past. LOL.
Ed,
Nice description of academic audiences. Even a bit funny, although you did not mean that, perhaps. I really like that you suggested that the faculty serve the student guild. Wonderful. Sadly this may not happen as often as one thinks it should. Publishing takes precedent in the reward system.
There is no magic in "emergence" except that feeling of finally understanding something that, in the end, seems so obvious.
I dunno. How complexity transcends itself seems a bit like “magic” to me. I mean think about it a little bit. From an acorn, a giant oak may grow. From a little acorn. (Of course there is a wide cast of characters like light, dead things in the ground, air, etc.) From our limited viewpoint, it looks so natural and convincing, but there is an almost infinite host of players that are contributing to that one little acorn. I think that’s the obvious part, Ed: that we’ve seen it so many times that we don’t look closely at the complexity, the transcendence, and the ultimate miracle of life. IMO, of course.
eeyonkee: Hold the presses! I've got a new position.
Are you aware of yourself? You change your mind more often than a woman changes dresses.
Dingus: . . . there are ways other than Zen sitting to get to emptiness.
How would you say *you* came upon it? Not that I know anything, but I’m a little unclear what you’re getting at.
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clinker
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, California
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Dec 27, 2017 - 08:14pm PT
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There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the "decision" by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster than light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already "knows" what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.
Although he acknowledged the loophole, he also argued that it was implausible. Even if the measurements performed are chosen by deterministic random number generators, the choices can be assumed to be "effectively free for the purpose at hand," because the machine's choice is altered by a large number of very small effects. It is unlikely for the hidden variable to be sensitive to all of the same small influences that the random number generator was.[4]
Superdeterminism has also been criticized because of its implications regarding the validity of science itself. For example, Anton Zeilinger has commented:
[W]e always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist... This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature.[5]
So Werner may be right?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 27, 2017 - 08:32pm PT
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eeyonkee,
Did you also watch the Q/A at the end of E4?
Let me know if, or when, you finish E5, E6.
More tomorrow...
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 27, 2017 - 09:36pm PT
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confirmation bias, moose, the other article posits that everything in the universe is prescribed, including the feeling you have about free will...
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 27, 2017 - 09:58pm PT
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of course the mathematicians must have their say, too
I wish they hadn't.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Dec 28, 2017 - 04:06am PT
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MikeL,
How would you say *you* came upon it? Not that I know anything, but I’m a little unclear what you’re getting at.
A process similar to what some might use for breaking a bad habit. Each instance of the urge to repeat the habit, tell your self why you think a change would be better. Think of this word form of telling yourself as a mantra.
The processes started a long time ago to fend off a bout of depression in junior high. Choice: Rather than run with the pack, I took up walks along the creek. This was flow. Depression was gone. I created challenges -- Work every problem in my brother's college calculus book before entering 9th grade. Take an automatic transmission apart to understand how they work. What do those schematics mean on the back of old tube radios cases?
Some years go by and I wonder what Alan Watts is talking about? Yes, Largo downplay him -- it is you scummy style.
At some point, I was assigned a mantra for meditation. Rather than use a Sanscrit word, I would make an English phrase that was suited to the present condition of my mind I thought needed work. I created a quiver of these English mantras and begin using some forms in waking life. Success? Mind chatter attenuates.
Some of the mantras tones were,
It is useless chatter
Interpretations must go.
Abandon Labels(words) of any manner as they must go in waking life. The beginning of a pre-verbal mind experience. I do not "see street people" and likely will not make a phony creation of one as Largo did.
What is going on? & with these feelings.
cease differentiation.
cease making mental images
etc ...etc ...
A lot of the work was done in waking life when the need to have an immediate interpretation was unnecessary. e.g. hiking an easy trail. When mogul skiing immediate interpretations are necessary and they flow out of the subconscious. I do not engage in mantras when in states of intense flow.
After a long lineage of mantras properly applied the mind has little to quell. You are there but you may not know it as emptiness for not all of us have had Largo style preppie training.
Edit: At 82 my mother was diagnosed as manic-depressive.
Again there is a phony Zen narrative but Zen is not phony. It likely gets one to a similar place a little differently -- this also is a phony narrative.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 28, 2017 - 06:39am PT
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Largo: . . . there's no end of folks stumbling into meditation centers ready to set the staff straight on the fine points.
:-) That was really funny, and I’m afraid all too true. It probably described me at some point in the past. LOL.
--
Didn't it describe ALL of us? It did me. But Dingus feels he is outside of this loop. But hey, since he finally responded like a human being, with some meaningful self disclosure - albeit larded with a side order of grinch - I'll come clean here.
Prodding people interested in the work has a long tradition in Zen, especially in Renzai Zen, the school where I started. It has a samauri heritage and so confrontation and combat is part of the training. Depending on the teacher and the group, "Dharma combat," refers to the direct and spirited exchange between teacher and student, or in this case, between students (I'm not a teacher) to demonstrate his or her understanding of the Dharma.
For example, every so often the people in a given group have a session where one adept sits in front of the class and everyone gets to lambast him/her with questions and yell and scream and call him/her a poser and a phony who doesn't know sh#t and to go back to (fill in the blank).
What generally happens is at some point the adept will crack and disclose some telling personal riff and actually describe the process through which he or she arrived at their present understanding - as Dingus just did, and kudos to him for doing so. He suddenly became a real person grappling with a real life - at least to me.
The process Dingus describes is called "no-mind" in Zen and is an essential practice to start to get some footing with the whole shebang. It involves experiencing "reality" in a precognitive way before your discursive mind starts to label and categorize and evaluate, which leads to an interpretation, "narrative" or map, which however accurate, is not the territory itself.
Where I believe Dingus is getting turned around is in believing that Zen or Mike or I am proposing a map or evaluation of the territory that is "phony," whereas the word "emptiness," a hallmark of ALL esoteric adventures, is a declarative statement that both internal and external "reality" has no inherent narrative or label or handle one can grasp that effectively describes just WHAT is there. And at a deeper level, the WHAT itself is ungraspable and empty.
In the Western tradition, both Plato and Kant (the thing-in-itself is unknowable) augured towards this but stumbled over expressing it coherently. In modern terms we might say that no-mind drops one in the whole shebang, the all, in undifferentiated, and representations of the whole necessarily involve digitizing the analogue (so to speak) into discrete labels which themselves are NOT the whole, undifferentiated shebang.
Except this is just the start of it. Skipping the details, the end game (which never actually ends) is in encountering how the analogue and the digital, how the whole and the parts, the discrete (forms) and the undifferentiated (emptiness) are not only two sides of the same coin, but the coin itself is empty, and if you think you understand it (can label it, grasp it, know it discursively), you don't.
This is not to invalidate science, which we all know works brilliantly, it's just that when we bore down deep enough, there is "no-thing" there that we can describe purely in and of itself. Even if we say, it's all energy, we can ask, What IS energy? That which has a measurable charge. WHAT has a measurable charge? Energy has a measurable charge. In this regards, energy itself is both empty (no-thing) while having a discrete physical signature or "form" vibrating charge. While this may sound like a word game, a rhetorical merry-go-round, on an experiential level is is anything but.
That much said, I would encourage Dingus to seek out a like minded group to continue the work. There are countless ones out there suitable for every kind of personality type, including the cowboy type who feels honor bound to go it alone. A little reflection would disclose that the Cowboy is himself empty - there is really nothing there but a concept and personality type. In joining a herd of like-spirited folks, you not only get the crucial resource of peer review, but you have the unseen hands of every loner and cowboy and adept who has ever grappled with the work pushing you, propping you up when your motivation flags. The old-style guru has largely vanished from modern practice. Nowadays it's more like a home-room monitor because when you settle into the work, however you do it, its cowboy all the way.
So by whatever path you choose, Dingus, I wish you luck.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 28, 2017 - 07:14am PT
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Good description, John. (It's one of your strengths, it seems.)
Dingus,
Ok, thanks. Your rendition is a little sketchy to me, but I guess anything didactic would perhaps seem sketchy to another person. Most times it takes a few conversations to really start to understand another person. Was there a dojo or center that you frequented at any point?
One of DMT’s posts above somewhere relayed a conversation with his daughter about unconsciousness and anesthesia. I think they both agreed that when a sedative hits, it’s completely lights out, and nothingness until they awake. I think I commented that I’ve had a number of experiences with that, and that I thought there was something there, but couldn’t put my finger on it.
Recently in my morning sittings I’ve been viewing the mid space between consciousness and unconsciousness. For some reason, I’ve been tired lately, and even though it’s pretty nippy at 5 or 6 in the morning outside after expresso, I’m still sleepy and feel myself falling into an intermediate stage of unconsciousness for brief moments. You know, its not like there’s nothing there. It seems like another world. I’m trying to pay attention as I uncontrollably fall asleep for micro moments. Images and symbols out of nowhere arise, and there is a sense of another texture of awareness.
There is a sense that delirium is delicious. How often have any of us yearned almost desperately for sleep. If unconsciousness means no awareness at all, then what is it that we yearn for? Are we being overloaded in our consciousness, and we want the entire show to simply stop for a while? I think we all believe that without sleep one goes psychotic and experiences hallucinations. With these observations (subtle as they seem to me, at least), it’s difficult to argue that there is nothing going on in awareness when one is unconscious. Is there a dividing line between consciousness and unconsciousness, or is that just the way we talk because we are paying attention to only the grossest phenomena. Jung and his students argued that there is a strong pull in the psyche towards instinct and the unconsciousness (The Great Mother) emotionally.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Dec 28, 2017 - 07:36am PT
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So by whatever path you choose, Dingus, I wish you luck. -- Largo
Thanks, Largo. That was an interesting interpretation. May we both produce and understand those of others some more?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 28, 2017 - 07:42am PT
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"... will have to dig into emergence right to the bedrock, since emergence is not a mechanistic explanation, but a descriptor of how higher levels of organization can emerge from lower levels."
This is ultimately incorrect, of course, if you are making a physical explanation, as the thing that is "emerging" is emerging from something, that is, the "mechanistic" underpinnings.
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That's not the argument, Ed. The argument involves your use of "physical explanation" as it relates to WHAT emerges, above and beyond physical causation. That is, the properties of WHAT emerge are not inherent properties of, and are not disclosed through measuring the physical properties that we supposed "caused" them.
Put differently, no matter how deeply we study the physical aspects of the meat brain itself, we will never find therein an "interpreter" as described. Said interpreter is qualitatively different than the physical agents said to "produce" it. The interpreter is above and beyond (is not identical with) the dancing neurons, no matter how closely related it is to the physical substrate.
If you look at other instances of physical causation, from steam off a kettle to galaxy formation, the cause and the effect can be entirely explained by way of physical descriptors. That is, WHAT comes from THAT is NEVER more than another physical phenomenon. There is no "more than" the physical, in which a physical descriptor describes entirely the phenomenon in question.
The bottom line is that even if we were able to crack the "hard problem" and demonstrably show in observable or measurable ways how the meat brain CAUSES the Interpreter, said physical description would in no wise describe the whole story about the Interpreter itself. The Interpreter is more than the neurons from which we believe caused the Interpreter. And that "other" is not itself physical, no matter how closely related it is to the neurons.
That's the basic argument saying that even the best explanation of supposed physical causes falls short in explaining the reality of WHAT emerges. There are various work arounds, such as saying the neurons and the interpreter are identical (identity theory), but most people consider this to be logical incoherent.
The difficulty of wiggling out of this corner has led many neuroscientists working on consciousness to adopt some provisional form of panpsychism, where the onus of totally "explaining" (beyond causation) the subjective is not limited to objective drivers. Another tact is taken by Dennett and other like-minded folks who acknowledge that the objective and subjective at least APPEAR to be different animals. The difference being that physical causation is not an explanation of subjectivity itself, and since there is no such "thing" but physicality, subjectivity is an illusion.
Allow me a little story. A person suffering from withering anxiety visits a psychiatrist who has the patient take a qEEG that discloses radical incoherence between the left and right hemispheres of his frontal lobes - a common physical footprint of depression. And the shrink says, "That's what is really going on." And the client says, "But my problem is LIVING with it."
The psychiatrist showed the physical footprint associated with the client's anxiety, and the client made clear that "living with this" is not the same as the frontal lobe incoherence, which went no distance in explaining what the client was experiencing. It would not help to tell the client his experience was not real, and "frontal lobe incoherence" and it's causal efficacy could never "explain" the subjective nature of the client's suffering. Closely related - absolutely, but anxiety no more "explains" frontal lobe incoherence that said coherence explains the subjective horror of crippling anxiety. They both form a seamless whole called life, but neither subjective experience nor objective facts totally "explain" the other, anymore than a physical description of someone's parents totally explains their son.
In other words, physical causality does not totally explain the reality of subjective reality. This was the basic insight of Nagle, who was instrumental in giving the modern Mind conversation lift off.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 28, 2017 - 08:07am PT
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the basic argument saying that even the best explanation of supposed physical causes falls short in explaining the reality of WHAT emerges. There are various work arounds, such as saying the neurons and the interpreter are identical (identity theory), but most people consider this to be logical incoherent.
And that is only ONE type of incoherence.
What IS the best explanation of physical causes explaining what emerges?
How much weight should we give to what most people consider to be the case?
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 28, 2017 - 08:23am PT
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Fruitative activities and Karma cause the living entities emerge in different material bodies .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 28, 2017 - 09:21am PT
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That is, the properties of WHAT emerge are not inherent properties of, and are not disclosed through measuring the physical properties that we supposed "caused" them.
I am addressing the term "emergence" from a scientific point of view (who would have guessed that!)
The properties of thermodynamics are, as you have stated, "not inherent properties of, and are not disclosed through measuring the physical properties that we supposed 'caused' them," yet both the physics of the "causing" stuff and of thermodynamics is well established. Computational power has allowed us to study how thermodynamics "emerges" from the groupings of atoms what Maxwell and Boltzmann hypothesized were the stuff (remember this was before the atomic theory was accepted).
Behavior is measurable, quantifiable and is probably the most important expression in social groups of our intentions. It doesn't take much thought to realize that these expressions of intentions can be misinterpreted, that we can provide false expressions to elicit desirable acts of others, etc., etc.
From an evolutionary point of view, behavior is an expression of our genetic makeup, and is subject to pressures from natural and sexual selection.
Finally, behavior is generalized from the observation of others to the more subjective acts of introspection.
Because of the complexity of an organism, but also the social interactions of organisms, and the interactions of those groups of organisms in a particular setting, the ecology of that organism, it could appear that understanding it all is hopeless.
But that is, in the end, what science tries to do, not by tackling the entirety of it, but picking away at things it can understand, and largely by a combination of empirical and theoretical methods.
Whether or not you can abstract any relevant guidance from considering the problem in toto as philosophy attempts depends entirely on what you think you know. Philosophy certainly has no problem moving on once science makes some major breakthrough, but it by and large only addresses questions like "can this possibly be true?" (questions that MikeL likes to ask), e.g. how do we get to quantum mechanics from classical mechanics? and what might that mean? (two questions philosophy is still grappling with after 100 years, physics seems to have been very productive in the meantime without the answers).
So a precise scientific understanding of emergence would stand us all in good stead. This is (and has been) the direction of work that many physicists have been pushing for many years. The program has not accomplished a utilitarian definition (and even lacks a coherent set of physical principles) which can be applied generally.
But it is worth recounting those physical systems that exhibit emergent behavior, and even those that seemingly do but aren't emergent.
In you list of examples, galactic formation probably is NOT emergent, though in trying to explain the nucleation of the galaxies it was thought that "emergence" might do where gravity and mundane dissipative forces wouldn't. That was before the existence of dark matter was known, and it is the clumping of the dark matter that provides the gravitationally attractive "sink" for the luminous matter.
This does push the problem down one level of turtles to the question of why dark matter clumps, but that has a reasonable explanation (an explanation that allows the clumpiness to be calculated). Galaxies occur along the filaments of dark matter like beads of dew on a spider's web. This was a picture that "emerged" from the very first deep space surveys of galaxies in the 1980s before dark matter became a prominent feature of cosmology.
My point being that we did not have a means of assessing whether or not galactic formation was describable as an emergent phenomenon or not. Our ignorance drove us to it, later, when we had learned more, the answer was "obvious." Like any detective novel it takes time to develop the plot so that we might learn who the murderer is, and what their motive was... it's all clear once the story is told.
That is the nature of scientific progress.
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Lennox
climber
in the land of the blind
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Dec 28, 2017 - 10:22am PT
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That was before the existence of dark matter was known, and it is the clumping of the dark matter that provides the gravitationally attractive "sink" for the luminous matter.
Emergent gravity and the fall of dark matter?
https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02269
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.11425
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