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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 31, 2017 - 09:46am PT
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When it comes to brain functioning (i.e., mind, mentation), you're better served thinking in terms of circuitry than chemicals (neurocircuitry or biocircuitry than biochemistry or biochemical).
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 31, 2017 - 09:59am PT
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Courtesy IntheFog...
"Nail In the Brain," New England Journal of Medicine, 1993:
"The patient disclosed that 12 years earlier, he had attempted suicide with a nail gun directed between his eyes. Aside from right-sided facial droop and a slight limp, the patient had been symptom-free since the suicide attempt; he had had neither seizures nor episodes of loss of consciousness."
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199303043280905#t=article
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Dec 31, 2017 - 11:47am PT
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More on the brain side of the coin, than the mind. Is this a possible case of tails wagging the dog?
BTW there appear to be over 6000 links out in this thread either to articles or images.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Dec 31, 2017 - 01:58pm PT
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Dingus said "you mention that currently, you occasionally doze off easily while meditating and are curious as to why?
Would you consider using a material remedy to keep you just conscious?
I suggest eating some portion/all of a Cutie mandarin orange say maybe 10 min before sitting.
You mention slamming java early in the morning"
This question points to a common misunderstanding RE meditation. Common in that everyone who makes an concerted attempt to meditate for an extended period (i.e. months) find themselves trying to manipulate the process. Trying to create something or gain,attain something; like a special state (i.e. enlightenment) . We can't help ourselves; that is what the ego does and defines things; pursue the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant. IME it was very difficult being sleepy in my early days of sitting; "I" did not like it!
The retreat process and structure typically solves this awkward sleepy dilemma of sleepy/sloth and torpor. IME during a 7 day retreat I would be sleeping on and off through a mid day sitting and really struggling sitting there constantly nodding off and when you are about to fall over you wake up in a startle and regain your balance and this process goes on for the whole 30 min sitting. Then you do 10 min. of walking meditation and to my great surprise as the next 30 min session gets underway you feel more wide awake then you have ever been in your life. It can take years till this happens. Some people try to meditate and they just fall asleep most of the time.
The change of energy from sloth and torpor to wide awake present with no "cutie" to attribute it to is a very interesting point to look at. One idea is the sit/napping solved the sleep problem but I doubt that. I think it has more to do with the POV relationship. "I" gets bored "I" gets sleepy
; when "I" falls out of the POV there is no "I" (small I for WB) to be sleepy; just a clear unbiased view appears in front of you. Even if sleepiness comes into the view it is a different experience; it is like you are super awake watching the experience of sleepiness. It is quite interesting.
Have a clear New Years!
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Lennox
climber
in the land of the blind
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Dec 31, 2017 - 04:29pm PT
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There is digestion, metabolism and absorption.
Give it time. Excuse the occasional fart; allapah is still digesting.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 31, 2017 - 05:32pm PT
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Where you at, Moose? It's been a week or two now. Have you "reconciled" the different frames re "free will" yet? Curious minds want to know!
You know, there are other reconciliations we moderns have to make. One concerns, as you know, reconciling the opposing, competing claims that we humans are significant and we humans are insignificant at the same time.
Why should reconciling determinism and free will be any more difficult?
hfcs, reconcilist
Happy New Year!
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 31, 2017 - 05:42pm PT
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allapah is a lot sharper than you fools.
You're just dead conscious sterile robotic cavemen ......
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dec 31, 2017 - 07:01pm PT
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...... says the raving lunatic duck
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Dec 31, 2017 - 07:31pm PT
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TC said "Nicola Tesla pointed out that when science begins studying non-material phenomena, more progress will be made in a decade than all its previous history
Tesla also stated that if you want to understand the universe, study vibration and frequency
Academic sciences are still a hundred years behind Tesla and have embarrassingly not been able to assimilate the revelations of quantum physics, as it blows apart the physical universe Matrix upon which the controllers depend for enslaving human minds"
Ed is this true or urban myth? Has there been physics pursuit in this area?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 31, 2017 - 08:41pm PT
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PSP also PP,
Would you agree that human minds often enough enslave themselves?
What interest would controllers that could create a 'physical universe Matrix' have in human minds?
It is a common misconception that someone is out to get something important of yours. Occasionally it does happen, but you only lose some money or your bicycle.
Your mind is not something which a thief can steal or a controller can enslave. Paranoia comes from within you.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 31, 2017 - 09:22pm PT
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Dingus,
You seem irritated. What’s the matter?
The notion that all texts are inexact, perhaps internally contradictory (Derrida), and certainly should not be taken literally simply alerts one to pointing at understandings and experiences, rather than saying what anything is exactly. Misunderstandings should be rampant and expected. One way to express this notion is to look for the object of conversations, rather than to specific words or definitions.
I should not have indicated what I thought I wrote to you but instead taken what you appeared to be providing. In this case, what you seem to have provided was some concern about caffeine and diabetes. I suppose I should appreciate that you have a concern for me, but it seemed irrelevant to the object of my post, which was about the nether world between consciousness and unconsciousness. That’s what I’m interested in.
Right now I’m reading through this book.
It’s a book that is written in German, but the second half has the English translation.
Between 1913 and 1916, Jung fell into a so-called psychotic state and documented it closely (much writing and many drawings). In that state, he conferred intimately and existentially with personalities that (he believed) arose from the unconscious. Jung said in 1957 that it was his experiences during these three years that formed the bases of everything that followed—including his student followers and educational programs, his decades of practice in psychiatry, his academic publications, and his many books. I say “so-called psychotic state” because those around his life (wife, children, colleagues, patients, etc.) perceived nothing unusual about Jung during that period. Jung continued to work, practice, and instruct. On the other hand, Jung experienced remarkable interactive waking dreams with mythological beings and unarticulated images—experiences that he initiated because he felt compelled to do so by great powers that he could not put his finger on.
(I’m not too awfully far into the reading, so I’m sure I’m not expressing what I’m reading very well. Plus, the notions that he’s expressing are difficult to understand.)
I have to say that in the beginning of the reading, when he first relates his earliest “visions,” they remind me very much of some of the comments I read here in this thread from the “non-spiritualists”: it’s ridiculous, it’s not scientific, it makes no sense, etc. And yet, many of the responses to Jung from the “alien” personalities resonate with feelings in me—especially ever since I’ve started to make artifacts. Images show up in mind, and I feel compelled (driven) to engage with them. Yet, the understanding of “what’s going on?” eludes me. I admit that “What’s going on?” is interesting, but as to what IS going on, that is knowing in any cause-and-effect, “A precedes B is associated with C” way, seems laughably irrelevant.
This is where I got to today on one of my projects.
Look, I’m into this “consciousness - unconsciousness - awareness” stuff—not as some academic or theoretical idea.
In his book, “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom made regular reference to what he referred to as “the theoretical life.” What he meant by that is taking one’s philosophy and not arguing it or believing in it, but living it to the fullest extent that one could with absolute conviction. To Bloom, the theoretical life was the reason for living at all.
For me, it’s that “consciousness - unconsciousness - awareness” thing. To me, that’s all there is.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 31, 2017 - 09:28pm PT
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JL: Time to try and unpack the Lund paper...
Peter Lynds' paper?
It might be tempting to think of mind research via neuroscience as "discrete" and mind exploration via meditation as "continuous", but I think those are false analogies. Perhaps you are not going in that direction; if so, my apologies.
MikeL: nether world between consciousness and unconsciousness
Welcome to the hypnagogic world, gateway to great adventures, like the Art of Dreaming.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 31, 2017 - 10:06pm PT
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Kalman filters are used for guidance systems & robotic arm control and processed on digital microprocessors.
Kalman filters are more generalized than the original application which was to track radar trajectories with noisy data.
Basically, it is a linear predictor that weights the prediction using constraints on the possible evolution of the "trajectory" in some space.
For instance, an object being tracked on a radar screen cannot change its trajectory in an arbitrary direction instantaneously, thought of as a time series of detections, the next element of the series has to obey constraints of, for instance, the energy required to change its position from the previous time step.
Similar problems can be addressed that have similar features that are not "guidance" systems, but have time sequences whose evolution is constrained. An example is digitizing the trace of an oscilloscope trace viewed by a CCD camera (yes, there are still uses for fluorescent screen oscilloscopes).
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dec 31, 2017 - 11:27pm PT
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This, again, is the old complexity argument. One of the outstanding papers on this subject...
Read Moody's paper quite some time ago and found it quite weak rather than outstanding and on re-reading it just now found it weaker still on multiple fronts. If anything, it plainly exhibits philosophy's shortcomings as a vehicle for exploring the problem; those weaknesses revolve around biology, evolution, the 'function' of consciousness, and causation. Here are the possibilities he explores in the paper:
1. Brains are conscious because of their complexity.
2. Brains are complex because they are conscious.
3. The consciousness and complexity of brains are both caused by some further fact about brains.
4. It is a coincidence that brains are uniquely complex and conscious.
Specifically Moody and philosophers in general always black box the brain, stick exclusively with subjective experience, and then dance about with their various denials of any and all causal possibilities. And really, the third of the four possibilities he explores is the usual panpsychic trope, the fourth utter nonsense. That leaves the first and second possibilities and the second is more a philosopher's device for covering bases and a case of reverse causality which hardly stands up when you're dismissing causality in general.
That really reduces his argument to a simple dismissal of the first possibility due to a lack of any direct causal relationship. This is again because of the artificial binary nature of his argument after blackboxing both the brain and its complexity. The problem with that is there no real consideration of complexity or the subconscious as blackboxing conveniently dismisses both in a single stroke. Key here is that the basic question and any valid exploration of it is far from a black and white, all or nothing proposition.
So let's tackle some of this. My comment Largo is keying off of and attempting to dismiss was this:
Says healyje: And through subconscious processing you can drive physical processes right up to the edge of consciousness / subjective mind.
So, what do I mean by that? I mean that you can walk from sensory inputs straight on through unconscious and subconscious processes right up to the gate of subjective experience. How so? In the earlier post where I laid out processing of the spoken word I mentioned I occasionally become acutely aware of subconscious processing by way of words / phrases my conscious mind is handed by my subconscious which are grossly 'wrong' or wildly out of context to the conversation at hand. How does that relate to complexity and consciousness? Well, you wouldn't be able to subjectively experience a conversation with another person without that subconscious processing taking place under the hood. Or, in other words (and unless those words are popping out of a universal word aether) then the only viable alternative is they are the result of processing by the brain - i.e. they are a product of the brain's complexity. And that's what I mean by being able to drive physical processes right up the the edge / gate of the consciousness and subjective experience. And that's just one example, there would be no subjective experience at all without a myriad of subconscious processes supplying and contextualizing the very 'stuff' of subjective experience. Key here is that there is an explicit hand-off interface or 'gate' between subconscious processing and the conscious mind which shows the explicit blackbox exclusion of complexity-based subconscious processing by the brain is a major failing of typical philosophical arguments around complexity and consciousness. Considering subconscious processes' contributions to subjective experience is what gets you from brain complexity to the very 'gate' of the conscious mind even if we don't understand the actual hand-off.
Then there are the problems with Moody's discussion of the 'function of consciousness' where his shortcomings in biology and evolution become all too apparent and glaringly so. For instance, Moody asks these questions:
It's no good to explain consciousness by explaining why it's good to be able to be conscious of X, where X might be internal cognitive processes, social situations, environmental threats, or whatever. This begs the question of why it's better to be conscious of X as opposed to simply detecting or monitoring X without consciousness. What benefit does consciousness add to the detection of X?
... or what purpose our consciousness has.
He utterly fails on every front here - he fails in the set up and fails on all three questions. The question isn't what benefit does consciousness add to the detection of X; the question is what benefit does consciousness add to a response to the detection of X.
When the consciousness in question is that of a wolf and the detected X a deer, then predation is no longer a simple unconscious stimulus / response loop in the manner of a Venus Fly Trap; no, now it's a sophisticated predation response which requires learning, strategy, tactics, and in the case of a pack hunt, cooperation and coordination. In short, a successful predatory response to the detection of a sophisticated prey X requires conscious decision making: assessment of wind direction, terrain, cover, direction of approach, stalking modalities, flight prediction, timing of strike, and coordination in the case of a pack hunt. The ability to make decisions in advanced predation scenarios is clearly both a driver and direct benefit of consciousness and one of its primary purposes. Again, a complete fail on Moody's part.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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jGill,
MikeL: nether world between consciousness and unconsciousness
Welcome to the hypnagogic world, gateway to great adventures, like the Art of Dreaming.
Hypnagogic state? Consciousness--unconsciousness? In the early 70's I bought an Ibex North Face Sleeping bag rated to -40F. About New Years Day forecasted temps were to plummet to just < -40F. This cold snap was the chance to yard test the Ibex. That cold night I slept in the bag without a tent. The drawstring of the sleeping bag hood was closed to a little hole around my nose. My intention was to somehow keep my nose aligned with the hole all night along even while I slept.
The night passed and I was able to keep my nose aligned with the tiny breathing hole all night long but I was very certain that I was awake all night. Before bedding down, I decided I would go inside the house when the housemates left for work at 6:30 am. I felt I would hear them start the car as I was normally up before they were.
I waited and waited for them to start the car but I never did hear any engine starting/running noises. Finally, I decided to get up. To my surprise, it was broad daylight and 8:30 am. The additional surprise came that evening when one of housemates said that when they left for work he ask, "How is it going, Dingus". He figured I was still sleeping when he got no reply. Additionally, I did not have the body feeling of a sleepless night but I had the experience/feeling of having been awake all night, yet I was oblivious to both sounds and sunlight.
I have had this same feeling on several other nights with marginal shelter. Certainly, I was not awake as we normally think and my mind was not in an ordinary dream state. Was I in a minimal state of conscious awareness, perhaps similar to what happens when watching breathing during meditation?
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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MikeL,
yes, it was sort of a concern on my part. Thanks for the clarification on your part.
And Jung? Is there a form of his universal consciousness which has an outline stored & updated maybe in our DNA? Epigenetic phenomena?
I like your version of a solar panel pergola?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dingus,
The panels are not solar; they are 24-gauge perforated steel sheets with supporting structure. The image that arose in my mind might be an abstraction of an acacia tree as one might see in the African plains. (View “acacia tree” on Google Images.)
I wouldn’t say that Jung’s referent concerns a universal consciousness. Not everyone “knows” the same thing or has the same thoughts and feelings. He referred to his referents, the object of his studies, as “archetypes.” Archetypes are supposedly templates for projection, recognition, and meaning that the species has access to. Archetypes are called-up when conditions and circumstances resonate with them. An archetype is a kind of pattern, I guess. When they are triggered in a mind (unconsciously), they become compelling beyond conscious reasoning.
I think it’s fair to say that Jung became a shaman in that he became oriented to the human soul and that he found and healed his own lost soul at what seemed to be the peak of his conventional life. (He had wealth, fame, career security, and a loving family and friends.) All shamans are supposedly self-healers first, later tapped by others in a tribe when they lost their souls.
What Jung attempts to communicate is a complex subject and exceedingly difficult to talk about analytically because there doesn’t seem to be any parts—just deep, moody, hidden, fragmented complexes struggling for expression and air. When humans sense their place confidently, then they are “individualized.” When we are in doubt, then some complexes have become dominant or vie for dominance, and there is no integration or wholeness of being.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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An interesting little side note on getting to the "heart" of things.
Otto Loewi´s experiment (1921)
T = time
S = stimulus in the vagus
D = contractions of heart D
R = contractions of heart R
The experiment was very simple and became a prototype for all investigations of humoral (i.e., chemical) factors in the nervous system. He cut out two hearts from frogs and perfused them with a warm physiological solution (Ringer). In this condition, the frog´s hearts continue to beat for some hours. He then stimulated the vagus nerve to one of the hearts. As a consequence (R), there was a strong inhibition in this heart beats. The second heart (D) was unaffected. However, when he perfused the second heart with the outflow of the perfusion of the first one, he achieved exactly the same effect, with a small delay provoked by the pump action and the chemical action.
The only fact that could explain this result was that there was some substance being produced at the parasympathetic synapse level in heart R, which had the power to provoke a similar response in the muscles of heart D. Loewi called this substance Vagusstoff (vagal substance). He was almost certain that it was acetylcholine, how was proved later, but he was cautious in the beginning.
After using the same preparation to study the effects of stimulating the sympathetic nerves to the heart, he obtained an opposite effect: heart D accelerated its pace, very much like injected adrenaline (later it was identified as being a similar molecule, named noradrenaline). With the same caution, he called this Acceleransstoff (accelerating substance). He also coined the term "neurohumoral transmission" to explain what he found.
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