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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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But a self examination of our own feelings or our own mind reveals a powerful sense of a self we understand as a knowing, experiencing individual whose thoughts seem to stand apart from the meat that produces them.
"...seem to stand apart from..."
indeed.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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But a self examination of our own feelings or our own mind reveals a powerful sense of a self we understand as a knowing, experiencing individual whose thoughts seem to stand apart from the meat that produces them.
Again, a matter of perception and interpretation. At no time have I personally ever considered myself as standing apart from my brain [and body].
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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"...seem to stand apart from..."
indeed.
And to dismiss that "seemingness" would be to dismiss an important piece of evidence in a very difficult problem.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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not to be dismissed, certainly, but to give it unexamined authority just because it "seems" to be something is incorrect.
you must admit the possibility that what it "seems" to be isn't what it is.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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That structure is separate from the chemical that affects it.
Let us fetch another, to me a more appropriate example. It has to do with Sting's tune Lithium Sunset:
...all elements on the periodic table have a specific light frequency they emit in the solar spectrum and this is their light fingerprint or bar code. This fingerprint can travel 93 million miles to Earth to interact with chemical that contain this element and it will react to this similar frequency via a vibration. We call this molecular resonance. You need to understand how this light fingerprint can be used to activate Lithium in your brain to change your mood. That is how all elements and all bio-moleculres work. We've been conditioned to believe it is a lock and key mechanism but this is a very simplistic linear way of thinking about chemistry. Light controls all chemicals by imparting information and energy to their valence electrons and once the light frequency matches the element or chemical the distant element or chemical reacts. This is how sunlight can affect a depressed brain. It turns out lithium light from the sun is more abundant in AM and sunset light so Sting was right about his song.
Fill my eyes
O Lithium sunset
And take this lonesome burden
Of worry from my mind
Take this heartache
Of obsidian darkness
And fold my darkness
Into your yellow light
I've been scattered I've been shattered
I've been knocked out of the race
But I'll get better
I feel your light upon my face
Heal my soul
O Lithium sunset
And I'll ride the turning world
Into another night
Apparently Sting used this process, and still does, to jump-start his creative process.
Have fun in creating degrees of separation in this example.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Again, a matter of perception and interpretation. At no time have I personally ever considered myself as standing apart from my brain [and body].
Well good on you. But the birth of a spiritual life is a notion deeply imbedded in the entire history of human culture and is, of course, where we get the notion of soul, eternal or otherwise. What is the animating force that leaves the body or ends when death occurs and where does it go? Fascinating to consider.
A thought problem:
"Suppose that a scientist were to begin replacing your cells, one by one, with those of Greta Garbo at the age of thirty. At the beginning of the experiment, the recipient of the cells would clearly be you, and at the end it would clearly be Garbo, but what about in the middle? It seems implausible to suggest that you could draw a line between the two—that any single cell could make all the difference between you and not-you. There is, then, no answer to the question of whether or not the person is you, and yet there is no mystery involved—we know what happened. A self, it seems, is not all or nothing but the sort of thing that there can be more of or less of. When, in the process of a zygote’s cellular self-multiplication, does a person start to exist? Or when does a person, descending into dementia or coma, cease to be?"
you must admit the possibility that what it "seems" to be isn't what it is.
Sure. But what better evidence do we have currently?
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Coleridge's laudanum-fueled verse puts Sting's to shame
Oh I agree, but having written both song lyrics and poetry the differences are stratospheric.
Have you ever penned a song lyric -- set to a delineating chord structure and syncopated beat?
I thought not.
Can you imagine the flagrant bad taste of applying Milton's lines to say, Nights in White Satin by The Moody Blues? Or worse yet to the Stone's Sympathy for the Devil
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Apparently Sting used this process, and still does, to jump-start his creative process.
Have fun in creating degrees of separation in this example.
The poem is not the lithium.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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But the birth of a spiritual life is a notion deeply embedded in the entire history of human culture and is, of course, where we get the notion of soul, eternal or otherwise.
Lots of notions are deeply embedded in the entire history of human culture, that doesn't make many of them any more than just that: deeply embedded feelings and ideas. Mankind has held an endless litany of notions of human origins, souls and gods as we're endowed with fertile imaginations.
What is the animating force that leaves the body or ends when death occurs and where does it go? Fascinating to consider.
Life. Life is the animating force that ends with death. Nothing further is, as we've been talking about, necessary.
The poem is not the lithium.
Well, maybe not, but having been around a lot of folks on and off their lithium I would guess it's just as likely the poem wouldn't exist without the lithium...
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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The poem is not the lithium.
This is similar to saying the little child's "I love you mommy" is not the DNA, or not the TCA. Cycle in the cells, or the mitochondria that produced the energy for such a beautiful utterance.
As far as we know without these things there is no child, no mommy, no love.
But I'm open to alternative theories??
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Lots of notions are deeply embedded in the entire history of human culture, that doesn't make many of them any more than just that: deeply embedded feelings and ideas. Mankind has held an endless litany of notions of human origins, souls and gods as we're endowed with fertile imaginations.
What you ignore is the natural inclination toward such a belief because that's the way it feels intuitively right or wrong.
Life. Life is the animating force that ends with death. Nothing further is, as we've been talking about, necessary.
When you demonstrate that through the scientific process enjoy your Nobel Prize.
The poem is not the lithium.
Well, maybe not, but having been around a lot of folks on and off their lithium I would guess it's just as likely the poem wouldn't exist without the lithium...
Look, the form is not the content, the map is not the territory, the poem is not the lithium and the brain is not the thought.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Look, the form is not the content, the map is not the territory, the poem is not the lithium and the brain is not the thought.
This is a false construct, frankly.
Up to this point, as far as I know, the only individual on this thread willing to firmly identify non-empirical sources for these things would be Werner-- and he posits Hindu deities, as we all know.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Largo: . . . Reality is ALWAYS a moving target, . . . .
+1
The matrix, so to speak, is being stuck in a perspective in which one or the other side of the coin appears to be paramount. This is the trance.
A funny way to say it, but +1 again.
Healyje,
You and Largo are arguing what neuroscientists are finding (or not), and I’d be tempted to demur. Neuroscience appears to be a compilation of various approaches together. But they don’t really seem to add up to much (fMRI data notwithstanding). The problem for them, IMO, is that they’re trying to do too much with too little data. Look at how cognitive science has approached the issues. They are taking a very small parcel of the problem and trying to come up with solutions (knowledge representations, mental modeling, neural networking, analogies / metaphors, etc.). I am not the only one who has real doubts that neuroscience is not much more than something that people are attracted to: i.e., “THE BRAIN.” I challenge people to put together multiple disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology, cognitive science, psychology, etc.) into one grand scientific investigation program. If you’ve actually ever “done science,” you’d recognize how grand of an project neuroscience seems to be. But, pretty much only looking at colored pictures of a brain in-process leads to . . . a lot of speculation.
Healyje: Life. Life is the animating force that ends with death.
What is THAT? LIFE? “The animating force?” Ha. A poetic term, at best. What ARE you talking about? (Werner!!)
I’m sorry not to have responded those who wrote about the question I posed about “necessity” being a misplace modifier. We have a little artistic vision meeting I host, so I’m a little busy. Will get back. Interesting conversations, here!
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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This is a false construct, frankly.
This is a false construct, frankly.
I like this form of argument.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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MikeL,
If you have any interest in neuroscience, you should read Eric Kandel or Hubel and Wiesel.
That is only a start, but a good one.
Try to separate the wheat from the chaff.
edit:
The Big Book of Concepts is chaff. Serious chaff, but chaff.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Ed, thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I have been familiar with much of what your related on the subject, but you obviously speak from an insider viewpoint within the community of physicists, and I am more of an admiring associate.
I tend from my personal level of ignorance to agree with the perspective of the material universe as essentially a mathematical construct; quite amazing, intricate, and delicately balanced.
There seems to be plenty of evidence that the material universe is actually not material at all, but an ocean of energetic wave-forms which do not manifest into matter until observed by a conscious entity....aka quantum weirdness...
Leading straight back to the basic question on this thread...does consciousness arise as a rare and weird property of matter...or does matter arise as a thought form from a universal consciousness...
I am bothered by the apparent phenomena that every time physics tries to avoid the concept of universal consciousness, we wind up with another level of wild and wonderful mathematical explanations such as Hilbert Space, strings, multiverses and dark energy/matter....all very interesting...
I think the universe is more than enough complex and wondrous without trying to explain everything minus a prime mover consciousness.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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A human who is all wrapped up in specialized focused attention is less able to experience and appreciate expanded general conscious awareness....hence the value of meditating.
Plants are pretty good at meditating...LOL
Plants are also pretty good at growing what humans need to survive; as food and medicine and construction materials, etc...(An essential partnership we tend to not honor properly.)
If humans need help for expanding consciousness awareness, perhaps some plants are growing what humans need for that... (in the hope we will wake up to our stewardship role in the partnership .)
These plants are myopically called hallucinogenic plants because we are so wrapped up in the matrix that we don't believe in these temporary altered states of expanded awareness and consider such to be fantasies. (Incidentally I don't use such plants and am part of a government random drug testing program to ensure I remain a good and loyal subject of the matrix.)
We even ignore the expanded awareness implications of our relationship with the plants and focus on the biochemistry of the planet's quantum weirdness, since we don't want to recognize that the plant may be spiritually guiding us..... with the altered biochemistry aspect simply akin to focusing on a candle as a meditation aid, helping quiet overly busy minds.
(Overlooking that the material universe could from this perspective be more properly recognized as a hallucination.)
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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DMT, thank you for collating and re-posting the inconsequential blather about completeness and necessity. It cleared the sinuses nicely.
JL: One way of looking at it is that awareness and reality are sources and as sources they are continuous and analogue, so to speak. Consciousness is capable of digitizing the analogue into the discrete, lest we would never be able to deal with the "things" in our lives. The "trance" mentioned is our habitual enmeshment with the discrete, and our discursive rambling about it, however true or false. Worth noting is that for humans, though few realize it, the source is continuous, and as mentioned, consciousness can digitize the continuous into ...
JL: The main point of the Lund paper was to show that "there is not a precise static instant in time underlying a ...
How droll. To the rest of the world it's a paper by Peter Lynds, but to the Wizard it's the "Lund" paper.
I'm beginning to regret having brought attention to Lynds' metaphysical efforts, for I have given John another way to confuse issues. Especially since Lynds' ideas coincide more or less with those which Henri Bergson presented a century ago, and which have been discared for nearly that period of time.
It all started with Hilbert spaces many moons ago.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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MH2: The Big Book of Concepts is chaff.
It’s difficult to take you seriously. You don’t have any evidence of advanced study (I’ve asked where you’ve taken advanced degrees, and you’ve said nowhere), and the gravamen of your conversations tend to be somewhat slight IMO. Murphy’s work is chaff? Sorry, but I don’t think you have a clue what you’re talking about. To what extent is knowledge representation, mental modeling, or neural networking superficial or trivial to cognition? For Christ sake, read the scholarly reviews of Murphy's work and his book as one of the works that grad students refer to crib understanding.
BTW, what response do you have to my concern about a 30,000 foot, integrative view of about 5-7 different scientific disciplines for neuroscience?
Please, dazzle me with your brilliance rather than baffling me with your bullsh#t.
If you think that Eric Kandel or Hubel and Wiesel really have something important to say about mind and what it is—and you understand how it coalesces a field of study that pushes it considerably forward—why don’t you explain it to us?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mike,
You need to do groundwork, first. Eric Kandel has a little to say about cognition, but he was more modest in his research goals. Kandel studied nervous systems. What does Murphy study? Where does he find concepts and how does he study them?
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