What is "Mind?"

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Jan

Mountain climber

Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa

May 21, 2014 - 02:09pm PT

You know, exercising a modicum of 'prove it' - to scientific findings and recommendations, and to those of woo, is a good approach. Instead of accepting any ole claims on their own veracity.

My sentiments exactly.

What seems to be missing in this discussion is an understanding by the materialists that they are applying a naive, total faith in science approach to their pronouncements on the world of meditation which they know nothing about.

I accept as valid Mh2's assessment that his explorations in a multi year meditation practice have simply allowed him to use his biochemical brain in new ways. I think there's more, but his views have validity based on his subjective experience. The rest of you are just guessing, to quote Werner.

Jan

Mountain climber

Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa

May 21, 2014 - 02:21pm PT

As to what discoveries meditation has made, I would say, a lot, concerning the function of the human brain and mind. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism all had understood the unconscous mind two thousand years and more before Sigmund Freud rediscovered it for example. They have also been much more effective at reprogramming the unconscious mind in positive directions for larger numbers of people than psychotherapy ever has.

Moreover, they have discovered how to make people happier, less addicted, and more creative. Have you ever asked yourself why the highest rates of suicide, depression, and drug addiction are in the modern, comfortable, affluent countries of the world and not in the poorest most deprived countries that still have a spiritual tradition? Scientifically speaking, can you explain why the highest suicide rates are in Sweden, and the greatest number of heroin addicts per capita in Switzerland? And why the U.S. has such a high addiction rate? Does this not indicate that something is missing from these modern, secular, scientific societies?

Why is it so hard to accept that human beings need both science for the material world and an understanding of the mind based on human life,(not just brain scans), in order to truly thrive?

Jan

Mountain climber

Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa

May 21, 2014 - 02:23pm PT

And the minute you call something useless, you have made a value subjective judgement, not a scientific one, unless you argue that commercialism is an even higher value than science.

Marlow

Sport climber

OSLO

May 21, 2014 - 02:25pm PT

Scientifically speaking, can you explain why the highest suicide rates are in Sweden...

Jan

Scientifically speaking? Sweden? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

When it comes to facts: China and Japan, among a lot of other countries, are higher on the list than Sweden at number 44...

...and what do we know about the quality of statistics in the poorest countries?

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - May 21, 2014 - 02:32pm PT

Forty, for starters, you're talking to a scholastic (Jan) who knows her material. Not some hack peddling doctrine. She's not talking about religo mumbo jumbo, but the psychology of mind in many cases having little to nothing to do with religion at all.

This is once again a case of conflating direct insight and religion. Or doing what John S. is trying to do with me - saying any insight taken from the subjective realm is "revealed wisdom."

In it's normal usage, revealed wisdom is the idea that man receives wisdom by revelation. I never said anything of the sort and I wonder where John got this idea - except it seems that all materialists believe reliable data/knowledge has to come from some external source - like from instruments or symbols. If you have no experience quieting your mind, you probably would make this mistake.

I have never used the word "God" in reference to meditation, so this is another case of someone totally misunderstanding what is being said. Sentience and mind itself (no thing) source the data, not some God you are projecting onto the game.

Forty, trying to guess what is not there in those old texts, believing it is only poor science, or superstition, or goblins and bullsh#t, is to vastly mistaken about what is in many cases some pretty heavy material.

But it's not for everyone.

JL

PSP also PP

Trad climber

Berkeley

May 21, 2014 - 02:32pm PT

Why is it so hard to discuss human life without invoking the mystical?

DMT

There is no mystical in being aware in the moment. Mystical is your construct.

Marlow

Sport climber

OSLO

May 21, 2014 - 02:36pm PT

Among other things: Jan's use of Sweden in her suicide argument is mystical...

eeyonkee

Trad climber

Golden, CO

May 21, 2014 - 02:37pm PT

So, this is going to be my last post here (honest). First off, thanks for that, Bruce. And I am pining to get back to Squamish. Also, great post (as usual) jstan (I wish I’d of said that). I would like to contribute a final, non-sarcastic post, prompted by jstan’s nice summary. It occurs to me that I can state my position basically in four points:

1. Both science and peoples’ natural intuition about consciousness suggest that it is a continuous “thing” rather than a discrete thing. Most people would agree, I would think, that if you could somehow have a consciousness meter, that humans would score higher than apes and dolphins, who would, in turn, score higher than dogs, who would, in turn, score WAY higher than cats (just kidding, Mouser, if you’re reading this).

2. For reasons too numerous to count, the likelihood that consciousness has NOT come about through biological evolution on this planet seems remote at best.

3. As pointed out by Richard Dawkins and others, genes are like computer code…in base 4 (G, T, A, C) rather than base 2 (0, 1). Being a programmer myself, it’s not hard for me to imagine evolution working with this, along with all of the other, more substantive starting materials like neurons and dopamine, and producing consciousness.

4. Since it HAS come about through evolutionary processes, we have every reason to believe that it will eventually be understood in ways that do not involve the supernatural or Largo’s first person mind .

On a more speculative note, I would have to think that philosophy was or should have been forever changed in light of the scientific discoveries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly evolution. The whole dualism thing is well explained in an evolutionary context. You’d better be embracing science, like Dewey or, particularly, Daniel Dennett, or you’re a dinosaur, IMO.

cintune

climber

The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen

May 21, 2014 - 02:39pm PT

The earliest animals, according to this new theory, had no nervous system at all. The cells of these early animals could sense their environment directly, and could send signals directly to neighboring cells.

Millions of years later, those signals and receptors became the raw material for the nervous system.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140521-comb-jelly-ctenophores-oldest-animal-family-tree-science/

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - May 21, 2014 - 03:05pm PT

Since I am being painted as "mystical," kindly tell me what the hell that is because I have no idea.

And just note how people can't get their head around the idea that the discursive is a perspective that has limitations, and that the idea that instruments will never grasp experience itself is for many a non-starter.

Also, if you're using your "natural intuition" to investigate subjectivity, you'll likely just swim around in content, and get about as far into the cux of it as you would trying to intuitively investigate the quantum level. Our natural intuition is hard wired into our survival stuff. Getting behind that, and the discursive, is not an easy task IMO, and is very counterintuitive.

JL

WBraun

climber

May 21, 2014 - 03:19pm PT

It's as if these scholars of the mystical choose to completely ignore how the human mind has changed over the millenia.

The "brain" (computer) in your car has evolved quite a bit over time and the idiot
ultimately controlling that brain in your car is still doing the same stupid sh!t before they ever even had one in there ......

Jan

Mountain climber

Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa

May 21, 2014 - 03:20pm PT

Why is it so hard to discuss human life without invoking the mystical?

Because life without mystery is boring?

Among other things: Jan's use of Sweden in her suicide argument is mystical...

No, my information seems to be outdated, but not mystical. It is interesting that Sweden went from high to lower rates of suicide,and more interesting still would be a study of how that was achieved. Did rates of suicide rise elsewhere in response to modernization, or did Swedish society make a concerted effort to lower their rates? Maybe it was even the result of a simple scientific breakthrough like multispectrum light bulbs in winter. Or maybe all of the above and more.

It does seem that whatever a science type disagrees with on this thread, gets labled mystical, or the more derogatory term woo-woo.

Edit: Looking at Wiki's List, I note that out of 110 countries, Nepal is # 110 for suicide.

Jan

Mountain climber

Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa

May 21, 2014 - 03:32pm PT

Maybe the answer to preventing suicide depends on the culture? I suggested more material explanations for Sweden because I know they are a secular society.

Then again, what I would call spiritual approaches they would probably call psychological.

And for sure, no one can attribute the low rate in Nepal, one of the world's least developed countries, to materialist oriented interventions.

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - May 21, 2014 - 03:50pm PT

the evolving mind is a point I try to come back to over and over again, as a reference point from which we've come. None of the "transcendental" types care to go there. Beats me why not. Maybe they'd realize that they've been chasing their own tales (ha Ha).

The fact that you try and see everything through the lens of evolution is like a holy-roller interpreting the universe in terms of revealed wisdom. You both want one perspective to supply most everything. Plus it is no doubt your home turf so that's where you feel comfortable. Else you wouldn't use terms like transcendental to reference me - since I'm not a transcedentalist (as in divinely inspired or some such thing) at all, and have never used that language. Nor would I. I work in the opposite direction - you bore INTO the earth, and your own experience. You don't try and float above it.

But the reason I don't follow you into the evolutionary rabbit hole is that you continue to equate sentience with content, and continue to look at brain output as the golden fleece. The nature of sentience is that it's no thing at all. But you'll never see that from the outside. It will always seem to be nothing more than an evolved phenomenon. Where else did it come from, right? That's your sticking point: Believing that all phenomenon must be content or things that were created or sourced by some material. And any other notion is "mysticism" revealed by some "God," or is an "intuition" or feeling. This blind spot about per your own subjectivity is pretty glaring - especially the fact that you are convinced it is NOT a blind spot, and even heap virtue on being "objective."

JL

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - May 21, 2014 - 04:20pm PT

No. It's expression is an evolved thing.
--

The point that's being made here is that the expression is CONTENT. Sentience is NOT content. (Then WHAT is it he screams?) You're thinking that sentience is a computational function a kind of self-referent EXPRESSED by the brain - or else (laughingly) it is something that "transcends" the brain, is separate from, and is given to us by some "God." This is the only perspective possible when you are only studying objective functioning, ergo the blind spot.

What's amazing to me is that even science has revealed that reality is often totally screwy sounding and vastly counterintuitive, but when equally odd aspects of sentience are brought up that are not strictly materialistic or Newtonian, words like "mystical" are trotted out.

JL

Jan

Mountain climber

Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa

May 21, 2014 - 04:24pm PT

I don't mind discussing brain and mind in terms of evolution.

While there is ample evidence that individuals and societies have evolved in the past two thousand years, (mainly from agricultural to modern to post modern) there is also ample evidence that this has primarily involved the discursive mind and the culture that goes with it.

The deeper levels of mind and their emotional connections to the endocrine system have not been able to change all that much in two thousand years. In fact, they haven't really changed all that much in ten thousand. Physically and mentally, our emotions are still operating more in the realm of hunters and gatherers than of post modern techies.

Just take a look at some of the emotionally charged threads on ST. Advanced discursive minds using the latest technology to threaten and insult each other in the best style of symbolic warfare from the Stone Age. A pessimist could even argue that we behave more like apes still, at the emotional level, than advanced homo sapiens.

Two thousand year old books and contemplative traditions from a period in history when people had the time to explore the inner workings of the mind do still have something to teach us. In fact, if you read any of the great scriptures of the world, and then read the crime pages of any modern newspaper, you will be amazed at the similarity of human passions.

If scientific understanding could change these passions then we would now be living in the utopian technocracy predicted by the naive optimists of the early industrial revolution. Unfortunately, it hasn't quite worked out that way.