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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 26, 2018 - 09:45pm PT
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MikeL on the behaviour of rocks:
I suppose you’re using the yearly, decade, or millennium scale?
All things change; there is nothing that doesn’t. Change--if anything--is movement.
What is the cause?? What’s moving??
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Apr 26, 2018 - 11:20pm PT
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I suppose you’re using the yearly, decade, or millennium scale? All things change; there is nothing that doesn’t. Change--if anything--is movement. What is the cause?? What’s moving??
Rocks change, but that is not behavior.
You don’t have that data. You’re making this declaration up. Can you imagine the research design and implementations needed to be able to even begin to make that claim? As my teachers and colleagues in the doctoral program at UIUC would say: “show me the data.”
I do have the data, simply put there has never been a case of consciousness absent a brain. As Ed suggests, please reference a case of the existence of a consciousness absent a brain.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Apr 27, 2018 - 05:09am PT
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Getting back to the topic of "symmetry", I wanted to say that finding and exploiting the presence of symmetry (when and where it exists) is a fundamental (and very powerful) technique for solving problems in both math and computer science. It's not like symmetry "has" to exist, but when and where it does, you'd better take notice. This can even be true even when the solution to your problem is "negative".
A classic example is Galois's study of the solutions to polynomial equations. In high school, students are taught the quadratic formula for solving second-degree polynomial equations. There are also formulas for solving the cubic and quartic. Can we write more general formulas? Galois gained an understanding of this problem by studying the symmetries of the solutions. To what extent can we "replace" one solution with another? By characterizing the finite "group" of symmetries associated to a polynomial equation, Galois was able to show that there is a formula for the solution if and only if this finite group of symmetries (called the "Galois" group)) has a specific property (which, unsurprisingly, is also called "solvable"). Since it is sometimes easy to calculate whether or not the Galois group of a given polynomial has this property (i.e. is solvable), it is not hard to come up with polynomial equations whose solutions cannot be expressed by a formula (that is: a formula like the one used for the first, second, third and fourth degree equations). For example, the polynomial equation X^5 - 6x + 3 = 0 has five different solutions (three are real and two are complex) and someone who understands the relevant concepts won't have too much trouble showing that every permutation of these five solutions is an element of the Galois group. Since the full permutation group S_5 is not solvable (a topic for an introductory undergraduate math course in group theory), there is no formula to solve this polynomial equation. The irony being that this polynomial has "too much" symmetry to be solvable.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 27, 2018 - 08:01am PT
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Nature can't and never created anything.
Material natures inferior energies are subordinate to the superior spiritual energies which do the actual creating and destroying.
The gross materialists with their inferior academics and inferior material scientific methods will always ultimately remain in poor fund of knowledge,
all while masquerading themselves as authoritative as blind leading the blind .......
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larryhorton
Trad climber
NM
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Apr 27, 2018 - 08:09am PT
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I’ll apologize one more time, eeyonkee, to you and anyone else who thinks your description is how I view myself. Larry Horton is nobody, I can assure you—without false modesty—nobody. And the things I’ve tried to give form here have absolutely nothing to do with me, or ‘smartness’, knowledge, or intellect. I’ve apparently unsuccessfully attempted to make that explicitly clear throughout.
Students of a Living Master have great familiarity with apologizing, as you might imagine if you contemplate for a moment the eventual purification of not just the physical mind, but the contents of the subconscious and unconscious minds as well—a cesspool of our total, collective experience since our initial descent into the lower worlds. Impossible, you say? But for the Master, you’d be absolutely correct. The whole journey is the embodiment of His Grace, and the unimaginable Sound Current He carries.
What I am referring to is consciousness, in and of itself. Regardless of what you’re reading on the pages of this thread, consciousness cannot be known through words, definitions, or efforts of the mind. Mind cannot know consciousness, just as it cannot know love, bliss, the now, or the divine. Consciousness can be known only through the grace of a Godman who carries It, and anyone who brushes up against this divine current is changed forever. Life will never be the same.
So, yes, Mike, hopefully one can be forgiven for being supremely serious about maintaining contact with consciousness until we eventually merge with it.
As Werner said, Consciousness predates the creation itself, and saints and masters throughout time have channeled this current to those souls who are ready to dip their toe in the spiritual elixir. It’s been called the Sound Current, the Shabda, the Tao, the Word, Nam, and countless other names. Pythagoras, who taught the Sound Current through the medium of mathematics, called it the Music of the Spheres. In ancient Greece, it was also known as Logos. Each refers to this unspeakable, undivided power of love, which is always present on the planet through at least one Living Master at any given time.
Between the focus of a chela’s attention and the conversations on this thread, I’m reminded of a story told several years ago by a God-realized soul (not the Master) who was giving a talk at a hotel across the street from Harvard. He started by telling us that he had been relaxing in the lobby of the hotel, contemplating his talk later that afternoon, when a distinguished looking gentleman strolled in and sat down next to him. This man was clearly from ‘across the street’. Requisite tweed blazer, immaculately trimmed white beard, spectacles, and sharp, piercing eyes suggesting a high level of intellect.
He amiably said hello and asked Dennis if he was here to attend one of their talks today.
Dennis said, “No, actually, I’m giving a talk today myself.”
“Oh really?” the man replied. “What’s your talk on?”
Dennis said, “I’m going to be talking about consciousness.”
“Well! That’s very interesting. That’s exactly what we study—is consciousness! What a coincidence.” He paused, and his eyes narrowed over his spectacles. Dennis could see the man’s intellect homing in. “Well, if you’re talking about consciousness, doesn’t that suggest you know what consciousness is?”
“Oh, I do, yes.”
By this time, the man was certain that he had Dennis cornered—dead to rights—into a position where he could not possibly escape. Simultaneously, there was a faintly detectable glimmer of sincere hope in the man’s eyes. “You know, no one actually knows what consciousness really is.”
“No, I really do,” Dennis insisted.
“Okay. Tell me. What is consciousness?!”
“It’s the confusion I experience between naps.”
So, Mike, we continually balance great seriousness with a bit of levity—usually about ourselves, since it’s an easy target, at the tip of our noses.
But it’s amazing to me that this information, intended to be helpful, is taken as arrogance, when it’s already so thick here one can hardly breathe.
Is this information for everybody? Absolutely not! It would be a miracle if one person heard one thing that resonated with them. What am I doing here? God only knows.
So you have my sincere apologies for intruding. I am the one who does not belong here. And I’ve dispensed far more jewels than is appropriate. The parable of the frog in the well, shared on page number 732 of this thread remains the most appropriate message I could leave you with. There is nothing more I can tell you that would serve the divine. And that’s where my attention belongs.
With this addendum: Paul Roehe, given the faculties he had access to, Max Planck was correct—the instructions on how to get outside the box are written on the outside of the box. The beauty of Light and Sound is that we don’t need the instructions to get outside the box. All we need is the unfathomable love of the Sound Current which lifts the yearning soul right out of the box of its imprisonment, and returns it home.
The Master, in bringing me here, clearly wants to impress upon me more deeply how utterly blind and stuck humanity is. Thank You, blessed One—Your message is received.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 27, 2018 - 09:09am PT
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“You’re not using the word data correctly.”
“Everyone knows that . . . “
“You have to prove that some thing is wrong.”
“That’s not what we mean.” “We all know what is meant.”
(Turn in your degrees.)
larryhorton,
It seems to me that seriousness has given rise to more pain and suffering than anything else in consciousness. I suppose there are other issues that are equal glitches in the matrix, but the wont to see things concretely and seriously might be the very basis of ignorance.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 27, 2018 - 09:11am PT
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DMT: This is consistent with my observations. It's everything or it's nothing.
As Werner might say, a good fund of knowledge and use of intelligence.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 27, 2018 - 10:13am PT
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It's everything or nothing
is a bit of a trite comment, since we have debated the meaning of "nothing", and in so doing questioned that of "everything."
And while Largo had dismissed Feyerabend up-thread, he had discussed the interesting ideas of how scientific knowledge expands, and in particular, how it requires the "redefinition" of the words used to describe that knowledge. I suspect this is antithetical to MikeL's quest for "Truth," as an unwavering, fixed point.
In a discussion at lunch yesterday I was recounting the story of Eddington's explanation of how the Sun, and generalized to other stars, obtained their power, through nuclear fusion. That was 1919/1920. Prior to that year no good explanation for the energy source existed, none that were consistent with what was known about the universe. In many ways, the "universe" was not even "everything."
The Hooker Telescope at Mt. Wilson had just been completed, and it would be 10 years before Hubble completed his observations to conclude that the universe was much larger than the Milky Way, that nebula were other galaxies and that the whole shebang was expanding, the rushing out from what was evidently a big bang.
Eddington's (and others') insight came from a very simple observation, that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Sun. It was, what would seem to be in comparison the quotidian exercise of, measuring the masses of the elements to higher precision. An exercise which Largo would describe as the collection of dusty facts, though they hadn't collected much dust by then having been freshly minted.
Ashton had accomplished this task in the summer of 1919 using the new technique of atomic mass spectrometry, a phrase he coined. Ashton, a student of J.J. Thomson, won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
From these measurements, some might characterize as lacking any great inspiration, comes the first line of the story about the universe. As written by Eddington, that line interprets the remarkable measurements that Ashton had made that summer: four times the mass of a hydrogen atom was less than the mass of a helium atom.
This meant that if you somehow assembled the helium from four hydrogens you'd have energy left over, Eddington had understood Einstein's most famous formula (known for 14 years by then). And used it to calculate the energy output and, equally important, the life time of the Sun and other stars.
This provided a physically reasonable estimate for the age of the universe*, and together with Hubble's work over the next decade, expanded the spatial extent of the universe.
Astonishing to me was that Eddington chose to talk about the hypothetical nuclear fusion in 1919 rather than about the result he had obtained that same year, the observation of the deflection of light around the Sun during a solar eclipse, one of the first tests of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, our current theory of gravity (then four years old); this test is considered Eddington's most important scientific contribution. At that time, Eddington judged the possible explanation of stars to have been much more important.
Suddenly, the concept of physical cosmology made sense, over a 20 year period from 1919 to 1939 when Bethe published the full theory of stellar nuclear burning, the modern picture of "everything" started to come into focus. Stars are the crucibles in which the elements required for life are forged. The life cycle of stars provides all the other elements in our existence.
1929 saw the first experimental observation of nuclear fusion, now it was more than an "interesting speculation."
This is not even the "everything" we know now, we suspect, with good reason, that it is only about 4% of the total mass of the universe. "Good reason" provides a path to data, as well as a path from data, "good reason" and data are necessary for understanding, neither alone are sufficient.
We don't know "everything," but we know something, and that something grows as we continue to learn. The language changes to accommodate this new knowledge, our thinking also changes, and the very idea of a fixed "Truth" seems further removed from the actual activity of learning about and understanding reality.
The statement "it's everything or nothing" sounds supremely vacuous.
*this is particularly interesting in this thread because one can consider it a "prediction" of evolution that the Earth had to be billions of years old, not just 100s of millions, which was the estimate of the age of the Sun by Lord Rayleigh. While geologists had long suspected that the Earth was much older (based on sedimentation rate, and then the observation of sediment series) the young Sun estimate was hard to reconcile.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Apr 27, 2018 - 01:09pm PT
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LarryHorton, I would place you in the same category of posters on this thread as Werner and TomCochrane. You claim that you have special insight and that's that. You, because you have a "master". Good for you.
Here's a question, what was consciousness doing for all of those millennia before human consciousness arrived on the world stage?
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Apr 27, 2018 - 02:38pm PT
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Like it, DMT! But seriously folks...
What is Mind -- Categories of Posters
So, I apologize in advance, Largo, but I am a reductionist (aren’t we all, really?). Being a reductionist, I have contemplated my long history with this thread and have arrived at the following reductionist question that divides the posters into basically two camps.
Did human consciousness (mind) evolve, or is it something that preceded evolution?
I would then go on to posit 5 categories of poster and what their answer to this question would be.
• Religion-first worldview
• Scientific worldview
• Philosophical/humanities-first worldview
• Mathematical?
• Seat-of-the-pants
The categories are not mutually exclusive. Some posters can fall into two, but probably not more.
Religion-first posters see mind in terms of their religious teachings first. Science that more or less supports their position is accepted. Not so much the rest. I can think of at least 5 posters that I would place into this category. Mostly, this category sees consciousness as preceding evolution.
More than anything, scientific posters are just articulating the scientific consensus in the underlying view of mind; it is the result of biological evolution on planet earth. There are all sorts of interesting problems in the details (like is there free will?), but the consensus scientific view is; whatever it is, it evolved to be what it is. This category is firmly in the camp of evolution preceding (and leading to) consciousness.
Philosophical posters are basically scientific skeptics (at least in this crew) and mostly seem to be on the rationalist side of the empiricism/rationalism divide in philosophy. In general, this category of poster gives special status to human subjectivity, and are generally in the camp of consciousness preceding evolution (Largo’s “awareness”, for instance). By the way, I would place sycorax in this category, but I believe that she would be in the evolution leads to mind camp.
I’m throwing in the mathematical poster category to include joGill and yanqui, who often have interesting insights because of their understanding of that discipline. Also, how mathematics plays in the scientific worldview is big enough to deserve its own category.
Seat-of the-pants is a catch-all category that covers people’s trust in their own common sense and intuition. Think DMT. You can't exactly pin him down in the other categories.
Me? I’m both a scientific and seat-of-the-pants guy. It’s my nature.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Apr 27, 2018 - 02:52pm PT
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Here's a question, what was consciousness doing for all of those millennia before human consciousness arrived on the world stage?
Jumping spiders...
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Apr 27, 2018 - 03:01pm PT
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Okay, healyje, I'll rephrase my question. What was consciousness doing before nervous systems (that's really what I meant)? I can only surmise, waiting for them to evolve so that it could express itself. I can imagine a Star Trek episode.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Apr 27, 2018 - 03:45pm PT
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Serious spiritual life does not need to be either humorlous or anti-intellectual. As a group, the Tibetans are the most spiritually advanced people I know and they have a raucously good sense of humor. Likewise, the most advanced spiritual people I know are also among the most intelligent and intellectual. The Dalai Lama with the equivalent of a Ph.D. in Buddhist philosophy is but one example. He's also interested in science by the way. The goal is to develop the whole human brain and transform the whole human personality, not suppress any one particular part of it.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Apr 27, 2018 - 03:52pm PT
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Eyonkee you need another category for the confused agnostics
(not putting their faith solely in any one of your categories while retaining a sense of awe and mystery)
The Guru Yogananda had a saying by the way:
God sleeps in the minerals,
Begins to wake up in the animals
and realizes who he truly is, through humans.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 27, 2018 - 04:06pm PT
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Congratulations on 20K, Jan!
Mathematical approach might be expendable. Not much support for Tononi's Phi function hereabouts. And even less for a mathematical universe. Tim and I contribute bits and pieces and curiosities, and I enjoyed his Galois theory comments. The first grad course I took back in 1962 was in essence Galois theory, and having had no introduction to abstract algebra at that point I was a bit confused by it all. An intro course in group theory the following semester clarified things a tad. Nowadays I guess this sort of thing is taught to undergraduates.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 27, 2018 - 04:22pm PT
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Ed: I suspect this is antithetical to MikeL's quest for "Truth," as an unwavering, fixed point.
I don’t think you’ve been paying that much attention to my writing. (Perhaps I can’t blame you.) What I’ve said pretty much all along is that there is only one thing that one knows for sure: [their own] consciousness / awareness. The rest is speculation (maybe “informed speculation”) because no one has been able to say completely, finally, and accurately what any thing is. It might be best to say something along the lines of, “here’s what we’re believing today.”
For your information, I don’t concern myself too much over what is finally, completely, and accurately true in this thread; I am more concerned with statements that claim to be true, when they can’t be proven to be so. That makes them speculative, which is fine, really—but we could occasionally be clear about it. (My own personal search for understanding of *What This Is* cannot be readily articulated even to myself, much less to you folks. I’ll just say that it’s a multi-dimensional conversation with myself [sic].)
If there could be a useful result after some 40,000+ posts on “What Is Mind?” thread, it could be simply that people could hold their beliefs a bit in suspension, tentatively, gently, with some respect for other perspectives *as if those others could possibly be right* because one’s own beliefs can’t be shown to be unequivocally true. This does not mean to denigrate science, religion, culture, nationality, political leanings, or even “seat of the pants’ insights and intuitions in any way.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Apr 27, 2018 - 04:29pm PT
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I agree that IIT basically barks up the wrong tree and for Largo's favorite reason: in the end, it's really all about content. A further objection is it's a sort of backdoor panpsychism dressed in a tech wrapper which I certainly will never be able to get on board with.
P.S. Is there any truth which isn't doubtable?
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 27, 2018 - 04:59pm PT
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Is there any truth which isn't doubtable?
Yes, there is.
But!!! since you are clueless to what Truth actually is you doubt everything and just theorize, guess, and mental speculate about everything.
Even when you meet truth itself face to face you still can't recognize it because you are just a self-centered individualistic egotist......
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Apr 27, 2018 - 05:06pm PT
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God sleeps in the minerals,
Begins to wake up in the animals
and realizes who he truly is, through humans.
I really like that! And then humanity has the opportunity to do something remarkable (virtuous) based on that realization.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 27, 2018 - 05:26pm PT
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God sleeps in the minerals,
Begins to wake up in the animals
and realizes who he truly is, through humans.
That's full on Mayavadi philosophy.
God is eternally awake and is never material or subordinate to nature.
Is eternally fully self realized, eternally free from all illusion.
Otherwise illusion would be God.
The mayavadis always fall under illusion and then try to merge into the impersonal brahmin losing their individuality.
The mayavadis commit spiritual suicide and eventually fall back down into the material creation having to go thru the cycle of birth and death disease and old age again and again ......
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