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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Aug 19, 2018 - 05:42pm PT
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Jill said "Why then does JL make it sound like such a profound epiphany? He has spoken of EA and no-thingness as metaphysical concepts that may be tied to particle physics and fundamental properties of the universe.
Have the two of you discussed this?"
I would have to look back to see if JL talks about emptiness as an epiphany; not so certain he did. But; IMExperience at first it is an epiphany. If you are experiencing emptiness for the first time in meditation; the experience is moving from a self oriented narrative going on in your head usually associated with some situation you are dealing with and then you are just present without the a narrative. It's unique and feels like an epiphany. I guess the next question would be what is an epiphany?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epiphany
3 a (1) : a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something. (2) : an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking. (3) : an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.
So it is simple and striking, you have the view without the narrative; for the first time and you feel it.
With more practice it goes deeper because as you look closer you realize that these feelings and emotions that come to the fore (as you let go of the self oriented narrative) are also a form of narrative . Actually everyone gets enamored with the pleasant feeling of bliss but with practice and noticing you eventually notice the bliss is a form of narrative a construction and you then let it go and become present once again . Just seeing just hearing without distraction. It feels like an epiphany to the ego but in buddhism they call it your original nature.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 19, 2018 - 06:45pm PT
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I would say the whole "can't be represented by a tree" is a bit misleading.
I think that might be a way of getting attention for an article, the title of the NYTimes piece.
My point wasn't about the details of that particular argument.
My point WAS about the ability of the theory ("the modern synthesis") to make predictions that could be challenged by experiment and shown to be false.
These predictions did not falsify all of evolution, the perihelion shift of Mercury didn't falsify all of Newtonian Gravity, instead, the understanding of the departure from the theory's prediction lead to a much deeper understanding of the over arching structure of the theory.
In physics, gravity determines cosmology.
In biology, the fact that there is a universal common ancestry of life
the eukarya have sex... but they are not all the life forms on the planet, only they have "mothers and fathers"... ancestry is a broader term that includes both the inheritance from parents, but also cell division, and the introduction of genetic material by other means...
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 19, 2018 - 07:35pm PT
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You are only looking at dead material being animated by the evolution and de-evolution of the living entities as they transmigrate to different material bodies according to their developed consciousness.
The whole dead material consciousness of Darwin missed the living entity itself and is only seeing the material hardware.
Anyone following that consciousness will fall down into ultimately extremely poor fund of knowledge and be completely mislead.
The living entity can easily devolve into lower species and can evolve upwards to higher material species all by the development of the living entities consciousness.
Consciousness is the single most important thing to understand FIRST.
The gross materialists are completely clueless to consciousness itself and waste all their time studying dead matter and NOT LIFE......
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 19, 2018 - 09:34pm PT
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Jan: "It is a psychological phenomenon that whatever a human puts a lot of voluntary effort into, that human tends to value highly."
Very well stated, Jan. I certainly experience that in math. I can understand how years of practice might affect a meditator's interpretation of their efforts. Human nature.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Aug 20, 2018 - 01:36pm PT
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In physics, gravity determines cosmology. In biology, I would say that replication is the lynchpin (replication with the occasional change). Replication covers both sexual and asexual reproduction. Both can be represented by tree structures.
It seems obvious to me that, evolutionarily, mitosis (asexual replication) preceded meiosis (sexual reproduction). So, if we could follow our own ancestral line indefinitely, we would see the tree structure change from requiring two nodes to produce a new node to only requiring one.
I do like that last illustration from DMT. It really is an open question as to what the "trunk" of the tree of life exactly looks like.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Aug 20, 2018 - 02:41pm PT
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When you start thinking of all the interconnected relationships in a biosphere, it seems pretty complicated.
The ole binary, bred or didn't breed, seems too simplistic to categorize evolution.
Then there's the ability organisms seem to have to take in new DNA from methods other than reproduction.
Instructions get passed around in lots of ways. I would guess many of these mechanisms have yet to be discovered.
Good points! I would say, it might seem simplistic, but it seems to fit all of the facts as we know them. I can't emphasize enough that things like horizontal transmission and other transmission events not involving a parent-child relationship are relatively rare but important. They occur on top of the basic parent-child transmission. It seems to me that it is very much like geology. Uniformitarianism is really the most foundational principle, but catastrophic events "punch above their weight" despite their relative infrequency.
So back to mind, to think the concept is uniquely human seems, well, simplistic (to be polite). At least in terms of construction, nothing I've learned suggests there is anything utterly unique about humans. So mind wasn't invented here.
I've never exactly said that it is uniquely human. To distinguish what we mean by mind from anything else, I have been using human mind as what we mean by mind by definition. Me, of all people, does not have to be convinced that humans are not particularly special relative to other species. But, when we start at us and go backwards toward the trunk of the tree, there are some logical constraints.
But my mind is open to other suggestions to the contrary, I suppose.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Aug 20, 2018 - 03:19pm PT
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It occurs to me to ask you, DMT, how would YOU define mind? If it is something that you are pretty sure is not uniquely human, how would you describe your current views or even the boundaries of those views?
A quick synopsis of my views.
First of all, I would say that, although intelligence is probably a required precursor to mind, mind and intelligence are different phenomenon. Intelligence happens at the subconscious level; mind at the conscious level.
Mind, in humans, coincided with the development of "the interpreter" in the human brain, a piece of meat in the left hemisphere that is not a decision-maker but creates inclusive, personal stories about why we did what we did. That's it. It could change tomorrow (my view that is).
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Aug 20, 2018 - 04:27pm PT
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whatever a human puts a lot of voluntary effort into, that human tends to value highly."
Or one could say, "Whatever a person values highly, that person tends to put effort into."
Think about evolution being too summarily defined as survival of the fittest. We should put more voluntary effort into the careful use of language and unbiased consideration of perspectives different from our own. It's a great world out there.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Aug 20, 2018 - 04:30pm PT
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Hey, thanks for that! Self-awareness, I see as different from self-reflective consciousness. Every predator and prey animal is self-aware. They can project themselves as well as their adversary in some kind of mental grid, I'm pretty sure. That's very different from the human phenomenon of feeling responsible for your actions, IMO.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 20, 2018 - 04:31pm PT
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The gross materialist never ask the manufacturer.
They just guess and make opinions ......
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Aug 20, 2018 - 04:32pm PT
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Then there's the ability organisms seem to have to take in new DNA from methods other than reproduction.
Holy Jumping Genes, Batman!
My Dad knew Barbara McClintock and she visited our Springville, NY home.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 20, 2018 - 08:01pm PT
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I think the point made above is that "mind" is a human construction that bundles together many behaviors into a seemingly coherent whole.
Humans "see" other animals (and even other things) as having some aspect of "mind" because the behaviors of those animals/things exhibit some of the same behaviors.
So asking where the "mind" is in the brain is not going to get anywhere if you are looking for an object, the "mind" in our brain is the perception of mind, in this sense, there is no mind to find there.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 20, 2018 - 09:05pm PT
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Unfortunately, the mind IS there but NOT in the brain.
The mind is subtle material and works according to the consciousness it dovetails with.
You're either a gross materialist or the intelligent class that can see (consciously) the gross physical, subtle material and superior spiritual realms simultaneously .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 20, 2018 - 11:51pm PT
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^^^that's consistent with "mind" be a construction of human perception
fortunately or unfortunately
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 21, 2018 - 02:18am PT
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Ed Hartouni: ...bundles together many behaviors into a seemingly coherent whole
Yes, but I tend to think of it more as a priority-driven, hierarchically distributed sourcing, aggregating and filtering 'engine' with enough subconscious short- and long-term state/context to continuously render the 'illusion' of a conscious mind across varying time scales.
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Aug 21, 2018 - 05:47am PT
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The evolution of the human brain really began with the invention of fire, which led to cooking and the easy digestion of high calorie foods. Then over several hundred thousand years, the human GI tract became smaller, as the brain, a high consumer of energy, got bigger. Then as now, one of the brain's most important tasks was modeling and predicting the behavior of other humans. The rest, as they say, is history.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 21, 2018 - 07:54am PT
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Been in Europe (still there) and let this all simmer for awhile. Interesting to see the developments. Some might find it useful to consider what PPsP wrote.
Ed is still thinking of mind by way of the old behaviorialist model, whereby if you know what something will do, you can predict behavior and "know" what mind is = what it does. That's in keeping with his training with external objects and phenoemnon.
Healje is a little trickier to unpack bcause try as he might to follow the Dennett "illusion" model, what he is driving at is actually an epistemic angle - that is, the mechanistic output of the physical brain provides a state/context in which awareness can "arise" and "know" (this thing/state/information, etc.) by way of cause and effect and temporal reasoning. This kind of knowing is derived from the process by which we typically know (epistemic) any piece of information. A reflective process hinging on the passage of time.
The model might look something like this:
Through a hierarchy of emerging functions, a state/context arises in which the illusion of an aware self emerges by way of a real-time, recursive feedback loops hard-wired to a continually updating memory.
That's a mouthful, but most of the key stuff is in there.
Without the ability of an imaginary agent (aware self) to cross reference what just happened in consciousness, while contrasting the new with the conditioned (already known), the illusory aware self has no data from which to "know" anything. In fact, sans the passage of time (temporal reasoning), for example, a meditatior would have no way of "knowing" a "state" of emptiness from the taste of vodka.
It's only through reflecting on what just happened in contrast with what came before that any state or information can be differentiated from anything else. Take temporal reasoning out of the mix and the illusory self has no reference point, no means of "knowing" this from that. So it naturally follows from this reasoning - mistaken as it is - that objectless meditation or empty awareness - even if it was possible - could never be "known" since all knowing requires both a reference point to something prior, off which to draw a contrast.
If you go back to PPsP's post and ponder it for awhile you might get some sense about how the above - while indispensible in comekng to "know" external objects and phenomenon - is not the royal road to mind.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 21, 2018 - 07:55am PT
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began with the invention of fire
Fire was never ever invented.
It was already there from the start ......
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Aug 21, 2018 - 08:34am PT
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Thanks Werner. I will have to take your word for that. The phenomenology of it is way over my head.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Aug 21, 2018 - 08:51am PT
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Interesting reading in the thread, especially in that I don’t have an ax to grind these days. When one is neither attached nor averse, then then one might be able to see things as they are.
This morning, I find myself increasingly sympathetic to the Duck’s views. So much outright speculation.
Ed,
From this seat, I’d kindly point out to (or remind) you that posting writing from an journal article is a retransmission of someone’s views which presents only their written thoughts. As we both know, what tends to carry water and chop wood in research is the consensus of a community of appreciation, rather than any analysis or conclusion of a single report (even though a report may cite oodles of others’ reports).
Readers who do not frequent the academic publications in scientific disciplines may instead read the fragments of one or a few reports in journals (presented here) as if they were reading a report of facts. (Well, they are, but the facts per se are the raw texts—squiggles read as words sequentially: viz., syntax, grammar, and the purported meaning of the words. Derrida showed some of us that texts are self-contradictory if read literally.)
What naive or novice readers could use are academic mandarins who can see the whole field (or better yet, fields of inter-related fields) and point-out historical theoretical developments, theoretical and empirical gaps, and suggest where scarce resources (time, talent, $) might be best allocated, rather than this or that particular imaginative speculation. More often what we get here is individual's personal views.
For example, in the areas I’m reading these days (anthropology, sociology), it’s been recognized in the last decades that what historical reviews of theoretical development show is not so much how things have come to be conceptualized progressively, but instead they show how theory developments indicate the biased views (minds) of the theoreticians (and how many different theoretical perspectives there are). There appear to be no generalized theory that stands the test of close contextual analysis. I suspect this is always the case no matter where one looks.
In describing what constitutes a judgement of beauty, Kant and Hume said that art appreciation of beauty was “true” because it does not serve self-interests. That is, one is disinterested and indifferent to an object’s existence or to its practical use when judging beauty. I would say it would be great if scientific investigations were like that, but they don’t seem to be from my professional experience. As Jan has pointed out to me recently, the reward systems are not there.
One might be able to say something similar in this thread. Most posts don’t seem to be disinterested conversations. Little playfulness.
Is it the object of perception that’s valuable, or is what is valuable the raw experience an object triggers (before interpretations set in) the thing of value? What is the value of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata? Is it the thing itself (composition and performance by an artist), or is it the experience that arises from listening to it? In climbing, is it the route in achievement (the thing, the grade, the rating), or is it the consciousness (experience) of climbing? What is the value of the theory of evolution? Is it the experience of learning the theory brings up in us (“cool, clever, interesting”), or is it the reified thing (as a fact) that makes it valuable? Evolution could be seen as an “art-ifact” rather than a law, per se. These distinctions can help us realize mind rather than reifying it as a thing.
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