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WBraun
climber
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Aug 30, 2018 - 11:38am PT
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meditating just put me to sleep
That means you never meditated.
Sleep is the symptom of material conditioning.
The gross materialists love to sleep as is evident as they are static and asleep at the wheel of life itself.
Meditation awakens the living entity from its material conditioning .......
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Aug 30, 2018 - 02:53pm PT
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Religious awakenings can cause a lot of divisions in the world. Spiritual awakenings have the potential to change the world.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 30, 2018 - 03:46pm PT
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I've been saying that all along for years ^^^^^
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 30, 2018 - 04:31pm PT
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From my link above: ". . . change lies in the non-linear, or chaotic, dynamics of the relationship between genotype . . ."
The author may show a common misconception in perhaps implying non-linear and chaotic dynamics are the same. Iterations of non-linear functions can be quite stable and predictable, frequently propelling large regions to attractors. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions may be largely absent. For example, many non-linear functions of the form f(z)=(az+b)/(cz+d). (a linear fractional transformation).
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Aug 30, 2018 - 09:07pm PT
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Duck: There are many absolute word sound vibrations that you and the gross materialists are completely clueless about.....
That may be.
One cannot say what anything is finally, definitively, or completely. Words cannot pin anything down. A vibration may effect a cause, but it does not / cannot say or pin anything down once and for all.
I would say you’re equivocating on a label and thing. You don’t drive a “C” and an “A” and an “R.” You drive a car. Every word might be considered to be a map, but no map is the territory. We’re always pointing.
I don’t think you appreciate the power of a metaphor. A metaphor is the presentation of a thing using two different notions that create a tension in meaning and in emotion. It’s the tension that matters, not the analogy or simile of one thing in terms of another (“an atom is like a solar system”). If I would have described something new as the “information superhighway” many years ago, I would have been creating a tension in meaning between the two terms that don’t normally go together. (Consider a Venn diagram.) There are some attributes that they share, but there are other they do not. It’s the tension between the two (that they are not alike or the same or really go together) that generates an emotional state of excitement, and that excitement stimulates creativity, interest, and motivation.
Of course, at some point, metaphors lose their tension, become reified, and are then considered “dead.” Then they are considered literal speech.
Metaphors are not just figurative, flowery language. Consider them as fuzzy sets about “things” that cannot be known finally, completely, or accurately.
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Psilocyborg
climber
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Aug 30, 2018 - 09:25pm PT
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I read on the internet some "instructions" for astral projection. I didnt really think it was going to work, but I generally have an open mind and thought why not?
I dont remember exactly what the instructions were, but you were supposed to get into bed to go to sleep, and then blah blah blah. I just remember that there was some technique, it might have been breathing or something, but the instructions said that after weeks and weeks of practice eventually you would feel a vibration come. And then it would take weeks and weeks of that to become comfortable enough to ride the vibration out of your body and astral project.
I figured I would give it a try. I just must have happened to be in the right frame of mind. My first try with this technique, within minutes of laying down, I felt the f*#king vibration. It came from within myself, and I was quite excited about it. Within less than a second I realized it was happening and it stopped. So, obviously I tried it again, and it came again, and I realized it and it stopped. I dont remember (this was probably 10 years ago or more) how many more times I did this, but the last time, I was able to ride the vibration for 3 or 4 seconds. It was absolutely insane. The vibration grew exponentially intense with each passing moment. It got so intense that my teeth rattled. Thank god because I was about to get ripped out of my body, and my chattering teeth pried my out of the trance.
I jumped up out of bed, turned on the lights...I was really freaked out. I have no idea what happened but not sure I want to find out. I never tried that again.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Aug 30, 2018 - 09:30pm PT
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Werner,
I’m going to back up a little bit. I remember reading that in some instances, words do not describe a deed: they are the deed. J.L. Austin called those “performance utterances” and later defined various speech acts. Searle later picked-up on speech acts.
A performance utterance would be, for example, when the minister says, “I now pronounce you man and wife.”
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Aug 31, 2018 - 04:42am PT
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For example, many non-linear functions of the form f(z)=(az+b)/(cz+d). (a linear fractional transformation).
Right up my alley! Using complex numbers: a,b,c,d with ad-bc=1, this describes the action of the group SL(2,C) on the Riemann sphere. Perhaps the simplest example of a "complex reductive group" acting on a "flag manifold": the geometric setup in my Ph.D. thesis. This is used to study the representations of a "real form", for example SL(2,R) (where the numbers a,b,c,d are real).
SL(2,R) has 3 orbits on the sphere: the open upper half-plane in C (the Poincare half-plane) the open lower half-plane in C and the extension of the real line (the orbit in the case of the real line closes to a circle in the sphere). Then the irreducible representations of SL(2,R) can be constructed using certain "homogenous" vector bundles, either defined on the orbits or (in the case of the finite-dimensional representations) on the whole space (the entire Riemann sphere). The irreducible representations are realized as either an action on sections of the vector bundle or (in the case of the discrete series) as an action on a compactly supported cohomology group.
The results about "realizing" the representations of SL(2,R) have been known since around the 1950s. My thesis, and a few subsequent results I worked on were about trying to understand how this generalizes to an arbitrary "real reductive" group. I found this area surprisingly interesting (even compelling) to try and study, but rather overly engaging for my personality, abilities, and lifestyle. The mathematicians who excel in representation theory tend to work 24/7. From what I could tell, for example, the generally accepted view about Harish-Chandra was that he worked himself to death.
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Aug 31, 2018 - 04:49am PT
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raseling with things I choose
things I can use
things that be
if they are real
no one has been able to make me see
no one has tried
for a coons age
but hey
I used to test high...
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Aug 31, 2018 - 05:06am PT
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 31, 2018 - 10:14am PT
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This is underscored by the man's words per QM: If you think you understand it, you don't.
which is a statement that one could probably use to summarize the entire thread.
Philosophy discusses in very human-centric ways the perception of reality, spanning what Jan would term the personal issues of existence, and including statements of what reality ultimately is, including what it means for something to be.
Science, a much younger discipline, has taken the view that there exists and independent, objective and external reality, which is perceived by humans. Further, our knowledge of this objective external reality is provisional largely because that knowledge comes from empirical observations that are finite, both in precision and in extent, and those limited observations form the basis of our deductions regarding reality, which are inherently incomplete.
Largo's invoking the now ancient saying about Quantum Mechanics, a field of study now over 100 years old, has more to do with the process of "understanding" than it has to do with quantum mechanics. The "interpretations" of quantum mechanics, of which there are something like 17 formal instances (see the Wiki page for a comparison) are of more interest to philosophers of science than to scientists, that is, how do humans "think" about quantum mechanics, not how do humans "do" quantum mechanics.
Humans "do" quantum mechanics quite well, human thinking about quantum mechanics can be pretty muddy.
So it is with mind, and I would posit that humans already do things that were once thought "impossible" with aspects which had, until recently, been relegated to a domain of "mind only" capability.
Natural speech is one, facial recognition, learning, agency and a host of others coming online. These realization are not mere "party tricks," their existence has required a consideration of their proper use in human society.
Independent of these technical break throughs, which indicate that we "understand" mind, at least to the extent that we can build machines and algorithms that exhibit the same behaviors, our understanding of mind from a philosophical standpoint will probably never resolve. This philosophical consideration extends back to the beginnings of history, and the sophistication of the discussion certainly indicates it was well developed even in pre-history.
Basing a discussion on a human concept and construction as Largo does in his citing of the ancient conundrum he attributes to Democrities regarding the ship [? Democritus? where no citation of that type exists, but we know Largo is not keen on this sort of "dry" scholarship]. How does a very human idea become the basis of philosophical universals powerful enough to foil the scientific study of, say, the mind?
MikeL would say that science is a very human activity, why would it be any different from anything else? Science itself is not universal for the very same reasons.
In all the discussion of this conundrum, we talk about human activity and understanding, with no indication how these are universal. Yet the conclusions are that something exists independent of the physical instance of what we are describing.
It is a trivial point, our conception of a ship can exist without the ship actually existing. But our conception of a ship is not a physical object, is not a ship.
And a ship, as we understand it, does not exist without humans, though we can imagine that intelligent beings on other worlds on which large bodies of liquids exist might transport across them in something that looks like our ship. And kindly to this manner of thinking, there is no evidence for or against.
So how does such argument inform the discussion "what is Mind?"
wbraun will state what is so based on ancient writings describing ancient philosophy is TRUE. End of discussion. We have no evidence, of course, that such philosophy has any more generality than the humans that wrote it down.
One can at least speculate that SL(2,R) is more general than humans, and such speculation forms the basis of our search for extraterrestrial intelligence, that is, the communication of mathematical relationships (thought to be objective and independent of humans).
In the meantime, our empirical knowledge expands, our ability to deduce from those observations improves, and we acquire enough understanding to build technologies exhibiting behaviors that we once thought were the domain of mind alone.
“Suddenly [Deep Blue] played like a god for one moment.” From that moment Kasparov had no idea what — or who — he was playing against.
...a computer, of course... against the greatest chess mind in history, the computer was only behaving like one, yet that behavior defeated the human, who, even knowing it was "just a computer," attributed god-like chess playing qualities to it.
What is mind?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Aug 31, 2018 - 10:47am PT
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Psyilocyborg, your experience was a very typical rising of the kundalini. The teeth chattering happened because it could not exit the top of your head and you also didn't know how to circulate it back down the spine. There's lots of literature on the subject. Most people have to meditate many years before that happens.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Aug 31, 2018 - 11:13am PT
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Words and numerical forms that we use here are symbols. They are not signs.
The meanings of signs are generally unambiguous. When you pull up to an intersection in a motorized vehicle and see a red light or one of those red octagons with “Stop” displayed, you know what the sign means, and that meaning is shared by most everyone else.
A cross has untold meanings. Some say such meaning cannot be rightly articulated. A cross is a symbol.
Language, mathematics, movies; novels, paintings, sculptures, dreams are all symbolic. We cannot rightly say what they mean or what they stand for. What they point to cannot be rightly said.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 31, 2018 - 11:24am PT
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...We cannot rightly say what they mean or what they stand for. What they point to cannot be rightly said.
which is total bullsh#t, unless I did not interpret the meaning of your post correctly.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 31, 2018 - 11:53am PT
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"Using complex numbers: a,b,c,d with ad-bc=1, . . ."
Lots of musings about LFTs and their generalizations from a classical ("hard" vs "soft") analysis perspective here, Yanqui (analytic continued fractions are compositions of certain LFTs):
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John_Gill6
EDIT: (below) Turn the sign 90 degrees and it's pretty clear!
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Psilocyborg
climber
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Aug 31, 2018 - 12:59pm PT
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Psyilocyborg, your experience was a very typical rising of the kundalini. The teeth chattering happened because it could not exit the top of your head and you also didn't know how to circulate it back down the spine. There's lots of literature on the subject. Most people have to meditate many years before that happens.
I do not practice kundalini meditation or yoga, and oddly this was not my first experience with awakening chakras without really trying (if that is indeed what happened I only have a peripheral knowledge of this subject).
All I know is I was skeptical going in. I was beyond surprised and in disbelief when it was happening. My mind did not create this experience to fulfill some preconceived notion. I am not knowledgeable in these subjects, and am not a crunchy new aged hippy looking for affirmation.
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Aug 31, 2018 - 01:09pm PT
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It could also have been a grand mal seizure. MikeL has made several excellent points today and got me thinking about metaphors. A welcome respite from all the headline news about priests and altar boys.
I was just thinking that the Catholic concept of confession and forgiving sins is a big mistake. When you do something wrong, you are supposed to feel bad about it. Feelings of guilt, remorse, and sadness are what teach you not to do it again. Take away the self-punishment mechanism, and doing bad things becomes pain-free. How could that possibly help anyone to become a "better" person?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 31, 2018 - 03:05pm PT
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"I was beyond surprised and in disbelief when it was happening."
Sometimes a person is in the "right frame of mind" and may have a spiritual experience on the first try. This happened to me over 40 years ago with Castaneda's Art of Dreaming. A close friend tried over and over and could not attain that state. I suspect there are some who can have the Zen epiphany (no-thingness) very quickly, while for others it might take many years. For those requiring years the experience might seem that much more meaningful.
Don Paul, shame on you distorting the mind field! ;>)
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Aug 31, 2018 - 03:42pm PT
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It's true. I thought it was one of the best pieces in Star Trek history. Watched it again last night, enjoyed it, and thought one or two here might too...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEoz5PS6ohg
It seemed to me, the more one knows a little about molecular bio (DNA), evolution, information processing on one end and the more one's aware of politics and social diversity and divergence on another, the more they're likely to enjoy the writing and insights of this clip.
Star Trek: TNG
"The Chase"
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You might also recognize that Romulan as the English Colonel Monroe in Last of the Mohicans, you know, the one who gets his heart eaten by Magra, lol.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Aug 31, 2018 - 06:00pm PT
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Ed:
our empirical knowledge expands
The other day I said to a guy sitting next to me on the bus, "Nice binoculars."
He said, "Yes, they are the best." (They were Swarovski.)
It turned out that he knew names from my past: Mark Konishi, Fernando Nottebohm, Daniel Margolish, and others. He had just got his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.
I was surprised and delighted to hear how far things have come since I got interested in the neurophysiology of bird song back in the 70s.
My new friend had a good answer for why some species, like mynahs, parrots, mockingbirds, and starlings benefit from their ability to mimic sounds.
The research at the institute includes neurophysiology and many other aspects of how and why birds do what they do.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/1756/20170288?ijkey=5a4be6857fee3dec101e28a10599f74725c122e5&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
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