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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Sep 12, 2018 - 05:18pm PT
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JL: "There has been great progress made in the investigation of mind (as distinguished from brain), especially in terms of what most intelligent and informed people accept as true, probable or most logically coherent."
eeyonkee: "You are hopeless (and mean-spirited with the "whole most intelligent and informed" bullshit)! You don't seem to understand what you don't know."
Do you understand that I asked politely about your first quote, but that someone else wrote the second quote? Not me. Wake up, man.
I still await a more detailed reply to the question I asked about this "great progress" in understanding mind (and not the functioning of mind).
What you have written above sounds more like philosophical "results", which lack any real substance.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Sep 12, 2018 - 05:35pm PT
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Strange rant. Most would consider intelligence and being informed to be our best defense against bullsh#t.
Good point -- wish I'd have thought of that one.
I have a pretty tight definition of intelligence based on decades of reading about it and related ideas in evolutionary biology, anthropology, zoology, and empirical philosophy (I don't much care for the other kind). Intelligence, IMO, is completely divorced from your concept of it. I believe that intelligence happens in every single organism with a nervous system. I purposely say nervous system since there is plenty evidence for apparent intelligence in organisms without brains. Intelligence, as I see it, could be measured by, what I would call, algorithm-effectiveness. Algorithm-effectiveness is essentially how good your "automatic" response (algorithm) is in the actual environment that it plays out in time. It is, logically, a different thing than how we feel about a decision including our feeling of agency for the decision. On the last two points, I go with the Gazzaniga model of the interpreter; an extra bit of meat that evolved in the human brain -- not much -- for storing after-the-fact memories of your automatic decisions. Although after-the-fact, the stored memories can and are used as inputs in future decisions. That's the crux of it. Your brain is always one step behind, but it can use the stored memories in the interpreter.
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okay, whatever
climber
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Sep 12, 2018 - 05:53pm PT
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Well, after 20,000+ posts, and a wide variety of ideas posted... many of which are quite interesting... if we haven't collectively figured it out already, we're not likely to do so in my lifetime. Not to mention that there is not even remotely a consensus in the professional literature, some of which sometimes makes it here onto Supertopo, but not always. I personally have appreciated some of the offbeat posts with references to research, however offbeat that research might seem on the surface. John Long, who is the "father" of this attempt to figure this stuff out on this website, I do appreciate, and I also the different viewpoints that have appeared. I WOULD prefer to be an openminded individual, rather than someone who thinks that anyone who thinks differently than they do is "stoopid", or however he spells it... the standard Werner Braun dismissal of pretty much everything that doesn't come from his own mind, unless the idea comes from one of his Yosemite heroes. Move somewhere else Werner, and learn that life and the universe is not all about Yosemite in the 1970s-2018. Or not... but get off your high horse of imagining that you know everything, but no one else knows anything, about life.
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 12, 2018 - 06:13pm PT
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Intelligence is Not in the nervous system.
Intelligence comes from the living entity itself as the soul.
We are not the material body ever.
Who cares what the coward anonymous okay, whatever fool mental speculator and fool projectionist cries about every time he posts.
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 12, 2018 - 06:25pm PT
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The person (soul) is one and the same .....
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okay, whatever
climber
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Sep 12, 2018 - 06:33pm PT
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Werner, we obviously disagree, but I am not anonymous at all. My name is Jim Souder, and I live at 2420 Arlington Blvd, Charlottesville, VA 22903. My phone is 434-806-4173. You can find me on Facebook easily. I'm 64 years old, and have lived many places, worked for many years as a geologist and then did software, including some years at the Intel Supercomputing Systems Division in Oregon, when it still existed. I've spent time in Europe, Japan, and India on software projects, over the years, as well. And Earl Wiggins, who I know you remember, was a good friend of mine and a climbing partner back in the 1970's in Colorado. I also lived in Boulder for many years, and know many, many climbers and other people there.
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 12, 2018 - 06:39pm PT
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Thanks Jim and good for you .....
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okay, whatever
climber
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Sep 12, 2018 - 06:41pm PT
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Best to you as well, truly, Werner! May we be at peace!
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 12, 2018 - 07:06pm PT
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Are people always their soul ?
Yes, I've been saying that all along.
But we are not the material body we inhabit.
It is only a vehicle we reside in according to our developed consciousness.
To be in a human body is very rare and should be taken advantage of for self realization.
If you devolve your consciousness you will be reborn in a lower material body form.
Modern science has zero clue to any of this knowledge.
There's far far more, but very difficult for the gross materialist conscious living entites to understand.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 12, 2018 - 07:08pm PT
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It was true! Even me, complete Facebook idiot that I am, was able to find Jim Souder on it. Great video of eagle and cat.
He is on the case, too. From a paper linked somehow to his page:
Conscious experience is not directly observable in an experimental context, so we cannot generate data about the relationship between physical processes and experience at will.
I say that conscious experience is directly observable whenever we observe any behavior in a conscious organism. Even if you had a fancy-shmancy gadget that read consciousness experience from the mind, would that be "directly observable" conscious experience?
Of course, there is the objection that what we observe is not the "experience itself." I remain unconvinced that even people having the experience observe the experience itself.
Maybe we just talk or look at consciousness in different ways. Consciousness is hard to "explain" since there aren't good criteria for making sure you have an explanation. Even if we build a conscious machine, we may not understand how it works.
Each of us accumulates data about the relationship between physical processes and experience whenever we are awake.
Nice reference to Mt Hunter and David Roberts.
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 12, 2018 - 07:10pm PT
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Even if we build a conscious machine, we may not understand how it works.
You are that conscious machine itself.
Study yourself and not everything outside of yourself ........
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Sep 12, 2018 - 08:17pm PT
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Jim Souder, thank you for revealing who you are. Too many here hide behind their avatars. xCon, you are next. Come out of the closet.
;>)
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Sep 12, 2018 - 08:41pm PT
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ah?
I'm tubby, weak & blatantly un-repentant,
but Light?
I do spread Light
is that what you are saying
yes
I am god-like in my concept that is Light
so I'll build on that
and point out that I am more & so far above the questions
that go on here, I use this thread to put the lights out,
Good day Jim Clipper, there is a name, I'm sure you'll use it
I am aware that is not every ones cup-o-
but try to listen to a bit of one or the other,
there is redemption in the act of trying to listen,
is there Consciousness?
(given, I live in the past, when y'all was Da' greatest )
The Grateful Dead Playing "The US Blues" A particularly Crisp version,
7/13/85
https://youtu.be/waOfuTDaYl8
& Lady With A Fan/Terrapin Station from 7/26/87
https://youtu.be/k77EE3a7DUg
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Jim Clipper
climber
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Sep 12, 2018 - 08:49pm PT
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Gnome apologies! Gnome guilt! You are light!
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jstan
climber
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Sep 12, 2018 - 09:52pm PT
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Maybe it is time to drop the avatars?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Sep 13, 2018 - 07:31am PT
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Duck: You are that conscious machine itself. Study yourself and not everything outside of yourself ……..
Yes, yes, yes.
It (“the conscious machine”) appears to be completely *inconceivable* conceptually, doesn’t it (especially if one reads this thread). I look every morning at it, and I’d say mostly that every time what I see appears to be different. Consciousness never appears to be the same. Mise en abyme: the self-reflection of a projection.
Almost every generalization seems foolish.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 13, 2018 - 09:19am PT
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What you have written above sounds more like philosophical "results", which lack any real substance.
--
Again, John, by "real substance," are you not rooting around for a number, some quantification, some mechanistic "explanation" by which your experience can be reverse engineered to some observable, external object or phenomenon that in some way "produces" consciousness, which is really just biochemical artifact/output that we "think" is (fill in the blank)? This is what was earlier referred to as "mechanitus."
If I have this wrong, define to me, in simple terms, what would qualify to you as substance?
If you look closely at the study of mind and consciousness, most of the divergence of thought pertains to manner in which people choose to investigate the phenomenon, typically based on how they react to one simple fact in everyone's actual life: We all have experience, but that experience is directly know - is experientially real - only to the subject who has it. We take it for granted, in fact society is based on the fact that others have experience themselves, but we cannot observe another's phenomenological experience (their experience itself) as 3rd person sense data off which we can directly pull a measurement. That is, we cannot "see" of measure what you are experientially feeling, thinking, sensing, planning, imagining, etc.
This leads people to normally take one of two stances: They can accept that both the 1st and purported 3rd person (the view from nowhere) are seamless parts of reality, or that only the 3rd person perspective (and external objects/forces) are "real" (physical), so "knowing" what experience IS is a matter of wrangling down physical phenomenon.
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Sep 13, 2018 - 10:22am PT
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JL apparently teaching this course in Ouray Sept 29. Is the video less real than a live instructor? Discuss.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Sep 13, 2018 - 10:54am PT
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Almost every generalization seems foolish.
And yet generalizations are how humans collect experience. We are technological animals because we generalize. We notice similarities and concentrate their essences, despite ourselves.
When this essential fact is dismissed then it becomes easy to confine the act of conceptual generalization to that of a mere problematic artifact-- an error in thought and behavior; an impediment to a fuller experience, or even experience itself.
In the spirit of this specific generalization let me suggest that the quasi- spiritual mystagogue shares one thing with the religiously doctrinaire: the sobering conviction there is some kind of original sin going on out there. LOL
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Sep 13, 2018 - 11:38am PT
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That's a great video. A young, handsome, virile and talented John Long.
However, John, your reply seems to lack evidence of "great progress" by any interpretation (other, perhaps, than accepting as real the wily coyote's romp down the path of Zen). If philosophy has produced such results please spell them out briefly without simply referring to one or another philosopher. That might set in place a productive path of investigation.
I'm sure you have discussed them at various times, but a brief compilation of "great results" would be helpful.
And, no, I'm not looking for numbers and/or data. In fact, I try to avoid them in the math I do.
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