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WBraun
climber
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In essence, my mind was dead.
That's not meditation .....
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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And once again we flounder on definitions.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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...BONAFIDE meditative disciplines the absolute truth will then...
And people wonder at the remarkable proliferation of so many different religions and sects within religions. It's all about dem damned BONAFIDEs...
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capseeboy
Social climber
portland, oregon
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Quote. In essence, my mind was dead. Here
Uh Jah, it must have been when I wrote that.
Edit: In essence, my mind was no mind.
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WBraun
climber
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LOL I knew that from the getgo.
I just commented that to see what folks would say about it just for the hell of it ....
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WBraun
climber
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BONAFIDE
Yes ....
Now when I want to actually learn physics I would go to Ed and not to Chongo Chuck in Camp 4.
Because Ed is actually a real bonafide physics scientist and Chongo is a street academia wannabee.
One you'll actually get a bonafide understanding where as the other you'll a ... "It's all bitchin" understanding ..... :-)
Even the gross materialists require bonafide and have an actual disciplic succession ......
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Interesting talk by Dennett but to my way of thinking he was discussing vagaries of perception rather than consciousness.
How the job of trying to make people aware of the vagaries of perception could possibly demonstrate that consciousness is an illusion does seem to be a bit of a conundrum.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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How the job of trying to make people aware of the vagaries of perception could possibly demonstrate that consciousness is an illusion does seem to be a bit of a conundrum.
Everybody has consciousness and all people have imperfect perceptions was the lesson for me. The more important point for me however, was if our perceptions of simple things like photos is imperfect, how much more our perceptions of our own personalities and egos and belief systems. The most important question of all, it seems to me, is whether there is some mental state that is beyond all these imperfections. People from the Buddha to Largo say yes. I've never experienced it but based on their descriptions would like to. That's all.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Duck: Time is very real . . . .
Everything is real, and consciousness is the essential nature of both God and the soul despite their essential differences. Consciousness is the direct perception of entities just as they are in themselves, as-it-is, experience-as-such, free of thought constructs. Integrate: every "thing" has its place in the economy of the whole.
It’s not that there aren’t “things,” Werner. “Things” are a form of awareness. The objective status of a thing is cognition itself. Phenomena (“things”) have no being of their own. Their essential nature is consciousness itself, and one's experience depends not only on the nature of the object perceived, but also the personal factors entirely peculiar to oneself. In this regard, what is perceived is identical to one's perception. That is, every thing is real according to the manner in which it appears, for as the state of one's consciousness, so the experience.
Insight cannot be gained by going beyond appearances, but by attending to them closely, as-they-are, free of constructs.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Well looky who the cats drug in but the dogs refused to have!!
Welcome back MikeL
Where's JGill lately?
I returned from the gym yesterday about 4:30 to find a drunk driver being pursued by the police (earlier that day) decided to take an improvised detour through my front yard. Apparently after breaching the hedge he took a hard left and returned to the street where he was summarily apprehended. Another few feet to the right and he would have come through the front door.
Merry Christmas everyone!!
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Of all the places Santa decides on a hard landing where?
The red brick planter at the base of the hedge was totally pulverized.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Right now I'm perceiving him with a gargantuan hangover in the drunk tank looking at a good stretch in a penal colony somewhere.
From the tires looks like a big truck. Some of these chronic drunks will deliberately buy a good solid truck knowing they are eventually going to hit something. That means everybody is killed but they get to walk away with only a scratch on their wrist from the handcuffs.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sans tire tracks that front yard looks exactly like mine.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Sans tire tracks that front yard looks exactly like mine.
I'd keep it up better but I'm afraid of being run over .
Just to the left of the photo is a fire hydrant which the perp missed by perhaps 2-3 feet.
Imagine all that free water I missed out on!
Maybe during the holidays enough drunks will chew up the sod to amount to the entire yard being dug up allowing me to re-plant with grass seed and fertilizer.
Notice the turn to the left, just at the last moment he must've known no one was home.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Same to you T Hocking.
I just realized that before he turned he was headed straight for the window behind which my music studio is strategically placed. Later today I'll be moving some of the more expensive items in there to a safer location.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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If consciousness is not an illusion, why do we have such trouble coming to agreement about its description?
Do you have any solid evidence that people have more trouble coming to an agreement about the descriptions of things that are illusions than they have coming to an agreement about descriptions of things that are not illusions?
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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The most important question of all, it seems to me, is whether there is some mental state that is beyond all these imperfections.
To some extent, my point was that since we can be confused by these imperfections at some point and then (at least occasionally) become aware of their existence at some later point, that counts as a kind of affirmative evidence. "Aware" being the operational word. At any rate, I don't know how Dennett interprets the value of giving talks if he doubts that anyone else is really aware of them.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Funny/ironic: "the only stumbling block to a purely objective view of the universe is consciousness itself." It is the subjective experience of reality that gives us reality.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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For Ed: Does quantum entanglement happen instantly over great distance? Meaning does it happen faster than the speed of light?
what is quantum entanglement?
when a mixture of pure quantum states are prepared in such a way that the state of the mixture is defined, the members making up that mixture will have characteristics that taken all together will be in that defined state.
Since there isn't anything like it in our classical view of the world, we have to discuss examples from quantum mechanics.
The original challenge to quantum mechanics came from the Einstein Podolsky Rosen (EPR) paper, and maybe we can use that example.
In it we consider an atom emitting two photons when making a transition from one quantum state to another.
Let's say that this transition does not change angular momentum, that the initial and final atomic states have the same angular momentum.
Photons are quantum particles with intrinsic angular momentum 1, and they can only be in two states of "directed" angular momentum +1 and -1, their polarization. Because the photon is massless it cannot be in the state of 0 angular momentum.
So our two photons that are emitted have to have angular momentum that sums to zero, if we characterize the two photon state as (+1, -1) or (-1, +1) where the "A" photon is first and the "B" photon is second, (A,B) then quantum mechanics says that either of these two photon states are equally possible.
What is different from classical mechanics is that this is a state of two particles, not the individual particles themselves.
Now if we let these two photons travel some far distance and then measure the polarization of one of them, we know which of the two possible states the pair were created in.
Measuring the second photon far away, we get the opposite polarization, with a caveat, that nothing happened to either (or both) photons to change their polarization.
Discussed this way, there is nothing mysterious about the fact that measuring one of the photons tells us what the other photon's properties are, it is possible, in this case, to describe the two photon state with a single measurement, and the knowledge how the photons are made, and the assumption that nothing changed the two photon state in the time between when the photons were emitted and when one was measured.
We say the two photons are in a coherent two-body state, and that if the state is not isolated from the "outside" the coherence is lost, referred to as decoherence.
Arranging systems with long decoherence times is generally done by reducing the system temperature to as close to absolute 0K as possible, which is how large numbers of atoms can be put in quantum states and manipulated. For quantum computations, this decoherence time has to be longer than the time to setup, execute and readout the computation.
For light, polarized photons, these times may be longer because of the improbability of interactions from the environment (e.g. optical fibers, transmission through a optically thin region, etc).
This viewpoint at least eliminates the "faster than light" issues, you're just identifying which of two possible quantum states were produced, but raises issues about the size of the system, how could the two photons of the initial example remain in a state that is becoming very large?
The fact that the world happens "at temperature" essentially limits the typical size of these quantum systems.
It is possible to look at the behavior of "finite temperature" systems, the physics of which is still in the process of being described. For much of what happens at the atomic level, the T=0 assumption prevails.
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