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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 23, 2015 - 05:56pm PT
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Isn't criticism part of the scientific method?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 23, 2015 - 06:18pm PT
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We might ask ourselves: What is genius? From whence doth that sh#t spring?
Take a gander at this if you like predernatural talent. It makes "mind" seem all the more wonderful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RqrBKfg1sE
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 23, 2015 - 06:19pm PT
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For example, John hates "field," and other terms, meaning he has another picture of reality in his head (JL)
I wish. But if I did have a model of awareness or consciousness it would be associated with the brain. If I were to follow your lead I would have to also bring my Art of Dreaming experiences into the discussion and would speculate that the colorful and crystal-clear "reality" I visited was also a deeper experience of external reality and that somehow the two were inextricably related, perhaps in some sort of "field."
The problem of using "Hilbert space", "field", "virtual particle", etc. is that the metaphors come from objective or discursive investigations and I thought you wanted to avoid that and keep the discussion on a purely experiential level. If so, you should invent some new language.
Just a thought.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 23, 2015 - 06:38pm PT
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/can-the-bacteria-in-your-gut-explain-your-mood.html
Given the extent to which bacteria are now understood to influence human physiology, it is hardly surprising that scientists have turned their attention to how bacteria might affect the brain. Micro-organisms in our gut secrete a profound number of chemicals, and researchers like Lyte have found that among those chemicals are the same substances used by our neurons to communicate and regulate mood, like dopamine, serotonin and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). These, in turn, appear to play a function in intestinal disorders, which coincide with high levels of major depression and anxiety. Last year, for example, a group in Norway examined feces from 55 people and found certain bacteria were more likely to be associated with depressive patients.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 23, 2015 - 08:34pm PT
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The problem of using "Hilbert space", "field", "virtual particle", etc. is that the metaphors come from objective or discursive investigations and I thought you wanted to avoid that and keep the discussion on a purely experiential level. If so, you should invent some new language.
I'm not in charge of where this thread goes. Many people take wild and insighful sleigh rides into the ethers. My only contention is that investigations be empirical, not speculative. That means, in the subjective realm, you have to jump in and start trying to get intimate with how the process works and what is involved. The fact that you use instumentations and numberical systems to probe QM doesn't mean when you shut up and stop calculating and stay with your own perception you default out of your evaluating mind as well. But here, we have to draw directly from the subjective, and if you use mataphors, fields, spaces and so forth to approximate what we find there, this is not a knock on science or an appropriation of techniques that rightfully belong to all close study.
The symbol or word is not going to be the qualia itself, so it's all approximations. As as Ed has pointed out, we cannot objectify sentience as an thing or object, rip it out of experience and evaluate it to see if it is "real." We need symbolic representations to start working up model, and saying we can't use this or than on principal seems questionable.
Again, when you observe your awareness, NOT the content that you are aware of, what is a term you migh use to express the experience?
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 23, 2015 - 08:54pm PT
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Drawing directly from the subjective, JL has shown an uncanny knack for shooting himself in the foot.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Jun 23, 2015 - 09:05pm PT
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JG said"If I were to follow your lead I would have to also bring my Art of Dreaming experiences into the discussion and would speculate that the colorful and crystal-clear "reality" I visited was also a deeper experience of external reality and that somehow the two were inextricably related, perhaps in some sort of "field."
"colorful and crystal clear reality"(cccr) I get that!; that extremely clear perception , the quiet ; it is amazing!
After I had my first (CCCR) i was obsessed to figure it out and put it into words. I had to find the words in some buddhist texts and it clarified it as part of the process or path.
That said, it took several more years of practice ( I'm slow) that you can't take the experience with you , it happened and things are moving on! Just like everything else.
But it was so intense that "I" ego wants more. Like a drug. After a lot of observing; the "I" always wanting; becomes clear.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 23, 2015 - 09:40pm PT
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Stephen King, in his co-authored book The Talisman has a description of the young man awakening in a meadow or field with a degree of clarity that if someone were to pull a green onion out of the ground a mile away he would identify and relish the smell.
It's that way visually in Dreaming. I've mentioned before "awakening" in a desert under a brilliant sun, carefully examining a large, very intricate and colorful cactus, moving around it and delighting in the three dimensional display in utmost clarity and sharp detail.
So, if I were to entertain the field of awareness experienced by meditators as a an entity bridging the inner and outer realities, I would be forced to do so with the astral planes as well. But I would not dismiss the experience as merely a step along a path; perhaps a fork in the path and who is to say which branch is more illuminating?
The fact that Zen Buddhism, a religion, instructs me to abandon one path over the other as The One True Way is of no importance.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 23, 2015 - 09:43pm PT
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That means, in the subjective realm, you have to jump in and start trying to get intimate with how the process works and what is involved.
but it is something (sentience, mind, consciousness) that everyone is intimate with, they may have a different experience than anyone else, who's to say which of those experiences is "more valid" in terms of understanding sentience/mind/consciousness than any other in the subjective sense?
there are problems with taking the empirical path, also... especially if you want to argue philosophy.
For instance, you have repeatedly identified the "phenomenon" with "experience" yet you have no justification for elevating what is essentially a rule of faith, that is experience being the foundation of empirical knowledge. Without some stronger philosophical justification "experience" hasn't really any special weight in your argument.
As for qualia, our scientific vocabulary is inadequate to provide a description. That could mean that there is not vocabulary possible, or it might mean the science hasn't progressed to the point to provide it. There are other possible reasons. The lack of such a vocabulary doesn't constitute a proof as to whether or not a science explanation exists. As with all descriptions, whether they be scientific or common, there are limitations to their ability to describe. What is important in science is whether or not the descriptions provide the means by which we can learn more about the thing, in this case, qualia.
What do you learn about mind/sentience/consciousness by asserting that there is no description of qualia? (or the mechanism, since we're talking about science here, that generates the putative phenomenon of qualia).
What do you learn from excluding mind/sentience/consciousness from the domain of scientific investigation? Especially since your claim that the "experience" is preeminent requires an identification with the phenomenon that you haven't supported with any argument.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 24, 2015 - 05:40am PT
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Host manipulation by parasite is one of the more eerie if not shocking aspects of evolution. I remember learning about it for the first time reading Dawkins' Selfish Gene.
Dennett mentioned it in his 2013 caltech lecture (jstan's link) - the ant is manipulated into climbing to the top of the blade of grass where it's more readily picked off; the mouse is manipulated to be reckless (more bold and forthcoming in the field) where it is more readily picked off.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tF6KvI5KuA
When we sneeze during a cold or flu, we as hosts are being manipulated by the parasite (the virus) as means to propagating it.
"The fluke made me do it!"
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 24, 2015 - 07:33am PT
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The fact that Zen Buddhism, a religion,
Sorry to blow your dream out of the water.
Zen Buddhism is NOT a religion.
It's atheism.
Buddha preached against his own philosophy to stop animal slaughter and the vedic animal sacrifice that was being misused in the name of religion.
There is a Vedic animal sacrifice where the brahmanas take a very old horse and test their spiritual powers to release the soul of that animal so that it can advance to a human body in it's next life.
As the age of Kali Yuga advanced the brahmanas misused the animal sacrifice in the name of eating the animal.
Stupid fool brahmanas and thus they created karmic reactions to them selves.
Buddha said follow me to stop their idiotic nonsense in the name of religion and simultaneously stopping them from incurring more Karmic reactions.
Buddha returned as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu then drove Buddhism out of India to re-establish the vedic consciousness.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 24, 2015 - 08:41am PT
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but some idiots on ST just keep pissing me off!!!
Ha ha!
But at least we have Moose to relieve the tension.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 24, 2015 - 08:48am PT
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Dingus, most every one of my posts is posited from a psychological position of a "knower" energy, which I am intentionally doing to needle and offset the scientism that holds that the "knower" can only be rightfully claimed by dorks with hight water pants, 75 pens in their pockets and a slide rule in their hands, "because we can PROVE what we know."
I've called bollocks on this from the start, and will chide whoever defends that quicksand. Black and white thinkers like yourself recognze measurements and all else is priestcraft. I have fun mocking this silly position, knowing how easy it is to draw a predictable response (prescherman, woo, and so forth).
FYI, we are rarely onscious of being fused with the rational mind. So long as we do so - and it's easy to do - we project our disowned energies (intuitve, not-knowing, etc.) onto the crowd. No harm in being fused with a sub-personality like the rational mind, but so long as we ARE fuesed, we have no way to know who we are, though every "reason" to believe that we do. But these reasons are drawn directly and entirly from the sub-personality we identity with. "We" don't need to participate. The Rational Mind will do all the work and we can coast. Being conscious means holding the tension between the opposite parts of our experience. And that's work.
MH2, predictably, said: Drawing directly from the subjective, JL has shown an uncanny knack for shooting himself in the foot.
You must have missed this part that I wrote:
Psychologists have for ages understood how easy it is to merely rip at something - a little distemper and an irritable or riteous thought will do it. An honest effort requires the contribution of new data.
So what are you actually contributing, relative to your own empirical observations? If I am shooting myself in the foot, you would know as much only if my version clashed with the picture you have in your head per the process. What is that picture, MH2.?
Lastly, outside of the US Zen is largely approached as a religion, though the association is largely ceremonial. In western countries, a person can be a "lay" dude and just do the practice. In this sense, there is no "God," no doctrine, no beliefs, no content, so the practice has none of the formal attributes of "religion," and only someone with no empirical experience would guess otherwise. Sit on a cusion or a chair, keep your eyes open, soft focus, gently letting your gaze setle on the wall and simply abide with the present moment and your awareness of same. The experience you get out of that might be "religions," and I'd be happy to hear all about it. I can use a little religion.
JL
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jstan
climber
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Jun 24, 2015 - 09:19am PT
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Without Moose we are in deep trouble.
I know next to nothing about Buddha but I like what I have heard. Reportedly he laughed when asked if he was god. Like Gandhi he himself seemed to follow what he advocated. Rare and admirable.
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jstan
climber
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Jun 24, 2015 - 09:28am PT
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Dingus, most every one of my posts is posited from a psychological position of a "knower" energy, which I am intentionally doing to needle and offset the scientism that holds that the "knower" can only be rightfully claimed by dorks with hight water pants, 75 pens in their pockets and a slide rule in their hands, "because we can PROVE what we know."
OK That's what I concluded was going on years ago. Great finally to have the possibility of an productive discussion taken off the table.
Maybe this is a good time to bring up an important matter.Years ago PT wanted to take a UCSB class on rappelling. When we got there I found they had set up a force equalization anchor WITH A SINGLE SLING between two big trees. No redundancy. Rappels are a serious matter and by their nature they are all different as regards risk reduction. Your book is apparently used as an authority by new people. I would like to urge you in the event of any new revision to make clearer the subtleties involved in rappel anchors.
Presently the data seems to show that force equalization as a technique is very uncertain. You might also give new people some of the data on this subject. When it comes to rappels, you don't want to mislead people.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jun 24, 2015 - 10:04am PT
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DMT: Let me get this straight... our human brains are wired to talk. Through this ability we humans have risen to dominate the world. You hold that this talk gets in the way of reality. Do I have that right?
What I wrote was that we appear to be word and idea junkies. How that happens is open to debate. I don’t know how one could prove that we are hard-wired for anything in particular. I think anthropologists, neuroscientists, sociologists, economists, philosophers would all have different explanations for why ideas and words are so important to us.
Jgill: Are these your words, or are you quoting or paraphrasing Peter Brown?
All three, I suppose. Does it matter, really?
. . . babbling about an "all encomapssing field."
Here’s what Peter has written, as a response.
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All apparent objects that you may focus on are abstractions held in your imagination, imaginary differentiations of the one reality-field, with no independent existence whatsoever, excepts as the field itself. No “separate” object can possibly be experienced outside of the context of the field. Only the field, indivisible in actuality, can be experienced, whether you consciously notice that or not. Directly experiencing this fact clearly reveals the true nature, the actual condition, *reality,* clearly and obviously as it actually is.
. . . .
Starting with one of your sense fields, vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, or thought, relax your focus and experience the full field of the experience of the energy radiantly appearing as that sense-field as a whole, as a continuum. If vision, for example, experience the full field of light-energy appearing in your experience as a whole. Feel the texture, its miraculous spontaneous apparition, its radiance, its boundarylessness. Relax into that until you effortlessly experience the field as the whole presence that it is.
Then let yourself fully and in detail notice an object within the field. Then relax the noticing of the object and experience the effortless wholeness of the field again. Do this over and over, slowly and carefully, and notice the mechanism whereby the object is abstracted, and particularly how abstracting the object doesn’t in any way remove the wholeness of the field, with all of its inherent properties, which is always the true context of experience. Notice how abstraction is just one mode of experience within the field, and how engaging with it or not actually doesn’t change the true situation in the slightest.
——————————
[Peter says to explore IT through other sense-fields, singly at first and then with several sense-fields at once, and note the properties of infinity, identity, discontinuity, indeterminacy, presence, spontaneity, undefinability, and so on. Doing this, even when experiencing a bracketed object within IT in an abstraction mode, will bring a revelation of what You actually are, what This actually is, and how It is. IT appears to be an eternal event of ongoing Be-ing of mystery and sacredness.]
Ed:
You seem to have strong concerns about the following in your posts: validity, verifiability, justification, rules, knowledge, argument, vocabulary, definitions, proofs, explanations, and descriptions. Those concerns would appear to constitute a vision of, or a take on, reality, I believe. Would you say that there could be others? If there could be, would you use the one above to assess them?
If people only see reality in terms of one theory versus another (no matter how different), would that not be a part of the same vision? “Thinking differently” is still just thinking.
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jstan
climber
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Jun 24, 2015 - 10:24am PT
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A video on diet is titled Fed Up. Worth watching. As a long time sugar junky I have concluded sugar is the most serious drug dependency in the US with huge health consequences. Beats even nicotine.
Nearly checked me out.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 24, 2015 - 10:27am PT
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If I am shooting myself in the foot
I am intentionally doing to needle BAM!
Black and white thinkers like yourself BAM!
MH2, predictably, said
An honest effort requires the contribution of new data.
Go ahead and show us.
Please predict my next statement, which I will send to jgill, and you send your prediction privately to jgill, and he can post the 2 statements for comparison. If you have paid any attention to my own process, you have an excellent chance of guessing what I will say.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 24, 2015 - 10:42am PT
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i think a few here especially Largo have been very generous in offering up their intelligent knowledge for the rest of us to chew on. I don't know where else one could find the plethora of ideas floated through this thread.
Remember what Einstein said, Imagination > Knowledge
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 24, 2015 - 11:06am PT
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which really seems from here to be just another form of prayer, of ritual, and prescription, all with coaches and zen centers and such, of course. You yourself said the acolytes must be guided through this process, they cannot do it alone.
This deserves closer study:
Most people getting into the experiential disciplines these days look at it as one might any other subject or study. Quite naturally, the road to success is adied by finding experts steeped in the work and who have been teaching for years. Like in school. Name a scientist or poet who has not been mentored by "experts" (often for years, as in grad studies) or at least did not study their work avidly. This simply shortens the learning curve. Why would one want to study alone when you can get expert instruction? I suppose it boils down to how ambitious you are. Only ambitious folk go to grad school. Mosrt people just play at learning, then have another beer.
And who wears togas these days? And how did togas get associated with math teachers and Zen instructors and so forth? Who has actually seen this in real life? Where the hell do you live, Dingus. Perhaps in your mind, which sounds like quite a circus.
The crux of what you said is, "Seems from here."
Where is "here?"
My contention all along with the experiential adventures is that you need empirical evidence, lest you are simply guessing and speculating ergo all that silly guff about math teachers with togas "preacher'men" and all that wonky woo.
Real practice in the experiential adventures is real efort and for some, who cannot shut up and stop calculating, their interior life remains terra incognito. How can such a person hope to know who they are?
And MH2, you are doing what psychologists call a reversal. The invitations was for YOU to offer up some new data per YOUR experience? I figure the chance of you risking being honest in this regards are the same as a whirlwind blowing through a junk yard and spitting out the space shuttle. What are you afraid of? Not afraid? Fine, pony up your inner process starting with observation. Can you be honest, or merely clown around? Or try ham-fistedly to reverse the question - the climbing equal of passing the lead to the other dude.
And Mike said:
All apparent objects that you may focus on are abstractions held in your imagination, imaginary differentiations of the one reality-field, with no independent existence whatsoever, excepts as the field itself. No “separate” object can possibly be experienced outside of the context of the field. Only the field, indivisible in actuality, can be experienced, whether you consciously notice that or not. Directly experiencing this fact clearly reveals the true nature, the actual condition, *reality,* clearly and obviously as it actually is.
Brown does a great job here especially with the "no independent existence whatsoever." The real work is having a direct experince of this, as opposed to noodling it as a concept. Not easy.
JL
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