What is "Mind?"

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jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Dec 23, 2015 - 07:38pm PT
In other words, the idea that no-thing is the long shot and that science has proven that matter is "real," it appears the exact opposite is most likely . . .

You keep employing "reductionist" arguments, supported by your enhanced CarPool, without acknowledging that such processes may very well end at the Big Bang, and there is nothing "before" that in a causation sequence. So, philosophically, you might as well put your experienced no-thing there.

It's as good a place for no-thing to reside as in your meditative trances. And who can argue?


Happy Holidays!
MikeL

Social climber
Seattle, WA
Dec 24, 2015 - 04:38am PT
MH2: Can't argue against that. And afterwards?

Sparkles??
Jan

Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
Dec 26, 2015 - 08:49pm PT

BLUEBLOCR

Social climber
joshua tree
Dec 26, 2015 - 09:00pm PT
^^^HoHoHo. i mean, HaHaHa :)
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Dec 26, 2015 - 09:03pm PT
Wow, Jan . . . over the top!
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - Dec 27, 2015 - 06:54am PT
Sez Ed:

I said we explain what we see, the explanations tell us to look for something else and we go to see if we can see it...

that's all.

You don't have an explanation of mind, you've been interested in it for a while, and you are ready to say various pathways are unproductive.

You needn't muddle your arguments with "what is energy?" "what is matter?" etc... these are red herrings in what you are trying to convey.

What I do believe is that what you define/think of/perceive/meditate on/etc, mind is, that will not be amenable to scientific explanation. My guess is that is because it doesn't have much to do with what mind is. It is your perception of mind.



I think why we both circle around here, Ed, is at least in part owing to you not owing certain truths that seem obvious to me but which you - to my way of thinking - gloss over with glib efforts to explain them away.

You said you sought to explain what you see. Great. But I have said that no one, not even you, Ed, cannot "see" mind (which even you agree is itself a subjective phenomenon), we can only see objective functioning.

Leibniz pointed this out centuries ago: " ...supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another."

In other words, we would see the brain's millworks, so to speak, but we would never "see" mind as an object IN the pieces "which push one against the other." Why, because the objective and subjective are not selfsame.

You say that my use of an energy metaphor is a red herring to what I seek to convey, but what I am saying is that A), what you see in largely colored by your brain, and it is not objective "out there." and B), what we DO see and measure, upon close inspection, seems to be no more "there" in any absolute sense that "mind" is to be found in Leibniz's mill.

Your idea that "the cupboards are bare" is in fact what I have been saying all along - and it applies not only to mind, but to the god of physicalism as well - material. The smart money says energy sourced matter, a word that has no universal definition whatsoever. By your way of reasoning, science hopes to explain by way of an entirely undefined "thing" what we cannot even see ("mind").

My contention all along is that science is not even studying mind at all, rather objective functioning, which you are in so many words are saying are selfsame.

But where IMO you totally flub this whole McGilla is in this statement:

"...what you define/think of/perceive/meditate on/etc, mind is, that will not be amenable to scientific explanation. My guess is that is because it doesn't have much to do with what mind is. It is your perception of mind."

I couldn't have made it more clear that the experiential adventures are not about an observer conjuring an objectification of what mind "is," and drawing conclusion that a third party can evaluate as "right' or "wrong" or imagined or being the fruit of a person "me" having a perception of some thing or object "mind" that you believe is in this case incorrect. In this case you are trying to drag meditation back into the arena of quantifications and evaluations by which we can prove a statement by way of experiment, but my sense of this is that ultimately was can no more physically prove that mind exists than we can prove that god or material exists, or that there is an object called a photo beyond the measurable radiation. The whole damn thing is provisional and it isn't mind created because there is no creation in the reductionist sense and mind itself is not "real" in terms of it being, itself, an object.

But yes, I do think mind is amenable to scientific investigation and I will get to that later. For now, understand that I do not think a scientific investigation of mind begins with measuring (that is what we do with "brain"). A scientific investigation of mind begins by first getting a handle on the basics of what perception is, and we go from there.

JL




MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Dec 27, 2015 - 07:52am PT
JL,

You assume that there is a mind separate from the millworks. There could be only the millworks, dreaming of a mind.
WBraun

climber
Dec 27, 2015 - 08:26am PT
Modern science doesn't study their own selves.

They study someone else.

They dissect someone other then themselves.

No wonder modern science fails so miserably and at the same time it's masquerading as advancement of scientific knowledge.

At the same time the clueless masses go gaga at everything that comes out of their soulless lifeless sterile machine ......
Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Dec 27, 2015 - 10:53am PT
I think a lot of work, scientific, objective, empirical, has been done on perception.

As far as abandoning a study of the brain as the source of mind, you are centuries late in some ways, and even wrong as far as our "theories of mind" go, as we are aware of the effectiveness of the "head shot" as we hunt, denying the prey the use of their executive center... the brain.

You can then go on to say that the human experience of the phenomenon of "the mind" is a special case. You run up against the prevailing science that humans are the result of an evolutionary process, this process is responsible for human behavior too, and "mind" is a behavior.

It is a very steep hill to avoid this with some explanation that the "mind" arrives to humans independent of the biology. But perhaps you wish to dodge that bullet by redefining science itself, to include things outside of the physical domain.

As far as philosophers of the past, you have to have noticed that I don't feel the constraint of philosophy in terms of doing science. You can philosophize as much as you wish, in the end, it is our experience that determines whether or not philosophy means. I don't think that considering what is "mind" is any different. Modern philosophers have a lot to say about the problems of "mind," whether or not they have any insight awaits science.

You are understandably confused over the energy/matter issue... but you are insistent on your own view and aren't that interested in an answer.

I remind you that another SoCal thinker had similar reservations, Millikan thought Einstein was "smoking something" when he proposed that energy was quantized, as an explanation of the Planck radiation equation. Millikan was not just a thinker, he actually devised an experiment to test the idea. It was a very involved and clever experiment... and in the end he verified Einstein, energy was quantized, measured the Planck constant for the first time, and won the Nobel Prize. Millikan's first thoughts about the idea were wrong, and he demonstrated that...

It's an example of how science is done... not the cartoon that you draw.

And it was the beginning of decades of confusion over matter and energy, a fog you've not emerged from.


jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Dec 27, 2015 - 03:17pm PT
But yes, I do think mind is amenable to scientific investigation . . .

Twenty monks Zensit and then fill out a questionnaire about their experiential adventures = data?

Probably you have something more scientific in mind.
Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Dec 27, 2015 - 03:35pm PT
Twenty monks Zensit and then fill out a questionnaire about their experiential adventures = data?

Probably you have something more scientific in mind.


actually, experimental philosophy does just that, and oddly, the "data" so gathered counters many of the usual "we all know that..." assumptions of philosophy, assumptions that Largo glibly embraces without any attempt to actually verify if those things he calls "common sense" are common.

Of course this opens us up to the accusation of requesting "quantification" of the "unquantifiable" but by invoking "common sense" in one of its many guises on this thread, (in particular, the hay-seed narrative that Largo often uses when trying to make a point about something he thinks is stupid), one is using an assumed consensus of opinion, invoking a "measurement" ('everyone would agree') that is made up...

if no one agrees, then you might have to go back to square one and reconsider your own brilliant insights... or consider that your own particular meditation might be relevant to a domain of one.


I would be interested in what such a poll of monks would say...
Jan

Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
Dec 27, 2015 - 08:09pm PT
Cultural Anthropology is also based on the subjective views of many different people gathered from either observation of events or interviews.

Of course we are not searching for any universal truth, rather, many peoples' subjective truths. We can theorize based on what we see, as to the causes of the observed behavior and beliefs, and once hundreds of ethnographies had been done and recorded, we could then add statistics to certain ideas and behaviors and what they were co-related with. I can tell you for example, what percentage of the world's people or ethnic groups have practiced celibacy, monagamy, polygyny, polyandry and polygynandry for instance. I can also co-relate those practices with certain geographic regions of the world. Beyond that, it gets more complicated.

I did a master's thesis on high altitude land systems around the world. I had the intuitive hypothesis that all high altitude societies would share common social systems since they lived in similarly constrained geographic environments. It turns out that I had underestimated human ingenuity and needed to learn the limitations of numbers versus a deeper insider view of the culture.

Pakistani mountain dwellers practiced monogamy and polygyny, European peasants, celibacy and monogamy, Incas monogamy and polygyny, Sherpas monogamy and polyandry. Tibetans were the most versatile with celibacy, monogamy, polygyny, polyandry and polygynandry.

When I looked deeper, I discovered that they all did face the problem of overpopulation in a constrained and harsh environment, but in vastly different ways.In Catholic Europe there were Swiss valleys where only the oldest son and daughter were allowed to marry and the rest had to remain celibate. In Tibet, three brothers were often married to the same wife and the fourth brother sent to a monastery. Both practices controlled the population leaving the very subjective question of which would lead to a more satisfying life - celibacy or sharing a wife with your brothers? In polygynous societies, the wealthy who could afford to raise many children had polygyny, the poor had monogamy if they were lucky and there was a large pool of poor men who would never be able to marry and reproduce.

I learned the powerful and positive effect religion can have on human ecology and I certainly learned that marriage and associated notions of morality are highly subjective. I also learned that the people involved did not perceive the problem as I did, yet we came to the same conclusions. I saw too many people, they saw the problem as not enough land. Either way, the problem was recognized and dealt with by mountain people unlike their traditional compatriots in lowland societies.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Dec 27, 2015 - 08:30pm PT
experimental philosophy

I did not realize there was such a thing. Learn something every day.

Experimental Philosophy

Disagreement about what experimental philosophy can accomplish is widespread
BLUEBLOCR

Social climber
joshua tree
Dec 27, 2015 - 09:59pm PT

if no one agrees, then you might have to go back to square one and reconsider your own brilliant insights... or consider that your own particular meditation might be relevant to a domain of one.

PLEEEEEZ... Can science measure love? If i said "i love my Grandma", or i said "i love tomatoes" EVERYONE would fuze with the difference. Can you show us how science could tell the difference? Maybe by a brighter red light showing where more of my blood flowed???

Seems like your sidestepp'in truth just to be anti-coherent?
Jan

Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
Dec 27, 2015 - 09:59pm PT
It seems from the article that experimental philosophy could easily be subsumed into psychology and in the process tighten up their methodology.
BLUEBLOCR

Social climber
joshua tree
Dec 27, 2015 - 11:10pm PT
It seems from the article that experimental philosophy could easily be subsumed into psychology and in the process tighten up their methodology.

So would it be seemingly be wrong, false,or a lie, for me to say that;

methodology can be easily subsumed into psychology as a process to tighten up experimental philosophy?lol
BLUEBLOCR

Social climber
joshua tree
Dec 27, 2015 - 11:30pm PT

I did a master's thesis on high altitude land systems around the world. I had the intuitive hypothesis that all high altitude societies would share common social systems since they lived in similarly constrained geographic environments. It turns out that I had underestimated human ingenuity and needed to learn the limitations of numbers versus a deeper insider view of the culture.

Interesting.

So now what's your surmise?
BLUEBLOCR

Social climber
joshua tree
Dec 27, 2015 - 11:33pm PT


I learned the powerful and positive effect religion can have on human ecology and I certainly learned that marriage and associated notions of morality are highly subjective. I also learned that the people involved did not perceive the problem as I did, yet we came to the same conclusions.

How so?
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Dec 28, 2015 - 08:45am PT
Thanks for the great perspective in Jan's post. It has the combination of informed opinion and clear personal expression that makes paying attention here occasionally worthwhile.


Experimental philosophy? What's so strange about that? I am an experimental historian.
Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Dec 28, 2015 - 09:50am PT
The smart money says energy sourced matter, a word that has no universal definition whatsoever. By your way of reasoning, science hopes to explain by way of an entirely undefined "thing" what we cannot even see ("mind").

The argument, if I am liberal about recognizing it as an argument, is that we can't "define" energy, like we can't "define" mind... so science can't be used to understand mind.

It can't be used to understand energy?

If we understood mind like we understand energy then it would be an amazing accomplishment. Energy is a very broad concept, and we find that concept useful in almost every domain of physics. There is no difficulty using this concept to calculate the outcome of experiments, and "follow the energy" is a very fundamental technique in analyzing what is going on in an observation.

So far, the fundamental connection between time and energy, with the help of Noether's theorem, explains why there is conservation of energy... because the universe, at the subatomic level, is symmetric under time-reversal, the quantum mechanical operator that changes thing in time is the energy operator...

But energy starts with James Prescott Joule in the 17th century and the understanding of the relationship between energy and mechanical work.

By any stretch, mechanical work is a human-centric concept... and a number of human judgements color the language of thermodynamics from this time, what, for example, is "waste heat"? That's an engineering term at best... but from thermodynamics we understand what is going on in chemical reactions, which by and large fuel our modernity.

So in spite of the Largo's claim that "there is no universal definition of energy" we have sufficient understanding of the concept to base the entire technology of the modern world on it. And also understand the role of energy back to the Big Bang, and perhaps even a little bit before that.

On top of that range, we can even understand the apparently paradoxical statement that the net energy of the universe is 0... which is a bit of a mind blower, but actually is consistent with the thoughts of the Big Bang being a quantum fluctuation out of the vacuum.

And science did this somehow... thankfully they didn't ask the philosophers first.

So I can ask Largo... what is it about the history of the development of our physical understanding of energy that leads you to claim that a physical understanding of the mind is not possible using the orthodox scientific methods?

It would seem that our deep understanding of energy is an optimistic example that we can understand mind.

The challenge that Largo proposes cannot be met for anything, "what is...?" an ontological enquiry that has a dodgy basis... before asking it, how do you define the question and what would a legitimate answer be?

Since we cannot answer it in any manner, we can conclude that "no-thing is" and be done with the discussion.
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