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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 3, 2016 - 08:34am PT
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Ed said: "Largo has yet to provide anything but a Hollywood script concept for the question title of this thread... "
I think the crux of these wonky appraisals is that Ed is only looking for and will only accept "mind" as an object, a thing we can measure and evaluate just as we measure and evaluate every other object in time and space. To me, this is like asking Ed (or any staunch materialist) to simply tell us what matters IS. No one knows how to frame of describe matter as an object, though there are many objective constituents we can point to.
I have always made a point of stating that a first step in looking at what mind is requires us to first, recognize the differences between objective and subjective. When you study Mind from the inside, you pretty quickly encounter the phenomenon of no-thing, which is another way of saying "this phenomenon is NOT an object."
For those in the dark about this, having never encountered such a phenomenon, no-mind, no-thing, and so forth makes no sense, and they will quite naturally seek an object that seems to BE mind, i.e., the brain. Or go with the default position that no-thing implies a kind of ephemeral thing that lies outside of time and space. This is still hanging onto the notion of thingness, but this time, your thing is immaterial and lies somewhere else. The idea of no-thing simply sounds like rubbish.
Pushed even further, we have the fundamentalist of the physicalist camp saying that mind in a learned, mental construct that is not real, as a pine cone is real, but is a trick played by the brain leading us to believe we have the "thing" called mind. Note that this is yet another dodge from delving into no-thing.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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actually, you keep saying you're going to post something more elaborate and then fail to do it...
in the mean time, I'll keep meditating, and thinking about the mind...
so you think you had a mind when you were born and then "discovered" it sometime later?
or that it is something that you learned?
you have a habit of excluding any phenomena unassociated with the mind you've lived with as an adult... how did that mind come to be?
maybe you just downloaded it off the astral plane?
[Click to View YouTube Video]
as far as material is concerned, what do you want to know about it? we can discuss it 'till you are totally bored (about 5 minutes I'd guess)
as far as the question of ontology, you know that can't be answered about anything. so it hardly serves as an arguing point.
mind as an illusion?
I'd go with that, but there is something we experience... if the "brain" is tricking us into thinking we have a "mind," why would it do that? what is it doing to create the illusion? and once the illusion is executed, what is this thing "that is not 'mind' according to Largo"
Maybe we should be discussing that phenomenon, since it is a part of all of our experience, and we'll call it "not the real mind" but "the illusion of mind" maybe a the acronym "IoM" then Apple can come out with a product "iOM" which can be downloaded off the internet
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WBraun
climber
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No ... the mind is not gross physical but subtle physical material energy.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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For myself, no. I usually see myself a bit from behind and above. Clearly this is not how I experienced the event.
How do you "experience" it? and how do you know?
MH2 reminds us from time-to-time that our "fine motor coordination" is inherited from the sharks over 100 million years ago... in the cerebellum which provides our "coordinate system" to reference our motion.
The particular Point-of-View (PoV) that we perceive is simply the result of those calculations which are optimized for those motions. Displacing the "origin" of the coordinate system is a relatively simple mathematical transformation which should leave everything else in the calculation invariant.
However, the perceptual experience of moving that origin is so disturbing that they take on a spiritual/mystical interpretation when perceived by humans.
The Cerebellum is able to move this 3D coordinate system around, when it does, we freak out...
of course, that leaves us trying to figure out just who "we" are...
But then, this contemplation of perspective is taken from my perspective invariant scientific approach (which is not, apparently worth arguing with... according to some). Perhaps we should not seek deeper insight...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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The Cerebellum is able to move this 3D coordinate system around, when it does, we freak out...
I freaked out back in the 70s upon reading an early Pellionisz and Llinás paper which used tensors to describe the operation of the cerebellum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_network_theory
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Are you all even sure those early memories are authentic?
Not sure at all. When my parents would describe to me something that had happened to me or something I had done, my mind provided visuals to go with their words, which later may have appeared to me as my own memory of the events.
A friend of mine was once witness to a car accident and was called as a witness. There were two other eye-witnesses who testified. They were asked how fast one of the cars were going. One witness testified that the car was going well over the speed limit, another that it was going much slower than the speed limit, and the third said it was going right around the limit.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 3, 2016 - 09:50am PT
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Ed said:
"mind as an illusion? I'd go with that, but there is something we experience... if the "brain" is tricking us into thinking we have a "mind," why would it do that? what is it doing to create the illusion? and once the illusion is executed, what is this thing "that is not 'mind' according to Largo"
I was referencing a comment you made earlier that you believed what we were experiencing was not the mind, but some thing else. I assumed that what you were driving at was what some other physicalists believe - that the mind is an illusion produced by the brain, that the subjective - lacking the stuff of all other objects in time and space - must necessarily be imagined or some kind of brain generated blow back, since all real phenomenon are purely physical.
A few questions for you.
What is the difference between an object and your experience - in and of itself? What makes you believe there is "something" (some "thing," that being an object) that we experience? Who ever instructed you to meditate by "thinking" about mind? Or are you trying what PPSP warned about - inventing your own practice?
There is an old saying that basically says that to use the mind to evaluate the mind can only result in a "great confusion." The counterintuitive royal road is to not-think, which you cannot "do," but you can develop non-attachment to thinking and things and memories etc. and then, paradoxically, the nature of mind as no-thing, as non-object, will deepen.
A fun drill is to try and walk yourself through the steps of imaging what would be involved for the brain to trick you into believing you had subjective experience, defining along the way what would be required to actually have real experience, while answering who, precisely, would be having this thing you call experience, and which you don't actually have, at least not in the same way you have a car or a bicycle.
I have been fiddling around with working through the steps one would have to go through to actually get an AI rig up and running, at least in theory, and what happens when you do this is that many of the assumptions one has going in simply turn to dust once looked at carefully. I am in Zurich now but will return home on the 10th and will post that. I learned a lot just tackling this thought experiment.
My sense of where you get turned around here is that you conflate what something does with what something IS, which is a strategy that works well with objects, but with subjective experience, makes you always "think" about mind in terms of tasking, of what mind "does." Most serious meditation practices aim you away from this track because it bears little fruit and reduces mediation to a flow or centering or relaxation task, some technique you "do," as opposed to an experience of dropping into being. Consider if I asked you to define what matter IS above and beyond discrete and measurable functions of properties per what matter DOES. I was once asked in I believed a photon was a thing or an object that contained radiation and triggerd in humans the experience of luminescence. I was informed that there was no such thing or object - there was merely the radiation and what we humans experience as light. What are your thoughts on the matter? Did it ever occur to you to put aside that question of what mind does, and to explore it in terms of what it IS beyond all tasking and doing and thinking ABOUT something, including thinking about mind?
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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from Jan:
psychologists say that our most basic emotions and personalities are formed by age 5
Evidence for or against?
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cintune
climber
Bruce Berry's Econoline Van
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The counterintuitive royal road is to not-think, which you cannot "do," but you can develop non-attachment to thinking and things and memories etc. and then, paradoxically, the nature of mind as no-thing, as non-object, will deepen.... and what happens when you do this is that many of the assumptions one has going in simply turn to dust once looked at carefully. I am in Zurich now but will return home on the 10th and will post that. I learned a lot just tackling this thought experiment.
At last, the big reveal seems just around the corner.
But then:
My sense of where you get turned around here....
Suggests that we're in for the same old rehash.
Can't wait.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Ed: mind as an illusion? I'd go with that, but there is something we experience... if the "brain" is tricking us into thinking we have a "mind," why would it do that? what is it doing to create the illusion?
IF there is a thing that is illusory, called mind, then where and what is that which perceives it? Who or what does the brain “trick?” It seems to me that these musings indicate the paradoxical nature of the phenomenon.
Mises en abyme.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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if Largo claims to have solved the deep philosophical problem of "being" then he's far ahead of the pack...
so far I don't see that his "experience" does that, rather it just begs the question "what is experience"?
he can't answer that either...
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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There is an old saying that basically says that to use [one's] mind to evaluate [one's] mind can only result in a "great confusion."
Self-referential investigations may easily lead to conundrums, if not paradoxes. I'm unconvinced the meditative approach is more reliable than an intellectual analysis. Your no-thing may simply be an experiential paradox that is no closer to "reality."
A machine without a mind might be more appropriate for studying the mind.
Whatever that is.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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There is an old saying that basically says that to use [one's] mind to evaluate [one's] mind can only result in a "great confusion."
JL has said that one should not argue with a person locked into a perspective. This would make it difficult for him to question his beliefs.
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WBraun
climber
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Fact
The gross materialists do not have facts.
They have theories and speculations masquerading as facts.
They have .... "There is no need for truth"
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Ha-ha.
There is only one fact.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Ed: if Largo claims to have solved the deep philosophical problem of "being" then he's far ahead of the pack... so far I don't see that his "experience" does that, rather it just begs the question "what is experience"?
Experience is what you know. But what that is can’t be pinned down or defined. It *can* be expressed, however . . . which is what science, story, instinct, emotions, myth, religions, art, symbols, etc. all do to some extent or another.
Hey, thanks, DMT! :-)
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Experience is what you know. But what that is can’t be pinned down or defined. It *can* be expressed, however . . .
which begs for a definition of "to know," perhaps we are caught in some circular reasoning here.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/know
transitive verb
1
a (1) : to perceive directly : have direct cognition of
(2) : to have understanding of [importance of knowing oneself]
(3) : to recognize the nature of : discern
b (1) : to recognize as being the same as something previously known
(2) : to be acquainted or familiar with
(3) : to have experience of
2a : to be aware of the truth or factuality of : be convinced or certain of
b : to have a practical understanding of [knows how to write]
3 archaic : to have sexual intercourse with
intransitive verb
1: to have knowledge
2: to be or become cognizant —sometimes used interjectionally with you especially as a filler in informal speech
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Ed:
I’m having no trouble using the word “know.”
Would you kindly explain yourself without simply pointing me to another definition?
If that won't work for you, then perhaps you can say what the experience of experience is for you?
I'm more of a practitioner than a theorist. Definitions don't do much for me.
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