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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I would say that whatever exists in your brain when you have nothing to see or hear, is your consciousness.
How about:
Whatever would exist in your brain if you had never heard, seen, felt, or in any other way sensed anything outside your body? Or more restrictively, outside your brain?
Otherwise, it seems that the word consciousness must include such things as the dog whistle, if only as memory, even when you are in the isolation tank.
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WBraun
climber
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Consciousness is none other then the self.
Not mind, not brain as these are the instruments of the self ....
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jan 13, 2016 - 08:33am PT
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It would seem that a sense of wonder is what most matters [sic]. There would seem to be no greater story than the story that unfolds on the inside of oneself. Anyone who can make close observations can see it for themselves. Evolution is there in subjectivity, in experience, in consciousness, in being.
Most everyone believes they are just a little insignificant point within an expanse of infinity. Ironically enough, it might be just the other way around. You are the expanse of infinity, and the universe is just this little dot within consciousness.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 13, 2016 - 07:39pm PT
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Most everyone believes they are just a little insignificant point within an expanse of infinity.
If this is so I am surprised that most everyone does not act with more humility.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jan 13, 2016 - 08:14pm PT
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Quite impressive. I understand very, very little of what he writes about.
He was a climber? I can't find a reference.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 14, 2016 - 08:37am PT
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He came up to Devil's Lake and climbed. I think he was introduced to it by undergraduates in one of his classes, possibly Bill Zitek at right of second photo, or Gabriel Lombardi, or Tony Julianelle. The climbers in his classes also understood almost nothing of what he said during the lectures. In person he spoke and acted clearly and sensibly.
As mentioned once before, we asked him what he worked on. He told us that it was a branch of math, but difficult to describe. He said that if you wanted to get an idea and some intuition about most of mathematics you could study examples of what you were interested in, such as differential equations. Then he said that for the objects he studied there were no examples.
At the time I knew him, Bill Tait was reading Isaac Newton's writings on religious and mystical themes.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jan 14, 2016 - 09:20pm PT
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Then he said that for the objects he studied there were no examples
That would finish me. I've always needed examples.
I once heard of a grad student who finished his PhD thesis on a peculiar kind of function. But when asked for an example he discovered such a function resided only in the empty set. He started over.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 15, 2016 - 07:58am PT
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The example of the grad student should warm JL's heart.
Way way back, in the late 60s, a math grad student was trying to tell me about existence theorems. I believe they were proofs that a solution to some problem existed, although the actual solution was still unknown.
"It exists."
"Yes, but what is it?"
"We don't know but we do know that it exists."
Could such a solution be considered an "object?"
Although Bill Tait commuted to abstruse realms for work, in his dealings with other people he was perceptive and kind. In one of the photos above I believe he is complimenting me on how neatly the rope was coiled.
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rmuir
Social climber
From the Time Before the Rocks Cooled.
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Jan 15, 2016 - 09:16am PT
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Yes. Everything is an object.
Every thing is an object.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 15, 2016 - 09:27am PT
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in the most common use, an object is a material thing which can be sensed and manipulated. The extensions of that definition first happen in opening up what can be "sensed" and how it can be "manipulated."
more serious extensions happen when the "object" starts to be defined by components, this is a major direction of Largo's argument above, that at some point this reductionism violates "common sense" and leads to statements that are absurd.
for instance, is an "electron" an object? in our current model of the electron it has no physical extent, and this is consistent with our measurements (whose precision is not sufficient to measure its size). Yet we can "sense" and electron, and we can "manipulate" it...
further, since it is a component of "material" things, we attribute this quality of the thing to it... this is a conceptual leap that may not be necessary. For instance, we have the traditional states of matter: solid, liquid, gas; which we take to be different "phases" of the same collection of atoms/molecules. We learn that the pressure of this collection, and the temperature, are important to defining what the state of the collection is... our current understanding of these materials, that they are composed of atoms/molecules, leads us to believe that we can describe these states in terms of the interactions of the constituents.
This turns out to be a bit more difficult to do, and not entirely obvious. Not only that, but the size of the collection, the number of atoms/molecules being described, turns out to have some effect on the behavior of the collection.
Usually we attribute these difficulties in understanding to the different "physical scales" involved, where the physics describing one scale is inappropriate for defining the other. For instance, thermodynamics works for very large quantities of atoms, and is difficult to define for a few atoms. Atomic dynamics works well for a few, but we are challenged to make it work for the "bulk". And we have no well defined way of describing thermodynamics in terms of the statistical mechanics of the atoms/molecules.... we're still exploring that. Whether or not we can define how thermodynamics "emerges" from statistical mechanics is an open question... we could say that we have already done it, but there is still considerable art involved, and not bulk phenomena are well described.
It is interesting to contemplate if a mathematical proof or a mathematical "fact" is an "object," it certainly is not in the traditional dualism, which separates our thoughts from what is material.
This dualism of the "inner" and "outer" worlds is a convenient model that works for many situations, but it is fairly obvious that it would breakdown when trying to describe the very thing that the dualism is modeling, that is, the brain/mind "problem."
Here we have a dualism, the brain being the "outer" thing, an object, and the mind being the "inner" thing, we presume not an object. The fact that our language describing this situation gets confused and results in paradoxical statements is not at all surprising. However, it is also the case that resolving this confusion and the paradoxes is possible, but requires a language very different than the one we have appropriated, since we do not invent a new set of words, we repurpose words and rewire grammar to provide the logical structures for the new meanings.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jan 15, 2016 - 11:34am PT
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All of this above is mind.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jan 15, 2016 - 03:25pm PT
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Mathematical concept/result = "object" of thought.
It's mostly semantics, objective vs subjective.
But I could be wrong.
Non-constructive proofs can be very clever, but if one cannot "construct" a mathematical "item" whose existence has been logically inferred, it is a little unsatisfying. Well, for me.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jan 15, 2016 - 04:03pm PT
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(Psssttt!! . . . the word "semantics" means *meaning.*)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 15, 2016 - 06:12pm PT
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All of this above is mind.
Too simplistic.
You do not do justice to Bill Tait's The Myth of the Mind.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jan 15, 2016 - 08:21pm PT
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^^^ Care to elucidate?
Getting back to W. W. Tait:
As an example, I want to consider and disarm an influential line of thought, by John McDowell,which implicates the mind in the analysis of knowing and understanding, not in the legitimate sense of suggesting causal accounts of our cognitive abilities in terms of mental or physiological structures, but in the sense of claiming that these abilities are mental or essentially involve the mental in a way that escapes the net of cognitive science (Tait)
JL's take on this might be interesting.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 16, 2016 - 08:08am PT
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Perhaps if I were terribly interested, I'd ask around at my local mental hospital.
The crux of The Asylum is on the 4th pitch.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jan 16, 2016 - 01:39pm PT
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Sycorax's reference to the allegory of the cave is a good reference for the inability to say what any thing is finally, precisely, and accurately. Nothing is resolvable. All this talk is about concepts, not about what this is. Can't say. One can only come up with expressions, which is fine: be creative.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 16, 2016 - 07:05pm PT
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Sycorax's reference to the allegory of the cave is a good reference for the inability to say what any thing is finally, precisely, and accurately.
It is fun to see Sycorax referring to sf.
However, using allegory to question interpretations of reality as we experience it is even funnier.
We could have all sprung into existence a nanosecond previously, but it would make no practical difference to us.
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