What is "Mind?"

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Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - May 11, 2016 - 09:49pm PT
It's entertaining to read people's reactions to metaphysics, as though we humans are doing something else, or that people working on consciousness at the level of consciousness are trying to do science without instruments, making their work "soft." Thing is, some of the most radical "metaphysical" stuff I have read has come from hard core measurers.

Said Bohr:

"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."

"When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it."

"Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems ."

Said Erwin Schrödinger:

"The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence."

Werner Heisenberg adds:

"The smallest units of matter are not physical objects; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language."

And Eugene Wigner:

"[T]he laws of quantum mechanics itself cannot be formulated ... without recourse to the concept of consciousness."

And lastly, David Bohm

"In principle this reality is one unbroken whole, including the entire universe with all its ‘fields’ and ‘particles. To begin with undivided wholeness means, however, that we must drop the mechanistic order.”

Not one measurer in one hundred now thinks any of these guys were correct in their views, but if only they knew about information theory, cha cha cha. They "were wrong about the data," or misrepresentd the data. Sort of a shame that few even test drive the ideas and find out for themselves.

You can't base a world view on other people's experiences or insights, nor would one want to base them on the screwy world of QM, though the commonalities are interesting in a passing way.

But the empirical investigation of consciousness at the meta level holds out real promise.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
May 11, 2016 - 10:07pm PT
My ex-wife's late father, a Hungarian aristocrat, was a friend of Wigner's and corresponded with him regularly. Jeno was an architect, government official, and former member of parliament during WW2, and he was a fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He enjoyed discussing calculus and some of Chardin's metaphysics with me. Chardin's Omega Point would be an appropriate topic for this forum . . . too bad the good priest died in 1955.
BLUEBLOCR

Social climber
joshua tree
May 11, 2016 - 10:50pm PT
Anyone arguing against this fact need only provide an example of a conscious third-person perspective existing anywhere in the world.

Alright i'll try. And i won't bore you with my personal experiences.. Here's the framework; gotta start at evolution, and the evolution of "consciousness". Though just from the point when the first air breathing lungs appeared, and obliviously the brain was already present. i'm starting here because "Us" mammal's, or more precisely we human's, when bore from the womb exchange environments from water to air(those being the basic). For an adherence to this new environment the lungs must be flushed of all water, and the first gasp/grasp of air; Is where most people will say, "Consciousness Starts"!{i would ask those; Isn't the baby responding to music IN the womb "Conscious"?] i'll try not to regress! But the mechanical action of breathing air isn't enough to suffice to scientist's the presence of "consciousness". In sleep we continue to breathe, but if we're not awake and fully aware. Science say's we are "NOT Conscious", also meaning "without consciousness"! i think this is a disgrace! Sorry. Just refining the framework. So science holds Consciousness at the maximum of being equivalent to "seeing and being functionally aware and active within one's own environment". This is where your guyes "First person perspective" comes from. But i'm not sure where your "second person's) comes from? Am i, your "second person's perspective"? From my argument, you are my "second conscious perspective", outside of my own. You and i do relate subjectively about objective experience. And there is confirming objective truthful evidence. Even if i only use the narrow view that science has of consciousness as a decipher'er, my consciousness knows you are conscious. And that your truths are also mine.. Surely i would expand the definition of consciousness past science's boundary. For instance, sleep, i believe dreams are consciousness proving "she's"at work..

Are we in cohoots over the second person's perspective? Or am i way off your mark?

As for my perspective of a "third person's perspective" and maybe even a "Forth"?. i will revert to;

consciousness cannot be divided between here, where it is only in the first person, and somehow appropriated by some other agency or machine that, from from a mind-independent perspective different than our own, can render a strictly "objective" perspective from the third person perspective. Only a god can do that.

And i'll agree, God can do that! And this is where the "miracles" that believers are always proclaiming come hence from.. "Ask and You will receive". The statement is not a Google commercial. It's a challenge, of sorts. The subjective challenges of the bible are what?? They are challenges aimed at objective action!

My "third person" that i listen to is my Conscious. And i'm not, meaning my first person breathing and awareing to the environment "Conscious" either! That consciousness's only concern is survival in the environment. Remember evolution! i'm talkin about the conscious i hear through feelings informing me it's not right to eat the neighbor's dog.. We can all feel when we're about to do something wrong. If we are just Stardust being pushed around by unseeable, but not unknowable forces, how could then anything be "wrong"? Standing here today, i can say that burning to much fossil fuel to quickly will destroy earth's atmosphere, and that would be wrong! Would "Evolution" be considerate to all life dying? No! Couldn't care less! No Right or Wrong in evolution, Right?

Sure you can blot me out by sayin i have image's in my head! That good and bad are just constructs. But in all reality we are all trying to lead our life's through our own unique version of what is good or bad. More framework, "good and bad" hasn't to do with senses, it's about getting along with one's environment. And my third person put's a twist on that;)



BLUEBLOCR

Social climber
joshua tree
May 11, 2016 - 10:53pm PT

Said Bohr:

"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."

his is contrived, and unproven.

there is to much flabbledickey goin on here!
MikeL

Social climber
Seattle, WA
May 11, 2016 - 11:05pm PT
BB: And i'll agree, God can do that!


And this is what you are. Look and see. There is no need for an imagination. You don’t need to posit an all-powerful being with omniscience. You can see everything that matters—which is nothing at all, or everything. Take your pick. You are all that there is. It is just playfulness in process. Just look. There is nothing that lies outside of your consciousness. You are IT; IT is you. There is no difference.
WBraun

climber
May 12, 2016 - 07:35am PT
You are IT; IT is you.

That's mayavadi impersonalist nonsense rooted from Sripada Sankaracarya's playbook.

Sorry ....
MikeL

Social climber
Seattle, WA
May 12, 2016 - 08:01am PT
:-)

Thanks, Werner.

Now, . . . all we have to do is to say what consciousness is.

:-)

P.S. My stand is that there is no place to stand.

:-)
cintune

climber
Colorado School of Mimes
May 12, 2016 - 11:06am PT
[Click to View YouTube Video]
High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber
May 12, 2016 - 12:21pm PT
Please no more TED links!!

(those poor, poor Forengi, always short-changed.)

.....

What is it like to be a mother goose (in distress)?

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/goose-appears-to-ask-cops-for-help-for-gosling-tangled-in-string/

It’s unfortunately a bit depressing to realize that animals have intelligence [mental lives, subjective experience], when you think of the hard and cruel lives they often endure. -ploubere
cintune

climber
Colorado School of Mimes
May 12, 2016 - 01:42pm PT
A lot like being a dinosaur?

PSP also PP

Trad climber
Berkeley
May 12, 2016 - 06:30pm PT
JG said"Is one "self-aware" after the small "I" is suppressed? If so, it seems a contradiction of sorts. "

To say the practitioner suppresses the "I" is not understanding the process and sets off linguistic alarms for the people that do this. The term most people use is you let go of the small "I", but even that may be misinformed or probably not quite correct in how the small "I" drops away.
IMO It really has more to do with attachment. The Small "I" is constantly trying to get things to go it's way. When you sit still and don't move for 30 minutes there is no place for the small "I" to escape to or at least it provides a venue where it is easy to observe the small "I" trying to escape or co-op pleasure. You get to witness the small "I" in all it's glory; it will fall a sleep out of intense boredom, or it will wander off into narrative after narrative to stay occupied ; not being able to avoid getting involved in every stimulus.

The meditation technique is fairly easy; when you notice you have fallen asleep or wandered way down a narrative road you let go of the narrative and come back to what you are doing sitting ,seeing ,hearing ,feeling, breathing etc. without judging anything as good or bad. So there is a constant letting go of your narrative and coming back to listening and seeing and breathing over and over again. It is as if you are re-programing the way you relate to your senses.

Eventually you start to be able to not create a narrative for every stimulation and you just observe the stimulation without creating a narrative for it. The thinking slows down and there are gaps between the thoughts. During those gaps it is not unusual to feel very calm and very confident and very undistracted.

The small "I" likes to co-op this experience and say "hey! this is really cool give me more". That is just more narrative to let go. Some people don't know that and think they got it now!

As the narrative becomes less and less the mind becomes less and less distracted and it becomes effortless to just witness ; you become absorbed in the moment effortlessly. But small "I" will magically appear and say wow! that is really cool give me some more!"Just More narrative to let go of.

From doing this process and using it as a tool, on a regular basis, you can gain deeper insight into why you do things and hopefully have the presence to act appropriately for what ever arrives.

High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber
May 12, 2016 - 07:16pm PT
Cintune, that is an interesting mouth anatomy to say the least.

Hey you might not have caught this one on insect consciousness (in partic subjective experience)... Peter Singer no less...

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/are-insects-conscious-by-peter-singer-2016-05

and if insects are conscious (in the subjective esperience sense), then what?

ho boy.


I don't think we H. sapiens were evolved to parse this sort and/or depth of complexity. :)
BLUEBLOCR

Social climber
joshua tree
May 12, 2016 - 08:13pm PT
OK PSPP,

From doing this process and using it as a tool, on a regular basis, you can gain deeper insight into why you do things and hopefully have the presence to act appropriately for what ever arrives.

How is it, and to how/why is it that makes you believe there are two I's?

Do you think Ape's have two I's?

you seem to glorify the "small i". Would it be your wish to remain in a small i existence 24/7?

Also, what would you say your meditation discipline has achieved for you? What is enlightenment you got when you realized your mind contained two "I's"? Can you describe the two different "jobs" the two i's have/do?

thanks
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
May 12, 2016 - 08:35pm PT
From doing this process and using it as a tool, on a regular basis, you can gain deeper insight into why you do things and hopefully have the presence to act appropriately for what ever arrives


Suggested plank for the Republican National Convention. Pay attention, Mr. Trump!

Nice post PSP.
PSP also PP

Trad climber
Berkeley
May 13, 2016 - 11:06am PT
BB'er said "you seem to glorify the "small i". Would it be your wish to remain in a small i existence 24/7? "

You need to read more carefully. According to Buddhist theology attachment to small "I" is the root to all suffering and if you unattach from the self oriented POV the suffering stops. (not the pain). IMO It is very similar to what the Christians talk about when they say you give your soul or heart to Christ.

The intent of that last post was to just give JG a better perspective on the process of meditation and how it relates to witnessing the mind and it's common I, ME MY POV.

If you are really interested in your own "I" then sit down for 20 or 30 min and witness your internal dialog like I described in the previous post. Who is the star of the dialog? Whats going on in there?

I have deadlines so can't post much today.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
May 13, 2016 - 12:05pm PT
According to Buddhist theology attachment to small "I" is the root to all suffering and if you unattach from the self oriented POV the suffering stops

And, yet, if in a different kind of meditative state one liberates the "I" and allows it to romp unrestricted, a most amazing and memorable experience ensues. Of course, if one doesn't have a relatively calm and placid mind, all hell could break loose in this state! At least I suspect that might happen . . . for me it was comparable to my young Corgi/fox pooch racing across the green expanse of a local park, uninhibited and joyful.

Not necessarily at the root of all suffering.
Marlow

Sport climber
OSLO
May 14, 2016 - 12:57pm PT

BASE104

Social climber
An Oil Field
May 14, 2016 - 02:52pm PT
Well, JL makes absolute statements, and it is pretty tempting to reply.

He said,
And John G. brings up a great point per illusions, bore out in Dennett's claim (know as Dennett's Folly) that our experience of subjectivity is fatally flawed but that our sense of objectivity is beyond questioned, ignoring the fact that our only way of knowing the "real" universe is through first person consciousness itself.

So. The only way of knowing the real universe is through first person experience. This is so false that I barely know where to begin. No person was onboard of any of these missions:

I will post some pretty pictures:

From mars:



From Saturn's moon Enceladus:


The largest moon of Saturn is Titan. It is constantly shrouded in an opaque atmosphere of methane. The ESA attached a probe to the Cassini spacecraft whose mission was to land on Titan. Remember, even with the strongest telescope, nothing could be seen of the surface.




The Huygens lander was small, with a short battery life. However, it gave us some great information about the surface of Titan. I assume than when John has meditated, or even a person achieving "Enlightenment" would ever have been able to predict this surface appearance.

I don't have to stop there. The New Horizons spacecraft recently made a close fly by of Pluto. Prior to this, even the mighty Hubble telescope could barely make out fuzzy images of the minor planet.


New Horizons found a small atmosphere and measured its constituent gasses very precisely. They also measured the surface constituent makeup on a portion of the planet, as well as other measurements. It took some pictures of Jupiter as it made a gravity assist maneuver, and since the camera on New Horizons was so much superior to the previous Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter, because the newer camera was much better than Galileo's.

I'll close this out with a picture of Earth as seen from one of the now ancient Voyager Probes, from 4 BILLION miles away:


You can meditate until the cows come home, but I dare you to give me a picture like any of those above. You can't, because you ignore the ability of humans to OBJECTIVELY measure things that are far beyond our ordinary perception. You can't do it. So stuff it when you say that it is impossible. You would have to live in a cave not to notice what technology can do.

This explosion of technology is taking place only 130 years after the battle between Tesla and Edison on whether we should use AC or DC current. Modern technology has exploded in the last 50 years.

Simple answer? John ignores this stuff. He apparently believes that the only way to understand the universe is to sit on a pillow and hum for hours.

John will never make a contribution about the nature of our universe, or even its solar system, because he has a brown paper bag over his head. It isn't just these unmanned robot spacecraft, it is all technology.

Humans can do things in an objective manner. We have to be careful, and it has to be repeatable by independent humans, but we regularly make totally objective discoveries in the laboratories of universities and technology companies, and certain government funded agencies, such as JPL and NASA.






BASE104

Social climber
An Oil Field
May 14, 2016 - 03:16pm PT
In 1987, a Supernova 1987A exploded in one of the dwarf galaxies around our own Milky Way galaxy: The Large Magellanic Cloud. It was easily observable with telescopes such as Hubble (visible light), Chandra Telescope(x-ray light), and ALMA (radio telescope). It was also very close. The closest supernova since 1604.

It was visible to the naked eye, but you had to know where to look, because it wasn't that bright on Earth. It had an apparent magnitude of 3. You wouldn't have been able to see it in the light pollution of Los Angeles first, and second, it was only visible in the southern hemisphere. It has been intensely studied.

Some remarkably interesting things happened with that Supernova, the closest and most observable one in a long time. Hundreds of years.

For instance, 2-3 hours BEFORE the visible light hit the Earth, the hard to detect neutrinos saw a burst of neutrinos in 3 different detectors:

Approximately two to three hours before the visible light from SN 1987A reached Earth, a burst of neutrinos was observed at three separate neutrino observatories. This is likely due to neutrino emission, which occurs simultaneously with core collapse, but preceding the emission of visible light. Transmission of visible light is a slower process that occurs only after the shock wave reaches the stellar surface.[12] At 07:35 UT, Kamiokande II detected 11 antineutrinos; IMB, 8 antineutrinos; and Baksan, 5 antineutrinos; in a burst lasting less than 13 seconds. Approximately three hours earlier, the Mont Blanc liquid scintillator detected a five-neutrino burst, but this is generally not believed to be associated with SN 1987A.[9]

It has been monitored as the remnant grows outwards into space.

Here is a picture of it now using all 3 telescopes mentioned above. A composite image:


You guys can drag on about philosophy and religion, or non-physical things, but you have no clue as to the physical nature of our universe. Unless you are more curious than appears, you probably look up at the night sky and only see some stars, if you bother to look up at all.

BASE104

Social climber
An Oil Field
May 14, 2016 - 03:21pm PT
DMT, John never talks about this stuff. He acts like it doesn't exist. I wanted to be an astronomer as a little kid, so I eat this stuff up.

What you snipped out was only part of the sentence:

you have no clue as to the physical nature of our universe. Unless you are more curious than appears
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