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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Bruce
In fact we are very different. There is a personality profile that show us who are at "risk" of criminality. I believe it's a high score on hedonism, low score on morality and high score on love of partying.
Parts of Largo's point about the comfort sone is spot on. It's an important point also during leadership development. Stay within the comfort sone and there will be no learning and no change. You have to get outside the comfort sone for learning and change to have a chance of taking place.
Just to be clear about that - This is not Marlow supporting Largo's and WBraun's power of the SPRIT point. I'm not studying my navel with great fascination. Neither am I so fascinated about the outer world that I would have any interest in studying the simultaneous oneness and difference of WBrauns navel. Yelena I's maybe...
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Bruce Morris
Social climber
Belmont, California
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Sounds like the Freudian id or the darling of the Psycho-babble crowd: the child primitive that wants to be immortal and omnipotent and at the same time wants to have its dependency needs met. If not, it has a big tantrum and lashes out, especially if it's frightened and threatened. That's why Freud thought that Repression with a capital R was necessary to preserve the existence of civilization: cf. Civilization and its Discontents. Well, just don't send them to Boston Latin & Greek Preparatory Academy for Young Men and Women or they'll wind up wetting their pants the rest of their lives.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Excuse or not, Dostoyevsky sure was right when he noted we all have criminal minds. We just haven't evolved far enough to reconcile the unconscious and conscious portions of the brain.
Another way of positing the G.K. Chesterton quote, "Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved,"
Just in Biological, psychological parlance.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Freud is history, still the criminal risk profile is to a large extent "id-like/id-governed".
Yes, be careful about the rightwingers, the knowledge could be used in a way it should not be. But politicians on the top should be tested. LOL...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 2, 2012 - 05:33pm PT
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I'm not studying my navel with great fascination.
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Marlow, get back in that corner and study your navel. As though that's what we're doing. Really?
But the clencher here with the free will thing is that a strictly mechanistic/materialistic model of reality is mutually exclusive with the idea of free will. You can explain away variation in life by way of the chaos and random vectors found in any system, but actual free choice - to any degree - is impossible within a mechanism dependent upon and determined by prior physical causes.
In my opinion, the sticking point is in trying to posit choice or determination in absolute terms. To say that we are not largely determined by our genetic makeup, personal history and real-time situations is just silly and wildly inaccurate. Likewise to say every hold I have ever grabbed was the inevitable outcome of the past, with a little randomness tossed in for flavah, is equally absurd no matter if you can get the math to say so.
I think people would be shocked if they clearly understood how determined they really are, and how difficult it is to get a little separation from our own patterns. I have found it to be very difficult.
JL
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Bruce Morris
Social climber
Belmont, California
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Freud may be dead, but some of his basic observations about the operation of repression and transference are definitely not. The power of the unconscious is not going away anytime soon either. Neo-Freudian revisionism is very much alive and well in the modern psyche because, at least descriptively, it's highly accurate about the way mind works in our culture. Like Samuel Johnson, Sigismund is a very difficult man to disagree with. His observations have a way of coming back to haunt you because at least some of them are true. Today, not many people have true hysterical symptoms, like aphasia, blindness and hysterical paralysis, but back-aches, headaches, sciatica, RSI and CTS are very much in vogue these days. Oh, but I forgot the foot! Now everyone's showing up with foot complaints. Yes, Dorthy, there may not be a Santa Claus, but the operation of the mind is influenced a heck of a lot by social and cultural programming. Just look how traumatic re-enactments repeat through two or three generations. Something mysterious operating here that we don't really understand yet. Maybe the good doctor was right about unconscious intentionality? You can't really hide from the fact that 95% of all the brain's activities go on beneath the conscious level. At the present moment only 5% have been described accurately. We still don't know how we learn languages despite Chomsky's rather silly book on syntactic structures. Lot more complicated than deep and surface structures I'm afraid, Noam! Go write another book and this time don't base it on Russell's failed logical positivist "experiment".
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 2, 2012 - 07:19pm PT
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Those of us in the work (like Sam Harris) have an expression. The future is contained in the content of the past. This includes your holds - all the holds you ever grabbed, all the sequences you ever worked out, out the cruxes you ever pulled. Even your every step and grunt and breath on your NIAD project bitd. Pretty amazing, eh?
Except it's not true and is based on a truncated view of how cognition and consciousness works, based in part on the study of objective functioning alone, and secondarily on Harris' bucolic observation of our unbidden thought stream.
As I said, most people hang onto a fully determined view of "will" not because they have studied first person subjective experience with excrutiating care, but rather they'd been focused on the bio-mechanism they believe "produces" it entirely - which for the 1,000th time are not the same things (IE - objective functioning does NOT = experience). What's more, as mentioned, you can't have mechanistic determinism (a fancy name for materialism/physicalism) and have ANY space for free will, however small.
Basically, one's conviction in materialism - that consciousness is a mechanistic "thing" - cannot be shaken till one has such experiences to prove to them otherwise, or has the sudden and corrective insight of a Werner Heisenberg, who said so many years ago:
“The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible . .. atoms are not things.”
Free will is not nearly so neat and mathematically clean as determermism, but it has the advantage of being true in a relative sense.
JL
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Gary
climber
"My god - it's full of stars!"
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One night while doing some Windowpane, it became quite apparent that through my entire life from the very beginning, one event had led to another, one following the one before, with no input from me.
We're just corks bobbing along the river.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Maybe the cat does.
but the dog assuredly thinks with his nose and the horse with his ears.
And the dog chases something in his dreams frequently.
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aspendougy
Trad climber
Los Angeles, CA
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Man has a physical body, an astral or energy body, a causal or "thought" body, and a soul. The soul is beginningless and endless, beyond all categories of thought. Harris is right in the limited dimension in which his mind deals.
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Mungeclimber
Trad climber
the crowd MUST BE MOCKED...Mocked I tell you.
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slipping from thought to thought has a very appealing notion about it as a precognitive aspect. isle to isle I think you said Largo.
Does this play into the 'emergent property' theory?
The mind is what the brain does, as an emergent property over time?
During the life of a person, some say they become more self aware over time?
Others, try to become less aware thru substance use.
Mind protecting itself?
Absolute free will being the ability to do anything, doesn't exist. Straw man.
But we do have a mind like a river, catching eddies, paddling upstream, but mostly going downstream of time. When enough learning is accomplished the ability to leverage that downstream aspect becomes easier, whether muscle memory or not. Does that not mean we have some freedom of movement as we make minor adjustments and more minor adjustments as we progress downstream?
just some thoughts, or chemical brain reactions I thought I would share.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 3, 2012 - 12:54am PT
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What is your source of data. I would like to study it, If I can.
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Fine. I'll consider that an honest question.
Since what you are asking about rises in consciousness - or not - you'' have to sit quietly and observe and see what comes up for you, at the same time, being aware of the awareness process itself. If you've already done this, for years, keep going anyhow.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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no one took up the spurned fruit fly issue...
how about this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/ibrain-a-device-that-can-read-thoughts.html
"Already surrounded by machines that allow him, painstakingly, to communicate, the physicist Stephen Hawking last summer donned what looked like a rakish black headband that held a feather-light device the size of a small matchbox.
Called the iBrain, this simple-looking contraption is part of an experiment that aims to allow Dr. Hawking — long paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease — to communicate by merely thinking..."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 3, 2012 - 12:42pm PT
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I'm finding that I am covering little ground here, beating the same points like a broken drum and only frustrating myself and others. So I'm going to bow out of these discussion and follow my own advice and concentrate on the experience I preach.
As a parting shot I want to pass on something I learned in a philosophy of science class I had as an undergrad. We were covering a time in science when the world was still considered the center of the universe, and it was shown that a crafty dude with figures could plot it that way using the most fantastic geometry. But just because one could model the universe with the world as hub did not necessarily make it so. And so if you are told that only matter has intentionality, which itself is only a physical mechanism lacking any "intelligence," and that the figures prove it so, wonder about it at the very least.
Lastly, watch those transitions. Not changes. Transitions. A young boy changes a lot when he is 13, but he doesn't become a unicorn or a thunderclap in the process. When you are told that inorganic matter becomes self-replication life, and that bio life became conscious, question the transitions. The assumption is that matter "produces" or sources all know things and effects and properties. Except at the point of origin, when nothing at all sourced all and everything with a big ass bang. Again, the transition point from nothing to something is worth close study. And beware when broaching these questions. There was no one point where life "began," or where we became conscious, so incrementally did these transitions occur. Just like there is not one moment when a woman becomes pregnant. This is a very slow and subtle process. Except at the beginning, and that was really fast.
Have fun with it . . .
JL
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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Largo - That last post is some of the best writing you've done on this subject.
Dr. F - Try to prove that you are NOT some kind of a spiritual being animating a material body.
Spirituality is some slippery stuff. Proving it can be a real tail chaser. Making it work for you, that's the proof.
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Bruce Morris
Social climber
Belmont, California
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In the 18th century, Dr. Johnson kicked a rock in the road and said, "Thus, I refute Berkeley and all idealists!" But did he, really?
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Evel
Trad climber
Nedsterdam CO
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Yikes! This thread needs Randisi to chime in.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good or of every evil which may befall me; therefore I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.
Giacomo Casanova
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snowhazed
Trad climber
Oaksterdam, CA
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Once you get beyond a superficial grasp of quantum theory, the laws of physics no longer threaten the concept of free will.
The dynamic feedback loops at the level of the organism- dna, synapses and all also leave plenty of room for free will on a macro level.
The fact that so many people are zombies in this life however.......
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