Consciousness and Levels of Awareness

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Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Feb 10, 2018 - 03:05pm PT
If the different emotions are associated with frequencies, that's not something I know about, but seems likely to me.


Having worked with EEg and qEEGs for years (up till about a decade ago), it's well established that brain waves and patterns (like coherence etc.) are associated with mental states.

EEG work is simple to understand but tricky to do. Since the voltage fluctuations measured at the electrodes (placed on your scalp) are very small, the recorded data is digitized and sent to an amplifier. The amplified data can then be displayed as a sequence of voltage values and band widths.

What gets interesting is once you get jiggy with the system and the feedback, you realize that consciousness and the brain are constantly feeding back on each other, so you end up with a chicken-and-the-egg kind of causal thing. That is, one can look at a skin magazine, experience arousal and see the brain wave patters change. Conversely, you can entrain the brain into certain patterns (coherent Alpha, for example) and the subject's subjective state will get more relaxed and expansive (or more focused in high beta).

Oddly, when long time meditator's are wired up, the deeper states are related to greatly decreased brain wave activity (but MUCH higher coherence), denoting a quiet mind. Big surges and spikes and activity in one frequency, especially delta, usually spells problems.
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Topic Author's Reply - Feb 10, 2018 - 06:45pm PT
Yes, Largo, I agree with you and am familiar with that sort of equipment.

In the 1960s a Dr Olds at Cal Tech was pioneering this technology and I spent evenings and weekends in the labs working with some of these techniques. My senior thesis at the Occidental College Music Department in the 1960s had to do with using an EKG sensor cap like that as input controller to run an early vacuum tube Moog Synthesizer.

What I haven't done or seen done is to wire up an actor who is expert at stabilizing on each of the points of the emotional tone scale. I can imagine creating a map of wave forms associated with each point on the emotional tone scale. But I don't know how that map relates to the Beta, Alpha, Theta, Delta map. Perhaps there are identifiable wave forms that are somewhat independent of frequency, but relate to wave shape, harmonics, or phase shifting.

As you mention, once this has been done, it would be possible to broadcast these wave forms and entrain people into a particular emotional tone. My understanding from various sources is that this is in fact being done as a form of mind control. I just don't know the particulars aside from frequencies and the recording and broadcasting of thought wave forms as part of the non-lethal weapons programs.

In the 1980s I was involved with a company in Connecticut that was using EKG sensor caps and 3D modeling software to show how wave forms were propagating through the brain. It was expected that certain areas of the brain would light up relative to certain stimuli, such as a repetitive tone or flashing light. However what we were seeing was more like multi-colored (frequency) waves sloshing around in a bottle, with the whole brain actively responding to every sort of stimulus. It was also obvious when part of the brain was inactive, as from a stroke. The wave forms still sloshed all around, but left that injured area dark. You actually use all of your brain, not just 10%.

TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Topic Author's Reply - Feb 10, 2018 - 06:50pm PT
Clearly the question, 'What is "Mind?"', is an interesting topic to think about.

So do you control your mind or does it control you?

Can you turn off your mind and stop thinking?

Can you be fully aware in present time without having to think?

Does your mind enhance awareness or does it get in the way of awareness?

Are you your mind?

Or are you simply possessed by it?

Do love, beauty, joy, and creativity arise as properties of the mind or from somewhere beyond the mind?
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Topic Author's Reply - Feb 10, 2018 - 07:01pm PT
"Do love, beauty, joy, and creativity arise as properties of the mind or from somewhere beyond the mind?"

mind is responsible for turning basal facts into notions such as love beauty and joy

creativity stretches out toward an actions to the point that I would disagree on a point but obviously its recognition is based on a particular state of mind

Yeah, so you skipped the other questions that are central to this issue.

A key question is can you turn off the mind and stop it's incessant thinking?

Some people would say no unless you are dead and gone.

I would say yes you certainly can, and doing that is an important step towards enlightened awareness. I first tried doing this while going alone into wilderness at about 12 years old before I had ever heard the term meditation. I've continued this as a practice all my life, and I still wouldn't exactly term it as meditation.

And I think that love, beauty, joy, and creativity are substantially enhanced by shutting down the thinking process ... it certainly seems to have helped my creative professional career in AI computing systems design ... genius thinkers who were busy trying to figure it all out intellectually have frequently been amazed by what I come up with while busily not thinking ...
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Topic Author's Reply - Feb 10, 2018 - 07:52pm PT
ive never come across a good analysis of creativity

You've just put your finger on the key problem with artificial intelligence.

To the extent that we can identify and chart out a thought process, we can replicate it in computing hardware/software.

And AI systems can very quickly restructure and reorganize thought processes in random/quasi-creative ways.

However AI systems will not and can not do original creative thought. That requires creative consciousness...preferably and optimally unencumbered by thinking...

Some members of the AI community fail to see the humor in a couple of my comments on the subject:

AI is what you study when you lack your own.

Artificial Intelligence ... just add water ...

This is the limiting problem and the huge risk that Elon Musk warns against about AI and the drive towards Tranhumanism.

The Transhumanists lack creative intelligence and are trying to entrap the human race in a state of robotic slavery. In this enslaved state, the creative intelligence will be entrapped as an energy source and nothing else.

This is why in the The Matrix movie, we see Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) holding up a battery and telling Neo that this is what the human race has been turned into within the Matrix.

Wayno

Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
Feb 10, 2018 - 11:34pm PT
I find the Matrix concept useful only up to a certain point. Fiction only crystallizes the time perception of a possible distortion.
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Topic Author's Reply - Feb 11, 2018 - 12:08pm PT
I find the Matrix concept useful only up to a certain point. Fiction only crystallizes the time perception of a possible distortion.

I agree.

Have you read the book? (non-fiction by Val Valerian)

TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Topic Author's Reply - Feb 11, 2018 - 01:31pm PT
Yes, I'm familiar with that story and with the challenges of language translation.

It turns out that humans don't really communicate using words. We communicate using shared experiential concept models and just use words to indicate which concept we are talking about.

When we don't have shared conceptual models, then we fail to communicate ... the challenge with this thread ...

Wayno

Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
Feb 11, 2018 - 04:12pm PT
Have you read the book? (non-fiction by Val Valerian)

Oh, that matrix. Started it, but no. I am somewhat familiar with the subject material. That opens a whole new can of worms. Is this a normal planet? Is there such a thing?
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Topic Author's Reply - Feb 11, 2018 - 04:58pm PT
I have no idea how you would define a 'normal' planet.

And I am not tempted to take this thread off in that direction.

I will just say that most surface humans on this planet have very little or no idea what is going on around here .

Irrespective of any of that, I am convinced that developing conscious/spiritual awareness is everyone's highest priority
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Topic Author's Reply - Feb 11, 2018 - 08:56pm PT
the alternative is perpetuation of enslavement
No God

Mountain climber
MT
Feb 12, 2018 - 09:31am PT
aliens and psychics. yes, yes. now that's the truth. You don't own the internet, Tom, as it turns out. I'll post whatever I want, where ever I want. Half our country think the earth is 4000 years old because of lack of education and religion, so I shouldn't be too surprised by the bs passed as fact in this thread. it would be funny, if it weren't so sad.
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Feb 12, 2018 - 02:54pm PT
I shouldn't be too surprised by the bs passed as fact in this thread. it would be funny, if it weren't so sad.
----


Pity the sad sac who judges others by their own intelligence, while guessing at yours as though his appraisal was itself a "fact."
eeyonkee

Trad climber
Golden, CO
Feb 12, 2018 - 04:48pm PT
The pronouns in that last sentence are not working for me, Largo. Must be my Catholic school upbringing.
thebravecowboy

climber
The Good Places
Feb 12, 2018 - 05:00pm PT
Just kinda passing through this mindf*#k of a discussion but the linkage between ketamine, out-of-body experience and resolution of treatment-resistant depression (not to mention quick and powerful dissociative analgesic effects!) needs further investigation and consideration, especially in this era of the opioid-dependent depressed middle american.


Daily oral ketamine for the treatment of depression and anxiety in patients receiving hospice care: a 28-day open-label proof-of-concept trial
eeyonkee

Trad climber
Golden, CO
Feb 12, 2018 - 05:07pm PT
but GOD is a piece of chicken parmesan...
GOD has a special place for you in Hell, Locker (possibly, not far from me). But, in the short term, rock-on! I mean, why not?
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Feb 12, 2018 - 05:24pm PT
eeeeeeyonke, if by pronouns you mean a word that can function by itself as a noun phrase and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g., I, you ) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g., she, it, this ), then you have me in a strict sense. But you flubbed it anyhow because you took an intentionally wonky riff and went literal on me ... according to the rules. Writers break the rules all the time to strike a conversational tone and interject guff and fun into the drift. Are you saying you didn't understand what I meant?

Funny thing here is that AI machines can't yet "understand" anything that tweaks the rules. We do have fun with literalists who take our writing symposiums. First task is to make them write a paragraph about something they recently experienced without reference to any facts, figures or data. Eyes roll. Even figurative language gives them fits because it's not "true," as though communication is actually math, but we're using words to "prove" whatever we are hacking on.

Go figure (literally).

We see a lot of his thinking in mind studies, as though anything but an equation is "poetry" or woo. It all harks back to the first assumption that quantifying is the only way to "know" anything. So you have someone studying a girl's parents, all their physical data, in the hopes of "understanding" all there is to know about their daughter, Petunia, who is the fruit of their (created by) loins. No need to even check out Petunia - or consciousness - when you have the source (brain). Some see a problem with this.

When Nagle said, the study of consciousness is not about what caused mind, but a study of what mind itself IS, so few people took the man at his word. A shame, really...
WBraun

climber
Feb 12, 2018 - 05:58pm PT
No God -- " Tom, as it turns out. I'll post whatever I want, where ever I want."

Yeah, you post alright, but never say anything because you know nothing to begin with.

Don't bother responding (we already know your brainwashed st00pid responses) as you're nothing but an idiot anonymous coward to boot ....
Contractor

Boulder climber
CA
Feb 12, 2018 - 09:13pm PT
OP-
I will just say that most surface humans on this planet have very little or no idea what is going on around here .
Really? Perhaps some surface people are willing to accept that, perhaps a universe of complexity, compassion, euphoria, wonderment, synergy, connectivity, infinity and awareness may have residence solely within the confines of our own minds. Would these self derived and self contained feelings of enlightenment be diminished from your perspective? Perhaps the physicalism of some surface people is actually the foundation of an open and evolving vessel that may, in time, transcend. By their own nature, some people need evidence, beyond the physical to accept a thing that has only been described in words by inherently fallible beings. Characterizations by snapshot in time shows such a lack of understanding and flexibility.

Irrespective of any of that, I am convinced that developing conscious/spiritual awareness is everyone's highest priority

From what origins would that development arise? Please help a fool...
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Feb 12, 2018 - 09:55pm PT
From what origins would that development arise? Please help a fool...
-


Not necessarily a fool, rather someone who's first assumption says that physical causation is the holy grail and "explains" the whole shebang, all else being woo.

Thar she blows...
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