Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
True to form, Ed is focusing on objective functioning and uses various pathological models to show that "mind," in terms of said functioning, can vary extravagantly person to person.
I was very careful not to call these "pathological" in the first two senses of that word: 1) of or relating to pathology; 2) altered or caused by disease...
but perhaps the third: 3) being such to a degree that is extreme, excessive or markedly abnormal.
Perhaps "abnormal" meaning "deviating from normal."
And it is not just "objective functioning" but a way of testing "theory of mind" where we are surprised to learn there are other ways that mind works... which is a way to see if any such "laws" are actually laws... or merely a codification of normal, a dangerous place to be, and especially for an inference. I have made no objective assertions here, merely I point out that we have a very narrow view of how mind works, so much so that it almost seems plausible to say, as I think Largo has, that only "normal minded" people have minds, that all else is something else, but not mind.
To a person with, say, Aton-Babinski syndrome, their first person experience is intact, they have a mind, they believe those experience correspond to reality, they cannot do otherwise. And so, yes, the idea of "mind" may or may not expand to include such "abnormality" but certainly our theory of mind must have something to say about such instances. Most of us would say "those people are injured" and somehow allow us to consider them ill, and in this case, it is brain injury. Implicit in that consideration is the idea that the brain is the source of mind. It is an inference that is very common and powerful.
As I cannot find a reference to "Laws of Consciousness" it is difficult to say whether they apply or not... perhaps Largo can point us there (perhaps he already has, I didn't see it)....
|
|
Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
|
|
Just read an editorial on yoga and was reminded of the body-mind connection.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/dowd-how-garbo-learned-to-stand-on-her-head.html
Yoga theory claims of course that not all of our mind resides in the brain but some of it resides within our spinal cord and the nerve bundles associated with it.
Modern yogis say this reflects evolution - that our complete consciousness reflects earlier stages including the reptilian and primitive mamalian phases.
And then there's this.
“A small trove of illuminating reports and investigations,” Broad writes, show that yoga “can in fact result in surges of sex hormones and brainwaves.........
New medical scans, he reports, “indicate that advanced yogis can shut their eyes and light up their brains in states of ecstasy indistinguishable from those of sexual climax.”
Being a vegetarian reduces the level of testosterone in the body, but yoga appears to raise it, as well as lowering fight-or-flight hormones
So do the materialists need to add to their theory of consciousness that the brain may not always be the instigator of consciousness, but the recipient of it? That some forms of consciousness can emanate purely in the physical body and in fact alter the brain?
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
So do the materialists need to add to their theory of consciousness that the brain may not always be the instigator of consciousness, but the recipient of it? That some forms of consciousness can emanate purely in the physical body and in fact alter the brain?
don't know why you phrase this this way... sounds like you think this isn't a part of a physical explanation... but if consciousness has a part in making the body do its thing, then this is a part of the physical description. An "idea" can cause changes in the body, not sure anyone claiming a purely physical model has said something else...
...in particular, you can certainly induce physiological changes based on mental states.
What I find peculiar in your question is that, perhaps, you believe that a physical explanation of consciousness somehow precludes this. Perhaps you can elaborate on this idea, perhaps I've misunderstood your question.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Oct 9, 2011 - 03:53pm PT
|
Going forward, I think it is helpful to touch on the battles already waged to avoid battling them once more. Much of what we are driving after has been covered upside down and backwards in epistemology.
Mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell distinguished "knowledge by description" from "knowledge by acquaintance." Gilbert Ryle emphasized the distinction between knowing how (3rd person objective) and knowing that (1st person subjective)in The Concept of Mind.
Using the example of the act of balance involved in riding a bicycle,
Michael Polanyi suggests that the theoretical knowledge of the physics involved in maintaining a state of balance cannot substitute for the practical knowledge of how to ride, and that it is important to understand how both are established and grounded. Ryle pointed out that a failure to acknowledge the distinction between knowledge that (3rd person objective) and knowledge how (1st person subjective) leads to vicious regresses.
JL
|
|
Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
|
|
|
Oct 10, 2011 - 12:04am PT
|
Sorry for the confusion Ed. I switched sides with that question and really was asking it from the materialist point of view. It does seem that yoga and the martial arts indicate that the body has a big impact, to the point of overriding the mind, which is certainly a material way of looking at consciousness. I also like the idea that we carry reptilian and primitive mammalian consciousness around with us as it fits into both an evolutionary and a psychological/spiritual framework.
If we start thinking along these lines, then spirituality is the discipline of our more primitive selves, to enable a higher consciousness to manifest, even if it's only our own higher consciousness. This would certainly be in keeping with Buddhism and the non theistic aspects of Hinduism and Taoism - an evolutionary mysticism as it were.
This still doesn't solve the question of whether there is a pervading consciousness in the universe, but all questions involving the nature of the universe in both physics and spirituality, seem up for grabs at the present time.
Anyway, just thinking aloud here.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Oct 10, 2011 - 12:22am PT
|
I haven't been asking an epistemological question, rather, and this has been a goal of mine for many months now, I've been trying to explore practical experience.
The "first person experience" only goes as far as the person that is experiencing it. That might be what your are interested in, but as you point out, once we begin discussing and comparing, it is "third person" stuff, if we collect it, and compare it, categorize it, measure it, it starts to sound like we're doing science. One of your "Laws of Consciousness" is that it can't be explained by such means. It would be nice to know how you come up on such a "Law" when you don't actually know what consciousness is, yet. I think all methods are in the running still, but that's an opinion.
The point of exploring all the other sorts of consciousness is to sharpen the questions, and focus on what seems to be important and what does not. There certainly seem to be forms of "mind" that are completely independent of reality, at least as communicated by those with those forms... and it is certainly true that there are well grounded minds that do not think at all the same way a "normal" mind would.
This calls into question the primacy of our "first person experience" as the sole arbiter of what is real and what is not, and even more so when it comes to understanding consciousness. It is obvious that a single person acting on their "first person experience" can go seriously wrong and act out in a very destructive manner, either to themselves or to others. It is the set of experiences together that start to make sense out of what is "normal" and what is not... or better yet, what is "real" and what is not. This doesn't happen in isolation no matter how much training you've had, at least, it hasn't happened unless we know about it, thus we're back to the "third person" again.
The ability to make inferences is a strong capability of human mind, but those inferences result in a probabilistic "truth." This works better with more of us communicating together our inferences, and the collective answer is often much better than any single answer, the power to get things right is in the "third person."
We can argue about this, it is true, but while it might be interesting to explore the individual experience of mind, it seems that both the evolution of mind, and its major use as a part of a community of individuals, suggests that it is the statistical collection of individuals play an important part in our understanding of mind.
|
|
MH2
climber
|
|
|
Oct 10, 2011 - 12:23am PT
|
Logan tells of an interesting thought experiment for those who can't get their meat brains around the 3rd law of mind and glitch on the differences. Logan feels it is a fixation on "hard," billiard ball causation, where one thing "causes" the next thing and by dint of the direct causal link
I don't know the 3rd law of mind, but Newton's Laws of motion do not specify the result if 3 hard elastic particles collide simultaneously. Given that even simple physical systems can behave unpredictably, it would be no surprise that a system composed of a trombonist, a lady, and a dog might behave unpredictably, and that says nothing about the possibility of measuring human experience and simulating or emulating it in non-biological form.
Working with 1st person subjective experience starts with the "all" (aka awareness or presence)
But where do you go from that start? Is first person subjective experience made up of sensations like pain, pleasure, sight, sound, touch? Can we consider sensations individually or do we lose the "all" as soon as we begin to analyze? How do you know that the parts do not add up to the whole?
We are probably a long ways from understanding the parts, let alone the whole, so considering the "all" seems premature.
|
|
Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
|
|
|
Oct 10, 2011 - 01:23am PT
|
Good point about the alien species. This question comes up often in discussions of anthropology. Who gives the most accurate interpretation of a society - an insider who is fluent in the language or an outsider who is more objective (with the help of good training)? It sounds like first and third person interpretations of consciousness again.
Anthropology's answer is that the objective outsider is better than the thoroughly immersed insider, though both together are better yet.
|
|
healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
Oct 11, 2011 - 02:29am PT
|
Brain linked to robotic hand; success hailed
First-person? Third-person? Is a robotic arm subjective or objective? Is 'owning' it experience? How is it that we can know 'where' we 'think' to move it?
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
|
|
|
Oct 14, 2011 - 04:11pm PT
|
Sam Harris,
Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.
re: the mystery of consciousness
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery-of-consciousness/
.....
"The problem, however, is that no evidence for consciousness exists in the physical world. Physical events are simply mute as to whether it is “like something” to be what they are. The only thing in this universe that attests to the existence of consciousness is consciousness itself; the only clue to subjectivity, as such, is subjectivity. Absolutely nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience. Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence of it in the physical universe—nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to. The painfulness of pain, for instance, puts in an appearance only in consciousness. And no description of C-fibers or pain-avoiding behavior will bring the subjective reality into view."
"It seems to me that ... an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness. However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence means—and I don’t think anyone else does either."
.....
EDIT for Keeps. F wrote to JL on 21oct2011:
Who uses that term, not me
But Largo, you asked me when I was about 19
i heard you were on the fruity side,
or was it, Are you fruity?
|
|
allapah
climber
|
|
|
Oct 16, 2011 - 04:33am PT
|
um, is this the Saturday night posting while drunk thread?
um, DATA, taken randomly from armchair-mountaineer memory:
dougal haston getting buried in the same avalanche he wrote about;
hugh herr hearing message in a bottle on the radio on the way to the great gulf;
pasang lama persuading wiessner to turn around near summit of K2;
glenn randall in breaking point having an OK feeling at base of avalanching couloir on south ridge hunter;
macinnes hearing the rock coming on the dru and knowing in advance he is target;
anchor boulder rolling off the top of Salathe wall after cowboyFFA
thinking of a song, then you hear it on radio;
you had a bad feeling before something bad happened
each of these situations is notable due to an intuition or syncronicity-- of all the people who've anchored off the boulder, why the hangdog cowboys, how can one view a sloughing couloir yet feel a calm certainty that the way is safe to proceed?-- we've all felt it: the intuition bone-- endless stories could and have been generated in this domain, yet the entity that is Supertopo manifests as almost hostile TAKE against mention of anything other than what concretely IS, as if hard men will brook no nonsense such as luck, or "more statistical anomalies than it takes to make coincidence."
these syncronicities and intuitions provide us with evidence that this system we are in is THINKING; syncronicity happens when an event is actively resonating with an event beyond the Plato's Cave of our own qualia. meat brain is a random generator of predictions based on learned memory, but certain predictions of this machine resonate slightly more (probably through the sub-nucleic strings- why not fund the hadron collider?) manifesting as intuition and syncronicity (which are 1st and 3rd person, respectively, come to think of it)
PROPOSAL: (climbers are good for this because adrenalin in the synapses affects electromagnetic energy body, combined with relative slowness of sport, giving time to think through the synaptically altered lens of norepinephrine, corresponding with proximity to death attractor in multiple-universe potentiality-- after all, what is GOOD STYLE OF CLIMB but slow-motion proximity to death attractor?)
A proposed (climbing-based) syncronicity rating scale:
Zone 1: qualia, first person domain, Plato's cave, the walls of meat brain
Zone 2: qualia resonating with third person verification of resonating thought process: the song on the radio you were thinking of, the time I mentioned bees while hanging in butt bag at bolt ladder boy scout rocks mount diablo to evil first girl friend hanging also, and a minute later, a swarm of bees flew by--
Zone 3: very rare-- three domains of coincidence resonating simultaneously-- climber must make shrewd choices, in the moment
the cataclysmic rockfall that fell in the couloir not taken, for instance, might be a syncronicity 1.9-- only two domains, but whoo man!
The thing that throws the science off is that MENTAL PROCESS is a weak force-- it doesn't permeate everything everywhere-- mountains are very low entropy, so MENTAL PROCESS does not permeate them deeply-- a brain, with its neural network, high entropy, is very permeable to mental process
everything everywhere is thinking-- the mountain is sentient, though not as much as climber or the blog at their side
Hal and Petunia doing the Prow or whatever and their super megabyte replica are separate but resonating so closely in time/space they are sucked into the same attractor and so are virtually one and the same...
surprised no one has mentioned Bateson in all this spew
|
|
go-B
climber
Sozo
|
|
|
Oct 20, 2011 - 08:06am PT
|
1 Peter 1:13 Therefore, prepare your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
|
|
Sierra Ledge Rat
Social climber
Retired to Appalachia
|
|
|
Oct 20, 2011 - 08:43am PT
|
Since the beginning of time, people have been explaining things that they don't understand by attributing the phenomenon to God or some other mystical force in the universe.
In the end, advances in science and knowledge have always shown that these "phenomena" were not miracles of God or mystical forces - but natural occurrences.
Religious people - always the most ignorant - are still attributing the unexplained to God despite thousands of years of experience that proves they have always been wrong.
We may NEVER understand things about our universe. Our brain just may not be able to comprehend certain things. That doesn't mean that these "unexplainable" things are miracles of God or mystical forces.
You can't teach an earthworm about a shovel that "mystically" appears in his underground world. Simply because an earthworm can't even comprehend a shovel, does that mean that a shovel is a miracle of God?
If there is a God, He or She gave us a brain. Use it, people.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Oct 20, 2011 - 11:29am PT
|
The brain is simply a lump of matter, it does not have independent power with which to act.
Consciousness must first exists.
You guys have it backwards.
HFSC -- "The problem, however, is that no evidence for consciousness exists in the physical world."
Then that means you are dead stone.
Only an idiot would make a statement such as "there's no evidence for consciousness in the physical world."
|
|
MikeL
climber
|
|
|
Oct 20, 2011 - 12:23pm PT
|
It is more than a fleeting possibility that there are various stages of consciousness that tap into different human capabilities as they have emerged in the evolution of our species, as well as capabilities that have yet to show up for it as a whole. (That is, we could tap into yet unrealized, latent capabilities.)
There are other powerful forms of consciousness that have led to our development and survival: instincts, the unconscious, emotions, feelings, so-called "mythical" views, mental reasoning, etc.. Each presents a different kind of consciousness at-work. For example, even when we sleep without dreams, parts of the self are at work--and that is a kind of consciousness, too. (Some of these are psychological, spiritual, biological, physical, etc.)
However, in our current age and stage of consciousness, we exhibit a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's believed that one must obsolete and throw out the other. Today, if it cannot be measured, it doesn't really matter or maybe exist. This is science's perspective, and it has a validity that is qualitatively different than other kinds of consciousness. It is very productive and has exposed parts of reality in ways that are new and exciting.
Science has its place, but not the whole place, please. Not everything important can be explained, described, or manipulated with science or its mechanisms. Science is a tool, but art is also a tool, as is culture, religion, ethics, and so on. None of those latter topics show up clearly under the lens of science.
Why can't that be ok? Why does it have to be only one way or the highway? If any of us are current with contemporary times, then we know we live in a multicultural, pluralistic world. That is, there are many interpretations and perspectives about everything.
Give a child a small hammer, and you will find that everything he (especially a "he") encounters needs pounding. I think that's where we've gotten to with science.
Science has its place. Everything has a place. If we are looking for Truth with a capital T, I think science is not going to satisfy any of us for very long if we think deeply about it. We're not going to find long-standing incontrovertible conclusions about anything, and we're not going to find deep grounded (rock-bottom) meaning.
There is this story of a Chinese King who runs across a Cha'an Master (Zen). They share a meal and as the Master begins to walk away, the King asks the Master what is holding up the world. The Master says, a titan. Then the king says, but what holds up the Titan, and the Master says a big elephant. The king asks what holds up the elephant, and the Master says 4 big lions. The king asks what holds up the lions, and the Master says 4 really big turtles. The king begins to ask his next question, but the Master interrupts him: "You can hold it right there, King; it's turtles all the way down."
That's were we always seem to get to with science. There is always the next deeper explanation. We never get to the rock bottom of things. Don't you think that's significant?
Maybe we should quit trying to find the one answer and make room for them all. I understand it would be difficult, but that's what our minds can do: we can think about thinking and even go beyond thinking. At least that's what a few people suggested (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Buddha, Jesus, just to name a few.) There is a place for a critique of pure reason.
Just my 2 cents.
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
|
|
|
Oct 20, 2011 - 12:48pm PT
|
A fine soliloquy. Or preamble. If that's how it was meant.
If not, to whom are you speaking? For there are no advocates of "scientism" here - at least none whose posts are worth anything.
If you know of anyone who is "scientistic" in his thinking point him out and we shall in turn point out to him that science is incomplete. As you rightly say, it is only a tool.
As you know I'm sure, one can be a causalist or physicalist or materialist - however you prefer to say it - which does not in any way signify that science or scientific revelation or wisdom is complete in the sense of being all we need to get on in life or the "practice" of it.
My 2 cents.
.....
WB, get off my grass.
If you're going to quote me, get the quote right. Not to mention the context.
Are you sure you're up to these conversations? Silly monkey.
|
|
Sierra Ledge Rat
Social climber
Retired to Appalachia
|
|
|
Oct 20, 2011 - 02:09pm PT
|
Your "intuition" is a deep calculus by 100 trillion neuronal functions working in synergy - as mysterious as consciousness or sentience - but an (ani)material deep calculus nontheless.
I agree that this is probably correct.
That's were we always seem to get to with science. There is always the next deeper explanation. We never get to the rock bottom of things. Don't you think that's significant?
We will NEVER never get to the rock bottom of things because we don't have omipotent minds. The only significance of that fact is that we should always keep an open mind to the fact that there are things we will NEVER understand, and we shouldn't be running off shouting, "It's God's will!" everytime something happens that we don't understand.
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
|
|
|
Oct 20, 2011 - 02:48pm PT
|
Science is only a tool.
It can't tell us-
 if we should drop a bomb or send in another drone
how many times we should clone Angelina Jolie' or Alex Honnold or Bill Clinton or Carl Sagan
"what matters" in the practice of living or if you should go skiing or rockclimbing tomorrow
Then again, it is indubitably the #1 investigational tool for (a) revealing how the world works and for (b) revealing how life works in modern times.
Important to those who in turn want to collect these scientific revelations into systems of knowledge and in turn use these as firm grounding for their own "practice" of living going forward.
.....
It is unfortunate that religious institutions over the long sweep of history set forth their own claims regarding how the world works or how life works and that these claims - by and large bogus based on "not knowing the half of it" - were then institutionalized.
If religious institutions hadn't set forth these claims - so-called truth-claims - regarding worldworks or lifeworks - e.g., claims which come to mind like purgatory, limbo, afterlife or lifeafter, exorcism, flesh-independent life, world as a three-layer cake, Satan and demons as a cause of evil, God Jehovah's wrath as a cause of evil (i.e., bad turn events like earthquakes or floods) etc. etc. - then today we wouldn't have so many religious people not only around the world but right here in America (and even on this site) invested in these claims (or imprinted on them starting as children) - living their lives in such a funk.
Signs and wonders.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!