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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 22, 2011 - 01:44am PT
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Tom, I found the experience you reported of dissociation and re-association to be fascinating to think about as you picked a time to recall those events coincident with my wrestling with the idea of how we learn to have a "body centric" view point... obviously we posses the ability to abstract the "location of our consciousness" elsewhere.
MH2's discussion on the role of the cerebellum and on the possibility of sensorimotor images further begs the question, where does our sense of association with the body come from?
Certainly the dissociative experience is common, though not frequent and often thought to be induced by some extraordinary event.
As for the "end of physics" who could possibly predict such a thing... it has been done before, once I heard it in the seminar room at Columbia U. by a distinguished Princeton Prof. who should really have known better. But his reasoning wasn't entirely incorrect at the time, he could not foresee the advances that theory and experiment made to overcome his assumptions. So while I too have some concerns about String Theory, et al., if it is physics, it will succumb to empirical tests, that may take some time to happen.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Nov 22, 2011 - 01:58am PT
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http://www.astronomynotes.com/scimethd/s7.htm
Is the Scientific Method the Only Way to Truth? Must science assume some ideas dogmatically? Must we assume that the scientific method, a synthesis of reason and experience, is the only avenue to truth? The mystics claim that some simple acts of knowing cannot be described by an objective language. Consider the experience of seeing a death on the highway. Does a cold scientific description, ``the cause of the cessation of bodily function was due to a rapid deceleration,'' accurately convey the truth? What about our own deaths? There seems to be much more to the truth that we will die someday than can be described in the statement ``I am mortal.'' Are there subjective truths that cannot be described in an objective language?
Ideas Change, Physical Laws Do Not
Most scientists today accept an assumption that can be traced to the ancient Greeks: Whatever they are, the basic truths of the universe are ``laws'' that do not change—only our ideas about them do. Scientific objectivity presupposes that there is one truth, a collective truth, and our personal beliefs or the beliefs of scientists of a particular time either match these truths or they do not. Most scientists assume that beliefs about what is real do not affect what is real. Truth results only when our beliefs about what is real correspond to what is real.
Perception Changes Reality?
This traditional assumption may not, however, be essential to science. Some quantum physicists have proposed that the points of view implied by our experiments can affect the nature of reality: instead of assuming that there is only reality, there can be ``complementary'' realities. And reputable physicists and medical researchers are not only reexamining this traditional scientific assumption, but also are wondering candidly if a person's state of mind may have a bearing on whether he or she is prone to diseases such as cancer and whether cures and remissions are possible using a mental therapy. The belief that there is only one reality can itself be subjected to scientific scrutiny. There could be multiple realities or none at all! Even if controversial, these ideas are at least discussed.
Value of Examining Assumptions
Although we may be caught at any given time within a web of many assumptions, science at its best does not rely on many assumptions. Science also assumes that the more we think critically about our beliefs, the more likely we are to know the truth. There are cynics, however, who believe that critical thinking is not a marvelous human characteristic at all. They argue that critical thinking makes life more complicated and distracts us from discovering the simple solutions to life's problems. There are also nihilists who argue that our so-called intelligence and our ability to be aware of the details of the universe are an evolutionary dead end, that far from producing the good life, our awareness and rationality are the cause of our craziness.
Defenders of science often argue that even if some assumptions are necessary in the application of scientific method, these assumptions are validated by the record of success. However, there is a major logical problem with this justification. It simply raises the problem of induction again. It is circular reasoning to attempt to vindicate inductive reasoning by asserting that so far inductive reasoning has worked, because this vindication itself is an inductive argument. It is logically possible for the scientific method to completely fail tomorrow even though it has been successful for centuries. Is it reasonable to continue to believe in the scientific method as helpful for our future? Can science be self-corrective? Philosophers believe these abstract questions are important because they are intimately related to our more personal concerns about who we are, where we have come from, and what may be in store for us in terms of the survival of our species on this fragile fragment of the universe.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 22, 2011 - 02:30am PT
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I'm not sure why Largo is misrepresenting what I am saying, intentionally and repeatedly, as if by going over the same argument again and again I will have to cave in and say the scientific method for understanding mind is wrong.
--
Ed continually accuses me of misrepresenting him, when all I am saying is: If Ed is the materialist he claims, it follows that all things "real" are material. Since no one here would dare say their fundamental human reality (1st person experience) is unreal, then experience itself must be material. NOT the mechanism some believe CAUSES experience, but our very subjective reality.
I ask - quantify that experience. No answer.
Okay. Than at least contrast experience with objective functioning. Is there a difference? Is the experience of being Ed the selfsame as a blueprint for a VW? What human amongst us cannot tell the difference between the experience of getting up in the morning and that VW blueprint? Most all of us can tell the difference, though none of us can prove it with numbers. Is that the fault of experience, or the shortcoming of measuring?
But again, what is the difference between being Ed and that blueprint? Is there a difference? If we cannot quantify or prove the difference with numbers, is that proof that there is no difference, that the two must be the same, since anything real is quantifiable?
I am not purporting any idea or method or belief. These are merely simple, common sense questions. Science is great at quantifying, which in one sense is establishing the difference between things and devising a formula and numerical representation for what a thing is. So what IS the difference between the experience of having a thought, and belay anchor? And how might Ed numerically represent both discrete "things?"
Though Ed says he is not a proponent of scientism, he also defers from answering what he believes are the limitations of quantifying in the investigation of mind, as opposed to any other method. Of course Ed believes only in purely mechanistic explanations. Therefor only measuring is of any value to Ed, since nothing else will satisfy his prerequisite (mechanistic materialism). Though Ed argues otherwise through reasonable sound bites, the approach just described is quentessential scientism. There's one answer and only one answer, i.e., a set of measurements, and these measurements and only these measurements describe all people, places and things. Yet where are the measurements that describe the experience of falling out of an offwidth crack? All you'll ever hear from Ed on this simple question is another deflection to physical functioning, leaving the original question either unanswered or ridiculed as immaterial.
The great shortcoming of this mindset is that direct questions like - What is the qualitative difference between objective functioning and subjective experience can never be discussed without explaining away or reframing the question.
Then Ed tells me that "my method" of investigating mind has never provided any results, but he fails to mention that by "results" he simply means measurements, since Ed doesn't accept or quite possibly doesn't know there are other results beyond superficial physical charicteristics or the magical, Frankienstein thinking whereby atomic activity "produces" experience.
Fact is, anyone who's grappled with experience and consciousness from within, knows that quantifying can only frame objective functioning. How could it be otherwise? These limitations are never owned by Ed. He simply pushes the conversation back toward measuring, then says I am married to a model that produces no results (numbers). Anyone who cannot recognize this circle is simply not paying attention, IMO.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 22, 2011 - 11:45am PT
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so with that response, Largo, please answer the question 'What is 'Mind?'"
I'm all ears...
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 22, 2011 - 11:54am PT
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Yes here we come back to the original crux.
"What is 'Mind?'"
Not endless mental speculative theoretical drool.
And don't go saying nobody knows since you don't know.
That's as stupid as me saying "Americans ARE stupid"
:-)
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MH2
climber
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Nov 22, 2011 - 12:28pm PT
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What is mind is, to me, another way of asking, what is experience.
Good. What is experience? That is a question I don't mind trying to answer. I don't know for sure which definition or interpretation of the word 'experience' is meant, here, but I'll hazard a guess based on the lengthy history of posts about this subject from the one who asked the question.
Experience is our real-time awareness of everything we are capable of being aware of. Examples of what we are capable of being aware of include sights, sounds, smells, touch, sensations internal to the body, moods, memories, emotions, mental dialogue with ourselves, ideas at the center of our attention and thoughts flitting through the shadows at the edge of the circle of light. There are other examples. Our experience is very dependent on context. Drinking the same glass of water will be a very different experience to a person who gets out of bed in the morning and turns on the tap, compared to the person who has been out in hot desert for days with no water. Experience is also highly individual. No two people have exactly the same life history. One person's experience of the color red may be affected by a red toy they had long ago. Another person's experience of color may be affected by some form of color-blindness or by the fact that for that person, color crosses boundaries and may be accompanied by a smell or sound. Experience and memory interact, in that fleeting experience can become long-term memory and memory can inflect fleeting experience.
That is an answer to the question of what experience is. I think a similar answer could have been given 2,000 years ago. My impression is that the person who asked the question doesn't wish to take the answer any further.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 22, 2011 - 01:14pm PT
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I'm guessing of the third sense... seems that the first and second senses seem too close to science...
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/experience
ex·pe·ri·ence noun \ik-ˈspir-ē-ən(t)s\
Definition of EXPERIENCE
1a : direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge
b : the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation
2a : practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity
b : the length of such participation (has 10 years' experience on the job)
3a : the conscious events that make up an individual life
b : the events that make up the conscious past of a community or nation or humankind generally
4 : something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through
5 : the act or process of directly perceiving events or reality
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 22, 2011 - 01:25pm PT
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Ed asks: What is mind? After all, that was the original question . . .
As we have seen, over 1,000s of posts, no one is totally satisfied with any one description of, or approach to, the subject of mind. Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, cybernetics, AI, computation/engineering schools, physics, et al, all have proprietary interpretations, specific to their approach and MO. As with religious sects, we typically see each camp claiming a kind of “favored nation” hegemony per their own descriptions, which quite naturally best meet their preexisting criteria about what an “answer” should and must be. Few camps are conscious that their approach itself is limited relative to ANY other approaches.
And yet while both the physicist and the Baptist preacher are existentially certain that their principal reality is being themselves, is the very experience of being born, moving through time in a particular body, and dying, and all that entails, that EXPERIENCE is so dastardly hard to explain. Can mind become an object of itself from within experience? If we should one day completely understand brain processes, would this understanding account for intelligence, emotion, volition, and experience itself. If so, how, since brain processes concern objective functioning, not the qualities just mentioned? These are old questions danced around for generations – and they won’t go away.
Mind is fundamental to us, but our understanding of mind itself, the very experience of mind, is largely subjective and intuitive. And the clear elucidation an any intuitive understanding is thorny because it requires us relate subjective first-person experience in objective third-person language.
The scientific/physicalist descriptions of mind equates mind with neuronal activity, as does the functionalist view of psychology. Such approaches divide and divide some more and entail a great deal of abstraction, much of it imposed since there are no clear boundaries between many of the functions involved. But the more serious “hard problem” is that measuring (scientific definitions) completely ignore our fundamental reality - conscious experience and its subjective qualities, which are not so easy to frame as quantifiable “things” in the physical world.
How, for instance, can the experience of love, which most everyone knows by heart, be described by physical structures and processes without the daffy default of collapsing it all into one, measurable thing? Is quantifying capable of explaining mind at all. Does a purely subjective description get us any closer to knowing, to answering Ed’s question?
As has been said for ages, a materialist notion of mind is possibly too limited for a general philosophical discourse by virtue of looking at only one side of the coin – the materialistic. Metaphysical, ontological, and phenomenological accounts of mind are simply written off as blarney since none are quantifiable, and only quantifying is valid, real, rational and authentic (scientism).
Anyway, for me, a definition of mind moves in the opposite direction from dividing and abstracting and gets infinitely inclusive. This means that “mind” is not a “thing” in the normal sense of the word because there are no edges to delineate.
What first comes to mind is the German word "Geist." Strictly speaking, Geist means mind and spirit. In my “mind’ we can change “mind” to material/objective, and “spirit” to “experience,” and loose nothing essential in the translation. So for me, “mind” is the all and everything – and nothing - is unborn and eternal. The meat brain is finite material and subjective experience is a finite human manifestation of an infinite quality.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 22, 2011 - 01:44pm PT
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“mind” is the all and everything – and nothing - is unborn and eternal
End-Of-Thread
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Nov 22, 2011 - 03:12pm PT
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As for the "end of physics" who could possibly predict such a thing
I have heard more than one physics professor make this odd statement, that roughly speaking all is now known. Couldn't believe my ears.
End-Of-Thread
Surely you jest!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 22, 2011 - 04:03pm PT
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jogill: been around this a zillion times by now, Largo wants to paint me as a materialist...
If Ed is the materialist he claims, it follows that all things "real" are material. Since no one here would dare say their fundamental human reality (1st person experience) is unreal, then experience itself must be material. NOT the mechanism some believe CAUSES experience, but our very subjective reality.
I am not claiming to be a materialist, I'm claiming to be a physicalist...
What is real? a physicalist would claim that approximate reality is a set of physical relationships and attributes of the material which composes the universe.
Please note the use of the word "approximate" which recognizes our finite ability to observe the universe. Please also note that "physical relationships" means the logical structure of how this all gets put together, including the observation of things that are not material. Because our observations are finite, our physical theories are provisional.
To make a simple example: temperature is not material, but it is a physical quantity that arises out of the interactions of lots of atoms. It's origin is the interactions of all these things, but it has no material presence itself. The other variables, pressure and volume for instance, are related to temperature, these relationships are described by thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is quite real, but it is not material, and it has no fundamental manifestation in the material of the universe, no attributes of temperature, pressure, volume exist in the description of atoms... yet all of those things can be used to predict how material, gas, liquid, solid, will behave. It is predictive, it is quantitative, but it does not exist, itself, as "material" or as an attribute of "material."
If Largo cannot understand that, it is not surprising he cannot understand the more subtle case physicalist use in explaining phenomena like "mind." And if he won't understand, then there is no point in continuing to try to explain it to him...
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 22, 2011 - 05:34pm PT
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temperature is not material
That's not true.
It's material.
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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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Nov 22, 2011 - 05:41pm PT
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i had the best thought to add,
really i did.
just a second...
where'd i put that genius?
hold on...
it's here somewhere....
stay with me..
it was all the right answers...
shite im freakin...
cant find it.
fvck.
nevermind.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 22, 2011 - 05:47pm PT
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WBraun your response explains a lot...
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 22, 2011 - 05:50pm PT
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" ... matter manifested in different elements, namely earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intelligence and false ego."
From fire, (which is matter), you get temperature
Really simple.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 22, 2011 - 06:43pm PT
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If Largo cannot understand that, it is not surprising he cannot understand the more subtle case physicalist use in explaining phenomena like "mind." And if he won't understand, then there is no point in continuing to try to explain it to him...
---
I think the fun I have with you Ed is that you honestly believe - or appear to believe - that per all things "mind," you have the obligation and responsibility of any scientist to set us straight and to "explain it" to all of us hayseeds. Of course what is being explained is something too subtle for a lug like me to fully grasp.
Go figure. Literally . . .
The many questions that I have put to you and the entire physicalist/reductionist camp, and which you have so far totally dodged, have to do with establishing criteria that undercuts the veracity of your argument of which the most recent is temperature. My contention is that the relation of mind to matter (brain) is qualitatively and quantitatively NOT AT ALL the same as the relationship of temperature to matter. How so?
Temperature is a physical property of matter that quantitatively expresses the common notions of hot and cold. Basically, temperature, in it's common usage, is just another measurement. When someone asks what the temp is on Mt. Watkins in direct August sunlight, you are given - you betcha' - a number. Said number is the temp. You can define temperature any number of ways but without an actual number you don't have a "thing," but a spectrum. And a physicalist can only get traction with a "thing" that renders a figure, however broad. Simple as that.
Experience, as any schoolboy can tell us, also has "no material presence itself," but quite unlike your example with temperature, experience is NOT itself a quantifiable physical property of matter. You might believe that the evolved brain "transmits" mind like a kind of super amplifier, but nobody in their right mind would step forward and say that experience and the brain are the selfsame things, just as no scientist would say "temperature" and Mt. Watkins in direct sunlight are selfsame things.
You can go into any number of examples per the physical properties of matter - from temp to gravity to (fill in the blank) - and all of them are measurable by some means and their relationship to matter is not remotely the same as the relationship of experience to matter. This was so obviously true that most leading theorists studying consciousness abandoned a facile reductionist explanation of mind as early as 1970.
The physical property model can of course never get at mind because while
things like temperature and gravity are themselves qualtifiable physical effects derived from and clearly exhibited in matter (white hot, warped space, etc.) experience has no numerical representation and does not in and of itself alter matter like temp or gravity. But this can go on and on.
It might be instructional to at least attempt to answer a couple of the questions I raised earlier.
1. Science is geared to differentiate the differences between "things" with remarkably accurate measurements (the difference in speed between a nutrino and a photon, for example). Using this model, contrast the difference between matter as matter, physical/quantitative properties of matter (temp, et al), and experience as experience (subjective, NOT objective).
2. Subjective experience alone has limitations in investigating actual, objective functioning (QM, special R, etc.). What do you see as the limitations of objective quantifying per investigating actual subjective experience. Contrast the differences per the limitations of both approaches.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 22, 2011 - 07:07pm PT
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Temperature is a physical property of matter
where does it reside, given that matter is composed of atoms... can you point to it?
in fact, can you show, from the collection of atoms, which of them are in the gaseous state, the liquid state or the solid state?
even a hayseed like you could do that I reckon...
I agree that temperature is physical, I don't agree that it is located in anything, but your explanation of the above will set me straight, I'm sure.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 22, 2011 - 07:57pm PT
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LOL we've been called yokels, a simple, unsophisticated person.
Most likely I am.
But definitely not Largo ....
Materially intoxicated would be a hayseed .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 22, 2011 - 08:06pm PT
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Largo self identified, read his post above, I never called anyone a hayseed or yokel, I've been careful not to use that sort of language, but if Largo wants to be so identified, I'll comply
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 22, 2011 - 08:09pm PT
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I know Ed.
I thought it was funny.
Don't worry Ed you're good man no matter what.
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