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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Nov 22, 2016 - 03:35pm PT
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If anyone has listened to the last third of the Frankish video... the best part in my opinion ... we should discuss it... Otherwise we would just be talking past each other per usual.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 22, 2016 - 05:30pm PT
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What then is the difference between "seeming to have" experience, and actually HAVING experience?
Why not take a crack at trying to honestly answer the question
It is the difference between a magician making it look like they are pulling a rabbit out of an empty top hat, versus CREATING a rabbit in the hat and then pulling it out.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Nov 22, 2016 - 07:37pm PT
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Ed: The major difficulty with using the word "metaphor" is that there is an intention when creating a literary metaphor, and that intention is different then the one employing a simile. It is a device used in writing, a tool of conveyance for ideas.
I think that’s how regular folks initially thought about it. But that notion changed with Ortony’s seminal 1975 article.
Why Metaphors Are Necessary and Not Just Nice
A Ortony - Educational theory, 1975 - Wiley Online Library
if you’re up to it, you can look at his compilation of how other thought about metaphor emerged from that point of insight in 1975.
(Lakoff and Johnson's work was only a tributary in that flow.)
[BOOK] Metaphor and thought
A Ortony - 1993 - books.google.com
(And many after and before that last one.)
Talk about what you’ve studied. Punters, please choose another venue.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 22, 2016 - 07:43pm PT
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Is there a continuum of consciousness, from unconscious to fully conscious, say from 0 to 1? Or is consciousness as described by a function discontinuous - a step in the function - at a critical point? And if there is such a function, does it vary over time, depending upon our age? Is it possible to assign a single function to many people, or would such a function depend upon the person?
Would this hypothetical function describe the spectrum of mental activity from the purely mechanical to the self-referential sense of "I"? Are "mind" and "consciousness" the same? I don't think so, for the mind works at below-conscious levels.
(I thought we had exhausted the subject of metaphors and moved on to zeugmae. Apparently not.)
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Nov 22, 2016 - 09:14pm PT
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In the Wright Frankish video, if one subs "perception" for "illusion" and "perceptual" for "illusory" it'll make even more sense.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Nov 22, 2016 - 09:24pm PT
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Interesting question jgill. Personally I think it is a continuum if allowed to happen naturally.
There's the unconsciousness of deep sleep, dreaming consciousness of REM, half consciousness of directed lucid dreaming, confused state consciousness when waking up in a strange place and trying to remember where you are, and there's the consciousness of waking up and OMG it's Monday again.
Of course there are abrupt transitions (dare I say quantum leaps?) that no one voluntarily chooses - being awakened by an alarm or someone screaming, having a really interesting dream interrupted and wondering what the outcome would have been. Worse yet, dreaming that you were solving an important research problem and then were awakened before the end. Trying to remember and unsuccessfully get to the same place with waking consciousness etc.
I do agree that mind lies below consciousness working away unnoticed for the most part.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 23, 2016 - 06:06pm PT
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there's the consciousness of waking up and OMG it's Monday again.
What is "Monday?"
And would the non-physical aspect of consciousness...[can't use words like continuous or discontinuous]?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 23, 2016 - 07:22pm PT
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Thank you.
It is said that if you don't use something for a year, you probably don't need it and could toss it and de-clutter your space. My mind appears to have adopted that program.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Nov 23, 2016 - 08:30pm PT
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Jgill:
Ugh. You’re so one-dimensional.
Is there a continuum of consciousness, from unconscious to fully conscious, say from 0 to 1?
Of / on what dimension? There are an infinite number of them, and that’s a narrow description. What dimension can your mind or any other mind conceive?
You don’t know the unlimitedness of your own consciousness.
What do you see? There’s your limits. There is your personal myth.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 23, 2016 - 09:08pm PT
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MikeL: Excellent misinterpretation. You have confused the state of consciousness with the object of consciousness. 0=unconscious, 1=fully alert. Are you conscious when you meditate? If not, then you've fallen asleep. Circle those infinite dimensions if you wish, but if you are aware of doing so you are probably >.8
Don't fret about it. Tononi's Phi Function is very complicated and advanced, but it's no better than my Consciousness Function. Neither applies as you spin through those astral planes. That's another function involving imaginary numbers and infinities.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 24, 2016 - 07:01am PT
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No more Mondays for you eh?
Funny, though, about the bad cheeseburger, because Tuesday is the one day I must be able to identify, because that is garbage pick-up day in our neighborhood. Since the municipality handed out bins and started a separate collection for food waste, I estimate they have made a pile big enough that the slide could reach you down in California if the crust moves up here.
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Nov 24, 2016 - 07:24am PT
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🎼
Feed the bears, tuppence a bin
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bin
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 24, 2016 - 09:05am PT
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I must be the only person in our neighborhood who has not seen the mother and three cubs. I have seen the photos people took on their phones of the bears in gardens, in front yards, and on the dog-walk trail. Lynn saw the bears coming toward her on the street as she was walking home, and she ran to the nearest house asking to be let in and watched through the hedge as the bears went by. We met a guy on the dog-walk who had seen the bears 10 minutes earlier.
The bears, like me, seem able to track one weekday. At my bus stop:
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 24, 2016 - 09:25am PT
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Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
So which is it?
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Nov 24, 2016 - 10:16am PT
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BUMP!
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 25, 2016 - 03:38pm PT
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When JL talks about the absurdity of attempting to scientifically dissect the experiential I more or less agree. In my book, to do that is akin to analysis and quantification of poetry, which of course destroys its very essence. Recently, we got off on a tangent discussing metaphors - that all of us enjoy in literature - that led ultimately to that list Andy linked of a bewildering array of categorizations, as far from mainstream appreciation as mathematical Category Theory - about which I am relatively ignorant and plan to remain so.
But, too often I think we confuse "What is Mind" with "What is Consciousness", and as Jan has noted mind is much deeper than consciousness. And so I present another purely descriptive mathematical function having only the vaguest form, with values defined from 0 to 1, with 0 being essentially non-functioning or dead and 1 somewhere up in the advanced experiential realm idolized by JL and MikeL.
Before you offer helpful criticism ("Ugh. You are so one-dimensional") let me explain a bit more. This function, or one-to one mapping, maps states of the mind to numbers in the interval [0,1]. The range of this function (included in the interval between 0 and 1) has an uncountably infinite number of values, so there is more than enough room to assign weird mental states (like empty awareness). For instance,s=empty awareness, M(s)= √(.987). An interesting question is how does M(s) relate to C(s)?
Fascinating isn't it? Easily as riveting IME as thousands of pages by Dennet and others. I'm ready to take on Tononi and bury his Phi Function!
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 25, 2016 - 03:54pm PT
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This function, or mapping, maps states of the mind to numbers in the interval [0,1].
Definitely more than enough room, there, but would it tell us anything about how one state changes to another?
To give an example, here is how the list of figures of speech came up.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/programs/northbynorthwest/saturday-november-12-1.3848489
The first few minutes are about the swans.
The next several minutes are a riff on figures of speech.
Then there is an interview with a man who had a stroke and he gives us a good look at how hard it is to know what your own mind "IS." A part of his brain died but he was not aware of some of what he was missing using just his own mind.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 25, 2016 - 04:06pm PT
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Forty years ago, one morning I decided to shave off my goatee, that I had had for years. The two kids at the breakfast table, girls ages 13 and 11, immediately noticed and I told them to keep mum when mom came downstairs to the table and sat down opposite me. Then one of them said, Mom, do you see any difference in dad? She looked up and said no. The other one asked the same question, persisting. Again, not really. Then they burst out laughing, which completely puzzled mom. Finally they told her and she said, Oh yes, I see! And was a tad embarrassed.
When we look at something very familiar what we "see" is a combination of what's there and an image from memory.
;>)
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 25, 2016 - 07:25pm PT
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I doubt it. The kids were typical agitated teens and my wife was very calm.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Nov 25, 2016 - 07:47pm PT
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your mind is very quiet then you'll see things as they are and not from memory.
There is a certain element of truth to that assertion. The more disciplined the mind the less the irrelevancies from previous experience are allowed to intrude. This amounts to a highly specialized state of mind characterized by a linear relationship to prior associations. Ordinary consciousness is more non-linear, by design, to facilitate survival in an often dangerous world. The more non-linear = the more consciousness resembles a grab bag of possible responses.
However all bets are off when quick action is required.
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