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TwistedCrank
climber
Ideeho-dee-do-dah-day boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom
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Aug 28, 2011 - 09:48pm PT
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"mind" is "headache"
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Mike Bolte
Trad climber
Planet Earth
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Aug 28, 2011 - 10:01pm PT
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my reaction was exactly the same as John's and I found it clever and ironic that he was so concise in his description
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Guernica
climber
the second star to the right
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Aug 28, 2011 - 10:04pm PT
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I'm surprised, HFCS- you seemed pretty open minded in the thread you started on psychedelics. Amit's position, "monistic idealism", doesn't seem particularly far-fetched and elegantly solves the mind/body paradox, at least to my amateur speculation.
To me, the notion that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter- the brain- just doesn't make sense intuitively. The closer we examine subatomic particles, the building blocks of the brain and all matter, the more ephemeral and strange things get. How could the cohesive narrative of a person's life experience be sustained by these little bits of flotsam and jetsam twinkling in and out of existence all the time? Easier for me to swallow that the material world is created and sustained by something much more subtle and powerful. What are your objections to the idea that consciousness is fundamental to matter?
To be clear, never formally studied this stuff just read and pondered a bunch.
edit... uh, corn spirit's post I was replying to seems to have disappeared...
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Aug 28, 2011 - 10:07pm PT
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^^^^hey q, that's pretty funny. everyone at berkeley then has a killer foucault story, each more entertaining than the next.
searle is back in fashion, these days. sort of. high structuralist (and post-structuralist) and post-quine brain-science-as-epistemology are having to fight uphill against all the "subjects are real" and "consciousness" people.
these days its kant and milton friedmann. and for the pop crowd, add in some esp and biblical prophecy.
i'm going to name a route, "Chinese Box."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 28, 2011 - 10:18pm PT
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Foucault, with his quirky homosexual rants while tromping through Death Valley with his band of Frog neo-strucuralists (wank), hammered on LSD, did nothing to establish him as a player in consciousness study. Searle is not my dood, but he raises the "hard questions" with clarity, and dismissed the common pat-answers to said questions.
When the "hard issues" of consciousness don't square with our particular discipline, we end up with simplistic quips like "brain output," which neither addresses or perhaps doesn't even recognize that the computational model of consciousness is a bust for a dozen reasons.
Perhaps the challenge is to tackle the hard issues head on without dismissing the questions if we don't understand and cannot measure same, insisting as scientism insists, that if we ain't quantifying, we're surly just bullshitting each other.
But rather than blast the people who put their ideas out there, I doubt there is much progress to be made by rejecting the hard issues (as straw man arguments = simplistic) and not tackling the questions with new perspectives or info. Otherwise it's just another circle jerk, and I'm out.
I'll do Kant with anyone here if that comes up. He had some interesting ideas but they changed over time making the old Kraut a slippery study.
JL
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Jingy
climber
Somewhere out there
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Aug 28, 2011 - 10:23pm PT
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What's that story in Quantum Theory that states that an observer ultimately influences the observed.
I think that there can be no meaningful science unless humans have nothing to do with it, and forgo interpretations of said observations.
Humans will find meaning in almost anything.
Just look no further than the bible for your "meaning".
If only us humans have made all meaning up entirely.
Meaning does not exist, it is what humans have ascribed to the things we have all around us. We see this, then this means this. We see this, then this means that. We see that, than it must mean this.
But if one takes a step back, and really observes objectively, then there is no meaning in any of it. There is just observation.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 28, 2011 - 10:24pm PT
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Amit Goswami now there's an intelligent man .....
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Aug 28, 2011 - 10:31pm PT
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I'll do Kant
i'm betting that's the first time anyone has said that on supertopo.
the return of kant has been one of the remarkable deals of the last thirty years. folks like stephen toulimin, steve fuller, and hacohen cohen have argued that many of the writers we think of as quintessentially hard-nosed empirical or rational anti-idealists-- from wittgenstein to popper to everyone in the vienna circle-- were really closet kantians.
toulmin's wittgenstein's vienna (1978) opened the flood gates. cohen's bio of popper has the best case. fuller has the most agressive claims.
and yeah, foucault didn't have much to contribute to the study of consciousness. aside from saying that it was a variety of priestcraft. much as i hate foucault, he has my sympathy on that claim.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Aug 28, 2011 - 11:03pm PT
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^^^^^i love foucault!
especially these days.
order of things is f*#kin brilliant. wrong, but brilliant.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Aug 28, 2011 - 11:35pm PT
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How does consciousness define itself?
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Aug 28, 2011 - 11:48pm PT
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heh, dr.f. has hit the nerve.
searle et al. want "consciousness" the be something that's more than special-- they want a qualitative rather than a merely quantitative line between other animals and humans called "consciousness."
"language" isn't good enough for john and the others.
at that point, you might start to suspect, as folks from foucault to dennett have argued, that "consciousness" is just a 21st century word for "soul."
nothing wrong with that, except that at that point you wander over into religion, faith, theology and priestcraft, rather than philosophy. all perfectly respectable behaviors, but not open to empirical testing.
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PhilG
Trad climber
The Circuit, Tonasket WA
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Aug 28, 2011 - 11:50pm PT
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May I share a somewhat simplistic, jaded perspective?
I work in a world (the ER) where people on a daily bases lose their "consciousness."
People lose their "minds" when their brains stop working. Sometimes their loss is so great that we have to provide machines to breath for them. Sometimes their loss of consciousness is minor and they are just confused about the date or who the President is.
From my perspective consciousness is the chemical reaction between the neurons in the synaptic cleft. Nothing more, nothing less.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Aug 28, 2011 - 11:51pm PT
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From my perspective consciousness is the chemical reaction between the neurons in the synaptic cleft. Nothing more, nothing less.
money
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Jingy
climber
Somewhere out there
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Aug 28, 2011 - 11:51pm PT
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"at what level is the mind of a lower life form considered consciousness?"
- Good question. Extended further "At what level is the mind of a higher life form considered consciousness?
I have to say... there are a few on this board that fit the lower life form definition, and their consciousness is well in doubt.
Much like myself, there are no correct answers.
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krahmes
Social climber
Stumptown
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Aug 29, 2011 - 12:36am PT
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Pattern recognition and language and I hope as Searle’s has hypothesized with a moment of quantum uncertainty as the kernel of the core.
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murcy
Gym climber
sanfrancisco
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Aug 29, 2011 - 12:38am PT
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klk is not a historian. he is a polymath, and knows more about parts of my specialties than i do.
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Patrick Oliver
Boulder climber
Fruita, Colorado
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Aug 29, 2011 - 12:42am PT
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I'm kind of simplistic, but consciousness to me is
tantamount to awareness. And all awareness is tied to
some or other sense of value. I mean, to look outward
at the night, one manner of mind might see only some flickering
light. Another higher consciousness sees something of
supreme value, something that signifies the vastness of
life and love, how infinitely we feel compared to what
we believe is possible to feel, and how infinitely
we don't know yet anticipate. The higher consciousness
looks deeper, in other words. Whether it be through the
tool of philosophy or of history or poetry or music, or
through plain reflection and response to the world around,
there is a level of feeling and appreciation, of
curiosity and search. We follow our own minds,
using the instruction of forest and air, carefully guided
until at moments we believe almost that we have followed
the right way into the only true living place. We know we are alive.
It is a mystery, all of it, and beauty is only diminished
by trying to pick it apart, to measure it in a scientific
way, or as Dylan once wrote, to "pluck apart the sound of
waves...." Simply, at times the moon is right. The smell
and feel of rock envelop a climber, on some otherwise
silent and empty-seeming tower of another day. We sometimes
must simply breathe, and we learn in ways we cannot speak. We
go on seeing something everywhere, where dreams flow together
in a new reality that appears always to be taking shape....
We are alert to whispers and gestures, attuned to powers,
as the poet W.S. Merwin would say. Children, we hope to be the heir
of every secret. Each hour we go farther into the dream, into
the clouds and rain, and along the distance a caravan of friends
we admire for their kindred sense of adventure through the days and nights.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Aug 29, 2011 - 12:48am PT
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heh, murcy, yr just dodging--
start posting some real content in this thread and ill buy the heritage rye
im thinkin potrero green cask.
not like i can actually get my hands on any, but whatever.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Aug 29, 2011 - 12:49am PT
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Each hour we go farther into the dream
nice, i like that
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john hansen
climber
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Aug 29, 2011 - 12:58am PT
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I had a strange expereriance coming out of sedation from dental surgery..
My mind was fully aware, but the world was just a white void...
I was thinking while I slowly came to,,is this my new reality? I would exist in this reality forever...
Like suspended animation..
Slowly, after 10 or 12 min, I realized I was in the dentist office looking up at the florescent lights in the ceiling.
It was strange, my mind was completely aware but my body did not exist.
It was kind of fun....
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