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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Dec 11, 2011 - 06:23pm PT
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Each predator has its strengths.
Ours is our mind.
.....
Then again, time will tell if its heading us up a box canyon.
I hope not, we are an amazing species.
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part-time communist
climber
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Dec 11, 2011 - 06:37pm PT
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I would say consciousness is actually counter-productive and harmful in the evolutionary framework, considering mental illness and disorder.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Dec 11, 2011 - 08:19pm PT
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After all these posts, I think I'll stay with the efforts to (continue to) acculturate to the evolutionary mindbrain model (aka meatbrain model) of consciousness. Sure it's got its cruxes or briar patches (relative to the conventional thinkings) but it's also got great explanatory power for forging ahead in one's practice of living and for breaking new ground in thinking concerning our modern day complexities, challenges, pursuits, etc..
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 11, 2011 - 08:42pm PT
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Like what new grounds?
The mind is already perfect. What more are you gonna do to screw yours up.
You either ride the horse by controlling the reins and be it's master or you ride the horse out of control (the horse controls you) as you have lost the reins, (lost your mind).
Life is very simple to understand ....
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Dec 11, 2011 - 09:45pm PT
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Like what new grounds?
C'mon, man, you know what I mean, modern science and the Scientific Story have opened up all kinds of new thinking regarding who we are, why we are, our place in the Cosmos. And that's just for starters. It's also opened up all this new ground for thinking about how to live our lives including how we should live our lives taking into account others and our needs, wants and dreams. I for one am thankful for this new ground. At once unsettling but also exciting.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 11, 2011 - 09:58pm PT
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All that stuff is already being done. It's going on already since time immemorial in different versions cyclically.
(Spinning wheels)
This thread is "What is Mind"
So what is the "Mind" not that losing your mind and focus.
You're all over the place and have no clue what "Mind" is and instead you're preparing a "new way of thinking".
You don't even have a clue who you really are. You just let your "Mind" mental speculate and tell you according to the interactions with your senses of which your mind is one of them.
WHO ARE YOU .........
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MH2
climber
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Dec 11, 2011 - 10:01pm PT
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Kant made a distinction between sensation and perception. Sensation is the indiscriminated field of incoming sensory data only, and perception are those sensations that an individual chooses (by will or by circumstantial predilection) to become aware of and to integrate within ideas and associations. For Kant consciousness was defined as arising out of perception.
Do you think this can help us to understand the Original Post and occasional theme of this thread? Is Largo talking about sensation or perception? (When he claims that experience cannot be measured, or that it cannot be reduced to "objective 3rd person quantifying.) I have trouble understanding what Largo is asking about, or trying to say, but perhaps others understand better.
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part-time communist
climber
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Dec 11, 2011 - 10:04pm PT
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Kant made a distinction between sensation and perception. Sensation is the indiscriminated field of incoming sensory data only, and perception are those sensations that an individual chooses (by will or by circumstantial predilection) to become aware of and to integrate within ideas and associations. For Kant consciousness was defined as arising out of perception.
yes, but how does that^ mean this:
then consciousness does not play a role in the primary awareness of death.
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part-time communist
climber
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Dec 11, 2011 - 10:06pm PT
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Do you think this can help us to understand the Original Post and occasional theme of this thread? Is Largo talking about sensation or perception? (When he claims that experience cannot be measured, or that it cannot be reduced to "objective 3rd person quantifying.) I have trouble understanding what Largo is asking about, or trying to say, but perhaps others understand better.
What is meant here, is commonly understood as the qualitative properties of experiences, vs. the quantitative.
:Largo is talking about perception
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part-time communist
climber
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Dec 11, 2011 - 10:26pm PT
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This might help you understand it better:
Take one of those pictures that when you look at it up close, you see individual pigments of color. But when you stand back and look at the picture at a distance, it suddenly portrays something-like a human face, or a horse prancing in the meadow.
The picture we see when we stand back is seen as an "emergent property" of the picture-when analyzing the component parts (the pigments of color and how they are arranged) we don't really get the "big picture". We can't see what the picture shows upon closer, more mechanistic inspection.
Consciousness can be sorta seen as that "emergent property".
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Dec 11, 2011 - 10:40pm PT
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we don't really get the "big picture"
...in its fullness. About this I think we ALL agree... you, me, Werner, all.
Just how much human perception (a) gets in the way or (b) helps or (c) both is the big $64M question that will probably remain safe and secure in DMT's "whitespace" for a long time to come. Perhaps just as well, who really knows.
Everybody can probably recall that great oft-repeated Haldane quote. Much truth in it, methinks.
.....
Certainly consciousness in all its forms is an emergent property for those who support the mindbrain model.
But we are Americans, too, which means we live in a culture comprised of umpteen millions upon millions who imagine consciousness in the old way - like the Sarah Palins, Anne Grahams (Billy Graham's daughter), Pat Robertsons and Rick Santorums (likely our next Rep Party VP candidate): a blessing from God (Jehovah) ensouled in the body, ultimately immortal bound either for heaven or hell; and at base free of any material, physics and chemistry, causality...
And sometimes we wonder why there is so much discord in the thinking and believing and sociopolitics across the country, eh? Add this one to the mix. :)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 11, 2011 - 11:39pm PT
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Is Largo talking about sensation or perception? (When he claims that experience cannot be measured, or that it cannot be reduced to "objective 3rd person quantifying.) I have trouble understanding what Largo is asking about, or trying to say, but perhaps others understand better.
Ultimately I am not talking about perception, per se, because perception is just another cloud floating in the sea of emptiness. Whatīs more, perception tends to be viewed or considered as a function, a kind of scanning agent, when in fact we are not with qualia ... the elements of our experience . . . in that way, rather we are present with them. If you settle with your own experience yo will see this working at a very subtle level. In the same wordless way a dog can be present with us, we are present with our experience without being separate from it. There is watching, but the watcher is an evolutionary, provisional construct for survival. People new to meditation are often anxious to have so-called enlightenment experiences but if by some accident their "I" goes offline for even a minute they lose their freaking minds.
The Kantian stuff is fascinating. But itīs midnight here in Venezuela and Iīll to tired to dig into it. One of the difficult things about Kant is that he subtly changed meanings on things as he went along. But his idea that we never really encounter a thing-in-itself is a fascinating thing to explore.
So far as the last thing goes - "that experience cannot be measured, or that it cannot be reduced to "objective 3rd person quantifying," this is not so hard a thing to grasp, and the confusing comes from lumping brain function and experience together, or rather, to consider them as qualitatively the same thing.
The qualitative difference is the whole story here. If you try and force the issue and frame the quantitative aspect of experience itself, you cannot. People balk at this because their world view or belief system has room only for the quantifiable. That leads them to consider experience in 3rd person objective terms so in that way experience IS matter and qualitative factors are deemed hokum. Of course this is only a mental construct kept in place by brute stubborness. Nearly every choice we make is owning to both qualitative and quantitative factors.
JL
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Dec 12, 2011 - 07:06am PT
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Well Largo. I let you go. Now I'm back.
You say "because perception is just another cloud floating in the sea of emptiness"
You know Largo, every word you have uttered is now floating around in the sea of emptiness. And you are repeating the same empty point over and over and over again. There are now loads upon loads of your words drifting around in the sea of emptiness, and you are still continuing your rap of repetition. What is driving you?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Dec 12, 2011 - 11:45am PT
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jbs haldane
"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine."
"Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
Indeed.
.....
From the evolutionary sciences (incl e psych), the claim is our mindbrains are evolved learning machines precisely as healyje and others touched on earlier, evolved to cope with a complex dangerous environment (yes, chock-full of "occupational hazards") long enough to mature and reproduce.
Now the big question - is this understanding anything (not just the individuals of the future but) the social groups of the future can build on? -of course, without piling on all this pretense and fantasy and hyperbole (advanced by some as necessary in order) to satiate needful, desperate if not depressed egos...
If the Sarah Palins to Tim Tebows (the latest "Chosen One") to the Duggar and bin Ladin families of the present era are any indication the odds appear slim to none.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 12, 2011 - 12:03pm PT
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Mind and brains are matter that consciousness works thru.
This shows that we are not the mind and brain.
Mind and brain by themselves can not do anything without the help of the superior self.
A robot can not even begin the simplest tasks without the superior consciousness of the creator first.
You should know that as by the application of the written firmware.
And who wrote this universal firmware that applies to every living entity ......
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MH2
climber
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Dec 12, 2011 - 12:33pm PT
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Thanks, part-time communist. I believe Largo is mostly talking about perception. There is a famous account of trying to remove the filters our brain commonly uses and perceive things as an infant might, simply by looking and seeing and experiencing with no associated thought.
Meditation was tried but didn't work. Mescaline did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors_of_Perception
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 12, 2011 - 01:02pm PT
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And you are repeating the same empty point over and over and over again. There are now loads upon loads of your words drifting around in the sea of emptiness, and you are still continuing your rap of repetition. What is driving you?
Your frustration here is almost certainly that you have an idea in your head about the way you want reality to conform and if doesnīt work out that way, then something and someone MUST be terribly wrong.
What people want me to say is that mind is just this, just this thing that has this and that feature which causes this and that and itīs all the outcome of this evolved brain and that that here are the measurements that explain EVERYTHING so well that the map and the figures are so comprehensive that they ARE experience itself. Almost. You see itīs all just a huge bio machine that has these neat mega processing and discursive capacities and by way of triple mirrors we project a self out there on a kind internal digital monitor and an emergent awareness jumps off the atoms and cha cha cha.
Now the reason I am not saying this is that such talk and such an approach are perfectly suited for objective functioning, but have limited value for subjectrive experience itself. Kindly show me otherwise. Youīre explanation will revert back to objective functioning as sure as Iīm going to send you back to that corner.
There are two non-starters here. One, many people are totally loath to admit that quantifying has ANY limitation per investigating reality. And second, the idea that subjective experience must be approached on itīs own terms, is something many believe cannot be accomplished with any success. This belief is so strong in some that people like Dr. F are certain that no one in the history of ALL spiritual programs, since the beginning of time, have ever been anything but entirely deluded. Entirely. Every last one. Otherwise, they could serve up proof (measurements), right.
In many circles, quantifying has become the new God, whereby it is expected to explain EVERYTHING. The fact that we might be expecting too much from one approach is balked at with the same vigor some defend the infallibility of the biblical text.
These are some of the delusions and challenges I see with this subject.
JL
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Dec 12, 2011 - 01:07pm PT
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Interesting that MH2 should mention Huxley at this moment as I have just started a book by Huston Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals, about his mescaline experiences with Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Richard Alpert as part of a Harvard Study in the 1960's.
One of the major impressions Smith had on his first trip was that he could see the inside of his mind at work and it was very similar to what healeyje surmises it to be. Smith said he could see at least five horizontal layers, but thought there were more, and that they were all interconnected in a dense net of glowing neurons.
He could see this at the same time he could participate in several other conversations both within and without his head - the ultimate multi-tasking. He drew the conclusion that consciousness was that which tied all these disparate levels and pieces together into a kind of coherence.
Smith had his Ph.D. in philosophy at the time of his first mescaline experience and by the time it was over, he had decided to specialize in religion instead and went on to write the first non polemical comparative religion text which is still the standard in text in university classes on comparative religion.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Dec 12, 2011 - 03:50pm PT
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Largo
You say: "Your frustration here is almost certainly that you have an idea in your head about the way you want reality to conform and if doesnīt work out that way, then something and someone MUST be terribly wrong."
Answer:
There is no frustration. I am only observing your behaviour from time to time seeing no development and you are the "owner" of this thread. Your mind is leading you astray when you conclude that frustration is driving me.
You say:
"What people want me to say is that mind is just this, just this thing that has this and that feature which causes this and that and itīs all the outcome of this evolved brain and that that here are the measurements that explain EVERYTHING so well that the map and the figures are so comprehensive that they ARE experience itself. Almost. You see itīs all just a huge bio machine that has these neat mega processing and discursive capacities and by way of triple mirrors we project a self out there on a kind internal digital monitor and an emergent awareness jumps off the atoms and cha cha cha."
Answer:
I don't want you or anybody else to say that man or the brain is a machine. I would use the words bio organism to describe man better. Models can be made but the models will never be the brain itself. But I think in the future some of the processes of the brain will be modelled better and better. Models of the brain will by approximation describe the brain and the connection between brain and mind better and better. But the description will never be experience in itself. The map will never be the landscape.
What is strange to me is that you seem to be insisting that the human mind is in principle unapproachable by scientific method. Is that one of the points you are trying to make?
You say:
"Now the reason I am not saying this is that such talk and such an approach are perfectly suited for objective functioning, but have limited value for subjective experience itself. Kindly show me otherwise."
Aswer:
You say "such talk". Is what Ed or Healyje has said easily summarized into the words "such talk"?
And of course objective description of subjective experience has limited value for subjective experience. Perfect objective description of subjective experience would just be a repetition of subjective experience and what value has that for the individual. Who claims otherwise? But to learn more about what's happening during subjective experience could be of value in other contexts.
You say:
"Your explanation will revert back to objective functioning as sure as Iīm going to send you back to that corner."
Answer:
I know you will say that. No problem to me since that's just the way of the wind.
You say:
"There are two non-starters here. One, many people are totally loath to admit that quantifying has ANY limitation per investigating reality."
Answer:
Quanitifying will always have limitations, but the limitations are not set one time and forever. The ability to quantify or approach by scientific method is getting better and better. Just study the history of science and see how speculative thought/philosophical delusions have been corrected and ended up as scientific knowledge at a later time.
You say:
"And second, the idea that subjective experience must be approached on itīs own terms, is something many believe cannot be accomplished with any success."
Answer:
I guess you are here showing us your own ideology when you say that "subjective experience must be approached on itīs own terms". The important word is MUST. I think you see no possibility of a better and better scientific description of what is happening during subjective experience. You have on an ideological basis excluded this possibility from your world of thoughts. I am not saying that subjective experience cannot be approached by the individual him-/herself. That is and will without doubt always be the most important part of approaching subjective experience for the individual. But to exclude the possibility of a better and better scientific description of what is happening during subjective experience is to me nonsense.
You say:
"This belief is so strong in some that people like Dr. F are certain that no one in the history of ALL spiritual programs, since the beginning of time, have ever been anything but entirely deluded. Entirely. Every last one. Otherwise, they could serve up proof (measurements), right."
Answer:
I will not speak for Dr.F. He can speak for himself.
You say:
"In many circles, quantifying has become the new God, whereby it is expected to explain EVERYTHING. The fact that we might be expecting too much from one approach is balked at with the same vigor some defend the infallibility of the biblical text."
Answer:
I have no new God. I am not claiming science can explain everything. I am not excluding the great importance of subjective experience. But I also find it highly probable that what is happening during subjective experience will be better and better described through discoveries made by help of scientific method. The discription will never be the thing though. The description of what happens during subjective experience will never be the subjective experience itself.
I think you are the one having a God, Largo. You have excluded the possibility of a better and better scientific description of what is happening during subjective experience. Your God is 1st person subjective experience and that it must ONLY be approached on itīs own terms. And "on it's own terms" I read as "not through the use of scientific method"
These are some of the common views and challenges I see with this subject.
And you know, I am at present not holding you accountable for the loads of empty words drifting around in the empty sea. I am not holding you accountable for your own words. I have accepted your change of perspective. I will sooner or later return to the drifting words.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 12, 2011 - 04:54pm PT
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Jivatam = soul ie living entity us
1. The jīvātmā is the elementary unit of consciousness.
2. There are innumerable jīvātmās, and they can be neither created
nor destroyed.
3. All jīvātmās are qualitatively equal.
4. The jīvātmās are not numerically describable, although they can ex-
hibit quantifiable attributes such as position in space.
5. The jīvātmās obey higher-order psychological laws involving quali-
ties and modes of activity that are not amenable to mathematical
formulation.
6. The jīvātmās do not interact with matter according to the known laws
of physics, such as the law of gravity or the laws of electromagnetism.
7. The jīvātmās possess self-reflective conscious awareness, and they
possess innate senses capable of perceiving both matter and other
conscious entities.
8. The jīvātmās tend to be associated with material bodies, but they are
not dependent on matter and are fully capable of functioning without
material connections
All the above most accurately corresponds and reflects towards Largos dissertation
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