Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
DMT:
For reasons that can’t quite be articulated, any investigation of mind will be inherently interesting to many people. We think it’s the thing that makes us us, and that issue or question gets to the core of existence . . . and everyone is sort of interested in that.
Not only is the topic inherently interesting, but the object is infinitely personal, and it provides the very tool to ask and perhaps answer the question of existence.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
This, from my teacher . . . .
—So what about when an event happens, and it shifts my state, like from being very happy to being unhappy...
Of course. It happens all the time, nonstop. But that’s just ONE possible description of experience, right? We’re constantly being moved through various mental states and emotional states as a reaction to our interpretation of experiences as they arise. The experiences arise mysteriously; we can’t determine what they’re made of or where they come from, or even where they ARE. Our ideas about it all arise mysteriously as well. We tend to own our thoughts, and think “I’M thinking this” or “I’M thinking that”. But if you look very closely, I think you’ll find that thoughts just sort of pop out of nowhere, unbidden. And emotions likewise, they just sort of come and go; so both the events, and our reactions to them, are all just this spontaneous cascading of the unknown through consciousness. So what do you do with that? What do you do with that... Anything you want! (laughter) Because whatever you DO do, will just be more of THAT. It’s nonstop.
(from “Dirty Enlightenment” by Peter Brown)
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
"How can something that has no end be larger than something else that has no end?"
I could offer a mathematical comment on this, but I think Paul's take would be more interesting.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
There must be some value in knowing and that value is a function of the initial value of mind, an extremely unusual element/quality/thing in our solar system and perhaps the universe, whether a product of biology or not. By diminishing mind, what it is to be aware, you diminish knowing itself and, in effect, the whole purpose of your (scientific) endeavor.
and Paul complains about romantic scientists...
knowing things is quite useful for survival, and it is entirely possible that our mental abilities are the result of sexual selection, in general extraordinary traits appear in many parallel evolutions, like eyes, for instance. Look around and you see that our "mind" is not a common trait shared by the planet's life.
learning how to know, one takes a look around, bit by bit, and comes to some understanding. Rarely do significant scientific ideas start out as a proclamation stating the "big idea" as a goal, often they start out to explain something much more banal.
Einstein was interested in working out the dynamics of electrons in electromagnetic fields, and noticed that a commonly accepted notion of Galilean relativity was violated, and worked out what the "correct" principle of relativity was. That understanding was revolutionary, but eventually.
All of the applications of even that science, which more than 100 years later is poorly understood by most people, do a tremendous amount of good in the world.
The understanding of fundamental science is an important, and in some cases essential, for the application of science that lead to the "betterment" of the human condition. Most of my research lately has been applied, and while it is a formidable problem to overcome (and I work in a team of 100s of people) the possible good benefits from a successful conclusion of the work are tremendous.
But as Einstein's theory of relativity has passed from academic arcana to a fundamental principle used in modern technologies, the breadth of fundamental research promises similar important contributions in the future. Maybe even feeding those poor people.
I don't necessarily see "sky gazing" in the sense of the LSST program as a direct contribution to the immediate needs of humanity, it certainly can be inspirational. Eventually, though, the things we learn there will show up in applications...
You can romanticize the endeavor, but really it is just about pursuing curiosity, and that curiosity is something we have inherited, because our mothers liked smart mates...
It isn't so much different from Newton's statement in Opticks
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
some of those diversions have been important to mankind, not just for the "mind"
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
Words and numbers are abstracts. They are not the thing in itself.
Yes, material words are not the thing in itself.
But !!!!! Words are ultimately sound vibrations.
Certain "word\s" when vibrated are spiritual and not under the conditions of the limited material realm and are the thing itself.
Those word\s transcend the limited material plane and are absolute when vibrated without offenses.
This how you prove the soul and the spiritual realm exists.
While the gross materialists spend billions and billions of dollars and waste their time the same can be done for free.
All knowledge is there for free using the correct tools.
The gross materials use tools for knowledge that are never connected to their real selves.
The gross materialists are engaged with the limited and finite and neglect their real self.
The gross materialists "think" they are the body.
Fools research!
Thus material world remains the "House of Pain" in which they spend all their time running from it in various forums to enjoy.
The soul in its original state is always blissful but under the material variegated energises becomes conditioned
and falls under the realm of dualities to suffer the pangs happiness and distress due to false identifying with the material body as the self.
|
|
Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
|
|
Certain "word\s" when vibrated are spiritual and not under the conditions of the limited material releam.
Those word\s transcend the limited material plane and are absolute when vibrated withiout offenses.
Letting these words give the sense they can give to me, I believe in this part of the material/spiritual world. In the material world it could be given the name "placebo" or "communication skill"... etc ... depending on the perspective...
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
DMT: . . . hence my totally unqualified participation in this thread [emphasis added].
Oh no, my friend, you can’t get off that easily. There is no “unqualified” participation on any thread when it comes to the topic of mind and consciousness. Everyone has one. Of course you can ignore or poo-poo the topic (and you have), but you can’t justifiably claim ignorance.
Ed reporting Newton: “. . . diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
From my side, I see this as an on-running issue of partial interpretation. “Smoother pebbles” and “prettier shells” indicate evaluations of what is nice and not nice. Someone has created good and bad, right and wrong, beauty and ugly, appropriate and inappropriate—even giants like Newton.
As Ed writes, these are diversions. I ask: . . . from what?
“The great ocean of truth” cannot not be seen all the time, everywhere. If there are diversions, they are mind itself at work. It’s a kind of Mobius strip or what I wrote just above: the very tool of perception and understanding (mind), the very object of inquiry (mind), the absolute intimacy of experience or subjectivity itself (“my mind”) don’t allow any benchmarking or provide a standard reference point for objective confirmation. Hence, there is no verification and validation available to us. We are caught in a paradoxical conundrum, a Mobius loop, a mise en abyme, a play within a play, the mirroring of subtexts, a dream within a dream.
|
|
Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
|
|
mrocks
It is possibly bullsh#t, but if I try to make sense of the words in my own way: Lullabys have a calming effect on children, but not sung by everybody and not sung by someone angry or highly stressed...
A calm, not angry, listening, open and direct approach usually works better in a one to one or small group situation to create dialog and connectedness than indifference, angry attacks and ridicule.
Calm, listening, open and kind are not about the words in themselves, but the way the words (or the silence between the words) sound, if you will: vibrated without offenses... ...or fright...
mmmmmmm... hmmmmmm...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
[Click to View YouTube Video]
[Click to View YouTube Video]
|
|
Ward Trotter
Trad climber
|
|
Now, here, let me tell you a story...
...about a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed
Then one day he was shootin at some food
And up through the ground came a bubbling crude
Oil that is, black gold, Texas Tea
|
|
capseeboy
Social climber
portland, oregon
|
|
Damnit, any way, some dood said it was platos cave and called me lab coat (the dood deleted his post). In response I said, Socrates didn't have a cave? Sad. JGill He did, but Plato got all the credit. Little known factoid. Here Well, I figured he did. My rationale being Socrates never wrote anything down(?) and Plato was a smart sob who was just passing Old Socrates story on.
Anyway; the phenomena of misunderstandings going on in texting. Personally I find it easier and less confusing to talk with the person unless it's specific info e.g. address, time. Voice modulation, vibration (WB?), cadence, timing seem to give me a 'feel' for what a person is 'saying'.
I've noticed how some people like to correct other peoples 'error's' even when they knew perfectly well what was being said. I find this very interesting. We know what someone is talking about even when they are saying it incorrectly. It's like that incorrectly written page that I can still read correctly. Sorry, wish I had the example.
It's like when someone wants tell you you have the wrong man in the cave, but they still understand the story about the cave, man.
These days some men & women & children & grand folks is caveless.
|
|
jstan
climber
|
|
https://singularityhub.com/2017/03/09/are-these-giant-neurons-the-seat-of-consciousness-in-the-brain/
The towering trees with their sprawling branches in the redwood forests have always reminded me of neurons in the brain.
Like trees, each neuron extends out tortuous, delicate branches in a quest to make contact with others in its ecosystem. By communicating through thousands of contact points—synapses—dotted along their branches, neurons coordinate their activation patterns across the brain. In this way, bits and pieces of information integrate into unified experiences that are our memories, feelings and awareness of the world.
In other words, the secret of conscious thought may lie in the connections of neuronal trees.
In the 140 years of mapping neuronal projection, scientists have seen it all: stubby ones, lopsided ones, and shockingly long branches that thread all the way from the back of the head, the brainstem, to the very front.
But the brain has more surprises in store.
This week at the BRAIN Initiative meeting in Maryland, Dr. Christof Koch, the president of the Allen Institute of Brain Science based in Seattle, announced the discovery of three neurons with branches that extensively span both hemispheres of the brain.
Incredibly, these neurons sit in the claustrum, a mysterious, thin sheet of cells that Koch believes is the seat of consciousness. Among the three, the largest neuron wrapped around the entire circumference of the mouse brain like a “crown of thorns”—something never seen before.
“A single neuron, projecting across the entire cortex! Absolutely astonishing!” Koch exclaimed during his talk.
Giant neurons branching across the hemispheres of a mouse brain. Image Credit: Allen Institute for Brain Science
Brain cartography
These results are the latest to come out of a national, concerted effort to map the projections of individual neurons throughout the entire brain.
To hook up or troubleshoot electronic systems, the first step is to dig up their wiring diagrams. The same principle holds for deciphering the brain.
Since information processing in neurons is deeply rooted in their structure, scientists believe that building a map of these connections can eventually help us crack the neural code—that is, the electrochemical language in which neurons talk to one another.
It’s a behemoth of a task.
The brain has billions of neurons, including thousands of cell types connected into circuits by trillions of synapses. To trace neuronal projections, scientists generally inject a virus or a dye into a single neuron, and wait for the labeling agent to travel down the projections.
Scientists then thinly cut the brain, image each section under the microscope and manually trace the dye or virus. It’s slow, it’s tedious and scaling the process to the entire brain is completely unfathomable.
To automate the process, Koch and his collaborator Dr. Qingming Luo at Wuhan University in China devised a method that slices and images the brain continuously.
The team focused on neurons in the claustrum, “a beautiful part of the brain that doesn’t get enough recognition,” jokes Koch.
They engineered a line of transgenetic mice so that a drug activates a gene in the brain that produces a green florescent protein. Under UV light, neurons labeled with this protein glow a brilliant green, allowing them to pop out from the dark background.
The researchers then carefully fed the mice a small amount of the drug so that only a few neurons were able to switch on the genes. This is a good thing, since a sea of glowing, intertwined neurons would make it impossible to tease out individual projection trees.
The scientists then embedded the brain in a Jello-like substance, and took an image of the top surface of the brain with a microscope. Next, they used a diamond blade to precisely slice off an ultra-thin layer of tissue, and imaged the next layer. After about 10,000 cycles, the resulting images were stitched back up to digitally recreate, in 3D, the three glowing cells.
“This technique allows us to gain structural information…with uniform precision and high resolution for the individual whole brain,” says Luo in an email to Singularity Hub, “Our technique is revealing more and more curious structures of neurons and circuits.”
Crown of consciousness
The fact that the cells were found in the claustrum is perhaps not that surprising.
The enigmatic claustrum is a thin, irregularly-shaped sheet of cells tucked away under the cortex. The nondescript brain region caught Koch’s eye when imaging studies showed that it may be the most connected structure in the brain, based on volume.
“[Looking] at the white matter fibers coursing to and from the claustrum reveal that it is a neural Grand Central Station. Almost every region of the cortex sends fibers to the claustrum,” explains Koch.
And according to Koch, connection is the secret sauce for consciousness.
Virtually all scholars agree that the defining characteristic of any subjective experience, once it reaches the consciousness level, is that it’s unified, he says.
When you look at the face of a loved one, for example, brain regions that support sight, smell, memories and emotions all activate individually, and these pieces of information—both external and internal perception—integrate into a unified conscious experience.
The claustrum, given its massive connections, may be coordinating the inputs and outputs like a “conductor of consciousness,” says Koch.
Koch’s theory is hard to prove, though a medical case in 2014 gives it tangential support.
While stimulating various brain regions of an alert epileptic woman to identify the source of her seizures, neurosurgeons zapped the nerve bundles near the claustrum, and the woman became unresponsive.
She stopped reading, stared blankly into space, didn’t respond to auditory and visual commands and slowed her breathing, the team reported at the time. As soon as stimulation stopped, the woman restarted all activities, without any memory of the event. The neurosurgeons repeated the test over two days, and 10 out of 10 times the same thing happened.
To Koch, the finding that neurons in the claustrum project so extensively across the brain further adds evidence for his theory.
“This really supports, or is at least compatible, with the idea that Francis Crick and I wrote about in terms of the involvement of the claustrum in consciousness,” he says.
According to an email from the Allen Institute to Singularity Hub, the team is in the process of packaging up their results into a scientific manuscript, and details of the technique will be released to scientists around the world.
Going forward
Other neuroscientists are more hesitant to link claustrum neurons to consciousness, but applaud Koch and Luo’s new imaging technique.
“It’s quite admirable,” says Dr. Rafael Yuste at Columbia University to Nature.
According to Yuste, the technology could help scientists better identify different cell types in the brain based on morphology. The 3D reconstructions can then be compared to other datasets, such as gene expression patterns, to better understand the different neuron populations—and how they interact—in our brains.
As for Koch, he plans to keep mapping neurons in the claustrum, although the technology is currently still too expensive to reconstruct the entire brain region. The team is also looking at ways to further develop the technique, so that it can image multiple neurons in multiple brain regions at the same time.
Bit by bit, the goal is to reconstruct the entire brain, says Koch.
If the brain is a language, we’re still learning the alphabet, remarks Yuste. But every characterization of every single neuron brings us closer to identifying key components of neural networks that control our thoughts, feelings, behavior, and yes—maybe even consciousness.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
Capseeboy: . . . wish I had the example.
One given to me by my English professor: A big bruiser sitting next to you in a dive bar says menacingly, “I don’t never want you to do that again!”
Jstan:
(Note the word, "may" in your cut-and-paste.)
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
All is tentative, Mike, and subject to skepticism and review. Even, "I think, therefore I am."
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
Damnit, any way, some dood said it was platos cave and called me lab coat (the dood deleted his post)
The dood was Madame Sycorax, nee sullly, a high school English teacher whose father was an academic philosopher. By her posts she reminds me of Miss Gibson, my high school English teacher at Bass High in Atlanta in 1954. One of our assignments was to write a short story in our areas of interests. I chose science fiction and penned a neat little tale over which we had a lengthy discussion as to whether it had a plot. I thought it did, but Miss Gibson disagreed and I received a B- grade for my efforts. Many years later the kind of thing I wrote might have been similar in genre, but assuredly not in quality, to the vignettes I read in the New Yorker.
Be thankful for the Miss Gibsons. They toil in the trenches against relentless odds.
|
|
jstan
climber
|
|
Jstan:
(Note the word, "may" in your cut-and-paste.)
You and I have, before, talked about how absolute truths, are a myth. I think you have to ask if your belief in absolutes has gone subliminal. You are not conscious of it.
It is nearly always our assumptions that get us. Be extremely wary of your axioms.
edit:
An axiom is a self-evident truth. ... And axiomatic means evident without proof or argument.
Two problems:
1. The truth of an axiom has to be self-evident to someone. That's often a fairly weak link. There is no independent confirmation. So Euclid's theorems all are are correct iff the axioms are correct.
2. Euclid worked entirely in two dimensional space. Einstein calculated the effect matter has on that space, indeed to some precision it is curved. The more recent Ligo data suggests that curvature can even vary in time. You need to verify whether the precision you attribute to Euclid's theorem is valid for the space to which you will try to apply the result.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
But !!!!!!
There is Axiomatic truth.
In actuality, these axioms are coming from the Absolute .......
You've now been "Ducked"
|
|
Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
|
|
|
Mar 10, 2017 - 06:44am PT
|
As I was reading the most recent article on the claustrum, I wondered how touching that area of the brain with a probe and turning most brain functions off could be compared to what happens in meditation.
With the probe on the claustrum, breathing slowed down and consciousness was lost with no memory afterward. I think maybe meditation gets to this point by going in the opposite direction. The first step in meditation always, is slowing the breathing down.
After that, one set of techniques involves slowing thought down while the other technique involves making mental images and thought in the form of repetitive mantras so complex, that the brain short circuits itself and there is a break through. In both cases, the following state is one without words or concepts - nothingness and at the same time unity with everything.
In meditation however, one remembers the experience afterwards, perhaps because it is less shocking to the brain than an electronic probe?
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Mar 10, 2017 - 06:55am PT
|
If consciousness is lost then the living entity is dead.
One may lose consciousness of the material body.
But consciousness itself always remains.
Consciousness is the prime root of life itself.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!