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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Mar 17, 2017 - 12:23pm PT
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We didn't "solve" that hard problem by using rhetoric...
To the extent that consciousness is a physical phenomenon the understanding of that phenomenon rests on the accumulation of empirical knowledge. To the extent that consciousness is a "literary" phenomenon, it is possible that no scientific understanding will explain that literature. This should not be surprising.
What's meant by "literary phenomenon" here is at best vague.
The hard problem that rhetoric may solve is simply how best we live our lives: "acting independent of any particular desire or emotion, but rather from a law of which one is both legislator and subject." The scientific method must be unfettered but its discoveries are bound by the needs and determinations ( the philosophies) of humanity revealed within the crucible of rhetoric.
Science must be bound by a determined moral ethic that respects the reason and dignity of all humanity and that may and does mean limitations. And how all that's determined, well that's a hard problem. But to imagine that a moral construct can be based on science's revelations alone without a larger governing morality favoring what is good (a difficult yet important determination) is problematic.
I'm not sure what is meant by ancient knowledge here: Sumerian? Egyptian? Greek?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 17, 2017 - 02:05pm PT
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But to imagine that a moral construct can be based on science's revelations alone without a larger governing morality favoring what is good (a difficult yet important determination) is problematic.
didn't say that, nor imply it.... and on the other hand, when the "larger governing morality" (whatever that is, also very vague) eschews science the results are much less than ideal, and often "moral" within that very limited perspective.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 17, 2017 - 02:13pm PT
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I thought the "ancients" were learning about consciousness and trying to understand it... that constitutes knowledge.. whether or not it is scientific wan't relevant to what I was referring to... but the phenomenology of the experience is a part of that knowledge, and it has a place in informing current studies of the "mind," including scientifically informed studies.
that entire program, from the "ancients" has not resulted in any more or better understanding beyond what we understand through those teachings codified in the various schools... there has been no attempt within those boundaries to expand on those teachings, to extend them, and to cast off ideas that are no longer relevant in the light of new understanding, scientific or otherwise.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mar 17, 2017 - 04:53pm PT
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Data processing, no matter the mechanism, will only render you a sentactic engine, a zombie that is totally void inside. No awareness.
I wonder how you can be so absolutely certain of this. It's this certainty that has a religious aura about it.
I suppose the idea of a fundamental force or field of awareness or consciousness is no more absurd than Tegmark's Mathematical Universe. But the notion of mind as receiver is a stretch, since it then must be a transmitter as well, and by this time there would have been some scientific evidence of this theory, and none - apart from sporadic and unverified claims - has materialized. My mother used to say that as a college student a fortune teller had predicted exactly the man she would marry, my dad. But memory can be faulty.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Mar 17, 2017 - 07:52pm PT
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There are many things to be said here but no time right now. Let me just mention that the Dalai Lama has a yearly conference on consciousness to which he invites experts in many fields including psychology and neurobiology to see what a comparison of the various disciplines can find in common. He has said that if science proves Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism must change. There are also many yogis both Hindu and Buddhist, who have undergone extensive testing in western labs with electrodes and probes all over their bodies in the interest of helping western science see what the mind and body are capable of. Therefore I think it is unfair to claim that they all are frozen in their viewpoints and believe they have nothing more to learn.
As for translating ancient scripts to absorb all that knowledge, let alone having machines to translate it, is missing the point since all of the esoteric meditational schools say that one does not talk about the experiences in public. Only after experiencing certain things, can one perceive that the texts are written on different levels and refer to those experiences for those who have had them (along with their more mundane meanings). I believe the idea that interpreting a text is the same as an actual experience is the heart of the misunderstanding here or as Largo says, the map is not the territory.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 17, 2017 - 10:33pm PT
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It takes nine months to develop a new coat according to the consciousness one has developed in their previous coat.
If one thinks of woman in their mind at last breath they will be reborn in female body.
And if you've developed an animalistic consciousness in that previous life you will enter an animal female coat (body).
Modern science is completely clueless to the variegated powers of consciousness ....
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Mar 18, 2017 - 02:10am PT
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Why should science trust a reborn duck?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 18, 2017 - 06:38am PT
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Data processing, no matter the mechanism, will only render you a sentactic engine, a zombie that is totally void inside. No awareness.
Grim, but there may be truth in it. Where is any awareness of how the brain implements so many qualities and degrees of awareness?
It is as if a semantic engine keeps churning out the same phrases: first person this, third person that, awareness sans content, etc., etc.
Do you even know any zombies?
There is still some hope that you are only, "having us on."
Are you...
...pre-deceased?
A zombie trying to make conversation, and get some data for processing, in the movie, What We Do In The Shadows.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 18, 2017 - 08:31am PT
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Ed: . . . and they, modern scientists, have access to that ancient knowledge.
Only if they dive into it, Ed. Just because it’s in some book on a shelf somewhere doesn’t mean that people have read it, studied it, and tried to run it through experiential-experimental practice. Engineering, science, ethics, literary theory, etc. all appear to require *practice* in order to understand those topics. (Anything deemed to be a professional institution is so because there is no finality to its efforts.) There appears to be a feedback loop between received guidelines and doing, a connection between theory (or someone’s articulated understanding) and your own. This is partly how one becomes an expert.
I fondly remember cruising the stacks at the University of Illinois (a ten-story building about a half block square) through narrow corridors of floor to ceiling metal shelves of books, and books, and books, and books. Only library workers and grad students could get into the stacks (where study carrels were), and it felt like you entered into an enchanted land of knowledge where uncountable minds had spent their lives looking, thinking, writing. And here you were just starting your own journey into a life of truth finding and telling. I have never been so poor and never quite so happy and satisfied to be a part of the culture. Somehow I’ve lost and replaced that magic with I guess an even stranger magic. Ha-ha! I should call myself, “Dr. Strange!” Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Sh*t, everything is strange.
Finally, and this is a frustrating point, science doesn't claim to know everything, so being accused of closed mindedness is disheartening.
I hear and see that in your writing at times. My regards.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Mar 18, 2017 - 09:26am PT
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What I appreciate about Ed among other things, is that he is so consistent in his world view and expresses it so articulately. He can be counted on as the gold standard for the scientific material view against which the rest of us measure our ideas as we wander to and fro.
I agree with him that science also consistently produces more answers compared to other disciplines and endeavors. Some of the questions for me at least are how satisfying are those answers for the majority of humans in their daily life and can the scientific and humanistic be blended somehow into a new worldview that incorporates both, and what would that look like? Other questions are can we incorporate ancient and modern knowledge and East and West into a new synthesis?
I'm sure Ed would argue that science does all of the above and for him and other scientists it does. Science and mathematics are a planetary language and could form the basis of a new world culture. However, that is not what we see happening. Rather, there seems to be an extreme reaction against the scientific and rational, almost portending a new dark age. As one of those ancient scriptures states, "without a vision, the people will perish".
It seems to me the future is going to require new technology for our species to survive (in the energy and agriculture fields in particular) and some new vision that has not yet arisen. Meanwhile we all struggle with our own biases and particular talents as we fumble toward the future.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 18, 2017 - 12:11pm PT
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Jan: It seems to me the future is going to require new technology for our species to survive (in the energy and agriculture fields in particular) and some new vision that has not yet arisen.
The future is never quite what anyone thought it would be.
At 3M I was a part of its futurist group (all 4 of us) in Corporate Marketing Research, and at best we *might* generate a scenario reaching out 20 years in the future with a 25% probability. The rest was a dart thrown at a target from 100 feet away. It’s not even a science. I remember we paid Yankelovich, Skelly, & White (maybe it was SRI) $10,000 a year for a quarterly 4-page briefing on what they thought would be coming down the pike to us all. I remember in 1982 reading one of these things in my cube and running off to see the director. I asked him how much we were paying these people for this trash they were sending us. He asked why? I told him I had just read a single paragraph that claimed a 50-50 chance that East and West Germany would reunite! (At the time it seemed impossible.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVn6A-m9W1c
As this futurist at Ford says, the future seems to be a complicated weave of technology, society, economic, environmental, and political trends. Pull on a thread in one trend, and everything changes.
One nice thing to teaching young students is you get a peek in through a keyhole about what is coming your way.
The brief YouTube interview of Ford’s Sheryl Connelly by Charlie Rose above portends some interesting developments. Before we moved here to southern Arizona, we lived in the center of downtown in Seattle (4th and Virginia), and I got to see how Millennials-with-money were living their lives, and I can tell you they are not us in many, many ways.
Connelly tells us that the first person who will live to 150 years old has already been born. An insurance expert (an actuary) from Pacific Life told me 7 years ago that the average expected age of a female born that year would live to an *average* age of 102. It is very difficult to trace-out the implications of a society that will live that long. It will affect everything--things that just can’t be foreseen. (Demographics is perhaps the most predictable factor there is in life, other than the weather.)
I know I may at times sound like a pollyanna, Jan, but teaching these youngsters has made me optimistic. They are a better breed than we, IMO.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 18, 2017 - 01:14pm PT
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One nice thing to teaching young students is you get a peek in through a keyhole about what is coming your way.
Beautiful.
A theme well considered in the Strugatsky brothers' The Ugly Swans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Swans
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 18, 2017 - 01:31pm PT
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Americans are devolving and have been for thousands of years.
The speed of stoopidity is alarming fast and faster in today's modern stoopid world.
All while stoopid modern scientists claim humanity is evolving to smarter.
We, modern scientists, are making the world better, (and more stoopid)!
Smarter only means one thing ..... no intelligence as intelligence is far different than smart.
Even a stoopid robot is smart but with no real intelligence outside of it's rigid firmware.
Modern people all want to be robots now and be replaced by them due to stoopidity .....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 18, 2017 - 06:57pm PT
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I disagree. Most youngsters I teach lack critical thinking drive due to smart phones.
Peeking through a keyhole, as Mike put it, can lead to disturbing revelations. But are things what they seem?
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 18, 2017 - 08:29pm PT
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the legendary "Dasko"
Who's that?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 19, 2017 - 08:07am PT
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Sycorax:
I’ve heard (and made) the same criticisms about the lack of “critical thinking skills” of undergrads (and grads, too).
My personal experience suggests that the older the person is, the less one can require them to undertake hard-core (keen, complete, deep) analyses. The older they are, the more I have to present digested information. Why is that? Is it the topic, is it me, is it them, is it the context, is it all of the above?
The more that people are carpet bombed with “information” and analysis in their lives, the more they become deadened to it. We’re up to our eyeballs in analyses, other people’s interpretations, almost unending editorials about this and that every day. How can people generate their own considered opinions when we’re constantly telling them how and what they should think?
I’m not sure that it’s thinking that’s “critical” or missing these days. Thinking is just one faculty that mind shows one to, and it tends to emphasize models, frameworks, and abstractions—and “facts” . . . oodles of facts. The idea that reason is all we need to show us what is good, beautiful and true is limited in my view.
I thought the humanities meant to build broader understanding and respect of others—to break down provincialisms, nationalisms, blind loyalties, and inbred biases. I thought that the humanities, through a kind of internal simulation that comes from reading and talking with others about reading, was meant to link-up or unite what is thought with what is felt, the heart with the brain, to see a bigger picture than what a keen analysis provides.
Last, what makes a subject come alive for students? Great teachers? Great students? Great instructional methodology? Interesting topic? Great context or learning environment? Culture? Let’s remember that for the most part, students are not choosing your or my class or subject. Most of the time, subject (content) is required. (Few of us are attracted to doing “what’s required.”)
More magic is needed. Teaching is kind of an art, IMO. I’m thinking more and more that everything is (parenting, learning, working, thinking, etc.).
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Mar 20, 2017 - 02:58pm PT
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More magic is needed. Teaching is kind of an art, IMO. I’m thinking more and more that everything is (parenting, learning, working, thinking, etc.).
One factor often missing in such discussions as regards teaching in general, whether in the classroom, or inter-generationally, within families and communities, is the absolutely astounding pace of technological change and what such change has wrought to the fabric of human life.For almost all of human history younger generations were schooled in the use of tools and the lay of the land according to the dictates of survival. They learned all the essentials of life and living from the older ones existing in their clan or group. This survival protocol, in whatever guise it took form, was vitally central to survival-- and to some degree became encoded within genes.
What are the essentials of survival and social navigation in the contemporary environment? It is much more likely that a teenager will be teaching grandparents how to operate smart phones, rather than the opposite -- teaching the grandkids about plows, or the best planting window for corn, or where the deer are likely to hang out when the leaves begin to fall, or the absolute essentials of the ways of the midwife.
An astounding and profound reversal in the usual order of generational business has taken place right under our collective noses so that the old have become stripped of much of their economic and utilitarian value. Grandma and grandpa have been converted into sentimental props; or perhaps the mysterious ancient tool found in an old box in the garage which no one can figure out a use for. They share the same fate as the painted portrait in the face of the modern photograph.
This is a very sad outcome. And it deeply effects, often with advanced subtleties, every diverse setting in which older folks teach, instruct, and advise the young, no matter the formal setting or the casual occurrence-- and it is not new, having preceded apace particularly since the industrial revolution-- as the speed of knowledge has outrun the velocity of human life as predictably as the famous race between the locomotive and the horse.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mar 20, 2017 - 03:17pm PT
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This is a very sad outcome, And it effects every setting in which older folks teach, instruct, and advise the young, no matter the formal setting or the casual occurrence
Hmm. Guess the kids will be teaching me complex variable theory. Once they've taught me calculus. Scary.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Mar 20, 2017 - 03:24pm PT
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Hmm. Guess the kids will be teaching me complex variable theory. Once they've taught me calculus. Scary.
My answer to that would be something like this: one can go a lifetime without calculus or variable theory but only a few days without food and water.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 20, 2017 - 06:14pm PT
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We’re up to our eyeballs in analyses, other people’s interpretations, almost unending editorials about this and that every day. How can people generate their own considered opinions when we’re constantly telling them how and what they should think?
Not telling you how and what to think, but myself, I follow the dog.
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