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WBraun
climber
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Mar 26, 2017 - 06:05pm PT
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LOL ... you rascal :-)
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Mar 26, 2017 - 06:22pm PT
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So what is an animal spirit to do with itself when no longer faced with survival?
That's God talkin to ya.
Seek a made up do or die environment.
That's the devil.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 26, 2017 - 06:35pm PT
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Seems like the mystics and quantum physicists are getting closer to backing each other up.
no
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Mar 26, 2017 - 07:54pm PT
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I just re read about the Tower of Babel.
Some uppity folks tried to build a tower to reach Heaven. It irritated God so much that he came down, checked them out, and made them speak different languages, presumably to stop them, and here we are today, with a zillion languages.
Funny that God didn't get aroused by Yuri Gagarin going into space, or even with the supermodern highrises in the Middle East.
Seriously, we've been to the moon, and nobody bumped into heaven along the way.
I really have little use for the Old Testament. The New Testament on the other hand is filled with wonderful examples of morality and wisdom. Of course even the New Testament was written from many decades to over a century past the crucifixion of Jesus. Forgive me if I doubt stories that have been handed down orally for generations.
I still enjoy it, though, and the world would be a better place if we could all follow the moral examples attributed to Jesus.
About the Tower of Babel. It is in Genesis, not too long after the creation. Now you boys know that I've studied rocks, and now fossils, for most of my adult life.
Sorry, but the creation myth in the Bible just doesn't match up with the evidence, no matter how much some people try.
Here is the passage from the King James Version:
1.Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
2.They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
3 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”
4 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.
5 And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.
6 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
7 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.
8 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
— Genesis 11:4–9[10]
There are a lot of whoppers in the Old Testament. Why people take it literally confounds me, and although I enjoy and agree with many things in the New Testament, I still look at it as subject to human story telling.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 27, 2017 - 12:09am PT
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great writers always allude to classical and/or Biblical territory.
perhaps if they are from western cultures... there was literature in places not read in the classics or the Bible.
I know this not because I'm a bad ass, but just curious...
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 27, 2017 - 08:12am PT
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I’m with sycorax. The Bible, greek and roman mythologies (every culture has myth and magical references and narratives) have been utilized to communicate wisdom. Honestly, it’s difficult to teach any sense of morality without stories of some sort or another. Just giving folks semantic principles (as opposed to procedural knowledge or episodic knowledge) doesn’t seem to work when it comes to wisdom about how to be, live, and act.
Lear is perhaps the best treatise on succession ever written by anyone anywhere (and I’ve read a lot of those because I used to consult on how to make those transitions).
Let me ask you this, Base and Ed: where would you find your wisdom about how to organize, direct, oversee social arrangements and workings (whether they be at Livermore or in the oil business)?
This penchant for wanting to see the world literally and technically will only take one so far. Some folks might say it won’t help one to make the world a better place—if that’s what one is oriented to. This has much to do with Mind, IMO.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 27, 2017 - 09:12am PT
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I take that phrase from sycorax,
I know this because I am a literary badass.
to be the explicit statement of what various posters to this thread write implicitly (and at great length) in their posts supporting one of the many perspectives posed by the OP question.
I am sure that my peacock displays of science "badassery" are just as off-putting to some (many?) as that written sentence may be to others.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 27, 2017 - 09:30am PT
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This penchant for wanting to see the world literally and technically will only take one so far. Some folks might say it won’t help one to make the world a better place—if that’s what one is oriented to. This has much to do with Mind, IMO.
I recommend to technical people who are moving into management to bring their technical competence as a tool for managing. Management in general tends to reward all types of behaviors that are counter productive to actually managing well.
First off, managers have a job to bring resources together to accomplish tasks, managers are not supposed to accomplish the task themselves... that's not their jobs. This is the source of a huge confusion the symptom of which is "micro-managing."
Another unfortunate incentive is to demonstrate the ability to recover from crisis. This ability seems to be infinitely more desired than the much more effective management attribute of avoiding crisis in the first place. Often managers who navigate their organizations in a crisis-free manner are "invisible" to upper management, who often are dealing with crisis exclusively (often of their own making, which is an unfortunate consequence of the reward system). Too much emphasis is put on a manager's "gut instinct" about what to do...
Managers who have a good view of their organization's purpose (the "mission statement") can separate the strategy (the long term view of their organization) from the strategic outcome, and better choose among the many possible directions to steer their organizations. E.g. increasing market share is not a strategy, it is the outcome of a strategy... A view of the organization's purpose also helps in the personnel management, both hiring and in assessment for retention.
While one can allow one's "intuitive" and "emotional" "mind" to rule in management, I find that the injection of objectivity, and especially in formulating quantitive metrics, to be equally if not more important. Once again, it is important to view the tools for management metrics as tools, and not an end in themselves. Understanding what the metrics are telling you should be more important than just the display of the metrics. The response "they are what they are" to the question "what does it mean?" should never be acceptable.
I find that the technical management to be disconcertingly non-technical, with many of the attempts to educate that management woefully off base and largely insufficient to the needs of the organization. Further, the senior management generally views their status as an affirmation of their own ideas, an affirmation generally lacking any introspection (unfortunately the management lacks diversity which may explain their particular viewpoint).
Subjecting one's management performance to actual quantitative test is sobering, and not a pleasant experience for most managers. As such, they generally avoid it, much to the detriment of their organizations.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Mar 27, 2017 - 10:31am PT
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great writers always allude to classical and/or Biblical territory.
perhaps if they are from western cultures... there was literature in places not read in the classics or the Bible.
I know this not because I'm a bad ass, but just curious...
Actually etiological myths (which do serve a purpose) coming out of Mesopotamia inform cultures as far east as India and from India on to China. Not much in the way of literature throughout the world is not informed by the archetypes of biblical stories. It's so easy to demean the importance of those things you know little about.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 27, 2017 - 11:05am PT
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Because modern science is clueless to the subtle material energies (they call dark matter) and the spiritual energies, ... they will immediately discount them and pass them off as myths.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mar 27, 2017 - 04:08pm PT
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I am sure that my peacock displays of science "badassery" are just as off-putting to some (many?) as that written sentence may be to others
Not so, Ed. I find your commentaries on physics very interesting and enlightening. Especially when the Wizard wanders, stumbling, across that dangerous terrain. As an example, sometime back a reference you made got me interested in functional integrals, a poorly documented but apparently productive concept. Without input from you physicists this thread might become a staple at the Noetic Institute, I'm afraid.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 27, 2017 - 05:54pm PT
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I've seen many peacock displays and don't recall any that I did not like. Here is Angel in front of the barn:
I have also heard peacocks making a racket that was not lovely to human ears.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 27, 2017 - 07:16pm PT
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It's so easy to demean the importance of those things you know little about.
I agree, and you have read widely in those other cultures and obviously know that everything of any value in their literature originates in middle East. You can no doubt direct our attention to those important works of comparative literature which so assigns this unique origin of the World's significant literature.
I'm interested in what you come up with.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Mar 27, 2017 - 09:59pm PT
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I agree, and you have read widely in those other cultures and obviously know that everything of any value in their literature originates in middle East. You can no doubt direct our attention to those important works of comparative literature which so assigns this unique origin of the World's significant literature.
There's a reason they call it the cradle of civilization.
Dead and resurrected gods, world floods, the brother battle, virgin births, the hero's journey, journeys to the underworld, leviathan and his mystery, humanity's origin, from 3000 BCE on these ideas were diffused into any number of cultures from India and eventually to China and as well westward into the Mediterranean eventually manifesting themselves in Greece where they became the foundation of the western tradition.
The similarities between Both Christ and the Buddha are a function of this ancient source. The origin is Mesopotamia and the origin of literature can be found in the religious life of every culture and vestiges of that religious life remain.
You can find an easy popularization in Campbell's "The Masks of God, Creative mythology." It's not that anything of any value can be immediately traced back to the middle east, it's just that therein lies the foundation of much of what has become literature.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Mar 28, 2017 - 02:15am PT
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Sorry, I beg to differ. While there are some intriguing similarities from time to time, my favorite being the story of Moses floated down the Nile and the story of baby Krishna floated down the Ganges, a Mesopotamian tale that obviously spread both east and west, occasional similarities is all one finds.
The ethics of Buddha and Jesus are similar as both were rebelling against similar hierarchies of their day. Their theological underpinnings however, are completely different, as different as reincarnation and resurrection. By the time Buddha's teachings made it to China, they were again different. Not only had his sculptured body gained about 75 pounds, but his teachings had been transformed from a do it yourself philosophy to calling on him as a savior. In the West, if any borrowing occurred, it was from Buddhist to Christian, probably through the port of Alexandria, for the simple fact that Buddha lived 500 years before Jesus.
Christian missionaries tried to convince the Chinese that Kwan Yin as the maternal figure who hears the cries of the world and the Amida Buddha who spreads love and compassion from his celestial kingdom when called upon with faith and devotion, were actually precursors of Mary and Jesus. Chinese intellectuals in turn argued quite rightly it seems to me, that Kwan Yin and Amida were precursors of Mary and Jesus given their earlier chronology.
Anthropologists would argue against the theory of Middle Eastern diffusionism as western hubris. If one finds pyramids in China or central America, it is not because Egyptians went there, but because there are only so many ways to pile up dirt and humans sharing a common brain physiology, reinvent the same wheels over and over again in different times and places.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Mar 28, 2017 - 07:22am PT
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Anthropologists would argue against the theory of Middle Eastern diffusionism as western hubris. If one finds pyramids in China or central America, it is not because Egyptians went there, but because there are only so many ways to pile up dirt and humans sharing a common brain physiology, reinvent the same wheels over and over again in different times and places.
And I would argue that there is a combination of diffusion and natural human archetype at work and that the Gnostic tradition in Egypt is ripe with Buddhist influence only because the structure of Christianity fits it so well. Just as Christianity complements Orphism, the Dionysic and Elusinian mysteries and just as the Upanishads, the ultimate source for Hinduism and Buddhism, draw from the west. I don't see this as western hubris since Mesopotamian culture was already 2500 years old by the time the Greeks flourished, and, as well, it's important to remember that the first Chinese Dynasty began when Mesopotamian culture was already 1500 years old, and the pyramids in Egypt were already 1000 years old. When Herodotus went to Egypt in the 5th c. BCE the pyramids were already 2000 years old. I don't think it diminishes the accomplishments of any one culture to recognize the source of an idea.
There is an old Greek saying: where does knowledge come from? Answer: Plato and Aristotle. And where did they get their knowledge? Answer: they got it from Socrates. And where did he get his knowledge? He got it from Pythagoras. And where did he get his knowledge? He took a trip to Egypt.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 28, 2017 - 08:59am PT
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MH2 says:
consciousness discovering itself
brain learning about itself
...are different descriptions of the same thing.
JL: There's two parts implied in what MH2 said above. The first part involves the differences between machine registration (a mechanical device ingressing an input and outputting an action), and the conscious processing that goes on in a sentient being.
I'll address this on later since it is far trickier to unpack than the second point, which is "identity materialism." No need to look it up because MH2 just described it. Problem is, this position is logically unintelligible. Here's why:
"Same thing" is synonymous with "identical." That means, inescapably, that subjective states are identical (EXACTLY the same) with brain states. That is, inner and outer are meaningless in this regards, as MH2 has stated before. Same for subjective and objective. They are identical.
That can only mean one thing: because objects (and objectivity) are/is entirely public, observable and measurable through an external examination, subjectivity itself, because it is selfsame with objectivity, must also, itself, be directly observable and measurable through an external examination of the brain.
Of course every schoolboy knows this is patently false. A 3rd person cannot feel MH2's sensations, be conscious of his memories, etc.
What's more, if brain states and subjective states are the "same thing," i.e. are identical, the brain states themselves would be identical to colors, shapes, tones, sensations, feelings, memories, etc.
This folly is called reductio ad absurdum because it means that to simply observe neural function with a CAT scan, say, or an MRI, is identical to having subjective experience. That is, objectively observing is the "same thing," and identical to, subjectively experiencing. They are identical.
And this clearly is absurd.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Mar 28, 2017 - 09:03am PT
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Paul, you seem to have little understanding of Chinese mythology or the history of their sciences.
Terrific argument, I'll save it.
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