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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 28, 2017 - 09:07am PT
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Randisi,
Thanks for saying thanks.
MikeL, please explain how your position that nothing really matters will make the world a better place. Why should making the world a better place even matter, given your position?
For me, changing my mind about anything changes my world, and it may make living seemingly easier. “Better” is not a quality that I’m very clear about or comfortable with anymore.
What I wrote meant to highlight the seeming differences between what is technical (basically a cause-and-effect point of view) and what is not. What is not-technical is very large in my view.
I think what you are asking is why I would even bring the idea up of making the world a better place if it’s not anything that I care about. I wrote it because I think that other people care about it, and in my view those people are trying to make everyone else honor their values and beliefs. It’s that which, IMO, brings suffering to mind (i.e., “the world”). Of course, as it has been said, if one wants to pacify a mind, then one first has to find it, and that presents a fierce conundrum.
Ed:
I hear all that you wrote about management loud and clear. I can say that in school we do teach many technical frameworks and models about how to create sustainable advantage within competitive environments; but just because we teach it doesn’t mean that folks will use those models when they find themselves in the hot seat. Character comes from stress, and it’s an OJT program that all managers go through on their own.
I am not so sanguine about creating, building, and managing organizations as I might have been a decade or so ago. For me, the more I’ve learned, the more complex things have become for me.
I’ve become highly attuned to the importance of people in organizations, and I haven’t been able to conceive / make that understanding codified or technical. I’ve seen often that it takes the right guy / woman in the right place at the right time to make a real performance difference in organization. I’ve also come to believe that some of those right guys / women are not necessarily the people that we want to love. Last, I’ve come to see that different people / leaders / managers have their own ways of doing things that work for them. It’s very difficult to generalize how to be a leader / manager that gets people engaged and keeps them engaged and oriented to performance. (I like General Stanley McChrystal’s 2015 knowing book, “Team of Teams.”)
This takes me to Jan’s comment:
. . . theological underpinnings however, are completely different, as different as reincarnation and resurrection.
Whether it’s the bases of mind, myths, management, art, or “the world,” the penchant to want and expect understanding to be primarily explicit, technical, defined, and describable cuts out a great deal of what we know and understand as human beings, IMO. IF there is Truth that is singular, then it is the basis for all knowledge and understanding.
This conversation that we have here in this thread about mind seems to present to our senses the tip of an iceberg. There is much that we do not (and apparently cannot) have direct scientific access to. Paul and sycorax make occasional references to archetypes, the myths that express them, symbols, etc.—all which seem to be explicitly indefinable, indescribable, and not directly available to consciousness (as instinct is not). They are images—worth a thousand words. Far more is happening in and around our lives than can be literally said or pointed to. Unfortunately, phenomena are not largely subsumed by technical views. Phenomena—our knowledge of reality psychologically—viciously resist modeling. They appear to be more magical and imaginal. In time, one learns to dance with them. Psyche dances with Eros.
• There appears to be a base awareness that one is hesitant to call consciousness
• Bliss appears first as an essence of reality
• There is no movement, anywhere
• An Absolute—aka, Reality—projects itself out as consciousness; Reality appears to be alive
• Displays of mind arise out of unbounded energy, as an expressiveness that is creative, aesthetic, and playful
• Everything gets included; nothing is excluded (nothing can be)
• Consciousness requires subjects and objects.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Mar 28, 2017 - 09:31am PT
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Whether I wrote a lengthy treatise or nothing at all, your response would have been the same, so I spared myself the effort.
Well isn't the most concise argument simply, you're wrong? Doesn't do much to forward the conversation but such is the nature of the internets.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 28, 2017 - 09:50am PT
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Randisi
If that's all you have (Ting bu dong).
Then go away .....
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Mar 28, 2017 - 11:43am PT
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Elon Musk announced that he is working on a way to hook the brain up to computers.
The Wall Street Journal ran a story, but you have to subscribe.
I wonder how he will go about it? Any thoughts?
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Mar 28, 2017 - 11:57am PT
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capseeboy
Social climber
portland, oregon
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Mar 28, 2017 - 12:15pm PT
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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.
Man created car and it was said to be good, for it eased man's burden. The belief seems good at the time. In retrospect, not sure it was such a good idea.
Many technologies, medicines appear to be good at the time.
Caveat emptor with all beliefs. You may see an outcome as being 'good' or 'bad'. However, this is only man's arrogance.
Have your dance. The historical outcome of which time may only ever know.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 28, 2017 - 01:42pm PT
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Mike said:
What I wrote meant to highlight the seeming differences between what is technical (basically a cause-and-effect point of view) and what is not. What is not-technical is very large in my view.
Large to you, very small, if not illusory, from a 3rd person point of view.
That's really what is being argued here, from a thousand different perspectives.
It goes by various terms: form and substance (meaning); syntactic and semantic; objective and subjective; physical and ontological; nothing and everything.
The vexer per the brain and consciousness is that you have both facets operating simultaneously in a single unified system.
Meanwhile you have some honest, intelligent folks trying to understand and explain the unified whole in terms of one or the other facets. And in extreme cases, you have people labeling both facets as selfsame, the facet that is apparently cause and effect, which we can observe and measure. Then believing that the other facet is "really" just cause and effect artifact of the form, the syntactic, the objective, the physical.
Such beliefs perfectly describe a Turing machine, a syntactic engine, a super-processor.
And BASE, people have been hooking up the human brain to computers or amplifiers (and extracting data) for decades. That's what the old EEG rigs first did, when German physiologist and shrink Hans Berger (1873–1941) recorded the first human EEG in 1924.
This on the Musk Brain-Computer link:
"Elon Musk believes we are ready for a mind meld, but instead of connecting the brains of two Vulcans, a la “Star Trek,” the billionaire entrepreneur wants to link human brains with computers.
"The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors is exploring just such a connection through another company he has launched, called Neuralink, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. Musk has taken an active role in developing what he calls “neural lace” technology, which involves installing tiny electrodes in the brain to transmit thoughts.
"It wasn’t clear what type of products the company will produce, but they are expected to have medical applications, such treating as brain disorders like epilepsy or major depression. The approach could mirror that of deep brain stimulation, which uses a surgically implanted, battery-operated medical device to treat neurological symptoms, most commonly Parkinson’s effects such as tremor, rigidity, stiffness, slowed movement, and walking problems.
---
As mentioned earlier, recall the absurdity of "Identity Materialism," where brain states and conscious states are exactly the same.
And now we hear about Musk's “neural lace” technology, "which involves installing tiny electrodes in the brain to transmit thoughts."
Really ...
Rather than transmit the electrochemical activity going on in the brain, which has been going on for nearly 90 years, neural lace will transmit thoughts themselves, since both, to the Lace camp, are apparently the same, "we only think there is more ..."
I gots an Edsel for anyone who believes as much. Cheap, too...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 28, 2017 - 06:40pm PT
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"Same thing" is synonymous with "identical."
Not to me. And I'm the one who used the phrase. I don't think brain and mind can be easily described in a few words. Could you replace "identical" with "similar" and still stand behind your argument?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 28, 2017 - 07:50pm PT
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MH2 says:
consciousness discovering itself
brain learning about itself
...are different descriptions of the same thing.
Now you are contrasting "same thing" with "similar," then calling it "my argument."
When you keep changing up your definitions and terms, it makes it rather hard to follow what you are literally saying.
Machine registration (as happens with, say, a space probe that gets input, blindly processes the information, then executes an output) goes on in all humans. I would say that's the bulk of what goes on, beneath awareness. All the auto pilot stuff.
But in now saying that in an act of self discovery, brain function and consciousness act in "similar" ways, it follows that they are not "identical" ways.
What, specifically, are some of the differences from your perspective?
And dear Dingus, I'm not following you about "laying claim." About what?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 28, 2017 - 08:02pm PT
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But in now saying that in an act of self discovery, brain function and consciousness act in "similar" ways, it follows that they are not "identical" ways.
Very logical, Mr. Spock.
But I do not claim to know how either brain or consciousness act in full detail, so I make no judgement as to whether they are identical or not. My fallible human belief is that consciousness has no special extra-biological basis. There is no good evidence that it does. The story is being told and we cannot be sure where it is going to go.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Mar 28, 2017 - 09:38pm PT
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so I make no judgement as to whether they are identical or not.
or even similar, right? unless maybe your into the ying/yang thang;)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 28, 2017 - 09:45pm PT
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First, just to be clear, when I tackle any of these questions I totally forget who said them, and just try and make sense out of what is said while vectoring off my own direct experience, and logically try and work out the details so things add up. It's a fun and exacting exercise. And Ive learned a lot.
MH2 said: Consciousness has no special extra-biological basis. There is no good evidence that it does.
To me (JL), this is a confusing statement - nothing against MH2. It sounds as though MH2 is saying that anything but biology is special, and in turn, extra. And yet if we only study MH2s biology, there will be no sign of the sensations and experience of being MH2 that he had while typing his post. If he is saying that he only thinks, or is given the false impression that he has experience that we cannot seen in his body, that can only mean that the body itself is conscious. And we've already shown the folly of that idea - right? The only option being a strain of panpsychism where consciousness is an inherent property of matter, there, but unseen. Unless MH2 can point out his actual experience so we can see it with our eyes and maybe Ed can cop a measurement.
Then my Dingus said: Largo you make the claim awareness is a special thing, a force as you paraphrased it, a stand-alone property of the universe.
I try and use the word "phenomenon" talking about awareness. It's special only in the sense that it seems to be totally unlike objective phenomenon we can see an measure. But I never said it was a "thing," (external object), or that it was "stand alone." Name one object or phenomenon that is stand alone. What could that possibly mean?
And more from Dingus: But awareness is not thought. Thoughts are not awareness. Are thoughts yet another, special property of the universe, on the order of strong and weak nuclear forces, and awareness?
In the model I use, thoughts are the output of mechanical brain function but not brain function itself. You have to have other factors at play before electrochemical pulses become experiential thoughts. Electrodes can pick up electicity, but electricity is not itself, thoughts. What evidence is there in all the electrical gadgets in your crib that any of them are experiencing thoughts?
What makes this so fascinating is that the while production is so utterly seamless. Totally unified. My sense of it is there is really just one thing going on, and distinctions about biology and mind are ultimately arbitrary. But that's the exercise.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mar 28, 2017 - 09:53pm PT
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Consciousness emerging from the brain
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Mar 28, 2017 - 10:16pm PT
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Haha, I thought it was the other end?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Mar 28, 2017 - 10:21pm PT
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n the model I use, thoughts are the output of mechanical brain function but not brain function itself. You have to have other factors at play before electrochemical pulses become experiential thoughts. Electrodes can pick up electicity, but electricity is not itself, thoughts. What evidence is there in all the electrical gadgets in your crib that any of them are experiencing thoughts?
now that's build'in a field. Let's see if they come
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Old Dude
Trad climber
Bradenton, FL
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Mar 28, 2017 - 10:47pm PT
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Many answers depending on perspective, all related to conscious awareness, thought, emotion, and our sense of individuality. Perhaps a more interesting question arises when we ask what consciousness is (Who am I?)when thoughts, emotions, and body-identification subside, as in deep meditation or other peak experiences of pure awareness. Then, mind becomes a universal term for existence - consciousness - bliss, or God.
"The mind is a miraculous rubber band that can be stretched to infinity without breaking."
Paramahansa Yogananda
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 29, 2017 - 07:31am PT
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And yet if we only study MH2s biology, there will be no sign of the sensations and experience of being MH2 that he had while typing his post.
Study it how?
Why call it, "the experience of being MH2?" What does that mean?
Since I remember typing the post, I am pretty there would be a biological trace of my experience, if you had the tools to look for it.
Or is memory not a biological process? Is it part of consciousness? Of awareness?
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 29, 2017 - 07:45am PT
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Is it part of consciousness?
Yes ...... and there is much much you materialists are so far in the dark about it.
Your foolish attempts at reductionism, material measurements, theories will never reveal the real understandings of consciousness because you're so arrogantly fixed and locked in materialism ......
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 29, 2017 - 08:20am PT
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Old Dude, channeling Paramahansa Yogananda: "The mind is a miraculous rubber band that can be stretched to infinity without breaking."
Well, this is a new thought around these parts. This statement by the yogi concerns the characteristics of the capabilities of mind.
If I see a cheetah for the first time, how would I go about saying what it is? Would I not initially describe its seeming capabilities, its ostensible behaviors, its apparent limitations rather than trapping and cutting the thing open to look at the organs, muscles, and other systems? If we have not spent time doing that first, then we might not have sufficient justification or reason for saying *what it is* . . . other than perhaps ideologically.
The very nature of some of our investigations may be betraying our intentions to prove something ideologically rather than . . . first making empirical or experiential observations. This is what PSP continually referred us to. First one looks at the experience, and only afterwards maybe tear apart the mechanism to see what it’s made of. Isn’t that what Darwin did? Isn’t that what all famous scientists did: observe, observe, observe . . . and then hypothesize, test, conclude, and report on the hypotheses?
It would seem that the observations of any particular thing (much more so with mind) reside in a different realm of experience than the hypotheses, testing, conclusions, and reports that we generate.
But, “maybe not,” says the yogi. There is constant evidence that all these things are the very same one thing. It is what the yogis sometimes refer to as “one taste.” Observation, thinking, feeling, experience, expressions, images, and many things we can’t even label properly (like creativity, the unconscious, etc.) are all the same one thing. It can look like to some neophytes that from the subjective the mind generates the objective. But both also look to some yogis as the very same thing—hence, “one taste.”
Oddly enough :-D, there is both bliss and an emptiness to one taste.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 29, 2017 - 10:53am PT
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I said: And yet if we only study MH2s biology, there will be no sign of the sensations and experience of being MH2 that he had while typing his post.
MH2 wrote:
Study it how?
JL: Any way you want. MRI, CAT scan, PET scan, EEG, surgical intervention, psychological testing, voodoo - any which way you want. And do you believe any of these would disclose what none of us can see of you from a distance, from outside your own subjectivity - the phenomenological dimension of your experience itself, of being you and knowing you are you in space and time, with all your thoughts and memories and sensations and hopes etc?
MH2 added; Why call it, "the experience of being MH2?" What does that mean?
My reference above was to "the experience of being MH2" as it might have related to your brain. Are you saying that you DON'T have an experience of being yourself, of reading these words in space and time? What possible reason could you give to call the experience of being you anything but the experience of being you, when the question is specifically about the experiential dimension of you, MH2.
MH2 asks" What does that mean?
You are not alone in being confused about what your own experience "means," at least to extent that you would have to ask the qustion. Unless you are asking another question.
MH2 wrote; Since I remember typing the post, I am pretty there would be a biological trace of my experience, if you had the tools to look for it.
Or is memory not a biological process? Is it part of consciousness? Of awareness?
I look at this in the sense that we might look at a live, musical performance. You and I joined Ed, say, who had tickets to a Barry Manilow concert. We can fairly say that the concert was performed by musicians and they played specific instruments in a process called live music. And perhaps if you had the right instruments you might find some molecular evidence of the trumpets blaring and Barry crooning (but not of Ed swooning over "It Could be Magic"), but are we prepared to say the divine music we heard live and the experience we had of being there is the same or even similar to whatever trace elements we might find in Barry's piano, or even in dem bones when the concert was coming down and Ed was out fetching Bubble Up and corn dogs.
You hearing me on this, MH2?
And Dingus, I think the neural - computer link up is already happening because people can already control machines and prosthetics with their brain waves. But this is a non-verbal process so it's a challenge to try and unpack what is really going on.
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