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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I never found out anything, either.
Does your multiplicity of words make you more than others?
No.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Also, the significance of the giant humanoid skull is not fully appreciated.
It shows that gravity itself was much weaker not that long ago.
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cintune
climber
The Model Home
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Keller was 19 months old when she lost her senses. Old enough to have formed a sensory world view, but here's what she wrote:
“I fancy I still have confused recollections of that illness. I was too young to realize what had happened. When I awoke and found that all was dark and still, I suppose I thought it was night, and I must have wondered why day was so long coming. Gradually, however, I got used to the silence and darkness that surrounded me and forgot that it had ever been day.”
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Hiked and bouldered a little up in Baldy Canyon yesterday 4/8. My dog is seen on the trail of a wild biscuit . Shortly before this he flushed a hefty mule deer from the thick brush who bounded down the trail in a series of 6 ft. broad jumps. The deer this year are fat and strong.
Some of the sport action in a place I like to call "Baldy Gorge". A lot of heel hooking and hang-doggin -- very overhanging. I couldn't help thinking how nice it would be for the belayer to lower the leader down into the water afterwards for a cool dip in the raging rapids.
Finally a place to dip a foot in the cool water and nap on sunny rock and dream away the afternoon.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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You’ll probably have to remain in that mystical Zen state in your efforts to “tease apart” awareness from mind. Out here in the real world that seems a ridiculous idea. Even in your altered state it makes little sense, because having the empty awareness experience requires the presence of mind and thus the formulation of memory. Can you have a memory of the experience without the presence of mind? So when you try to separate the two you end up simply playing a semantic game wherein one set of vague definitions is replaced by another.
To truly “separate” awareness, try distinguishing between conscious awareness and non-conscious awareness, for there appear to have been experiments along these lines.
But I’ve learned to never say never. Forty years ago some leading mathematicians ridiculed something called category theory, by relating the anecdote of a disciple telling other mathematicians, All you have to do is believe in CT and I can prove anything. As it has turned out, great strides have been made in CT to the extent that it may replace set theory as the foundation of mathematics. It still has glaring deficiencies in analysis, but it has been used, I understand, even in quantum physics. CT doesn’t appear to have any value in the math I putter around with, so I don’t know much of anything about it – nor do I wish to.
So maybe the path taken by the Wizard is not so bizarre as it seems to me to be.
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crankster
Trad climber
No. Tahoe
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Is there a way one of you big thinkers could distill this down to a few sentences? What's been decided in almost 15,000 posts?
The mind is __.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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As an science-trained being, I can marvel at the operations of the mind . . . what it does. It’s great to explain occurrences. I can model the mind over and over again, in multiple ways at the same time and put it all together into another model. So when anything happens, I get to say what’s going on: science, my life, my retirement, old nasty climbers, even the study of mind itself.
But that’s not what experience is. It’s like jumping into an abyss. There’s no bottom, no sides, and no up and down. (Sorry for breaking the metaphorical image.) In the face of “that,” there’s nothing. I guess there’s “a display”, but even that’s heavy-handed.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Is there anything that could transcend any boundary put up in front of it?
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WBraun
climber
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Yes .... God almighty.
This post will not be approved by the fruitman .......
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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But can God create a boundary so insurmountable that even He can't transcend it? ;)
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Yes, that's a question.
And: Do you think that God could microwave a burrito so hot that He himself could not eat it?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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^^^do you mean hot "temperature" or hot "chili peppers"?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Hot chili peppers, of course.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Werner,
I’m sure you think that you need to bring God into this to resolve everything, but I doubt its necessity. One can just look around. One doesn’t have to have a Ph.D. or make a samaya to see what’s right in front to them. Look how the conversation veered.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Apr 10, 2017 - 06:36am PT
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Crankster,
you ask,
Is there a way one of you big thinkers could distill this down to a few sentences? What's been decided in almost 15,000 posts?
The mind is __.
I suspect what you ask for, namely a few sentences, is not possible in this rambling thread as it has few definitive studies to show convergence. About 100% of these posts converge to nothing as there is little of what might be thought of as cited research. Mostly opinions?
An example of convergence:
Statistical Significance? There have been over 11944 independent scientific studies done & confirming on the effects of C02 warming [" about 97 percent concluded that climate change is real and caused by humans] and for the other 3% of these studies: "That is, instead of the 3 percent of papers converging to a better explanation than that provided by the 97 percent, they failed to converge to anything." One study did show warming but the investigator could not figure out what years this happened. See Skeptic by Michael Shermer, Scientific American about Dec 2016.
When one asks, "What has been decided" aren't they asking for convergence? But in the metaphysics realm there is never likely to be convergence.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 10, 2017 - 08:16am PT
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IMO, it's worth taking a few moments to investigate the link Ed just provided in that other thread:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_definiteness
For years now I have been groping along, questioning the verity of a fully formed, rock-solid, stand-alone, observer-independent, objective world that supposedly exists "out there," just as common sense, our sense organs, and our discursive minds tell us that it must.
Unless I have this wrong, the notion of an observer-independent, stand-alone objective reality is known in QM as counterfactual definiteness, or (CFD), "the ability to assume the existence of objects, and properties of objects, even when they have not been measured."
If this is so, and leading thinkers in physics are apparently leaning that way, then the absence of counterfactual definiteness rules out "some features that humans are very much accustomed to regarding as enduring features of the universe." Namely, an observer-independent, objective reality.
But wait ... we can't expect people to give up hope just yet. From what I can gather, the doubtfulness of CFD is tied up to the so-called "measurement problem," meaning, in some fashion (let Ed explain it, this is NOT my field by a long shot), measured phenomenon exhibit CFD, while unmeasured phenomenon do not.
For me, the real question is: Does measuring imply an observer who DOES the measuring, or at any rate, conceives pulling a measurement. Or not.
I have read and heard many arguments by those trying to dump the observer from the equation and who insist that a purely objective interface between any old measuring device and the stuff that is measured, is good enough to achieve CFD, and that an observer in not needed in the process.
I suspect that most students of mind will find that to be an interesting question when looked at from a physicists POV.
This video by Adam Frank (professor of physics and cosmology at Rochester U. in New York), which I posted earlier, goes into that can of worms in some detail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ-xGdmfX7A
I should mention that this is not some silly effort on my behalf to try and cherry-pick science for screwy bits that I can cobble together into some patchwork in support of a woo metaphysic. I come from another camp altogether, from the subjective adventure or awareness universe, and the trouble with articulating anything directly from that arena is that unless you play ball there, so to speak, the language and concepts are going to feel as queer and remote as QM might seem to a salamander. And there's little in the way of figurative or metaphorical language or examples one can appeal to since mind is totally unlike other phenomenon in the universe. So if you are looking for seemingly "real world" examples, or "takes" on what we find in the subjective adventures, there is QM and not much else.
That is NOT to say either field confirms the other in any way shape or form. Both fields have existed and functioned fine without the other, and will continue to do so on both counts. But the study of mind opens the possibility of resolving the "explanitory gap" between matter and mind, objective and subjective, inner and external, awareness and the stuff we are aware OF, so physics seems like a logical thing to look at in that regards. Adam Frank provides one voice in that direction.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Apr 10, 2017 - 08:50am PT
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Here Largo, I got just the rock-solid lecture for you, let me go and get it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXglVf417Jo
It sounds to me... Frank J. Tipler (not to be confused with Paul A Tipler) is your man, Largo. He's a physicist, too! in all things quantum. Just substitute awareness, content and consciousness for God, resurrection and Christianity and voila!
QM to the rescue.
silly effort... to try and cherry-pick science for screwy bits that I can cobble together into some patchwork in support of a woo metaphysic
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 10, 2017 - 09:16am PT
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I've written about this before... but somehow it seems interesting...
in 1935 a now famous criticism of quantum mechanics was published in Physical Review and became the basis of the "EPR Paradox" see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox
basically the authors concluded that the paradox pointed to the possibility that quantum mechanics was incomplete, and that there were some "hidden variables" that made it complete.
In 1964 Bell published a now famous paper formalizing a test of EPR's paradox. At the time the general physics community has moved on from worrying about the "foundations" of quantum mechanics, "just calculate" and have the results confirmed by ever increasingly precise observations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
Bell himself hoped that something like Bohm's view would prevail, but experimenters using "Bell Inequalities" starting with the 1982 Aspect paper reporting a test showing that the inequalities were violated, and therefore quantum mechanics was all there was, no hidden variables.
Various criticisms of Aspect's original experiment were addressed, each time a refined experiment is performed the inequalities are violated, confirming quantum mechanics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments
The latest being the 2015 Nature article.
The maturation of interest in this area of physics is not because of an interest in the "metaphysics," but in the increasingly sophisticated manipulation of quantum systems for both research and technology. As our experience in the quantum domain grows our views of quantum mechanics expand and the issues raised by the early papers start to come into focus.
Along with the growing sophistication of the physics, the philosophical implications for physics have also greatly matured. In particular, we can reduce the philosophical "assumptions" of classical mechanics into three:
1) locality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_locality);
2) counterfactual definiteness (ibid)
3) no conspiracy (nature doesn't conspire against observers)
What the confirmation of quantum mechanics does is require one of these assumptions to be rejected... and we get into the "interpretation" game again.
More likely, a sharpening up of these assumptions (which has already begun) will lead to further tests...
But we know locality could (will?) be violated at the Planck scale, there are experiments performed to test Lorentz invariance at much lower energies... interestingly when gravity starts to become important in the quantum domain we start to run into "trouble."
While one can riff off of these ideas into the realm of philosophy, most physicists are rooted firmly in the physical universe, from which these results originate... it is my opinion that these results have little bearing on our discussion of "mind" except to provide a very loose metaphor that the physical universe, "nature," is stranger than we can imagine.
Newton's honest response is perhaps the best: hypotheses non fingo
But you can contemplate a universe that is "super determinant" to get around the Bell inequalities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism
sure to raise the hackles of our "free will" contingent... but sweetly ironic that quantum mechanics might force the very opposite of what the "free willies" wanted when they invoke its spookiness. [That is, the abandonment of assumption 3) above.]
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