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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 13, 2017 - 09:29am PT
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since solving it won't put food on someone's table, it's disqualified from having value
I did not mean to imply that.
What I meant was that when you refer to "the Hard Problem" you are leaving out an important qualifier. Chalmers is careful to (usually) use the phrase, "the Hard Problem of consciousness."
This is an especially telling drill for those considering internal content as "things" that exist in space and time. Like cars or baseballs.
How so? Do you mean that thoughts and feelings do not exist in space and time?
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Apr 13, 2017 - 09:44am PT
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Not all philosophers are in love with the outcomes of the Enlightenment, Ward. I’d say it’s another example of unintended consequences. Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Smith, and the rest had good intentions, but the three pillars of the Enlightenment project (never-ending Progress, objective Nature, and unrestricted Reason) haven’t solved Man’s ills or discontents. Instead our ills and discontents have wiggled-out from underneath those solutions and morphed into other ills and discontents. Everything is the same, even though everything is different.
David Hume lived in the 1700s when life expectancy was below 40 years. Today life expectancy is above 80 years.
How do you measure Man's ills? Is the "feeling of being offended" as relevant a measure as death is?
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 13, 2017 - 11:26am PT
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Gross material life's permanent ills "Birth, death, disease and old age".
This post is not Marlow approved, so do not respond ......
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 13, 2017 - 11:57am PT
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How do you measure Man's ills? Is the "feeling of being offended" as relevant a measure as death is?
----
A "measure," an analytic, some quantification per man's ills is probably relative to your particular values and experience. If survival tops the list, then lifespan is the medicine. However most people value quality of life first and foremost, that is, a longer movie is not by definition a better movie.
What's more, the general belief that we need only get the right data cued up and though some determined, mechanical process, life's challenges will be diminished, is only part true. Data doesn't automatically change people's character, nor yet our instincts, especially aggression, territoriality, and so forth - as though if we only programmed our brains with the right app or algorithm, we'd all be in tall cotton.
Meanwhile Venezuela is melting down, Syria is gassing its people and Trump is looking to hawk our wilderness while ignoring the data on Global Warming.
Go figure ...
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 13, 2017 - 12:10pm PT
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Syria is gassing its people
Not true, you better research this very hard and you'll find it's totally not true.
There is absolutely no reason at all for Assad to gas his very own people.
The 2013 gassing they also tried to blame it on him but showed a completely different chemical composition than what the Syrian sarin gas had.
Everyone in the intel business knows that satellite photos have and can be so easily manipulated and are unreliable as credibility as they released to the public.
There's every reason in the world to make this look like Assad did this so that the continuing attempt to capture Syria under the western influence for its globalization petro-dollar dominance.
Check Turkey and their nefarious business in this region for the last couple years especially.
But you'll never do any research as it takes a tremendous amount of time to find thru the scrubbed google posts on these events ......
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Apr 13, 2017 - 12:11pm PT
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Largo.
Do you believe the quality of life was better in the 1700s when most people died before they were 40 years old?
What about something as common as tooth-ache?
You have to turn away from man and to environmental concerns to argue the no-better-or-worse-point.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 13, 2017 - 01:09pm PT
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Of course the quality of our physical lives has improved and cheers to that. And if that was all we were, it would be case closed. But clearly it ain't.
One need only read a little Marcus Aurelius to vouchsafe the fact that our basic nature hasn't changed one bit since 150 AD.
Point is, riding a data stream is no guarantee to our psychological evolution, to us becoming more than we are, moving up Maslow's pyramid up our hierarchy of needs. And those needs extend beyond merely survival. We need to be alive to climb, so yes, that remains a crucial factor. But the human drama includes more then technology alone. One size does not fit all humanity.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Apr 13, 2017 - 01:15pm PT
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Largo.
Do you believe it is a coincidence that it was rich people or aristocracy who climbed as climbers for the challenge of climbing at the earliest times? Monks and crystal hunters climbed for other reasons.
Self actualization was for the upper classes. Marcus Aurelius didn't climb, but was certainly high up the ranks. Today a lot of people climb for the joy of climbing. Self actualization is available for most people in the western world.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Apr 13, 2017 - 02:57pm PT
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MikeL:
Great post in your response to me. Well-balanced, precisely explanatory, and written well .
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 13, 2017 - 03:04pm PT
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Marlow, I was using "climbing" figuratively.
And Maslow's pyramid of needs is not some esoteric calculus designed for the gentry. For example, moving past our own self interests is something most of us can work towards even with little money.
The interesting thing for me is that shifts in character and understanding usually happen through either actions or stillness or both. And yet so often we are frozen out of action by our own fears or thinking.
For example, in the link I provided a few days back, Professor Terry Rudolph suspected that quantum weirdness was possibly due to the classical Newtonian space/time goggles we have on when viewing any and all objects and phenomenon. Rudolph wondered if space/time is real at the quantum level, but opined the fact that it was so hard-wired into his head that he couldn't imagine how he might think sans space and time. His answer was - you guessed it: A mechanism. In this case, a quantum computer.
It never occurred to him, apparently, that his very mind might be operating in the manner he claimed not to understand, and that a little still oberserving might possibly open up things for him.
Point is, turning to data and external mechanisms is not always the solution. Sometimes we are called to take person action, including stillness, to deepen and consolidate our process. Granted there are crucial technological aids in this regards, including language itself.
Part of man's ills are no doubt owing to the fact that in the tsunami of data we all surf all the time, the faster we go, the more likely some part of us gets left behind. Some of us need a long climb or a bike ride so our souls can catch back up, so to speak.
JL
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Apr 13, 2017 - 03:34pm PT
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Some of us need a long climb or a bike ride so our souls can catch back up, so to speak.
Yes, ain't that the truth.
Sailing...........
" clew-up the mainsail topgallants!"
Lol.
I've heard of crew members walking the bowsprits on vessels like these-- in rough seas no less.
" keel-haul that man to the mizzen mast!"
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 13, 2017 - 07:08pm PT
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If you see your life as an objective material thing, then I would think there’s much to say about how life is better.
If you believe in and value other things, you will see life differently and have other things to say. That’s it. We’re just talking different worldviews—and that includes the real one. :-)
Thx, Ward. I read just about all of yours.
DMT: ;-> . . . which is Jgill language for “that’s cool.”
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 13, 2017 - 08:03pm PT
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We’re just talking different worldviews—and that includes the real one. :-)
I have to wonder if the "real" one is simply the one including all the opposites, time and timelessness, stuff, and no stuff. Or as the old Zen people used to say many centuries ago: Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Exactly.
Even space is full of quantum flux, which apparently is recurring, almost instantaneously going in and out, here and not. Both empty (no fixed, independent existence) and bundled into little parcels of vibrating energy.
How any of this relates to our consciousness - that's a hard problem indeed.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 13, 2017 - 08:46pm PT
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How any of this relates to our consciousness - that's a hard problem indeed.
One suggestion is to break big hard problems into smaller easier ones.
Or you can go the other direction.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Apr 13, 2017 - 09:19pm PT
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Encouraged by the Wizard's suggestion that we go back to a point before time and space existed to study consciousness, I have managed to do just that. Here is an instantaneous glimpse of the initial lattice of space/time as it is being imprinted onto the early universe.
Note that the universe is two dimensional and coincides with a pregeometric complex plane.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 14, 2017 - 07:55am PT
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go back to a point before time and space existed
Can't be done, nor ever be done.
Time is consciousness itself ........
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 14, 2017 - 08:28am PT
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Largo: I have to wonder if the "real" one is simply the one including all the opposites, time and timelessness, stuff, and no stuff. Or as the old Zen people used to say many centuries ago: Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Exactly. Even space is full of quantum flux, which apparently is recurring, almost instantaneously going in and out, here and not. Both empty (no fixed, independent existence) and bundled into little parcels of vibrating energy.
I’ll borrow from Longchenpa (1308–1364).
Absence is the view, openness is the meditation, spontaneity is the conduct, and unity is the fruition. All phenomena, all experience, is light. Emptiness is the essence of things, light its nature, and compassion the medium of indeterminate manifestation. Nothing whatsoever can be substantiated: no delusion, non delusion, ignorance, error, intelligence, stupid mistakes, names, language, misidentification, knowledge, confusion, mind, thinker, spurious reasoning, doing, doer, . . .
Yogins and yogini have no positions to defend.
MH2: One suggestion is to break big hard problems into smaller easier ones.
Yes, indeed, that’s the core of the practice of modern science (divide and conquer). It’s a pretty good practice.
In my field, however (and for example), that approach doesn’t work very well because different functionalities have different objectives and hold different beliefs and values. The “hard part” is to put all of those incommensurable views together so that they all fit together. In practical terms, that often requires a jar of vaseline and a crowbar—and a vision. (Or perhaps an arising suspicion that there is just one thing.)
The practice of dividing and conquering could be why we find so many unintended consequences from our stress and striving of ambition and deliberate committed efforts.
If being fully in-the-moment is a euphemism for perfect spontaneity, then analysis is futile.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 14, 2017 - 09:07am PT
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All phenomena, all experience, is light
And when you go beyond the effulgent bodily rays of the supreme personality then you will see the variegatedness, personality, individual forms.
The impersonal feature is not the complete ......
(This post is not approved by the impersonalists)
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