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pa
climber
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Aug 31, 2011 - 06:01pm PT
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Thank you Jan...nicely put.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Aug 31, 2011 - 06:05pm PT
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WBraun
Thanks. I appreciate that you are emptying your mind into the commons, speaking as the oracle you are.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 31, 2011 - 06:31pm PT
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Marlow, you actually have people, quite possibly friends, trying to walk you to other places and you insist on staying put.
How, for instance, is the direct, 1st person experience of being you for the next five minutes, a "thing" in the same sense that a cell phone is a thing?
Verily, dude, insisting that you know, as a transparent fact, terrain you equate to down-time during Thanksgiving, ain't getting you nowhere.
Try this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ICJUFOJa2g
Make no effort to process the tune as you hear it, go neither toward nor yet away from said tuneage, and make no effort in any way.
What are the basic elements, from a 1st person perspective, that you find in play as you listen, if beforehand you let go of all that you think that you know? Try and answer John S's questions about terms for the components of the process.
JL
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jstan
climber
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Aug 31, 2011 - 06:40pm PT
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In one of his Youtube videos Feynman says he has limitations. He thought himself not terribly bright. He said he just loves “to find out” and that this was his “soul”. When warm blooded mammals first evolved they were saddled with a huge requirement for energy. Mammals have an urgent need “to find out” where they can get food. Possibly Feynman’s need “to find out” dates from that momentous time. If it did, all the mammals we encounter share this property with us.
Largo suffers from the same defect. He wants to find out whether his feeling that there is some dimension to the world beyond the material – is correct. Though I have never had that feeling, looking around myself I can see that Largo is not the only person with such a feeling. If I follow my earlier description of consciousness as an environment in which we are guided by imperatives, I would suggest that this is one of John’s secondary imperatives.
We are talking about a feeling issuing from the brain, though the brain could itself be hormone driven from some other initial source. The first step in an inquiry, presumably, would be to ask why do we have this feeling? Since he has taken the conscious action of writing here on the subject we know the feeling has reached at least that level of neurological processing. We have to ask, “How do things reach the conscious level? And what constitutes the conscious level? How do the conscious and other levels interact?
Spurred by HFCS’ link I have looked more widely for discussions of the conscious and how it interacts with other levels of processing. It turns out this is a very active area of research and participants are today carefully working through defintions of words like, blindsight, feedforward and recurrent processing, attention, preattentive response, among others.
Rock climbers depend upon on such processing to stay alive.
On occasion while walking along, we all have had incidents where for no conscious reason we duck. We image a rock headed for us. We don’t carefully examine the scene showing the rock’s progress, nor do we carry on an extended process to decide upon our best response. Reflexively, we duck.
Evolution has given us several parallel work-arounds to deal with a primary neurological limitation, the time for a synaptic response.
The firing of a synaptic neurological response requires about one twentieth of a second for the appropriate ions to be gathered at a cell membrane. If our brains required us to go through a series of 100 synapses passing through higher and higher levels of the brain’s functional hierarchy, none of us would be alive. What are some of these work-arounds and how do we know they are there?
Blindsight and recurrent processing
Lamme and Roelfsema describe subjects who have suffered lesions to the V1 areas and who therefore lack the ability to render conscious images. They are blind, but if a flag of some color is shown them they can tell you its color. Processing required to produce the images we see is done high in the neurological chain and they require use of substantial data. Evolution has provided us a parallel route, not requiring this processing, to get visually derived data to a decision making area very rapidly. But wait. There is more.
We climbers do what is called recurrent processing. After climbing for a few years we have been through a wide variety of situations and have both consciously and subconsciously worked out the decisions needed to respond. So when a reflexive response is needed we need no time to make a decision. When the leader pulls off a block and yells “rock” the noobie has to say “well what the f am I supposed to do about it?” The experienced second knows immediately to unclip the anchor and to swing out over the abyss on the belay rope. This strategy has the salutory effect of educating the leader as regards the advisability of pulling blocks off.
Time as a constraint is also dealt with as regards just the transmission of neurological impulses. If we think of the transmitting nerves as data pipelines those dedicated to carrying huge amounts of data might well be much slower than a parallel pipeline intended to transmit small amounts. For a rapid response one of these fast pipelines is stimulated to send a signal to an area that recurrent processing has already prepared even to the extent of having a stored image of the danger. This is called “feedforward.” These images can be quite complete. In some cases a police officer images a coke can or any other object in someone’s hand as being a weapon.
The needed response is fedforward and gets there before the more complete dataset. Now get this. When the complete dataset gets there a half second later you are left saying to yourself, “Crickeys! I swear I have been here before!”
Déjà vu.
There is no problem explaining why it is only a portion of us have Largo’s feeling. As you might guess from the above, investigators find that each person’s neurological wiring is configured based upon that individual’s genetics and prior experience. Individually, individually mind you, each of us is very robustly built to survive in the life to which we are used . When we change our life, like taking up trad climbing, we need to do so in measured fashion.
Below some links that, to this observer, seem useful to those interested in the conscious and subconscious dichotomy.
http://www.jeroenvanboxtel.com/pubs/Tsuchiya2010-CommentCognNeurosc.pdf
Is recurrent processing necessary and/or sufficient for consciousness?
http://www.jeroenvanboxtel.com/pubs/vanBoxtel2010-pnas.pdf
Opposing effects of attention and consciousness on after images
http://www.unicog.org/publications/SergentDehaene_PsychScience04.pdf
Evidence for an All-or-None Bifurcation During the Attentional Blink
http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~peterk/Lectures/AttentionSeminar/Lamme.Tins.00.pdf
The distinct modes of vision offered by feedforward and recurrent processing
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Aug 31, 2011 - 07:15pm PT
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jstan, at this point Largo has made it pretty clear he isn't interested in what goes on in the meat despite the fact he couldn't continue taking part in this discussion if he suffered any number of brain insults tomorrow. He's pretty focused on [a albeit sober] consciousness exploring itself (though then wonders why he finds no boundaries...).
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jstan
climber
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Aug 31, 2011 - 07:42pm PT
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Joe:
I too am able to imagine all of cosmic history in a 10 second long span of time. If I can decrease that to one second I think I can nail down a slot in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Wish me luck!
There really is no boundary to imagination. Anything can be imagined, so the statement that one is at the edge of their imagination is not readily understood.
That stuff on consciousness is fascinating. The research papers are little dense for a novitiate like myself but after a bit of work it comes together. The papers are written with careful attention to the words used so sense can be made from them.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 31, 2011 - 10:40pm PT
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I have a dog named Jake
a clever little guy
He contemplates the mysteries
from earth to distant sky.
When asked about the mind
and body, how they link
He said, "I think, therefore I arf "
...and sealed it with a wink.
Scientist and philosopher
may draw the battle line,
but in my eyes, my little dog
reveals the truth just fine!
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jstan
climber
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Incredible.
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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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what the mind was yesterday,
it is not today.
you're pursuing a dynamic dream with
a static stare.
you are failing to see the rainbow because
you seek only grey matter.
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Some folks spend too much time thinkin' about their thoughts and not enough time living......
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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you are failing to see the rainbow because you seek only grey matter.
Maybe it's just that you are failing to see the rainbow in the grey matter.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Exactly. In tech parlance, what are the discovery and loading protocols? How does a 'universal' consciousness mutate / differentiate into an individual consciousness? And if consciousness is 'universal' (and survives the meat), why the local [memory] storage? Why is consciousness so utterly dependent on the health of the meat?
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jstan
climber
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"Universal" is a dangerous term to use when describing anything involving the brain. Everyone learns daily, and early in life especially, this means customization of each person's brain. A study of what parts of that functional unit are changed only slightly over time would, however, seem a very interesting field. I expect there is copious literature out there on precisely this.
In a discussion when informed our problems arise from some sort of personal inadequacy, one has to ask whether further effort is likely to have good result. A question none of us wants to ask.
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PP
Trad climber
SF,CA
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Most of my thinking is about how i think things are affecting "me" . probably a necessary survival mechanism. example I'm hot or I am cold or this is the perfect temperature etc. or sizing people up whether I feel comfortable around them or not. I also find that the mind keeps going even when i am not in that situation any more , the thinking keeps moving on , the mind just keeps going places even though I may be in the same place the whole time, like trying to go to sleep.
The thinking mind makes an opinion about things and it is rarely 100% correct and is often 100% wrong.
I have been doing Zen style meditation for many years and occasionally drop into a mind that is mostly just observing and not making up stories about the observation or feelings. It's a facinating mind state just to observe with very little thinking. Things area just as they are, not good or bad not hot or cold just the sensations of hot or cold . hot and cold before thinking.
In Zen and I am sure many other traditions they talk about "before thinking mind" ( Suzuki Roshi called it beginners mind) some people call it Don't Know mind. This can be misinterpreted that the goal is to try not to think but it is really about not being hindered by your thinking. Not being attached to your thinking.
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PP
Trad climber
SF,CA
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NWO if you really want to explore your mind go check out several teachers/groups and then do alot of actual practice. In the long run books won't help much. retreats can really help to you get started. The teachers job is to point you in the right direction you have to do all the work. Avoid people that are seeking special powers or higher states of conciousness that is typically just spiritual materialism .
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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So it is not a step back, or a question of superstition, or anti-science as some perceive JL's question to be but instead a step forward. A step that requires, at least if you want an intellectual understanding of what is going on, a fairly advanced understanding of much of the science we understand so that the imagination can make the intuitive jump to what is really going on around us.
Can't say I agree as I believe the leap JL is advocating actually leaps out of what is really going on and into an abstraction of his own [boundless] imagining. In fact his bias, which almost entirely excludes and dismisses meat from the exploration, is in itself as telling as his conjecture.
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nutjob
Gym climber
Berkeley, CA
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Alright, I'll stir the pot on the philosophy sub-thread.
From what little philosophy I've read, I get the impression that philosophers are insecure and try to justify their existence in general and being philosophers in particular. I form that impression after trying to read long-winded and obfuscated discussions and dissections of issues which can be stated more plainly and directly. I see a parallel to 13th century monasteries using libraries as prisons for knowledge rather than dissemination of knowledge. (I know this not from direct experience but from a casual reading of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. So if he's full of sh!t then the parallel I've drawn is utterly baseless.)
In our modern world, I see philosophers as trying to use a style of communication that excludes common people to maintain some claim to power over knowledge and use this currency to purchase appreciation or a sense of worth.
It could also be that I'm just lazy and ignorant, and there's a deeper current that I'm not tapping into. Or maybe the answer is somewhere in the middle.
I guess I'm also excluding the possibility of simply enjoying the process of exploring the borders of our mind, however we end up defining it. I'll shut up now, and get in the car if Tami tells me to, so carry on!
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nutjob
Gym climber
Berkeley, CA
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If there is a universal consciousness then the brain must have some circuitry and receptors and transmitters with which to connect to this ethereal cloud. Where are they? Is it magic?
That question is formulated by an engineer.
What if "universal consciousness" is not a specific entity to which one can connect, but an emergent property of a system of automatons (civilization/internet/humans/cells/atoms/quarks/....)? It's possible our interaction with the "universal consciousness" is a simple act of following our scripted life and interacting with our neighbor automata.
Consider The Game of Life (Cellular Automatons):
This "game" is just a grid of values where the presence/absence of life (a "yes" or "no" state at a given grid spot) at the current time interval is a function of which neighbor grid spots had life in the previous time interval. It is a simple model for stuff like bacteria spreading among petri dishes arranged in a grid. It spreads to it's neighbor cells at each generation, unless there are too many neighbors that eat all the food then it dies.
Well, with this model you have simple rules and means of construction, and you can get cool complex results (such as in the picture, with "gliding guns"). Taken on a grander scale, I think this model can explain a lot of crazy and inexplicable stuff that creationists like to attribute to God, that others explore with science, that philosophers ponder to define "mind," etc.
But it's always a recursive argument, "who made the rules that the simple elements interact to form emergent properties?"
Hmmm.. I guess there is God after all. Somebody had to compile the kernel and set the first root password. I pray sometimes just in case.
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