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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Jan 21, 2015 - 09:37pm PT
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The supertopo so called mediators on the material platform are nothing but Sahajiyas
What is it with all these posts that contain such obscure words?
I'm not even going to look this one up.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 22, 2015 - 07:35am PT
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.....
"postings on atheism vs religion are flat-out boring" -jgill, another thread
Hey, jgill, not long ago this thread touched on the sciences vs humanities conflict. To what extent is it real? To what extent is it false? To what extent is it a problem?
I remember you spoke of colleagues, friends, who limited themselves somehow in a way related to this issue.
John Brockman (in response to CP Snow's Two Cultures, a critique of the two academic worlds) wrote a book entitled Third Culture...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
I submit for your consideration that getting involved in the atheism vs theism zeitgeist, debate, dust-up, whatever... though admittedly not for everyone... is an expression of science and science education engaging the humanities.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jan 22, 2015 - 07:51am PT
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HFCS: . . .the sciences vs humanities conflict.
If it is a conflict, then any view is in conflict with any other view. Move two inches in one direction and look again. Another view. THINKING that there is only one view IS THE CONFLICT.
Not two.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:13am PT
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re: CP Snow and the two cultures...
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?"
"I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."
Snow, 1959, Cambridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
I've always felt a citizen of the third culture. All my life.
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John M
climber
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:21am PT
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John,
This is the easiest explanation of Sahajiyas that I could find.
Sahajiyaism we know means to imitate. Imitate ecstasy, imitate the behavior of exalted Vaisnavas, to take things cheaply by not following the four regulative principles and the recommended process of devotional service -- these practices are sahajiya.
In western terminology it could be likened to the teaching.. "fake it until you make it". The problem is that this teaching can easily be perverted. Too many people pretend to have higher understand when it reality they don't because they haven't done the foundational work. In mathematics its easy to tell the students who haven't done the foundational work, they fail the basic tests, but in spirituality it is often much more difficult. So what happens is that a student hears the teaching " fake it until you make it", and applies it in a rigid manner. They put on a smile and pretend that life is good. On one level this is good, because where you put your attention is where you end up. So the teaching is meant to keep you from putting your attention continually on your problems. I learned this from having depression. The more I focused on my problem of depression, the more depressed that I felt.
Yet this teaching can also be taken too far. If one never addresses their issues, then one will also never rise above them. So the teaching is a kind of Koan. How does one not dwell on an issue while at the same time seeking the truth about it. That is the balance one must have. But the faker, the Sahajivas, never seeks that balance. They take the lowest level of the teaching and remain there, and from that they believe they have reached the highest levels of a teaching.
Meditation is one such area where people can easily fake it. One gets a small benefit from the early stages of meditation, and one starts to think that they are now fully versed in mediation, and then they start to teach it and even believe that they now fully understand it.
There are literally thousands of ways one can be a Sahajivas. The bible calls it the blind leading the blind. The root of this problem is pride. The proper course is to recognize ones limited understanding which keeps one humble and always seeking a higher truth.
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WBraun
climber
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Jan 22, 2015 - 10:03am PT
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So John M shows good intelligence.
Whether he agrees or not is not important, but only the fact that he looked it up to see what this is,
From there one can "see" even farther .....
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jan 22, 2015 - 10:15am PT
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Thinking one is a spiritual genius after a few extraordinary experiences is a well known illusion on the path.
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Flip Flop
Trad climber
Truckee, CA
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Jan 22, 2015 - 05:03pm PT
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A real question for the religious.
(Warning: subversive content)
Is your spirituality better because of your religion's teachings?
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 22, 2015 - 05:16pm PT
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So, I must say, there have been several posts on this thread that I have found quite interesting and informative. Keep up the good work lads and laddies!
I'd like to turn your attention back to the free will problem. I have a new take. My main position all along, the one thing that I feel that I can hang my hat on, is evolutionary biology. Everything about us has evolved to be how it is.
So, my new take is that we should first ask the question, Do cats have free will? I just let my cat out of the downstairs. We kept the door closed because we had guys working on our upstairs bathroom for the last week. The first thing she did was go up to the bathroom and check it out. I often find myself trying to figure out what is going on inside her head. She certainly looked like she remembered that strange sh#t was going on upstairs and that she was going to check it out. She certainly looked like she had agency. It seems to me that if a cat doesn't have free will, than neither do we. Still working on it.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 22, 2015 - 05:38pm PT
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Free will is hard to believe in when you look at the behavior of drug addicts. On the other hand, if you allow that our brains are the gatekeepers of our behavior, a good question is how we manage to ever do anything twice the same way.
A single neuron exhibits different responses to repeated presentations of a specific input signal.
From the Scholarpedia article on neuronal noise
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 22, 2015 - 05:45pm PT
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So, let's acknowledge this randomness, MH2. How does this randomness help us become truly free agents of our behavior? How could it?
The more I think of it, it is a better argument for the fact that we have a truly fine-tuned nervous system that is capable of subtly different responses to situations. That's what we have over cats. It is a difference in degree, not kind IMO.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jan 22, 2015 - 06:22pm PT
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A single neuron exhibits different responses to repeated presentations of a specific input signal.
Do we know how many different responses a single neuron is capable of? Are there just two, like the one or zero response a computer uses? Or are there many different types, like say 26?
Since a specific input is the standard here, which lead to different responses. Could we predict the neuron is changing?
Are neurons linked to memory
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jan 22, 2015 - 06:30pm PT
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Is your spirituality better because of your religion's teachings?
for me, i would have no spirituality if it were not for the HolySpirit.
so my answer is yes to ur question.
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feralfae
Boulder climber
in the midst of a metaphysical mystery
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Jan 22, 2015 - 07:07pm PT
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Kind Climbers,
Greetings!
I submit these questions concerning the report cited below: What agency is causing the structure of the brain to change? Is it an agency subject to any closely-reasoned objective means of identification or description at this time?
[url="http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/mediation-correlated-with-structura-11-01-22/"]Meditation Correlated with Structural Changes in the Brain: Scientific ...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/.../mediation-correlated-with-structura-11-01-22 /
Jan 22, 2011 ... Scientific American. Sign In | Register · 0 ... Meditation Correlated with Structural Changes in the Brain. A study published this week ... Brain images were taken of each subject before and after the training. Scientists found ..[/url]
Decades ago, while studying an intoxicating mixture of philosophy, mathematics, and quantum mechanics, I wrote a paper on "Cooperative Determinism" which I submit is how we play this game called life in conscious cooperation with our Creator. (I was reading William James and de Broglie at the time, so you can see how this developed.)
Is it not possible that what we consider The Humanities might be the upwelling of the cellular accumulation of the life history of our species? And is it not so that science and religion are only recently bifurcated, (and I think the jury is still out on whether this bifurcation is a good move on the part of Humankind or not.) But if I may, I would like to replace religion as a concept with spirituality as a concept. Being a spiritual anarchist, e.g. Quaker, I find ongoing discussion of the ethics of science fascinating.
And so, thank you for this fascinating and engrossing discussion. These questions may have been posed and answered, and I may have missed it. If so, I would appreciate being pointed in the proper direction. Thank you.
feralfae
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:00pm PT
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How does this randomness help us become truly free agents of our behavior? How could it?
I don't mean to imply that randomness or noise or chaos have any strong connection to the notion of Free Will.
My feeling is that until we can look inside peoples brains and see their thoughts and how they develop, we will not be able to address the question of free will. And once we can do that there will be bigger problems to worry about.
For now we can only look at what people do, not directly at why they do it. However, noisy behavior in neurons could make it hard to predict choices people make, which may be hard to distinguish from free will.
Do you have a way to identify free will when you observe it? Do you feel free to make a choice about what you have for breakfast? Who you marry? What difference does it make if those choices are determined by the interactions of 10 billion noisy neurons working on faulty data, or if the choices are "free?"
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:27pm PT
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What agency is causing the structure of the brain to change?
Agency? Hmmm.. i've read about the same type of experiment being conducted on people who pray to God. That also showed changes in brain structure. People who are continually sad build up structual change in the brain enoughso we term it a disease called depression. Addicts build up so much of a loppsided brain structure, when sober they can't even cope until they get that fix. Then their able to recline back to what they consider their normal. What ever that is? IME
"Cooperative Determinism"
Sounds interesting! do you have a link where i could read it? or maybe post it here.
Thanks for posting
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:39pm PT
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. . . getting involved in the atheism vs theism zeitgeist, debate, dust-up, whatever... though admittedly not for everyone... is an expression of science and science education engaging the humanities
I agree, HFCS, that at times this is true. For instance, Darwinian evolution vs the "wisdom" of ancient literature. I only meant that at my age I don't have much interest in such dialogue, having been raised a Southern Baptist, then leaving religion after graduating high school.
(I didn't have the deplorable experiences Jan had since my church-going was to large Baptist churches in big cities, having pastors more like Mike Huckabee than rabid fundamentalists. The adults I remember were kind, generous, and forgiving.)
Your posts concerning free will certainly inspired me to consider a subject I had given no thought to before, and I found myself moving in the direction you pointed. At this time I would assign free will about a .3 in a fuzzy logic scale. I find it's possible to hold seemingly contradictory positions: yes, there is free will and no there isn't. I'm not sure how your "can do" spirit differs from FW.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jan 22, 2015 - 10:06pm PT
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While Kreiman sees no free will, he does believe mechanisms of self-control are built into the circuits that guide him down Broadway and through life.
Mechanisms of self control are predetermined by our biology therefore we have no free will even while exerting control? Sounds circular to me.
And what if we cross a cultural boundary ? Let's say we go from a highly controlled society like Japan to southern Italy. Our biology somehow predetermines whether we will maintain our Japanese control or decide that Italians have more fun and join in? Random chance encounters that change our way of thinking about control issues have nothing to do with the outcome? And if Sicilians go to Japan and wave their arms while talking loudly in spite of nobody else doing it, this was determined by their biology rather than their culture? Really ?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 23, 2015 - 12:16am PT
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sort of addressed the "Free Will" issue in the "What Is Mind?" thread...
but one very nice paper I found alerted me to a limitation on what I thought about the subject:
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, free will and mathematical thought by Solomon Feferman
This has to do with "mathematical thought" but I don't see why that is any limitation on it's generality. Many, perhaps most, of you will be turned off by the mathematical formality of the paper (though it is definitely a philosophy paper).
The proposal of Feferman is contained in this statement:
The Formalist-Mechanist Thesis II. Insofar as human mathematical thought is concerned, mind is mechanical in that it is completely constrained by some open-ended schematic formal system.
and it points the way to the generalization: ...the conceptual vocabulary of mathematics is not necessarily limited... to those that can be expressed in one basic formal language, but that mathematics is otherwise constrained once and for all by the claimed finite number of open-ended schematic principles and rules
What caught my attention was the concept of "open ended ... principles and rules"
Feferman goes on to give some examples in mathematics, the idea is what we might refer to as making an analogy... we associate one thing which is not formally the same (nor governed by the same formal rules) to a thing which is... and this ability to "analogize" is an example of the open-endedness.
This is important in Feferman's argument because it allows the possibility that the mind is a machine to escape the formal logical objections to the analysis along the lines of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Feferman provides the information that "there’s a lot of evidence ... that Gödel was convinced of the anti-mechanist position" but in the Gibb's lecture that Gödel gave he didn't state them strongly.
'The reason was simply that he did not have an unassailable proof of the falsity of the mechanist position. Indeed, despite his views concerning the “impossibility of physico-chemical explanations of ... human reason” he raised some caveats in a series of three footnotes to the Gibbs lecture, the second of which is as follows:
It is conceivable ... that brain physiology would advance so far that it would be known with empirical certainty
1. that the brain suffices for the explanation of all mental phenomena and is a machine in the sense of Turing;
2. that such and such is the precise anatomical structure and physiological functioning of the part of the brain which performs mathematical thinking.'
It is interesting that the "empirical" card is so strongly played in these discussions. Basically, that is the strong suit of those engaged in the study of the brain and its functioning and the possibility that human thought can be described in terms of a physico-chemical explanation, thus deterministic.
But the paper also points out that as that the construction of that machine does not contain a response to all possible stimuli, that its response can be "open ended" and appear as "free will" even though the machine itself is executing an essentially mechanical response.
This might be too deep too fast...
more simply, how would you describe the response of a machine to a stimuli it had never encountered previously and was not "designed" (nor could have been designed) to respond to?
The mechanics of the response would be deterministic, but the outcome of the response, in the context of the stimuli, might be quite unexpected.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jan 23, 2015 - 08:19am PT
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“Free will” is a way of talking. The term is a conceptualization of something that can’t be pinned down. It’s also an expression of values.
Free will is an instantiation (a subset or subcategory) of another conceptualization: cause-and-effect:—that is, that one thing leads to another.
So-called effects never appear to be the result of one thing. They appear to be the result of innumerable things—inextricably compounded and intertwined, infinite sequences.
The randomness or probabilities that different effects seem to result in every instance undermines the validity of the conceptualization of cause-and-effect even further.
It’s how we talk.
Has the situation changed since ancient greek philosophical thought? Not much.
That might encourage beings to reconsider radically new views.
But, no. No cause-and-effect.
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