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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jul 17, 2018 - 09:42pm PT
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Healyje,
I was apparently not clear. Other than brains, what else is apparently necessary for mind to exist (if indeed mind does exist)? Oxygen, a planet, a heart, lungs, a friendly environment, other life to consume . . . ?
Your claim of “No brains, no behavior, no minds” is exactly what’s being claimed by some and questioned by others. This is indeed what we’re arguing about. We’ve staked out territories or positions, and now we’re in the weeds. (It’s time to say something more.)
DMT: Are there any examples of mind without a brain?
Ha-ha-ha-ha. Are there any examples of mind (objectively, . . . I assume)?
One more time: “What Is Mind?”
SHOW ME. ha-ha.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jul 17, 2018 - 09:50pm PT
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If you first tell me what mind is, then I'll see what I can do to tell you if there are examples of that without a brain.
Please continue.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jul 17, 2018 - 09:58pm PT
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Don’t you see, my friend, if you cannot be clear with a question, then how can one be clear with an answer? It’s that very indescribability or un-resolveability that makes the entire project impossible.
Almost everything we think we know, we don’t—not really in any way that’s final, complete, or accurate. Again, we’re just talking, but the talking and talking and talking continues to point up the same roadblocks, the same problems, the same issues. At some point, it would seem that we have to change topics, shift gears, move to another level of inquiry, move to another paradigm. This *ain’t* working. We’re in another realm of understanding where words, logic, analysis, definitions won’t help us. How does one get outside the box with the tools that created the box?
What other kinds of knowing is there?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 17, 2018 - 10:35pm PT
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healyje: The issue isn't between content and awareness, that is a trivial and obvious distinction almost not worth discussing.
Largo: This, of course, is not derived from observing phenomenal consciousness itself but rather from mentalizing physical models. Ergo we get fantastic claims such as - awareness and machine awareness might be the same "thing."
Sigh, um no, it is derived from not only observing phenomenal consciousness itself but also from almost daily observations of the interplay between my subconscious and conscious mind / subjective experience.
The drawback for many on this thread is a disregard to those who have spent a lot of quality years observing their own consciousness, which is what the mind question is all about.
Jesus, dude, did you notice how over the course of this thread how you regularly come off as an insufferably arrogant dick who not only thinks he has a corner on meditation, but also thinks his meditation is the only way? Seriously, you need to get over yourself, some of us "radical materialists" have "done the work" observing phenomenal consciousness, but came away with different perspectives and conclusions.
Another first assumption is that physics is the favored nation mode of trying to "explain" mind, even though physics has never been asked to investigate a subjective phenomenon, and that the mode of inquiry precludes subjective "contamination." To say nothing of the fact that we cannot directly observe phenomenal consciousness.
This is your conversation with Ed and by and large I'll leave it with you two other than to say meditation and no-thingness by their very nature explain nothing and explaining isn't the name of the game. And philosophical conjecture is not going to explain mind any more than religion is.
The first assumption is that mind is itself a physical phenomenon, or is so closely linked to a physical object that the differences are inconsequential. Problem is, as mentioned many times, you're left with Identity Theory - of that we may be sure. And no amount of "new data" can change that.
Well, simply put it's not about data and I'm not subscribing to identity theory, token identity, functionalism or property dualism, I'm simply asserting that subconscious production, mind and subjective experience - in toto - are simply advanced and complex behavior and that complex behavior does not and cannot exist absent a brain. Period. It's a simple and unavoidable observation and an undeniable statement of fact. If anything, it's on folks like yourself to explain why mind needs meat as on the surface of it it seems mindlessly stupid (to me at least) that a panpsychic universal consciousness would require any association with the material - i.e. why on earth would mind need meat?
Stop labeling and focus - answer the question...
The problem with Healje's tiered take on mind is that the functions the mentioned are hopelessly muddled and conflated with conscious processes, as though awareness was a physical step process that depends on context to exist.
It's not a tiered take - it's a simple statement of facts: mind needs meat (lordy, for what conceivable purpose?) and you can't be aware or have subjective experiences without a subconscious. And what I keep trying to hammer home is there is nothing linear or stepwise about it - nothing. But to your last, yes awareness by definition wholly requires context as without it you wouldn't be aware and couldn't have subjective experience. Without it, you'd never be able to return from your meditations, but rather diffuse into no-thingness never to return to you.
Note the aversion to take up the subject of objectless awareness. Even a little dab of insight into this phenomenon would sort out the most glaring errors in healje's hodgpodge.
Note the aversion to take up the prloblems with a contextless awareness. Objectless awareness really is a great label for an aspect of your meditative experience, but again, if meditation were contextless you'd never return from it. So given you can return from no-thingness, it means you retain both a context and frame of reference while meditating no matter how objectless you get or got. So exactly how objectless is that really? A little dab of honest acknowledgment around context and framing might be in order and sort out the most glaring errors in your metaphysical blackholes (and hey, even they have an event horizon).
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 17, 2018 - 11:03pm PT
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MikeL: Healyje, I was apparently not clear. Other than brains, what else is apparently necessary for mind to exist (if indeed mind does exist)? Oxygen, a planet, a heart, lungs, a friendly environment, other life to consume . . . ?
A better question for Largo, again why on earth would mind need meat?
Your claim of “No brains, no behavior, no minds” is exactly what’s being claimed by some and questioned by others. This is indeed what we’re arguing about. We’ve staked out territories or positions, and now we’re in the weeds. (It’s time to say something more.)
My personal take is we never get out of the weeds because of a refusal to look at evolution, the coupling of mind and meat, the subconscious 'mind', and a lack of a simple acknowledgment mind is simply behavior. And obfuscating the issue by saying define mind and then you can ask if it's ever found absent the meat seems little more than semantic gaming even if you and Dingus are having fun with it.
What other kinds of knowing is there?
None, without meat...
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jul 18, 2018 - 09:21am PT
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"The moon really is there even when we divert our attention."
Thank you.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Jul 18, 2018 - 10:30am PT
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And philosophical conjecture is not going to explain mind any more than religion is.
That's because mind is not unidimensional. It can not be defined as only this or only that. We haven't even been able to do it yet with the brain, let alone the mind.
Maybe Zen nothingness is just the brain, most of it, at rest or maybe when the brain is at rest, a deeper level is present still, that does not depend on the meat part of it. Nobody can prove it scientifically one way or the other,at this stage of history.
However, many people have had examples of mind, of seeing and knowing, without the physical brain or senses being involved but that gets labeled as woo by those who have not experienced it, and dismissed.
Thus we're at a stalemate. Scientists demand physical proof of non physical phenomenon and people who have trained their minds to be open to it, tell them it isn't physical and you can't experience it unless you use your brain in a different way than you already are. It's those separate magisteriums again.
The other hindrance to a dialogue is that many meditation schools, particularly Zen, insist their students not talk about these unusual experiences in public, as that so easily leads to yet another ego trip and diversion from the path. They are dismissed as side paths or illusions (makyo) that naturally occur. Of themselves they are not the path to oneness or nothingness (no-thing-ness in terms of anything in the normal waking world).
Among groups of people where there are many practitioners of meditation, these experiences are so common, they're taken for granted and spoken of in everyday conversations. This can also occur in whole societies which are a mixture of the advanced and the non practioners such as Sherpas and Tibetans. The downside is that exaggerations can occur among the less practiced observers and superstitions result. However, defining superstition as opposed to truly extraordinary experiences, is about as difficult as defining what mind is. And round and round we go.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jul 18, 2018 - 01:20pm PT
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Jan: "However, many people have had examples of mind, of seeing and knowing, without the physical brain or senses being involved . . ."
I would love to see an example of someone seeing or knowing with no physical activity in the brain. This would be an astounding breakthrough.
(Do you mean the rational thinking part of the brain?)
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jul 18, 2018 - 04:40pm PT
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That's because mind is not unidimensional. It can not be defined as only this or only that. We haven't even been able to do it yet with the brain, let alone the mind. Jan, I've got to disagree with you here. How do you know that it can't be defined as "this"? Frankly, we know a lot about mind. We know that it is a product of evolution on our planet. We know how we are related to other animals, so we can conjecture about how our minds are different from other animal consciousness, including our closest relative, the chimpanzee. We even know the location in the brain where our sense of who we are is -- our special brand of consciousness -- originates. What we don't know is the how exactly and the why.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Jul 18, 2018 - 08:16pm PT
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I don't disagree eeyonkee, I just think there's a lot more to be discovered.
and yes, jgill, even minds that are possibly outside ourselves have to be processed through ours, or they don't register. It would probably be more accurate to say, if we quiet our minds it seems that we sometimes receive information from outside ourselves that comes from an unknown source, not of this physical world. Thus far at least, it is nothing that can be measured.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 18, 2018 - 08:30pm PT
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it is nothing that can be measured
It's measured within the heart as the soul.
Material instruments cannot measure the spiritual stratum, only living entity itself can do that.
This is why the gross materialists are ALWAYS so clueless ......
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 19, 2018 - 01:33am PT
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Jan: However, many people have had examples of mind, of seeing and knowing, without the physical brain or senses being involved but that gets labeled as woo by those who have not experienced it, and dismissed.
Both seeing and knowing depend on subconscious contextualization. In the case of seeing you wouldn't know what you are seeing without said contextualization. Ditto knowing. Both are dependent on memories and knowing has an associated temporal context.
Now we can argue over subjective experience/qualia, but hopefully, we can agree that whatever it is it's firmly rooted in the now - as in subjective experience doesn't happen in the past or future, only in the moment. But here's the tricky part, your mind provides you with a continuously updated 'state' while you're conscious. When you wake up your mind establishes it and then maintains that rolling, temporal frame of reference within which you have subjective experiences. Without it, you'd have no continuity of thought or experience and only exist in the now with no history of a you and no context for your experience.
The key to all that is memorization and short- / long-term memory. Anyone here care to posit memories are maintained in some out-of-body, universal panpsychic store? Or is it more likely they are stored in the closest near-line, hot storage facility available - like your brain? And without all those memories you might subjectively experience something, but you'd have no idea what and it would be gone forever the moment it was over.
Think the movie Memento, but even that character could contextualize the moment, he just couldn't remember things after the fact. Imagine what it would be like if he couldn't contextualize the moment - no context for thought, no idea of the world, no language, no inner dialog, no knowing, no you - might as well just be a set of sensors. And like I said, if you were in such a state and somehow managed to start meditating to get jiggy with no-thingness, you wouldn't know it and you'd never return from it.
The point of all this is subjective experience/qualia requires knowing, knowing requires memories, memories require brains. So you can claim all kinds of ineffable properties for subjective experience/qualia and call it a hard problem, but a harder problem is claiming subjective experience/qualia is possible absent subconscious contextualization or claiming memories are somehow ethereally self-contained within experience/quale.
The reality is you only have subjective experiences/qualia because the subconscious mind is providing continual contextualization within a rolling temporal frame and it couldn't do that without a brain to provide the memory store to make it all possible. And that's the same for "information from outside ourselves that comes from an unknown source" as you wouldn't know you were receiving anything or know/understand what you were receiving without that subconscious contextualization.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jul 19, 2018 - 07:21am PT
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Particularly good post by healyje! I love that movie (Memento), by the way.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Jul 19, 2018 - 07:34am PT
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DMT and healeyje,
I never said brain or mind were not involved or at least, according to jgill, I said that unclearly.
Meanwhile, here's an example that I've mentioned before, probably on the thread that was deleted. One night when I was heavy into meditation, I was driving home from work about midnight and in my mind's eye saw an image of a black and white cat sound asleep in my driveway. (Somebody else has to figure out where and what the mind's eye is). When I saw this internal image, I realized I could not go up the hill and turn into my driveway in the usual fashion, or I would run over the cat. Sure enough, as I slowly drove up the hill and shined my lights into the driveway, there was a black and white cat sound asleep there. I had to honk my horn to get it to wake up and move. I had never seen the cat before nor ever since.
This was just one such simple example of many such experiences. Maybe somebody else has an explanation, but I don't, and now that I haven't been meditating much for some years, I haven't had such experiences for an equivalently long time. However, these experiences lead me to conclude that there is a level of mind that is not normally accessible that becomes accessible as a result of meditation. These experiences however, are not the path which leads to personal enlightenment or liberation, they are simply phenomenon along the way.
Looking at it in terms of evolution, there may be senses left over from our days before the prefrontal cortex evolved much, which have disappeared again into the limbic system, but resurface when the prefrontal cortex is turned off frequently. These senses would have aided greatly in avoiding becoming prey and later on in becoming an efficient predator, especially with tools available. Or it could be a kind of universal consciousness that we can tap into. Of course I know which direction the physicalists will take this, but I am interested in hearing the details of their analysis.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jul 19, 2018 - 07:48am PT
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Folks,
It might interest you that there are scads of academics in cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, semiotics (and other areas) who have been providing good evidence and argument that a fair amount of what is claimed as mind seems to occur outside the brain: viz., understanding that comes from other parts of the body (distributed cognition) and the environment (grounded or embodied cognition). I’ve written about it way above, but you can do a quick search yourself and see what’s being claimed and provided for support. All of this tends to suggest that anything (mind, brain, life, two-by-fours) *exists* by virtue of everything else in the matrix. Interdependence. Bracketing “things” for analytical purposes leads to interesting conversations, but it has not exposed what things are. Not one thing. No one seems to get the idea (nor the implication) that not one thing has *ever* been described accurately, finally, and completely. (“Doesn’t mean squat.”)
That’s one thing for consideration, and it should give anyone pause in their analytical speculations about what they know—that is, if they are disciplined and rigorous. As Ed has said time and time again, all of what we think we know is provisional, pro tem, temporary, liable to be changed down the road, impermanent. (What word is unclear here?)
The second thing (and I’ll give an answer to DMT here) that I’ll say what’s been overlooked repeatedly. (it’s a bit surprising to me.)
I’m surprised that no one else here has suggested that there is no mind. Mind is an idea. Q.E.D. I guess one could say that Mind is an experience. (But, what’s an experience?)
I guess the wont to label and define “things” is at fault in three places: “wont,” “labelling,” and “things.” None of them is necessary.
In art, it’s long been recognized how we live life through images, experiences, and stories. Philosophy started to get caught up to those notions by 1910. Scientific studies in almost every field of study (I wouldn’t include engineering in that category) also started to pick at the loose threads of naive realism by the middle of the last century. Postmodernism merely put icing on the cake, as it were. Nothing is solid.
Things are not as they seem. You can dig down underneath surface appearances for as long as you want, and you’ll not get to the bottom of anything. As they say, it’s turtles all the way down. If you can’t see that, you’re not looking (or honestly).
“Hey, but what about all of the technology and science improvements? Surely that proves that surface appearances are real!” No, it doesn’t. I think MB1 has made that abundantly clear repeatedly. In addition, there is not a single technology or scientific understanding that does not come with unintended consequences. All things connect. One cannot affect one “thing” without affecting another. Bracketing is artificial. “Things” are false (unless you want to say that “things” are manifestations).
Be well.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 19, 2018 - 07:57am PT
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The resident Postmodernist, skeptical to the last.
Jan, at least you knew what a cat was and that you were driving home and remembered where home was...
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Jul 19, 2018 - 07:59am PT
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No brain, no mind, as far as individuals are concerned. To me however, it does not exclude the possibility of a universal, cosmic mind that exists concurrently and that we are mostly unaware of. Agreed however, that if it exists, the only way we could be aware of it is through our own minds whose metabolic functions rely on the brain.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 19, 2018 - 08:29am PT
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MikeL:It might interest you that there are scads of academics in cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, semiotics (and other areas) who have been providing good evidence and argument that a fair amount of what is claimed as mind seems to occur outside the brain: viz., understanding that comes from other parts of the body (distributed cognition) and the environment (grounded or embodied cognition)
I think you misconstrue what is being said, which is basically traditional ideas of functionality tied to specific monolithic higher brain areas are giving way to research finding instead functionality is the result of hyper-distributed processes across a diverse range of lower and upper brain elements. For example, there's more evidence of the motor cortex playing a role in cognition. But no one is suggesting your limbs play a role in cognition beyond providing sensory input - i.e. there is no satellite network of cognitive subprocessors scattered about your body/nervous system.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 19, 2018 - 09:15am PT
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I don't know, I think astrobiologists in general, while otherwise working on their day jobs, hold some pretty expansive views of what could possibly support life other than the way it's supported here on Earth.
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nafod
Boulder climber
State college
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Jul 19, 2018 - 09:29am PT
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I think you misconstrue what is being said, which is basically traditional ideas of functionality tied to specific monolithic higher brain areas are giving way to research finding instead functionality is the result of hyper-distributed processes across a diverse range lower and upper brain elements. For example, there's more evidence of the motor cortex playing a role in cognition. But no one is suggesting your limbs play a role in cognition beyond providing sensory input - i.e. there is no satellite network of cognitive subprocessors scattered about your body/nervous system.
The stuff I've read is about how there are more signals flowing down from the higher cognitive areas to the lower (all the way to the sensing organs?) than there are coming back.
The idea is that the higher brain is running the simulation, so to speak, that predicts what you will see (or hear or smell) in the future, and those predictions are used to prime the lower areas on what to look for from the massive data stream. So a *lot* of feed-forward.
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