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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jogill: While Mike tells us over and over there is no "truth" to be found in anything.
I said that? I might have said that truth is problematical for the very same reasons that I believe has you concerned: viz., the mind’s ability to create confabulations / interpretations / narratives. Where and how do you draw *your* lines, John?
Ed,
Congrats. I think you’re unusual, and it’s not how we’ve encouraged students (in my experience) to give deep thought to difficult issues. We tell them that one must not only think about things with great discipline but also feel and listen closely to their hearts, instincts, and even their souls (a nod to Jan’s earlier post).
I remember there’s research that says that multitasking is inefficient and ineffective for most everyone. The credence of that (for me) comes from my experiences in meditation. There is a level of concentration (on any object) called “Shamatha” in advanced meditation practice where one can be totally focused on a single object for hours. Very few people ever experience anything like that, even among highly practiced meditators.
I refer you to “The Attention Revolution” by Wallace and Goleman; the book is hardly a barnburner, but it illustrates just how very difficult it is to focus one’s complete attention on anything for any period of time. (The problem is humorously referred to as “monkey mind.” Any meditator knows what that is—heh heh.)
Healye,
You seem to be saying that experience shows you what some other folks here consistently claim is invisible / immaterial (and hence unreliable).
Would you be willing to accept other people’s experiences they report for themselves? You use a notion of opaque’ness as a qualifying hurdle for invisibility. Is that, too, your personal standard based upon your experience? Would you be willing to apply that standard to things that are not “woo” in your mind, or is it a singular qualification that only applies to the things that are “woo” to your mind?
Ed: What is your argument that science (or the scientific mind) is the most elitist? In particular, what do you mean by the word "elitist"?
The education and practice it takes to claim that one has a scientific mind.
It’s a costly path to take in many ways. With all due respect to folks' good intentions here, I’d say that most people think they know what science is, but don’t in practice. It’s like climbing; it takes a great deal of time, talent, and money. Moreover, there would seem to be an attitude, a bias, that claims that a scientific view of reality is surely more advanced (and hence correct) than any other view.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 8, 2018 - 10:25am PT
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You train to think, and if it is your life, your training is quite extensive, and is applicable to topics well outside your specific discipline.
I missed this on by Ed and it's a crucial point. The key here is the idea of training.
Training to think is always anchored about WHAT you are thinking about.
Observing mind - as discussed by Mile, myself and others here - is a matter of training to simply observe WITHOUT thinking, or at any rate, not attaching to thoughts as they bubble up unbidden.
This is different than TRYING to kill or suppress thoughts, a task that was arrived at by thinking about what you are supposed to DO while observing. Any effort to Do or direct any aspect of the process is roping yourself back to the evaluating mind.
This requires a lot of training to be able to pull off over anything more than a ten or fifteen seconds. The techniques arrived at are all geared not to tell you WHAT to find or do, rather to facilitate efforts to DO NOTHING and simply observe. Once the practice shifts from observing specific stuff, like your breath, awareness itself become the foci and that, IME, is where the rubber meets the road. it's of course impossible to observe observing because no one ever actually can inhabit a 3rd person perspective (the view from nowhere) so you can't get outside awareness to observe it from afar. But your mind will try and do just that, probably for years (mine did and still does). When this stops, the bottom falls out. Hang on amigos.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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"I remember there’s research that says that multitasking is inefficient and ineffective for most everyone."
That was my experience when serving as department chair. I quickly learned to do several things more or less simultaneously, but none well in my opinion. I began to lose my ability for deep focusing on a single task.
"it's of course impossible to observe observing"
Or experiencing experience? Where does the rubber meet the road for that? Can you be aware of experiencing experience? Even if this seems possible by some trick of the mind, where does this take you? I know, I've asked this question many times. How is this sort of thing more illuminating than puffing weed or eating mushrooms?
But, well wishes for your pilgrimage seeking truth.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 8, 2018 - 12:32pm PT
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My best answer to that question is that "observing observing," or experiencing experience is already happening, it's just that language, and the constructs of our rational minds, to say nothing of our natural interactions with ourselves and the world, lead us to believe that is a stand alone "I," something we can objectify, that is observing and experiencing. And of course this I is invaluable in making our way in the world. But observing mind is, in my experience, a reductive exercise where slowly but surly the provisional phenomenon in our experience drops away or recedes. The last of that to fall away is the I. When that happens the duality of me and it dissolves, and there is only observing and experiencing.
A common misinterpretation is that this resembles the flow state, but that usually arises when we are merged with a task. When you remove the task, the rubber meets the road, so to speak, because there is no separation between tire and road.
Not a great description but it feels right to me in the broad strokes.
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WBraun
climber
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Thus the conclusion is that the gross materialists are still running around like the monkeys they evolved from with a tape measure trying to measure the mind ......
And meanwhile, the intelligent class has long gone to advanced knowledge far beyond the scope of these stagnant gross materialists.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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JL: "A common misinterpretation is that this resembles the flow state, but that usually arises when we are merged with a task. When you remove the task, the rubber meets the road, so to speak, because there is no separation between tire and road."
So, when you're on a climb (an experience) and reach the flow state, isn't it risky to remove the task of climbing while you are climbing? I hope there is plenty of rubber to meet the hard road down below.
But, I admire your resolve.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 8, 2018 - 04:12pm PT
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So, when you're on a climb (an experience) and reach the flow state, isn't it risky to remove the task of climbing while you are climbing?
No cigar on that one, John. You took it and ran sideways.
Contrasting what I described with a known experience is common. We all do it. When I said, remove the task, I didn't mean get on a climb. Removing the task means sitting and doing nothing, including trying to think or not think. It's a little like trying to dig a hole in the ocean: our minds keep filling in the hole with stuff.
One of the things about introspection of any serious kind, is that it's hard to sustain your effort. And t cover any ground you have to learn things you won't gt any other way - like climbing a big wall. It's a task for this guy:
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I think JL does a good job of talking about what he knows.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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JL: "Removing the task means sitting and doing nothing, including trying to think or not think."
OK. So your definition of "experience" which one can experience means an inert state, no physical action. So why use the general word "experience" when you mean an absence of (physical) experience?
(I feel like I'm toying with fundamental premises of philosophy, where building, block upon block, might lead to an illuminated mind. Exciting!)
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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^^ Maybe I’m not versed in the background study for this or I’m just dense and not getting it but I don’t understand what JL is trying to say. After reading many posts.
It seems along the line of: through meditation he is able to sense a connection between consciousness and the nature of reality. That somehow consciousness is a required element for the universe to exist or that human consciousness is a reflection of or modeled after God or God’s consciousness?
I need things explained in simple everyday language. Or maybe he is just saying it can’t be explained and you’ll know it when you experience it, but that’s not very useful to me. I need a better topo or I’m likely to end up on another climb altogether.
Maybe I’m way off base?
I’m open to new ideas but if it’s not explainable and/or supported by observation and/or evidence I won’t rule it out but won’t put much stock in it either. I’m am not going to believe something just because I read it or someone tells me it, and the more someone is adamant that they know what is going on without any way to observe and or test their models the less likely I am to give it any stock.
I do think there could be a connection between consciousness and the existence of the universe because it’s like the old question if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it did it make a sound. (Although when I was in school I was a wise as and answered the teacher well of course it makes sound waves but it doesn’t make a sound which is an animals perception of sound) anyway maybe for the universe to exist it must be experienced, so perhaps we start with the first consciousness and reverse time from there back through the evolution of life and the evolution of the solar system the evolution of matter etc all the way back to the Big Bang. Kind of like Schrödinger’s cat. Unless you observe it does it even exist?
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WBraun
climber
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I’m am not going to believe something just because I read it or someone tells me it
evolution of the solar system the evolution of matter etc all the way back to the Big Bang
You have no problem reading, hearing about and believing someone's unproven theory that the big bang actually happened.
The gross materialists are always hypocritical within their uncontrolled minds.
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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You are speculating about what I believe. Why do you try to be so condescending?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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John's been a good sport over the years. He has tried to convince those of us who are gross materialists to meditate and seek the holy grail of emptiness, but to little or no avail. It has to be frustrating for him to try to describe the pleasures of no-thingness, which is of course beyond description, only to encounter a wall of skeptical scientism.
But he writes so well we take his peculiar beliefs in stride. Long live the Wizard!
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jstan
climber
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hearing about and believing someone's unproven theory that the big bang actually happened.
Werner is not stupid. His statement above is designed to sound sensible to anyone not familiar with how the world, generally, and human efforts to understand the world, in particular, are structured. He frames his statement as if he understands nothing. Never accept another's framing of a question without questioning it. The devil is all in the framing.
1. When you use the word "proven" you are asserting something is known with certainty. With apologies to the very specific work by Euclid, no one really needs "certainty". Even Euclid was vulnerable to his axioms.To be certain of anything in nature you have to have measurement devices capable of infinite precision. No such exists. To measure down to what is known as the, "Planck length"(10^-33 meters), you need near infinite energy.
2. We don't need certainty in anything we do. When a theory (Fermi-Dirac Statistics) tells us how to dope some silicon with impurities and otherwise prepare it, we only want the computer made using them to work acceptably. Abject certainty is a red herring injected only to confuse people.
3. One of the early papers suggesting there was a Big Bang is by Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow. You can look it up. Hans Bethe had nothing to do with it. Alpher asked him if they could put him on it as an author, as a joke. That paper endeavored to show that a Big Bang would have created the proportions of hydrogen and helium actually measured to exist in the universe. No one "believed" it. Others confirmed the data----many times over. Recently Alan Guth proposed that merely seconds after the initial bang, the universe's size underwent a huge increase. Because it explains the presently observed properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background. But no one "believes". Belief is entirely absent from science. In science we use those things that work. When something does not work, it goes out with the bath water.
In general, it is good practice to treat everything you read with skepticism. There is no way to know what lurks therein. Anyone who reads ST knows this.
Confirm.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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in my experience, the "monkey mind" is not what happens when I am thinking deeply about something.
and I do meditate also, that is awareness absent of the priority of thought, since thoughts do, from time to time, float by like clouds.
these meditations do not play any earth shattering, consciousness raising, profound experiences for me. more like cleansing the palate.
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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I appreciate what John has been trying to do here and I grasp little pieces of it here and there (mainly in kind of flashbacks to insights I've had when I've meditated) but it seems like there's more that I'm not getting. Maybe it's like the Matrix not one can be told what it is, you have to see it for yourself?
If I've experienced that the model for a photon explains it's properties and behaviors well and it's a no-thing am I still a gross materialist?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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And Healje, the business of awareness without content is hardly disproven because you have not been there yet.
Again, the breathtaking arrogance of someone who's sure he's the only one to have ever truly meditated.
It's not a quick or easy study - none of this stuff is - but it will cure you of the misconception that awareness is anchored and only anchored in content.
For about the hundredth time, I've never said awareness is anchored in content - I said conscious awareness by definition cannot occur, does not exist without, and is defined by a context or state provided by the subconscious mind - i.e. you wouldn't have any form of conscious agency, awareness, or continuity of mind at all absent context. And there is simply no separating awareness from context under any circumstance.
You sound like the guy who said El Cap will never go free because you haven't done it yet, and then won't take the word of those who did, who "only think" they have, and are bragging about it. Not even. This is not even advanced stuff, amigo.
Well, amigo, as someone who, along with millions of others has done it, I do happen to know what I'm talking about.
Context, in it's general meaning, refers to: the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs.
Yes, now you're beginning to get it...
This is the bit-torrent model I've referred to, whereby awareness is an output or is "caused" by brain activity (and that anything else is "magic," ie, a phenomenon sans cause). The problem with this model is that it implies a linear sequence in which content births or gives rise to awareness, which is impossible because content only becomes as much when it becomes conscious. Before that it's neural activity. There is no content, fully formed, camping in the unconscious and waiting to present itself to awareness, like a computer file waiting to be opened. Prior to awareness, it's all machine works.
...only to go completely off the rails. You really, really need to drop all computer-related references as you are instantly underwater every time you attempt to employ them. And no, content does not give rise to awareness (and consider dropping that line as well given no one is arguing content gives rise to awareness).
And your assertion content only exists "when it becomes conscious" doesn't really hold water. Take a memory, like that file on a disk, if it didn't exist prior then your consciousness would have no knowledge of its existence to ever reference it. Without the stateful continuity inherent in the context provided by the subconscious mind you would have no awareness of the passage of time or of anything which you were previously aware of in the past - i.e. you'd be a stateless (and mindless) sensor no different than a light sensor registering random photons - aware, but mindless.
And when my subconscious mind reaches up into my awareness to hand me some gibberish it thinks it heard, that gibberish existed before I became aware of it. And note, when I say my subconscious mind reaches up into my awareness I mean just that - that my subconscious mind has agency independent of my conscious mind and can, in fact, intrude on it as opposed to my conscious awareness somehow noticing it pacing about and granting it an audience.
Really dude - think - your conscious awareness isn't intently focused on waiting for the soundwave of someone speaking and it doesn't hear that raw noise and then roll up its sleeves and to decide if it came from a person and was speech then work out what was said if it was. No, your subconscious mind is what's on standby, what recognizes speech, filters it from the other noise and converts it to fully formed speech. It further then knocks on your awareness interrupting whatever business was at hand and delivers said speech. It can't be any other way - your awareness isn't intently focused on waiting for a photon to hit your retina, a soundwave to hit your tympanic membrane, or for a breeze to waft over your skin - those are all things handled by your subconscious mind and it's various agencies have a relationship with the agency of your conscious mind. And looking at things this way tends to make your notion of a monolithic and continuous conscious awareness seem simple and naive.
Then again your hearing is probably better than your logic so you've never experienced or 'done' the interacting with your subconscious mind thing.
The question is what is the relationship between the machine and consciousness, and how do they dance together to form a seamless whole.
That's not the question. First, it isn't a machine, it's layers of agency and awareness all the way down and your conscious awareness is just that agency which has context or state at the moment.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow
I've met a fellow on the island, who was born in Kenya but has lived here 16 years, currently on a boat in a bay. He gave his name as Saahv(phonetic spelling), and his dog was named Delta because of where it came in a line of previous dogs. He called himself a naturalist, which I believe meant that he liked to live as close as possible to nature.
I was thinking about the so-called Big Bang lately, too. It's history makes a good case against any suggestion that science follows straight lines. There was that guy correlating galactic red shifts with Cepheid variable luminosities, then some weird idea about the proportions of helium, hydrogen, and so on, and then a couple of guys having trouble with birds nesting on their antenna (or not).
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