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WBraun
climber
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Much of science depends on logic.
Unfortunately, the true reality is beyond the material logic and reason in which the gross materialists base their so called material science.
Thus the so called modern scientists ultimately remain in poor fund of knowledge which they masquerade as advancement as the blind leading the blind .....
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Largo,
I should have better explained that the feeling I referenced is on the way to no-mind meditation, when I'm in no-mind I'm not really thinking or feeling anything, except maybe peace and emptiness(emptiness in a good way), but I'm not really focused on it, I can kind of remember it after the fact.
Werner,
And when they are shown they immediately refuse to test it.
Tell me how to test it in a way I can comprehend and I'd be happy to.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 9, 2018 - 06:14pm PT
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You seem either unwilling or unable to grasp the reality that without state you'd have awareness, but no mind. That without state there would be no passage of time. That without state there would be no way for your awareness to be aware of itself and it wouldn't be. Think, dude, think. You make yourself out to be a deep thinker and philosopher - apply some basic logic around awareness and state, it isn't rocket science.
Wonky thing about this is that these stabs at trying to dig into mind haven't gone far enough to even be wrong. They're the standard declarations of people in beginning meditation classes. If you doubt it, ask around.
If you looked closely at this silly rant, you'd see what I mentioned earlier - that no matter how Healje tries to spin it, his belief about how his mind works is run of the mill physicalism. The vaunted "state" he mentioned is, as you might guess, an accrued output of the the physical brain. Owing to a hierarchy of systems, the complexity of which I don't appreciate, the brain "creates" or causes an emergent "state" in which awareness (see as a function) can operate, without which awareness wouldn't be since after all, without a reference point in time, and a "context" in which to operate, awareness wouldn't be.
In computer science, a task context is the minimal set of data used by a task (which may be a process or thread) that must be saved to allow a task to be interrupted, and later continued from the same point.
Perhaps Healje is in some wise positing awareness as a task context, in which the minimum data for it to function at all, or to even exist, hinges on registering the passage of time, memory, a felt sense, etc.
This assumes that awareness is a phenomenon that in kind is not unlike other physical phenomenon, some thing or function or (fill in the blank) that has recognizable qualities of which it (awareness) can "be aware of" and get hold of as this or that, and insofar as this or that is content, and since all content requires recognition, yada yada. Content is basically any thing or phenomenon of which we can be aware of. Being aware of awareness implies a separate agency that can look at itself, so to speak. Except there is nothing to look at. Awareness has no such qualities, and all states and contexts arise IN awareness, not as a consequence OF said states, contexts, and so forth. Poor guy is effectively struggling to make a case that space, void, and nothing at all arises from and is made possible by dint of the transient matter bubbling within it. As though stuff creates a context in which space can be.
The other stuff, how Healje has within his brainpan a diversity of autonomous and fully aware bits and pieces (sub-personalities) that essentially stage his sub-conscious mind and then jump up like Jack-in-the-boxes ... he's on his own with that one.
And MH2, you surely know from all those years in a hospital that a qEEG is no toy, and that it's a go-to tool diagnostic tool for all manner of investigations, and is the favored rig (over CAT scans, MRIs etc) at the Brain Institute at UCLA. It was through qEEGs that they discovered that ADD was not one condition, but six.
https://qeegsupport.com/what-is-qeeg-or-brain-mapping/
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Well, that's very complex compared to the steady state theory.
ah, no it's not...
in the "classic" steady state cosmology and with the observation of the Hubble expansion, the universe had to generate mass in order to keep its density constant.
How it would do that is not simple by any means. But the theory makes very definite predictions, and observations have ruled it out (that is, the predictions disagree with observations).
You can read about it in Weinberg's Cosmology, see page 45. Also on pages 88-89 Weinberg takes the number count of radio sources per redshift, which the steady state theory makes such a prediction of, and this sort of radio-source survey "discredited the steady state model even before the discovery of the cosmic microwave radiation background."
The CMB implies that there was a time of high temperature from which the current universe evolved; the steady state universe states that there is no evolution of the universe.
You don't need to solve GR to understand this.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Ed mentioned that he hasn't had any earth shattering experiences meditating, rather it works for him like a reset, "cleaning the palate." That's the launching point for exploring: what IS the palate. Where are it's edges? Who's observing said palate? this, in my experience, is just where it starts getting interesting.
obviously a matter of taste in what is interesting, the fact that I can manipulate my "mind" is not a very startling realization, and in some ways for me, it is akin to playing with the computers I first encountered (at the Claremont Colleges, where we stole time in a very archaic way, as high school students at CHS).
The difference? wetware manipulations are not as formal as software manipulations, but the similarity of making hardware perform is quite analogous.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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If you looked closely at this silly rant...
Sillier by the minute for sure. Let's reel this back in and I'll try to keep it simple for you. Once a soundwave hits your tympanic membrane (a physical phenomenon), please tell us all here your version of how it is you - your conscious mind - becomes aware of fully-formed human speech (feel free to skip some of the harder bits in the middle)?
In computer science, a task context is the minimal set of data used by a task (which may be a process or thread) that must be saved to allow a task to be interrupted, and later continued from the same point. Perhaps Healje is in some wise positing awareness as a task context, in which the minimum data for it to function at all, or to even exist, hinges on registering the passage of time, memory, a felt sense, etc.
Minus the really bad computer analogy, stay with that for a bit and answer these five questions:
* How do you think you become aware of a sudden noise or bright flash?
* How is it exactly that you think self-awareness works?
* What conceptually is being said by the term 'self-aware'?
* Exactly how do you suppose we have a continuity of self-awareness?
* On what basis will you wake up tomorrow knowing you are you?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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A site called qeeg support dot com is the place to learn about the relevance of qEEG.
Along the lines of self-observation being the way to learn about mind.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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while Largo seems to feel that objective measurement cannot be the basis of a science of the mind (which seems to be contradictory even though he claims it is not) it is not clear that "self examination" leads to any more fundamental understanding...
one can investigate the validity of horoscopes, by making one and give it to a person and asking if it is true... who would better know the answer to such a question?
of course, the results are interesting
[Click to View YouTube Video]
apparently lacking precision of the horoscope, and some objective way of evaluating their predictions, self examination might lead to erroneous conclusions.
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Kalimon
Social climber
Ridgway, CO
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On what basis will you wake up tomorrow knowing you are you?
A wonderful question that we should all take very seriously . . . our self identity is the core of our material existence. We take this for granted on a daily basis, our mind is the stage we live our lives upon. Without our self identity (ego) we would be adrift in the matrix of the world at large. Only our belief in the world of our senses keeps us on our daily path.
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WBraun
climber
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self examination might lead to erroneous conclusions.
Yes, they will lead to erroneous conclusions 100%, without God.
Since modern science says "There IS NO NEED for God" all their ultimate conclusions will always be erroneous, inconclusive an incomplete.
They Will be forced to be that way .......
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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I don't need science to tell me I don't need any of the tens of thousands of gods...
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Aug 10, 2018 - 03:23am PT
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Don:
Your F=ma question was straight forward and was handled by Ed.
I disagree. It's a serious flaw on a conceptual level. Ed's criticism of the steady state theory relied on the red shift measurements (the so called "Hubble expansion") which was what I was challenging in the first place. On this particular subject, people become defensive of illogical ideas they have an emotional attachment to, the hallmark of religiosity.
The CMB implies that there was a time of high temperature from which the current universe evolved;
Ed, here is another puzzle to solve. On the one hand, proponents of this theory state that "space itself" is expanding, rather than objects moving away from each other. Then in the next breath they tell you that once upon a time, the universe was a hot, dense mass - and then there was a great explosion. It's either one or the other.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Aug 10, 2018 - 09:28am PT
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the Fet: Most scientific people understand models like the Big Bang include mechanisms and can be proven false.
Honest observation and a little knowledge about how people construct understanding psychologically and sociologically suggest that just about everyone is in a delusional state that focuses on surface features and creative interpretations.
When you rest your arm on a table to type your post here, there is an implicit assumption that the table is solid, that what you’re writing or typing is what it appears to be (rather than squiggles created by differences in light reflections), and what you have to communicate is concrete and serious. Your orientations are instrumental: it doesn’t matter what things really are (to hell with that), you “get things done” by golly, so you’re good.
The everyday world of delusion and illusion appears everywhere to anyone who looks at any "thing” closely and systematically. Don’t believe me? Read up in almost any scientific discipline, and what you’ll find are very academic people who are telling you that there are deep structures that lie underneath (invisible) causally that give rise to common, everyday views. What *appears* to be going on for everyone here in everyday life is, we’re consistently told, ill-understood. (Thank god for all those “experts.”)
On the other hand, I’d suggest that if you don’t see everything in front of you as an energy flow, then you’re stuck in someone’s creative narrative (probably your own—which is what the physicalists appear to be concerned about with spiritualists).
But, hey, that’s ok for 99.99% of the people on the planet. They’re interacting with other folks who disagree (sometimes vehemently) about those delusions and illusions (ala, the same “facts”).
That there are significant disagreements everywhere about everything could lead you to a recognition that there must be delusion and illusion everywhere (or rampant belief structures taken as incontrovertibly real). We are smart enough to understand that: what we were told or taught when we were inexperienced or younger was over-simplified or not quite true. (Did you notice that not everything’s quite working out in conventional reality?)
So-called “no-mind” doesn’t make the world go away. For those who realize it (occasionally), it simply makes things in the world (to include oneself) a bit translucent or evanescent, a bit like a dream, not quite concrete and serious. For almost everyone on the planet, we live in a a dream that we cannot quite escape.
Which dream would you prefer? The one you’re completely involved in and committed to, or the one that you are conscious of?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 10, 2018 - 09:43am PT
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the expansion is a measure of the shifting spectra of objects viewed in the sky. This doppler shift increases as the distance to the object increases.
The distance to the objects is measured by a luminosity relationship, objects farther away appear dimmer.
The hypothesis that dust causes the dimming, not distance, would alter the interpretation. The problem with dust is that as it absorbs the light from the stars it heats up, and then emits that energy, albeit in the infrared. The apparent creation of "magic dust" that can absorb the light without re-emitting the light has to provide some explanation of how the particles escape this process of re-emission.
Not only that, but the optical depth of the particles has to be such that the signature of expansion, that all points of the universe are expanding away from us (actually each point) uniformly, requires the distribution of the particles to be uniform.
Dust distribution in the universe is not uniform. Dust is generated in the cycling of material in stars, and stars are not uniformly distributed.
The methods for determining the distance essentially overlap as we go to farther and farther distances. Trigonometric parallax, proper motion, apparent luminosity. Improved telescopes are able to extend these observations to large distances.
I believe that gravitational lenses also provide a means of checking the distance scales, essentially these are "natural" telescopes and the geometric configuration of the objects help to confirm the distance relationships.
The first chapter of Weinberg's book gives a very good review of this accessible to a reader who would skip over the formulae, but might want to read the cited observational literature.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 10, 2018 - 10:14am PT
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Ed, here is another puzzle to solve. On the one hand, proponents of this theory state that "space itself" is expanding, rather than objects moving away from each other. Then in the next breath they tell you that once upon a time, the universe was a hot, dense mass - and then there was a great explosion. It's either one or the other.
I'm not at all sure what your puzzle is, General Relativity (GR) makes space-time dynamical. This is the major extension of Newtonian gravity in which space-time is taken to be static.
A dynamical space-time can depend on the distribution of mass, its position and velocity. GR provides a way of discussing the time-dependence of space-time.
The Robertson-Walker scale factor, a, can be time dependent, and that is usually how we think about the expansion. The time-dependence of the density of the universe can be derived
dρ/dt + (3ȧ/a)[p+ρ] = 0
This relationship mixes up the expansion of space-time contained in the scale factor with the time and space distribution of mass (the density) and energy (the pressure). GR is a framework that tells how to do the mixing.
if ȧ=0, no expansion, then dρ/dt = 0, the density does not change with time, that is steady-state.
pressure and density in the square brackets has to do with the equation-of-state of the universe.
Here is where Einstein proposed the cosmological constant, which is also the vacuum energy, if
p=-ρ
then there can be expansion but static density.
For cold matter p=0 and ρ proportional to a⁻³ the inverse "volume"
for hot matter p = ρ/3 and ρ proportional to a⁻⁴
Physical cosmology has been around for over 100 years in its modern form and is becoming the focus of high energy physics, modern observation and the current model of cosmology indicate that the majority of the universe is composed of stuff we don't have any idea of... and since that is the goal of high energy physics, to describe all the fundamental stuff, we see a shift from accelerator based observation (which is at "low energy" comparably) to astrophysical observation and "precision" cosmology.
What is the equation of state of the universe?
How ȧ came to be is a least plausibly described in inflationary models, these put the "bang" in the big bang.
I'm not an expert on this though...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Aug 10, 2018 - 10:31am PT
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I’d suggest that if you don’t see everything in front of you as an energy flow, then you’re stuck in someone’s creative narrative
You might be stuck in a traffic jam, too.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 10, 2018 - 10:39am PT
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Which dream would you prefer? The one you’re completely involved in and committed to, or the one that you are conscious of?
[Click to View YouTube Video]
...just eat the steak...
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 10, 2018 - 11:01am PT
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"self examination might lead to erroneous conclusions"
A salient point, but unlikely to convince those with deep attachments to the process.
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Aug 10, 2018 - 11:39am PT
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Ed the question I asked you is another well known problem with the Big Bang. The red shifts are isotropic, meaning that no matter which direction you look, objects at the same distance are receding (and accelerating) at the same rate. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that the earth is at the center of the expansion, which cannot be true. Hence, "space itself" must be expanding, or so they say.
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