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Zay
climber
Monterey, Ca
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Mar 12, 2019 - 10:03am PT
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My take on "mind" as someone who just started A.A. and has been couchsurfing until emplyment kicks in (which is finally tomorrow!!!)...
Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger, the soul shapes our perception.
Heaven and hell are constructs of day to day life.
We have a gift, and that is CHOICE.
We CAN choose to life rich lives or we can CHOOSE to make them a hell.
Science is our delving into the laguage of God (or what have you) and we try to apply scientific understanding to a non human reality.
Universe has been and will be, we are along for the ride.
Am I crazy?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 12, 2019 - 10:56am PT
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We're all crazy, bro.
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Zay
climber
Monterey, Ca
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Mar 12, 2019 - 11:06am PT
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thanks largo, having just got out of my third stint in a psych ward... that means a lot right now.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 12, 2019 - 11:56am PT
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having just got out of my third stint in a psych ward...
We may have all (WB excepted) been there. I have been there in several different roles. But the main question: was it voluntary? I think it is perfectly okay to be crazy, or at least considered to be so, but it gets hard when you lose your freedom.
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Zay
climber
Monterey, Ca
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Mar 12, 2019 - 12:13pm PT
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MH2,
this was my first voluntary stay. the first time i was tricked, the second time a cop had to sneak up behind me ans choke me out LOL
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Zay
climber
Monterey, Ca
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Mar 12, 2019 - 12:14pm PT
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im good now though. i have accepted that i need meds
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 12, 2019 - 12:20pm PT
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Your choices deserve respect, Zay.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 12, 2019 - 12:32pm PT
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I think it is perfectly okay to be crazy, or at least considered to be so, but it gets hard when you lose your freedom.
That's the crux of it right there IMO. And given MH2's experience in a clinical setting (so far as I understand it), this plays right into his wheelhouse. When you have direct experience with this stuff, it's a totally different animal then knowing it as a talking point. That is, knowing it theoretically.
One of the trickiest things to come to see clearly is that "crazy" is in many cases NOT a matter of having a psychotic brain, but rather getting your subconscious mind encoded with crazy, or traumatic inputs that cause "crazy" states that can jump into and totally swamp your experience. Think Jack-in-the-Box. If those old states (and the programming that causes them) are strong and toxic enough, once they are on line, so to speak, the subject has little to no freedom. That state "has you," body and soul. It's my impression that these unwanted, automatic and involuntary states cause more psychological havoc than you can ever imagine - till you grind right down to "the wood" and start consciously working with them.
The computer model of mind is invaluable in this regards (IME) because it functions TOTALLY on auto-pilot. That is, it is machine like and functions entirely on autopilot - unless you take conscious action to reprogram it with corrective programming. There are scads of techniques to address this but one in particular can often have remarkable results. It comes out of NLP (Neural Linguistic Programming), a modality that IME is vastly overblown but "Anchoring," and in particular, the process of "collapsing anchors" has been refined over the years since Bandler et al cooked up NLP and it's something of a marvel if a person is willing to put in the reps. It takes advantage of the automatic programming capacities of the subconscious and how old programs, which cause wonky and limiting states, can sometimes quickly, but generally over time, can be neutralized and replaced with more resourceful states.
If I get the time I'll jot out how it works. As complicated and byzantine as Mind is, collapsing anchors is remarkably simple.
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Trump
climber
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Mar 12, 2019 - 12:33pm PT
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A strong criticism of the focus on the gene's role in evolution is that the genes don't interact directly with the environment, the "phenes" do (genotype, phenotype). The environment, and all the other things living in it, produce a "fitness landscape," and it is where all this evolving takes place. This is an amazingly non-linear dynamical non-equilibrium system, the landscape changes due to this evolution.
Seems to me to be the same for mind.
What gets acted upon by the environment (fitness landscape) are behaviors. But then those behaviors get produced by the mind. And the mind gets produced by (fill in the blank with whatever it is that we make up in our minds and are then so confident is true about what produces the mind). I expect genes come into play somewhere there too.
Along with what else? Our ability to fill in the blanks with stuff we imagine is actually factually true regardless of whether it is or not, I think for one.
Hopefully we’ll retain an ability to make room for new stuff that we make up along the way, and then see how the resulting behaviors play out in our environment. Who’d a thunk he could free solo el cap without plummeting to his genes’ demise? Pretty cool.
I don’t think that the irrationality of human thinking is really irrational - our sunk cost fallacies and our confirmation biases and all - it’s just that we lack the information to understand its rationality in the bigger picture, and lack the humility to admit it. Prolly for some good reason or other.
What matters to our survival is not how true our beliefs are, even our beliefs about our own minds. What matters is how fit the behaviors that our minds produce are in the environment. I think that we’re inclined to confuse fit beliefs and fit states of mind (awarenesses and perceptions of reality) with true ones, because doing so works to our advantage.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 12, 2019 - 01:00pm PT
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We're all crazy, bro.
Not everyone on this planet is crazy.
Mostly the gross materialists who always masquerade themselves as sane .....
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Zay
climber
Monterey, Ca
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Mar 12, 2019 - 02:06pm PT
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So I still get many "delusions" but as of now I am able to recognize them as such, breath, and move on.
I have the "capacity" to be a harm to myself and that is scary.
I was definitely a "gross materialist" until about a month ago.
The light of alter-able perception is blinding at times.
Another manic-depressive friend of mine agrees that the veils of what we all reality do seem to be a bit "thinned" for people like us.
Doesn't take much for the other side to come a-knocking.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Mar 12, 2019 - 02:21pm PT
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Eeyonkee, I think you would enjoy reading this if you haven't already.
Challenging Mainstream thought about Beauty's Big Hand in Evolution
It deals among other things, with ideas of whether concepts of beauty which seem to determine sexual selection at the expense of the survivability of males, is determined by genes or are exercises in feminine free will, bizarre as some of the selections may be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/science/evolution-of-beauty-richard-prum-darwin-sexual-selection.html
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Mar 12, 2019 - 03:34pm PT
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^^^^
It deals among other things, with ideas of whether concepts of beauty which seem to determine sexual selection at the expense of the survivability of males, is determined by genes or are exercises in feminine free will, bizarre as some of the selections may be. I KNEW IT! Wily feminine free will... it definitely passes the smell test for me:>
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Mar 12, 2019 - 03:57pm PT
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John, you linked a time theory article that referenced some math I was not aware of (these days the preponderance of mathematics is in that category!) Thanks.
C2 = 0.11011100101110111…
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 12, 2019 - 04:49pm PT
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John, I'm not really "aware" of any math (I bailed after high school stuff), so it's no wonder. Hope we can unpack the Lynd paper someday. That's a task but worth it I think because most all of what we have covered (especially how perception factors into all this) so far might be in there. Not sure, but that's my hunch.
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Trump
climber
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Mar 12, 2019 - 05:24pm PT
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How crazy do we need to be before we’re crazy crazy, and not just everybody’s crazy crazy? How many times do we need to not notice that we believe something that’s not true, or that we’ve misperceived some fact of reality? How many times do we need to repeat the same thing, whether it’s “other people are stupid, but not me’ or “I do believe in ghosts” or whatever, before we’ve left the realm of the “right” way to be conscious, and entered the realm of the “wrong” way to be conscious?
Make it up however you want, and believe it. Assign whatever prior probability you prefer to you being right and believing what’s true and being truly honestly conscious the right way and not the deluded believing stuff that’s not true way.
98%? 99%? 99.999999%? Go for it! You’ll either crash and burn, or you won’t, but maybe we ethereal material materialists left behind will have learned something either way. Who knows - maybe it’s good to be a cat.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 12, 2019 - 07:18pm PT
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Make it up however you want, and believe it.
You can't make up reality.
It's never been done nor will it ever be done.
Reality is always reality ......
The gross materialists always make up sh!t masqueraded as reality .....
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Mar 13, 2019 - 06:49am PT
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Just got my shiny new Stuart Kauffman book, The Origins of Order; Self Organization and Selection in Evolution. I can already tell that I'll be eating some crow. I'm gonna STFU and do some digesting for awhile.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Mar 13, 2019 - 01:45pm PT
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^^^^
Please tell us what Kauffman has to say about water. Those other molecules would have a tough time getting organized without it. I know that I said that I would STFU, but when have you ever been able to believe me about this before?
I don't know exactly what he would say, but it would be in keeping with his idea of pre-biotic factors as (at least in part) controlling the show. It's a great question. Life evolved from non-organic molecules in water.
So far, I immediately see Kauffman's central thesis and have a hard time refuting it. Self-organization is a really cool, additional architectural element to the whole story. As a geologist, I totally get the crystallography example. I can see how I might change my ultimate agent from gene or community of genes to community of molecules. The community of molecules is bounded by a membrane from the outside world. Maybe the chemical bond is the ultimate driver.
Nice link, btw.
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