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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Apr 26, 2019 - 05:34am PT
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Thanks, Mike, but for an expert in history you'll have to look elsewhere.
I will mention the scholars I have been reading, however, on the chance that others might recommend related authors. Besides Pagels, there's Bart Ehrman, Joseph Atwill, Barbara Thiering and Robert Eisenman. All have been career academics except for Atwill. I'll never be familiar enough with the material to judge them very well, and they've all come to rather differing conclusions about the big picture, but there are some interesting threads connecting them, particularly the business of James, the perhaps younger brother of Jesus.
Otherwise, good luck to ye. I haven't much fascination with gnosticism, but it's a direction which was drummed out of Western religion which, since that happened, seems to be concerned much more with belief than experience. If it had been different, one might not have to ask, "what is mind?"
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Apr 26, 2019 - 07:32pm PT
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In talking with my wife tonight, I realize that I need to move a little bit in my distinction between consciousness and mind. I have essentially been saying that we might as well define mind as human mind and posit it as the difference between us and say mammalian consciousness in general. I realize now that all primates likely have mind as well as cetaceans and presumably other vertebrate lineages. Since cetaceans and primates do not lie along a continuous lineage, this suggests that mind has evolved independently along multiple evolutionary pathways branching off of vertebrates.
Edit: Recognizing oneself in a mirror is as good a definition of mind as any I can think of. Mind is understanding that there is a you.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Apr 26, 2019 - 08:20pm PT
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^^^^ Like it! That's mind, baby!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 26, 2019 - 09:28pm PT
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eeyonkee,
If you're talking to your wife about this stuff, I'd say you're too far gone to save.
Mirrors are an oft-used metaphor in so-called spiritual circles, btw. The Mind has been said to act as a mirror. At first one does what one can to make sure it is clean. Then one let's go of the mirror entirely.
Viola, then there "you" are.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Apr 26, 2019 - 09:49pm PT
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Whoa or woe is me
I thought I was behind the third door
The third eye indicated I was
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Apr 27, 2019 - 12:39pm PT
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While the male gorilla posted by zbrown seems to have never figured out his self image, a total of eight animal species so far have been able to recognize themselves in the mirror, including magpies, thus proving as eeyonkee speculated, that evolution has produced intelligence more than once and in more than one way.
Here's an interesting video on Elephant self recognition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncKXLHz-PZI"]/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncKXLHz-PZI[/url]
and another one on animals and music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYyWyHrGn_k
and one of elephants in particular which seems to show a sense of rhythm although there are also many videos of cockatoos bobbing rhythmically to music, especially rock and roll.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC7z8JU5jZU
This would help explain why the super learning concept of adding music and/or rhythm and bodily movement while memorizing lists, aids in memory retention. The propensity for these existed in mammals and some birds long before humans and human speech came along.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 27, 2019 - 12:55pm PT
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Interesting post, Jan. Thanks
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 27, 2019 - 08:59pm PT
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Jan: . . . the male gorilla posted by zbrown seems to have never figured out his self image, . . . .
Whoa. Let's quickly give thought to what we mean by "self image."
I don't have to tell you that idea / concept is under great consideration.
EDIT: I'm objecting to the term. I think you really mean something else entirely. It's a really complicated idea.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 28, 2019 - 08:07am PT
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It's an interpretation, Mike. Performed automatically by the brain but in different ways in the brains of different species. It could also be called a model. Your brain builds a model, or models, of the world your senses report to it. It can also model itself by the feedback it gets when you interact with the outside world, and it can include sensations from your internal sense receptors, too, the ones that monitor temperature, stomach pH, fluid balance, etc.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 28, 2019 - 08:11am PT
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I know what models are. I'd like to see or hear what the model is.
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Trump
climber
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Apr 28, 2019 - 08:41am PT
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What we think of as “would help explain” I think is not necessarily about helping us understand what is actually factually true, but is more about helping us believe “the stuff that we say” is true. A belief that the earth is flat used to “help explain” a lot of stuff. Help explain at its root maybe is more “help us believe the stuff that we need to believe is actually stuff that’s also true”.
If we want to help explain the image that we see of ourself as thinkers and sayers, sure our concepts about consciousness and how much righter and more intelligent we are than other people, and how our fund of knowledge is so much greater than other people’s, probably “helps us explain” it.
But I don’t think that what we’re necessarily doing in our minds is trying to help ourselves understand the truth - I think we’re trying to most effectively survive, in whatever way works the best. But we really don’t like to believe that about ourselves - that’s not the self image that we want to see in the mirror.
We much prefer imagining that my fund of knowledge is greater than yours, maybe because that’s so important to our ability to survive. So we do. And then we admire the reflection of ourselves that we imagine is in the mirror and not just what we prefer to imagine in our minds, the thing we sayers prefer to say, the story that we prefer to tell about ourselves.
Why am I always the one who needs to explain? Prolly like that for all of us. Really I could stop saying any time, but for some reason I don’t. But I could. Really. Have I convinced you that I could not say yet?
Wings would be cool, but this seems to be working for us so far.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 28, 2019 - 10:24am PT
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I'd like to see or hear what the model is.
In this case it is "you."
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 28, 2019 - 12:33pm PT
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That's the object.
What's the model?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Apr 28, 2019 - 05:23pm PT
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I definitely was not referring to the Wikipedia article.
However, I think that self recognition would be a better term. The gold standard of that is to place some kind of mark on man or beast that they can not see unless they look in a mirror. If they reach up to touch it or try to remove it, we know that they have understood that it is themselves they are viewing and can therefore explore it or try to remove it.
On the other hand, it may just be a measure of learning through practice in which case that particular gorilla wasn't very smart. I have in fact seen very poor and deprived villagers in Nepal who had never seen a mirror before want to look at mine and then jump back at the eye staring at them and then glance behind the mirror to see who it belonged to. These were the same villagers who could not recognize images in a photograph because they had never seen one before. Since I was only passing through their villages, I had no chance to see how quickly they could learn when given the chance.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 28, 2019 - 07:58pm PT
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Terrible sterile model made by mental speculators just plain guessing with no life in it at all .....
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 28, 2019 - 08:33pm PT
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Jan: "I have in fact seen very poor and deprived villagers in Nepal who had never seen a mirror before want to look at mine and then jump back at the eye staring at them and then glance behind the mirror to see who it belonged to."
Astounding. You would think they had seen their image numerous times in still water in lakes and ponds.
Checking the sharpness. Not the best but not too bad.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 29, 2019 - 06:54am PT
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MH2,
Doubling down with a broken-record response would seem to me to be a form of avoidance.
Thx, Jan. It was your post, so I was hoping you'd say something more.
If you'd be a depth psychologist, you'd probably say an image refers to an archetype. They argue that archetypes are essentially images that guide understanding, although they need not be pictures in any way. Most of them are described by gods and goddesses in Greek and Roman mythologies. "Self-image" could be any description, but Freud and Jung (and others) said they weren't: hence, a limited number of archetypes. It's easy to see them applied to humans, how humans look at themselves individually, and how humans use them to guide their actions (albeit unconsciously). But it is not easy to see how animals use "image" in any of those senses. We could use such notions to separate a fully conscious being (humans) from those that are not (animals). Of course particular apes have been shown they can "ape" human behaviors, but the capacity to reflect on what one is would indeed seem to be god-like.
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