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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 24, 2014 - 04:07pm PT
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spiritual entity = magic. The NAZI reference with regards to recognizing our micro machineness is beyond cliche. What's not wonderful about being what we actually are again? Do the 'spiritual' require magic as a salve for self loathing? After all, a micromachine carries no burden of Original Sin. I would think such purity would appeal to the spiritual.
The idea that there can be a 'space inbetween perception' is just more religious exceptionalism. Invariably, the author of such gibberish CAN access those mythical spaces - most mere trogs cannot.
Well, newsflash - if those dendrites aren't lit up - there is no perception - or 'space inbetween'. There is truly no-thing.
Largo has agreed that consciousness requires a physical source (science), yet he continues to insist that this source produces ectoplasm (magic).
'raw' awareness (as opposed to half baked or fully fried awareness)is a 3 D array of dedicated dendrites lit up in a pattern. There is no attempt to separate sentience, or, more accurately, consciousness, from the body which produces it, because there is nothing to separate. The aforementioned dendritic marquee IS consciousness. It's not really all that weird that we experience richness from such basic components (albeit a whole lot of them) - after all, most of our communications, art, technology, etc are just 1s and 0s. Everything that is is made from a few Lego part numbers.
That's natural. Ectoplasm to explain richness? Not so much.
It's also not difficult to grok that the same types of neural structures that manage our perception of other people is also employed, with overlap, to provide our first person experience of how we feel and think about things. When one meets a new person, how we feel about them can be pretty nebulous and inaccessible - not all that different from our perception of how they might feel about us. As time goes on and we gather more information, this 1st person viewpoint gains resolution and becomes more definitive and personal in comparison to our perception of the other person.
It all makes pretty good sense to me. The woo layer, accessible only by the highly spiritually trained.
Yeah, I've heard that one before a few times. That's not a very complicated idea either. It's just a bit battered from millenia of gross overuse.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 24, 2014 - 04:12pm PT
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Ed asked: what is "raw awareness?"
Raw awareness is the aspect of sentience which is aware. From a discursive POV, which focuses on objects (objectifies), awareness is a field (Q Field, or qualia field) in which objects and things become real and known to consciousness.
Ed asked: "is there even such a thing to be described?"
Awarenss is not a "thing" to be described. What is described, or discursively objectified, are the articles that enter awareness. Hence, awarenss is known as a non-thing full of things.
Ed said: "The distinction the authors make is apt, that there is physical attention, and that "awareness" is the perception of that physical attention."
By "physical attention" I trust you mean that attention was placed on a physical thing, something "real" and observable to our senses. In that sense, awareness is the preception of our attention when it is placed on a physical thing, like a visul article or a sound or a smell. But what is equally apt is to recognize and experience directly that awareness is not limited to things on which we narrow focus our attention. With practice we can hold our focdus wide open, "paying attention" to no physical thing in particular, and yet be intimately present with our raw awareness. That is the whole business of the "space between thoghts and perceptions."
Put differently, when we objectify physical reality, awareness and attention will be known in those terms. But when we DON'T objectify reality, and don't narrow focus attention, awareness becomes a much broader issue.
Ed said: "in their model, "awareness" is a perception of that attention. There is real content there, but it is not attention, but the perception of attention...
No offense intended, but to anyone who has worked on the awareness arts, this statement is almost hoplessly muddled. "Awareness is the perception of awareness" can be understood like this: We are aware and have the capicity to be aware of things. We become aware of things when we narrow focus our attention on a particular person, place, thing or phenomenon. Ther is no "attention" with narrow focusing becuase that is how we "attend" to a thing. Our awarenss perceives and is aware of THAT TO WHICH WE ARE PAYING ATTENTION. But we need to understand clearly that awarenss is not limited to our preception of "real content," ie the awareness of a physical thing. That would imply that awareness is entirely "created" by way of us paying attention to a thing, and this is not the case at all.
Ed said: "Your "raw awareness" is a perception. Can you show it is not?"
When you preceive the "space between your thoughts" in your yoga class, WHAT exactly is it that you perceive?
Ed concluded: "As far as "not being a physical thing" it has a physical consequence, which is our action... how does that happen? how does it connect from the non-physical to the physical?"
And what is awareness, perception, and attention etc. when there is no action involved? what IS it then?
JL
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 24, 2014 - 04:38pm PT
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"And what is awareness, perception, and attention etc. when there is no action involved? what IS it then?"
It's a dendritic structure lit up in a certain way. Probably most, if not all, of our perceptions and thoughts cause outgoing (from those structures that responsible for maintaining the schema of our consciousness to some other part of the neural system) signals for action - however subtle. Slight changes in heart rate, neurotransmitter/hormone levels, further requests to access more memories, etc.
I really don't see why this is so confusing at this point.
The 'space between your thoughts' is just another thought, of course. Same rules apply. If that feels really 'spiritual', well, so does an acid trip or a rave, depending on one's point of view. Feel special? We all do.
Largo's getting wrapped around the axle with regards to the 'physical'. A 'pure thought without action' isn't 'physical' to him - you have to manipulate something like a paperweight or whiffle bat, I guess.
It's all physical - every thought, or no-thought - which is just another thought, regardless of whether a whiffle bat is employed or not. It's all dendrites doing their thing.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 24, 2014 - 04:58pm PT
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consciousness requires a physical source (science), yet he continues to insist that this source produces ectoplasm (magic).
You make up sh!t as you go along and put that bullsh!t onto other people.
You're full of sh!t and make up sh!t every day because ultimately you have no real clue what consciousness itself really is nor its actual source.
You're just another babbling mental speculator with no real clue .......
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Jul 24, 2014 - 05:03pm PT
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So there.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 24, 2014 - 05:09pm PT
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The remote possibility of one day having a clue is what keeps me hanging on.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 24, 2014 - 05:36pm PT
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Ed posted the abstract to that link, here's the first part;
Significance
What is the relationship between your own private awareness of events and the awareness that you intuitively attribute to the people around you? In this study, a region of the human cerebral cortex was active when people attributed sensory awareness to someone else. Furthermore, when that region of cortex was temporarily disrupted, the person’s own sensory awareness was disrupted. The findings suggest a fundamental connection between private awareness and social cognition.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 24, 2014 - 06:23pm PT
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spiritual entity = magic.
Magic is me using magnets under the table to levitate stuff and spook 8yo girls who don't what magnetism is.
Who said a "spiritual entity" can't be physical?
What Is magnetism or gravity considered?
Sam Harris was asked about the "Ghost pulling the levers" in his vid. He said there is no such thing as a no-thing spirit controlling the body. It's ALL deterministic by the meat-brain. Consciousness is merely the attention to being alive. No free-will. None!
Maybe to him that's magic too?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 24, 2014 - 06:40pm PT
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"And what is awareness, perception, and attention etc. when there is no action involved? what IS it then?"
It's a dendritic structure lit up in a certain way. Probably most, if not all, of our perceptions and thoughts cause outgoing (from those structures that responsible for maintaining the schema of our consciousness to some other part of the neural system) signals for action - however subtle. Slight changes in heart rate, neurotransmitter/hormone levels, further requests to access more memories, etc.
I really don't see why this is so confusing at this point.
The 'space between your thoughts' is just another thought, of course. Same rules apply. If that feels really 'spiritual', well, so does an acid trip or a rave, depending on one's point of view. Feel special? We all do.
Largo's getting wrapped around the axle with regards to the 'physical'. A 'pure thought without action' isn't 'physical' to him - you have to manipulate something like a paperweight or whiffle bat, I guess.
It's all physical - every thought, or no-thought - which is just another thought, regardless of whether a whiffle bat is employed or not. It's all dendrites doing their thing.
Where you betray yourself rather handily is your insistance that "the space bewteen a thought is another thought, of course."
This might help you get clear on it: just spend thirty seconds with your attention wide open, NOT focused on any thing. No thoughts will rise up if you keep that focus wide enough. In the abscnece of thought, what do you find? That is what you are missing when your attention is fused to what your dendrites are parading before you. We don't expect you to know otherwise, lacking the expoeriences that would make some of this material clear to you and entirely void of woo and magic and all the other silly sh#t your heap on what you don't understand. But so long as you are curious and are not a slave to your own POV, you have a shot at a wider, and clearer perspecitve.
JL
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 24, 2014 - 07:04pm PT
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Ed this might have happened when you hit ur head?
Systems in the brain not only compute the information that I am aware, but also compute a spatial framework for it, a location, and a perspective. Screw up the computations, and I screw up my understanding of my own awareness.
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MH2
climber
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Jul 24, 2014 - 08:32pm PT
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First, some time back, MH2 said that the bio machine/human being actually directs "our" attention to this or that and that "we" have no dominion over our actions, or perceptiolns, etc., whatsoever. In fact the bio machine itself, as a stimulus response mechanism, has no self awareness at all. It simply does what it does entirely on mechanical, automatic principals. It exists outside and separate from sentience, which is an impotent, subjective observer entirely beholden to the determined mechanisms of the bio machine. (JL)
Your awareness of what other people have said is flawed, JL, and that calls into question other statements you make about awareness. Objective evidence of poor memory, careless reporting, and poor comprehension can make us doubt what a person has to say. No one is immune from making mistakes but you could do better.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 24, 2014 - 08:36pm PT
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I call this the ‘attention schema theory’. It has a very simple idea at its heart: that consciousness is a schematic model of one’s state of attention. Early in evolution, perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago, brains evolved a specific set of computations to construct that model. At that point, ‘I am aware of X’ entered their repertoire of possible computations.
The heart of the theory, remember, is that awareness is a model of attention,
In reality, attention is a data-handling method used by neurons. It isn’t a substance and it doesn’t flow. But it is a neat accounting trick to model attention in that way; it helps to keep track of who is attending to what.
So HIS "consciousness" is a schematic model of one's "state" of awareness.
And awareness is a model of attention.
And attention merely a "method" of data-handling USED BY neurons.
in this sense aren't models and methods type's of ghost's?
His consciousness is a long ways from Harris's just knowing your alive!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 24, 2014 - 08:52pm PT
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When you preceive the "space between your thoughts" in your yoga class, WHAT exactly is it that you perceive?
Well, it is as I describe it, of course. But the idea that it is a perception means it is a representation of what that state is/was, not the state itself. In fact, I have no idea what the actual state might be.
Do I actually stop paying attention? I don't know, I think at the stage I am at probably not, or at least not for long. But could I, in principle, stop paying attention? perhaps. But what my perception of that state is, what ever it is, is still a perception.
Mechanistically, it is the perception that I act on, that model which the brain computes of the outside world, which does animate action. My perception could be wrong, some combination of shadows that appear as the face of a tiger, for instance, might make me jump. Or a fallen branch that I notice as I step over a log, that appears to be a snake...
When something happens that is outside of that perceptual model, it is difficult to know just how to behave. We've had those "deer in the headlight" moments... not frozen by fear, frozen for lack of a response to the stimulus. Truly confused as to what was unfolding in front of us.
Why would that ever happen if we had this thing "free will"? What is it about those situations that prevent us from exercising that "free will"? The deer's full attention is on the headlights, it's perception of the situation, however, is confused, it isn't "programmed" to have a response.
getting back to my concussion experience, it is true that I don't remember what happened. Certainly it seemed as if I were conscious to others, but equally certainly, I behaved in a not fully normal matter. While I cannot recall the entire incident, at the time I acted as if I had memory, but I could not remember my locker combination.
I would assert I was not conscious, yet others thought I was... and all due to a head injury. Where did that consciousness go, and how did it come back? If you think it was just a lapse of memory, which we believe is something mechanistic, what is the relationship of the physical nature of memory, and the putative non-physical nature of consciousness?
How does this non-physical thing (consciousness) express itself physically (through our physical behavior, now including memory)?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 24, 2014 - 09:19pm PT
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Ed wrote: "When you preceive the "space between your thoughts" in your yoga class, WHAT exactly is it that you perceive?"
Well, it is as I describe it, of course. But the idea that it is a perception means it is a representation of what that state is/was, not the state itself.
--
You're getting a little closer IMO to getting this. At this level of inquiry it's mostly a hall of mirrors and is very tricky to negotiate save to a defalt into simple mechanical terms, which is simply our discursive mind objectifying the "space" into a form our brains can mentally wrangle.
If you observe close enough you will see that the space between thoughts involves awareness sans an object. A thought is awareness that has narrowed on some thing (thought, feeling, etc). Without the narrowing of focus, there are no trees in our perception, only the forest (space between trees).
In this sense, when you are present with the space between thoughts, THERE IS NO REPRESENTATION, no position of remove, no state or tree (so to speak) "out there" to perceive. There is only the state itself and raw awareness, with no duality between them.
It is only our discursive minds that tell us awareness MUST involve states and objects and representations of things we can mentally get hold of.
But brother, this is slippery material.
JL
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Jul 24, 2014 - 09:25pm PT
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this is still a very interesting discussion
however all this mental wiggling and squiggling serves to further convince me that humans generally know next to nothing by way of understanding the nature of the universe
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 24, 2014 - 09:35pm PT
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but there is no way to access that "raw state"
you experience that state only through perception.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Jul 24, 2014 - 10:04pm PT
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Ed, I have the greatest respect for modern physicists and cosmologists and trust you all are promising guiding lights for attaining a more viable understanding of the nature of reality. However it also seems to me as an interested observer that major breakthroughs in understanding are blocked by politically controlled academic obstinacy. All this would be sufficiently intriguing if only as a matter of academic dialog. However such questions appear threatening to the very survival of our civilization and planetary life support systems. Elaborating on this could involve a major discussion branching off from this thread...but I suspect your ability to continue participating here indicates your deeper sense of these matters...
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 24, 2014 - 10:20pm PT
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The deer's full attention is on the headlights, it's perception of the situation, however, is confused, it isn't "programmed" to have a response.
Well in my idiodic mind the headlights have "rays" holding the deer immobile. HeHe.
Seriously, i believe simply the deer doesn't know how he "feels" about the light. Until he does, his program can't respond.
i'm thinking the ONLY imediate Free-will we have is the choice to move in a direction to cause change in the way we feel about someone/something.
All other movement is deterministic. Within each breath we have the capability to change hate to love, or love to hate. i don't mean within the emotional experience itself, although one could. Rather a reasoned concious descision to not hate George Bush(or whoever/whatever you don't like) and start showing him love. Once you make that 180, your attention changes, your programs start changing. Your awareness changes, and mostly ur conscious/subconscious changes.
what do ya think about that one?
What's the consensus on love, physical or not?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 24, 2014 - 11:38pm PT
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I have yet to hear an answer as to when (and how) this non-emergent, non-physical 'consciousness' attaches it an organis. And where along the line of life from bacteria to humans or, with humans, from conception to adult? How do we find it or it us?
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 25, 2014 - 06:54am PT
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I have yet to hear an answer as to when (and how) this non-emergent, non-physical 'consciousness' attaches it an organis
That's because you refuse to listen, you tune out completely unless it's some scientists that's been rubber stamped so called expert by their own tuned out clan.
The blind leading the blind.
Just see how much you fools attack some simple thing as zazen and you get a very clear picture of western ridged consciousness.
Then throw in an extreme mad man like this fruit guy here and it's even more evident you're all locked into a very narrow ridged consciousness.
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