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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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Sep 18, 2011 - 08:23am PT
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mind is a crack in the spirit
thru which leaks the perception of life.
i can be god if i want.
or i can be the devil.
an angel? yes.
all of these entities are figments of each fluid dream.
they're ours to create, destroy, curse, praise.
though all of our emotional thrashing
never liberates the the mystery's bowel pressure.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Sep 18, 2011 - 08:51am PT
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Along the lines of what Ed has been posting, I've just done two field trips in two days with my students. Yesterday I went with an Anthropology class to the zoo where they did observational studies of primates. Today I went with an Asian Studies class to a monthly service at one of the local Buddhist temples. In both cases, the subject was mind.
I too have learned much from these discussions and have a renewed interest in science as a result of this and other threads of the past year and a half. I have been immersed in the humanities department of my university for 20 years now and had been so involved in teaching the differences in belief and practice of various Asian religions that I had forgotten to ask the larger questions.
Since my interest in mind is mainly referenced from my own experiments with meditation, and increasingly, neurobiology, some of the questions I am wrestling with at the moment are:
1. Is my meat brain really clever enough or am I really gullible enough, to be fooled into thinking that the source of many of my experiences was outside of myself?
2. How many statistical anomalies does it take to make more than a coincidence?
3. Why do these experiences only happen in a transformative spiritual context?
Other rhythmic activities that call for breath regulation and a different world view (snorkeling in the ocean for hours for example) do not provoke the same chemical and electrical experiences, let alone profound transformations of emotions and points of view.
4. If different types of spiritual beliefs and experiences change actual brain structure in different ways as indicated by recent research (best summary so far: How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist by Andrew Newberg M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman), could non religious practices be devised which would produce the same results?
5. If such practices could be devised, would they be as effective at producing measurable changes in the brain as the corresponding spiritual practices and if not, why does faith in something greater than oneself seem to produce better results? And how is this faith element related to evolution?
Meanwhile many thanks to all the people who posted the many wonderful links on this and similar threads, which have provided me with a crash course in neurobiology, and to a lesser extent, philosophy.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Sep 18, 2011 - 12:07pm PT
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Jan
Ok - right guy, wrong god or main server. Then let me reformulate using WBraun's words - the content is the same.
WBraun
WBraun writes "The brain is a lump of matter, it does not have independent power with which to act." Strange, who wrote those words? Was it "the main server of life" using the hand of WBraun? I guess you are talking about yourself - this is the answer introspection and excessive "main server-reading" or "main-server-meditation" has brought to you. Do you consider yourself a medium for the main server? One of "the main server's/the unnamables" lines so to say?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Sep 23, 2011 - 02:46pm PT
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Wow. This thread is still going on.
How about morphic fields from the noetic "sciences" ???
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 23, 2011 - 03:18pm PT
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Been too busy to join in on the fun here. But my feeling is that unless some clarity and standardization can be brought to bear on the most basic terms - especially clarification of 1st and 3rd person, subjective and objective, raw awareness as opposed to "content," and a few more critical aspects of "mind" - the conversation just ends up looping on itself for the lack of consensus on the most basic shite. I read a stack of those papers off the web list and they all struggle to speak a common language.
JL
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Sep 23, 2011 - 03:29pm PT
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There really isn't even a consensus on what qualia are in philosophy circles.
More like there isn't a consensus that the idea of qualia is even a valid or useful vehicle for the discussion.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Sep 23, 2011 - 03:32pm PT
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NIHILISM:
Nihilism ( from the Latin nihil, nothing)
is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.[1] Moral nihilists assert that morality does not inherently exist, and that any established moral values are abstractly contrived. Nihilism can also take epistemological, metaphysical, or ontological forms, meaning respectively that, in some aspect, knowledge is not possible, or that contrary to popular belief, some aspect of reality does not exist as such.
The term nihilism is sometimes used in association with anomie to explain the general mood of despair at a perceived pointlessness of existence that one may develop upon realizing there are no necessary norms, rules, or laws.[2] Movements such as Futurism and deconstruction,[3] among others, have been identified by commentators as "nihilistic" at various times in various contexts.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Sep 23, 2011 - 04:07pm PT
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Fort Mental:
Tiss a wonderfully beautiful day here in Albuquerque would you not agree?
Posting from the Flying Star on Juan Tabo, coffee and oatmeal cookie of course!
Maybe some day we can meet up?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 23, 2011 - 09:55pm PT
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There really isn't even a consensus on what qualia are in philosophy circles.
More like there isn't a consensus that the idea of qualia is even a valid or useful vehicle for the discussion.
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I think this is a pretty good example of "qualia" not being properly explained or understood. For me, I just stick to what is undeniable in human experience, and call that qualia.
For instance - I am a subject who has experience in time and space. I obviously experience myself from the first person, though I can objectify things with my left brain; but said objectification or thought will be experienced by me, as content or qualia, since I cannot escape myself and remain conscious.
IOWs, the shite that passes through my 1st person subjective experience, is qualia, including the thought (qualia) that qualia itself might not be "valid or useful."
Simple enough for a grade schooler to understand it - but arguments persist.
JL
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go-B
climber
Sozo
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Sep 24, 2011 - 10:34am PT
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Ephesians 4:23 and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, 24 and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.
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TWP
Trad climber
Mancos, CO
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Sep 25, 2011 - 11:50pm PT
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Largo wrote:
"... since I cannot escape myself and remain conscious."
Occurs to me that "escaping myself and remaining conscious" describes the state of satori (Zen Buddhism) or "union with the infinite" (Patanjali's samadhi).
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jstan
climber
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Sep 28, 2011 - 03:45pm PT
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Great links Joe. So elder memory loss may just be due to a competition between several memories
trying to reach the conscious level. Either because of degradation in the lock-out mechanism
or just because our lives have been so memorable.
In my case the lock-out mechanism is clearly at fault.
Got to stay trinary.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Sep 28, 2011 - 04:43pm PT
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I hear you John! Have to figure this aspect of 'place' organization is one of the first victims of dementia. I also suspect the rapid context searching / matching is also probably responsible for the occasional sense of déjà vu.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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A thought experiment proposed by Kathryn Schulz in her book Being Wrong:
"...imagine that you step outside not in Chicago or Houston, but in someplace truly dark like the Himalayas, say, or Patagonia, or the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look up in such a place, you will observe that the sky above you is vast and vaulted, its darkness pulled taut from horizon to horizon and perforated by innumerable stars. Stand there long enough and you'll see this whole vault turning overhead, like the slowest of tumblers in the most mysterious of locks. Stand there even longer and it will dawn on you that your position in this spectacle is curiously central. The apex of the heavens is directly above you. And the land you are standing on--land that unlike the firmament is quite flat, and unlike the stars quite stationary---stretches out in all directions from a midpoint that is you.
...this is the view that we as a species have been looking at for 73 million nighttimes."
So our experience in this case is overwhelming, we are at the center of it all.
It is codified in the Bible, e.g.:
1 Chronicles 16:30: "Tremble before him, all the earth! The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved."
Psalms 93:1: "The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed in majesty and armed with strength; indeed, the world is established, firm and secure."
Psalms 96:10: "Say among the nations, 'The LORD reigns.' The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity."
Psalms 104:5: "He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved."
Ecclesiastes 1:5: "The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises."
These passages are the most obvious evidence from the Bible for the geocentric view that our experience agrees with, and the basis for the inquisition's heresy case against Galileo.
Cardinal Bellarmine:
"If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion false which has been proved to be true. But I do not think there is any such proof since none has been shown to me."
It was not just the Catholic church, here from Martin Luther:
"There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must . . . invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth."
And it is not just an ancient idea... as recently as 1999 a Gallop poll found that 18% of Americans believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth. (see http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-general-knowledge-levels.aspx and also http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2007/06/06/eppure-si-muoveor-does-it/);. The later study also found that the belief was strongly correlated with the lack of formal education... which is to say perhaps, a stronger dependence on "personal experience" as a guide to the world.
For this discussion of "mind" it begs the question: "to what extent should our experience of reality be used to explain reality." Obviously (I think) we see the limitations of such arguments in an idea which coined the term "revolution."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 1, 2011 - 01:55pm PT
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For this discussion of "mind" it begs the question: "to what extent should our experience of reality be used to explain reality."
I haven't had time to write about this lately but I've been reading like crazy and have some things to say per this stuff.
The above question boils down to recognizing and differentiating. Chalmers sees a science of consciousness as relating third-person data - about brain processes, behavior, environmental interaction, and the like - to first-person data about conscious experience. Others have other ideas.
A fundamental Law of Consciousness is that third-person data cannot totally explain first person experience, and vica versa. Chalmers (originaly a mathematician), Nagle and others posit arguments that the process described about is not ultimately reductive, which is interesting.
I don't agree with Chalmers about several key points, especially this:
"The job of a science of consciousness, then, is to connect the first-person data to third-person data: perhaps to explain the former in terms of the latter."
This is basically backing into reductionism, but more on that later.
JL
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