Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
|
|
Finished the 8 day zen retreat on saturday. will post a TR soon. One observation is how extremely physical it is . It follows an exact schedule of 6 am to 920 PM everyday with four sessions of sitting, chanting and bowing meditation for a total of 10 hours and 3 formal meals that are another from of meditation each lasting about 40 minutes.
I have done this numerous times and it still amazes me how physically committing it is and how physically difficult it can be during the retreat.
|
|
cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
|
|
As for that which you don’t know HOW you know it--life, reality-, it's the same thing, but you put these different labels on it (autonomic system, unconscious, subconscious, instinct, pristine awareness). You're making theoretical distinctions.
These things have been found out through indirect means, which themselves provide conscious experience, first to the researchers and then to the rest of us by means of their publication. So yes, they are labels, but they're still based in experience.
You both say seem to say that real knowledge is only what you know through ideas and concepts. Hence you eschew the validity of your very own direct experience and apprehension. You say you're aware of the world through intermediary articulations and conceptualizations. I say those are veils.
That's an exaggeration. No one can escape knowing through experience those things that can be apprehended, and it would be absurd to denigrate the obvious value of that.
Every time you denigrate any kind of wisdom that you cannot sense empirically or with thoughts, you hold yourself up for the same denigration as you apply most often to (let's say) religions.
Not every time, because unfortunately there's a lot of self-proclaimed "wisdom" out there that's just complete nonsense in disguise. Ask any deprogrammed cult member.
Are you an empiricist or not? Do you trust experience or not? What ISN’T conceptual or theoretical to you?
Everyone is an empiricist. My own daily experience includes lots of pure awareness, which can be joyous, terrifying, the whole gamut. Then again schizophrenics trust their experiences too, but that doesn't mean they're right. Unless you want to go all R.D. Laing on the subject, which is fine.
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
You both say seem to say that real knowledge is only what you know through ideas and concepts
Well, it may seem that way to you, but I've never said that, Mike. Experience leads to knowledge and hopefully we learn from our mistakes. I have no doubt that you and JL, PSP and others here have gained through your meditative exercises an insight into the capabilities of mind that some of the rest of us can't comprehend. My only argument occurs when these mental experiences are somehow equated to phenomena in the physical world. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form is a delightful bit of poetic non-imagery, and in a certain mental state it must seem that way . . . however, in the physical world it just doesn't fly.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
|
|
Cintune: These things have been found out through indirect means, which themselves provide conscious experience, first to the researchers and then to the rest of us by means of their publication. So yes, they are labels, but they're still based in experience.
Their founding is by inference, not by direct apprehension. Content is not consciousness. Content is narrative or theory.
I truly appreciate the approach of referring to research studies. They are useful for conversations, but I wouldn’t put too much credence in publications. We are not of one view in any area of study. The practice of science (academic, at least) is best seen as conversations rather than finding truth. We get rewarded for publications; they are the metrics in our business. They are related to researchers, not truth statements.
|
|
Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
|
|
'Introspective'
Wherever I go,
I go with me,
Wherever I go,
I always am,
Wherever I am
I'm always with me,
Wherever I'm not,
I'm on the lam,
Whenever I'm lost,
I then go missing,
Whenever I'm found,
I'm back again,
Whenever I'm missed,
I'm only missing,
Whenever I'm not,
Myself my friend,
Whomever I am,
Is what I am,
Whomever that is,
Is only me,
Whomever I see,
Behind the mirror,
Whomever it is,
Looks back at me,
Whatever I think,
My thoughts are secret,
Whatever I say,
It comes from me,
Whatever I try,
It's sometimes easy,
Whatever I think,
I'm still not free,
However I seem,
Sometimes uneasy,
However I feel,
Sometimes carefree,
However the truth,
Though cloaked in riddles,
How clever my death,
Concealed from me.
Forever is not,
So much my business,
Forever as such,
I cannot see,
Forever I'm so,
Irreconcilably,
Forever as lost,
As I'll ever be.
Bushman
03/09/2015
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
I truly appreciate the approach of referring to research studies. They are useful for conversations, but I wouldn’t put too much credence in publications (MikeL)
Especially in the social sciences. From a link provided earlier by HFCS . . .
by Ed Kroc: I wanted to pass this along in case no one else has yet, as it could be of interest to you, as well as to anyone who has the occasion to use statistics. Apparently, the psychology journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology just banned the use of null hypothesis significance testing; see the editorial here.
As a statistician myself, I naturally have a lot to say about such a move, but I’ll limit myself to a few key points.
First, this type of action really underlines how little many people understand common statistical procedures and concepts, even those who use them on a regular basis and presumably have some minimal level of training in said usage.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
Are multiple universes like the quantum world? In the "mix" of uncountable universes at each instant we observe causation and physical laws, but if a single universe were to be isolated would it collapse into bizarre irregularities?
the "many worlds" view of quantum mechanics is another attempt to make the Hilbert space in which this is all "happening" real (no pun intended).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
we only know what is happening in that Hilbert space through the intensity of the wave functions, not their amplitudes...
we interpret the intensities as probabilities.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
|
|
Jgill: Especially in the social sciences.
Might I ask what you know of it personally or professionally?
I would imagine that anyone in a field of study would have something derogatory to say about any attempt to nullify his her point of view . . . wouldn’t you?
Let's not get defensive. Let's talk about what we know.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
|
|
Ed Kroc: . . . [banning the use of] null hypothesis significance testing; . . . this type of action really underlines how little many people understand common statistical procedures and concepts, . . . .
The best course I ever had in statistics was not concerned with the mathematical proofs, but what test to apply to what situation. The assumptions of any application are significant.
A null hypothesis test makes the assumption that a hypothesis is true or not true. (We don’t have to go any further.)
What can you say is true, and what can you say is false? (I mean beyond the simple “saying” of it?) Now, how do you feel about allowing statistics to make those determinations for you? (This is where the assumptions come in.)
Anyone who is an expert tends to be sure that most everyone else doesn’t really understand their field. There is always a prediction about the future. However, one has to go through the assumptions. By the time you are through with those, just about everything that is interesting has been squeezed out of the event or thing as to make it about as interesting as a turd.
What’s interesting are outliers, not means or averages. The mean and the average tell us almost nothing. All they tell us is what tends to happen. Like other tests of this ilk, they say a few things--but they leave out far more than what they expose. They tend to suggest to us a normal, stable, predictable world, with error-reducing feedback loops. Everything falls to the mean.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Mar 10, 2015 - 08:05am PT
|
It would be helpful, Mike, if you provided a few examples. The difficulties involved in studying human society are well known but that hasn't stopped people from doing what they can, and the notion that one would stop after accepting or rejecting a null hypothesis, without pursuing any significant implications, is bizarre.
From a social scientist and statistician:
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=2552086&tn=89
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Mar 10, 2015 - 08:23am PT
|
What’s interesting are outliers, not means or averages.
perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at the relative lack of introspection that would be required to write such a sentence... maybe you could think about the meaning of "outlier" in the absence of any indication of what an "inlier" might be...
but what most "experts" bemoan is the idea that "thinking" is not required in applying the knowledge contained in the field of their expertise. Why would anyone think that statistics simply requires "turning the crank" to get an answer? Or, similarly, a statement of statistical significance need not be understood?
Or that someone, whose enduring memory of contact with statistics was a course they took rather than years of practice, actually provides a vapid statement regarding the interest in one sort of event over another when it is their statistical relationship that categorizes them.
MikeL, have you ever read Kolmogorov's tiny treatise Foundations of Probability? I doubt it, it does contain proofs so based on your statements of abhorrence I doubt you'd find it at all engaging,
Decades ago I attended a seminar by Persi Diaconis in the mathematics department of the university I was teaching physics at... sitting in the audience with a mathematician friend we kept up a bantering back-and-forth... Diaconis mentioned Newton, and I marveled at his contributions outside of physics, my mathematician friend reminded me that "mathematics has a Newton, too." But he also informed me that mathematicians didn't consider statistics to be a part of mathematics...
...that's an interesting idea, maybe an outlier...
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Mar 10, 2015 - 04:39pm PT
|
Let's not get defensive. Let's talk about what we know (MikeL)
Well, apart from your previous position that we can't know anything, my comment concerns the challenge of quantitative research in the social sciences and how that can lead occasionally to a pulling back from the "science" part of such investigations, whereas the designation social sciences was an effort to legitimize social studies.
On the other hand your statement about journals has some merit I believe. My experience was that papers published in reputable mathematics journals - which I no longer even attempt to read - are not merely reports of varying levels of significance, but useful in obtaining tenure or promotions in the academic world. I think I've said this before. There's a lot of chaff mixed with the intellectual grains of wheat.
. . . my mathematician friend reminded me that "mathematics has a Newton, too." But he also informed me that mathematicians didn't consider statistics to be a part of mathematics... (Ed)
This attitude varies from mathematician to mathematician. Probability theory is certainly mathematical and statistics unfolds in that context. Here's a funny story I may have mentioned before: As a senior at the U of GA in 1957-58 I took a couple of semesters of mathematical statistics, which was truly mathematical. Several years later, as a beginning math grad student at the U of AL I was assigned a basic statistics course to teach in the business school since none of the regular math staff knew very much about the subject. The irony was that although I had some knowledge of the mathematics involved I knew nothing of the application of statistics to the real world. The students and I both learned something that semester.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 10, 2015 - 07:49pm PT
|
t is true that I view people as a unique collection of their life's experiences, including their formal and informal learning as modified by their equally unique biological existence which includes their biological inheritance.
To this aggregation the assignment of "person" (the "I" or "you") seems quite natural and even complete.
I think this comment by Ed underscores a lot of what is said on this thread. Ed is looking at a "person" in terms of what they do, what content (experiences) they have, the way they have programmed their brain (education etc.), and the way biology and instinct influence their objective functioning. This is one approach. The rub is that some who take this approach either consider it the only viable approach, or that all other approaches are attempting the same thing, but don't have the methodology of science to serve up anything but weak sauce.
A question - the way Ed has posited a "person," is awareness or consciousness or life required, or could Ed's description just as well apply to a machine that runs according to it's specs in (to some degree) a predictably causal way for which the output is a "person?"
Meditation says to this: You will never find out who you really are by looking at what the machine does. You have to settle into what you are, and that is not trying to do Ed's mechanical "mind" in some other way that is unscientific. This is a misunderstanding.
A hint of the way to go is found in Ed's next statement:
"To this aggregation the assignment of "person" (the "I" or "you") seems quite natural and even complete."
Except Ed's aggregation needs not include awareness or witnessing, ergo the model is incomplete.
Finding out what Ed's person "is" involves a reverse process - of letting all your attachments to memories and feelings and thoughts and instincts and impulses. Till they all drop away along with all your concepts of "I."
That's the purpose of the koan: Who am I? You can never get hold of this "I" and be watching it concurrently. The subtle work (at least part of it) involves coming to directly experience that our watching of the content Ed takes for being "Ed" is not the same as the content itself. Every time this happens, our attachment to that bit of ourselves become less rigidly bound to our illusory "I" that lives and dies.
Once you realize that the true nature of the person is the watching itself, sans content, and that this watcher is somehow, inexplicably non-local (though our psychological, provisional survival "I" IS local), whole worlds start tumbling down.
JL
|
|
Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
|
|
|
Mar 10, 2015 - 09:05pm PT
|
'The Azure Blue Sky'
And so I sit with the azure blue sky
The white silver moon just catching my eye,
And I ask half in jest if the moon should know why,
Why our lives are so short and then we must die?
Does our simple existence not matter one whit?
In the blink of an eye we grow old and we quit,
And our struggles and triumphs are gone in a flit,
As if all that we were never counted one bit,
See the babe in the cradle at the dawn of its life,
And the flowering youth oh so wistfully lithe,
There the athlete and warrior who wields gun and knife,
And the clattering skeleton hoisting a scythe,
As the stories and fables they occupy our minds,
The hourglass empties and the clock it unwinds,
And the days that are numbered like our fortunes we find,
Disappear like our past we regret and in kind,
Do the loved ones and family so cherished and revered,
And all those with such passion we so lovingly endeared,
As a whole when the end comes the slate is then cleared,
We'll have no one and nothing in the end as is feared,
As our anger and pith turn to slightly annoyed,
That to hold out for something is a thing to avoid,
Like a puppet at show time we are thoroughly toyed,
As our essence gives out to the limitless void,
As I sit and I look at the azure blue sky,
With its ghostly illusion of beauty ask I,
What does it all mean in the end when we die?
When to witness such beauty begs us not to ask why?
-bushman
03/10/2015
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Mar 10, 2015 - 09:05pm PT
|
Once you realize that the true nature of the person is the watching itself, sans content, and that this watcher is somehow, inexplicably non-local (though our psychological, provisional survival "I" IS local), whole worlds start tumbling down (JL)
Once again I would argue that some of us think the "true nature" of a person has much to do with "I." But we would not be so bold as to state emphatically that our perspective is the "correct" one. This is one reason the word "religious" is invoked in this context. Could this inexplicably non-local watcher be Jesus? And does "watching" extend downwards to no physical extent?
Clearly your years of sitting have opened new perspectives for you. But when the only way to convince doubters is for them to fall under a similar spell, well, that sounds a lot like religion. Oh wait . . . Zen Buddhism . . .
OK, I'll admit my objectified "I" is recoiling in terror, as you have pointed out on numerous occasions!
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Mar 10, 2015 - 09:22pm PT
|
whole worlds start tumbling down
Same as happened to Chicken Little!
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 11, 2015 - 12:40pm PT
|
Once again I would argue that some of us think the "true nature" of a person has much to do with "I." But we would not be so bold as to state emphatically that our perspective is the "correct" one.
You are not getting this, John.
See where this takes you:
You said that "much" of what you consider your true nature is hooked up to this "I." What - that is not in some form content (people, places, things, phenomenon) - do you see as NOT being part of your vaunted "I," and which you nevertheless consider an integral part of your true nature? The rest of your "much." Or is the "I" all to you? What is left, in your experience?
What's more, you think that what we are saying here is really just another version or perspective that but a different version of the "I" perspective. Meaning you are positing the "I" perspective as one thing, and witnessing as just another perspective that in contrast to your "I," can be judged as "the correct" one.
What we are saying is not that witnessing is an alternative or correct perspective relative to your "I." If you think otherwise, what, exactly is it that this witnessing IS that you can discursively and objectively judge as correct or incorrect? Of course you can never do so because you cannot witness witnessing, ergo you cannot objectify and discursively define it. That's why wisdom traditions from way back refer to as the "mind" being totally "ungraspable." It's beyond the discursive pigeon holes of right and wrong, good or bad, correct or incorrect. It is not a thing. It is completely "empty."
JL
|
|
Tvash
climber
Seattle
|
|
|
Mar 11, 2015 - 01:46pm PT
|
Given that all living organisms are, by definition, biological machines, then any 'wisdom' gleaned about the function of said organisms, including meditation, is gleaned by observing machines.
We are told that 'experience' provides the evidence for the spiritualism that is the 'non local watcher'. But all experience must come from memory, and memory, as it turns out, is an extremely fallible, malleable, and changeable thing. It, alone, makes for very poor evidence. And if there is little to no repeatable, credible evidence, then faith must fill the hole - just like it does with religion.
Sure, we 'share' many traits - there is a baseline definition of what it means to be a human machine and not some other kind. Evolution built us from the bottom up in a hierarchical fashion - our physiological uniqueness exists mostly at the upper levels of this hierarchical architecture.
We are also told that one cannot 'witness witnessing'. Really? How would anyone today know this?
So let's deconstruct what this means. Could a machine or another person witness what I witness (share my conscious experience)? Given that we are machines - there is not theoretical reason why not. Sure, it's a dauntingly gigantic technical undertaking - to duplicate an individual person entirely, including their moment by moment mental states - but I see no theoretical reason why it would be impossible.
100 years ago it would have been inconceivable to sequence a human's DNA. Today you can buy a sequencer for a few thousand bucks.
One might never be able to travel faster than the speed of light - that is a position supported by evidence. But would it be 'impossible' to 'ever' to port conscious experience to another individual, biological or artificial? There is no evidence at all for that position, nor is there a body of theory that would prevent it, so personally, I discount it as bluster.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!