What is "Mind?"

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healyje

Trad climber

Portland, Oregon

Mar 29, 2015 - 12:55am PT

SAND / Nonduality: For thousand of years, through deep inner inquiry, philosophers and sages have came to the realization that there is only one substance and we are therefore all part of it. This substance can be called Awareness, Consciousness, Spirit, Advaita, Brahman, Tao, Nirvana or even God. It is constant, ever present, unchangeable and is the essence of all existence.

I should think you'd have to buy into this sort of statement to bother attending. I'll give you it's all a step up from "What the bleep do we know?" but, for me, this sort of thing relative to science invariably brings up the image of Cinderella's stepsisters trying on the glass slipper.

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - Mar 29, 2015 - 07:53am PT

John's really trying to extricate himself from metaphysical flapdoodle. Keep at it, big guy!

Strange thing is that an empirical view based on both sides of the reality coin - things, and no thing, forms and emptiness, space and stuff, where both source the other, is seen as "flapdoodle," though it is the most obvious fact of life and one we live with all day everyday.

For example, if I want to go move across the room and fetch a glass of water, I have to pass through space to get there. My discursive mind can't get hold of space as a thing, but I can get some sense of dimensionality and extension through estimating the distance between where I am and the glass, while assuming my physical form will move through the space unimpeded.

My sense organs tell me that the space I move through is qualitatively different than the place I am standing, my physical body, and the glass of water I am going to fetch. However if I am to believe the measurements, my body and the glass etc. are composed of a ratio of matter to space that far favors the space, and when I reduce the matter itself down it dissolves into that which has no physical extent. Conversely, the space is not empty in any absolute sense as it contains energy potentials and all that jazz. Flapdoodle would be to start considering space and emptiness as a thing.

When we look at mind we quite naturally identify with the content of mind, mistaking it for mind itself, which is empty and is no thing. In this sense, evolution did not "create" mind any more than it created the space between me and the moon. Evolution created brain function. The reason AI, as advertised, will never attain sentience of any kind is because it is focused on producing objective function and content, believing mind is an extension of and blowback from, stuff. Here we expect the stuff to "do" what has nothing to with doing, as it were.

JL

Tvash

climber

Seattle

Mar 29, 2015 - 08:12am PT

Space is just another thing. Meditative experience is just another state of mind, a sensation like any other.

Flapdoodle solved.

WBraun

climber

Mar 29, 2015 - 09:00am PT

dissolves into that which has no physical extent

That is the subtle material plane .....

High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber

Mar 29, 2015 - 09:15am PT

re: mind and volition

I wonder if Edh has found (edit: made) the time by now to watch that Sam Harris free will video on youtube?

"I am too limited to make the time to read popular works on science these days. Perhaps when I slow down a bit I might..." -Edh

Perhaps that cues the problem (misunderstanding)? Most of those popular books listed (and of course there are many more) don't just concern "science" - they concern the philosophy of science and the humanity of science (or humanism of science). Thus their justification, the interest of many, and my interest. Many desire to explore otherwise bridge that notorious gap if not gulf between science and "the humanities". Right?

Make the time!

High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber

Mar 29, 2015 - 09:21am PT

Well,

different strokes for different folks.

Nature in Her Wisdom sees to that.

High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber

Mar 29, 2015 - 09:29am PT

Thus ... my interest.

Not bad, imo.

Since apparently tvashfruit suffers adult Asperger's (a recent supertopo diagnosis it seems) which limits his creative potential, comprehension and appreciation of the so-called humanities and what not.

"a hard time..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome

MikeL

Social climber

Seattle, WA

Mar 29, 2015 - 09:43am PT

healyje:

So, lemme guess. . . you’ve not been. “What the bleep do you know?”

People think and imagine because it’s so easy to do. All that’s needed is a brain.

allapah

climber

Mar 29, 2015 - 10:28am PT

my clumsy paraphrasis of f Bateson’s “Six Criteria For Mental Process”

A mind is made of interacting parts.
Mind is the relationship between these parts (not the parts themselves).
The system components of Mind influence the movement of other Mind systems.
The movement of the systems needs to be in feedback loops.
The feedback loops need to be analogic to each other.
The feedback loops need to be nested one inside the other, like a hierarchy or classification system, or Russian dolls

Mind (Creatura) manifests in the world of concrete things (Pleroma) as a weak organizing principle, which is what makes it elude empirical validation, but climbers, with their occasional proximity to death attractors, could get solid data, so as long as they stick to the climbing, which is what they know, which is where i’m heading, unless the sno-go gets stuck in willows on the way there…

BLUEBLOCR

Social climber

joshua tree

Mar 29, 2015 - 10:39am PT

Nature in Her Wisdom sees to that.

wouldn't that mean Nature is thinking, learning, planning???

didn't you say the universe was a spontaneous reaction

BLUEBLOCR

Social climber

joshua tree

Mar 29, 2015 - 11:02am PT

Only troubled yet erudite men?

maybe cause men(the seed planters)are continually nagged by their offspring with the question; "Why"?

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Mar 29, 2015 - 11:05am PT

My sense organs tell me that the space I move through is qualitatively different than the place I am standing, my physical body, and the glass of water I am going to fetch. However if I am to believe the measurements, my body and the glass etc. are composed of a ratio of matter to space that far favors the space, and when I reduce the matter itself down it dissolves into that which has no physical extent.

thank the sharks... as MH2 reminded us many, many threads ago...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum

you can assume that "space" and "dimension" are something abstract, or you can recognize it as just a part of the perception you brain process in its model of reality.

screw up that part of the brain and you screw up that perception...

What makes the center of your head the origin of your point of view? Why do we interpret an experience displacing that point of view to be of a "mystical" origin, rather than just a physiological consequence (since it is created by physiological processes)?

How do you access your cerebellum directly? Ask it what's up? and confer with it on various matters of space (and time)?

haven't watched Sam Harris yet, no time to devote to it...
as far as the intersection of popular science with anything else, if you've got the science wrong what happens then? Steve Weinberg's very popular book The First Three Minutes written in 1977, has an afterward in the 1993 edition that is in our house, and even that is not very up-to-date, in fact is lacks most of the modern results from "precision cosmology" a term utterly unthinkable, oxymoronic, even in 1993. In 2008 Weinberg updated the cosmology part from his 1972 book Gravitation and Cosmology, the new book being Cosmology (the gravity part hadn't changed) incorporates the latest results. Perhaps he should have re-written the part in the First Three Minutes to address the time up to 1e-34 seconds into the universe. He'd be able to explain the "bang" in the "big bang" then.

The results are significant in terms of how we fold in the ideas of "scientific cosmology" to "every-person cosmology," as demonstrated on this (and other) threads.

When there are new results, I prefer to look at the source of the results and draw my own conclusions. It is interesting to hear the conclusions from those scientists who are regarded as spokespersons to the popular audience. I don't always agree with their assessment.

This is a general science issue for me, I think I should be able to understand science papers... why would I seek out popular renditions which must, necessarily, leave out important detail? The most important reason to for me to look at the popular literature is to understand why someone might be asking me a particular question.

I'll get around to looking at the Sam Harris YouTube clip sometime, it's not a priority of mine at this moment.

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - Mar 29, 2015 - 12:21pm PT

you can assume that "space" and "dimension" are something abstract, or you can recognize it as just a part of the perception you brain process in its model of reality.

We call this logic, "bullet in the brain." That is, if you shoot a person in the head, his perceptions change. It follows, from this thinking, that the brain produces or sources "space" and "dimension," and that they are not inherent aspects of reality, but material is. In other words, Ed has dragged us back to looking at all of reality as being sourced BY material, now, that includes space and dimension.

And what, exactly, do you think sourced material?

You can see how this logic paints a person into a corner in which there is no escape.

Meditation is the means of making the seeming abstract nature of emptiness, space, dimensionality etc. as real as the stuff in our discursive minds. Ed is missing the point when his discursive mind tries to make space a cognitive or mental product of the brain. Looked at differently, it is in this space and this emptiness that all the stuff arises, including our brains, and including the idea/qualia that space is a brain perception.

The thing to understand there is that Ed or anyone else will never see things differently till perception shifts. The fear that perception will shift away from what is "real" is the terror of abandoning the discursive mind, which habitually holds onto stuff and the idea that this stuff (brain, in this case) sources reality. But does the brain source material itself? If I shoot you in the head, your perception of the stuff will change. Does that mean the stuff is only a perception, sourced by brain?

JL

TWP

Trad climber

Mancos, CO & Bend, OR

Mar 29, 2015 - 12:23pm PT

I've meditated (transcendental meditation as taught by Maharishi Maheshi Yogi) twice a day for 45+ years.

Recently focused upon the unanswerable question:

"What is the source of my thoughts?"

Meaning this; I observe that thoughts arise in an unending procession; they seemingly arise from within me and from an "unconscious" or pre-conscious level before reaching a level where thoughts take a form which I can perceive them in a knowable and conscious form. So, what is the preconscious and unknowable fountain from which my thoughts arise?

I am guessing that if I could answer this question, I could also answer the question: "What is Mind?"

Cross reference; I simul-posit this same question on the "Meditation? thread.

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Mar 29, 2015 - 12:24pm PT

Largo is mistaking perception for reality...
...how interesting.

TWP

Trad climber

Mancos, CO & Bend, OR

Mar 29, 2015 - 12:50pm PT

OK. And what "tells" the neurons how to resonant?

Am I to infer my your "elementary" remark, that TWP is "Watson" and Moosedrool is "Sherlock Holmes?" Fair enough. But really I am Gilligan to your Skipper.

MikeL

Social climber

Seattle, WA

Mar 29, 2015 - 02:10pm PT

Ed: Largo is mistaking perception for reality...

How can there be two?

“The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.”
(Erwin Schrodinger)

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - Mar 29, 2015 - 02:38pm PT

Ed, are you saying that perception is not real? But that the stuff of perception IS real?

If perception itself (NOT the content of perception) is false, if that is what you are saying, then by means of what agency do "we" come to know what is real, whatever you may believe that is.

The problem, of course, is that when you conflate content with perception, or awareness with stuff (as you need to do in a fundamentalist, materialist model), you have done away with no-thing, but also with the perception that can verify the existence of material. The underlying hope of this angle is that "we" can know reality while at the same time denying the reality of perception. This come from the idea that we need not include subjectivity to get a total picture of reality. Or that one stands outside the purview of the other.

Another thing that is rather disappointing is that Moose actually believes that someone who has looked at mind for 45 years is making an elemental mistake that he understands having never looked at mind from the inside. This rather amazes me.

JL

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Mar 29, 2015 - 03:45pm PT

and Schrödinger kept a mistress too, one that lived with his family, and his inspiration for wave mechanics came on a skiing vacation he took with a pair of twins, sisters...

I'll have to look at Schrödinger in much more detail to see just what I should and shouldn't believe...

Here is the epilog to What Is Life? I don't agree with Schrödinger, but so what...
[I've guessed at the paragraphs]

Epilogue
On Determinism and Free Will
As a reward for the serious trouble I have taken to expound the purely scientific aspects of our problem sine ira et studio [without hate and zealousness], I beg leave to add my own, necessarily subjective, view of the philosophical implications.

According to the evidence put forward in the preceding pages the space-time events in the body of a living being which correspond to the activity of its mind, to its self conscious or any other actions, are (considering also their complex structure and the accepted statistical explanation of physico-chemistry) if not strictly deterministic at any rate statistico-deterministic. To the physicist I wish to emphasize that in my opinion, and contrary to the opinion upheld in some quarters, quantum indeterminacy plays no biologically relevant role in them, except perhaps by enhancing their purely accidental character in such events as meiosis, natural and X-ray-induced mutation and so on - and this is in any case obvious and well recognized.

For the sake of argument, let me regard this as a fact, as I believe every unbiased biologist would, if there were not the well-known, unpleasant feeling about 'declaring oneself to be a pure mechanism'. For it is deemed to contradict Free Will as in warranted by direct introspection. But immediate experiences in themselves, however various and disparate they be, are logically incapable of contradicting each other. So let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. (ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' - am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature. Within a cultural milieu (Kulturkreis) where certain conceptions (which once had or still have a wider meaning amongst other peoples) have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires.

In Christian terminology to say: 'Hence I am God Almighty' sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving also their God and immortality at one stroke. In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN upheld in (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.

Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger, in spite of Schopenhauer and others who stood for it and in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other's eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one - not merely similar or identical; but they, as a rule, are emotionally too busy to indulge in clear thinking, which respect they very much resemble the mystic.

Allow me a few further comments. Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Even in the pathological cases of split consciousness or double personality the two persons alternate, they are never manifest simultaneously. In a dream we do perform several characters at the same time, but not indiscriminately: we are one of them; in him we act and speak directly, while we often eagerly await answer or response of another person, unaware of the fact that it is we who control his movements and his speech just as much as our own. How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all?

Consciousness finds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the physical state of a limited region of matter, the body. (Consider the changes of mind during the development of the body, at puberty, ageing, dotage, etc., or consider the effects of fever intoxication, narcosis, lesion of the brain and so on.) Now there is a great plurality of similar bodies. Hence the pluralization of consciousnesses or minds seems a very suggestive hypothesis. Probably all simple, ingenuous people, as well as the great majority of Western philosophers, have accepted it. It leads almost immediately to the invention of souls, as many as there are bodies, and to the question whether they are mortal as the body is or whether they are immortal and capable of existing by themselves. The former alternative is distasteful while the latter frankly forgets, ignores or disowns the fact upon which the plurality hypothesis rests. Much sillier questions have been asked: Do animals also have souls? It has even been questioned whether women, or only men, have souls.

Such consequences, even if only tentative, must make us suspicious of the plurality hypothesis, which is common to all official Western creeds. Are we not inclining to much greater nonsense, if in discarding their gross superstitions we retain their naive idea of plurality of souls, but 'remedy' it by declaring the souls to be perishable, to be annihilated with the respective bodies? The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of less is never which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and Even in the that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different personality aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAJA); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys.

There are, of course, elaborate ghost-stories fixed in our minds to hamper our acceptance of such simple recognition. E.g. it has been said that there is a tree there outside my window but I do not really see the tree. By some cunning device of which only the initial, relatively simple steps are itself explored, the real tree throws an image of itself into my the physical consciousness, and that is what I perceive. If you stand by my side and look at the same tree, the latter manages to throw an image into your soul as well. I see my tree and you see yours (remarkably like mine), and what the tree in itself is we do not know.

For this extravagance Kant is responsible. In the order of ideas which regards consciousness as a singulare tanturn it is conveniently replaced by the statement that there is obviously only one tree and all the image business is a ghost-story. Yet each of us has the indisputable impression that the sum total of his own experience and memory forms a unit, quite distinct from that of any other person. He refers to it as 'I' and What is this 'I'? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just the facts little more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected.

And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. “The youth that was I', you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you.

Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.