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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 17, 2015 - 03:38pm PT
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So I think we'll just have to conclude we perceive these things differently.
Have a good one, it's been fun.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 17, 2015 - 03:40pm PT
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Ed said: You have made many assertions based on your experience. However, isn't it a bit of a pickle to do that, to use your subjective, first-person experience to explain/understand/describe what consciousness is?
I still think you are referring to my experiences of mental content - which changes person to person and moment to moment - and NOT to the phenomenon of sentience, of consciously being present with our internal and external stimulus in time and space.
A crucial distinction to make is the difference between the phenomenon of "being consciously present with" content, and the people, places, things and phenomenon (content) of awareness. This distincting is made profound through the process of detachment, of separating "our" awareness from a given thing or object or feeling, say. We come to realize that what gives consciousness shape is the content. Otherwise awareness can be talked about and experienced as a borderless field that has no form or substance or objective quality whatsoever.
This field no more needs to "learn" to exist than the sun needs to learn to be luminous. It is what it is, inherently. We learn how to relate to being conscious, how to act from a sentience POV, and so forth. But all tasking and doing and behavior must for a moment be set aside to ever get a clear view of sentience otherwise consciousness will always be construed as a function, a cognitive doing, a task, an output.
So when I say, "Shut up and stop calculating," I am inviting you to delve for a moment into human being (as in being, sans tasking or doing or thinking or efforting or wanting this and not that, etc.), which is the direct experience of the open space of the sentient field in which our every thought and feeling and objective function arises. The fundamental nature of this field is "emptiness." It has NO inherent algegraic structure or edge or size nor yet any content. The challenge is our attention always fuses with and gloms onto content, so the field is to most humans what water is to a fish.
Of course this is not easy and totally twarts even seemingly bright folks: Steven Pinker: "Sentience is a red herring here -- stupid and simple creatures can be sentient, and super intelligent ones could be zombies; we have no way to tell. So let's concentrate on intelligence."
Of course he has no idea what he even means by the terms beyond stimulus response mechanisms. He never had the discipline or curiosity to "shut up and stop calculating," and so he harkens straight back to objective functioning and tasking, in this case, "intelligent" tasking. What we call "numberical woo." A man entirely fused with content. And putting virtue on same.
And we ask such a person: Who is calculating?
And John S,. what you wrote down about consciousness is more suitably framed by developmental psychology and the slow development of an independent "I" identity, the so-called individuation process, from fusion to the mother to altruism at the top of Maslov's pyramid. Developmental psychology is full of interesting material.
JL
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 17, 2015 - 06:11pm PT
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Otherwise awareness can be talked about and experienced as a borderless field that has no form or substance or objective quality whatsoever . . . . This field no more needs to "learn" to exist than the sun needs to learn to be luminous. It is what it is, inherently. . . . which is the direct experience of the open space of the sentient field in which our every thought and feeling and objective function arises. The fundamental nature of this field is "emptiness." It has NO inherent algebraic structure or edge or size nor yet any content (JL)
Once again you appropriate a concept from the physical or mathematical world and metaphorically shoehorn it into meditative experience. It all started some time ago with Hilbert spaces, then into (mathematical) virtual particles, to the present. But if this is your way to describe sentience, so be it. The question is Where does this take you? Is it anything more than simply a pleasing poetical digression, or does it amount to anything more than vacuous mind? If it is entirely empty and has no qualities whatsoever, how can you move beyond its simple non-existence? It is both alpha and omega.
Never mind. You and Ed can bounce this back and forth.
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Jun 17, 2015 - 07:07pm PT
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 17, 2015 - 08:17pm PT
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so the field is to most humans what water is to a fish.
Glad to see you admit to being a fish out of water. A red herring, at that.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 17, 2015 - 08:32pm PT
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^^^dont be silly
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 17, 2015 - 09:05pm PT
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The challenge is our attention always fuses with and gloms onto content, so the field is to most humans what water is to a fish (JL)
Water is the medium in which a fish lives. It supplies oxygen necessary for life. You are saying that the sentience field supplies the physical means for our lives even though it has no physical extent and is emptier than a vacuum? Not even a mathematical structure.
Strange.
Keep at it .. . a work in progress. Initial ideas may appear foolish in hindsight.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 17, 2015 - 10:08pm PT
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Largo, you avoided the question:
To the extent that I have no idea what goes on in you to give you the appearance of consciousness, and vis-versa, we somehow can come to an agreement that we both do exhibit the property of having consciousness.
How do we come to that agreement?
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 17, 2015 - 10:08pm PT
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So you can calculate,
After so many years the whole universe will be destroyed.
Your body will be annihilated also.
Then you will take rebirth and calculate again only to be annihilated again.
And thus you just waste your time in the prison house cycle of birth, death disease and old age calculating.
Only the insane do that .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 17, 2015 - 10:11pm PT
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I am inviting you to delve for a moment into human being (as in being, sans tasking or doing or thinking or efforting or wanting this and not that, etc.), which is the direct experience of the open space of the sentient field in which our every thought and feeling and objective function arises. The fundamental nature of this field is "emptiness."
I don't need your invitation, I do that on my own... I agree that it is not easy.
However, I apparently do not interpret that "moment" the same way that you do.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 17, 2015 - 10:21pm PT
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Yes the materially condition soul will interpret the "moment" where as the meditator "sees" the "moment" as it is .......
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Jim Clipper
climber
from: forests to tree farms
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Jun 17, 2015 - 11:13pm PT
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^^ It really is a beautiful racket, explaining the unknown. Never seems to end... People will always be wondering, and looking to others for answers. science and religion
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 17, 2015 - 11:23pm PT
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whatever, Werner...
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STEEVEE
Social climber
HUMBOLDT, CA
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Jun 18, 2015 - 10:28am PT
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The Japanese truly live by the Golden Rule rather than a set of laws. Jan, I believe you have forgotten WWII. Imperial Japan was as fanatical as any religious group with devastating outcomes to millions of people. Your argument is flawed, plus Japan has the highest suicide rate of any first world nation.
Fanaticism is a result of pin point focus and pursuit of an idea without regard to the larger picture. Religion and capitalism can all breed fanaticism. Fanaticism is the result of losing one's mind.
I had to respond to your post because you packaged up a group (Japanese) into a nice, neat little box. We all know people are much more complex than that. There's no black and white, but everything in between.
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STEEVEE
Social climber
HUMBOLDT, CA
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Jun 18, 2015 - 11:07am PT
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jstan, thanks for posting that link. I started watching and have found it very intriguing. It's easy for us to forget history and to lose our minds. We can't imagine, those of us living as present day 'Mericans, what it was like when the whole world went mad.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jun 18, 2015 - 11:52am PT
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In math research I found that frequently I made progress through a sequence of mistakes and errors, with that sequence ultimately converging to a decent and accurate result. I believe JL is doing the same as he gropes toward a functional perspective of sentience or awareness. I suggested some time back he might look at fields and he is doing so. However, he hasn't struck upon a definition/concept that works yet. But he may do so.
Keep plugging away, Big Guy.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 18, 2015 - 12:37pm PT
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I am inviting you to delve for a moment into human being (as in being, sans tasking or doing or thinking or efforting or wanting this and not that, etc.), which is the direct experience of the open space of the sentient field in which our every thought and feeling and objective function arises. The fundamental nature of this field is "emptiness."
I don't need your invitation, I do that on my own... I agree that it is not easy.
However, I apparently do not interpret that "moment" the same way that you do.
First, just notice the phenomenal resistance people have once we edge off the known terrain of a metaphorical X/Y axis, so to speak, where objects exist and we can still calculate and evaluate and "know' in the normal sense of the world. MH2 is back to wisecracking sans content, Dingus harkens back to some wonky preacherman - even though what we are saying has no doctrine, no higher power, no beliefs, and is merely an invitation to empiracally find out for yourself. And instead of acknowledging the common use of common scientific terms to point the direction to the slippery field of inquiry, I am now "appropriating" sacred scientific terms, vastly misusing them to bolster "my" case.
As Mike said many posts back, the only thing that is "mine" in all of this is my delivery and language. No-mind, borderless field of awareness, open awareness, no-thing, emptiness - all of these have been the basic tenets of the experiential adventures for ages. And now we are looping back to scientism, in that what those unfamiliar with said terms quite naturally think is that what the experiential adventures were actually trying to do - and continue to do - is science without the math and instrumentation and theories and experiments.
This, I can assure you, is 100% bass-ackwardes.
If I have learned anything in this thread, it's people's do-or-die attachment to the classical "objective" world, and the maxim, "What's not physical?"
What we have seen, explained a thousand different ways from Zen interpretations to Copenhagan interpretations to Suffi breakdowns to investigations into quarks and photons and other "non-things" is that A), there is only one reality, and people use their awareness and intelligence in various ways to probe same, and B), both experiential and scientific camps seem to agree on the concepts of fields; a slippery, intermediate realm of no-things, where phenomenon have effects and footprints but no dimensionality, no physical extent, phenomenon that are NOT objects and have no mass. They are, or appear to be, inherently "empty." Not to be confused to having no qualities, but rather, there is no object with qualities.
I am told . . . '
Definitions of mass often seem circular because it is such a fundamental quantity that it is hard to define in terms of something else. In fact, matter has many definitions, but the most common is that it is any substance which has mass and occupies space (ie, a physical object. A ‘thing.”) All physical objects are composed of matter, in the form of atoms, which are in turn composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons.
Returning to "not-things," the classic example are photons, which have no mass, so they are an example of something in the physical world that is not comprised of matter. Photons are not considered "objects" in the traditional sense, as they do not exist in a stationary state (no “rest” mass).
Why bother mentioning this? Not to try and vouchsafe some far out and remote preacherman" claims about the experiential realm, but rather to use a tangible example about an intermediate realm sans objects but nevertheless where phenomenon (waves, energy, etc) still arise. According to my friends, where people get lost here is in thinking - in the case of a photon - that there is a thing or "object" called a photon that has so and so properties, when in fact there is no object (no rest mass), just the phenomenon. Sure, you can call the phenomenon a thing, but it is a thing sans material, stuff and mass, so it cannot be called an object. I use the term "nothing," or "No-object." Perhaps someone else has a better term.
Now if we were to look at mind, or sentience, we cannot say with any real assurance that this intermediate realm between void and object has any direct bearing or relevance to sentience or consciousness; but it gives us a starting point for conversation, and some mental pictures and concepts to start working up some common language. And we can agree that this is slippery terrain. Like mass, definitions about sentience are often circular because it is such a fundamental quantity to our life (and yes, John G., we do live IN it. Try and escape it to an purely objective place. You will still be embedded inside your experiential bubble) it is hard to define in terms the non-thing itself. So we go to something else - normally brain function - to try and define sentience, believing that what is does is selfsame with what it is.
Now that brings us back to Ed's contention that he is delving into sentience on his own (he doesn't need my invitation), that he finds it difficult and that his experience in the "moment" renders him an interpretation, or evaluation, and that his evaluation is different than that universally posited by the wisdom traditions, from Zen to the Suffis to Tibetan paths to Mindfulness to Taoism to every last contemplative discipline out there. Fair enough. But we can't stop there.
First, it would be useful for Ed to put into words what his interpretation (in the moment) IS, and how it differs form mine. Second, can we agree that experientially, there is a phenomenon we all encounter we can provisionally call "self awareness?" We don't need to objectify it as yet and try and hold self-awareness "out there" so we can collectively evaluate it as an object. Rather for the time being, let us be satisfied with a merely experiential take on self-awareness, not trying to "prove" anything, rather just trying to find a few words that we can agree on that point to what self-awareness itself (NOT the objects of awareness) is on an experiential level.
JL
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 18, 2015 - 01:49pm PT
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. . . a few words that we can agree on that point to what self-awareness itself (NOT the objects of awareness) is on an experiential level (JL)
That's better. However, I would argue that self-awareness has an object: one's self.
And now we are looping back to scientism, in that what those unfamiliar with said terms quite naturally think is that what the experiential adventures were actually trying to do - and continue to do - is science without the math and instrumentation and theories and experiments (JL)
OK, this means no defined experimental processes, no evaluation of any kind, just sitting and staring inward. So how do you expect to relate this to the mysterious realm of QM? You seek to convince others that there is only one reality and it is encountered while sitting or while experimenting. Prove this, please, and we all will become your disciples.
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