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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 21, 2015 - 10:06pm PT
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The fact we so often find people on ST retreating to the position that they can't describe sentience/porn but that they "know it when they see it" we have to conclude language is a highly arbitrary construct so arbitrary we cannot always use it. We especially can't use it when we are talking about equally arbitrary ideas, like soul and sentience. If you will we face a double whammy.
There was no retreat, simply a declaration of the difficulty of the problem. Language isn't the issue. Language is a remarkable human conceit that is the basis of a civilized life.
The problem: what is mind? This is the difficulty.
Soul and sentience aren't arbitrary ideas they are entirely specific yet difficult.
You're blaming the problem on what it is not: language.
Language gives us civilization, communication and understanding, abandon it and see where you get.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 21, 2015 - 10:11pm PT
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Hey WOO-WOO ponderers, nobody has an answer to what troubles everyone. It's a mystery...
If you're gonna quote Donald Trump you should give him credit.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 21, 2015 - 10:38pm PT
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What I think will be the biggest surprise is when we can record where, or who inside the brain is making the final decision corresponding to an individuals behavior..
It ain't prehistoric probability's, or logic.
What part of the brain could provoke itself to commit suicide?
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Jul 21, 2015 - 10:56pm PT
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What I think will be the biggest surprise is when we can record where, or who inside the brain is making the final decision corresponding to an individuals behavior..
It ain't prehistoric probability's, or logic.
What part of the brain could provoke itself to commit suicide?
I would say it's the part of the brain that experiences the deepest emotions of sorrow, remorse, loneliness, and despair.
The part of us that refuses to recognize that such action might be rash? Or the part of us that refuses to reconcile ourselves with our past? Or the idea that such action might save others, suicide as sacrifice.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 21, 2015 - 11:16pm PT
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Bushy I'd agree, thinking bout the people I knew who ended it by choice.
My point leading to, there is a part or parts of the mind that can overrule the militant logic or the genetic coding of the brain. Lots of people are just not scared of a tiger or a hoody with a gun. Mostly due to their daily beliefs.
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MisterE
Gym climber
Being In Sierra Happy Of Place
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Jul 21, 2015 - 11:20pm PT
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"Mind" is that thing which fukked everything up for all of the other creatures, plants and insects on earth.
Can we just go back to simply living?
No, I think not - our basic human "mind" is the spin cycle that only ends like this:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Total destruction, and still spinning out...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jul 22, 2015 - 05:51am PT
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Total destruction, and still spinning out...
We aren't there yet but philosophers have already covered it, "Like a Seattle-ite on a latte."
It is only through the constant attempt to gain happiness that people can learn the desirability of nothingness; and when this knowledge has become universal, or at least general, deliverance will come and the world will cease.
Karl R E von Hartmann
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jul 22, 2015 - 09:32am PT
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DMT:
Did you look at the pictures and compare them? Personally, I didn’t see that much similarity. I could not have used them to pick out a person from a line up of the ones they presented. (Maybe it’s just me.)
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jul 22, 2015 - 09:40am PT
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(BTW, I suggest doing a google search on: "Interpretation problems in fMRI.")
P.S. Yeah, I read the words, too!
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jul 22, 2015 - 09:46am PT
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Loved Mister E's washing machine sequence. Reminds me of the title of the last chapter in an old biological anthropology book - "Tool Smart and Goal Stupid: Will there be a next million years?".
It seems to me that's exactly the problem, the people who tinker with the technology don't stop to think what it could be used for, they just build a better widget. Then they seem to get mad at the people who ask, is this wise?
It's also a gender thing. If women were in charge, there would be more emphasis on people and their welfare and less on technology and weapons.
Bryan Sykes, one of the world's preeminent geneticists has predicted that the y chromosome will disappear - Adam's Curse: A Future without Men" - if we make it that long.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jul 23, 2015 - 08:01am PT
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[Click to View YouTube Video]
Made me giggle with delight. Evolution, perception, reality with some twists and turns.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 23, 2015 - 08:15am PT
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...the guys do it to impress the gals...
Darwin does the rest.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jul 23, 2015 - 10:00am PT
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I think the guys do it because they think it impresses the gals, but I don't think that's what the gals are really impressed with. More like that's what they put up with - men and their toys. Given the number of single mothers these days, it seems a lot of gals would rather live a deprived life and not put up with it anymore. So mainly guys are busy impressing other guys.
DMT's right, it's built into their genes but so is intelligence and flexibility. The question at this point in history is which will win out first - the apelike battle for tools and toys and hierarchy or a more ecologically sound way of life?
We have two near cousins that have chosen different paths, the war like and cannibalistic chimpanzees and the peaceful and sex loving bonobos. The question is which way will humans go in the future? So far it looks like a fight to extinction Chimpanzee style.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jul 23, 2015 - 10:01am PT
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Yep, Dingus and Ed.
.....
"because they think it impresses the gals, but I don't think that's what the gals are really impressed with."
Sure it is, you see it every day.
(Well, maybe not YOU.)
"More like that's what they put up with - men and their toys. Given the number of single mothers these days, it seems a lot of gals would rather live a deprived life and not put up with it anymore. So mainly guys are busy impressing other guys."
This is so off, on many points. Sorry.
What irony.
(Yeah, and what a rich culture they got, the bonobos, that is. lol)
can we decouple? Can you?
We're fated to a sawtooth trajectory - in boom and bust cycles - it seems. That is my personal long term ecological time analysis-conclusion.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jul 23, 2015 - 10:21am PT
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Well one thing we can agree on fructose, is that the all time weirdest human male behavior is the guy who blows himself up in the hope of getting all those virgins on the other side. Definitely a bizarre use of evolutionary impulses regarding both tools and women. The only consolation is that they have permanently removed themselves from the gene pool.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jul 23, 2015 - 10:59am PT
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Definitely a bizarre use of evolutionary impulses
So it seems, but it's a big world out there and evolution has resulted in variety to match. Don't jailed killers sometimes get marriage proposals from women?
I don't know much about chimps or bonobos (although a not-very-good sf novel by David Brin long ago made me aware of the differences), but I am reading Bernd Heinrich, a raven researcher. I was mainly interested in what ravens eat and his book Mind of the Raven covers that well. Heinrich must have his own critics as every scientist does but one of his observations is likely to stand up well; all students of raven behavior agree that raven behavior is hard to predict.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 23, 2015 - 11:26am PT
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I'm not claiming that there is or is not "stuff" "down there." While you like to paint a big "M" on my forehead ("M" for materialist) and invoke the authority of your car pool (who all have the most reputable vitae no doubt) you are taking your "macroscopic" concept of "nothing" and equating it with a "microscopic" description of the universe that you don't know anything about (by your own admission).
--
Not so, Ed. I have to teach today so I only have a minute. But my knowledge of "no-thing," or emptiness in Zen language, comes from spending years being present in the space between thoughts, of empirically observing the dance between content and awareness, between macro and micro. You seem to believe that the only way to "know" the micro is through measuring.
I said: My definition of sentience, as I said and have said, starts with the three cornerstones of awareness, focus, and attention.
Ed said: What is it about those three cornerstones that limit them to human experience?
I say: Nothing limits them to human experience, any more than gravity is limited to falling rocks. I am simply saying that for the purpose of objectfying sentience, you have to have a starting point, and those three are ones that we can all empirically verify through direct observation - NOT in others, but in ourselves. If we can agree on this, we have a start.
JL
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jul 23, 2015 - 11:38am PT
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The sad, sobering part, Jan, is imagining just how highly motivating and effective... and of course, lethal... the Islamist narrative was in medieval times in internecine tribal warfare.
Today's ISIL ISIS ideology-narrative is a glimpse into its history, I think. A historical study not for the faint of heart, eh? Yes, and the boys just eat it up. I'm determined not to let it all jade me too much. But pretty disgusting. Points to the power of belief narratives, too. I wish we could find a modern one highly motivating. I know many seek it.
I think you might enjoy that Robert Wright David Sloan Wilson (he and Dawkins are adversaries over group selection, name-calling, etc, btw) conversation. They speak of this very thing... belief narratives, the highly motivating nature of counterfactual ones, the absence of motivating factual ones (that they are constrained, limited, thus handicapped), meaning systems (how we all have them even if not religious), an "interspirtualism" movement based on the interconnectivity of everything, the desperate need in modern times for a science-based belief system or meaning system, the narrow-minded thinking of certain scientists or science circles when it comes to understanding religions and their reason of being, etc.. I found it insightful, very interesting, esp in the way some of the concepts were articulated.
http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/31537
Future systems... economic, educational, ecological... are going to have to figure out how to provide young males esp those down and out a meaningful place in society or else (a) they will continue to fall prey to narratives just as enticing, counterfactual, violent as ISIS; and (b) the rest of society prey to them.
The fact that societies of millions exist in the world's deserts today when we know fossil fuels are running out (the lifeblood of these societies) is likely a problem as severe as global warming, I think. It's a horror to ponder.
Imagine you and your buddy having to push a car down the road and through the city end to end and back n forth for 30 miles. Imagine all that energy output. It's worth remembering every so often that's how much energy is contained in just one gallon of gas. No wonder the industrial age took off, no wonder we have what we have today. If the electric grid goes off-line tomorrow and stays off indefinitely, a few months say, can you really expect the bulk of your city to remain law-abiding and in sharing mode to the very end? I really don't think that's the smart money bet.
Primary school (1st - 6th) should be exposing kids to so-called "Peak Oil" so by the time they graduate jr high, every single one of them understands its dynamics and dangers. So every single one of them understands and appreciates just how lucky they are to be living in the age of oil. But this is not Planet Vulcan, we are not Vulcans, and so this isn't done and they don't.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Jul 23, 2015 - 11:56am PT
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The tech guys go where the work is and who has the best benefits. Government funding also draws them ie Lawrence livermore , Knolls Atomic (GE). When the government provides funding for things that are good for the planet they will do that work ie when Carter was president alot of funding went into Alternative energy research. RayGun cut that funding immediately when he took office and gave them work doing star wars research. Set back alternative research 20 years. My dad used to negotiate the contracts for the Airforce, Nasa, General dynamics and GE most of the contracts were for weapon systems or defense systems but during the Carter admin he did contracts for some really cool solar research pilot projects, ocean energy systems based on temperature differences in a column of water and others.
The scientists will do what society asks them to do; many are young and naive like soldiers.
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