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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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What Does Not, or Could Not, Exist?
El Cap in my backyard. (why the capital letters?)
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jgill:
Perhaps imagination or thoughts are not real for you.
Titles or subject lines--as a means for setting topics--are often capitalized.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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MF: I can assume that you're kidding. Right?
If anything, your response presents a conundrum that cannot be solved rationally. Reality must be all-encompassing. There cannot be anything outside of it. Whatever Reality is, it must include everything that could be and is (aka, the 3 kayas). If there are interpretations of any sort, then they must be a part of or in (or simply "is") reality. On the other hand, it’s probably appropriate to say that all interpretations are wrong in that they are not complete or accurate. So, lastly, whatever it is that one perceives (Jgill’s dreaming of El Cap in his backyard) exists.
Do phenomena exist? They appear to be ungraspable.
Giving some consideration to such conundrum can encourage a more circumspect view of consciousness. Consciousness appears, to me anyway, so intimately entangled with reality that I suspect they are one and the same.
Do phenomena "matter?" (Ha.) Phenomena seem to be the basis of our lives.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jeremy, Moose, Ed... Fareed Zakaria CNN interviewed Cal biochem professor Jennifer Doudna on... the "mind-boggling science" of CRISPR today. Pretty exciting piece. From "gene drive" to designer babies and master race. You should check it out.
Dr. Jennifer Doudna, pioneer of the gene editing CRISPR technology, explains how editing DNA can slow the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.
Nice to see someone thoughtful like Doudna (esp in this climate of Trumpism, etc.) speak to its implications and needs of discussing it sooner than later.
Fareed Zakaria GPS at 10am again this morning.
"I ordered green eyes and 6'4" and macgyver-smart."
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Well, we have been at an impasse for quite some time. On the one hand you have MikeL, who questions everything. I wonder if he questions stoplights or stairs, or coming up to breathe when swimming, or in daily life, he acts like his beliefs. I just don't see that.
On another hand, you have some who say that everything exists, it is only the human perception that leads to divergent beliefs. I fall in that category. And even though I know that HFCS will have a stroke over it, I believe in nigh absolute free will.
And then you have those whose beliefs are spelled out for them. Like BB and his religion, or Werner with his. I don't intend to discount them, because a vast majority of the planet believes in some sort of God.
By now, beliefs are fairly well cemented.
So why are we still talking? It isn't changing anyone's mind.
I'm looking forward to the James Webb space telescope, which will be vastly superior to the Hubble ST. Why? It is because every time we look, or investigate something through a better yardstick, we are surprised, and have to change theory.
Science isn't rigid, although it may seem like that on occasion. It tends to grow in spurts, and in between those spurts, people flesh out the new theory or try to blow holes in it. My science, petroleum geology, has gone through an earthquake, with the ability to recover hydrocarbons from shales, which are ULTRA low permeability rocks. We have found so much new gas from shales that prices will likely remain low for decades.
I don't work too much with shales. I know how the decline curves look, and can advise on acquisitions, but I don't explore for them. I still look for conventional oil and gas fields. I do read the articles. I go to the seminars, but I'm a one man shop. I don't have access to hundreds of millions of dollars of capital, which is what a shale play costs. I'm a little guy, because it is easier to raise half a million dollars for a well as opposed to a 19 million dollar well.
I've made most of my money by going through tens of thousands of well logs looking for pay zones that the original driller ignored, on the way down to a deeper zone, and I've done well at it. I can interpret logs from wells drilled in the 40's to today, and that period involves a huge number of different logging tools which were state of the art when they were run. When you flow test a good gas well, it is hard to deny that we were wrong. When you pump test a good oil well, it is hard to deny that we were wrong. I say we because it is usually a collaborative effort involving many people. I just find the idea. Before we drill, I have to convince every other person with a dime invested in that well, and I try like hell to make partners money. Engineers and other technical people are involved in the actual drilling.
I bring that up, because over the boom of the last few years, companies were taking investor money and drilling well after well that would never pay for themselves. They knew that they were going to lose money. Those outfits walk a line very close to fraud, but rarely do they get sued. To participate in a well, you have to sign an exploration agreement, and they state that you have examined the maps and the like and agree to drill these wells. A liability waiver, basically.
Some people are incredibly dumb with their money. I should move to New York and advise venture capital companies on where to put their money if they want to play in the oil business. That would be an easy job.
Right now I am looking at old fields as acquisitions. Most of the big companies have had to lay off most of their technical departments, and stop drilling. Soon enough they will go bankrupt. When that happens, cash rich companies will be in the drivers seat, and it is a perfect time to buy. Situations like this don't come around every year. It is simple. We just left a drilling boom, and we are headed for a lot of companies to go under and have to sell their assets, both large and small.
The mistake that they all made was to use bank debt to fund their drilling programs. Same thing happened in the mid-80's, when I got out of school, so I learned this lesson: Never borrow money. If you grow slower, so be it, but oil price is unpredictable. Several years ago gas went into the toilet. Nobody drills for gas right now, at 1.80/mcf. The next one to fall was oil. When oil is at 100 bucks, you had a drilling boom, and these guys are victims of their own success. Oil falls, they can't service their debt, have to sell assets, and eventually go under. I know companies which are on life support, but people still buy their stock. A lot of their assets (wells) are so burdened by debt that they have no liquidation value. They will have to go through bankruptcy.
It is a very simple supply and demand business, and if I could predict the price of oil, I wouldn't have to spend months and months grinding through areas looking for it. It is easy to find oil. It is difficult to find enough to make a profit. A lot of big companies ignored this simple fact, and drilled a ton of wells that had no chance of paying out. Deja Vu all over again.
I wonder how MikeL would interpret the situation. I've always been very curious about his Zen beliefs, but I don't think that it would change the facts of what is going on in my business. Things are happening very quickly, and to stay in business, you have to be on top of it.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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^^^ Nice post, Mark
Perhaps imagination or thoughts are not real for you (MikeL)
Of course thoughts are real - they are real thoughts. El Cap actually existing in my backyard and me imagining it there are two different things, at least to most people. You seem to be on a different plane, upon which a thought and a physical object represent the same reality - an all encompassing reality with no differentiation.
Good luck with that.
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WBraun
climber
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So why are we still talking? It isn't changing anyone's mind.
Mind can never be changed.
Mind is only mind.
What changes is consciousness.
Mind can only follow consciousness.
Consciousness is faster then any material speed.
It's instantaneous, faster then the speed of light.
The physics and neurosciences men will be bewildered by this because they are ultimately clueless to what consciousness really is and where it comes from ......
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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But, if you hold that "reality" stands outside of mind, that that there is incontrovertible scientific proof that this reality existed before mind ever came into play, to say that you are not curious WHAT that reality is, is not consonant with insisting that it is there. WHAT is there? As if probing that question will melt you down to water.
Ed sez: "This statement reflects a profound misunderstanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, or if not that, a totally disingenuous statement intended to be controversial (i.e. a troll).
Dear Edmund, you sure work hard at providing avuncular, faux academic ramblings about how much I misunderstand what science is about. If you put even a tenth of the effort you put in on calling me a troll, into the thought experiment, we might have something to talk about, as to opposed to your lecturing and info dumping and logical stretches to make me appear deluded - without making any attempt to understand what is actually being said. That is dishonest, because you DO know what I am saying.
But let's look at what I actually did say.
As we all know, there are a whole squad of folks who insist that there is tangible, physical evidence (that they - not I - have repeated called "proof") - in the form of old bones, evolution, back ground radiation, the big ass bang and a host of other event and things - that have been scientifically affirmed to place a whole lot of events and objects ahead of the emergence of mind in the timeline of reality.
I never said as much, nor do I believe that time is anything but an overlay on the physical stuff we experience and measure. The issue of "proof" is another issue, and I leave Ed to take that up with the people who insist that bones, geological records and so forth constitute scientific proof. Niggle all you want over the word "proof," and how little the people who use it know about science - and also know you are totally missing the point.
The point is, most science has sought to measure and explain and define so far as thy can, the physical people, places, things and phenomenon that are most associated with the word objective "reality." And this so-called objective reality, many claim, stands outside and is separate from and predates all "subjective" interpretations of same. We can in a broad stroke way say that people who believe this are convinced that Niels Henrik David Bohr and all of his amigos at the University of Copenhagen totally misinterpreted the findings of their own science and that "mind" plays no meaningful or effective role in the origin of the "objective" world just described. This reality is backed by all manner of science to vouchsafe it's existence to the extent that some would go so far as to ask, "What isn't physical?" in an effort to clear the decks and simply remove or abolish "mind" from the discussion altogether, and lump the whole mo-fo in the physical container.
Rather then get into the ludicrous argument of conflating objective and subjective, lets, for the sake of this discussion, agree that mind is a thing, and that (we can surely agree) this mind provides us with a picture or "take" on reality. But also, this mind is limited in its scope, especially in macro and micro worlds, and is a notoriously unreliable tool in determining the physical properties and make up of the physical people, places, things and phenomenon in the "reality" previously stated, which exists wholly separate from the direct influence of said mind, which plays no significant role in said "realities" physical makeup.
In word, the moon physically exists weather our minds see it or not, and our minds play no role in the formation of that moon, which would be there big and bright and round no matter if mind never evolved into being.
So the thought experiment now asks: We physically experience a reality of people, places, things and phenomenon that we commonly call "reality." Science has measured the world of objects (that we physically experience) in a myriad of ways, and has loads of data that, if not "proves" certain aspects about this reality, certainly has data that describes and paints a picture of an objective word of objects and phenomenon "out there."
That gives us two versions: one, the reality that our physical minds gives us, and two, the reality that science seeks to describe, and which many on this thread believe exists totally separate from mind.
What is the difference between these two versions of reality? In other words, when you strip away all the influences of our unreliable minds (especially Bohr's) on the objects "out there" and which science describes by way of measuring, of what is it that you speak? What ARE the objects that science measures and which people insist exist, whether or not if there is a mind there to see and experience them?
JL
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jstan
climber
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BASE:
TFPU.
I learned a little from your post.
The present mismatch between the temporarily reduced need for oil and the global need to sell oil in order to float entire economies, to my thinking, poses a hard problem. Matching these horizons has low probability.
J
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cintune
climber
Ollin Arageed Space
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What ARE the objects that science measures and which people insist exist, whether or not if there is a mind there to see and experience them?
Word games. It's come to this. Cue the Popeye theme song LOL.
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Norton
Social climber
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inevitable after 7500 posts?
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jgill: Of course thoughts are real - they are real thoughts. El Cap actually existing in my backyard and me imagining it there are two different things, at least to most people. You seem to be on a different plane, upon which a thought and a physical object represent the same reality - an all encompassing reality with no differentiation. . . . Good luck with that.
(Thanks. It’s apparently working out pretty well as far as I can tell. Life seems pretty darned unobstructed to me these days.)
Jgill, if I understand the implications of what you’ve written, there seems to be real things but those things have radically different characteristics or bases, and hence things are completely differentiated.
Would that make those things independent of one another? Would they be made of the same stuff?
It seems to me that you have started down the road that leads to multiple disconnected realities, where there are (i) different things, (ii) things that are made-up of different stuff, (iii) things that are not connected to each other (somehow not the same stuff). And yet, they are related to each other through a linkage called, cause-and-effect. (I’ll hold aside Largo’s concerns about things that must be measured to be real.)
Honestly, Jgill, I don’t see how all those things can happen in the same reality except under a scenario that looks to resemble a dream.
Moreover, at least for me, the incommensurability of domains means that the knowledge of those domains don’t connect. That is, what gets declared or claimed by just about any field of study is different than what gets declared in any other field. The terms, the elemental constituents, the dynamics are all apparently different.
You and others here seem to think that I’m completely bonkers. Ha-ha. Maybe I am. But the theories of reality that you appear to spin seem, well, . . . very problematical, to say the least.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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It seems to me that you have started down the road that leads to multiple disconnected realities, . . . And yet, they are related to each other through a linkage called, cause-and-effect
Honestly, Jgill, I don’t see how all those things can happen in the same reality except under a scenario that looks to resemble a dream
Let's see. I proposed that a thought was a kind of (mental) reality, and a physical object another kind of (physical) reality. And the former certainly connects with - gives rise to - the latter much of the time. Not so my El Cap example. So, I really haven't started down that road yet, but I'll let you know when I do.
Not bonkers so much as you seem to surf another existential plane, weaving and darting and strafing us with a fusillade of notions that defy our normal perceptions. Never a dull moment.
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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About descendant reality, God, and the nature of consciousness;
In all seriousness my life will end one day but the reality of living will continue to be experienced by those still living. Many decisions I make today are based upon trying to do right by the the loved ones I have who will be here after I'm gone. This is contrary to my nature, for I am at heart a selfish person. I know the concern for my predecessors will end upon my death, so why do I bother? I bother because it doesn't sit well with my conscience to do otherwise.
I have made many mistakes in this life only to finally come to understand how important it is to always try to accept and show love towards every family member, no matter what our differences. I've also begun to learn how important it is to try and preserve the legacy of my more revered family members who have passed on.
Be that as it may, I would like to mention a thought that occurred to me today regarding the topic of this thread. I would be remiss not to point out the irony and absurdity of the statement, yet it still stands IMO as an observation of some merit;
"The task of proving the existence or nonexistence of God and the job of unraveling the mysteries of consciousness are squarely within the purview of theologians and philosophers yet, these endeavors might only be finally accomplished by the cold hard calculations and experimentations of scientist, though due to the esoteric nature of the subjects (God and consciousness) scientists might have no serous interest or motivation to do so."
Doubtful that I should ever see such an experiment come to a conclusion before my own demise, I remain unconvinced that any God or purpose beyond my own interpretations exists. For now I shall exist to try and better learn to experience the here and now, (I'm here to be myself?) and hopefully I will leave my predecessors a few positive impressions which could be of some use to them. But that's just me?
What is the difference between these two versions of reality? In other words, when you strip away all the influences of our unreliable minds (especially Bohr's) on the objects "out there" and which science describes by way of measuring, of what is it that you speak? What ARE the objects that science measures and which people insist exist, whether or not if there is a mind there to see and experience them?
My answer is that there is no difference between the physical reality that my mind perceives and the physical reality that science measures. The physical reality is that the moon, the stars, and the sun exist and will continue to exist long after I'm gone regardless of my interpretation of them and the actual physical reality of them. The only real difference that I can perceive is my perception of them.
This difference is threefold. The third difference is purely conjectural.
1. My perception of physical objects as my mind interprets them.
2. My perception of physical objects as my mind sees science interpreting them.
3. My perception of physical objects in the negative sense, in other words, the perception which my mind may or may no longer have of these physical objects after I am deceased, which remains to be seen or not seen, whatever the case may be.
This brings me back to the statement I made earlier here about the difficulties of unravelling the mysteries surrounding the existence of God and the nature of consciousness. It is no futile or unworthy task, it is just not one that I would expect to see answered in my lifetime.
-bushman
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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“Imagine for a moment that we are [nothing but] the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed [only] of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.”
David Eagleman
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
Brackets mine.
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WBraun
climber
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“Imagine for a moment ...."
Coming from the guy who imagines everything masqueraded as science.
No wonder you have no clue .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dear Edmund...
actually I think you could use my first name, "Edward" as a pejorative just as effectively, it is rare enough to invoke the affect of your assumed "hay seed" philosophy up against the stodgy pronouncements of "the establishment," invocations that are now a habit to you.
That you seek "proof," that most everyone "seeks proof," is not a demonstration that there is "proof."
A more nuanced view of this would actually support your basic argument (at least what I see as your argument).
But fundamentally, you are asking for a description of something, but with the requirement that no language be used to make the description... an interesting assignment for sure.
A simple "thought experiment" is to contemplate the Universal Law of Gravitation:
F = G m₁m₂/r₁₂˛
there is no "causality" here... it might be a convenience to speak of it as "the force of one on the other" with a colloquial meaning, but not necessary.
Outside of spoken/written language, we can put that force into an algorithm and just grind out the positions of the two masses... then go and check if we got it right, the Moon Rise over Half Dome... at a particular time and place...
But for the fact that our mathematics and our language are one in the same thing... go ask Gödel, I think he knows...
So now, let's describe this without description.
That makes for a very short thread, but one in which you can entertain us with your folksy wisdom.
You might also look up "confirmation bias" and think about it when you quote authorities... oh, "confirmation bias" is a phrase that "Edmund" would use, perhaps more appropriately here would be "cherry picking"
Have you ever read Bohr?
I think not... all the better to state what it was he was talking about, with none of the difficulties associated with what that actually was.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Right-O Jeremy. Unfortunately I think the First Lady's death preempted the showing at 10am west coast. Such mind-blowing science and technology proves to me cloning is not that far off (always assuming civilization doesn't collapse first of course). So far not, but hope it shows up on youtube at some point, well worth watching.
Ha, found it. Just for you, Jeremy!
[Click to View YouTube Video]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoN--b6Aq8A
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WBraun
climber
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Consciousness is not bound to the Universal Law of Gravitation .......
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