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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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...then I don’t think you can do it. I don’t think anyone can do it. Just about every liberated master has said so.
so you have the authority of "every liberated master"
it must be so
apparently, some practices are more pointable than others...
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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The experience of pain becomes emotional. We've all witnessed cutting ourselves and seconds later felt the pain. So pain is our bodily senses traversing into our emotions. The power of the mind is able to subside the emotion. Shouldn't that be considered free-will?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 5, 2015 - 04:24am PT
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John, I have noticed that you often use the word "vacuous mental state" to describe something but I am not sure what. Is such a state what you experience when you shut up and stop calculating? Are you inferring or speculating per what others encounter when they do whatever it is they are do?
My sense of this is that you might be equating content and the discursive grinding on content to be stimulating and in the absence of content and working it over, our brains go into a kind of sloth nothing blah "state."
If this is accurate, or nearly so, perhaps you can empirically do a "reality-check" and ask around and see if a vacuous mental state is found by anyone on this thread, and what is involved in attaining same.
In the experiential adventures most people are surprised to find that with some little training, they can pay even grater attention when, paradoxically, their content - equated with wild horses - is simply left to graze in the widest possible corral one can muster.
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Yes, Dingus. There may be a kind of similarity in the swooping of bird flocks and the swirling of thoughts in a human brain, as there is between the shape of a coastline and the shape of a snowflake. However, we can see the birds and capture their behavior on film for analysis. We can't do that for thoughts.
Questions about how individual animals interact to generate collective behavior are being asked and answered. I like the studies of ant colonies. A study that opened new doors looked at the activity of individual ants versus the activity of the colony as a whole. Individual ants showed bursts of activity and long intervals of doing nothing. There was no clear rhythm to individual ant activity. When all the single-ant activity cycles were added up, though, the activity of the colony as a whole did show a distinct periodicity.
http://nsmn1.uh.edu/bcole/papers/Cole1991c.pdf
Questions about how individual(?) thoughts interact to generate behavior are beyond the scope of study by direct observation for now. Your reminder about apparent randomness is a point well made. In so-called chaotic systems, what appears to be random may be the result of deterministic processes which are very sensitive to conditions down at distance and time scales we have trouble resolving.
All of the examples of colony, swarm, school, flock, herd, or human crowd behavior depend to some degree on the nervous systems of the individual organisms. It could be that from studies of those interacting organisms we will learn things about how the neurons inside their brains interact to produce individual behavior. Sort-of fractal, eh?
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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BB: You’re a tough guy! Dude.
Jgill: So work, research, climbing, gymnastics, surfing, etc. do not constitute "experience", eh? The word "experience" means sitting in a vacuous mental state?
Ha-ha. Close. Even “a vacuous mental state” is a thing. No Thing.
Turn on the TV and watch it for a while. You’ll probably fall in with whatever narrative shows up for you. Now, drop the narrative. What do you see? Are you saying that there cannot be experience without content? Without interpretation?
Many of us have read captivating novels. How would you casually explain the feeling that you get, the story that captures you? Well, here’s what I might say. You are looking at dark squiggles on a white background. From that words are constructed by you, and those words become a plot line, and if it is one that really resonates somehow with you, feelings arise. If it is an especially vividly written novel (let’s say), you might even feel muscles tightening and loosening. It might even seem as though you are actually LIVING the story. All this from dark squiggles on a white background. Look at just HOW MUCH interpretation and construction are involved.
Neither I nor you can possibly describe how much or how extensively of that is going on every instant of our lives.
There is the equation, there is the chalkboard, and there is the light that shows both. It’s an old allegory (of the cave).
Ed: apparently, some practices are more pointable than others...
At the end of the day, it’s an inside job, Ed. An “experiential adventure” is a direct apprehension. You just “get it.” A person can be explained differential calculus all day long and never get it, and another person can get it right away. There seems to be nothing that can prove anything to anyone (eh, DMT?). Everything is “personal.”
I can imagine, for example, how exasperating it might be for someone to say to an artist that (let’s say) something cannot be painted.
Only you’re not an artist. You’re a scientist.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 5, 2015 - 09:43am PT
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Ward said:
But that is not amenable to objective measurement
Not true. If your skull was physically opened up and your cerebrum scrambled like an egg you would conclude that consciousness is associated with the proper biologic functioning of the brain and CNS.
This is a type of crude observationally-based association which tells us more about consciousness than any activity bereft of measurement.
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Actually it doesn't tell you anything about consciousness, Ward, but it might tell you plenty about the objective functioning you associate with consciousness.
In fact, any activity bereft of direct observation cannot tell us anything about consciousness itself. This statement will make little sense to you unless you have worked through the reasons that subjectivity is not reducible to objective functioning, a kind of baby step toward the experiential adventures without which you will likely be looking to measurements while believing you are studying consciousness itself.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Only you’re not an artist. You’re a scientist.
oh, MikeL, you seem so controlled by your stereotypes... which you obviously require to maintain your rather stark criticisms...
when you resort to the refrain "you either get it or your don't" it is a sign that you not only can't explain "it" in any manner, but you secretly suspect that your prejudice for "it" is baseless... make an appeal to the "universal rightness" of experience.
as I've been saying since we have gotten onto experience, it has as much to do with reality as quantum mechanics does... experience is no more authentic then theoretical physics, it is ultimately just another perception... another construction if you will. Its major advantage is that you can't explain what it is, so that allows for all sorts of speculation.
as for your distinction between "artist" and "scientist" you display an obvious, but commonly held misconception of how science is done and probably how art is done, you aren't an artist and you aren't a scientist, you're, at best, a critic... and you decide, based on your own personal whim, what is "worthy" of your criticism on some particular day.
I find some of your criticisms very useful foils for my own opinions, which is criticism at its best.... often I find your criticisms rather flaccid... e.g. appealing to 8th century writings and presenting them as unquestionable 'truth' seems a bit weak, not that you seem to try very hard in many cases...
it is an Aristotelian notion: the reliability of our everyday experience...
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle/#Sci
"In Posterior Analytics ii 19, he describes the process by which knowers move from perception to memory, and from memory to experience (empeiria)—which is a fairly technical term in this connection, reflecting the point at which a single universal comes to take root in the mind—and finally from experience to a grasp of first principles."
not only Aristotle, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-india/
yet, in Aristotle's case above, we know that memory is not "objective" and we certainly know that "perception" is not "objective" either...
I can see that Largo, MikeL and others will object to the accusation of being Aristotelian in their notions of "experience," and there are problems with Aristotle's account... but this seems to be a common issue with grappling with experience... see the discussions on classical Indian philosophy. I invite them to describe their notions of "experience" (an invitation which I think they will demure with the equivalent statements: "you get it or you don't").
A powerful criticism of "experience" comes from Feyerabend's essay "Science without experience" which applies more broadly to our discussion.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Ed: oh, MikeL, you seem so controlled by your stereotypes...
Oh, Sweet Jesus, Ed. Try to relax a little. You’ve read that poorly. (Black squiggles on white backgrounds and two tons of interpretation.) It was just an imaginary characterization to point to something. I can see I should have added . . . “and you’re a darned good scientist.” Ugh.
EDIT: my most sincere apologies for the misunderstanding.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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John, by vacuous mental state I mean a mental state without objects of attention. Not perjorative. As Ed said, good to hear you are continuing to contribute your expertise to the climbing world.
Mike, good example of construction in reading and experiencing. But in the TV example the content remains when the narrative disappears. If you close your eyes and merely listen to a TV drama you become a more active participant in the narrative construction.
In mathematics there are some who are constuctivists. They require proofs of theorems to be direct and describe theoretical constructive approaches: clear logical narratives from start to finish. That is to say they don't allow indirect proofs: for example showing that something exists by assuming it doesn't and logically arriving at a contradiction of some sort.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Actually it doesn't tell you anything about consciousness, Ward, but it might tell you plenty about the objective functioning you associate with consciousness.
Au contraire mon frere, discovering that consciousness is entirely associated with the biologic functioning of the physical brain reveals to me-- in a categorical way-- all I need to know generally about consciousness.It is a precept I find 100% useful in my profoundest view of human consciousness.
What it does not reveal to me is the fallacious and frankly contrived notion that objective measurement or the scientific method can reveal only itself exclusively and not anything about the thing being observed. As if any investigation of nature is merely a superimposed investigation of the method , or the measurements, used to arrive at a given truth about something.
This amounts to a new wrinkle in the idea of operationalism
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/
In other words, discovering the boiling point of water is 100°C or 212° F at 1 atmosphere of pressure (sea level), we are told is merely about the thermometers ,barometers, the pan used to boil the water,and the heat source-- and not uncovering a central truth revealed about water itself.
Consciousness is no different than water as a subject of study.In fact the brain's operation would be impossible without water. This one fact is more profound than any truth covered or uncovered by meditation states and/ or the theosophist society.
In fact, any activity bereft of direct observation cannot tell us anything about consciousness itself.
I generally agree with that statement. If one were directly observing a mockingbird one would learn little about human consciousness.At least not right away.Lol
unless you have worked through the reasons that subjectivity is not reducible to objective functioning,
Subjectivity is a constituent of the physical universe and therefore ,as we speak, is the subject of the same species of inquiry as the determination of the nature of water-- yes, even subjectivity is impossible without water (and a DC current, among many many other factors-- like quantum tunneling in synaptic neurons and mitochondria and elsewhere)
http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/view/168/168
It is a hopelessly romantic notion to regard human subjective mental functioning as somehow standing outside the same universe as water and DC currents.
As if subjectivity was the unassailable citadel. The last redoubt.
---------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday while waiting for a train (train station next door to climbing gym) I closed my eyes and faced the sun in an attempt to produce a little Vit. D3. Within a few seconds,with eyes still closed, I noticed a solid deep red field. I initially thought this could be something to do with processing at the red end of visual light. A little research later revealed that what I was actually seeing was the blood in my eyelids. I could have uncovered an excellent self-diagnostic biohacking tool.
This can be seen when the eyes are closed and looking at the back of the eyelids. In a bright room, a dark red can be seen, owing to a small amount of light penetrating the eyelids and taking on the color of the blood it has passed through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination
This experience rivals the very hot 105 degree day, in the same location, when I spat upon the train rails and could hear my spit sizzling a full 10 feet away.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 5, 2015 - 11:45pm PT
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Ward, your arguments make sense but they have all long ago been refuted by people in the field. Rather than kick a dead dog, what do you think Neuroscientist Harris means by the statement: Subjectivity is NOT reductive to objective functioning? THis is the point you are not grasping - the why of it all. It is hooked up to your belief that consciousness is the same as water, when Harris and others have done a cogent job of showing that consciousness is qualitatively different than any other phenomenon you can point to as an object, as some thing "out there."
Try it, Ward, try and contrast the qualitative aspects of consciousness with water, a bowling ball, a pear tree, a comet blazing, with Half Dome. Ignoring the qualitative is simply an effort to reduce the phenomenon to - you guessed it, measurements. But at some point, no matter how close the associations we hold subjectivity to the objective, we are no longer looking at the subjective itself, but the objective. Mistaking them for being the same things is to fundamentally misunderstand your very topic of discussion - we can easily se why.
Though the metaphor is not nearly what we want, we ask - can you reduce Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," to the trumpet you believe "created" said tune. WIll a close examination of the trumpet tell you all you need to know about music? Are music and the brass instrument the same things?
What's more, you are arguing for a direct causal explanation for consciousness by way of material antecedents. Two problems: What if the matter you are banking on has no physical extent when reduced far enough - meaning your trumped is begotten by nothing at all. And second, what of the efforts by physicists that suggest (Copenhagen school etc.) observing itself plays a hand in the formation of things?
If you shut up and stop calculating, backtrack and read up on the experts who have tackled these questions, you will find some answers. Harris is a good place to start.
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Subjectivity is NOT reductive to objective functioning?
The dead dog doesn't care. It's subjectivity depended upon physical functioning.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Good morning.
Jgill: If you close your eyes and merely listen to a TV drama you become a more active participant in the narrative construction.
Hmmmm, . . . well, why don’t you just hear sounds, rather than a narrative? It's the narrative that is the content. The sounds are, . . . er, a "quality" that can't be described accurately or fully.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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But did his physical functioning depend on his subjectivity?
What came first, the eyeball or the need/want to see?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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And second, what of the efforts by physicists that suggest (Copenhagen school etc.) observing itself plays a hand in the formation of things?
of course, the physicist who so speculate may be entirely wrong... not that that the physics is wrong, but that the interpretation is wrong...
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle sets up the Copenhagen interpretation's view on this...
we can get into the weeds on the the physics... but please keep in mind that the uncertainty principle depends on the idea of the wave function, and the formal algebraic structure of the theory, in which the operation of defining the position of this wave function, and operation of defining the momentum do not commute.
By commute, of course I mean that if you operate one after the other, the result is the same when you reverse the order.
But what it the wave-function? it is a quantity defined in a space (a Hilbert space) which we have no direct access to. We can only formulate a probability through the calculation of "intensity" which is a measure of the wave-function's "amplitude" in that space...
So already we are on pretty shaky grounds by insisting that this has some correspondence with the physical reality that we perceive...
That is what the interpretations do... allow us to interpret the quantum mechanics in classical mechanical terms. This whole program is fraught, of course, and erroneously applies words shared by the two in an equivalence.
This leads to Largo's exhausting refrain that there is "nothing down there."
Actually, taking the formal quantum mechanical view, those wave functions spread out over all space and time, they are everywhere that there is a "where" to be... That is, Hilbert space is filled, packed solid, with all the stuff in the universe, not a speck of it is "empty" in the sense of Largo's "nothing."
Largo could claim that he escapes this wonky wave-function view by adopting a "particle" view, but since we can show an equivalence between the two views this doesn't get him out of the trouble that our Hilbert space is still "full" of particles, we need only calculate the probability of the particle being somewhere.
Bell helped make a number of issues clear in quantum mechanics. And this clarity informs our modern thinking and explains, to some extent, the foibles of the early thinking. Don't forget, quantum mechanics has been around for more than 100 years, and it's not like physicists haven't been puzzling about it all that time.
In particular, Heisenberg's "microscope" is an example of how the "observer" affects the "observed."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle#Heisenberg.27s_microscope
One need only ponder the development of Quantum demolition measurements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nondemolition_measurement
to see a more nuanced understanding of preparing, manipulating and observing quantum states, beyond the Copenhagen interpretation, which was, after all, developed nearly 90 years ago... and did not have access to the subsequent 90 years of thinking, observing and experimenting...
But more importantly, the physics is not "trapped" by the Copenhagen or any other interpretation of quantum mechanics, the interpretation is not the physics.
No doubt we'll wait for Largo to confer with his "car pool" experts on this... my views being dubiously tagged as "old Dad thinking"
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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what do you think Neuroscientist Harris means by the statement: Subjectivity is NOT reductive to objective functioning?
Well, mon frere d'Largo, maybe you should ask Harris, I have no idea why he would say that or in what context it was said.
It is hooked up to your belief that consciousness is the same as water, when Harris and others have done a cogent job of showing that consciousness is qualitatively different than any other phenomenon you can point to as an object, as some thing "out there."
As a further clarification, I declared that water is the same as consciousness inasmuch as it is a phenomenon that resides in the universe we inhabit and therefore subject to the methodical investigation of nature.
Surely Harris did not say or mean that consciousness is inherently exempt from the probing of science,or any revelations that might ensue from same?
Secondly, my use of water as a comparison to consciousness allowed me to establish not only the above-- but additionally the solid fact that biologic consciousness as well as all its progeny, including subjectivity, would be impossible without water. Moreover,if there be any substance qualitatively different in some very fundamental ways then that substance is water.
If you remove water you remove all traces of consciousness along with subjectivity. Why is this so? If consciousness is so unlike water as a phenomenon "out there"?
When you look at consciousness do you automatically omit the "out theres"? Do you negate the proteins,fat, neurons, the DC current?
What kind of consciousness do you get after you have cleansed it of all objective determinants?
But at some point, no matter how close the associations we hold subjectivity to the objective, we are no longer looking at the subjective itself, but the objective. Mistaking them for being the same things is to fundamentally misunderstand your very topic of discussion - we can easily se why.
Up to this stage what has defined consciousness in a way that clearly points to its fundamental nature? Is it the cultural or individually-determined products of consciousness?
Answer: yes.But what underlies even that? When we peel back the layers of culture where do we ultimately arrive?
We arrive at objectively determined factors. Evolution, proteins,fats,water,sunlight,electrons,etc.
If it is a mistake to associate consciousness and subjectivity with those things then what things should I associate them with?
And if I am forbidden to associate them with anything, or nothing, how can I really know anything about them--especially as they relate to other things.
How can human subjectivity be inherently exempt from objective study when its very indispensable antecedent constituents, active for billions of years, have been determined by same?
I'll wager you this: let us agree beforehand that death is the cessation of consciousness. Let us further stipulate that something removed from consciousness which results in the cessation of same is therefore essentially and intimately associated with consciousness/subjectivity.
I'll go first. I remove water.
Okay,pretend I put water back and everything returns to life.
Your turn.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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It's interesting, the comments by Ed about this particular Hilbert space extending everywhere, yet it is in a sense an abstraction conjured up by mathematicians long ago as they toyed with ways to extend the notion of the common 2-D or 3-D vector. From the minds of mathematicians and theoretical physicists - pretty darn subjective - to concrete applications like your microwave oven.
What's more, you are arguing for a direct causal explanation for consciousness by way of material antecedents. Two problems: What if the matter you are banking on has no physical extent when reduced far enough - meaning your trumped is begotten by nothing at all. And second, what of the efforts by physicists that suggest (Copenhagen school etc.) observing itself plays a hand in the formation of things? (JL)
Once again, no legitimate counter-argument from the Wizard: What if . . .
No physical extent = woo is real and reflects the physical world. Metaphysical ectoplasm.
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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'The Lost Dreamer'
I dreamed the dream was real,
The dream became my reality,
I dreamed there was a dreamer,
And the dreamer dreamed a dream,
Then he dreamed that he was real,
He dreamed his dream was real,
His dream became his reality,
When he awoke his dream was gone,
His dream reality was lost within his dream,
When I awoke my dream was gone,
It was lost along with the dreamer,
The idea of the dreamer lost among my lost dreams frightened me,
And I waited for the dreamer who had dreamed me,
To wake and lose the dreamer who was I.
-bushman
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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What if the matter you are banking on has no physical extent when reduced far enough - meaning your trumped is begotten by nothing at all.
Man, really, really, seriously stuck on that little confabulation, huh?
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Yeah well i see theories from the bible like, "God knows ALL" a little easier to grasp when I hear scientist say a photon on this side of the planet "knows"what a photon on the other side is doing. Or that a glass of water, or any body of water acts as one thing/unit.
And QM, well maybe that is love...
It's been Prophesized for a few Millennium that the Universe is One.
Edit: sorry JGill wrong thread
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