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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Jan,
The kinda kooky stuff that we all see on the fringes is often just people trying to play objective analysis when it is really garbage.
Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World is a really great read on how to parse out junk science. Or junk conspiracy theories. Of course it is foolish to discount everything whilly nilly also.
I find myself understanding JL more here when he talks about our everyday first person experience. It is a bewildering mess of sensory data filtered through our, yes, emotional and intuitive, brains.
At the moment I don't know how one would really define or accurately describe experience in a solid, quantitative way. When you look at something from the scientific method, you have to be really, really careful. Try to recognize and reduce things to component parts and isolate individual variables one by one. This is all well and good on lots of things, but the brain is a very complicated and poorly understood thing at this point in time. I have faith that given enough time, consciousness and complicated experience will be understood that way, but for all that I know, it is a very distant target.
With most things in nature you can start with the easier fundamental properties and build on that. To try to build a brain might be hard for the very reason that it is complicated, messy, and perception is apparently different for different individuals.
If you have an equation with one or two variables, a small error in one of the variables is not so bad. When you have an equation with a dozen variables, like the Drake equation on intelligent life in the Universe, if you get a little fudgy on multiple variables, your solution will be off by orders of magnitude.
Really, I don't know jack about modern neuroscience. I do know how it is to operate a brain, though. So I am just yacking.
Hey, Tommy C is up freeing the Dawn Wall as we speak. Is that cool or what?
edit: Did somebody fart? I can hear an as#@&%e buzzing at the periphery of this conversation.
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WBraun
climber
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I have faith that given enough time, consciousness and complicated experience will be understood that way,
Reduce things to component parts and isolate individual variables one by one
Will never happen using this defect method ......
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 5, 2011 - 01:40pm PT
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At the moment I don't know how one would really define or accurately describe experience in a solid, quantitative way.
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You can't. You can quantify objective functioning, and label subjective experiences, but the subjecive and objective are two different sides of the coin, and one you go into experience, you're down the rabbit hole. No matter how hard people try, the rules of one realm fall apart in the other realm. Presence/raw awarenss is, IMO, the only thing that spans both.
And Werner is right: Form (stuff) equals emptiness (nothing) and emptiness equals form, exactly. Calling form "unreal" was a poor choice of words. Impermanent is the better term.
JL
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MH2
climber
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JL quotes:
the subjecive and objective are two different sides of the coin
Presence|raw awarenss is, IMO, the only thing that spans both.
Sounds quite promising. The brain, and the mind, have much to do with connections, spanning different aspects of experience, and finding bridges between various things we perceive.
Drawing a border, though, between raw awareness and some other kind of awareness, doesn't translate into neuroanatomy or neurophysiology, so far as I am aware. In the brain everything is connected to everything else, at most at a few "degrees of separation."
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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A story about complicated thinkers:
"A man in the city Merv, known for it's complicated thinkers, one night ran around in the streets of the city shouting: "Thief! Thief!"
People collected around him and asked: "Where is the thief?"
In my house, he answered.
Did you see him?
No.
Was anything stolen?
No.
How do you then know that there was a thief?
I lay in my bed and suddenly I realised that thieves break into houses in absolute silence and that they move extremely silently.
I was not able to hear anything, so I understood that there had to be a thief in the house."
The funny thing is that to Largo the experience of this man from Merv about a thief in his house is as "experiencally" real as the fact (to my knowledge) that he Largo has a daughter educated as a doctor or that the earth is circling around the sun. To Largo the illusion of the thief is just the other side of the coin.
And I guess choirboy WBraun is applauding for the thrill of the challenge.
My bullsh#t-protector is at full alarm though I am perfectly calm.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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JL, here is where we part ways.
I believe that the brain exists in the universe and is therefore subject to physical laws. Why toss all brains into some "reality vacuum chamber."
So I see no reason to suggest that it CAN be quantitatively understood at some point. "Never" is a long time. I haven't given up. I am honest. This viewpoint is for right now, and it could change over time.
For instance last night. I was up really late working, and after 2:00am we had a 4.7 earthquake in central Oklahoma. I noticed it because we had a metal vase in a bowl on the table and it kept making a lot of noise. The house felt like it does when we have a big cold front come through.
The noisy cold front hit many hours later. At the time it was quite still.
Having been through a bunch of earthquakes in california, I was pretty sure that the rattling vase and shaking house was a weak earthquake, but it lasted for quite a long time and was followed by several weaker ones.
I went to bed and found out that we had a series of small earthquakes last night. Not only that, anyone who was awake or who woke up felt the same thing. Calls came in from Texas to Missouri and east into Arkansas.
So hey, it was an earthquake. It has been measured quantitatively by the USGS.
I don't think I would have figured it out if I hadn't previously experienced many small aftershocks. Many others did, though.
So subjective experience was reasonably consistent from an objective standpoint among the several million who felt it. Of course it was all filtered through admittedly imprecise sensation, and each person who experienced it did not have the box of tools I have from experiencing it previously and therefore correctly placing the phenomena in the right category. As I said, not my first earthquake rodeo, so I have a context of experience to compare it with. It is very poor quantitatively, but hey, I can tell a big one from a little one. So there is an experience shared by millions, and it had a very strong physical cause. Amazing that people around here placed it in the correct context. This lasted a long time. Most of our earthquakes just shake the windows for about five seconds. 4.7 is huge around here.
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Largo: Werner is right: Form (stuff) equals emptiness (nothing) and emptiness equals form, exactly. Calling form "unreal" was a poor choice of words. Impermanent is the better term.
Oh-oh.
The introduction of emptiness (shunyata) has opened a door, and it might be worthwhile to post a warning sign to allow people to avoid tripping and tumbling into confusion.
(You can skip this missive if you bore easily.)
"Emptiness" is not exactly what it seems connotatively. The notion comes from a different culture and from a different structure of consciousness.
Basically, emptiness means "not inherently or independently existing from its own side," that is, on its own. Whatever is pointed at exists only because everything else exists. Interdependence. Inter-are. Not "be." Be, to be, suggests independent existence. No such thing can exist on its own, by itself. The more you look into anything, the more you become one with it, penetrate it, you'll see that everything needs everything else to exist. Think of anything: could it exist completely on its own without a universe? How?
If it exists, then one speck of dust exists.
If it doesn't exist, then the whole cosmos doesn't.
(12th Century Zen Master)
This means that nothing can die, and nothing can be born. Everything just changes form forever, and everything is a participant in the impermanance or change in everything else. Emptiness is change, constant and eternal change. Good thing, too, for if nothing changed, then nothing could live or grow. Just dead matter.
Nothing is created, and nothing is destroyed.
(Lavoisier)
If everything is impermanent, then REAL THINGS THAT DON'T CHANGE cannot exist. (This causes some measurement and ontology problems, obviously.)
Emptiness is not nothing. No thing can come from nothing. Nothing can be created from nothing. Everything comes from something, and the something else must be everything. All things are empty, neither produced nor destroyed, neither defiled nor immaculate, neither good or bad, neither right or wrong. Consider emptiness a reference to an infinite matrix.
In an old wording: form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.
As you can see, projecting "thingness" on consciousness (as with anything tangible) is a problem if everything is impermanent.
When you have direct apprehensions of emptiness (subjectively--not just cognitive understanding), then supposedly you will have perfect understanding. (Ha-ha. It might as well be on the other side of the universe for me at the rate I'm going.)
(Remember that there are cultural differences and differences in consciousness in these notions and explanations. For example, Eastern Indians think that a circle does not mean zero, but totality. Just because you find emptiness an odd idea in odd language, doesn't mean there is no wisdom or insight in it.)
Be well.
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pa
climber
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"The engenderment of things is called their transformation.
The end of things is called their change."
Nei Jing Su Wen
I am starting to feel like an eastern Go-b...I promise I will stop this now.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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sorry Largo, I didn't pick up on the cutesy "emotion -> e-motion -> energy-in-motion" it would be wonderful if all we had to do was write a story and then it would be true....
let me wrap up this bit of my thinking, interesting I get accused of being some hyper Left-Brain (or is it Right Brain?) science wonk, a unrepentant physicalist, and a delusional who believes in empiricism as a way to understand things... how gauche of me...
but actually, I find all this rather interesting and quite stimulating, although I don't think I'll be quite throwing off my particular approach, I am not worried if you all take your own angle on this rather difficult question...
the right-left brain thing isn't a personality type, it's a description of the way the brain works, and it is the biggest, and maybe the first people had discovered... basically different parts of the brain do different things.
When I mentioned the symptoms of confabulation related to brain injury, Largo went off on a rather strange tack, as if we couldn't learn anything from "damaged brains" his theory of mind and consciousness seems to be limited to healthy, "normal" brains... I suspect there is a huge variation in the types of brains and their compositions, and that probably reflects somewhat on the particular "mind" which I will seat in the body, primarily the brain.
But what struck me as interesting for this discussion was the idea that our discursive facilities may actually be there to report what is going on, and though it may act in concert to initiate some action, it is not the primary initiator, which is what MH2 has been trying to tell us, that our inheritance from the sharks is this wonderful aptitude for translating a map of the physical world into a stage on which we act with precision and intent, and that is quite cut off from those parts of the brain that report what is going on...
...there are many other things that we do, we know we do, that are quite separate from the discursive part of the mind's access, not only cut off, but with no way of describing the exact details. So that part of the mind makes it up... as I said before, it may not understand itself, but it has an answer.
Largo's exercise to shut that off and just "go with the flow" is not so unique or difficult to do, even Largo learned to do it, and he loves to tell stories... but the description of mind without the discursive part of mind certainly comes up lacking...
So I propose that the "1st person experience" may actually be just a fiction, and not really what we experience at all, but rather, how we describe what we experience, with all the bits made up which we really don't understand. That is, while our discursive mind does a good job with the bits it has access to, it does a terrible job when it doesn't understand something, but it doesn't stop and say, "don't know," it attempts to make a description. That's its job, and its good at it.
Just like the people who confabulate...
All the bits of the brain work together to generate what we recognize as human attributes of thought, but they are not a monolithic entity, the parts do their thing, mostly in concert, but just as we are not sharks swimming in the sea anymore, those parts of brain have been adapted and appropriated to do other things, in a patch work, which makes it all the more difficult to understand scientifically.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Great summary Ed, and much of what you say about the discursive mind could be taken straight out of a Buddhist textbook. They too say we make up stuff with our discursive minds, and that's why we have to look to a deeper layer of mind (the unconscious) to begin to understand ourselves as we are, rather than through the ego based stories we tell ourselves.
In as much as the left brain processes verbal thoughts and speech, it is connected with the discursive mind. Damage it and you lose speech, alphabets and numbers in all cultures. The right brain is concerned with spatial orientation, symbols, dreams music, art, emotion and the unconscious or subconscious mind. Damage it and you are still able to read and do math although if you're Japanese or Chinese, you do lose the ability ability to write characters or visualize the abacus.
Left brain and right brain do represent personality types in the sense that we all have a dominant hemisphere. Yours is obviously discursive. Mine is maybe less obviously symbolic. After so many years of education I can navigate the verbal world, but it is not my first way of relating. You must be pretty good at symbols too after using math for so many years.I'm guessing words are still your first response however. For short hand we call them left brain and right brain personality orientations. They exist.
Below the verbal and symbolic levels however, there is yet another type of mind, the one that simply is, serving as a witness or a presence. This is the mind that experience says is connected to other consciousness in the universe. Whether it is or we just perceive it is, hasn't been addressed much by science yet alone disproved so far, though it might be in the future.
The chakras somehow represent the confluence of nerve bundles mostly in the spinal cord and associated endocrine glands that exude certain chemicals. Undisciplined the represent our more primitive elements, the reptilian responses of our nervous system so to speak. By training both the discursive and unconscious levels of mind on them, we can in fact alter our electrical and chemical responses, including our autonomic nervous system and thus over time, alter our personality toward greater calm and reason.
Conversely when we are overwhelmed by our chemicals, our primitive nervous system from much earlier in evolution manages to override or completely cloud our other more developed levels of mind.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Marlowe-
Are you saying there are no patterns?
Or that a new idea is better than a pattern that has lasted for a couple thousand years?
or that earning a living through yoga is untenable?
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Jan
Are you saying there are no patterns? No, I am not saying there are no patterns, but it depends on which patterns you are talking about and what status you give the patterns.
I am not saying that every new idea is better than every longlasting and long accepted pattern. But: old is not the same as true. Evidence-based patterns are generally better than old not evidence based patterns. The idea of the sun circling around the earth is older than the idea of the earth circling around the sun, but the newer idea or pattern is the best one because it is grounded on facts and not religious prestige. And the idea of the earth moving elliptically around the sun is better than the idea of the earth moving around the sun in a perfect circle because the new idea is better supported by observations/facts. Old delusions are still not true just because they are old. Neither are new delusions true because they are new.
As I see it earning a living through yoga is fair enough. Untenable is not the word to be used when we are talking about the value of earning a living trough yoga. You're a joker? ;o)
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Marlow and Ed:
You both are concerned that what is perceived (subjectively) could be false. Yet you seem to hold that empirical, objective "facts" cannot be false.
Facts are socially constructed, and facts are theory-laden. It is theories that tell us what constitutes facts (what things and processes are to begin with). In the end, facts are what science says they are. Yet all so-called facts are perceived subjectively. There is not an entity that can perceive anything without the intervention of a subjective mind. To say that anything exists or not, a fortiorti, demands mind, and all mind is subjective.
To wit, how can you be so sure of the existence of "facts" when you must go through a mind that you say has inherent problems of valid and verifiable perception?
If your response is that bona fide "facts" are cross-validated by others (legitimate or otherwise), then you open yourself up to the problem of social construction--which Marlow has pointed out is fraught with difficulties historically.
Tu quoqui. You have the same problem that you complain about with Largo.
If given a choice between my subjective experience and what another tells me (no matter how legitimate he or she may be), I'll be going with my own subjective perceptions. All great philosophers and wise men and wise women have said that each and every person should learn to judge things for themselves, and THAT would be a balance of subjectivity, reason, instinct, emotions, and self-reflection--not just reason alone.
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pa
climber
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Nicely put MikeL, once again. Thank you.
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WBraun
climber
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MikeL -- ".... each and every person should learn to judge things for themselves .."
And judge them against what is the problem here.
What is the/your/their foundation that one is judging against ......
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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MikeL:
You say:
"You ... are concerned that what is perceived (subjectively) could be false. Yet you seem to hold that empirical, objective "facts" cannot be false.
Answer:
It may be false that the earth is circling around the sun, but the probability is extremely low. It may be true that there were thieves in the house of the man from Merv, but the probability is extremely low. When you now argue you are using words to make it look like something of very low probability is to be taken just as seriously as something of exteremely low probability. This example clearly illustrates my point. But much of what is taken for facts today is also just bad science, as seen within biomedical medicine where only around 10-20% of what is held for true by physicians is facts according to skilled rigid metascience. But this does not undermine the point I made.
You say:
"Facts are socially constructed, and facts are theory-laden. It is theories that tell us what constitutes facts (what things and processes are to begin with). In the end, facts are what science says they are. Yet all so-called facts are perceived subjectively. There is not an entity that can perceive anything without the intervention of a subjective mind. To say that anything exists or not, a fortiorti, demands mind, and all mind is subjective."
Answer:
Sound scientific method eliminates the biases connected to individual subjectivity, while Largo embraces individual subjectivity as just as true as facts based on rigid use of scientific method. To Largo the thieves in the house of the man from Merv are just as true as the fact that the earth is circling around the sun. ("Two sides of the coin") Largo and maybe also you MikeL do not make a distinction between what is extremely low probability and what is extremely high probability. To me only what is extremely high probability means fact.
You say:
"To wit, how can you be so sure of the existence of "facts" when you must go through a mind that you say has inherent problems of valid and verifiable perception?"
Answer:
Scientific method, metacognition and critical reasoning skills are needed. I am sure that the earth is circling elliptically around the sun in the way that it is extremely high probability that it is so.
To me it looks like you and Largo use the straw of a small difference between "extremely high probability" and "proven fact" to say that everything under the sun is just as much a fact - everything from the thieves in the house of the man from Merv to the daughter of Largo is just as much a fact. You see no distinction between what is highly probable and what is not.
You say:
"If your response is that bona fide "facts" are cross-validated by others (legitimate or otherwise), then you open yourself up to the problem of social construction--which Marlow has pointed out is fraught with difficulties historically." "You have the same problem that you complain about with Largo."
Answer:
I hope the answers I have already given make my answer to this question clear.
I do not have the same problem as Largo if you accept that there is a difference between what is probable and supported by scientifically collected facts and what is not.
You say:
"If given a choice between my subjective experience and what another tells me (no matter how legitimate he or she may be), I'll be going with my own subjective perceptions. All great philosophers and wise men and wise women have said that each and every person should learn to judge things for themselves, and THAT would be a balance of subjectivity, reason, instinct, emotions, and self-reflection--not just reason alone."
Answer:
I make distinctions between facts and not facts having no intention of robbing anyone from choosing by free will. I just don't express my gratitude for weak reasoning to make people feel well. How people feel when I express my reasoning, which is honestly expressed, is their business. And I know from scientific findings that advertising/PR severely distorts the ability to make informed choices.
But I do not always follow my own intuitions. If I was in the jungle seeing some unknown berries I would like to eat, I would easily follow the advice of an expert telling me that the berries were poisonous.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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MikeL writes: Yet you seem to hold that empirical, objective "facts" cannot be false.
no I never said that, in fact I have said the opposite, though it might be too subtle, what I have said is that our empirical observations are finite, they have measurable accuracy and precision, and because of that, empirical observations and the theories based on them, are provisional.
Further, it is possible to perform an experiment or make an observation and get it wrong... which is why science is published in such a way as to allow for the independent verification of those observations/measurements.
Certainly in a model of the universe which is purely physical, empirical observation forms the basis of knowing what is going on in that universe, nothing more, nothing less.
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Marlow,
You appear sure about a great many things. That's not very scientific of you.
The use of probability--which is itself a theory--opens the door to an admittance that you don't really know anything for sure at all. Probability indicates the stance of your mind; it does not indicate reality. You can look at the sun and think that the earth revolves around it, but others say it's more like a dance, rather than a static and perfect circle.
No matter, you "Know."
What you know is your own mind. You don't know the Truth. No one here or not here can SAY what the Truth is because Reality is infinite and endless. Again, everytime you break reality up analytically, you destroy its essence. As Hegel once said, if you want to completely describe a red ball, you'd have to describe everything else in the universe.
As for sound scientific method, critical reasoning skills, metacognitive approaches, ad nauseum, please . . . it's not like I'm the only person on this planet who has ever had doubts about the purity of science, its adherents, or its effects.
You are also forgetting about the problem of rigor versus completeness. Models are meant to be rigorous, not completely accurate.
Try applying the scientific method to the scientific method itself. Use that analytical mind of yours. Are you telling me you find no significant problems with the scientific method or the nature of "facts?" Work harder. Many other thinkers have.
(BTW, your metaphor or allegory of thieves in the night is Your Story. You need to get the rest of us to buy into it if you want to get any mileage out of it.)
Ed, I did not see that your emphasis was provisionality. If so, then I beg your pardon. I'm totally fine with provisionality. I hope that means we won't reify research results.
I find it difficult to accept the idea of independent verification in any absolute sense, Ed. I hope you mean independent verification in a relative sense. I think it's the best one can do within the discipline. I can't help but sympathize with the concerns of postmodernists who want more self-reflection in studies (re: method, purpose, and how outputs are used).
Cheers.
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SuperTopo on the Web
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The brains are so constructed that they often see patterns where there are in reality no patterns. Some people are not able to let the untenable pattern go because they are not well equiped for critical reasoning. When they discover a pattern they just hold it for true and start defending it - example Don Quijote. This is a common property of most human minds. We are pattern-recognizing beings.
Let us know!