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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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MikeL
I said:
"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."
When I say fact this is what I mean by fact and nothing else. There is a possibility of these facts being challenged by other observations and theories in the future, but at present they are standing strong. To this extent I am sure.
The positions of the sun and the planets were observed and noted down year after year and at last when religious authorities allowed scientists to express what they had found it became possible to say that the earth circled around the sun. This was the only theory that was in accordance with the observations.
And poets may say that the earth dances across the sky - that is alright for me, but if poets argue against scientific facts like "the earth is circling around the sun" and say that "the earth does not circle around the sun", "it just dances across the sky", then I will tell them they are wrong. If the rotation of the earth and the change of it's "axis" is the point you have in mind when you say dances and if you do not deny that the earth also circles around the sun, then we could agree.
Using the scientific method to science itself is just what one do during metascience. Rigid metascience is important - as an example when it comes to biomedical science.
Are you playing games with me now?
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TWP
Trad climber
Mancos, CO
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Does these questions help the test-taker understand their opinions about the mind/brain dicohotomy?
A. If you think so, please take this test. Give your answers to each statement. True or False? Why?
B. If you think you can develop a better test working from this template, please do so. (Calling Ed H.)
C. If neither, please rant and flame about my utter stupidity for having the temerity to post to this thread.
___
A Test on the "What is Mind" Thread?
Respond to each statement, true or false? and why?
1. Mind = Brain
2. Brain = Mind
3. Mind > Brain
4. Brain > Mind
5. Mind < Brain
6. Brain < Mind
7. If Mind > Brain
Then There is a "Consciousness" "Out There" Guiding the Universe.
8. If Mind = or < Brain
Then There is Not a "Consciousness" "Out There" Guiding the Universe.
9. This statement is illogical: Brain > Mind
10. This statement is illogical: Brain < Mind
11. Are the limits of qualia = the degree to which Brain = Mind.
12. Are the limits of qualia = the degree to which Mind = Brain.
13. If a tree falling in the woods makes sound when no one is present to perceive,
Then mind > brain.
14. If a tree falling in the woods does not make a sound because no one is present to perceive,
Then brain > mind.
15. During the term of my existence, somewhere in the universe there co-exists MY MIND and a Universal Mind.
16. After the term of my physical existence, My Mind ceases to exist but A Universal Mind Exists.
17. After the term of my physical existence, my mind continues to co-exist along with a Universal Mind.
18. After the term of my physical existence, neither my mind nor a universal mind exists.
19. The purpose of life is to obtain "enlightenment" to wit: a state of in which my mind comprehends the truth that there is a Universal Mind.
20. If you believe there is a Universal Mind,
Then you are a theist.
21. If you do not believe there is a universal mind,
Then you are an atheist.
22. If you believe there is a Universal Mind,
Then you cannot be an atheist.
_
P.S. i) Who gives out the grades on this examination? I don't know, but I nominate Largo, Eric Beck or Ed Hartouni, if they will post their answers and/or flames against the test itself.
ii) What are the answers? I don't know that either. But I am sure Werner knows that he knows the answers. (And I would love to see his answers; we might get some idea what he really thinks for the first time ever.)
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Dingus
The other side of the coin: WBraun is playing his silly game. And you know it.
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sandstone conglomerate
climber
sharon conglomerate central
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Anyone following this thread an active participant in Zen, either Soto, Rinzai or Pure Land? Do any of you practice koan work, just out of curiosity? I've just recently picked up some works by Brian Greene, not that he's an affiliate of Zen, but I find the concepts of quantum physics to be completely compatible. Fires the imagination for sure.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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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).
what I have said about this upthread, and in other threads, is that the scientific method works even though humans are involved. I'm not sure what the distinction of "absolute" and "relative" as you have used it... if I read Newton's Opticks I can perform all of his described experiments, and I will get his results. I don't have to know anything about Newton's cultural setting to do so... I have to be able to read Newton.
I may not interpret the results as Newton might have, but his results stand... even though Newton discusses the nature of light in the Queries section of Opticks and gets it wrong, his measurement of the frequencies of light were some of the most precise and were used long after his corpuscular hypothesis was superseded by the wave hypothesis of light, which opened up classical optics.
So you're fear that a particular world view is required in the verification seems to be misplaced. I don't have sympathy for the post-modernist point of view, which has a lot of trouble with the scientific method, on the other hand, philosophy has no such methodology, and it has a lot less success understanding, and no success in predicting.
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MH2
climber
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I'd better try to modify what could be misperception. When judged by the amount of anatomy and activity devoted to locating the body within the world and deciding how to move and when and how fast and how far, the brain devotes a large part of its time, effort, and floor space to those problems. But quantity is different from quality. As far as consciousness goes, we barely perceive a lot of what the brain does. But the part we do perceive, especially the voice in the head, or train of thought, or stream of consciousness, can be hugely important for success in the modern world.
There is a good site for looking at what is currently known about the brain. It is easily understood and balanced when it comes to open questions like consciousness. It includes a fair look at what Largo is getting at in this thread.
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/index_d.html
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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MH2:
You say:
"I'd better try to modify what could be misperception. When judged by the amount of anatomy and activity devoted to locating the body within the world and deciding how to move and when and how fast and how far, the brain devotes a large part of its time, effort, and floor space to those problems. But quantity is different from quality. As far as consciousness goes, we barely perceive a lot of what the brain does. But the part we do perceive, especially the voice in the head, or train of thought, or stream of consciousness, can be hugely important for success in the modern world."
Answer:
The problem I see is that Largo and maybe also MikeL is putting a delusional mind-filter between everything that is measured (by repeated observation, by taking photos, by using instruments and so on), the facts found and the theories supported by what is found. And their mind-think at times even excludes the physical world from what we can be quite sure about. Their reasoning is close to this: "Only through mind can we take in the world, therefore we can not be sure about the world. The only thing we can be sure of is what we are thinking and feeling. We can be sure of mind."
I, on the other side, am quite sure that there is a tree that I am looking at outside my window, and I am quite sure it is a fact that Largo's daughter is educated as a doctor and I am quite sure that there were no thieves in the house of the man from Merv. But according to the reasoning of Largo and MikeL the thieves in the house of the man from Merv are just as much a fact as the tree outside my window or the daughter of Largo. And now I leave the question about biological fathership out.
To me this part of Largo's and MikeL's thinking make them the bros of Don Quijote. I like good poets but they do not make good scientists and their thinking around facts is weak. As MikeL points out some deep thinkers have produced the same kind of something close to mindful nonsense before them. To me that does not make MikeL's thinking around facts any better.
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WBraun
climber
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To me you are nut ..... ^^^^^ who over analyzes, over projects and over mental speculates everything here.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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WBraun
From seeing your posts, I must say I have no problem with being a nut to you.
Overanalyze? If you try harder you will see that my posts are relatively clear and free of overly mentalistic and abstract terms while your own is just overly abstract and mentalistic.
Over projects? Just tell me WBraun how your analytical mind reaches such a conclusion. Or are you just under-analyzing, jumping to conclusions?
Mental speculates everything here? Just tell me again how your analytical mind reaches such a conclusion. Or are you once more under-analyzing and jump to the conclusions your feelings and friendships tell you to?
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WBraun
climber
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I just proved my point about you .....
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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WBraun,
As long as you're not able to show us your reasoning and what you are basing your conclusions on, the only things you are showing us are points about yourself. You're an oracle of sloppy abstract thinking. And as every oracle you have no argumentative value. Your only function is to create a wall against which people can project their own thoughts and feelings.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 7, 2011 - 06:33pm PT
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Marlow said:
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.
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Back in that corner, Marlow. You're making no sense again.
The main problem many of you physicalists face is in trying to homogenize reality into measureable bits, and from within these narrow parameters you can declare this "right' and that "wrong" and provide vigorous "science" to prove it so.
But what happens when reality presents us with something like subjective experience that is not divisible into quantifiable bits? First, you'll notice that the knee jerk reaction is to stick to a fundmantalist material approach (scientism) and simply deny there is anything real that is not measurable. This causes so many problems that you have to start collapsing the objective and subjective, the first and third person, the experiential and material into one homogenous soup where the measuring can still operate with impunity.
What's amazing to me is that most of the proponets of this model are not aware of doing this homogenizing and in fact accuse me of the opposite, of trying to homogenize the objective into the subjective, where if you were to believe Marlow, I am perfectly content to confuse a phantom with a genuine thief.
All along I have made the simple assertion that exhaustive knowledge of the physical properties of this or that is not the whole story unless you believe there is nothing more to reality than physical properties. Not even Marlow's boyfriend can tell us this is so since we all live fully embedded in subjective experience. The default position is to declare experience as fundamentally unreal, the "real" thing being the evolved and measurable meat brain said to produce subjective experience. This leads to the ultimate delusion, that the meat brain IS experience, that the map is the territory, and that the discursive mind is king after all.
Of course this leads us to the untenable position that our fundamental reality - our direct, 1st person subjective experience - is somehow less genuine or "real" than the material believed by many to entirely "create" it. Then you get wonky bullshit like saying subjective experience is the equal of a story or a literary yarn (make up, imagined, fake, undisciplined, et al) while the real stuff, the mature and authentic shizat are the measurements. The wonky thing her is not that one is right and the other is wrong, it's that the entire argument rests on believing the criteria for subjective and objective are the same - measuring being the one and only authentic benchmark - while in fact measuring is a tool for material reality with limited value in the subjective mode, just as intuition and felt sense has only a kind of orienting value when objectifying matter. Using the subjective to try and do cosmology begets dragons and goblins and creation myths, while trying to do life or the subjective with strictly materialist tools leaves you locked out of your own inner kingdom - but with a mouthful of numbers to chew on.
Another thing worth mentioning, touched on by Mike L., is that "emptiness" is not just a post modernist social construct, nor is it entirely a concept filched from the orient, nor yet is it something merely suggesting the unreality of anything existing independent of everything else (Like people holding onto the entirely false idea that numbers exist independent of subject). In every drop of water lies the universe. But emptiness also is the stark vacancy of mind in a quiescent state, that is the container of content is itself dead empty, though it is know so only by the existence of content.
This last one is extremely tricky and has to be demonstrated every which way to a Zen teacher before you get the nod.
JL
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Using the subjective to try and do cosmology begets dragons and goblins and creation myths, while trying to do life or the subjective with strictly materialist tools leaves you locked out of your own inner kingdom - but with a mouthful of numbers to chew on.
This is what I've been saying all along. We need balance yet our entire school system, at least when I was in it, was directed toward the objective or what I call the left brain. I remember having to give up art and music classes in high school because I was college bound and was told by parents and school counselors that I couldn't waste my time on fluff. I was not able to resume those interests until my mid 30's when I finally had a stable job practicing my profession.
At the same time I am appalled by the irrational subjective right brain conspiracy theories I see being given credibility, especially dangerous ones like the anti-vaccine campaigns. I understand these not as lacking in science but being a defiant anti-science, anti-bureaucratic stance brought on by two much logic and its cousin, mindless bureaucracy.
One society that seems to do a better job of balancing the two sides of the brain/mind is Japan. Having three writing systems and two separate counting systems which use both halves of the brain was probably a good start although incredibly laborious. Basically the Japanese are subjective, intuitive, artistic right brain thinkers who were smart enough to realize after being invaded by Admiral Perry, that they were now operating in a western dominated left brain world.
They compensate for their subjectiveness by following forms and rules for every procedure. They're still not very good with logic and their right brain way of relating to the world shows through in such anomalies as a country of 120 million with streets that have no names and are numbered in the order in which the houses were built. They compensate by having layers of memorized maps in their heads and of course GPS in cars was made for them. I still have enough of a left brain left however, to think that named streets and numbered order would be better.
We need balance.
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yosemite 5.9
climber
santa cruz
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Here are several good videos discussing the brain at www.charlierose.com. I especially liked Nora Volkow's discussion of drug addiction being based on stimuli associated with drug use that promises reward, thereby producing dopamine, though the drug itself no longer produces dopamine because the brain has adapted to the drug. So relapses are caused by such stimuli which the pre-frontal cortex can no longer adequately resist.
You can go to http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11191 for this topic. There are other videos on the brain at this site that might interest you. I wonder what neuropsychologists would say about climbing. Can it become an unhealthy habit? Is the stimuli of reading a climbers' forum in November maintaining an addiction?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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All along I have made the simple assertion that exhaustive knowledge of the physical properties of this or that is not the whole story unless you believe there is nothing more to reality than physical properties.
yes, it is an assertion and you have failed to have provided anything more to back it up... it is truly lame to say "you can't explain it therefore my assertion is right." Further, there is overwhelming evidence that "there is nothing more to reality than physical properties". That doesn't mean that there is no subjective experience, no art, no "right side" thinking, etc, etc...
Oddly, the last statement Largo makes above is the strangest and most ridiculous in my mind:
This last one is extremely tricky and has to be demonstrated every which way to a Zen teacher before you get the nod.
that is, the idea that some sort of authority, some person tells you whether or not you've "got it." Science is, at least, not dependent on the authority of people... I'm sure someone like MikeL might object, but there is a recent example, at least, of making progress in the face of great objection from practitioners of science; they were wrong, it turns out... see this article e.g.:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2011/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Shechtman
this is not an isolated incident in science, but the "Zen teacher" equivalents didn't nod on Shechtman, they told him to "go back and read the textbook," that his ideas were wrong.... the ideas were testable, had experimental consequences and were found to be consistent with the empirical evidence which the "orthodox" theories were not...
Who knows what your "Zen teacher" knows, or doesn't know, there is no way to verify that knowledge, independently, objectively.
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WBraun
climber
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" .... there is no way to verify that knowledge, independently, objectively."
Just talking will yield nothing.
All absolute truth can independently be verified by testing it thru a bonafide discipline.
Completely scientific.
The gross materialist never tests it instead makes a defective machine to test only the temporal material world.
Thus the materialist remains eternally bewildered.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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The idea that the mind/brain is a physical system that can be replicated by a computer has been around for quite a while now.
The memory state space inside a computer is maintained by changing switch states between zero and one.
I started playing around with computers back in the 1950s when a switch was a fist-sized electromagnet activating a mechanical relay. My friends and I built the first computers in Idaho from parts scavenged from the telephone company trash cans. Then computer science went to vacuum tube switches and memory built from small magnetic donut cores threaded in a grid of copper wires that could switch their polarity back and forth. My first big computer was an IBM 705 with long banks of vacuum tubes and a 10k core memory the size of a large portable ice chest. Memory was stored on magnetic tapes, then on a RAD Random Access Drum, and then on huge disk platters. This was in the later 1960s in San Francisco; and one of my hobbies at the time was hanging around the local university where lab studies were being done to reverse engineer the ‘computer’ inside the heads of Resus monkeys.
Now we put billions of switches on a fingernail sized chip and we are still playing the same game of reverse engineering the mind/brain.
Once such is Henry Markram, a South African neuroscientist who received his doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the Us National Institutes of Health. He is founder of the Human Brain Project at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland; using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer with 16,000 processors. He states that:
For 50 years we’ve been thinking of memory, despite all evidence to the contrary, as where you imprint changes in the brain. You go to your synapses, you go to your neurons, and you change them when you remember something. It’s an imprint. It’s called an engram. Where is the print of memory in the brain? They think it’s like a scar, a mark. This is one of the most fundamental mistakes in neuroscience. And the reason why I say it’s a mistake is simple: All evidence indicates that the neuron does not reset. The synapses do not reset. They are always different. They’re changing every millisecond. Your brain today is very, very different from what it was when you were 10 years old, and yet you may have profound memories from when you were 10. What has to be answered in neuroscience is this: How do you remember something from long ago when your brain is actually different?
We’ve had too many physicists move into neuroscience and say, “Oh, it must be some kind of statistical distributed memory, so even if it’s overwritten there will still be some traces of it.”
In our view, the idea that memory is held in the brain the same way it is held in a computer is fundamentally wrong.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Illuminating, Tom. A cut above the usual stuff batted around in this weird thread.
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wack-N-dangle
Gym climber
the ground up
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My 2cents
It seems foolish to believe that eastern concepts of our nature are THE answer and that science can never provide an accurate empirical model. Still, eastern understandings seem based on practices and observations that are sometimes relevant today. we are human, they are/were too
If that upsets you, I hope you meditate on it
Werner kind of reminds me of a hardened old teacher, ready to prod with the stick. Still, maybe something that is hard won, can lead to appreciation of our place, and ourselves and others in it. Maybe that is why he prods the modern scientist, whose progress is not necessarily progressive.
Finally, given enough time and resources, humans will create a conscious being. What will we see when we look back at the other? A life as valuable as our own? It might not be a binary computer. It may happen with genetic engineering. Also, it probably has already been created by another sentient being in another part of the universe.
Maybe, it would have been easier to have simply typed, "Why bother?".
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 8, 2011 - 12:27am PT
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I fully expected Ed to try and disqualify anyone "knowing" anything save for his home team of quantifiers. A Zen master, as Dr. F. and Ed can tell you (empirical knowledge here, or are we really just guessing?), is simply working off the subjective, off feelings, so what he or she is testing you on is merely subjective data that has just as much chance of being "false" as it does of being "true."
Man alive, are you mistaken about that. I'm tempted to underwrite a year long seshin for Ed at the Idylwild Zen Center with Sensai Charles Fletcher. Ed could climb AND get Charles clear on a few things.
His other argument is totally circular: Since there is no physical evidence that anything exists other than the physical, we can by our own criteria, disclaim all but what we are quantifying, and write off as crack pots anyone mentioning something other than our modern God: Matter. And while we mostly agree that experience is not itself material, we can simply write it off as being the direct product or live feed of material, though any empirical evidence is still forthcoming. And it still will be in 1,000 years.
The crazy thing here is that somehow it is implied that objective shizat is an end in itself, whereas virtually all objectifying is in the service of the subjective. We do what we do to mostly to better the quality of our experience. Even the pursuit of "pure knowledge" and understanding yields great personal (subjective) rewards, without which we would never strive so hard - of that you may be sure.
The objective in any absolute sense is just as one-dimensional and absurd as the strict computer model is for "mind," but if that's all you know and trust then that's how your going to see the world. Period.
JL
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