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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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to say that there's no knowledge in experience
Who says that?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 9, 2016 - 01:15pm PT
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MH2. Who said anything about a realm?
Had it ever occurred to you that there are other options?
When Planck said that all things (including realms) postulate consciousness, what do you suppose he meant?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Can you tell me? Are words not adequate?
You may be being wilfully mysterious.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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I have recently been reading old buddhist translations by Geoffrey DeGraff. Having meditated for 30 plus years most of that time I read very little about meditation just had good teachers and did retreats etc.. I am bringing it up because a lot of books and papers written by western philosophers are brought up on this thread but very little written about Buddhist interpretations regarding what mind is and consciousness.
I have been enjoying reading these because I can relate them to my activity of meditation and experience. It gives the interpretation context for me. I imagine without that context they may be difficult to appreciate.
What might be easily grasped is the Buddha is talking about mind and consciousness and this is like 2,500 years ago; and it refers to the vedas view on mind which is a few thousand years prior to the Buddha (these guys were not just cave men gathering fruit). The preface and abstract might be all a non-meditator could wade through.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/likefire/1.html
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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From just.thinkingofit.com:
"Compare the brain to New York City: just as cars navigate the city’s neighborhoods via a patchwork of streets, bridges, tunnels, and highways, electrical signals traverse the brain via a meshwork of neurons. Tononi’s theory predicts that in a fully conscious brain, traffic in one neighborhood will affect traffic in other neighborhoods, but that as consciousness fades—for instance, during sleep or anesthesia—this ripple effect will decrease or disappear.
In 2008, in one of several experiments demonstrating this effect, Tononi pulsed the brains of 10 fully conscious subjects with his electromagnetic gun—the equivalent of, say, injecting a flood of new cars into SoHo. The traffic (the electromagnetic waves) rippled across Manhattan (the brain): things jammed up in Tribeca and Greenwich Village, even in Chelsea. Tononi’s EEG electrodes captured ripples and reverberations that were different for every subject and for every region of the brain, patterns as complex and varied as the traffic in Manhattan on any given day.
Tononi then put the same subjects under anesthesia. Before he pulsed his gun again, the subjects’ brain traffic seemed as busy as when they were conscious: cars still circulated in SoHo and Tribeca, in Greenwich Village and Chelsea. But the pulse had a drastically different effect: This time, the traffic jam was confined to SoHo. No more ripples. 'It’s as if [the brain] has fragmented into pieces,' Tononi told me."
There are many references on the WWW to consciousness in altered states, like dreaming. This might provide paths of inquiry that have not been explored on this thread. My own experience years ago with the Art of Dreaming (lucid dreaming) demonstrated how consciousness (I-consciousness) can be evoked when at most marginal sense input exists. There, the I-consciousness (even as an artificial construct) reveled in strange internal worlds in which the laws of physics had little authority. This contrasts with ordinary dreaming, where one is conscious but has little if any free will.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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So is New York having experience? Or only objective processing?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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New York is having a ball. Well, a Big Apple.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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MH2: So is New York having experience?
That’s one way of talking about consciousness . . . the collective consciousness of a community. (It’s been said that we are all on this earth, as it were, because we all share a common karma and as such we share the same general viewpoints).
Somewhere around 2002, I undertook a year long program in coaching, thinking that it would help me in my management consulting practice. In that program, the instructors made a distinction between what was a mood and what is an emotional state: an emotional state is personal and doesn’t last too long; a mood was more ambient and could last for months. The best example I heard was the different moods that one feels in different cities. New York expresses it self differently than Chicago (where I used to live). Ditto for Silicon Valley, Seattle, Coventry UK, London Ontario, and now Green Valley, Arizona. Every community seems to express itself differently. One can feel it.
From my reflective studies and observations, I see a great deal of qualitative difference among different emotions that I experience and among moods. Saying that I am angry, sad, jealous, surprised, lonely, interested, loving, caring, etc. initially seems descriptive, until I look at those experiences up close and carefully. Each of those feelings appear to be qualitatively different from each other; none of them are comparable. It’s like jumping from one dimension to another, a spatial-temporal shift from one reality to another. Referring to them as “emotional” seems to be far too vague and non-descriptive. But, it’s what we do because we don’t make close observations. We say we’re in “an emotional state” and leave it at that.
Consciousness is so highly textured. No one experience seems to be comparable to any other, either in texture or feeling, or in time [sic], or space [sic]. These are just ways of conversing with others.
I’d suppose that artists might be attenuated to these “distinctions.”
Everything is infinitely unique. Generalizations seem socially necessary, but they are all lies.
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cintune
climber
Colorado School of Mimes
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See, there you go again. Sounds good in theory but there is still common ground for consensus that is not a lie. Unless you have some vested narrative of your own that requires that to be.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Tononi's (IIT) concept of Φ is debatable. For instance, there are over 40 definitions of complexity. Although Φ can be calculated in theory, to do so becomes virtually impossible in practice. The math itself is dense and as such may be unappealing to fellow investigators of consciousness. Tegmark has come up with a number of counter-definitions.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Although Φ can be calculated in theory, to do so becomes virtually impossible in practice.
But it might be worth the trouble if it would help my wife and me agree on what the differences are among seemingly infinitely varied shades of paint. And that's only in the range from white to tan. Which look more or less alike to me.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Cintune, I’m not following your writing. What theory? How can a theory be drawn from an observation that everything is unique? What consensus was I talking about? What I said was that it might seem as though there is agreement, understanding--but that it is a lie.
There I go again??
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 10, 2016 - 03:57am PT
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For every mind it's season...
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jul 10, 2016 - 04:20pm PT
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Is that gal to your far left solar powered, John? Looks like she's charging up for action.
;>)
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Jul 10, 2016 - 04:26pm PT
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“If you seek with the mind, it will not take you anywhere, except to a tautological situation where you repeat the obvious. In science, the tautological questions prove themselves. That's the art of our science. . . ‘All these variables and nothing else.’ We are champions of pseudo control–we reduce the problem to manageable science. What a fantasy!
-Notes from Underground or at least from in my notebook
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 10, 2016 - 07:50pm PT
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what is time?
perhaps MikeL can start his own thread...
Entrada, Carmel, Dewey, Navajo, Kayenta, Wingate, our own Jurassic Park, sitting on Chinle, Moenkopi...
a year, a season, a day, a heartbeat
The human consciousness may have begun to leap and boil some sunny day in the Pleistocene, but the race by and large has retained the essence of its animal sense of time. People think in five generations--two ahead, two behind--with heavy concentration on the one in the middle. Possibly that is tragic, and possibly there is no choice. The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it.
John McPhee
Basin and Range
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 11, 2016 - 12:23am PT
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Sorry. I don't buy this. It is entirely possible -- probable in my opinion, that we will be able to create life from scratch -- not entirely digitally, of course, but with some starting material of say stem cells or something. It will involve no new fundamental principles. It's right around the corner.
Was done in 2010. Lab grade A, T, C and G was used to construct a synthetic copy of a genome (Mycoplasma genitalium - a human STD) and it was transplanted to a cell devoid of DNA which then successfully replicated - not ground up, but impressive nonetheless. The obstacles to a ground up synthetic life are myriad, but mostly resolve around biological 'systems'. That and, despite the accomplishment, our understanding of genetics is still relatively shallow and even more so for epigenetics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, connectomics, on and on...
Making some progress relative to systems with the first whole-cell computational model of the same Mycoplasma genitalium in 2012 which is helping us to start understanding some of the fundamentals (running on a 128-core Linux cluster, the simulation takes 10 hours for a single M. genitalium cell to divide once — about the same time the actual cell takes — and generates half a gigabyte of data):
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jul 11, 2016 - 07:04am PT
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You know, you're making me rethink my position on this one, healyje. Of course all of these "principles", were the result of evolution -- lot's of this stuff clearly did not exist in earliest life. So that's my take-home. In biology, many (most?) of the principles themselves constitute an evolved and evolving set. Let's home those quickly-evolving nasty bacteria don't hit on some new principle for which we have no defenses.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jul 11, 2016 - 08:33am PT
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zBrown:
(That’s quite a quote, there. Are they your thoughts?)
Back to Cintune’s thoughts (as I might understand them), would not any “common ground for consensus” be a social construction if consensus among any community constitute the validating standard? Would not any social construction constitute reality?
I’m a student of social construction. My professional work focused on it, and my personal experiences began to appear to be *only that* a few decades ago.
One doesn’t have to get all tied up in the knot that results from thinking about whether subjectivity is or is not symmetric or has a basis in objectivity (ignoring whether it “should”). Trying to say “what really is” is a knot of our own (social) making. it’s sort of like a drama that we like getting embroiled in: it’s fun, it allows us to hang out with other people who share the same interests, and it might keep us in a position where we can readily avoid the hard problem of who and what we are.
The “What Is Mind?” thread ends up to be not really about whether brain is mind or consciousness can be explained by neural nets, computer metaphors, computer simulations, complexity theories, etc. Those are all inventive, speculative, technical riffs. The “What Is ’Mind’?” thread is really about each person looking at what everyone seems to think he or she has (a mind), and as a result, coming to understand his or her life. (This is what meditation introduces one to.) There are an infinite number of interpretations of what one is for each and every being.
Who / what you really are is pretty much the ultimate question and the ultimate conundrum / dilemma / paradox. Again, the technical riffs are inherently interesting to those who generate them and others who enjoy the amusement park of puzzles. But the activities don’t really get any being anywhere. None of these things seem to make any difference in the felt experience of one’s life. In other words, nothing changes. We continue to see ourselves the same perceived beings as we were, only perhaps in some new or amended contextual narrative. As zBrown suggested, we become champions of pseudo-control by reducing the problem (of “me”) to manageable science.
PSP has suggested that the investigation into “mind” might benefit from fewer references to scientific studies and Western philosophers and more references to what great spiritual teachers of the past have said. In my view, that approach tends to bring the same problems of presenting highly technical notions / concepts, convoluted practices, domain-specific language, and a long line of he-said / she-said historical development. We each end up referring to detail that others don’t understand.
One can become familiarized with the here and now on his or her own. It doesn’t take a Ph.D., advanced education, or a teacher / guru (although those might help). What it takes is what basic courses in science is always arguing for: keen systematic observation, circumspection, and thinking for oneself. (More practiced investigators can provide pointers and guidance, but no one can walk another’s path for them.) Everyone has a mind laboratory they can get to work in.
Real change is what the Duck might call a change of heart; real change is the radical change of “me”; not of the conventional world we see ourselves living in. The most radical change in “me” comes about from recognizing that the “me” is not findable (or suspecting that it is not). That’s the beginning of the acquisition of wisdom (J. Brennan). There is no need for any of the historical, conceptual, ritualized, ceremonial, folksy, arcane, complicated practices that any discipline seems to require. You seem to have all the tools available to do the work—if you are truly interested.
The rest is just talking, which is perfectly fine.
Changing one’s perceptions changes one’s universe. How does one change their most fundamental perceptions? By changing one’s mind. How does one change one’s mind? By coming to realize that it (mind) cannot be found. Mind appears to be ungraspable, unresolvable, and indescribable.
Ok, then what’s going on right here and now?
(There’s the gordian knot. As many Buddhists say, cut the tree of ignorance at the root.)
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