• NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!

    Subscribe to The Paracast Newsletter!

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 12

Forums New posts

Free episodes:

Status
Not open for further replies.
smcder said:
You have, as my high school history professor would say...a firm grasp of the obvious! ;-)
Click to expand...
But isn't it amazing how many people don't have such a firm grasp on the obvious, and consequently get themselves caught in one faulty belief system or another? Perhaps obviousness is less prevalent than we assume? Remember, this is coming from the guy who has a habit of walking into glass walls ?
 
smcder said:
@Soupie - in terms of continuity of consciousness, Buddhism looks at the time scale for individual thoughts, or maybe more accurately awareness, in other words, we can experience a moment of only finite duration - I need to look the term up, but that implies consciousness is discrete, so where is it and where are we not just in dreamless sleep but in the gap between experience? This unit of time may be involved in the teleportation problem. It seems unavoidable, indeed you have posited that only one is conscious at a time during the process, that the earth original dies (at best) at the instant the planet y copy comes to consciousness. "I" would not want that. But sleep, the gap between awareness and aging don't bother my intuitive sense of "I" ...now, how do we either make this rigorous or expose it as false? Is it possible that the momentary gap in awareness, that actual minimum unit of time is what makes this rigorous?
Click to expand...
The above looks like the post you were referring to right? If so. You're onto it with exception that you're referring to consciousness as quantized rather than time itself. That results in a similar but not identical situation. In other words, consciousness appears to exist as an intermittent phenomenon in a non-quantized time continuum. This is all as you pointed out, rather obvious.

However if the continuum itself is quantized, then even the periods we think we're continuously awake are purely illusory. In other words, if the universe machine responsible for this realm was put on pause for a thousand years in its external construct, and then unpaused, we'd never be the wiser, and every iteration of us would be a copy, so there would never really be any continuity of anything, at least not on the physical level we imagine.
 
Last edited:
USI Calgary said:
But isn't it amazing how many people don't have such a firm grasp on the obvious, and consequently get themselves caught in one faulty belief system or another? Perhaps obviousness is less prevalent than we assume? Remember, this is coming from the guy who has a habit of walking into glass walls ?
Click to expand...

He had a lot of quotable lines ... he used that one all the time, even when something was far from obvious, it just stands out as one of the all time sarcastic lines and I keep it alive in his memory ... ;-)
 
USI Calgary said:
The above looks like the post you were referring to right? If so. You're onto it with exception that you're referring to consciousness as quantized rather than time itself. That results in a similar but not identical situation. In other words, consciousness appears to exist as an intermittent phenomenon in a non-quantized time continuum. This is all as you pointed out, rather obvious.

However if the continuum itself is quantized, then even the periods we think we're continuously awake are purely illusory. In other words, if the universe machine responsible for this realm was put on pause for a thousand years in its external construct, and then unpaused, we'd never be the wiser, and every iteration of us would be a copy, so there would never really be any continuity of anything, at least not on the physical level we imagine.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I just didn't mention it because I thought it was so obvious. ;-)
 
Last edited:
"...existence of robust suboptimality...most of the information in the sensory representation was lost during the transformation to a decision-level representation...severe limits in the quality of decision-level representations for multiple alternatives"

www.biorxiv.org

The suboptimality of perceptual decision making with multiple alternatives

It is becoming widely appreciated that human perceptual decision making is suboptimal but the nature and origins of this suboptimality remain poorly understood. Most past research has employed tasks with two stimulus categories, but such designs cannot fully capture the limitations inherent in...
www.biorxiv.org www.biorxiv.org

Maybe high strange events are not moments of naive hallucination but rather moments when we are actually perceiving reality in higher fidelity.

@burntstate
 
smcder said:
I'm quite serious. What do others think?
Click to expand...
I don't think I ever got to the point where I was sure what @Michael Allen was trying to convey. Whatever it is, it's not obvious to me. I offered a couple of interpretations that seemed to fit ( subjective idealism & solipsism ), but it seems they only fit by way of coincidence, like puzzle pieces with the right shape, but the wrong picture. I find this problem quite interesting. What do you make of it?
 
USI Calgary said:
I don't think I ever got to the point where I was sure what @Michael Allen was trying to convey. Whatever it is, it's not obvious to me. I offered a couple of interpretations that seemed to fit ( subjective idealism & solipsism ), but it seems they only fit by way of coincidence, like puzzle pieces with the right shape, but the wrong picture. I find this problem quite interesting. What do you make of it?
Click to expand...

yes...I am baaack.

I definitely think solipsism is out of the question and leads to more absurdities than it solves. Regarding "subjective idealism"...not sure...I think my problem is that it depends on categories already presumed of what we are trying to grok.

What I said that evidently appeared obvious to myself after a few glasses of wine:

We cannot think in terms of the objects we think we comprehend....and thus we cannot retro-fit objectivity into a system that supercedes and creates the BASIS for both "objective" and "subjective"...we cannot fit a full meaning of being in the very entity or object...or subject...or any verbal or mental division of being into a box that supercedes the very entity that creates the "box"...

We get back to the very simple point....that the very point of the needle of being cannot "prick" itself "

Perhaps it isn't so obvious...
 
Michael Allen said:
yes...I am baaack.

I definitely think solipsism is out of the question and leads to more absurdities than it solves. Regarding "subjective idealism"...not sure...I think my problem is that it depends on categories already presumed of what we are trying to grok.

What I said that evidently appeared obvious to myself after a few glasses of wine:

We cannot think in terms of the objects we think we comprehend....and thus we cannot retro-fit objectivity into a system that supercedes and creates the BASIS for both "objective" and "subjective"...we cannot fit a full meaning of being in the very entity or object...or subject...or any verbal or mental division of being into a box that supercedes the very entity that creates the "box"...

We get back to the very simple point....that the very point of the needle of being cannot "prick" itself "

Perhaps it isn't so obvious...
Click to expand...
Yes, I recall that. Then there were a couple of responses in an attempt to identify the contexts and specifics, which we have yet to resolve. Specifically I asked:
USI Calgary said:
Let's unpack that. What exactly do you mean by, "We cannot think in terms of the objects we think we comprehend." Why not? Example please. Let's pick an object and proceed. For example, I look out my window at the mountains in the distance. I comprehend ( or at least apprehend ) mountains in the distance, so why can I not think of this scene in terms of mountains in the distance?
Click to expand...

You responded with an answer that led us to the comment about "A thing is a think", which you correctly deduced made me ask if you were referring to solipsism or subjective idealism. We are now at the point where solipsism is off the table, but perhaps not subjective idealism. Either way, we have not yet answered the quoted question above, so let's chip away at that some more.

Given the example, I can and do think of objects ( like mountains ) that I do comprehend ( or at least apprehend ) as being part of the scene outside my window. Therefore why would you say "We cannot think in terms of the objects we think we comprehend", when it seems that we do? There must be some perspective or context in your statement that I'm missing.
 
Last edited:
USI Calgary said:
Yes, I recall that. Then there were a couple of responses in an attempt to identify the contexts and specifics, which we have yet to resolve. Specifically I asked:


You responded with an answer that led us to the comment about "A thing is a think", which you correctly deduced made me ask if you were referring to solipsism or subjective idealism. We are now at the point where solipsism is off the table, but perhaps not subjective idealism. Either way, we have not yet answered the quoted question above, so let's chip away at that some more.

Given the example, I can and do think of objects ( like mountains ) that I do comprehend ( or at least apprehend ) as being part of the scene outside my window. Therefore why would you say "We cannot think in terms of the objects we think we comprehend", when it seems that we do? There must be some perspective or context in your statement that I'm missing.
Click to expand...

I messed up ..."we cannot comprehend the source of our own ability to think in terms of the objects we use unconsciously as a source of what we 'think' or firmly 'believe' can is 'thinking and comprehending comprehension'"

I took a shortcut and used the word "think" in two different domains...the metaphor of human consciousness as a pin stabbing into the world ... perhaps it is a bad analogy, but the "point" is a metaphor of something very subtle: the human consciousness can no more find a comfortable and final explanation of itsel anymore than a needle find a way to stab it's own point.
 
Michael Allen said:
... the "point" is a metaphor of something very subtle: the human consciousness can no more find a comfortable and final explanation of itself anymore than a needle find a way to stab it's own point.
Click to expand...
The ideas of "comfortable" and "final" are fluid and subjective. Therefore perhaps some people are perfectly comfortable with an explanation that is final for them, e.g. God created man. Hence God created consciousness, and the word of God is final. So exactly what you mean has yet to be established. It seems that you're attempting to convey some sort of logical impossibility with respect to understanding one's own self-awareness through self-reflection. Is that in the ballpark? BTW: Don't worry about Constance. I don't give -up quite so easily ;-)
 
Last edited:
Constance said:
Not necessarily. You could try expressing your ideas in different language than the language you use over and over again, which seems not to communicate clearly with the rest of us.
Click to expand...
He could also try to identify a thinker who has expressed this same idea perhaps in a much clearer fashion. Although it’s possible MA thinks the idea he is articulating is completely novel.

I think the mbp is a problem of self-reference. We can look at the work of Godel and others for support.

I’ve suggested that what MA is arguing is the same or at least similar. Not sure. ??‍♂️
 
One important difference in our presentations is my focus on the problems a perceptual (modeling) system has in perceiving itself accurately/veridically while MAs focus seems to be on the difficulties a conceptual system has in conceptualizing itself, it’s ability to conceptualize.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top