Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

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This article discusses physiological explanations for epilepsy as far back as fifth century BCE

Diagnosing Mental Illness in Ancient Greece and Rome - Atlantic Mobile

... And indicating hallucinations would have been less stigmatized then than today - I can believe this from my work experience ...

From what I've seen the average person isn't necessarily more sophisticated now in terms of mental illness, education helps but it always has - at least folks get to the level of "chemical imbalance" which I understand is inaccurate but got life by being an easy thing to tell people. Stigma and superstition are by no means uncommon. Whatever the modern conception or knowledge available about mental illness - its a thin veneer for almost anyone under the stress of dealing with acute mental illness.

 

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Hm, so you're going with dogs as having a consciousness most like us and dolphins and cities least like us?

How about cats, worms, and bowling balls? And also, importantly, why? (If you care to share.)

And this question was for anyone, not directed at you per se. Constance? Tyger? Michael?

India outlawed dolphin captivity in 2013 - there was some confusion that they were granted rights under Indian law but from what I can tell the law said they should have some rights as a non human person but did not grant those rights.

I came across this organization which has articles on chimpanzee sign language and other articles of interest on animal intelligence:

The Nonhuman Rights Project

 

[Soupie]

A Sense of the Cosmos - Jacob Needleman
Arkana edition 1987

"The fact that we are bedazzled by the pragmatic success of science shows us that when we pursue science our real intentions do not match what we sometimes claim to be searching for. We say we want knowledge about the universe, but we test our knowledge only by its logical consistency, it's power to predict and its production of marvelous feats. Our real intention, therefore, is to satisfy our desires or allay our fears - desire for explanations, a sense of security, or material gain; fear of the unknown, death, pain and loneliness.

We must therefore recognize that there is a great difference between the wish for knowledge and the wish to satisfy desire, which is the basis of pragmatism. And that knowledge in the service of our ordinary desires may produce a very different picture of the universe than knowledge which is connected to other motives."

You've mentioned many times that the results we get from "science" depend on the questions we ask. I think you are correct. I think this ties into the idea that the human species is forming a Collective Narrative, what I call Consensus Science and others the "Official Story."

A couple articles I read recently touch on this indirectly (as many, many do).

Religion's new frontier

Subtitled Spirituality, Ancient Aliens, and Religious Yearnings in the Age of Extraterrestrials, Peters’ book proposes a middle ground, Astrotheology, for people of faith. Its title takes a direct swipe at Erich Von Daniken’s postulations on ancient aliens, and the sort of analytics EVD applies to support his theories on who — or what — originally seeded Earth with intelligence. But Von Daniken, asserts Peters, is only the tip of the iceberg: “It is more accurate to say that science is a re-expression of religion in a secular guise. Science has become the modern religion.”

Peters, Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology and Ethics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, filters four popular ET stereotypes — the interstellar diplomat (the political model), research scientist (science), celestial savior (religion) and hybridizer (a fusion) — through his lens as a Christian. Although he argues that God is transcendent, separate and apart from those models, Peters also states the UFO riddle can’t be solved through ancient sacred texts. “The answer is most likely to come from the explorations of science,” he writes, “not from the speculations of the theologian. What the theologian can do is consider the meaning and importance of finding that we are not alone in the cosmos, but the theologian must permit actual experience to discern the relevant facts.”

And this is a good overview of the controversy going on right now in the social sciences. Why do all these experiments going on in the social sciences seem to confirm the Collective Narrative? Could be simply bias, cherry picking the stats, or some other influence?

Replication controversy in psychology: Bullying, file drawer effect, blog posts, #repligate.

Psychologists are up in arms over, of all things, the editorial process that led to the recent publication of a special issue of the journal Social Psychology. This may seem like a classic case of ivory tower navel gazing, but its impact extends far beyond academia. The issue attempts to replicate 27 “important findings in social psychology.” Replication—repeating an experiment as closely as possible to see whether you get the same results—is a cornerstone of the scientific method. Replication of experiments is vital not only because it can detect the rare cases of outright fraud, but also because it guards against uncritical acceptance of findings that were actually inadvertent false positives, helps researchers refine experimental techniques, and affirms the existence of new facts that scientific theories must be able to explain.

One of the articles in the special issue reported a failure to replicate a widely publicized 2008 study by Simone Schnall, now tenured at Cambridge University, and her colleagues. ...

The #repligate controversy spiked to an unusual intensity, even for academia. But the stakes for the rest of us are anything but low. Scientific knowledge is not produced by scientists alone, and it certainly doesn’t affect only them.

There are many ways the human collective shapes reality, and that isn't even considering psi-related or observer-related quantum wave function collapse.

 

[Soupie]

Consciousness may be the same throughout, different minds adapt it to different kinds of existence ...

Are you purposefully making a distinction between consciousness and minds? Either way, can you expand on that a little? Consciousness is the same, but different "minds" adapt it differently? How so? By what mechanism do they "adapt" it? If it's adapted differently, how do we know it's the same? Why assume it's the same in the first place?

Finally, you think consciousness may be "the same" for dolphins, cities, cats, and humans? What about worms and bowling balls? Is it the same for them too? Why or why not?

 

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You've mentioned many times that the results we get from "science" depend on the questions we ask. I think you are correct. I think this ties into the idea that the human species is forming a Collective Narrative, what I call Consensus Science and others the "Official Story."

A couple articles I read recently touch on this indirectly (as many, many do).

And this is a good overview of the controversy going on right now in the social sciences. Why do all these experiments going on in the social sciences seem to confirm the Collective Narrative? Could be simply bias, cherry picking the stats, or some other influence?

There are many ways the human collective shapes reality, and that isn't even considering psi-related or observer-related quantum wave function collapse.

See "the decline effect" I believe there were several articles in the NYT - and it didn't just apply to the social sciences. Also "cosmic habituation".

 

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Are you purposefully making a distinction between consciousness and minds? Either way, can you expand on that a little? Consciousness is the same, but different "minds" adapt it differently? How so? By what mechanism do they "adapt" it? If it's adapted differently, how do we know it's the same? Why assume it's the same in the first place?

Finally, you think consciousness may be "the same" for dolphins, cities, cats, and humans? What about worms and bowling balls? Is it the same for them too? Why or why not?

"Are you purposefully making a distinction between consciousness and minds?"

Yes.

"consciousness may be the same throughout"

"may" .. Maybe ... Might be ... Speculation, imagination, I'm asking what if it is? What would that be like?

And when i look at each moment of my experience, when I break it down as far as it will go, to just basic experience ... What is this moment like now and this one and this one ... There is an underlying qual-ity that feels the same to me. Do that experiment for yourself - a meditation. Let me know how it is for you.

And then I wondered, what if that "what it's likeness" is the same for any sentient creature? The texture of consciousness itself.

"Consciousness is the same, but different "minds" adapt it differently? How so? By what mechanism do they "adapt" it? If it's adapted differently, how do we know it's the same? Why assume it's the same in the first place?"

If there's a "mechanism" - I'd probably look for it in the brain.

I didn't assume and don't - I speculated.

So the speculation is:

"What if"

The texture of consciousness is the same for any sentient being because that's the way consciousness feels? Any self-conscious being capable of reflecting on momentary experience would feel the same "texture" (at least).

 

[Soupie]

The texture of consciousness is the same for any sentient being because that's the way consciousness feels? Any self-conscious being capable of reflecting on momentary experience would feel the same "texture" (at least).

So what about worms and bowling balls? Are they not sentient? If not, why not? Why are some objects sentient and some not?

So now we have consciousness, minds, and sentient minds? How do we determine which objects (Strawson processes) have which?

 

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@Soupie

"Vipassana" is a key word you might look for - it's not easy to separate from its context but I'm leery of simply giving someone meditation instructions without context - it's best you find your own way in ...

But the exercise above, at a minimum, involves quieting the mind by watching the breath - then returning to the breath each time an experience distracts you ...

Thought, feeling, bodily sensation ...

Pretty soon you'll see patterns, we have the same thoughts over and over - it's really embarrassing how chaotic it is in there!

But you'll get to where you'll be able to anticipate what's coming up before it fully forms and you can abandon it for the breath ... To me sensations are harder than thoughts to deal with ... But there is, it seems to me, a "having" that is the same for thought or sensation or emotion ... In other words the basic experience of "having" a thought or sensation or emotion feels the same each time.

 

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So what about worms and bowling balls? Are they not sentient? If not, why not? Why are some objects sentient and some not?

So now we have consciousness, minds, and sentient minds? How do we determine which objects (Strawson processes) have which?

You "pruning your narrative" with my dull blade aren't you!? Lol

One thing you very often do is ask a question in terms of your beliefs.

The last question is better addressed to Strawson. Have his theories been proven? If not, we may not have to worry about that - at least I may not.

And it seems we're back to "objects" ... The sentient part would be a subject not an object - yes this gets into selves and processes for Strawson which is fine - remember the Buddhist influence on his thought.

Sentient beings (Buddhism) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For me - when I meditate on sentient beings, I think of any thing capable of suffering, since that's the direct relevance.

 

[Soupie]

You "pruning your narrative" with my dull blade aren't you!? Lol

One thing you very often do is ask a question in terms of your beliefs.

The last question is better addressed to Strawson. Have his theories been proven? If not, we may not have to worry about that - at least I may not.

And it seems we're back to "objects" ... The sentient part would be a subject not an object - yes this gets into selves and processes for Strawson which is fine - remember the Buddhist influence on his thought.

Sentient beings (Buddhism) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For me - when I meditate on sentient beings, I think of any thing capable of suffering, since that's the direct relevance.

Haha, yes.

I didn't mean to throw us of by adding the Strawson piece, but I think it's important. What we see as objects may actually be processes. So the distinction between objects and processes may not be firm.

sentient beings, I think of any thing capable of suffering

Ok, so why are some "objects" or things capable of suffering and some not?

 

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Henri Bergson and William James on Vicious Intellectualism | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

It is no wonder that earlier thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the temporal flux, should have ended up treating them as a superior type of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in nature to the turbid, restless lower world. The latter then appears as but their corruption and falsification."

This ties in with Needleman's critique of science and @Soupie's article on science as religion. And why people who understand religion and science aren't threatened by either. Science is limited to the repeatable, the predictable - Jeffrey Kripal thinks of the paranormal as a narrative, experimental science can't capture a story because it's not made up of repeatable events ... Kripal says we start by being written but perhaps we can learn to write our own stories - if reality is responsive to our expectations, to our questions - and the decline effect seems to be an answer to the question: "if we ask the same question over and over will we get the same answer?" - then we may already be writing those stories.

 

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Haha, yes.

I didn't mean to throw us of by adding the Strawson piece, but I think it's important. What we see as objects may actually be processes. So the distinction between objects and processes may not be firm.

Ok, so why are some "objects" or things capable of suffering and some not?

Why don't you tell us - I think you have an answer you can hardly wait to share!

For more on objects/processes being/becoming - listen or read Strawson's talk on Nietzsche's metaphysics. You may get more Strawson than Nietzsche and he had an interesting take on Descartes that I want to follow up on some day.

 

[Soupie]

Haha you already know what I think the answer is, but I was curious if you (or anyone else) had an answer that I might prefer.

 

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Haha you already know what I think the answer is, but I was curious if you (or anyone else) had an answer that I might prefer.

Brains! Generate! Consciousness!

If we had an adequate account of OOBEs, reincarnation studies, NDEs, deathbed visions and a whole raft of other experiences in which consciousness doesn't appear local - then I might agree with you.

 

[Soupie]

"It is no wonder that earlier thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the temporal flux, should have ended up treating them as a superior type of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in nature to the turbid, restless lower world. The latter then appears as but their corruption and falsification."

Kripal says we start by being written but perhaps we can learn to write our own stories - if reality is responsive to our expectations, to our questions - and the decline effect seems to be an answer to the question: "if we ask the same question over and over will we get the same answer?" - then we may already be writing those stories.

Lately I've been swimming in the "narrative" that reality is an unfolding, dynamic processes constantly giving rise to temporal physical and mental (informational) structures/patterns, we call these temporal structures/patterns objects and subjects respectively. That all objects can affect the "unfolding" of all subjects and vice versa seems obvious via this narrative.

 

[Soupie]

Brains! Generate! Consciousness!

If we had an adequate account of OOBEs, reincarnation studies, NDEs, deathbed visions and a whole raft of other experiences in which consciousness doesn't appear local - then I might agree with you.

So do you suppose bowling balls have all/any of the experiences listed above? Why or why not?

 

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Lately I've been swimming in the "narrative" that reality is an unfolding, dynamic processes constantly giving rise to temporal physical and mental (informational) structures/patterns, we call these temporal structures/patterns objects and subjects respectively. That all objects can affect the "unfolding" of all subjects and vice versa seems obvious via this narrative.

You think too much ... Meditate!

I think (sometimes) brains are part of bodies, are bodies - bodily and are all about our embodied experience, which puts consciousness out there (perhaps outside of time and space). See the Five Skahndas.

No, it's not a band.

 

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So do you suppose bowling balls have all/any of the experiences listed above? Why or why not?

I don't think so, because they don't seem to have brains.

 

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Now, if a bowling ball were inhabited by say the spirit of Janeane Garafalo's dead father ... That might be different.

See the film: "Men of Mystery".

 

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My question for you:

@Soupie

Does a bowling ball have Buddha nature?