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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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S
smcder
Guest
@Soupie is alive and well and his mind is ever green.
We are currently having a bit of an e-gab on the "physics of subjectivity" ...
Leibnitz Monadology came up and that's an interesting idea of consciousness that we haven't dis - cussed ... must put on our bucket list.
and ... then the phrase "rich, inner subjective life" came up and I plied again the following:
Do you have a rich, inner subjective life? I am always curious about the inner lives of others as I have long suspected we vary a good deal more than our language and conventions permit us to express - I often mix up inner and outer lives and is there any difference, really? I have a rich, outer objective life ... as I subjectively perceive it!
How do I know my sharp pain is the same as yours? We marvel that we can so precisely agree with a sensation: sharp, throbbing, dull, aching - but what if I were to tell you my physical pain had the same texture as pressing bubble wrap just to the point of popping, that my head felt like steam just before the whistle? Then we might see how far apart we are - even if my pain and yours are both covered by the four standard adjectives.
I think it's this complacency that prevents us from finding other means to communicate, complacency and a culture of isolation - Cartesian insularity and skull-bound ideas of individuality. If there is something rite in Transhumanism (though buried very deeply) it might be this impulse toward interconnection, a kind of misplaced sense of intimacy that longs for the ((hive)(mind)) instead of a healthy oscillation of self and other set against a background of the alien.
File this one
We are currently having a bit of an e-gab on the "physics of subjectivity" ...
Leibnitz Monadology came up and that's an interesting idea of consciousness that we haven't dis - cussed ... must put on our bucket list.
and ... then the phrase "rich, inner subjective life" came up and I plied again the following:
Do you have a rich, inner subjective life? I am always curious about the inner lives of others as I have long suspected we vary a good deal more than our language and conventions permit us to express - I often mix up inner and outer lives and is there any difference, really? I have a rich, outer objective life ... as I subjectively perceive it!
How do I know my sharp pain is the same as yours? We marvel that we can so precisely agree with a sensation: sharp, throbbing, dull, aching - but what if I were to tell you my physical pain had the same texture as pressing bubble wrap just to the point of popping, that my head felt like steam just before the whistle? Then we might see how far apart we are - even if my pain and yours are both covered by the four standard adjectives.
I think it's this complacency that prevents us from finding other means to communicate, complacency and a culture of isolation - Cartesian insularity and skull-bound ideas of individuality. If there is something rite in Transhumanism (though buried very deeply) it might be this impulse toward interconnection, a kind of misplaced sense of intimacy that longs for the ((hive)(mind)) instead of a healthy oscillation of self and other set against a background of the alien.
File this one
under
"R" ...
for random musings
S
smcder
Guest
As to what goes on in other minds - are we separated by a common language?
Do we have only language,
... and I always rail at the blockiness of words - their discreteness makes discretion at some point, impossible, because the granularity of my experience is far greater than the words I have available. As soon as it is out on paper, it's different and the more I edit the more the thing runs away from and with me. God knows what happens to it from paper to the next mind ... though I've seen monstrous distortion!
I prefer to Monsieur Droust:
Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
But even here, we have infinite abridgement - even between the raising of the spoon and the miracuous explosion of sensation and words that followed an instant later is an infinity of sensation lost ... and worse, we think Proust has really done it! Has captured a moment in words ... but if we will but stop a moment and look, we find experience goes all the way down. An infinity of experience lies below each moment and well below what can be expressed in chunky, blocky words.
Limit texts like Finnegan's Wake expose the raw flesh of experience even better than Proust's crude fumblings, his adolescent undraping of Mnemosyne:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe totauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Noam Chimpsky created this sentence--which is grammatically correct but incomprehensible--(yet, someone will say it makes sense) to demonstrate that the rules governing syntax are distinct from the meanings words convey.)
Finally, a product of a mind diagnosed with schizophrenia:
“It was shockingly not of the best quality I have known all such evildoers coming out of doors with the best of intentions!”
Do I wax purple rhetoric - yes! - (and the seal of truth melts and runs under the heat) because one must use fair means and fowl to convey - and even a little obscuration isn't outside the rules. A buried bone tastes better. But you must primarily want, intend to communicate, although if you write to be misunderstood - you shouldn't complain of the results, although there is as much to be learned from the way one is misunderstood.
Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. The latter, perhaps, wounds his vanity; but the former wounds his heart.-
Nietzsche - BG&E
Do we have only language,
guttural mouth sounds
26 symbols composed of straight and curved lines to define what can be said? (you can spell all the numbers, you nameless wag! You can spell anything and nothing)and
crude graphic inscriptions?
falling
like
tears
drop
in rain
drop
in rain
... and I always rail at the blockiness of words - their discreteness makes discretion at some point, impossible, because the granularity of my experience is far greater than the words I have available. As soon as it is out on paper, it's different and the more I edit the more the thing runs away from and with me. God knows what happens to it from paper to the next mind ... though I've seen monstrous distortion!
I prefer to Monsieur Droust:
Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
But even here, we have infinite abridgement - even between the raising of the spoon and the miracuous explosion of sensation and words that followed an instant later is an infinity of sensation lost ... and worse, we think Proust has really done it! Has captured a moment in words ... but if we will but stop a moment and look, we find experience goes all the way down. An infinity of experience lies below each moment and well below what can be expressed in chunky, blocky words.
Limit texts like Finnegan's Wake expose the raw flesh of experience even better than Proust's crude fumblings, his adolescent undraping of Mnemosyne:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe totauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Noam Chimpsky created this sentence--which is grammatically correct but incomprehensible--(yet, someone will say it makes sense) to demonstrate that the rules governing syntax are distinct from the meanings words convey.)
Finally, a product of a mind diagnosed with schizophrenia:
“It was shockingly not of the best quality I have known all such evildoers coming out of doors with the best of intentions!”
Do I wax purple rhetoric - yes! - (and the seal of truth melts and runs under the heat) because one must use fair means and fowl to convey - and even a little obscuration isn't outside the rules. A buried bone tastes better. But you must primarily want, intend to communicate, although if you write to be misunderstood - you shouldn't complain of the results, although there is as much to be learned from the way one is misunderstood.
Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. The latter, perhaps, wounds his vanity; but the former wounds his heart.-
Nietzsche - BG&E
S
smcder
Guest
A little more purple prose
... perhaps I should start a thread?
This is an excerpt from The Ape and the Angel: or, Tikkun Olam - taken from
Fifty-One Tales (plus two!) of Earth and Brailry
Remember that Brailry is a product of anagramagenesis (about half the planets in the known universe are) – this will help a lot in understanding these tales ... as if explanation were the point.
People are always saying things like well obviously Brailry is an anagram of library, to which I always point out that “… to the contrary library is an anagram of Brailry and there are a few more possible anagrams – can you work them out?”
If you want subtlety read Gulliver’s Travels or A Modest Proposal or even Moby Dick (did you know that’s not entirely and only about a whale?) or even any of the current novels described as:
“A marvelously camouflaged (or, if you prefer “camusflaged”) social commentary … the author deftly plucks metaphors as if they did grow on trees, but, of course, in an ecological sound way - leaving the hearty thicket of language not only to grow but to prosper as, like the lion, he takes only the weak and the old.”
- Lindsleydale Burntumberington writing in the New York Rhymes Review of Printed Matter
(If you have a hard time understanding, it’s because my tongue is lodged firmly in cheek in order to keep from biting it.)
Further, people ask me, it is so obviously you in the story - but do you really need to be a large, hairy ape for the story to work? To which I cry out, “Well, from a certain light, namely a harsh one, I am a large, hairy ape and it’s only by my own lights that I’m anything else!”
And with that, or perhaps with possibly one more set of absurdities:
“But are these people real? Did these things really happen??”
We have surely left the pedant and the compulsive behind and as for the last traces of literal-mindedness that I know only lingers faintly in the remaining readers, I will assure you that yes, this story is more real than the lives of the doubters who question it.
Steve wrote:
"Do you have a rich, inner subjective life? I am always curious about the inner lives of others as I have long suspected we vary a good deal more than our language and conventions permit us to express - I often mix up inner and outer lives and is there any difference, really? I have a rich, outer objective life ... as I subjectively perceive it!
How do I know my sharp pain is the same as yours? We marvel that we can so precisely agree with a sensation: sharp, throbbing, dull, aching - but what if I were to tell you my physical pain had the same texture as pressing bubble wrap just to the point of popping, that my head felt like steam just before the whistle? Then we might see how far apart we are - even if my pain and yours are both covered by the four standard adjectives."
You broach a very important subject. Frederick Jameson described language as a "prison house," recognizing the ways in which words limit what we can think and say and, as generally employed, do not, cannot, express what we feel in our experience in the world/of the world. Heidegger had to disrupt ordinary language in the creation of his hyphenated compounds and some other devices to express ideas foreign to reified concepts embedded in modern language. Chomsky misled a generation of scholars in multiple disciplines with his programmatic theory of language as expressing an innate 'universal grammar', still infecting information theory. Analytical philosophy had its eyes closed to human experience in its investment in language and concepts as the only path to understanding ourselves and the nature of reality. Phenomenological philosophy instead sees language in terms of what can be expressed originally (originarily) in language beyond its limiting structures, patterns, habits, and embedded 'concepts' and definitions. There's are several very good books on the phenomenology of speech, expression, and semiotics by Richard Lanigan at this link:
and this one:
Table of Contents of the above work:
(I) Existential Communication as Phenomenology: (1) Existential Communication; (2) The Apparent Antinomy of Existential Communication; (3) Communication as Existentialism; (4) Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy as Existential Communication; (II) Existential Phenomenology as Semiology: (1) The Cartesian Dualism: Semiotic Phenomenalism (Peirce, Morris, Ogden and Richards, Russell); (2) Dualistic Synthesis: Semiotic Existentialism (Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre); (3) Semiotic as Existential Phenomenology (Barthes, Merleau-Ponty); (III) Perception: The Lived Body Experience: (1) The Primacy of Perception (Description); (2) Radical Reflection as Gestalt [Reduction]; (3) Radical Cogito [Interpretation]; (IV) Expression: Existential Phenomenology as Speaking: (1) Expression as Phenomena; (2) Langugae; (3) Tongue [Langue]; (4) Speaking [Parole]; (V) Introduction to the Prose of the World. Definitive Bibliography of Merleau-Ponty's work [Primary Sources] and commentaries [Secondary Sources] on it (in eight langugaes, including English).
There is a more recent semiotic study by Lanigan as well, but I have not read it yet:
Steve continued:
"I think it's this complacency that prevents us from finding other means to communicate, complacency and a culture of isolation - Cartesian insularity and skull-bound ideas of individuality. If there is something rite in Transhumanism (though buried very deeply) it might be this impulse toward interconnection, a kind of misplaced sense of intimacy that longs for the ((hive)(mind)) instead of a healthy oscillation of self and other set against a background of the alien."
That's an interesting thought, but if that deep and subtle motivation you detect in some transhumanist/posthumanist writing is accurate, we'll never get there by pruning off all the facets of our experience in the world that make each of us unique. It's not our being 'unique' in itself that is the issue for me, but the fact that despite our individuality we are deeply interconnected -- and I think we need to explore how that happens and what it means before we alter ourselves beyond what we are in our naturally evolved presence in the world.
"Do you have a rich, inner subjective life? I am always curious about the inner lives of others as I have long suspected we vary a good deal more than our language and conventions permit us to express - I often mix up inner and outer lives and is there any difference, really? I have a rich, outer objective life ... as I subjectively perceive it!
How do I know my sharp pain is the same as yours? We marvel that we can so precisely agree with a sensation: sharp, throbbing, dull, aching - but what if I were to tell you my physical pain had the same texture as pressing bubble wrap just to the point of popping, that my head felt like steam just before the whistle? Then we might see how far apart we are - even if my pain and yours are both covered by the four standard adjectives."
You broach a very important subject. Frederick Jameson described language as a "prison house," recognizing the ways in which words limit what we can think and say and, as generally employed, do not, cannot, express what we feel in our experience in the world/of the world. Heidegger had to disrupt ordinary language in the creation of his hyphenated compounds and some other devices to express ideas foreign to reified concepts embedded in modern language. Chomsky misled a generation of scholars in multiple disciplines with his programmatic theory of language as expressing an innate 'universal grammar', still infecting information theory. Analytical philosophy had its eyes closed to human experience in its investment in language and concepts as the only path to understanding ourselves and the nature of reality. Phenomenological philosophy instead sees language in terms of what can be expressed originally (originarily) in language beyond its limiting structures, patterns, habits, and embedded 'concepts' and definitions. There's are several very good books on the phenomenology of speech, expression, and semiotics by Richard Lanigan at this link:
and this one:
Table of Contents of the above work:
(I) Existential Communication as Phenomenology: (1) Existential Communication; (2) The Apparent Antinomy of Existential Communication; (3) Communication as Existentialism; (4) Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy as Existential Communication; (II) Existential Phenomenology as Semiology: (1) The Cartesian Dualism: Semiotic Phenomenalism (Peirce, Morris, Ogden and Richards, Russell); (2) Dualistic Synthesis: Semiotic Existentialism (Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre); (3) Semiotic as Existential Phenomenology (Barthes, Merleau-Ponty); (III) Perception: The Lived Body Experience: (1) The Primacy of Perception (Description); (2) Radical Reflection as Gestalt [Reduction]; (3) Radical Cogito [Interpretation]; (IV) Expression: Existential Phenomenology as Speaking: (1) Expression as Phenomena; (2) Langugae; (3) Tongue [Langue]; (4) Speaking [Parole]; (V) Introduction to the Prose of the World. Definitive Bibliography of Merleau-Ponty's work [Primary Sources] and commentaries [Secondary Sources] on it (in eight langugaes, including English).
There is a more recent semiotic study by Lanigan as well, but I have not read it yet:
Steve continued:
"I think it's this complacency that prevents us from finding other means to communicate, complacency and a culture of isolation - Cartesian insularity and skull-bound ideas of individuality. If there is something rite in Transhumanism (though buried very deeply) it might be this impulse toward interconnection, a kind of misplaced sense of intimacy that longs for the ((hive)(mind)) instead of a healthy oscillation of self and other set against a background of the alien."
That's an interesting thought, but if that deep and subtle motivation you detect in some transhumanist/posthumanist writing is accurate, we'll never get there by pruning off all the facets of our experience in the world that make each of us unique. It's not our being 'unique' in itself that is the issue for me, but the fact that despite our individuality we are deeply interconnected -- and I think we need to explore how that happens and what it means before we alter ourselves beyond what we are in our naturally evolved presence in the world.
Last edited:
S
smcder
Guest
@Constance wrote:
"That's an interesting thought, but if that deep and subtle motivation you detect in some transhumanist/posthumanist writing is accurate, we'll never get there by pruning off all the facets of our experience in the world that make each of us unique. It's not our being 'unique' in itself that is the issue for me, but the fact that despite our individuality we are deeply interconnected -- and I think we need to explore how that happens and what it means before we alter ourselves beyond what we are in our naturally evolved presence in the world."
well put - I think the raio varies (as individuality dictates!) from person to person, but I am confident both aspects - the need to be individual and the need to belong are intrinsic and will assert themselves ... and yes, we need to conscientiously explore this aspect before rushing off to a post-human world, as I believe you've said - we need to learn how to be fully human before we go anywhere else. That's something we may have to fight for and something worth fighting for.
"That's an interesting thought, but if that deep and subtle motivation you detect in some transhumanist/posthumanist writing is accurate, we'll never get there by pruning off all the facets of our experience in the world that make each of us unique. It's not our being 'unique' in itself that is the issue for me, but the fact that despite our individuality we are deeply interconnected -- and I think we need to explore how that happens and what it means before we alter ourselves beyond what we are in our naturally evolved presence in the world."
well put - I think the raio varies (as individuality dictates!) from person to person, but I am confident both aspects - the need to be individual and the need to belong are intrinsic and will assert themselves ... and yes, we need to conscientiously explore this aspect before rushing off to a post-human world, as I believe you've said - we need to learn how to be fully human before we go anywhere else. That's something we may have to fight for and something worth fighting for.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Any comments much appreciated on the following?
On physical facts
and the temporal dependence that blurs the metaphysical/epistemological distinction
1. An externalist view and the blur of temporal dependence
Worldly facts vary in their temporal relevancy. Some endure whilst others are fleeting. The facts that physicists elucidate tend to be of the enduring kind and so they are viewed as foundational and dependable. Similarly, matter itself is considered enduring. However, other facts are more enigmatic. If one were to play a five minute time-lapse video of the 5 billion year history of earth to Mary, what facts would she know about the earth? She might respond that the earth itself is a material fact along with its changing geography. But its surface land and sea is a fluidity of appearances and changing facts. The ripples and the waves of the oceans obey laws of physics; perhaps there is even an equation for them. But ripples and waves are not facts in that sense. Their essence is of process and continual change. The fact that at t=1 the oceans' waves will be as they are, and that this fact contrast with that of t=2 and so on ad infinitum, is a series of facts that is hardly instructive of the nature of the motions of the oceans. After watching the video she anticipates that the earth would be something like it truly is now, but when she is first taken to the earth, the surface facts as they are at any given moment, appear at least novel if not surprising to her, and are hardly informative of the true nature of the moving impression of its changing surfaces. Similarly, whilst the facts of phenomenal experience may be considered identifiable as a unified body, knowable in broad outline, or understood to obeying unified principles of physics, its surface facts may be deemed never complete or whole. Perhaps phenomenal experience is a moving landscape of qualitative feeling to which no facts can be defined and isolated. Maybe it is the changing facts themselves that constitute the process that generates phenomenal experience. This view of the varying temporal nature of worldly facts provides an explanatory account concerning the know-how of the Ability Hypothesis (AH). AH emphasises the relevancy of connective temporal or time-dependent characteristics such as imagining, remembering and recognising, thereby identifying the importance of process as opposed to rigidity and substance [Lewis 1983, 1988; and Nemirow 1980, 1990, 2007]. To know a physical fact is to freeze-frame reality and to assume a temporal rigidity. We think of ‘red’ as a rigid property in the external world because it remains ‘red’ in our experience of it over time. But the phenomenal experience of ‘red’ is not the same property, but a process of factual fluidity. Is there such a thing as "a physical fact" of process?
On physical facts
and the temporal dependence that blurs the metaphysical/epistemological distinction
1. An externalist view and the blur of temporal dependence
Worldly facts vary in their temporal relevancy. Some endure whilst others are fleeting. The facts that physicists elucidate tend to be of the enduring kind and so they are viewed as foundational and dependable. Similarly, matter itself is considered enduring. However, other facts are more enigmatic. If one were to play a five minute time-lapse video of the 5 billion year history of earth to Mary, what facts would she know about the earth? She might respond that the earth itself is a material fact along with its changing geography. But its surface land and sea is a fluidity of appearances and changing facts. The ripples and the waves of the oceans obey laws of physics; perhaps there is even an equation for them. But ripples and waves are not facts in that sense. Their essence is of process and continual change. The fact that at t=1 the oceans' waves will be as they are, and that this fact contrast with that of t=2 and so on ad infinitum, is a series of facts that is hardly instructive of the nature of the motions of the oceans. After watching the video she anticipates that the earth would be something like it truly is now, but when she is first taken to the earth, the surface facts as they are at any given moment, appear at least novel if not surprising to her, and are hardly informative of the true nature of the moving impression of its changing surfaces. Similarly, whilst the facts of phenomenal experience may be considered identifiable as a unified body, knowable in broad outline, or understood to obeying unified principles of physics, its surface facts may be deemed never complete or whole. Perhaps phenomenal experience is a moving landscape of qualitative feeling to which no facts can be defined and isolated. Maybe it is the changing facts themselves that constitute the process that generates phenomenal experience. This view of the varying temporal nature of worldly facts provides an explanatory account concerning the know-how of the Ability Hypothesis (AH). AH emphasises the relevancy of connective temporal or time-dependent characteristics such as imagining, remembering and recognising, thereby identifying the importance of process as opposed to rigidity and substance [Lewis 1983, 1988; and Nemirow 1980, 1990, 2007]. To know a physical fact is to freeze-frame reality and to assume a temporal rigidity. We think of ‘red’ as a rigid property in the external world because it remains ‘red’ in our experience of it over time. But the phenomenal experience of ‘red’ is not the same property, but a process of factual fluidity. Is there such a thing as "a physical fact" of process?
I like it, Pharoah. A new tack and style for you. I want to read more.
Can there be 'an externalist view' on a universe unfolding and expanding in temporality? From what external point of observation? Also, I can see how the temporal 'blurring' of what can be cognized by each observer within the universe problematizes epistemology, but why does it necessarily blur epistemology with metaphysics? It's possible that we arrive at a point of understanding being in time as an accurate descriptive metaphysics of what-is, to the best of our collective knowledge.
Can there be 'an externalist view' on a universe unfolding and expanding in temporality? From what external point of observation? Also, I can see how the temporal 'blurring' of what can be cognized by each observer within the universe problematizes epistemology, but why does it necessarily blur epistemology with metaphysics? It's possible that we arrive at a point of understanding being in time as an accurate descriptive metaphysics of what-is, to the best of our collective knowledge.
flipper
Paranormal Adept
Hope & Belief: The Hidden Fuel of Intention
Conscious awareness is the term and expression I use to label a very special state of mind: The state where the consciousness rests in pure consciousness. The mind rests in the mind – so to speak. It just observes, it labels not. It contemplates on its own source. The Silent Witness. It is the leveling of the right brain and the left brain, into one.
By declining hope and belief, you will take out a very important loop in your consciousness: The loop, which merges the left-brain qualities of hope and belief and the right brain’s ability to visualize for yourself and others. So, declining hope and belief as two of the more important powerhouses of the soul, is very much serving the spirituality of it to the Matrix definition of it.
Hope & Belief: The Hidden Fuel of Intention - Waking Times : Waking Times
The Six Grand Illusions That Keep Us Enslaved to “The Matrix”
5. The Illusion of Time
The big deception here is the reinforcement of the idea that the present moment is of little to no value, that the past is something we cannot undo or ever forget, and that the future is intrinsically more important than both the past and the present. This carries our attention away from what it actually happening right now and directs it toward the future. Once completely focused on what is to come rather than what is, we are easy prey to advertisers and fear-pimps who muddy our vision of the future with every possible worry and concern imaginable.
The 6 Grand Illusions That Keep Us Enslaved to the Matrix - Waking Times : Waking Times
Conscious awareness is the term and expression I use to label a very special state of mind: The state where the consciousness rests in pure consciousness. The mind rests in the mind – so to speak. It just observes, it labels not. It contemplates on its own source. The Silent Witness. It is the leveling of the right brain and the left brain, into one.
By declining hope and belief, you will take out a very important loop in your consciousness: The loop, which merges the left-brain qualities of hope and belief and the right brain’s ability to visualize for yourself and others. So, declining hope and belief as two of the more important powerhouses of the soul, is very much serving the spirituality of it to the Matrix definition of it.
Hope & Belief: The Hidden Fuel of Intention - Waking Times : Waking Times
The Six Grand Illusions That Keep Us Enslaved to “The Matrix”
5. The Illusion of Time
The big deception here is the reinforcement of the idea that the present moment is of little to no value, that the past is something we cannot undo or ever forget, and that the future is intrinsically more important than both the past and the present. This carries our attention away from what it actually happening right now and directs it toward the future. Once completely focused on what is to come rather than what is, we are easy prey to advertisers and fear-pimps who muddy our vision of the future with every possible worry and concern imaginable.
The 6 Grand Illusions That Keep Us Enslaved to the Matrix - Waking Times : Waking Times
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Interesting questions... that I don't have particular opinions about. Perhaps you could expand these thoughts further.
The AJP reviewer stated, that facts belong to metaphysics. I am trying to make the point, that the term 'physical facts' - as in Mary has "all the physical facts" - is meaningless. That Mary has all the physical facts is akin to saying she knows the lengths of all pieces of string. Facts, being something about the truth of what there is, is contingent on both the interpretation of the external and internal. And in a way this cannot avoid an epistemologically founded reading.
I think that is as best as I can express it.
S
smcder
Guest
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S
smcder
Guest
"The one indispensable quality in a writer is a rage to be understood." - Ann Arthur
S
smcder
Guest
I would say you are wrestling with the wrong angel, Pharoah and I say unto you:
"Let my people go, so that they may read Nagel."
The SAM problem to me never worked as a challenge to physicalism ... the knowledge and know-how categories are distinct but it's not immediately clear how these can be used in a physicalist argument. So I go back and ask myself WWND?
One of the reasons Nagel's argument is misunderstood, is that one of the primary mechanisms around which his argument revolves is rhetorical and intentionally so, so dismissing it as rhetorically incoherent is to miss the point. It hinges largely on objective/subjective and attempts to resolve (or dissolve) the former into the latter.
(It's also interesting what Nagel does not argue in the paper.)
He simply challenges the physicalist claim that everything can be accounted for in physicalist terms ... which he says is necessarily an objective description. I've not yet seen a full frontal assault on this simple point - as that, of course, to be successful, would be to solve the hard problem. There is however, lots of flat out denial of the problem and then all sorts of working around it ... which is what I think goes on in SAM and responses to it.
We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more, accurate view of the real nature of things. This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points
of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description.
It is possible to follow this path because although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves—toward which we have the phenomenal point of view.
Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about the same things. Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing?
Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.
Where Nagel went with all of this as represented in his latest book on natural teleology is also very interesting.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Fo
for me it is more like the compulsiive, yet pathetic and rather futile agony of trying to put one's guts back in one's abdomen after having stepped on a landmine.
Hi Pharoah. What's the landmine in your metaphor?
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Something one does not set out to stumbled upon.
And what was it you stumbled upon? I'm sorry to be so persistent with the questions today, but I'd really like to understand the landmine. Thanks.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Constance!! The beauty of sound bites is that one doesn't have to elaborate and you can read into them what you will. You must know what I think. The question is, do you see more than just a dying man?
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