Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

[smcder]

The responses to that blog are more interesting and informative than the blog itself. Has anyone here read Bernardo Kastrup or Pentti Haikonen? The latter participates in the discussion. Well worth reading.

Yes, read some of both and heard Kastrup in some interviews, I think Skeptiko did one not too long ago ... he has an interesting version of panpsychism.

 

[smcder]

I haven't seen the film and am not motivated to watch much of this kind of thing (AI-focused science fiction). But I'm interested in the ideational effects of all these films on the general public. What are people who follow this genre inclined to think and believe about themselves, their consciousnesses, consciousness in general as evolved in nature, and the possibility and meaning of 'artificial intelligence'?

I'm pretty much outside the loop on popular culture - but things have changed in the past few years with all the competition from streaming, Netflix produces it's own series, etc - so there are so many genres and sub-genres out there. Just as I am amazed that so many "lay" people (and "professionals") blog about what used to be esoteric ideas in philosophy - I am amazed at the sophistication and complexity of popular entertainment. Both belie the popular notion of a dumbed down population with a short attention span.

One example, my brother in law has brough some of this to my attention - True Detective Season 1 - eight episodes, an hour in length each and the plot and character development is impressive, very, very good acting by the principles ... not sci fi, just crime and with a disturbing plot line (but no more disturbing than your average Shakespeare tragedy) but they didn't dumb down for the audience or do gore, etc to produce the cathartic effect ... it's not something I would have watched on my own or would watch again, but it was very impressive and very popular. So people engaged the material for eight hours over the coure of several months and stayed with the plot. As I said, it's not my sort of thing - but you can equate it, roughly, with what Shakespeare did for the popular audience of his time.

The last part of your question about what people think - I see a lot of people checking out these kinds of books and films in the library and I have conversations with them ... my sense is the majority think it's computational (not using that term necessarily), based in the brain and something that could be uploaded, many seem to take it for granted we will have AI or robots, sentient even, in the very near future and that technology will save us - those seem to be the conventions of the genre as I understand them, that is the defintion of the genre hard sci-fi ... that's my very biased sense of it - also, I would say there is probably, surely a big difference in the way extraverts and introverts think about this - introverts of course, you don't have the same conversations with ... so I'm not sure, but the extroverts focus on the outside, the tangible, social interactions and focusing on solutions, are more cut and dried, they don't worry as much and when they do they work to resolve this worry - so they tend to be very optimistic, as to what they think of themselves, I'm not sure they focus on that - it's not that there isn't an introspective element there, and plenty of ego - but they don't tend to live inside of themselves, they are bigger on the outside than the inside - so I think the idea of being a kind of machine isn't something that worries them - machines are admirable in fact ... they might focus on the positives - that if something goes wrong, it's something in the brain, a biological organ and that can be fixed with a pill or a therapy session (that is exactly NAMI's take on it - and it drove me, pardon the expression, nuts while I worked there) or they may look forward to being uploaded in the future and fixing all the problems ... if the inside isn't as much developed, I don't mean the ego but the internal sense, - then there isn't that much to lose in terms of a conception of "Self" - that's very rough and I may be able to polish it some, but that's my initial thoughts on it.

On another track, we recently had a young person come in to the library who had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia, they were convinced someone was out to get them and the police thought it was a good idea to let them think they were in protective custody (you can see how this backfired) and encouraged the family to let the person make an appt with an atty and then take them to a therapist instead (again, bad idea) - and the police work many many calls with persons who are living with mental illness, but its not simply a matter of education for them - there is no community solution for this, mental health providers and things like mental health courts are nearly non-existent here and have failed the community and these members of it, so the police have no where to take them for help.

I didn't get to talk to the person or the family - but in working with persons for several years, you learn to stand beside them in terms of looking at the world together with them - but you don't validate what you don't see. For example, if the person is hallucinating, you don't say you see what they do - if you don't see it, tell them that ... but acknowledge that they do see it, because hallucinations like that, of any sense are indistinguishable from "real" sensations - if you are hallucinating you hear the voice and it's not in your head, it's out there ... so you treat it as real to the person.

Anyway, had to get that off my chest ...

 

[Constance]

I think the idea of being a kind of machine isn't something that worries them - machines are admirable in fact ... they might focus on the positives - that if something goes wrong, it's something in the brain, a biological organ and that can be fixed with a pill or a therapy session (that is exactly NAMI's take on it - and it drove me, pardon the expression, nuts while I worked there) or they may look forward to being uploaded in the future and fixing all the problems ... if the inside isn't as much developed, I don't mean the ego but the internal sense, - then there isn't that much to lose in terms of a conception of "Self". . .

I think that's a good assessment of the popular view of technology as panacea in our time. Thoreau saw it coming: "things are in the saddle and ride mankind". What's to stop it, short of a widespread geomagnetic storm that takes down the grid for a number of years? And what are the odds that our species, given its present lack of psychological, mental, and spiritual lights, would come out of that chaos with a different sense of itself and a more grounded set of values?

 

[Constance]

I would say there is probably, surely a big difference in the way extraverts and introverts think about this - introverts of course, you don't have the same conversations with ... so I'm not sure, but the extroverts focus on the outside, the tangible, social interactions and focusing on solutions, are more cut and dried, they don't worry as much and when they do they work to resolve this worry - so they tend to be very optimistic, as to what they think of themselves, I'm not sure they focus on that - it's not that there isn't an introspective element there, and plenty of ego - but they don't tend to live inside of themselves, they are bigger on the outside than the inside - so I think the idea of being a kind of machine isn't something that worries them - machines are admirable in fact ... they might focus on the positives - that if something goes wrong, it's something in the brain, a biological organ and that can be fixed with a pill or a therapy session (that is exactly NAMI's take on it - and it drove me, pardon the expression, nuts while I worked there) or they may look forward to being uploaded in the future and fixing all the problems ... if the inside isn't as much developed, I don't mean the ego but the internal sense, - then there isn't that much to lose in terms of a conception of "Self" - that's very rough and I may be able to polish it some, but that's my initial thoughts on it.

I'm don't think extraversion/introversion can account for the wilful blindness of the technocrats pushing the Singularity. Like politicians and Global Capitalists, those people have, and act out, plenty of Ego, which is not the same thing as -- is far from -- possessing a balanced sense of self-in-a-world-of-others {our natural, given, situation}. Writing 'Self' as 'self' makes the point. As you yourself expressed it: "if the inside isn't as much developed, I don't mean the ego but the internal sense, - then there isn't that much to lose in terms of a conception of "Self."

 

[Robert Baird]

The Mayans say: "Do not put yourself in front of your SELF." And "Do NOT put your self in front of your Self." And "Don't PUT yourself in the way of the SELF." and every other variation of the Magian Law it contemplates as does Shake-his-spear in 'To be or NOT to BE!"

Which of the Three Magian Laws is this? Is it more than one? It certainly is As Above, SO Below as found on the Tabula Smaragdina. It has elements of RIGHT thought = Right ACTION (All these laws have meaning as you change emphasis.) And because each law integrates with the others maybe it should be added as a law. I used to say that with the advent of Atomic or quantum knowledge being let out of Pandora's Box (Notice I did not say the discovery of it.) WE needed to remove the 'Keep Silent part of the third law. Scrire, Potere, Audere, Tacere.

I posited we add a saying attributed to Jesus (a title not Yeshua Bar Joseph): "He who is least selfish is MOST Selfish." My one course in Logic had a Professor who got his doctorate on a thesis saying Do gooders do good only for their ego. All year we went back and forth, and he proctored the final exam which per usual I finished way early. So I wrote an explanation in one page of why he was not deserving of a Doctorate if he did not consider the possibility of Karma.

A couple of months later I saw him at the race track, I know he saw me. He almost ran to get away as I approached.

All the epistemological modern wavering and woofing does not come close to understanding CONsciousness or CONstructs. I think epigraphists and code breakers have a better chance.


Language Of the Gods & Dogs

Language of the Gods:

In Man and His Symbols, Jung shows us the same archetypes in the untutored dreams of contemporary children, in medieval alchemy, in Hindu mythology, and in Persian folk tales. Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts have continued and extended this study of a vast and strange inner world, little appreciated until quite recently. How does Jung account for the universality of symbolic themes? He sees it as evidence for the collective unconscious, which could be called the collective Soul of humanity. Jung was not the first person in Freud's school who took from the Mystery Schools set up by St. Germain de Medicis in Freud's Vienna. But few authors talk about Silberer and fewer still know about how great an adept Hitler learned to be in these arts. Hitler and his father before him had studied long and hard in this bastion of Rothschild involvement. They received money in a legacy from their Rothschild family according to the OSS in a book by Langer called The Mind of Adolph Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was another personal coven of the Rothschilds in London as Crowley weaved his magic. Joseph Campbell did a forward to Marija Gimbutas' Language of the Goddess and there is a lot in her archaeological work that he knew would have altered much of what he had previously written. Jung did an excellent forward to the Evans-Wentz version of The Tibetan Book of The Dead and I heartily recommend it to any person seeking to know what connects the likes of Krishnamurti and Jung beyond the mere scholarship of Eranos Conference scholars.

In fact the Set and Gematria of all alphabets can be traced to adept Keltic or Phoenician scholars who the Father of Biblical Archaeology knows gave us the Bible. I think it is important for us to know who these 'gods' calling themselves Anunnaki or Elohim and alien Dragons were. So I have done a whole new history of man's cultural evolution that uses forensic and modern artifacts that I am sure Joseph Campbell would have loved to have access to.

Consider the impact of speech and the many ways it can be used including what Hitler (Trance channeling) learned in Vienna as you read this.


As usual we have people assuming things not in evidence about Neolithic people as they impose modern technological understandings upon a different society with different technology and spiritual goals. I am referring to this useful link with many pictures or illustrations that include the Earth Mother (Gaia) or a matriarchal influence. The Human Journey: The Neolithic Era > Page 2

Religious manipulation includes secret societies for the more studious or inquisitive demographic who also like to get some table scraps from the elite who dine upon us and our labours. You have probably heard about Hiram in Masonic lore - here is a little further code to contemplate. The Lord Hermes – Part 1 | GnosticWarrior.com

Many priests appeared to be great diviners because of their astronomical knowledge of events including eclipses. This kind of fake out was still being done in the last century and you could even say all the apocalypse crap of Christians talking about Mayans predicting the 2012 spiritual re-alignment as the 'end of days' is the same thing. But it often had ghastly results as in the case of Pizarro's men hacking and hewing thousands to death because their leader told his army that could easily have killed all the Spaniards to lay down their arms. History seldom tells you about the written agreement between this leader and Pizarro done about a year earlier on the occasion of Pizarro arriving in South America. The leader had used the Cosmic serpent astronomy as his reason for predicting the arrival of a new age. Sometimes this was done over a century in advance as in the case of the Holy Romans who worked with Aztecs to alter the Mayan calendar to predict the arrival of what Cortez brought to fruition on the first day of wheat - the return of the white g-ds.

The Greek oracles were often in an hallucinatory state due to gases coming up from the earth according to recent archaeology. They really didn't need to hallucinate to repeat what they had been paid to say in order to assist getting people to venture out in new expeditions to colonize or defeat some other place.

If you go back a lot further you find priesthoods attuned to helping people and improving many conditions. The trust developed by ancient shamans was usurped by religions with interpreters running nations. The currently running Expedition show on TV had the Atacama giant and Nazca Lines mystery on a recent episode. It said what I said - lines over water aquifers and people using spiritual rituals to draw energy to bring water to the surface. The rituals include alignment of the designs to the sun and stars (like Venus or the morning star) and the Earth Energy Grid like all other megaliths.

The following link is selling the I Ching as the earliest divinatory system. It is derived from Ogham as are the runes. The author of the site says the Chinese invented paper - it occurs naturally on trees in Central America - better than papyrus which is also older than they say for Chinese paper. Yes, maybe the Chinese refined something a little more. But if you read the whole article you see more BELIEF and little truth. That is not to say I disagree with the thrust of the article - we do indeed benefit from knowledge developed by humans over more than a million years before the advent of writing alphabets which Plato noted lead us away from wisdom and discipline.

On the History of Divination - Divination Foundation

 

[Pharoah]

In America, it's A-hem .... ;-) You have to read both posts I linked - the invective and then the response on consciousentities to the invective ...

It's always incidental in a good film - because we are interested in the human aspects - incidentally another such film is Frank and Robot ...

I was going to read the comments but lost the will...

 

[Constance]

The Cognitive Short-Circuit of ‘Artificial Consciousness’ | Science and Nonduality


The new sci-fi film Ex_Machina has been teasing back into the cultural dialogue dreams of artificial consciousness: the idea that we humans, through the Faustian power of technology, can birth into being mechanisms capable of inner life, subjectivity and affection. Since these dreams are entirely based on implicit assumptions about the nature of consciousness and reality at large, I thought a few observations would be opportune.





The computer engineer’s dream of birthing a conscious child into the world without the messiness and fragility of life is an infantile delusion; a confused, partial, distorted projection of archetypal images and drives. It is the expression of the male’s hidden aspiration for the female’s divine power of creation. It represents a confused attempt to transcend the deep-seated fear of one’s own nature as a living, breathing entity condemned to death from birth. It embodies a misguided and utterly useless search for the eternal, motivated only by one’s amnesia of one’s own true nature. The fable of artificial consciousness is the imaginary bandaid sought to cover the engineer’s wound of ignorance.



And a response:


Conscious Entities » Blog Archive » Alters of the Universe

From a comment following that second blog I linked to a page by Sam Harris, at the link below, which I hope we can discuss in terms of the mystery of consciousness. Here is an extract:


"The emergence of vision from a blind apparatus strikes us as a difficult problem simply because when we think of vision, we think of the conscious experience of seeing. That eyes and visual cortices emerged over the course of evolution presents no special obstacles to us; that there should be “something that it is like” to be the union of an eye and a visual cortex is itself the problem of consciousness—and it is as intractable in this form as in any other."


The Mystery of Consciousness : Sam Harris



As I see it, not just in this thread but in this forum as a whole [and in many of the blogs and other sources cited] we witness an ever-widening spiraling outward of hypotheses concerning the relationship of mind and world, of subjectivity and objectivity, that remain un-anchored in any achieved understanding of what consciousness is. We don't know what consciousness is. We don't know what it is or how it arises in the physical world (to the extent that we comprehend the nature of the physical world in which we seem to feel fairly sure we exist).


It's not too much to say that this continuing ignorance concerning consciousness constitutes an intellectual scandal initiated during the dominance of the reductive materialist/objectivist paradigm of our species' physical sciences, and abstracted still further in the current aegis of 'information theory' understood in computational terms. As trickled down to popular discourse cited and entertained here and elsewhere, the widely invoked term 'information' suffers from the same lack of definition as the term 'consciousness' as used by many popular writers. Popular discourse concerning consciousness and 'information' increasingly attempts to draw far-ranging conclusions concerning the nature of reality by reducing consciousness and mind to effects of/outputs of computationally processed 'information' but without identifying the origin/source of that information.


The results are often bizarre and wildly imaginative, postulating 'control systems' that shape our sense of reality but which remain in themselves beyond our ken. These efforts are surely sincere attempts to 'make sense' of the variety of human experiences recorded and reported historically up to the present, especially those experiences involving physical and psychical anomalies. But I question attempts to reduce human experience to informational input received and processed by the brain conceived of as a computer connected to a larger computer. It is the anomalies in experience – both physical and psychical -- that require investigation before we can begin to propose a creditable theory of how and why they occur. And we will not reach that point before we have thoroughly studied consciousness itself as the site of all humanly possible integration of subjective and objective aspects of what-is as directly experienced in the world.



I’m impressed by Bernardo Kastrup’s response to the film Ex Machina, linked above by Steve, and by what I’ve seen so far of his writing and thinking as a whole. The comments following his response to Ex Machina raise some questions we could develop here. I think you, Steve, could provide some guidance for us in evaluating the discussion toward the end of those comments concerning concepts derived from
Eastern thought.

 

[Constance]

Let's look first, though, at this blog essay by Sam Harris that I linked first above. What follows is a c&p of Part II of that essay, best read following Part I which links here:

The Mystery of Consciousness : Sam Harris


Consciousness | Neuroscience | Philosophy | October 19, 2011

The Mystery of Consciousness II

(Photo by h.koppdelaney)

The universe is filled with physical phenomena that appear devoid of consciousness. From the birth of stars and planets, to the early stages of cell division in a human embryo, the structures and processes we find in Nature seem to lack an inner life. At some point in the development of certain complex organisms, however, consciousness emerges. This miracle does not depend on a change of materials—for you and I are built of the same atoms as a fern or a ham sandwich. Rather, it must be a matter of organization. Arranging atoms in a certain way appears to bring consciousness into being. And this fact is among the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.

Many readers of my previous essay did not understand why the emergence of consciousness should pose a special problem to science. Every feature of the human mind and body emerges over the course development: Why is consciousness more perplexing than language or digestion? The problem, however, is that the distance between unconsciousness and consciousness must be traversed in a single stride, if traversed at all. Just as the appearance of something out of nothing cannot be explained by our saying that the first something was “very small,” the birth of consciousness is rendered no less mysterious by saying that the simplest minds have only a glimmer of it.

This situation has been characterized as an “explanatory gap” and the “hard problem of consciousness,” and it is surely both. I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have judged the impasse to be total: Perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms. Every chain of explanation must end somewhere—generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. Consciousness might represent a terminus of this sort. Defying analysis, the mystery of inner life may one day cease to trouble us.

However, many people imagine that consciousness will yield to scientific inquiry in precisely the way that other difficult problems have in the past. What, for instance, is the difference between a living system and a dead one? Insofar as the question of consciousness itself can be kept off the table, it seems that the difference is now reasonably clear to us. And yet, as late as 1932, the Scottish physiologist J.S. Haldane (father of J.B.S. Haldane) wrote:

What intelligible account can the mechanistic theory of life give of the…recovery from disease and injuries? Simply none at all, except that these phenomena are so complex and strange that as yet we cannot understand them. It is exactly the same with the closely related phenomena of reproduction. We cannot by any stretch of the imagination conceive a delicate and complex mechanism which is capable, like a living organism, of reproducing itself indefinitely often.

Scarcely twenty years passed before our imaginations were duly stretched. Much work in biology remains to be done, of course, but anyone who entertains vitalism at this point stands convicted of basic ignorance about the nature of living systems. The jury is no longer out on questions of this sort, and more than half a century has passed since the earth’s creatures required an élan vital to propagate themselves or to recover from injury. Are doubts that we will arrive at a physical explanation of consciousness analogous to doubts about the feasibility of explaining life in terms of processes that are not alive?

The analogy is a bad one: Life is defined according to external criteria; Consciousness is not (and, I think, cannot be). We would never have occasion to say of something that does not eat, excrete, grow, or reproduce that it might nevertheless be “alive.” It might, however, be conscious.

But other analogies seem to offer hope. Consider our sense of sight: Doesn’t vision emerge from processes that are themselves blind? And doesn’t such a miracle of emergence make consciousness seem less mysterious?

Unfortunately, no. In the case of vision, we are speaking merely about the transduction of one form of energy into another (electromagnetic into electrochemical). Photons cause light-sensitive proteins to alter the spontaneous firing rates of our rods and cones, beginning an electrochemical cascade that affects neurons in many areas of the brain—achieving, among other things, a topographical mapping of the visual scene onto the visual cortex. While this chain of events is complicated, the fact of its occurrence is not in principle mysterious. The emergence of vision from a blind apparatus strikes us as a difficult problem simply because when we think of vision, we think of the conscious experience of seeing. That eyes and visual cortices emerged over the course of evolution presents no special obstacles to us; that there should be “something that it is like” to be the union of an eye and a visual cortex is itself the problem of consciousness—and it is as intractable in this form as in any other.

But couldn’t a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of human consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? We have reasons to believe that reductions of this sort are neither possible nor conceptually coherent. Nothing about a brain, studied at any scale (spatial or temporal), even suggests that it might harbor consciousness. Nothing about human behavior, or language, or culture, demonstrates that these products are mediated by subjectivity. We simply know that they are—a fact that we appreciate in ourselves directly and in others by analogy.

Here is where the distinction between studying consciousness and studying its contents becomes paramount. It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood at the level of the brain. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object—its color, contours, apparent motion, location in space, etc. arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball’s roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of a ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of “binding” can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is perfectly intelligible—and it suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the character of our experience can often be explained in terms of its underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why it should be “like something” to see in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full.

For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine what experimental findings could render the emergence of consciousness comprehensible. This is not to say, however, that our understanding of ourselves won’t change in surprising ways through our study of the brain. There seems to be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our beliefs about the nature of conscious experience. Are we fully conscious during sleep and merely failing to form memories? Can human minds be duplicated or merged? Is it possible to love your neighbor as yourself? A precise, functional neuroanatomy of our mental states would help to answer such questions—and the answers might well surprise us. And yet, whatever insights arise from correlating mental and physical events, it seems unlikely that one side of the world will be fully reduced to the other.

While we know many things about ourselves in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary terms, we do not know why it is “like something” to be what we are. The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in this universe. How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness? Not only do we have no idea, but it seems impossible to imagine what sort of idea could fit in the space provided. Therefore, although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our mental life. That doesn’t leave much scope for conventional religious doctrines, but it does offer a deep foundation (and motivation) for introspection. Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly, or not discovered at all.

 

[Robert Baird]

In my research into what consciousness is I have found a couple of Universities seemed to think they were close to an understanding - Arizona and Virginia (Maybe Berkeley too). But that was before the Higgs-Boson was proven. And in the matter of psychic phenomena or the fuller concepts it has often been the likes of J. B. Rhine (FRNM).

I debated the Higgs particles on the major MSN physics site for over a year and got support off site from a researcher at CERN, as well as a man named Laurent in Gaithersburg Maryland. I will try to find remnants - maybe the thread on The Singularity at Brain-Meta.com. It had top Neuro-science and AI people but we really did not get anywhere, so why bother.

I see the same thing all over the place. It is better than the ecclesiastical scholastic tyranny of religion and Empires thereof, but not really far removed. From the above we have:

"It's not too much to say that this continuing ignorance concern consciousness constitutes an intellectual scandal initiated during the dominance of the reductive materialist/objectivist paradigm of our species' physical sciences, and abstracted still further in the current aegis of 'information theory' understood in computational terms. As trickled down to popular discourse cited and entertained here and elsewhere, the widely invoked term 'information' suffers from the same lack of definition as the term 'consciousness' as used by many popular writers. Popular discourse concerning consciousness and 'information' increasingly attempts to draw far-ranging conclusions concerning the nature of reality by reducing consciousness and mind to effects of/outputs of computationally processed 'information' but without identifying the origin/source of that information."

I put the thread Re-discovering the Mind here which shows the Nobel Laureates of all major hard sciences had reached the same conclusions of our "reality" that mysticism had. That was not all about consciousness but maybe it was because consciousness may in fact be (BE) "all that is, in universe". That would fit the Logos in the Bible taken from earlier Harmonic attunements under the heading of The Lost Chord. In String Theory they say all matter is comprised of "one dimensional Harmonic Force". Now we can say the god particle if part of what comes from this Harmonic.

About a year ago on Quirks and Quarks they had a top Gravitational Wave Theory researcher who said if the results keep coming as they have - Metaphysics (mysticism) will be regarded as REALity. So Re-discovering the Mind will be proven even more correct. I blurted out - SEE - "I told you!" to my brother and his wife. Despite decades of discourse my brother still doesn't know what a mystic is, and I doubt most people actually do - mysticism is as cloudy as consciousness. I have found Krishnamurti and his physics protégé Bohm are near the top of the heap along with The Institute of Advanced Study people like Einstein and Gödel (Bucky was their engineer I guess you could say.). Gödel is called a mystic because he had an open mind. Einstein was no slouch in integrational lateral thought either.

I will attempt a brief sentence or three and then go look for some of the discourses or blasts from the past. Consciousness has levels of organizational integration which are always seeking higher refinement. It was so when there was no matter at all, according to the Greeks a hot and cold dimension collided leading to what we now call (derisively by Denton a Christian at first - my memory sometimes fails) The Big Bang. The inflationary universe has many more secrets to unfold as we hurtle ever-faster through a universe that might not even be the only universe, and alongside alternate or parallel universes. Thus we have a lot of Intelligence in Design and Dembski is not all wrong. I have shown Tegmark and he are saying similar things as they pontificate they are not. I see consciousness in all design (I put a thread here today including The Acts of Creation by Tiller who taught epigeneticist Bruce Lipton. The Thread also includes the formation of water crystals according to thought or musical (Harmonic) inputs; it is titled Mind over Matter - Proven). Is anything organized without design? Is that proof of consciousness in all things as we New Agers are wont to say? Bruce Lipton is aware of the Earth Energy Grid and Cosmic Thought Field which I have put many things here addressing (The Wonder Child and The Third Eye). Many more are available - but that is a few steps past consciousness.

The author quoted above decries what amounts to Post-Modernist thinking and a paradigm including the De-Construction of Derrida. His "trickle down" phrase should be given special attention. Is he RIGHT? Do we simply have a new Deity dressed in the same anthropomorphic raiment? Will our computers never have consciousness and will we soon be fool-owing them to oblivion of our soulful potential? His words strike me that way. Sometimes I almost think it would be better to have Scriptures from above - just kidding.

The thread titled The World Mind has many good links including this one.

World Mysteries - Guest Authors: Daniel Neiman - Evolution and Consciousness

I see soul as a very advanced integration of consciousness. Does any advanced entity have a soul? I am open to there being chakra centre level souls in robots. And Jung, the father of modern psychoanalysis and depth psychology is almost supplanted by Sri Aurobindo, in a book called Alchemy of the Soul by Arya Maloney.

"This book depicts the ever-widening circle of an evolutionary psychology which views the soul rather than the ego as the epi-center of human experience. The reader can observe this experience directly. Within the context of the author's therapeutic practice, trauma converges with the transpersonal.
The force that propels this work and redefines the boundaries of depth psychology is the Integral Psychology of the great mystic/philosopher, Sri Aurobindo. This ever-widening, yet clearly defined psycho-spiritual realm incorporates the fullness of the human psyche without ignoring the occult or cosmic. Beyond the theoretical, this book opens the office door as client and clinician experience the soul's alchemy."

Alchemy of the Soul (Blue Dolphin Publishing)

Then there are the constant proclamations that various 'experts' make about ESP. Stanford Research Institute included the inventor of the laser and many fine scientists that these so-called 'experts' are seldom able to evaluate or as debunkers are paid to marginalize. Russell Targ's book Limitless Mind including a foreword by Jean Houston is a great book for the truly open-minded individual. Targ's book - which is the study of consciousness and the ethereal Matrix at a high scientific level says: "...forced-choice ESP tests are an inefficient way to elicit psi functioning: they always have an additional burden of boredom and mental noise (AOL). In the above studies, the experimenters, on average, had to carry out 3,600 trials to achieve a statistically significant result. With the free-response type of experiment, such as remote viewing, we typically have to do only six to nine trials." (2) Does it not make sense to 'observe' all the avenues for wisdom that we are blessed with?


1) God against the gods: the history of the war between monotheism and polytheism, by Jonathan Kirsch, Penguin, NY, 2004, pg. 46.

2) Limitless Mind, by Russell Targ, New World Library, California, 2004, pg. 95.

http://www.shamanism.com/

And you may think I am berserk to claim a connection exists with the soul or spirit, also known as the mind. But that is what I have said ever since I noticed the lymph system is connected with psychic points in my 20s. I could say I told you so. No I will say I told you so. It will be good to see the brain-mapping done at Harvard which shows yogis and mystics in states of esoteric bliss and healing, integrated with consciousness and this study.



"In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist.



That such vessels could have escaped detection when the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly mapped throughout the body is surprising on its own, but the true significance of the discovery lies in the effects it could have on the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease to multiple sclerosis.



“Instead of asking, ‘How do we study the immune response of the brain?,’ ‘Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?,’ now we can approach this mechanistically – because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels,” said Jonathan Kipnis, a professor in U.Va.’s Department of Neuroscience and director of U.Va.’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia. “It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction. We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can’t be studied. But now we can ask mechanistic questions."



He added, “We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role. [It’s] hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component.”



Kevin Lee, who chairs the Department of Neuroscience, described his reaction to the discovery by Kipnis’ lab: “The first time these guys showed me the basic result, I just said one sentence: ‘They’ll have to change the textbooks.’ There has never been a lymphatic system for the central nervous system, and it was very clear from that first singular observation – and they’ve done many studies since then to bolster the finding – that it will fundamentally change the way people look at the central nervous system’s relationship with the immune system.”"

http://news.virginia.edu/content/res...-immune-system


The next link addresses research on cancer cells spreading through the lymph system. Suppressing this system which is vital to our health has many consequences.

http://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/david-jackso...ity-and-cancer

 

[Constance]

Baird, as I wrote in response to one of your posts on page 36 of this thread, "your posts cover a range of subjects, and include wide-ranging references and allusions, so it's difficult to respond to all of what you say even in a single post in a comprehensive way." I'm not sure that you are actually seeking responses to your quasi-encyclopedic posts, but I for one am not up to responding to most of yours. If you do seek conversation, I suggest limiting your posts to one or two ideas along with a hypothesis that might invite dialogue.

 

[Robert Baird]

I really don't require my ego stroked or a response. I do this for RIGHT THOUGHT = RIGHT ACTION and my karma. Occasionally as in the case of yourself actually taking the time on another thread - it causes growth or learning. Here is the Neuroscience forum connection. And this is a quote from one of the posts in it - it applies to your question or comment. 'But my response would be that we must all try to integrate rather than compartmentalize our knowledge. That leads to coping skills and application of thinking processes that produce a net creative improvement rather than agreement from those we 'hang with'! '

I found some of the neuroscience forum content on The Singularity.

Introduction to the Singularity

Integrating Soul and Science


"Spirit is beyond the void of space. This realm, beyond the void, is not an empty nothingness; it is the womb of creation. -- Nature goes to the same place to create a galaxy of stars, a cluster of nebulas, a rain forest, a human body, or a thought... That place is Spirit." (1)

The idea of thought coming from Spirit is a little general and not something I agree with unless he means REAL thought rather than regurgitated thought. Deepak Chopra is a great and wonderful human being who escaped the material competitive focused world and the 'expertise' that was his, as a doctor. However, we have shown that science is getting dangerously close to finding templates and forms that mirror this kind of philosophy. The church felt science was philosophy and that all things came from this kind of godhead in the 'Dark Ages'; and scientists have justifiably thought any mention of a bridge to religion is fraught with these kinds of intellectual authoritarian terrors. Perhaps now we can re-evaluate our belief in godly forces and not involve religious or priestly interpreters who ask us to 'follow' like sheep. To replace one set of interpreters with another form of 'expertise' is not good. Surely there is a balance that harmonizes with purpose and true knowingness. I like the thought expressed by James Watson in his foreword to Discovering the Brain. He said, 'The brain boggles the mind.'. It is also true that a lot of the 'boggling' has been done by those saying they seek God.

The equipment based on Tesla's 'non-force info packets' that draws energy from a vacuum that Bearden has patented and the wireless transmission of generated energy will make perpetual motion seem tame. The real possibilities of using other dimensions as storage for energy we create could be just around the corner. Someday the barriers we have created in our real world through an ignorant adherence to conventions of black and white certainty will be brought down just like the Berlin Wall; we built it to keep ideas and people from each other.

I'm not cognizant of all the ins and outs of 'red-shifts' or other astrophysical esoterics so the generalities of my insights might not have as much merit. The exorcisms I've been involved in helping free both the possessed and possessor are part of the limbo state which energy exists in after death. Does this limbo state include the same energy band- width that our solar or auric body travels in? Not by experience of the astral work I've done. However, one can meet dead people in astral travel if one has a guide or the spirit is attuned that you are about to visit. That spirit would be a multi-dimensional traveler then. There are many shades and variations of spiritual bandwidths and it may be because there is so much more energy in the unseen world that the astrophysicists told us about earlier. Ninety-five per cent versus 5 per cent is a large ratio in favor of the unseen. The ultraviolet and light energies might even be part of the visible universe, which would mean we can only actually see a percentage of the material universe. And as big an issue as all of this kind of talk is, we still must consider whether or not we know what we see when it slaps us in the face, as they say.

The average person today will likely have their mind and senses closed to the opportunity that the thalami offer to accentuate, amplify and direct non-visual forces to our conscious processing centers. The operational paradigms of the spiritual world are a science unto themselves, and the astrophysicists may not have as good a picture as I hope they do. There are those I have met, who can travel between dimensions and we will deal with these aspects of life and natural possibilities versus hallucination in other parts of this book. But, if the modern research is right about the Thalami, I feel quite certain that all the dimensions are at our disposal in every aspect of our existence. When one remembers the way we thought about spirits and devils as we listened to the preachers who tried to tell us about HELL - it is difficult to open our minds to what they were saying about the saints who performed the very miracles that men and women have always been able to do.

We see that the Gospel of Thomas from the Dag (or Nag) Hammadi 'finds' confirms Jesus never performed any miracle that you or I can't do. We are all the 'children of God' (John 10:34). The dimensional spiritual world is science and real even if we are ignorant of it. That is what the Gnostics he studied with say is the 'Original Sin' that separates us from God - IGNORANCE! Scipio Africanus and others before and after the time of Jesus were used to seeing each other and the spirits of their loved ones alive or dead! In many instances there is potential to visualize the future and it will happen with proper INTENT. Bucky Fuller did it, and I have too. Some say the forces of darkness that created the Dark Age were able to re-program the world mind to the point that our ability was diminished by the evil they fomented. Energy of a negative nature does have to be attuned with good, in order for Abraxas or unity to occur, on the grand scale and as an individual. That is why selfish prayer is wasteful and one must operate in 'brotherhood' and love to come up with things like the geodesic dome or wireless 'free energy'. Still these things are on the shelf and few really know how great they are and how much better the world might be.

Microchemical potentials and observations are exciting corollaries to chaos science. The laws of universe are 'unfolding as they should' (Desiderata was a nice poem that Pierre Trudeau often quoted as Canada's Prime Minister when I was a young man.) 'whether or not it is clear' to us! There are always good things to learn when one looks at the work of these scientists. I especially enjoy those who are willing to do what Bucky Fuller described when he talked about 'stepping outside the circle' or 'biting his tongue' when he felt complacent in the knowledge he had in a particular area of deliberation. Professor Morowitz is a microbiologist and chemist at Yale University who we will show later as an example of what can happen when people think integratively and lose their ego. He also correctly observes that few of the physical sciences encourage this integration. Is it possible to have an answer when the questions are slanted to dovetail with only one perspective? We respectfully offer that no real truth has ever resulted from the need of any tenured or other 'expert' who sought power from his peers rather than enlightenment from 'ALL that is!'

What with genetics and the basic building blocks of matter becoming more apparent to researchers who are free of old philosophic rule by the church there is truly a dawning of a new age. The title of Prof. Morowitz's article in August of 1980's 'Psychology Today' was quite appropriate - 'Rediscovering The Mind'. As we continue to RE!-discover we might even know what is important 'within' our soul. Of course, my opinion is just 'post-modern democratized' ideology as Prof. Wiseman points out. But my response would be that we must all try to integrate rather than compartmentalize our knowledge. That leads to coping skills and application of thinking processes that produce a net creative improvement rather than agreement from those we 'hang with'!


It has been said that there is not much advancement in a civilization which has science separate from its belief system or religion to any great extent. I find a lot of physics in many religious writings throughout time and yet there are still a lot of controlling interests who promote sins and demons in these religions. Here is a little of the Dag or Nag Hammadi papyruses which the Gnostics (later Cathars) saved from the destroying Empire-builders. It is specifically from the Gospel of Mary which was mostly found before the end of the 19th Century.
"22) The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.
23) For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone.
24) He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
25) Peter said to him, Since you have explained everything to us, tell us this also: What is the sin of the world?
26) The Savior said There is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called sin." (2)

This neuroscience forum which I was invited to has had many people respond to various postings without identifying themselves. I think some of that is because they have a reputation to protect or job they value. Here is one such response to a thread I started.

"Science is reductionist whereas mysticism is broadly integrative. It would seem that science and mysticism occupy anti-podal positions. They are both concerned with truth, yet go about it differently. Science seeks to objectively and mathematically describe truth, whereas mysticism seeks to experience truth. Science and mysticism are flip sides of the same coin. The greatest scientists have invariantly been deeply mystical. I'm tempted to say that the greatest mystics have invariantly been deeply scientific, or at least had an appreciation for science, but this I'm less certain of."

I responded by saying I agreed and that I was certain the sages or greatest scientists were indeed very spiritual. One of those sages is David Bohm.

 

[Pharoah]

@Robert Baird you say,
"Thus we have a lot of Intelligence in Design and Dembski is not all wrong. I have shown Tegmark and he are saying similar things as they pontificate they are not. I see consciousness in all design (I put a thread here today including The Acts of Creation by Tiller who taught epigeneticist Bruce Lipton. The Thread also includes the formation of water crystals according to thought or musical (Harmonic) inputs; it is titled Mind over Matter - Proven). Is anything organized without design? Is that proof of consciousness in all things as we New Agers are wont to say? Bruce Lipton is aware of theEarth Energy Grid and Cosmic Thought Field which I have put many things here addressing (TheWonder Child and The Third Eye). Many more are available - but that is a few steps past consciousness."

What are you meaning by "I see consciousness in all design" ... My dinner plate is designed... or are you referring to certain things that exclude artifacts?
What is "- Proven" in reference to "water crystals"?
What is "design"? What do you mean by the term 'design'?
If consciousness is in all design, and design is "to be organized", consciousness is any kind of organisation... is this corrct?

 

[smcder]

I was going to read the comments but lost the will...

What comments?

 

[Pharoah]

What comments?

What i said was daft... but I was referring to ConsciousEntities commentaries in reaction to the post about the critique of the film Ex Machina. I will look through them at some point...

 

[Robert Baird]

Pharoah asks and comments:

What are you meaning by "I see consciousness in all design" ... My dinner plate is designed... or are you referring to certain things that exclude artifacts?
What is "- Proven" in reference to "water crystals"?
What is "design"? What do you mean by the term 'design'?
If consciousness is in all design, and design is "to be organized", consciousness is any kind of organisation... is this corrct?

Of course the threads I referred to answer those questions except for the Dembski Tegmark claim I made.

Your comment about your dinner plate may seem ridiculous but it is not. Bucky Fuller in the Thread World Mind has much to say about how a sculptor FREES the image from the marble and the craftsmen imbue their bar counters, or other art with thought energy. True your dinner plate was designed by man and then machines made it so it has none of what Dembski calls Intelligent Design. But Bucky says all of our materialistic world is what it is due to our "creative realization' and collective Imagineering. So even the most mundane architecture and artifact is "design' in place and reality.

The water crystals research covered in the threads mentioned is the place to ask the question "What is Proven" -where you will confront expertise of near Nobel Laureate stature including the works of all hard sciences in an article from Psychology Today Aug 1980 called Re-discovering the Mind. I probably put it in this thread already. It has Nobel Laureates in every hard science weighing in and quoted by a Full Professor of Microbiology at Yale.

And your final comments about design and consciousness are the start of a conversation where we might begin to get somewhere, other than pedantic philosophizing about things not either in evidence or Proven. The kinds of things Asimov called Grandmother Theories and which lead me in 1981 to use Morowitz's Re-discovering the Mind in an Organizational Behavior business class Masters course to great results. But I really do not want to have a discussion on this thread which has already mired itself in NONsense.

The Professor said he had once studied the I Ching and mysticism, or other such things and had seen the error in them, on many occasions. That curdled my spine because I know a cursory investigation by a person who had a need to say he KNEW what he did not know was in play every day I sat in his class. I had already been elected by the students to represent them on the Master's Programme Committee of Canada's top MBA program which I had entered in on a part-time basis without a degree. I was accepted into this program due to ten years of success in business and passing a CLEP test plus getting over 75%-ile on the Princeton administered international GMAT. I had never taken calculus and the math section included 42 questions (of a total of 75) on calculus. I had studied on my own for two weeks and thought I had a good sense of the first three elements of quadratic equations and I guess I did, because I got 75% on it while competing with engineers and degreed people around the world. I got 85%-ile overall. The only other special entrant got 99%-ile and we became good friends. He had taken calculus in his native England.

Pardon me for sounding egotistical (I am proud of this story.). He was in over his head, quoting Asimov who was a fiction writer and mere associate Professor at Brown. My Professor was part time and not tenured, he worked in the head-hunter business. He was sick the week after touting Asimov and I had a copy for every student of various things including Morowitz's great article. His boss was sitting in for him, and I talked to him about what research I had done to debunk Asimov and his employee. He said I should take over the class that day, and I did. This Professor's employment at York University was not re-newed.

 

[smcder]

Pharoah asks and comments:

What are you meaning by "I see consciousness in all design" ... My dinner plate is designed... or are you referring to certain things that exclude artifacts?
What is "- Proven" in reference to "water crystals"?
What is "design"? What do you mean by the term 'design'?
If consciousness is in all design, and design is "to be organized", consciousness is any kind of organisation... is this corrct?

Of course the threads I referred to answer those questions except for the Dembski Tegmark claim I made.

Your comment about your dinner plate may seem ridiculous but it is not. Bucky Fuller in the Thread World Mind has much to say about how a sculptor FREES the image from the marble and the craftsmen imbue their bar counters, or other art with thought energy. True your dinner plate was designed by man and then machines made it so it has none of what Dembski calls Intelligent Design. But Bucky says all of our materialistic world is what it is due to our "creative realization' and collective Imagineering. So even the most mundane architecture and artifact is "design' in place and reality.

The water crystals research covered in the threads mentioned is the place to ask the question "What is Proven" -where you will confront expertise of near Nobel Laureate stature including the works of all hard sciences in an article from Psychology Today Aug 1980 called Re-discovering the Mind. I probably put it in this thread already. It has Nobel Laureates in every hard science weighing in and quoted by a Full Professor of Microbiology at Yale.

And your final comments about design and consciousness are the start of a conversation where we might begin to get somewhere, other than pedantic philosophizing about things not either in evidence or Proven. The kinds of things Asimov called Grandmother Theories and which lead me in 1981 to use Morowitz's Re-discovering the Mind in an Organizational Behavior business class Masters course to great results. But I really do not want to have a discussion on this thread which has already mired itself in NONsense.

The Professor said he had once studied the I Ching and mysticism, or other such things and had seen the error in them, on many occasions. That curdled my spine because I know a cursory investigation by a person who had a need to say he KNEW what he did not know was in play every day I sat in his class. I had already been elected by the students to represent them on the Master's Programme Committee of Canada's top MBA program which I had entered in on a part-time basis without a degree. I was accepted into this program due to ten years of success in business and passing a CLEP test plus getting over 75%-ile on the Princeton administered international GMAT. I had never taken calculus and the math section included 42 questions (of a total of 75) on calculus. I had studied on my own for two weeks and thought I had a good sense of the first three elements of quadratic equations and I guess I did, because I got 75% on it while competing with engineers and degreed people around the world. I got 85%-ile overall. The only other special entrant got 99%-ile and we became good friends. He had taken calculus in his native England.

Pardon me for sounding egotistical (I am proud of this story.). He was in over his head, quoting Asimov who was a fiction writer and mere associate Professor at Brown. My Professor was part time and not tenured, he worked in the head-hunter business. He was sick the week after touting Asimov and I had a copy for every student of various things including Morowitz's great article. His boss was sitting in for him, and I talked to him about what research I had done to debunk Asimov and his employee. He said I should take over the class that day, and I did. This Professor's employment at York University was not re-newed.

But I really do not want to have a discussion on this thread which has already mired itself in NONsense.

Then why post here? Why take the time and energy to insult those of us who participate? Just go to another thread or start your own.

I'm tired of people saying this thread is nonsense or saying things about "mutual mental masturbation" - etc ... (that was posted on another thread, which I think is cowardly, you know who you are - or, if you like, I can call you out) ... we've been trolled, insulted, etc. I think we've got a fairly thick skin and I have no problem with the ignore button.

But this is a difficult topic and I've not see anything better from those who criticize it, those of us who have participated from the beginning have made some effort to work with something that has no points of agreement and no valid experts ... others have come and gone. If you want to participate and be constructive, I would like that.

 

[Pharoah]

Pharoah asks and comments:

What are you meaning by "I see consciousness in all design" ... My dinner plate is designed... or are you referring to certain things that exclude artifacts?
What is "- Proven" in reference to "water crystals"?
What is "design"? What do you mean by the term 'design'?
If consciousness is in all design, and design is "to be organized", consciousness is any kind of organisation... is this corrct?

Of course the threads I referred to answer those questions except for the Dembski Tegmark claim I made.

Your comment about your dinner plate may seem ridiculous but it is not. Bucky Fuller in the Thread World Mind has much to say about how a sculptor FREES the image from the marble and the craftsmen imbue their bar counters, or other art with thought energy. True your dinner plate was designed by man and then machines made it so it has none of what Dembski calls Intelligent Design. But Bucky says all of our materialistic world is what it is due to our "creative realization' and collective Imagineering. So even the most mundane architecture and artifact is "design' in place and reality.

The water crystals research covered in the threads mentioned is the place to ask the question "What is Proven" -where you will confront expertise of near Nobel Laureate stature including the works of all hard sciences in an article from Psychology Today Aug 1980 called Re-discovering the Mind. I probably put it in this thread already. It has Nobel Laureates in every hard science weighing in and quoted by a Full Professor of Microbiology at Yale.

And your final comments about design and consciousness are the start of a conversation where we might begin to get somewhere, other than pedantic philosophizing about things not either in evidence or Proven. The kinds of things Asimov called Grandmother Theories and which lead me in 1981 to use Morowitz's Re-discovering the Mind in an Organizational Behavior business class Masters course to great results. But I really do not want to have a discussion on this thread which has already mired itself in NONsense.

The Professor said he had once studied the I Ching and mysticism, or other such things and had seen the error in them, on many occasions. That curdled my spine because I know a cursory investigation by a person who had a need to say he KNEW what he did not know was in play every day I sat in his class. I had already been elected by the students to represent them on the Master's Programme Committee of Canada's top MBA program which I had entered in on a part-time basis without a degree. I was accepted into this program due to ten years of success in business and passing a CLEP test plus getting over 75%-ile on the Princeton administered international GMAT. I had never taken calculus and the math section included 42 questions (of a total of 75) on calculus. I had studied on my own for two weeks and thought I had a good sense of the first three elements of quadratic equations and I guess I did, because I got 75% on it while competing with engineers and degreed people around the world. I got 85%-ile overall. The only other special entrant got 99%-ile and we became good friends. He had taken calculus in his native England.

Pardon me for sounding egotistical (I am proud of this story.). He was in over his head, quoting Asimov who was a fiction writer and mere associate Professor at Brown. My Professor was part time and not tenured, he worked in the head-hunter business. He was sick the week after touting Asimov and I had a copy for every student of various things including Morowitz's great article. His boss was sitting in for him, and I talked to him about what research I had done to debunk Asimov and his employee. He said I should take over the class that day, and I did. This Professor's employment at York University was not re-newed.

@Robert Baird

1. you say, "Of course the threads I referred to answer those questions except for the Dembski Tegmark claim I made." I must have missed the references.... could you pinpoint them for me, or better still, quote the relevant text?

2. What I was trying to get at with the dinner plate comment was where consciousness resides... So you don't see consciousness in 'all' design after all [that is a relief]; only in "Intelligent Design".
What counts as Intelligent here? Is a planet Intelligently Designed?

3. I am not particularly in awe of Nobel Laureate stature or whether someone is a professor at Yale. What do you understand by these ideas related to water crystals? If you don't know, just say so.

 

[Constance]

But I really do not want to have a discussion on this thread which has already mired itself in NONsense.

If what we explore here is nonsense, why are you using your valuable time to post in this thread? Merely to inform us that the research we explore is nonsense and to hint at the direction we should follow {which, so far as I've seen, is not clearly expressed in what you write}? I'm sure we'd be willing to listen to what you want to say if you will make the effort to express it more succinctly and directly.

In this thread we've spent a year, maybe two by now, surveying and discussing the various approaches taken in interdisciplinary consciousness studies to arriving at an understanding of what consciousness is. These approaches have originated in cognitive neuroscience; information theory and computational theories based in the presupposition that consciousness and mind are products of the brain; philosophy of mind from a variety of perspectives including phenomenology [edit to add:] in the west and as developed in Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and schools of meditative practice; affective neuroscience as developed by Jaak Panksepp and others; neurophenomenological investigations led by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and others; and psychical research from F.W.H. Myers and the SPR through experimentation by Robert Jahn and others, including the SRI's remote viewing research, to the work of Edward Kelly et al from the disciplines of psychology and psychical research.

If you wish to persuade us that all of these approaches are 'nonsense', I'm sure we'll all read what you write, but you'll have to do more than simply dismiss it all by rejecting it with the single word 'nonsense'.

 

[Robert Baird]

I have spent decades doing far more than you have here. It is ego and mental masturbation - and I clicked on the do not follow function but still I am drawn back into this nonsense despite creating numerous threads to disassemble the very integrative research I have done - since you made the remark about it covering too much for you to address.

 

[Robert Baird]

Pharoah says:

1. you say, "Of course the threads I referred to answer those questions except for the Dembski Tegmark claim I made." I must have missed the references.... could you pinpoint them for me, or better still, quote the relevant text?

2. What I was trying to get at with the dinner plate comment was where consciousness resides... So you don't see consciousness in 'all' design after all [that is a relief]; only in "Intelligent Design".
What counts as Intelligent here? Is a planet Intelligently Designed?

3. I am not particularly in awe of Nobel Laureate stature or whether someone is a professor at Yale. What do you understand by these ideas related to water crystals? If you don't know, just say so.

I say: I answered it in the Threads and you don't read Nobel Laureates so I have no motivation to try to get past YOUR ego. I also answered it in this thread.