Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

[smcder]

Conversational and street hypnosis rely on these various methods - and show that the conscious mind is easily bypassed ... in one of the talks on a vidao I was watching - the speaker is addressing one of the attendees and basically makes him forget what he, the speaker, just said, so when the man questions something, he says "ok, what did I just say?" and the man can't even speak coherently and then just starts laughing ... the funny thing was I couldn't rememeber either, I had to play it back and listen very closely.

In terms of getting people to do what they might not ordinarily do, in street hypnosis, someone can convince you that for example you have their wallet and so you quite willingly (and confused, embarassed at why you have their wallet) hand it over, if you can control the context the person thinks they are in - you can get someone to do pretty much anything.

A coouple of other interesting things I've worked with are reading hypnosis, so you read a hypnotic script aloud to yourself and writing hypnosis, where you write yourself into a hypnotic trance.

 

[smcder]

@Constance - I'm trying to find a post you made, end of part 3, about when everything came together for you about phenomenology and how that changed your world ... do you remember this?

 

[smcder]

One other thing that's fascinating is how the (unconsious) mind can translate metaphor or ideas into physiological expression ... so we don't know how we do an atheltic maneuver or slow our heart rate or relax our muscles or block pain but we can translate some language into a physical change - , for example I might suggest to myself the idea of setting the pain to the side or I might work on distinguishing the pain from the awareness of pain and then what happens is I can watch my hand under the hot water and be aware of the pain, but it's "to the side" or in another space, even very vague language or abstract language will work, for example putting the pain into another dimension ... we don't even know what that means or how to visualize it, but it works ... so this seems to address @Soupie's question about sensations, there is at least a degree of plasticity there.

I've long thought that tolerance for pain is a cultural trait as well as an individual one ... I think previous generations were far more stoic in part because their expectations of physical comfort were less, media wasn't telling them they needed to and were supposed to feel good all the time. So when an illness occurs, one of the things you might learn is that discomfort and pain as subjective experiences aren't reliable indicators of the seriousness of your situation ..

all this occured to me when you @Constance wrote about Kasper Hauser, one of the stories you linked talked about a wild boy sticking his hand into boiling water to retrieve an egg without flinching ...

 

[Constance]

The law of compounding, according to the speaker, means that once you get past the critical factor (the censor) - then suggestions are accepted retroactively. So when the second suggestion comes in, the mind accepts it and updates the first suggestion, when the third comes in, the second and first are updated again, so the first has now been accepted and updated twice ... etc.

In this case it's another person making the suggestions - hadn't thought about it in terms of self-hypnosis.

It seems that in self-hypnosis the conscious mind might still be making suggestions to the subconscious mind. I 've never been or sought to be hypnotized, but from what I've read in Brian Weiss's and Michael Newton's books about hypnotic regression it seems that they do not make suggestions concerning the content of what is to be found but merely ask the hypnotized individual to go back to an earlier point in their experience and describe what was happening 'then' and 'there'. These were not the first psychologists and psychiatrists to discover memories of past lives maintained in the subconscious but they have been prominent in current practice and discussion of past lives. Hypnosis is also used, of course, for other purposes such as helping individuals to give up habits (such as smoking and probably other addictions), and in those cases regression to deeper memories probably does not come into the therapy (but I don't know that). In the field of 'alien abduction' research, the practice of Dr. David Jacobs has been criticized by some ufo researchers on the basis that he has planted false memories in his patients (the same has been charged in recent decades against practitioners hypnotizing children who are suspected of having been abused). I don't know whether those charges are valid or not. The point is that if they are, they taint any 'evidence' that might have been produced using those tactics. I'm interested in the stream of 'liminal' consciousness that apparently dissipates in self-hypnosis, where it seems to me that an individual attempts to 'let go' of associations in the conscious mind in an attempt to reach a deeper, subconscious, level of awareness.

This material really does make you question and try to be aware of where your conscious thinking comes from and how autonomous your thinking might be ... it's another area where a -hyper rational approach tends to leave one vulnerable.

Or at least out of touch with the subconscious mind, the extent of what it stores and processes, and how it feeds into what an individual can become consciously aware of in the passage from prereflective experience to reflective experience and thinking as such. I might be misremembering what I read a few nights ago in Heidegger's introduction to The Problems of Phenomenology, but it seemed to me at one point that he was making direct allusions to the subconscious mind. I'll go read it again to be certain. There is no doubt an extensive literature concerning applications of phenomenology and existentialism to psychiatry and psychology [R.D Laing is an exemplar of the latter as I recall], but I have not read it and it obviously needs to be read to understand how these disciplines of philosophy have been developed in dealing with the subconscious. Sartre wrote a book on Freud that I have around here somewhere but have not read. It would also be necessary to read James and Jung in this regard.

 

[smcder]

It seems that in self-hypnosis the conscious mind might still be making suggestions to the subconscious mind. I 've never been or sought to be hypnotized, but from what I've read in Brian Weiss's and Michael Newton's books about hypnotic regression it seems that they do not make suggestions concerning the content of what is to be found but merely ask the hypnotized individual to go back to an earlier point in their experience and describe what was happening 'then' and 'there'. These were not the first psychologists and psychiatrists to discover memories of past lives maintained in the subconscious but they have been prominent in current practice and discussion of past lives. Hypnosis is also used, of course, for other purposes such as helping individuals to give up habits (such as smoking and probably other addictions), and in those cases regression to deeper memories probably does not come into the therapy (but I don't know that). In the field of 'alien abduction' research, the practice of Dr. David Jacobs has been criticized by some ufo researchers on the basis that he has planted false memories in his patients (the same has been charged in recent decades against practitioners hypnotizing children who are suspected of having been abused). I don't know whether those charges are valid or not. The point is that if they are, they taint any 'evidence' that might have been produced using those tactics. I'm interested in the stream of 'liminal' consciousness that apparently dissipates in self-hypnosis, where it seems to me that an individual attempts to 'let go' of associations in the conscious mind in an attempt to reach a deeper, subconscious, level of awareness.



Or at least out of touch with the subconscious mind, the extent of what it stores and processes, and how it feeds into what an individual can become consciously aware of in the passage from prereflective experience to reflective experience and thinking as such. I might be misremembering what I read a few nights ago in Heidegger's introduction to The Problems of Phenomenology, but it seemed to me at one point that he was making direct allusions to the subconscious mind. I'll go read it again to be certain. There is no doubt an extensive literature concerning applications of phenomenology and existentialism to psychiatry and psychology [R.D Laing is an exemplar of the latter as I recall], but I have not read it and it obviously needs to be read to understand how these disciplines of philosophy have been developed in dealing with the subconscious. Sartre wrote a book on Freud that I have around here somewhere but have not read. It would also be necessary to read James and Jung in this regard.

I'm interested in the stream of 'liminal' consciousness that apparently dissipates in self-hypnosis, where it seems to me that an individual attempts to 'let go' of associations in the conscious mind in an attempt to reach a deeper, subconscious, level of awareness.

I don't know if this is what you mean ... but I use a technique sometimes, I came across it as a child trying to sleep (I'm a life long insomniac) and then I visualized a bouncing ball going down the street - it was a cartoon image, and I just let come up whatever came up as the street rolled up into view ... this led to vivid imagery and sometimes, sleep - I still use this same idea, sometimes what I do is put on music and visualize a story to that, or I may put on a lecture or talk or an audiobook and then let my mind wander ... like a child listening to adults in the other room, the train of thought and the talk seem to cancel one another out and pretty soon you are in a very different place ...

some of these experiences result in something that is very similar to descriptions of psychedelic experience and include "realer than real" imagery, tacticle/kinesthetic, visual and auditory ... vivid landscapes that are clearer than with my normal eyesight - and then combinations of experience, so that a kinesthetic image takes on an emotional meaning - I may see an ordinary object but it's as if my own sensations are of that substance - wood, or metal or other flesh and the emotional and even meaningul component is overwhelming, ecstatic ... and entities can be this way to, so that you are communicating with a being that is a sensation, ... needless to say some of these experiences are unpleasant - this is why I'm not keen on taking psychedelics.

One other experience I've mentioned before is of a brilliant light - it wasn't blinding but it eclipsed all other light so that all that could be seen was this pure light and it was terrifying because you couldn't see anything as a result, you could see the light but nothing else could be distinguished in the light.

Usually this happens in a hypnagogic state but I'm working more on this happening from a wakeful state during the day, sounds are distracting but light isn't - and I don't have to be physically relaxed or make special preparations, not all the time ... I think there are multiple "energies" or states or layers in the body - whatever metaphor you want to use ... and so even if I'm keyed up, I can focus and find the energy that is still ... for example, I can picture the bones - that kind of "mineral being" and appreciate it as still, or I may find a part of the body that is relaxed and focus on that and bring that energy throughout the body - the key is breath ... "square breathing" is in, hold, out, hold all to the same count - start with four and if your keyed up, it will relax, if your relaxed, it will bring you up ...

One image that helps me is the tip of the tongue phenomena, when you are trying to remember something, you hold it but gently, keep your focus on it without force and let it emerge, I would say that's a basic skill in moving into these states.

 

[Constance]

@Constance - I'm trying to find a post you made, end of part 3, about when everything came together for you about phenomenology and how that changed your world ... do you remember this?

That would have been after my third reading of the essays of the later Heidegger in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated and introduced by Albert Hofstadter. I was reading it for a course on Heidegger, several decades ago, and on the third reading I experienced a major shift in my ontological thinking and all that I'd read of Heidegger in that volume and previously suddenly fell into place. That's why I continue to recommend that book to others; it turned the key and opened the door for me to phenomenological philosophy in general and Heidegger in particular.

I also think this book we're approaching now {The Problems of Phenomenology} will save extensive time spent in slogging through the intricacies of B&T for Pharoah and anyone else approaching Heidegger's thought.

 

[smcder]

On learning a new piece of music, one might be tempted to listen to recordings. From these recordings one would hear this or that interpretation and adopt bits from each. Personally, I would recommend an untainted learning: to open a conduit to the composer's inner thoughts and develop an individual relationship with him/her. Following this interpretation, further understanding and exploration then entails incorporating the ideas of others. From my experience, there is no better exponent of truth than the originator of the germ of an idea. All interpretations are 'translations' and all translations are approximations to the intentions of the original author.

Groking - we don't have that term on this side of the pond. Or is it German?

I am leaving MP - the best - till last!

Isn't phenomenology an exploration and study of perspectives from a perspective, broadly interpreted? I anticipate no as the answer. Why no in your words.
Is it possible to truly understand or explore Being perspectively? What I mean to say is that for there to be Being-in-the-world implies a mode of Being not-in-the-world. The first is necessarily perspectival and potentially meaningful in that limit, the other however, is necessarily beyond peerspectival comprehension. To try to speak of the second in terms of the first is a fake enterprise.

Meaning does not exist in the absence of analysis. To derive meaning from B&T demands analysis. For me, this is the paradox of B&T.

Meaning does not exist in the absence of analysis.

I keep knocking this one around, from right to left hemisphere and back ... can't quite agree unless you mean it very narrowly.

 

[Constance]

. . .then let my mind wander

That's what happens when the cortex and language centers shut down as one passes into sleep. I've experienced hypnogogia too and marveled at the images that came up for me on that brink of sleep. In one case I saw a quickly succeeding series of historical images as if the pages of an ancient book were being turned rapidly before my mind's eye. I remembered most vividly only the last one, which appeared to be a detailed black and white engraving of a Roman soldier on an enormous white horse rearing up in front of a wide set of stairs leading into a temple. In another case I saw (and it seems was) a young child sitting in a bell tower with an elderly man who sat farther back in the tower. I was sitting at the edge of the floor of the uppermost room of the tower, swinging my legs over the edge and looking down into a very dusty street scene filled with people in ancient garb, some walking and some driving animal-drawn carts. I had the sudden sense that I would fall from the tower and woke up immediately in a state of anxiety. In recent years, reading in bed at night, I've soon found my mind wandering from the text, sometimes continuing to write the text but realizing the lack of connection between what I'd been reading and what I was writing and then turning off the light and falling immediately into sleep. I've also found myself viewing scenery not associated with what I was reading and then turned out the light and gone to sleep. Sometimes I awake in the night to find the light still on, so I've obviously slipped off into sleep before realizing I was on the cusp of sleeping.

It sounds to me as if your very active mind has always found it difficult to let go of consciousness so you've devised various ways to in a sense force it to do so. I might still have the link to work by a neuroscientist engaged in research on sleep and the measurement of changes in activity in various areas of the brain leading to sleep. If I can find it again I'll link it for you.

I'm interested in the stream of 'liminal' consciousness that apparently dissipates in self-hypnosis, where it seems to me that an individual attempts to 'let go' of associations in the conscious mind in an attempt to reach a deeper, subconscious, level of awareness.

". . . some of these experiences result in something that is very similar to descriptions of psychedelic experience and include "realer than real" imagery, tacticle/kinesthetic, visual and auditory ... vivid landscapes that are clearer than with my normal eyesight - and then combinations of experience, so that a kinesthetic image takes on an emotional meaning - I may see an ordinary object but it's as if my own sensations are of that substance - wood, or metal or other flesh and the emotional and even meaningul component is overwhelming, ecstatic ... and entities can be this way to, so that you are communicating with a being that is a sensation, ... needless to say some of these experiences are unpleasant - this is why I'm not keen on taking psychedelics.

One other experience I've mentioned before is of a brilliant light - it wasn't blinding but it eclipsed all other light so that all that could be seen was this pure light and it was terrifying because you couldn't see anything as a result, you could see the light but nothing else could be distinguished in the light.

Usually this happens in a hypnagogic state but I'm working more on this happening from a wakeful state during the day, sounds are distracting but light isn't - and I don't have to be physically relaxed or make special preparations, not all the time ... I think there are multiple "energies" or states or layers in the body - whatever metaphor you want to use ... and so even if I'm keyed up, I can focus and find the energy that is still ... for example, I can picture the bones - that kind of "mineral being" and appreciate it as still, or I may find a part of the body that is relaxed and focus on that and bring that energy throughout the body - the key is breath ... "square breathing" is in, hold, out, hold all to the same count - start with four and if your keyed up, it will relax, if your relaxed, it will bring you up ...."


This is all fascinating. It seems to me that you are able to open to some aspects of subconscious knowledge directly from a state of waking consciousness. Your reference to sensing "mineral being" is especially interesting. Once when I was about to undergo extensive dental surgery I sat in the waiting room reading a National Geographic article concerned with layers of vegetative life interconnected in a kind of half-sleeping state supporting plants and trees in untraveled regions of the world. The article put me into a state of deep relaxation and passivity, and I informed the oral surgeon as he prepared numerous shots of novocaine for me that I would be thinking of myself during the procedures to come as existing in the state of those minimally active underground layers of organic life. Of course I didn't refuse the novocaine. The combination worked very well for me for two or more hours, til I was all sewn up again..

It seems to me that you have an extraordinary ability to move around in various layers of your consciousness-subconsciousness complex. I don't think you need psychedelics to explore beneath the waterline of your consciousness; you already do that. I'm less of an explorer than you are so would never consider consuming mind-altering substances (beyond marijuana), but I think I don't need them either to recognize how complex 'consciousness' is -- compartmented as well as allowing the flowing downward and upward of imagery and ideas (or proto-ideas) not requiring language for their expression. That was made unmistakably clear for me in my spontaneous OBE at age 21.

 

[Constance]

Meaning does not exist in the absence of analysis.

I keep knocking this one around, from right to left hemisphere and back ... can't quite agree unless you mean it very narrowly.

To the extent that Pharoah means that meaning requires concepts/conceptualizations such as POM relies on in its analyses, I think he's plainly wrong. Conceptual thinking arises from a plenum of preconscious experience in the world -- prereflective experience. How else could reflection develop? On the basis of what<?> would it take root? Infants and toddlers experience meaningfulness in their environment and gradually in themselves long before they are able to form concepts. The parallel case is the development of primordial consciousness in our evolutionary forebears.

In a long and humorous poem (a kaleidoscopic marvel to read), Stevens pursues the adventures of a character who stands in for all of us humans as we attempt to make sense of what comes to us from the world and what we can think on that basis. Crispin is the name of the character, and the title of the poem is "The Comedian as the Letter C." Two key lines, each set at the beginning of a long section, are:

"Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil."

and

"Nota: his soil is man's intelligence."

Both are true in my opinion.

 

[Constance]

@Pharoah, this paragraph from H's introduction to The Problems of Phenomenology should be helpful. {This introduction as a whole is helpful. Try it and let us know if you find it so.}

"Every being with which we have any dealings can be addressed and spoken of by saying "it is" thus and so, regardless of its specific mode of being. We meet with a being's being in the understanding of being. It is understanding that first of all opens up or, as we say, discloses or reveals something like being. Being is given only in the specific disclosedness that characterises the understanding of being. But we call the disclosedness of something truth. That is the proper concept of truth, as it already begins to dawn in antiquity. Being is given only if there is disclosure, that is to say, if there is truth. But there is truth only if a being exists which opens up, which discloses, and indeed in such a way that disclosure itself belongs to the mode of being of this being. We ourselves are such a being. The Dasein Itself exists in the truth. To the Dasein there belongs essentially a disclosed world and with that the disclosedness of the Dasein itself. The Dasein, by the nature of its existence, is "in" truth, and only because it is "in" truth does it have the possibility of being "in" untruth. Being is given only if truth, hence if the Dasein, exists. And only for this reason is it not merely possible to address beings but within certain limits sometimes - presupposing that the Dasein exists - necessary. We shall consolidate these problems of the interconnectedness between being and truth into the problem of the truth-character of being (veritas transcendentalis). . . . ."

 

[Constance]

^the link again: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

 

[Constance]

Also helpful in that introduction:

"The thesis that world-view formation does not belong to the task of philosophy is valid, of course, only on the presupposition that philosophy does not relate in a positive manner to some being qua this or that particular being, that it does not posit a being. Can this presupposition that philosophy does not relate positively to beings, as the sciences do, be justified? What then is philosophy supposed to concern itself with if not with beings, with that which is, as well as with the whole of what is? What is not, is surely the nothing. Should philosophy, then, as absolute science, have the nothing as its theme? What can there be apart from nature, history, God, space, number? We say of each of these, even though in a different sense, that it is. We call it a being. In relating to it, whether theoretically or practically, we are comporting ourselves toward a being. Beyond all these beings there is nothing. Perhaps there is no other being beyond what has been enumerated, but perhaps, as in the German idiom for "there is," es gibt [literally, it gives], still something else is given, something else which indeed is not but which nevertheless, in a sense yet to be determined, is given. Even more. In the end something is given which must be given if we are to be able to make beings accessible to us as beings and comport ourselves toward them, something which, to be sure, is not but which must be given if we are to experience and understand any beings at all. We are able to grasp beings as such, as beings, only if we understand something like being. If we did not understand, even though at first roughly and without conceptual comprehension, what actuality signifies, then the actual would remain hidden from us. If we did not understand what reality means, then the real would remain inaccessible. If we did not understand what life and vitality signify, then we would not be able to comport ourselves toward living beings. If we did not understand what existence and existentiality signify, then we ourselves would not be able to exist as Dasein. If we did not understand what permanence and constancy signify, then constant geometric relations or numerical proportions would remain a secret to us. We must understand actuality, reality, vitality, existentiality, constancy in order to be able to comport ourselves positively toward specifically actual, real, living, existing, constant beings. We must understand being so that we may be able to be given over to a world that is, so that we can exist in it and be our own Dasein itself as a being. We must be able to understand actuality before all factual experience of actual beings. This understanding of actuality or of being in the widest sense as over against the experience of beings is in a certain sense earlier than the experience of beings. To say that the understanding of being precedes all factual experience of beings does not mean that we would first need to have an explicit concept of being in order to experience beings theoretically or practically. We must understand being - being, which may no longer itself be called a being, being, which does not occur as a being among other beings but which nevertheless must be given and in fact is given in the understanding of being."

 

[smcder]

Fear that drives the analytic? No.
I think fear prevents someone from seeing contrasting concepts... if one is content with one's conceptual view of the world why risk upsetting that view with new ideas that might undermine it? To do so is scary.
Analytic approach is driven by the notion that underlying principles of explanation are possible; that unity underlies complexity.
furthermore, if you don't appreciate this principle of unity in art and literature, then you can't understand its greatness. Complxity without unity is chaos

Do I understand the greatness of Kipling? I dont know you silly boy, I've never Kippled! ;-)

Complexity without unity is chaos.

Chaos (n.)
late 14c., "gaping void," from Old French chaos (14c.) or directly from Latin chaos, from Greek khaos "abyss, that which gapes wide open, is vast and empty," from *khnwos, from PIE root *gheu- "to gape, yawn" (cognates: Greek khaino "I yawn," Old English ginian, Old Norse ginnunga-gap; see yawn (v.)).

Meaning "utter confusion" (c. 1600) is extended from theological use of chaos for "the void at the beginning of creation" in Vulgate version of Genesis (1530s in English). The Greek for "disorder" was tarakhe, however the use of chaos here was rooted in Hesiod ("Theogony"), who describes khaos as the primeval emptiness of the Universe, begetter of Erebus and Nyx ("Night"), and in Ovid ("Metamorphoses"), who opposes Khaos to Kosmos, "the ordered Universe." Meaning "orderless confusion" in human affairs is from c. 1600. Chaos theory in the modern mathematical sense is attested from c.1977.

Here is no less an authority than Wolfram admitting chaos is tricky to define:

Chaos -- from Wolfram MathWorld

and here it is on complexity:

Complexity -- from Wolfram MathWorld

The complexity of a process or algorithm is a measure of how difficult it is to perform. The study of the complexity of algorithms is known as complexity theory.

So for a randomly generated sequence, there is no compression, the algorithm is the sequence:

HTHTHHHTTTHTHTHTH

Randomness can be defined and measured ... throw a coin an infinite number of times and you get 50% heads, etc ... but throw a chaotic coin an infinite number of times and once you will get 53.1% heads ... throw it a second infinite number of times and you get nothin' but heads ... throw it a third time and you get chicken. That's chaos - as is the back row in a Willie Nelson concert, the greatness of which the unaltered mind may not be able to understand.

Tohu wa-bohu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Pharoah]

How does any consciousness/mind that originates in and is always already situated in the world achieve a perspective from outside the world? If there is a perspective on the world maintained by a mind outside the world, whose perspective is it and how do we find out what it knows? See Kierkegaard's leap of faith.

@smcder I often feel like an alien. Perhaps that is helpful in being a good groker.

@Constance
A perspective of outside the world is 'limited by imagination' but unapproachable to experience or perspective itself, in my view.
As soon as one limits Being to beingintheworld (which is a noble pursuit nonetheless), it becomes exclusively Being of and part of worldly things. It becomes ordinary (in a wider sense), in that it becomes part of a world that need not have certain Beings. Consequently, such an approach merely sidesteps cartesial duality. With my limited view, B&T seems deeply anti-theistic which is fascinating... another striking contradiction between MH's writing and persona perhaps.

Tasty questions... I don't know. I think about these things much of the time.

 

[smcder]

The Heidegger and his McGilchrist | Talking Philosophy

The Heidegger and His McGilchrist

But McGilchrist’s greatest influence of all, also explored in a novel way in the first half of the book, is phenomenology in general, and Heidegger in particular. McGilchrist frequently in this book plays emissary to Heidegger, his ‘master’…

I mean that metaphor in a tongue-in-cheek way, just to raise perhaps a wry and friendly smile; but I also mean it somewhat in earnest. I had a niggling sense, repeatedly, as I read this book, that McGilchrist’s way of working is actually rather less ‘right-hemispherical’ than is that of his great heroes, who he often explicates to us grippingly in the course of the work: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Heraclitus, Goethe, Wordsworth, Blake, and (above all) Heidegger. To give a key for-instance; there is an obvious danger that his neuro-story involves a homuncular fallacy. For most of the book, McGilchrist writes almost as if the left and right hemispheres really were separate people, with intentions, wills, personalities, etc.

 

[smcder]

@smcder I often feel like an alien. Perhaps that is helpful in being a good groker.

@Constance
A perspective of outside the world is 'limited by imagination' but unapproachable to experience or perspective itself, in my view.
As soon as one limits Being to beingintheworld (which is a noble pursuit nonetheless), it becomes exclusively Being of and part of worldly things. It becomes ordinary (in a wider sense), in that it becomes part of a world that need not have certain Beings. Consequently, such an approach merely sidesteps cartesial duality. With my limited view, B&T seems deeply anti-theistic which is fascinating... another striking contradiction between MH's writing and persona perhaps.

Tasty questions... I don't know. I think about these things much of the time.

In re: feeling like an alien

“If it could eventually be shown…that the two major ways, not just of thinking, but of being in the world, are not related to the two cerebral hemispheres, I would be surprised, but not unhappy. Ultimately what I have tried to point to is that the apparently separate ‘functions’ in each hemisphere fit together intelligently to form in each case a single coherent entity; that there are, not just currents here and there in the history of ideas, but consistent ways of being that persist across the history of the Western world, that are fundamentally opposed, though complementary, in what they reveal to us; and that the hemispheres of the brain can be seen as, at the very least, a metaphor for these… //

What [Goethe’s Faust, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Scheler and Kant] all point to is the fundamentally divided nature of mental experience. When one puts that together with the fact that the brain is divided into two relatively independent chunks which just happen broadly to mirror the very dichotomies that are being pointed to –

alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole, and so on

– it seems like a metaphor that might have some literal truth. But if it turns out to be ‘just’ a metaphor, I will be content. I have a high regard for metaphor. It is how we come to understand the world.” (Pp.461-2; cf. also p.7)."

So take hope that there is another way of being in the world ... a way of be-longing.

 

[smcder]

Do I understand the greatness of Kipling? I dont know you silly boy, I've never Kippled! ;-)

Complexity without unity is chaos.

Chaos (n.)
late 14c., "gaping void," from Old French chaos (14c.) or directly from Latin chaos, from Greek khaos "abyss, that which gapes wide open, is vast and empty," from *khnwos, from PIE root *gheu- "to gape, yawn" (cognates: Greek khaino "I yawn," Old English ginian, Old Norse ginnunga-gap; see yawn (v.)).

Meaning "utter confusion" (c. 1600) is extended from theological use of chaos for "the void at the beginning of creation" in Vulgate version of Genesis (1530s in English). The Greek for "disorder" was tarakhe, however the use of chaos here was rooted in Hesiod ("Theogony"), who describes khaos as the primeval emptiness of the Universe, begetter of Erebus and Nyx ("Night"), and in Ovid ("Metamorphoses"), who opposes Khaos to Kosmos, "the ordered Universe." Meaning "orderless confusion" in human affairs is from c. 1600. Chaos theory in the modern mathematical sense is attested from c.1977.

Here is no less an authority than Wolfram admitting chaos is tricky to define:

Chaos -- from Wolfram MathWorld

and here it is on complexity:

Complexity -- from Wolfram MathWorld

The complexity of a process or algorithm is a measure of how difficult it is to perform. The study of the complexity of algorithms is known as complexity theory.

So for a randomly generated sequence, there is no compression, the algorithm is the sequence:

HTHTHHHTTTHTHTHTH

Randomness can be defined and measured ... throw a coin an infinite number of times and you get 50% heads, etc ... but throw a chaotic coin an infinite number of times and once you will get 53.1% heads ... throw it a second infinite number of times and you get nothin' but heads ... throw it a third time and you get chicken. That's chaos - as is the back row in a Willie Nelson concert, the greatness of which the unaltered mind may not be able to understand.

Tohu wa-bohu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Or ... an Eddie Izzard concert ...

tonight! Die Hard ... the musical!!

... and Pontius Pilate was pilot, he flew for the Romans, he flew great, hairy eagles!

 

[smcder]

@smcder I often feel like an alien. Perhaps that is helpful in being a good groker.

@Constance
A perspective of outside the world is 'limited by imagination' but unapproachable to experience or perspective itself, in my view.
As soon as one limits Being to beingintheworld (which is a noble pursuit nonetheless), it becomes exclusively Being of and part of worldly things. It becomes ordinary (in a wider sense), in that it becomes part of a world that need not have certain Beings. Consequently, such an approach merely sidesteps cartesial duality. With my limited view, B&T seems deeply anti-theistic which is fascinating... another striking contradiction between MH's writing and persona perhaps.

Tasty questions... I don't know. I think about these things much of the time.

B&T seems deeply anti-theistic which is fascinating... another striking contradiction between MH's writing and persona perhaps.

Say more?

Holy Atheism: The Puzzle of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” | The New Oxonian

The author argues that H was working on very specific problems with a level of despair such that paradox, aphorism and obscurity are the only tools to adequately express their intractability. The author compares this to the negative (apophatic) theology of Gregory of Nyssa, Catherine of Sienna and Meister Eckhart.

The "Letter on Humanism" proposed to locate modernity's ills in history - his solution was the humanism of the Western philosophical tradition.

humanism “lies at the root of the reification, technologization, and secularization characteristic of the modern world"

humanism is a philosophy which defines man either:

1. in terms of a universal essence as a rational animal of voluntary action
or
2. in terms of the denial of an essence: existentialism as a pure form of humanism through choice and action

Heidegger says that man's essence has been misconstrued:

“Man as a rational animal”

predetermines the nature of man at a metaphysical level and shuts off discussion of the relationship between Being and being human, it determines the essence of man "downward" choosing a definition that equates science and reason with the sufficient definition/essence of humanity.

umanism as we understand the term can not provide an understanding of throwness, does not provide an “analytic” that can help us to understand authenticity, mortality, responsibility and provides no escape from the “vulgarity of calculation” or a sense of the temporality of existence.

That (my summary of the article to this point) then is followed by this sentence:

This leads to the question of God and the matter of Heidegger’s atheism.

Tasty, indeed!

 

[Pharoah]

One other thing that's fascinating is how the (unconsious) mind can translate metaphor or ideas into physiological expression ... so we don't know how we do an atheltic maneuver or slow our heart rate or relax our muscles or block pain but we can translate some language into a physical change - , for example I might suggest to myself the idea of setting the pain to the side or I might work on distinguishing the pain from the awareness of pain and then what happens is I can watch my hand under the hot water and be aware of the pain, but it's "to the side" or in another space, even very vague language or abstract language will work, for example putting the pain into another dimension ... we don't even know what that means or how to visualize it, but it works ... so this seems to address @Soupie's question about sensations, there is at least a degree of plasticity there.

I've long thought that tolerance for pain is a cultural trait as well as an individual one ... I think previous generations were far more stoic in part because their expectations of physical comfort were less, media wasn't telling them they needed to and were supposed to feel good all the time. So when an illness occurs, one of the things you might learn is that discomfort and pain as subjective experiences aren't reliable indicators of the seriousness of your situation ..

all this occured to me when you @Constance wrote about Kasper Hauser, one of the stories you linked talked about a wild boy sticking his hand into boiling water to retrieve an egg without flinching ...

On pain:
I was born and brought up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. I was struck by the relation tribespeople had to pain. Don't really know how to write about it but...
Binding emotion with experience (lacking a concept of a division between emotional and experiential pain), self-chopping off fingers to mourn or express child loss. Acceptance of it. Something to be experienced rather than avoided. A right of passage. no empathy with animal suffering.
Personally, when I began to explore the pain inflicted by my dentist, rather than dread it, it ceased to disturb me.

 

[smcder]

@smcder I often feel like an alien. Perhaps that is helpful in being a good groker.

@Constance
A perspective of outside the world is 'limited by imagination' but unapproachable to experience or perspective itself, in my view.
As soon as one limits Being to beingintheworld (which is a noble pursuit nonetheless), it becomes exclusively Being of and part of worldly things. It becomes ordinary (in a wider sense), in that it becomes part of a world that need not have certain Beings. Consequently, such an approach merely sidesteps cartesial duality. With my limited view, B&T seems deeply anti-theistic which is fascinating... another striking contradiction between MH's writing and persona perhaps.

Tasty questions... I don't know. I think about these things much of the time.

B&T seems deeply anti-theistic which is fascinating... another striking contradiction between MH's writing and persona perhaps.

Say more?

Holy Atheism: The Puzzle of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” | The New Oxonian

The author argues that H was working on very specific problems with a level of despair such that paradox, aphorism and obscurity are the only tools to adequately express their intractability. The author compares this to the negative (apophatic) theology of Gregory of Nyssa, Catherine of Sienna and Meister Eckhart.

The "Letter on Humanism" proposed to locate modernity's ills in history - his solution was the humanism of the Western philosophical tradition.

humanism “lies at the root of the reification, technologization, and secularization characteristic of the modern world"

humanism is a philosophy which defines man either:

1. in terms of a universal essence as a rational animal of voluntary action
or
2. in terms of the denial of an essence: existentialism as a pure form of humanism through choice and action

Heidegger says that man's essence has been misconstrued:

“Man as a rational animal”

predetermines the nature of man at a metaphysical level and shuts off discussion of the relationship between Being and being human, it determines the essence of man "downward" choosing a definition that equates science and reason with the sufficient definition/essence of humanity.

umanism as we understand the term can not provide an understanding of throwness, does not provide an “analytic” that can help us to understand authenticity, mortality, responsibility and provides no escape from the “vulgarity of calculation” or a sense of the temporality of existence.

That (my summary of the article to this point) then is followed by this sentence:

This leads to the question of God and the matter of Heidegger’s atheism.

Tasty, indeed!