Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Maybe this discussion wasn't a complete waste of time after all ... LOL.
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 5
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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Burnt State
Paranormal Adept
Our technology has changed us but it appears to be something that invites itself. So much of invention is chance, dumb luck, or without any forethought to know what it will lead to. In this way the sticks, wheels, gears, computer chips and nano-bots all call each other forward in succession. And as much as the tool, be it hammer, needle, axe, or paintbrush, may appear to be a fluid extension of the body engaged in acts of creation or lawnmowing mundanity, the devices remain indifferent to we emotional bio bags.
With our tech we recklessly change and alter our trajectory as if operating under remote control. The legs are shackled and the arms swing the hammers in rhythmic repetition, a well oiled machine that transformative chain gang. We passively surrender ourselves to the surveillance camera. We invite the machines to monitor us closely and they direct us to the next task. Millions of hands clicking the mouse and swiping the screens on demand. We are on command.
Dewdney said our destiny was to create Artificial Intelligence, to give birth to a new form. Perhaps we evolved humans are just an interim organic feature, until some new silicon creature, fueled by primate indifference, rises up out of the morass of civilization to take its rightful place in the patterned matrix of consciousness. I wonder, if in time, it will master time and space and eventually come to resemble the technology we call the UFO? I bet it will come back to visit us in the past to encourage us to accelerate our next technological discovery.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
It sure does seem to be headed in that direction, and it reminds me of at least a couple of sci-fi plots to that effect. A scene from one of my favorite series Babylon 5 ( now deserving of classic status IMO ):
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It's probably the only one available online, except in the online version of the Collected Poems, which I linked in one of the earlier parts of this thread. Would you like me to link that source again?
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Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
If I read it right, not made to bear the wont of is why I don't want them taking any of my body parts - I can't really remember how it used to be before the illness, how it felt - or honestly if it is actually worse - you get into a way of being in the body gradually, with sharp pain of course there's a quick adjustment but when sharp, occasional pain, though unpredictable is a normal part of things ... then you get into that as a way of being too.
That seems to be part of the flexibility of consciousness that Catherine Marabou writes about. It also seems to me to verify the extent to which consciousness can be said to be located in the body as well as in itself as 'mind'. While we live in an organically embodied state our consciousness is to a great extent integrated with/in our bodies. Yet we are also capable while embodied of experiences in which the sense of embodiment falls away (in OBEs, NDEs, deep meditation). Those are evidently some of the experiences that need to be investigated and understood before we can understand the layered nature of consciousness and what it means, signifies, about what we are.
About that statement "that which a being is made to bear it is not made to bear the want of," it seems to have been intended to go in both directions of our being, toward the materiality of our bodies and the spirituality expressed throughout our recorded history (and visible in prehistorical cultures we study in archaeology). This statement was cited in some lectures by Sherman Paul at the University of Iowa in his courses in American Criticism and Culture. As I recall (this was years ago) he foregrounded two prominent perspectives in historical American culture, one marked by the prevalence of what he referred to as 'organicism' expressed in American literature {Whitman would be a good example} and the other expressed in the spiritually oriented practices of early alternative communities that sprang up in many places in the 19th century in this country. The latter were influenced by the thought of Emerson and his group in Concord. What I think Sherman was getting at with the citation to 'that which a being is not made to bear the want of' concerned both bodily {physical} and mental/spiritual needs of the human being, needs not met [and indeed forgotten] in the directions in which American society and culture were heading during the 19th c. As Thoreau expressed it, "things are in the saddle and ride mankind."
Those figures in popular culture seem to me to express the sense of the inherent needs of human beings and a hopeful belief that that which is 'human' will survive technological adaptation.
I think Heidegger hoped we could learn to use technology intelligently -- to enhance the well-being of the living, including our own life -- but that in the end he doubted that we would do so given the organized pressure of the powerful economic structures and interests exploiting technology as a means of control. Part of the problem is our adaptability, the ease with which we 'get used to changing situations'. The other part is the prevalence of calculative thinking trickled down in the modern period in which most humans live "in the forgetfulness of being" -- i.e., forgetfulness of the nature of being as we are capable of experiencing it, and thus gradually losing our natural access to the question of what Being is as a whole.
Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto was originally written in the 80s and rewritten in the version she published in a more recent book. It was never a manifesto on behalf of cyborgs [more recently 'digital AI constructions' in common usage] in the sense that she attempted to speak for them or from their perspective. What she wrote in the original version needs to be understood in the context of Feminist Studies {subsequently referred to in academia as Womens' Studies}, as does the second version. In both she writes predominantly for feminists, a category much more diverse than people in general recognize, and in the midst of numerous disagreements concerning how feminist thinking should proceed. SEP has a very good article on developments in 'feminist' thought at this link:
Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Btw, that article is immensely instructive concerning the development of feminism vis a vis postmodernist ideas characterizing cultural studies in America and elsewhere beginning in the mid-20th century.
At the time Haraway wrote the "Cyborg Manifesto" she was also influenced by the few books (by Wiener and Shannon) generating what came to be called Cybernetics. She seems to have thought at that time that the impending cybernetic revolution could provide another, more radical, more complete escape for women from the historically sedimented patriarchal thinking that disadvantaged women in most all societies up to the present (the present of the 80s). One thing feminist studies accomplished beyond advancing the study of women's situations in human history and providing directions for 'liberation thinking' for women was to lead the way to cultural criticism in even broader contexts (racism, colonialism, genderism, classism, etc.) Haraway's first cyborg manifesto was, in my opinion and the opinion of many others, a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Kind of like 'it's hard to be human, esp a female human, so stop being human as soon as possible'.
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Here's the link to it:
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2
I think we should read it and take up further discussion of it with Pharoah if he is interested and willing.
Don't worry about the Stevens poem. His poetry has to be read again and again, and in great quantities, to grok what he's doing and saying in it.
Which is the Varela paper you linked in part 2?
There's a book on Stevens and Whitman that is in my yet-to-read stack(s). If I read it while we and this thread are still extant, I'll share the essence of it.
Here is the post by @Soupie that I thought we might take off from in our current discussion, embedded in a discussion with you:
smcder said:↑
1. Did you not expect something like this? I may be missing something but it seems like that's the way it would work. Cochlear implants and implants for vision, I think using sonar sound similar to me?
2. It surprised me that the effect of relieving phantom pain was "unexpected" for the researchers?
SOUPIE: No, I do expect this. And yes, I believe researchers have now been able to create artificial organs that generate stimuli that the body (?) uses to produce (?) qualia.
The rest of Soupie's post:
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2
Note to Soupie: The vibrations around his waist were "a qualitative feel." He did not 'produce' them or the qualia by virtue of which he felt them. We're saturated with qualia in our embodied experience in the world and they all inform our thinking.
Getting to the point that I think we should foreground:
Steve a few posts later: “How is the pencil example different, fundamentally from the artificial arm example? Both take some kind of ultimately physical input and in the end you have an experience.
Do the experiment - pick up a pencil and run it along some different surfaces ... you should be able to switch back and forth between feeling it 1) at the tip of the pencil, as if it were part of your hand and 2) where your hand and the pencil touch."
smcder,Oct 14, 2014Report
#1365 1365 in part 2
smcder said:↑
1. Did you not expect something like this? I may be missing something but it seems like that's the way it would work. Cochlear implants and implants for vision, I think using sonar sound similar to me?
2. It surprised me that the effect of relieving phantom pain was "unexpected" for the researchers?
SOUPIE: No, I do expect this. And yes, I believe researchers have now been able to create artificial organs that generate stimuli that the body (?) uses to produce (?) qualia.
The rest of Soupie's post:
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2
Note to Soupie: The vibrations around his waist were "a qualitative feel." He did not 'produce' them or the qualia by virtue of which he felt them. We're saturated with qualia in our embodied experience in the world and they all inform our thinking.
Getting to the point that I think we should foreground:
Steve a few posts later: “How is the pencil example different, fundamentally from the artificial arm example? Both take some kind of ultimately physical input and in the end you have an experience.
Do the experiment - pick up a pencil and run it along some different surfaces ... you should be able to switch back and forth between feeling it 1) at the tip of the pencil, as if it were part of your hand and 2) where your hand and the pencil touch."
smcder,Oct 14, 2014Report
#1365 1365 in part 2
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Randall
J. Randall Murphy
You seem to be confusing me with a subjective idealist.
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Randall
J. Randall Murphy
What are we to make of a statement like:
- Embodied vs. disembodied? If not. Then what does it mean?
- How exactly does qualia "inform" our thinking?
- Can qualia not be a component of thinking?
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smcder
Guest
I'm not happy with any of the interpretations Ive found - all seem to claim him for there purposes.
Yes, I've read it out loud and recorded it - I remember you said he would walk out the rhythm, so Ive tried that to see if I could get the rhythm internalized.
There's a collected poems and a biography in our library ... I didn't have time to go down and pull them today - back on Tues.
I'll have to find the Varela article.
Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
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smcder
Guest
leet? please translate
S
smcder
Guest
Sorry, Velmans - not Varela, my bad -
ARCHIVE: phil-mind, cross-references: phil-epist, cog-psy, psy-phys
CONSCIOUSNESS, BRAIN AND THE PHYSICAL WORLD
Max Velmans
Dualist and Reductionist theories of mind disagree about whether or not consciousness can be reduced to a state of or function of the brain. They assume, however, that the contents of consciousness are separate from the external physical world as-perceived. According to the present paper this assumption has no foundation either in everyday experience or in science. Drawing on evidence for perceptual projection in both interoceptive and exteroceptive sense modalities, the case is made that the physical world as-perceived is a construct of perceptual processing and, therefore, part of the contents of consciousness. A finding which requires a Reflexive rather than a Dualist or Reductionist model of how consciousness relates to the brain and the physical world. The physical world as-perceived may, in turn be thought of as a biologically useful model of the world as described by physics. Redrawing the boundaries of consciousness to include the physical world as-perceived undermines the conventional separation of the 'mental' from the physical', and with it the very foundation of the Dualist-Reductionist debate. The alternative Reflexive model departs radically from current conventions, with consequences for many aspects of consciousness theory and research. Some of the consequences which bear on the internal consistency and intuitive plausibility of the model are explored, e.g. the causal sequence in perception, representationalism, a suggested resolution of the Realism versus Idealism debate, and the way manifest differences between physical events as-perceived and other conscious events (images, dreams, etc.) are to be construed.
In the present paper I wish to challenge some of our most deeply-rooted assumptions about what consciousness is, by re-examining how consciousness, the human brain, and the surrounding physical world relate to each other.
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smcder
Guest
Reference/support site for Consciousness and the Paranormal
consciousness & the paranormal
I've started adding links from the discussion here.
consciousness & the paranormal
I've started adding links from the discussion here.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
According to this page: Philosophy
Reflexivity takes for granted the existence of these phenomena, but offers only limited explanation for their processes. Reflexivity offers no explanation for the “hard part”, that is, how a material process creates a non-material, “experience, feeling or sensation”.
Instead we have:
"... the Reflexive model states that external events as-perceived are "projected" by the brain to the judged location of the initiating stimulus."
Such "projections" are of course the result of the way our visual processing system maps the stimulus onto consciousness, particularly that part of consciousness that reflexivity offers no explanation for. Consequently this line of inquiry appears on first inspection to be a dead end.
"The physical world as-perceived is a construct of perceptual processing and, therefore, part of the contents of consciousness. A finding which requires a Reflexive rather than a Dualist or Reductionist model of how consciousness relates to the brain and the physical world."
Excellent. This seems to be the right paper at the right time to bring forward at this point in the discussion. I'll read it this afternoon.
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