Here is an interesting video about life, consciousness, beliefs, models of reality, but, most of all, the concept of anatta -- or no self. Some of you might disagree with Leo and some of you might agree with the gist but find that he did not convey this "truth" as best as it could be conveyed. Nevertheless, he is not making this up. There is actually something along these lines to be realised in our field of awareness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsyplaii9p4

One of the subjects he talks about is free will -- or the notion that this is an illusion -- which is covered in the literature of Benedict Spinoza, Bertrand Russell; and Peter Cave. Sam Harris has also published a thesis on it. We have also discussed free will extensively here for anyone who is interested:

http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=15086

The no-self concept, by the way, is covered in detail in a recent book by the neuroscientist Sam Harris called "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion." Harris puts it more eloquently and mentions a lot more. (I really recommend that you get the book.) Meditation is included to help one realise that the self -- as an observer hiding behind the eyes -- does not exist. But Leo also has something to say about this:

http://www.actualized.org/articles/how-to-become-enlightened

I'd say dreams, on reflection, are enough to realise that our waking identities are fictions seen as one can be someone else and even have different memories in dreams (and it all seems to make perfect sense at the time). Padmasambhava spoke of an underlying pristine awareness (pure consciousness) that exists before the self fiction. This is one area where studying the brain can tell us nothing and where meditation can be used as a scientific tool for the exploration of the nature of mind and its underlying consciousness. I've already mentioned something along these lines here which somewhat pertains to the practice of lucid dreaming:

http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16442

Yes, this is consciousness revisited in a different way. Say what you think regarding the mystery of consciousness, philosophy of mind, theory of mind, beliefs about life and death, Buddhism, and what the Buddha actually said. Mention if you have had interesting experiences with meditations (it doesn't have to be anatta.)

Here is an interesting thread authored by deschainXIX that some of you might want to revive about the concept of souls and other versions of dualism:

http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=15420

Have fun! 8-)

I will follow the links later and come back. I just wanted to ask that if the self does not exist, then why do we see it?

There is an answer to that. The self, according to this view, is an illusion. This means that it is not an observer, but rather, just a mental concept that begets a sense of self. The self -- as an eternal soul riding the body -- does not exist.

But feel free to follow the links, and, if you feel like it, counterargue if it really makes no sense to you or is counterintuitive. But... do we really see the self? Describe it to me. What do you see? What does the self look like?

Ok, here is something that will spice things up. After much deliberation, I decided to practise mindfulness under the influence of cannabis. It's an idea for an experiment whereby attention is paid to the contents of consciousness from an unconventional mental perspective.

Remember, we are not just lucid dreamers or oneironauts; we are mind explorers and thus we investigate all aspects of mental activity. We have adept tools at our disposal: meditation, dream yogas and mind-altering substances to stir the pot with. If we commit to our own ways of exploration, patiently undergoing trial-and-error, and are enthusiastic about this project, I believe we can acquire a better understanding of consciousness.

I am serious about this. We don't have to do as Leo says. He doesn't know everything and neither did Siddartha Gautama. (In fact, the Buddha gave to undertand that following him wasn't required, that one could find his own way by himself.) Perhaps there are other ways to become enlightened. There is also a good chance that there is no such thing as permanent enlightenment in our present human condition. It also seems to me that the pursuit of getting a glimpse of what may be the substratum of conscious experience is an egoistic one from the start. (This doesn't mean, however, that we won't be able to lose our egos later.)

The idea of practising mindfulness whilst stoned revolves around the possibility that altering the state of my consciousness will enable me to easily reduce the familiarity of my mind to a degree conducive to dissociation from its conceptions, bringing about the corollary of nitid contemplation of the psyche's inherent phenomenalism.

If the kif-induced state doesn't help me to attain an indifferent view of my own mind, I may at least be able to notice unusual conceptions -- this should be the height of the buzz as there will be a marked difference in perception that I will be aware of. Well, I have certain predictions for how I will feel. Notice how this is an imagined future state of consciousness and in some ways a desired one too. I haven't taken drugs in a while, especially not as some potential shortcuts to altered states of consciousness. With drugs, it is always a gamble. All I have right now are memories of drug-addled highs, some lows, lucid abstractions, and interesting epiphanic moments.

I guess my predictions here are more hopeful than theoretical. I need to move on to the practical side of things. Try out this method. I recall from my previous encounters with marijuana that sensations tend to be heightened during the buzz and this may help to emphasise the contrast with anatta (if stumbled upon) and even prolong such epiphany -- which in sobriety tends to be elusive and extremely ephemeral. I want to be able to "stare" at the absence of self. I may not agree with Leo entirely -- especially on the time it takes to realise his "shocking truth" -- but he is right about one thing: Anatta lies at the surface; its patency so blatantly before us and thence easily imperceptible (kinda paradoxical, right?) with our habit of constantly flirting with enticing mental illusions.

So I spark up, thinking, "hopefully, quod erat demonstrandum... amen." I can now bid farewell to my default waking awareness. :mrgreen:

To be continued...

I hold to the idea that the job of the philosopher (or any "thinker," really), is not just to sit and think but to adventure. To explore altered states of mind, to experience the world through lenses wholly unfamiliar, to put oneself in strange, even uncomfortable situations, and thusly observe. The state of mind of a person spending weeks prostrate in the darkness, vomiting and dry-heaving, is inevitably different from that of an Olympian whose mind swims with endorphins almost always. Someone who doesn't explore alien states of mind is, in my opinion, not flexing their philosophical muscle to the extent that it could be.

Marijuana can be an interesting substance to experiment with, especially for what we're discussing. I think one way to put it is that it compartmentalizes experience and existence. While high on cannabis, one aspect of the organic orchestra that composes my existence is easily accessible and separated from the others to be vivisected without the mire of sensory overload that is vanilla neurology obscuring the focus. (It's why the substance is the great plastic soother; pain is easily put into a box and locked in a closet, it is only a mere facet of the spinning orb of sensation.) The manifest principium individuationis of the psychophysiological duality. I have observed the absence of the ego while on it. I've also been smoking Calea Zacatechichi because marijuana, I've noticed, can take me too deep into the strata of consciousness to the point where I lose conscientious lucidity of myself; plus tetrahydrocannabinol can have a negative effect on lucid dreaming, while CZ has a positive one. The effects are similar, only much more mild (and it's legal!).

I'm actually going to argue for the existence of an ego (to keep things fresh), but I haven't had the time to properly read everything and compose my argument. :D

deschainXIX wrote: I hold to the idea that the job of the philosopher (or any "thinker," really), is not just to sit and think but to adventure. To explore altered states of mind, to experience the world through lenses wholly unfamiliar, to put oneself in strange, even uncomfortable situations, and thusly observe. The state of mind of a person spending weeks prostrate in the darkness, vomiting and dry-heaving, is inevitably different from that of an Olympian whose mind swims with endorphins almost always. Someone who doesn't explore alien states of mind is, in my opinion, not flexing their philosophical muscle to the extent that it could be.

This is exactly what I had in mind and I wholly concur. :ugeek:

deschainXIX wrote: Marijuana can be an interesting substance to experiment with, especially for what we're discussing. I think one way to put it is that it compartmentalizes experience and existence. While high on cannabis, one aspect of the organic orchestra that composes my existence is easily accessible and separated from the others to be vivisected without the mire of sensory overload that is vanilla neurology obscuring the focus.

Well, my "vanilla neurology" was caked in sweet chocolate and other strange flavours last night when I took what I now believe to have been a skunk strain of cannabis. The following is an edited version of the notes I took whilst stoned:

***"**The mind is ostensibly becoming so convoluted -- a kind of pollution, it seems -- that an unnatural propensity for confusion is perceived. I feel lost and slightly queasy. A little anxious. Why must I feel this way? I talk to my wife and ask her if she wants a cup of tea thinking that I need something, too, something that will keep me distracted from this mental pestilence that I believe should be kept hidden from my wife. I feel that if I tell her about this mild torture that she will somehow begin to experience it, too. I feel I should make that tea as quickly as I can. I think of tea as a life saver, the bringer of peace and tranquillity.

My wife knows I'm stoned and suggests that we watch Jesse V. Johnson's "The Package" starring Steve Austin and Dolph Lundgren. I tell her about my experiment. I sense that dialogue is a bit of an effort. Too many thoughts, the heart is racing, and I am slightly paranoid about what my wife is thinking. I need to sit down and rest. I deliberately recall past bad trips and lows in the hope of ameliorating my mental state. I remember being so stoned once that I freaked out at the sight of people performing body suspension with hooks at a pain party on Karl Pilkington's "The Moaning of Life." There was a man saying he is happy when he feels pain and I thought he was a right weirdo. Pilkington was the only normal individual there, a hero striving to understand a perceived mad world.

I realise the film is on and think that it might be interesting to see how I perceive it. I worry about how I come across to my wife. The ego is certainly magnified! If there is a permanent state of enlightenment, I am light-years away from it. Living in this condition is problematic. I watch the film and feel like a child observing events in an adult world where the protagonist (Steve Austin's character) is always right and not to be fucked with because he is an unbreakable tough guy and it is wise not to be on the wrong side of him. I'm unusually self-aware as I watch The Package, as opposed to being absorbed by the film and forgetting myself. My mind is too concerned about ego, it keeps asking what I would do in the situations depicted in the film. I briefly ruminate about these conceptions and make an attempt to transcend them.

Then it dawns on me. How can I be the thinker of my own thoughts, the author of these emergent excogitations, when my own mind asks me questions? Or I ask myself questions? But why? Then I realise that I am not really talking to myself; rather, this phenomenal mind is using input data from the external world to further its activity -- making associations which serve to preserve and expound upon my identity. It seems to be answering a question that should have never been asked: "Who am I?" So it creates and expands an intricate narrative in order to answer the mental non sequitur.

The mind has authored me and not the other way around. It builds me. I realise I am nothing until it answers questions based on events perceived in the objective world. It's strange. It asks, in a way, how is he supposed to act in that situation as though it should have a contingency plan. My identity, it seems, is a mental piece in the making, not a work of completion. This seems to me an unusual way of realising anatta. The sense of self has remained but I understand that it is not an eternal soul. The self exists only as an illusion, a fiction somehow concocted by cerebral data, a goliath of a knot in the field of pure consciousness. Now I understand the thought and therefore emergent concept of 'observer' as opposed to the thought of 'observed.' Hence the epiphenomenal sense of dichotomy. I think if I shatter this dichotomous illusion I will annihilate the ego.

Suddenly, there is a mental pressure urging me to pay attention to the film. 'You're missing out!' it says. There is an overwhelming hedonic compulsion to follow the plot. The challenge to be mindful seems to be greater in this state. Or perhaps this state makes one realise that there is a challenge to surmount. I sip my tea and try to relax. I'm sweating a little. Body temperature has risen. Am I thinking too much again? My tension has diminished but my preoccupation with ego remains unusually prominent. It's clear to me that it's a problem. Ego. What a snag! My wife is in the room, self-image is everything. I don't want to freak her out. I don't want... and I want to transcend the sense of self. Now, that I have managed to relax, there is a tendency to pay attention to details which doesn't even seem to be undergirded by proper curiosity. Where is this coming from? Doesn't even feel like a proper urge. Does it come from a prior wish to focus more? Is this a delayed reaction. The concept of free will is more absurd than ever before. I am certainly not in control. If one wants to take baby steps in the practice of mindfulness, this is not the ideal state. I feel like a neophyte thrust upon the hardest level.

I want to be mindful but, strangely, a part of me clearly does not want to mind. It seems to avoid focus in the present moment, it gets bored quickly, novelty wears off fugaciously. It never keeps still, it wants to go places in the realm of imagination. It's self-absorbed. It's selfish. Its doctrines are egoism and hedonism. It complains that the past didn't go so well, that there is always something better in the future, and it always overlooks the present. I realise this side of me is augmented in this altered state and it is never satisfied. This aspect of my psyche, it is clear to me, is unsustainable and needs to be addressed. I will never have proper peace as long as this exists. Perhaps it's a good thing that this intransigent ego doesn't live for long. Simultaneously, I am aware of the concept of not desiring so much. I can imagine it. I see it as a blissful place where true peace and happiness are found. A place where I keep still because I see no reason to move. Free from desires -- the best kind of contentedness. An "I" that doesn't move? Still like a placid lake, beautiful and pristine? An "I" with no worries and desires? There is no such thing. And then I realise I am just like Tommy Wick in the theatre of this thing I call 'my mind.'"*

deschainXIX wrote: I've also been smoking Calea Zacatechichi because marijuana, I've noticed, can take me too deep into the strata of consciousness to the point where I lose conscientious lucidity of myself; plus tetrahydrocannabinol can have a negative effect on lucid dreaming, while CZ has a positive one. The effects are similar, only much more mild (and it's legal!).

I should have gone for this option! :lol:

deschainXIX wrote: I'm actually going to argue for the existence of an ego (to keep things fresh), but I haven't had the time to properly read everything and compose my argument. :D

Well, the ego does exist, no question, just not in the way that most people think. It is not distinct from the mind but part of it. It is an illusion, i.e. not what it seems. But there is definitely something that precedes the self fiction, a kind of baby awareness or pure consciousness which is devoid of all concepts. And it seems to have a tone. A tone of lightness, weightlessness and... bliss. :shock:

What interesting observations! The lack of free will is very noticeable, as the mechanization and causal compartmentalization of mental processes is somewhat easy to see; at least, that's the case for me. I find it more conducive to the object of mind-exploration to be separated from the corporeal world (and I only mean "external" by this word), so as to allow the internal mind to wander without preoccupation. Whatever stimuli that the mind perceives will be expanded to occupy nearly the totality of one's mental consideration.

I empathize with the gross influx of hedonic will that you suffered--on second thought, that is one aspect of cannabis. I think you can observe the absence of the ego, but it's far more difficult to transcend its sensuous demands ... in some ways, acknowledging its absence amplifies the desire. Calea Z has some of the same effects as far as disorientation; for your purposes, it's probably better to retreat from superficial considerations and to separate oneself from all external concerns like film and self-image.

"My identity, it seems, is a mental piece in the making, not a work of completion." This profundity (taken from my favorite paragraph of your psychological transcript) is precisely the thesis of my argument. Or, perhaps more concisely, "Time is what defines an ego."

I think the concept of the ego is not illusory per se but transient, which is to say that the typical human's idea of the self is indeed completely false. It is absolutely a concept, a mere generalized construction that encompasses all that is an individual organism's manifold and variably-manifested existence. All of the members that come together in an instant to compose the orchestra (I like referring to it with the word "orchestra" because it connotes a series of parts whose assembly produces an intangible, abstract, and liquid entity that, despite being difficult to define, certainly exists--a symphony, a self) last for only a moment; which is to say that I exist, but "I" did not exist one second ago. To be linguistically correct, one can say that "I" open the door, but one cannot say that "I" opened the door; the "symphony of ego" that was Me opening the door has already disassembled and reassembled to formulate a new Me by the time the door is open. And, obviously, the increment of time distinguishing separate existing egos is far more fastidious and minuscule than my absurd "one second"--but it is quantifiable. It's a value that would be extremely difficult to obtain, but we can surmise that it exists. This specific valuation of Chronos, this is wherein lies the existence of myself. That's my postulation.

This hypothetical segment of time, further, varies with each egotistical usurpation, so it would be impossible to isolate a singular ego, to take a snapshot in time to really observe it (perhaps this is why meditation and introspection never allows us to actually see the self).

An interesting (and troubling, if one were to be a nesgirlian fatalist) corollary to this assertion is that "I" thus am dead by the time I perceive of "I"'s existence. I am perpetually nonexistent. It takes time for my neurons to connect and perceive and observe my "self," to achieve introspection. And by the time this happens, there has been an alteration to my neurology which produces a new "self" and the "self" I am observing is nothing more than a stony epitaph, a ghostly silhouette of my true present existence... I am the Late Sam, not the Now Sam. Rather than listening to the London Symphony Orchestra in person, I'm listening to a dusty recording of them.

We must evolve from the classical meaning of self--that of an independent, indivisible entity residing within the body--to a kind of neo-egoism, in which we recognize the self as a collective, ephemeral flash of existence that has so little significance that we might as well say it does not exist.

Of course, Summerlander, your conclusions and mine are the same. I just find this more interesting than simply saying "The self does not exist." :mrgreen: By the way, I haven't watched the video yet so I have no idea what we're even supposed to be talking about, and I wrote this on a whim.

Mental models (at least in the waking state) usually act as interpreters of what the physical body detects in the world at large. This means that you never experience reality directly, you experience the mental fiction. (Buddhism is quite distinct from other religions in addressing this in practice.) What Leo up there is trying to get everyone to consider is the possibility that the self, or observer, is part of that fiction and that all that we are is manifest reality. (Although I suspect he is mostly a master of sophistry mingled with hypnotism, not everything Leo says should be rejected.)

Anatta is in fact very easy to experience. You can notice the absence of an observer in the very first instance of trying an exercise which is outlined in Sam Harris's "Waking Up." It's not something akin to a brief DMT or salvia high that will knock you off your feet. It is merely a mild epiphany where you feel qualia arising without the need of a receiver or observer -- in fact, none is found. (And one need not be implied just like a divine creator.)

What is hard, as you say, is transcending the ego's sensuous demands. The real battle is with Mara, the lord of illusions so to speak, the one who did all he could to distract a contemplative Buddha who admirably did not budge in the end. I think, however, that observing the truth of anatta can help one to pursue the path of enlightenment. We are talking about losing our egos here. We are talking about abandoning our desires including the will to win arguments on WOLD when we believe we're right! And this is an uncomfortable prospect for me right now.

You mentioned that "time is what defines an ego" and I swear something along these lines was posted by a member of obe4u.com some time ago now. I think his name was bluremi. He was certainly an enlightened person (and I mean it in the educated sense). I must have a look at his posts when I get the time. Like us he abnegated God and declared free will to be false.

I like the idea of the symphony of ego, but to me it is still a fiction that changes and rearranges itself as time passes -- not really who we are, just who we believe to be. Underneath all this mental malarkey, there is a ground of pristine awareness, something that can exist apart from conceptual reality. A kind of clear consciousness. This is our true nature which I have witnessed once, however ephemerally.

I don't have a theory for how consciousness emerged and evolved in this world, but I do have a hypothesis. Imagine that different types of organic mechanisms evolved and stumbled upon different flavours of primordial awareness. Then, these different flavours evolved complex mental models in accordance with their anatomy. The complex minds that evolved from a primordial awareness with a negative or intrinsically unpleasant tone denoted conscious creatures whose psychologies led them to behave erratically and often drove them to annihilation. I posit that human consciousness evolved from a primordial awareness of a blissful tone. This led to the generation of monstrous mental models and conceptions that required a sense of self by association, and an ego with attachments and desires to survive, to experience highs, and crave happiness in general. The happiness the ego seeks is a complex conceptual mutation -- or the concept of an unrealistic ideal against objectivity -- begotten by the intrinsic blissful tone of naked consciousness. What I'm proposing apart from the idea that hedonism -- as the conceptual doctrine adhered to by the ego -- drives us away from enlightenment, is that the self-indulgent happiness is an aberration, a distortion of the truth.

Your chronoscopic postulation (which may help us to penetrate the complex mental web and reach the pristine ground of all this existential being) could still be true, and indeed some types of meditation (usually of the 'know thyself' kind) urge practitioners to pay attention to thoughts coming and going, and to capture the very moment when they are about to flare up in your mind.

But if the self exists and is as elusive (and yet paradoxically obvious as a sense) as your postulation implies, what exactly does it look like? Are you postulating distinct observers that hide within immesurable increments of time that somehow beget the illusion of a continuous self? If we surmise that such time increments are quantifiable, we can also surmise that an elusive ego could be observed/captured in principle if not through meditation. What would one of those short-lived egos look or feel like? I only pose this question because all that seems to be experienced in the field of awareness are conceptions and nothing more. You'd think that by removing, or in the least seeing those conceptions for the illusions that they are, that we'd be left with a lucid observer to contemplate. But this is not what is found. What is found is an empty awareness devoid of identities and thus barren of aspirations or desires.

I could quote David Hume on Cartesian absurdities, but Leo would say I am wasting time with philosophy because it is also a mental narrative, a fiction. The "Truth" of anatta is right on the surface for all to see. We look at the movie and become absorbed by the plot, not realising the obviousness of the situation right before our eyes: It's just a projection of light on a screen...

Another useful analogy: We often pay attention to what the mirror reflects whilst overlooking the truth nature of its surface... and never seeing it without reflection.

Here is bluremi on the topic of free will, evolution, time, self and the universe:

"I just read several books on this topic, starting with Sam Harris's book you mentioned above.

To sum up my current understanding of free will, consciousness can be thought of as a series of systems working simultaneously.

The simplest creatures, such as insects and amoebae, are systems that react to stimuli using heuristics determined by their simple neurons. If you cut a cockroach's head off, it will continue to run around. It's just a series of electrical impulses moving the legs around, reacting to light/sound/texture, etc. Kind of like an organic robot.

Moving up the chain to larger animals and mammals, these creatures have much more complex brain systems. Their brains take all of the input from their sensory organs and use it to fashion an internal representation of the world. We have this basic system as well: the world we see looks nothing like we think it does. All the colors we imagine to exist are just different wavelengths of light: solid objects are not actually solid, we just perceive them to be because we can't see the spaces between atoms, or the radiation passing through them at higher wavelengths. Our brains create a world and then place us inside it, at a specific time ("now"). If you described the entire physical universe in mathematical and conceptual terms, there would be no way for you to describe the concept of the present moment. Time is a continuum, and the idea of "now" is an illusion created by our mental model. That's how we get the feeling of "existence" or "Presence". A self that exists is one that can experience the world and all it's suffering or pleasure, at a single point in time.

Humans randomly evolved one more complex layer above the already mentioned systems: our brains are able to abstract one level further, and we are able to form recursive concepts of ourselves. We have thoughts, but we can actually think about our thoughts. This third-level-abstraction is what allows us to form goals, and most importantly, it allows us to analyze the behavior of others and project goals onto them. We went from behavioral reading (that lion is hunting) to mind reading (that guy is lying to me because he wants X). These systems of abstraction can get incredibly complex, which proved to be a great evolutionary advantage. Think of poker and the limitless recursive loops our brains create (I know that he knows that I know that he wants me to think that...etc).

What we perceive as consciousness is the system that arose to represent our own "self" in our brains.

What does this have to do with free will? These systems are all part of the same larger system of organized complexity, and they loop into each other. Our brain has subconscious decision making abilities: that's where our thoughts and motivations come from. When they arise in our brain, they fall into the attention of our highest neural system, the self-referencing system, and in the act of perceiving them we ascribe them some personal agency. Our body gets bored, creates the thought "I'm getting up to do X", we become aware of the thought, and our "self-system" takes the credit for coming up with it, even though upon closer observation we have no idea where the thought came from.

You can think of us as having two minds: one is in the background, a complex system that processes all the input and comes up with solutions and thoughts and actions: the other is the foreground, our self-abstracting system of "self-awareness", which is aware of the thoughts only once they are fully formed. One invisibly does all the work, the other takes all the credit.

This means that free will is a nonsense concept. If you know the starting points of all the objects in a system, we can calculate their position at any point in time. The universe is one such system, and we are part of the universe. We can't escape causality, but our brains have evolved to mask it from us under the illusion of "self" (or the Ego, if you prefer).

This is very counterintuitive and hard to explain, so sorry for the block of text. This is a very important subject to me and I am still researching it.

When people reach meditative states deep enough to see through the illusion of the "self" or ego, the experience is of a uniformity of reality. Everything is connected, there is no separation between the body and another person, nor is there a boundary of air, of water, etc. The causal nature of reality becomes completely apparent. Your statement of "if a brain is a computer then all of nature is too" is completely accurate.

A computer is organized complexity. So is all organic life. The only difference between a computer and a brain is that the design of the former is bottom-up and the other is top-down, meaning a computer was designed from base components towards an end goal, and the top-down brain reached organized complexity through random mutation. There is no coherent organization principle at the micro-level in a brain, only at the macro-level."

If Leo is Protagoras, this guy is Aristotle. Sorry Leo, but when seeking the truth, to be without philosophy and science is to be without a compass. The argument from Plato's Cave with the caveat that the shadows cannot tell us anything about the true nature of reality is an argument from ignorance. :-P

What is meant by "distinct egos," in my postulation, separated by "increments of time" is that one singular snapshot of a single distinct ego would be the molecular composition of the entirety of your body at an instant in time. As soon as some molecule exits or enters your body (which happens all the time, of course) and your molecular composition is altered in any way, the old ego is dead and a new one is produced. Or maybe the level we should be looking at is smaller than the molecular and the atomic--it doesn't matter, the principle remains. My idea is that this value is so unimaginably minuscule (and also constantly varying) that it would be too difficult to quantify it, but I can assume that it exists, and it can be quantified, thus a self can be isolated. It can be argued that time, too, is a construct, so my argument is probably kaput. There are far more minute alterations to the atoms composing an individual body, things like electrons, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us that there is a limit to the exactitude we can measure "change" in a physical body.

I further reject my postulation because I am reconciled with end-all absolute "Everything is fiction." I like approaching this true abrogation of faith in Truth itself not from any ideological, Buddhistic, or Christian way but in the way of the order of Assassins, free thinkers par excellence, whose only thought is epitomized in the haunting maxim: "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."

I haven't read Sartre extensively, but this subject/object issue is discussed phenomenologically by him and his conclusions are similar: that there is not subject but yet another conceived object based on reflection back into the mind.

I mean, isn't the idea that everything is a construct (which is absolutely correct) produced by philosophy; meaning just love of wisdom? I know what Leo means by that, though; a lot of philosophical literature like Aristotelian syllogisms and the atomism of antiquity is so clearly just clever manufacturings of semantics, and they don't really mean anything objective. What we should do (and I know that Nietzsche asserted this too) is forget all of our unborn values that society projects--not in the sense of classical nihilism, but in a new kind of nihilism, a Sartrean nihilism in which we constantly accept the world to be an absurd construction produced by conscious objects--that we ourselves are nothing more than phenomenological objects constructed from the observer's conception--and as a result we are truly free. Free to pursue anatta, say. Or anarchism and mass murder... which is problematic. Our current society is a twisted model of all mankind could be had it not been laden with the deception of "morality," specifically Christianity.

I think all of this is perfectly apparent to people like us ... the problem is that we need to be able to be constantly aware of this principle of conception. Bluremi did a good job of explaining the illusion of free will in the context of the illusion of the self--I don't think I had made that connect yet, and fully understood how the two operate. It also throws light upon the "mystery" of the conscious/subconscious dichotomy; we are really just our subconsciousness and that which we consider "us," or our consciousness, is merely the portion of our mind that is self-referential, that is aware of the mind thinking and takes credit for those thoughts by constructing an abstract sense of self.

I used to assert like Bluremi does that free will is a non sequitur when one posits a universe framed in causality. But then one's opponent, arguing for the illusion and against reality, only has to adduce quantum spontaneity in evidencing the possibility of a non-causal universe. But, of course, even then we have no control over the random movement of electrons, over the virtual particles blinking in and out of existence seemingly unprompted... We still don't have control.

As is probably apparent, I'm a pretty infatuated Nietzschean and Hitchensian at the moment. Which is to say that my perspective is that the annihilation of the ego is the annihilation of life, of all existence. It implies a certain Christian ressentiment and hostility toward life and humanity itself. But perhaps that is the point--life is a petty, vicious thing, after all. Maybe we need not stoop to the level of life simply because we are living. Nietzsche wanted to revalue all mankind's fabricated, civilized values; what he failed to do was take it a step further and revalue all innate, biological values. Perhaps what we're talking about is a secular transcendence of life, which ultimately would lead to annihilation of society--a truly classical nihilism. Because even if you achieve anatta, you still have the problem of pleasure and suffering--the will to abnegate oneself is probably not as powerful as the will to resist torture. I feel like a natural centralization of mind would be restored the moment an intense pain or pleasure is experienced...

I see where you're coming from very clearly, Deschain. You certainly stand with Harris and the Hitch on this. Believe it or not, Sam Harris brings up your arguments and provides some intriguing veridical examples. He also has criticisms for and against Buddhism. It is also important to remember that one does not need to be a Buddhist in order to benefit from meditation. We don't even know if it's possible to become permanently enlightened -- but we do know that we can attain interesting mental states and that meditation benefits the brain.

Perhaps merely experiencing anatta once in a while; knowing free will is an illusion; and meditative introspection will help us to acquire more poise, to know thyself, and be more compassionate towards others (knowing it's not their fault if they don't really author their actions). Do not suppress feelings like anger, for instance, but notice how it arises in your mind, how it defines you at the time, and how thinking or remembering something pleasant can make the enmity vanished. Find out why you become angry. This self-transcendence will, in time, make it all easier and help you to have a more positive outlook.

I agree with everything you said, Deschain. But before we dismiss this as a viable path, perhaps we should remember that it's urging us to be prepared for what's to come -- and it's telling us it need not be torture and misery. Perhaps we should take a little from Buddhism and a little from Epicureanism. Enjoy life and have fun with the things you love, but remember not to become too attached. Wouldn't it be nice if we knew that our minds will still be at ease when the hedonic, self-indulgent fun is over? Wouldn't it be nice if we could stop and be still once in a while -- caught in the present moment where the past doesn't torment us and we are unconcerned about the future -- and appreciate the simpler things in life. What an attractive balance. I find that a life worth living. Strong is he who can find peace in all situations. According to Seneca, 'he who wants nothing challenges Jupiter, who himself wants nothing.'

I think such peace is attainable.

Certainly. I haven't read Waking Up, but I have the book. My post is not necessarily an opprobrium on meditation, but on too much of one thing. You're absolutely right we should take from Epicurus (especially his anti-teleological materialism) and from Buddhism (especially meditation). I'll adduce that other fine wisdom from Greek antiquity along with know thyself; that of Cleobus: Nihil nimis; nothing too much. I meditate regularly to abstract myself from my ego and to keep me lucid of myself and of the illusory nature of my conceptions. It's useful to be mindful, but it's also useful to have some raw, Dionysian abandon, some consumption and pleasure, like smoking cannabis. :)

Wow, very interesting!

Thank you, PurpulTeen Top! :-)

Often, a good idea will disunify the populace into the following categories: sensible users; abusers; antagonists; and critics (of all groups). There is value in what the Buddha prescribed, and perhaps where he was most exact was when he said, and I paraphrase, 'Following me is not a requisite,' and, 'Find your own way.' The latter couldn't be truer when we observe meditation aggravating certain pathologies; it's not for everybody! (Sam Harris is cautious when recommending meditation; he is in a position to be more precise apropos the application of meditative exercises than Siddartha Gautama could ever be.)

No self is found in the brain. It's no good to say, 'Oh, but, I prefer to think that there is one who is in charge, in control, independent of the brain because I can't stand the thought of no afterlife.' We must look at the evidence and anatta, so far, is quite apparent. One can verify this by experiencing the pristine awareness that precedes conceptions -- however ephemerally. But we are not required to contemplate anatta -- just like we don't need to bear in mind that free will is absurd -- 24/7 in order to find peace and freedom from the binding aggregates of existence. Like you, Deschain, I think flirtation with a range of pleasant experiences at our disposal is healthy. Cleobus' dictum is ostensibly unexcelled where such matters are concerned. I have used and toyed with marijuana quite recently (and other mind-altering substances in the fairly distant past) for pleasure and experimentation to slake my curiosity regarding this topic. Christopher Hitchens smoked and drank himself to an early grave but it worked for him -- that's how he functioned. Sam Harris was inspired by an MDMA high. Dawkins wants to try LSD before he dies. So fucking what? Each to their own! :mrgreen:

John Aubrey describes an instance where the great political philosopher Thomas Hobbes gave a poor and infirmed old man some money. At first we might be persuaded to warm to what might appear to be an altruistic Thomas Hobbes. But then we learn of his reply to Dr Jaspar Mayne when this one asked him if he'd still have been charitable if Christ had not commanded it so. 'Yes,' said Hobbes, 'I was in pain to consider the old man's miserable condition and now my alms, giving him some relief, doth also ease me.'

There is no selfless good deed. (As Joey said to Phoebe in Friends.) :-D

So I can't help but think that the Sri Lankan monk, with his holier-than-thou attitude, was somewhat of a morbid exhibitionist. Now pardon my Pilkintonian sense of humour if I ask you all now to imagine the Joker telling you that, after years of meditation, he realised it was all about the self. (Hence that permanent smile.) Meditation had the opposite effect of what is normally expected. He thought, 'Why seek happiness by being nice to others, sod empathy (cut the middle man), and focus only on "me".' (Hence where his psychosis stems from.)

'Let's put a smile on that face.' :twisted:

But if the ego does not exist, then why Leo suggests that we destroy it?

No need to answer, I am just talking to myself. Oh, wait a minute.. I do not exist! OK, please answer. :mrgreen:

The ego, or self, exists as a mental construct, a bundle of thoughts, an identity. This identity changes in dreams. In dreams we can be other people and have different memories. The self as a real observer independent of the mind -- or something like an eternal soul -- however, does not exist. It may feel like it is that way to you, but believe me, once you look for it in meditation, it vanishes; it's an illusion! What you are left with is an empty awareness (no conceptions). Leo is talking about eradicating the mental concept of self -- but I do think he is going about it the wrong way.

Read my 'Carpe Somnia Mundi' where I explain more. Look at the world around you arising in your perceptual field. Do it calmly and pay attention. After a while, ask who is aware. Observe the sights, sounds, and thoughts emerging spontaneously without being 'authored'. Thoughts don't need thinkers; thoughts just arise in experience -- that's what they are (what they feel like). Same as sights, sounds, taste and touch. It is just convoluted consciousness, a structured, conceptualised mind. Try to look at who's looking and you will realise you have no head, as it were -- the whole world just sits on your neck; you are reality (ex nihilo). You are an emptiness filled with the whole world -- no self to receive perceptions. The pristine awareness precedes the complex concept of self and will be the last thing to 'evaporate' when the brain dies. ;-)

I will read it, thanks.

When Leo said: "You do not exist", I became very confused, but I was excited in the same moment for some weird reason.

I may watch his next video about this subject.

Actually, what it sounds like is more of a practical solution to live a better life. Creating the notion that everything is irrelevant, unrelated, impersonal with yourself can truly help you. I am excited of this actually, but I would not say the same about the way Leo represents it. He represents it as a fact, which I can understand that it may sound more intriguing to other people. But I would appreciate and trust him even more if he was saying that it's a great practical solution that can give you the "freedom" you may have been looking in your whole life.

I'm going to sleep now and talk more about it after I read your thread, Summerlander and watch Leo's second video. The dude has some extraordinary equipment by the way! I don't think I have ever seen a greater video quality than his!! :shock:

Lol! I would argue that the Joker personified anatta, not egotism. He clearly had no regard for his own well-being--he didn't believe in anything, not even himself. "You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with."

The film's cynical conclusions are that nihilism is combatted with nihilism (the line of dialogue, "The thief, how did you catch him?" "We burned the forest down," is in parallel to Alfred's earlier line "Some men just want to watch the world burn.") But this isn't a film analysis forum! :mrgreen:

Great film.

Take a look at a Kamakura period (14th century) sculpture of Aizen-Myoo (also known as Ragaraja), a deity from the esoteric Vajrayana and commonly venerated in Japanese Buddhism. In Hinduism, Aizen-Myoo is a 'wisdom king' who inspires a lustful path to spiritual awakening. He represents a loving passion sublimated into the desire for enlightenment. His ferocious face, crowned by a lion's head, is surmounted by a thunderbolt which calms (does not eradicate) evil passions and guilty desires.

If the Joker were a real character, I would be tempted to say that he is the incarnation of Aizen-Myoo! :mrgreen:

But, yes, I see what you are saying about Alfred's nihilistic statements. If you want to challenge the criminal 'Buddha', you must become him. (Slightly pertinent to Seneca's quote.) In this sense, the Joker was certainly closer to enlightenment than Batman, who cared very much about his well-being, the preservation of his sanity, and the salvation of Gotham city. You could see how much the 'agent of chaos' riled the caped crusader when they met. :-)

To have order, one must care. Chaos does not require such concern.

Did you ever mention Christopher Hitchens, Summerlander?

Christopher Hitchens? He completely despised Buddhism. The Hitch was only 'Enlightened' in the same sense as his heroes of reason, such as Spinoza, Voltaire, Paine and Jefferson. Whiskey, tobacco, prose, poetry and contemplation of the cosmos was as close as the man ever got to the numinous. (Well, perhaps a little more of the 'spiritual' sort on his deathbed, once his endorphins and endogenous psychedelics kicked in big time.)

Nolan knows how to make an antagonist--you give the character a legitimate philosophy, one that's superior to the protagonist's, and people are terrified of him because what he says makes sense and it's uncomfortable to contemplate the implications. :lol:

I think Hitchens acknowledged the legitimacy of those sorts of experiences, but he was simply scrupulous and suspicious of them because they often fueled the credulity of weaker minds. These kinds of hermetic, superficially-divine explorations of the mind were dangerous to him, and he thought that they ultimately called for the annihilation of vanilla reason in favor of a more ego-centered one; he chose to remain in the world that everyone inhabits rather than turning inward and entering another.

deschainXIX wrote: Nolan knows how to make an antagonist--you give the character a legitimate philosophy, one that's superior to the protagonist's, and people are terrified of him because what he says makes sense and it's uncomfortable to contemplate the implications. :lol:

I must say that the Joker stole the show there. He was somewhat untouchable; charismatic; scary; quaint. Kudos to Heath Ledger, may the man rest in peace. 8-)

deschainXIX wrote: I think Hitchens acknowledged the legitimacy of those sorts of experiences, but he was simply scrupulous and suspicious of them because they often fueled the credulity of weaker minds. These kinds of hermetic, superficially-divine explorations of the mind were dangerous to him, and he thought that they ultimately called for the annihilation of vanilla reason in favor of a more ego-centered one; he chose to remain in the world that everyone inhabits rather than turning inward and entering another.

Well, whatever path we take, we all reach nirvana in the end. :-)

Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, stressed the suffering of human life: either we want something that we lack or we have got what we wanted -- either way, we suffer. If we run out of things to want -- with our egos (human default state) -- because we have it all, we quickly become bored.

There might also be the fear of losing everything. Schopenhauer would say it is better to be a pebble but you may disagree and state that we enjoy the activity of overcoming dissatisfactions -- as the saying goes, 'tis better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

Plato reports Socrates as saying that philosophizing is practising dying. :mrgreen:

Jim Carrey has realised the 'shocking truth':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIaY0l5qV0c&playnext=1&list=PLFBC667DB8EC9FF15

8-)

'I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the "I" that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void! I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness”, just observing and watching.'

• Eckhart Tolle

Beautiful and inspiring. Eckhart Tolle knows that the self is nothing but an identity construct of the conditioned mind -- a conception -- and that, beneath all conceptions exists a pristine awareness (pure consciousness). One can observe mental phenomena without bias, from a fresh perspective where even the observer-observed dichotomy dissolves. The self is a user-illusion and does not exist in the Cartesian sense. There is only being:

https://youtu.be/S83izXEsA58

I watched it. For some reason, Jim would be the last person that I could think of he would speak about things like that.

Well, Jim made that discovery and I'm happy for him. I also wouldn't take him for a death metaller, but, as it turns out, the actor is a fan of Cannibal Corpse -- a band who features in Pet Detective. You can see Jim headbanging to 'Hammer Smashed Face'. :mrgreen:

I like Jim. He's great! And I somehow feel that this is one comedy actor who's very unlikely to get depressed. He will always have meditation to fall back to. (Please do not 'recidivate' and make me look like a changeling, Mr Carrey! :-P)

I feel for Robin Williams; that was unfortunate, but I guess the man reached his 'nirvana' in the end. His problem was extreme and required an extreme solution. With his whole brain affected, the mind was a 'place' of torture; thus meditation was out of the question.

I genuinely never could have conceived of Jim Carrey talking so much sense!

And, I don’t know about Robin Williams. I feel compelled to believe that there are usually solutions to mental torments in which suicide is not a necessity. There were probably steps that could have been taken to alleviate and eventually reform his unbearable condition. Or maybe not. That Epicurean aphorism is important to remember, despite the seductive lure of recently-popularized Dylan Thomas poems: “One who is wise neither gives up living nor is afraid of not being alive.” If not living is truly the only answer, that should be an option--the question is whether or not the subject has enough faculty and presence of mind to make a proper judgement for himself. Should we start using Jack Kevorkian’s “Thanatron,” the self-euthanasia or assisted suicide device, especially since the baby boomers are going to start getting old and starting to seriously weigh down the economy with gross social security costs???

By the way, I’m glad you’re reading Letters to a Young Contrarian, Summerlander. I think that was the book that made me truly realize what a spectacular and exemplary mammal Hitchens really was. The possibility of pursuing journalism has entered my head as a result! :D

deschainXIX wrote: I genuinely never could have conceived of Jim Carrey talking so much sense!

Same..

deschainXIX wrote: I genuinely never could have conceived of Jim Carrey talking so much sense!

Great human being. I like him. 8-)

deschainXIX wrote: And, I don’t know about Robin Williams. I feel compelled to believe that there are usually solutions to mental torments in which suicide is not a necessity.

He had a particular type of Parkingson's which affected his entire cortex and rendered his mind a tortuous. His condition altered his behaviour and personality dramatically -- he became more erratic! I think he wasn't even thinking straight so meditation would have been impossible. His brain was rapidly deteriorating and there was nothing anybody could do much less the actor himself.

deschainXIX wrote: By the way, I’m glad you’re reading Letters to a Young Contrarian, Summerlander. I think that was the book that made me truly realize what a spectacular and exemplary mammal Hitchens really was. The possibility of pursuing journalism has entered my head as a result! :D

If you do become a journalist, I am sure you will be a great one -- especially if Hitchens is an inspiration. He was a remarkable human being, truly phenomenal! (Even if he didn't really come up with the phrase 'Created sick, ordered to be well' -- it turns out the originator was Sir Fulke Greville, an Elizabethan poet and baron who almost sailed with Sir Francis Drake and took part in the French Wars of Religion; one of his works was 'A Treatise of Religion' -- I checked it out -- it's quite dark and insightful!) :-)

Greville is mentioned in Letters to a Young Contrarian, by the way! I also liked the American socialist Eugene Debs who opposed the USA's involvement in WWI and was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917. Debs is the one who told his fans that, to quote Hitchens, 'he wouldn't lead them into a Promised Land even if he could, because if they were trusting enough to be led in, they would be trusting enough to be led back out again. He urged them, in other words, to do their own thinking.' Love it! Just brilliant! 8-)

I will eventually get round to expanding this topic. We will discuss what experts say about consciousness pretty soon. There are still some who entertain the idea that consciousness might survive physical death and that quantum entanglement could provide an afterlife. Hmmm. :mrgreen:

I was thinking that after-life is impossible to be followed by studies and logical theories. I thought that any attempt in going after it with the intention to prove would be in vain.

But, thinking just how many things people would have said it's impossible for them to be identified by physical means, the possibilities get higher on my mind.

Well, wait and see what I will post once I get my shit together. :mrgreen:

I would still say that, so far, evidence suggests that there is no afterlife. I would say that souls definitely don't exist. As for the idea that consciousness somehow survives the death of a body via quantum entanglement, well, it's still speculatory -- and the people who espouse it seem to be in love with the likes of Deepak Chopra. Others, who aren't so well educated, venerate figures like Christ as being sources of morality -- that one should know the Lord in order to be saved. To those I would remind them:

'Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.'

• Aristotle

Aristotle was very much concerned with ethics and if you do a little thinking by yourself you can pretty much figure out what will suit you as an individual and what is applicable to everyone as a collective. He'd already figured out the golden rule of not doing to others what you would not want them to do to you. This, I might add, centuries before Christ is purported to have come along. As a philosopher he was capable of coming up with rules of thumb far superior to the Bible's Ten Commandments. Anyway, you can derive whatever logic you want from it. Knowing thyself is a battle won in that you understand exactly where your behaviour is coming from. Mindfulness can help and it also entails the realisation of no-self, aka 'anatta'. 8-)

The ten commandments is the most linear thing I have ever read. Whoever wrote it, they were probably dying of boredom. :D

I’m sure you didn’t mean this, Summerlander, but to be clear I don’t think Hitchens ever claimed the quote to be his own. I believe the line in Letters is: “Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville’s unforgettable line, ‘Created sick--Commanded to be well.’” But, again, I know you probably don’t think he stole it. Lol!

America would be a very different place had Debs been elected president. Certainly there would never have been the absurd antics of the Red Scare. Maybe even no Cold War. He probably would have been the “Reagan” of the Left. By the way, it’s utter insanity that they’re replacing Andrew Hamilton on the $10 bill with a woman; the obvious choice is to remove Andrew Jackson on the $20, the man who literally instrumented the Trail of Tears and murdered a man over a bet! sigh America…

Yes, it’s clear that philosophy is always superior to any dogma that has been retrieved from humanity’s primordial darkness. Socrates designed an interpretation of religion that would inspire moral fortitude in his citizens, in order to ensure the longevity of his republic. So, I’m curious: could you (or would you) intelligently design a religion that would be more beneficent than having simply no religion--that is, philosophy? Everyone would blindly believe whatever doctrine you invent, made to believe it with childhood indoctrination (the same way people believe in a religion nowadays). Which is more important, the thriving longevity of society or truth? Of course, this is not how it is in reality--that would be a false dichotomy. In reality, we can have truth as well as happiness and social health.

Quantum mechanics just seems like a magic button people can press (without actually understanding quantum mechanics) to assert that we can't explain the inexplicable, thus anything is possible! Can someone explain to me why people think quantum entanglement proves a soul? Are they saying that the mind is a collective body--whose particles are entangled--that is inseparable and ergo indestructible? How scientific!

It's easy to have hindsight bias about humanity's various discoveries throughout the ages. Probably the discovery that the earth is round was just as mind-bending and seemingly incomprehensible as our own closed ("circular") universe. But from the very beginning people have been asserting that there are things that transcend the physical universe, and are "supernatural," and so far all of the evidence in this area has disproved the proposition.

deschainXIX wrote: I’m sure you didn’t mean this, Summerlander, but to be clear I don’t think Hitchens ever claimed the quote to be his own. I believe the line in Letters is: “Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville’s unforgettable line, ‘Created sick--Commanded to be well.’” But, again, I know you probably don’t think he stole it. Lol!

That's the line I was referring to! 8-) I know he never claimed ownership. It's just that I have heard him say that before and I've always thought it came from him for some reason. It could've done! Hitchens is great! (Unlike God!) :mrgreen:

America would be a very different place had Debs been elected president. Certainly there would never have been the absurd antics of the Red Scare. Maybe even no Cold War.

Still a Cold War, I reckon. Debs's socialism would have clashed with Stalinism and Castroism. Remember Trotsky and Orwell? Besides, countries like Angola, with all its riches, would have still attracted the USA, Russia, and China besides those neighbouring African countries.

Yes, it’s clear that philosophy is always superior to any dogma that has been retrieved from humanity’s primordial darkness. Socrates designed an interpretation of religion that would inspire moral fortitude in his citizens, in order to ensure the longevity of his republic.

Yep! :-)

So, I’m curious: could you (or would you) intelligently design a religion that would be more beneficent than having simply no religion--that is, philosophy? Everyone would blindly believe whatever doctrine you invent, made to believe it with childhood indoctrination (the same way people believe in a religion nowadays).

I think Sam Harris has already done this -- hypothetically, of course. The tenets of the new 'religion' would be science, mathematics, philosophy, and secular humanism.

Which is more important, the thriving longevity of society or truth? Of course, this is not how it is in reality--that would be a false dichotomy. In reality, we can have truth as well as happiness and social health.

Yeah, both. But if we couldn't have both... truth! ;-)

Quantum mechanics just seems like a magic button people can press (without actually understanding quantum mechanics) to assert that we can't explain the inexplicable, thus anything is possible! Can someone explain to me why people think quantum entanglement proves a soul? Are they saying that the mind is a collective body--whose particles are entangled--that is inseparable and ergo indestructible? How scientific!

You are on the right track but soon I will do a helluva post where an individual proposed the survival of consciousness through entanglement. He has clashed with Daniel Dennett and I must say that Dennett was right to shake his head. If you can guess who he is I will persuade nesgirl to give you a kiss. :mrgreen:

It's easy to have hindsight bias about humanity's various discoveries throughout the ages. Probably the discovery that the earth is round was just as mind-bending and seemingly incomprehensible as our own closed ("circular") universe. But from the very beginning people have been asserting that there are things that transcend the physical universe, and are "supernatural," and so far all of the evidence in this area has disproved the proposition.

Yeah, people are full of shit, innit? I'm sorry... I'm feeling euphoric... too much coffee I guess! :mrgreen:

I don't know. I think I would have to sacrifice the truth if it meant society would exist longer or would be happy. I don't think truth is necessarily absolute. But ignorance is not in fact bliss in reality.

I'd rather the truth, however cold it is served. Society is important but there are days when I think mankind is better off going extinct. I admit having a proclivity for cynicism; life itself often seems problematic and one can easily find oneself envying the pebble as did Arthur Schopenhauer in the 19th century. Will things improve? I don't know! What would global improvement look like? It's funny how we often refer to this hypothetical amelioration of the world as though humanity is nem con. But where Peter Cave would agree with Christopher Hitchens is that human mammals can find enjoyment and purpose in surmounting perceived struggles - an elation and sense of achievement that can never be experienced by a rock. (But then again, the rock hasn't got a care in the world.) Moving towards the topic of consciousness as promised before... Is there a hard problem of consciousness? :geek:

This is somewhat of a continuation of what we were dicussing in pages 3-6 of Buildit's 'Why I Hate Drugs':

http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=16311

David Chalmers vs Daniel Dennett:

In his book The Conscious Mind, Chalmers ostensibly demonstrates how physicalist approaches have so far failed to account for consciousness. According to him, despite cognitive problems being solved with standard functionalism, phenomenal ones remain because we haven't got a clue why feelings accompany the awareness of sensory information. (This is the hard problem of consciousness.) Although Chalmers seems to lead us towards panpsychism, he admits agnosticism on such claim. He would be more inclined to endorse a dual-aspect monist view of consciousness - where the mental and the physical are simply conveyed by the same substance. :ugeek:

By contrast, Daniel Dennett rejects the notion of a 'hard problem', asseverating that those who subscribe to it are allowing themselves to be taken by the illusion of consciousness. According to Dennett, qualia don't exist - they only seem like they do. He draws the computer analogy to point out that the mind is the software of the brain - 3D images cannot be found inside this one, only representations of them which scientists strive to identify. (Donald Hoffman focuses on such identifications for a formal theory of consciousness.) :idea:

I would agree with Dennett that 'philosophical zombies' are inconceivable for such concept begs the question: Why are we not zombies? - A question that Chalmers seems to ignore. In fact, Chalmers would say that if we can imagine such concept, then it must be possible in principle - a fallacy not unlike the Creationist claim that if God can be imagined then He must exist. (But let us not dismiss Chalmer's points as a whole... just yet!) Furthermore, Dennett asks, 'What sort of explanation for consciousness are we looking for if we are not satisfied with physicalist solutions?' :ugeek:

The Hard Problem of Consciousness (Chalmers, Dennett, & Hoffman) Total time: 2:21:53 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoZsAsgOSes

At 1:21:50, after Dennett's presentation, Stuart Hameroff comments: 'Regarding the "hard question" (What happens next?) - spike trains don't necessarily mediate consciousness; they are not necessarily the representations that are relevant to consciousness. It's probably more that processes related to consciousness occur in dendrites and soma - the result of that then trigger the axon to fire or not; so if you're looking at spike trains, you've already missed consciousness - it's already happened - so the answer to what happens next is, spike trains happen after consciousness.' To which Dennett replies, 'I don't think there is a shred of evidence for what you've just said.' Hameroff retorts, 'Well, EEG correlates with consciousness and comes from dendrites and soma - not from axon spikes; so if you believe that there is any neural correlates of consciousness, then what I said is correct.' :roll:

Some of Dennett's opponents have pointed out that the brain is bilaterally symmetrical and could hypothetically hold two Cartesian theatres, in which case, arguments against only one are inevitably flawed. Chalmers has also stated that Dennett has only produced a theory of reportability whilst ignoring subjectivity. Others have said that Dennett has merely picked a fight with a dead strawman (Cartesian materialism) and that no cognitive scientist or philosopher of mind today - in academic circles - adheres to such erroneous non-explanation. The critic might say that Dennett concedes, unbeknownst to him, that consciousness cannot really be explained by physical events in the following passage (and that it is he who has given up the search or perpetuates the mystery): 'Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all.' (Although I happen to think that this is a pretty reasonable statement.) :|

Chalmers and Nagel (Batman :mrgreen: ) accuse him of evading the enquiry by redefining consciousness in a way that does not acknowledge subjectivity. His book (which I've read), Consciousness Explained, has been derisively dubbed 'Consciousness Ignored' and 'Consciousness Explained Away'. The philosopher John Searle goes as far as saying that Dennett committed the error of claiming that consciousness does not exist - only the baffling illusion of a physical machine - when 'where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality.' Many who buy the hard problem of consciousness exposit on statements of awe and wonder such as this one by TH Huxley:

'How it is that any thing so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.'

Dennett and Harris: Friends at loggerheads

To me, the most straightforward way to answer the profound question, 'Who am I?' is by saying that I am the world aware; the universe that has found itself - or evolutionarily stumbled upon - an expression through one of its complex physical properties (the physical body/organism). And still our minds are but a narrow interpretation of the world at large because the brain can only detect so far. Another question emerges: How much is the universe aware of itself? And the mystery of awareness remains. (I must confess, I'm somewhat divided and justly agnostic between Dennett's and Chalmer's arguments and won't be surprised if in the not-so-distant future they're both found to have made mistakes.) If one does not like to answer the question of who is aware with a simple, but counterintuitive, 'no-one' (or like James Herbert's classic, Nobody True :mrgreen: ), then perhaps the best answer really is, 'the universe'. :)

Perhaps the Kantian concept of a noumenal perspective (seeing things as they really are) is forever unattainable and hence the reason why we can never be absolutely sure that Daniel Dennett is on the money when it comes to consciousness. Everything is interpreted and reconstructed in the brain - all we have is the phenomenal view - and for this reason, the most elusive and profound verities may forever remain beyond our cognisance. :shock:

I would fault Dennett for stating that consciousness cannot be referred to in terms of either being 'on' or 'off' because it is an illusion. Harris misunderstands his fellow materialist by explaining that consciousness is, after all, simply what it feels like - and sometimes it is clearly absent in us on retrospection. It's definitely 'off' in a rock; in humans it is undeniably interrelated with memory. Sam Harris would not dismiss Douglas Harding's account of a 'headless experience' as he himself has had encounters with anatta (no-self; identity falls away; the concept that an eternal self, or soul, does not exist). (See Richard Lang on www.headless.org.) :!:

Perhaps Dennett and Harris are really saying the same thing about consciousness but where they differ may be semantics. Consider this excerpt from Consciousness Explained:

'No part in the brain is the thinker that does the thinking or the feeler that does the feeling, and the whole brain appears to be no better a candidate for that very special role. This is a slippery topic. Do brains think? Do eyes see? Or do people see with their eyes and think with their brains? Is there a difference? Is this just a trivial point of "grammar" or does it reveal a major source of confusion? The idea that a self (or a person, or, for that matter, a soul) is distinct from a brain or a body is deeply rooted in our ways of speaking, and hence in our ways of thinking.'

Daniel Dennett also intuits in his book that many mistake their failure to imagine how an unconscious physical system could generate consciousness for an insight into necessity. (See philosopher Phil's argument on page 48.) Dennett's examples and analogies can be quite compelling but obviously not enough to convince everyone. I would say that Dennett has developed a strong theory for how the mental software emerges, but it still doesn't seem enough to explain subjectivity and the user illusion. (Also, computers are not conscious and they use (pardon the pun) external users. In saying this, the man who opposes him, the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, also comes short. Hameroff is strongly influenced by Roger Penrose in thinking that somehow quantum mechanics can explain consciousness (or a Penrose-Tonomian model for that matter) in combination with brain computation at other levels; the biological complexity rooted at the microcosm led him to speculate that it might be enough for the 'genie' to arise.

In his Skeptiko interview with Alex Tsakiris about whether DMT hallucinations provided evidence of consciousness existing outside the brain, Hameroff stated that OOBEs (we are very familiar with these 8-) ) and NDEs could well be evidence that consciousness leaves the body and that at death, it is possible that an individual consciousness or personality could be quantum entangled and somehow persists as fluctuations in the time scale of the universe. (Yes, he has a hard-on for Deepak Chopra. :lol: )

Moving on, this is a relevant excerpt from Waking up - A Guide to Spirituality without Religion which demonstrates where Sam Harris stands:

*'I do not agree with Descartes's dualism or with some of what Searle and Chalmers have said about the nature of consciousness, but I agree that its subjective reality is both primary and indisputable. This does not rule out the possibility that consciousness is, in fact, identical to certain brain processes.

'Again, I should say that some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland, just don't buy this. But I do not understand why. My not seeing how consciousness can possibly be an illusion entails my not understanding how they (or anyone else) can think that it might be one. I agree that we may be profoundly mistaken about consciousness - about how it arises, about its connection to the brain, about precisely what we are conscious of and when. But this is not the same as saying that consciousness itself may be illusory. The state of being completely confused about the nature of consciousness itself is itself a demonstration of consciousness.'*

Harris's statement speaks for itself. 8-)

Donald Hoffman, The Monist

The last presentation of 'The Hard Problem of Consciousness' debate is by Donald Hoffman at 1:23:00. He strikes me as a modern-day Neoplatonist as he proposes consciousness to be the source of everything! 'Everything is consciousness,' he says. According to Hoffman, consciousness collapses states into certainty; consciousness causes neurons (its symbols) and not the other way around - 'downward' causation as opposed to 'upward' causation. (Or is it the other way around? I'm confused now! :lol:)

This highly speculative view certainly does not explain consciousness. Hoffman tells us that we are unable to see the truth (the noumena of reality) because the representations of reality in our brain - which are reconstructions - are begotten by a biological system that evolved to know about fitness for survival (to distort reality into 'eye-candy' and 'symbols for danger') and not to accurately perceive truth. As we focus on what we need to see (illusions), our perception hides the complexities that are irrelevant. This distortion of reality allows us to formulate our hacks to survival without distraction. His theorem, which I'm not a fan of, is known as the interface theory. I'm not surprised that this cognitive scientist works with the Chopra Foundation!

Another mystery: Hagart is conscious of having been away after an embarassing faux pas and thinks that he should have kept his mouth shut, but, is he aware that he is free to speak his mind with the caveat that he must be prepared to face the consequences? Why is his first retrospective thought, 'I must think twice before I post,' instead of 'I must do my homework in order to hold defensible positions'? :mrgreen:

EDITED: Had typos, proofread it, had to make it clear. 8-) ps. Great post, Deschain. I will be replying to it soon and will also give you time to watch the video!

To determine whether humanity should continue to exist or not, I posit that one must quantify the gross experience of happiness of all humans over all of history as well as the gross experience of suffering, and then compare those numbers. If the latter is larger than the former (which I would bet my life that it is), then, you’re right, humanity should not exist. If we had some means of instantly and painlessly putting a cessation to human existence, would we take it? We know that death is nirvana, but life is too precious and beautiful and sensuous to not experience. We have to ask ourselves, how long would it take to balance out the “happiness” and “suffering” meter, or to actually reverse the spectrum so that more happiness has been experienced … and is this even possible? That’s a hard no, even if we can’t actually run this grand experiment of mathematical hedonism. But I wouldn’t dissolve our species, because it’s not up to me, and even if I thought that the gross suffering was greater than the gross happiness, I would still be violating the will of all humans.

A bigger question: should biology itself exist? Should organic matter exist? This obviously is even more impossible to determine than “should humanity exist?”, but it’s a hypothetical. To do this we quantify the suffering and happiness of all organisms from the moment of the advent of nervous systems, however these two experiences might manifest themselves. We find that life is definitionally a struggle, a constant war against the absolute Indifference of the universe. What is our conclusion, then? Well, if anything, that hedonic morality is the ultimate nihilism! :lol: This absurd little thought experiment demonstrates that there are things more important to happiness to us.

That's quite a behemoth of a post. I'll get around to watching the video as soon as possible, but until then I have a few things to say on the spot...

Even if philosophical zombies are possible, I think there’s no point in asking the question of whether or not they are. It gets us nowhere. If that’s genuine philosophy that should be taken seriously, then why don’t we go around babbling things at strangers like, “How do you know this rock isn’t conscious? You can’t prove that! How do you know all the cells in your body aren’t individual consciousnesses? Ooooh! Spooooky!” We must operate with a policy of pure empiricism: the way things seem to be. All else--noumena--is useless nonsense. It seems like when we analyze magnetic resonance images and electroencephalographs from your brain and my brain, they look about the same, functionally. So--I know you’re not a zombie, as much as I can know anything at all. Of course, you can go the route of “Well, then, no one knows anything,” and the epistemic fallacy card is a fair one to play and it’s something to talk about; it just doesn’t get us anywhere.

I totally agree with your definition of ego. We’re simply matter aware of matter. The other night I was watching The Theory of Everything, the masterful film chronicling Stephen Hawking’s life, and during the scene when Hawking visits the Queen (and admirably turns down the proffered knighthood--he’s not one to pander to Britain’s “monarchical fetish,” as Hitchens called it), he remarks to his wife as they observe their children approaching them from across the garden, “Look what we made.” What does that mean exactly? “They” made those children in the same way “they” made the saliva in their mouths and the mucus in their sinuses and the lymph circulating their bloodstream. Yet they take responsibility--personal responsibility; I found that intriguing. This usage of the idea of “self” is acceptable to me; it’s a scientific usage, simply differentiating an individual organism and all the matter that composes its body from the matter composing its environment. It’s a definition that says “You are responsible for everything the body (which is you) does, even things that are involuntary and subconscious.” The individuated body of matter to which I apply the conception “I” as a means of preserving it is the self here. (Uh oh… my grammar is getting dangerously dualistic!) It’s like the example Dennett provided in his book: the psychological study that revealed people had no problem swallowing the spit in their mouths, but to spit it into a glass and then drink it? Revulsive. This self-other line is interesting.

This might surprise you, but I kind of like some elements of Hoffman’s interface theory (thanks for giving me synoptic treatises on each guy, by the way--I’ll probably still watch the video, though). And note that I’m operating solely on your description of his thoughts. At first the idea that “Consciousness is everything” just sounds like another voodoo, panpsychist, Chopraesque adage vomited up by people who don’t have any real thoughts but still want to seem like they do. And perhaps he didn’t mean it in the way I interpret it, but look at it this way: What is everything? Everything is just a phenomenon that arises in our experience. And what are these objects that arise? They are what define consciousness. Like we said, consciousness doesn’t exist without something to observe. So, everything is a result of consciousness; everything is a result of our psychic constructions. This is a nuanced, interesting description of the phenom; but you’re right, it doesn’t explain consciousness in the slightest. He’s also right that the noumena are beyond our perception and comprehension. But he fails when he moves on to talk about this “distortion of reality.” He doesn’t seem to understand that observing is a product of biological systems only, a mechanism employed to keep life going. Biology doesn’t warp the process of observation--it is the sole proprietor and operator of the process. Whatever it makes of observation, that is what observation is. He falls into the seductive but elementary trap we were talking about: the nonsensical “What does the world really look like?” fallacy.

By the way, I found a few psilocybe cubensis while hiking after a rainstorm (I’m something of an amateur mycologist) and I might experiment with them and talk about my experience in “Why I hate drugs” soon--I seem dead-set to make that title seem as ironic as possible, lol. I might chicken out, though. Despite the relatively distinct and beautiful anatomy of cubensis, even with microscopic cellular analysis, psilocybe species have been mistaken for lethal amanitas. :D

deschainXIX wrote: To determine whether humanity should continue to exist or not, I posit that one must quantify the gross experience of happiness of all humans over all of history as well as the gross experience of suffering, and then compare those numbers. If the latter is larger than the former (which I would bet my life that it is), then, you’re right, humanity should not exist.

What if there is a way to improve the human condition to the point where the former is larger than the latter? ;-)

deschainXIX wrote: If we had some means of instantly and painlessly putting a cessation to human existence, would we take it? We know that death is nirvana, but life is too precious and beautiful and sensuous to not experience. We have to ask ourselves, how long would it take to balance out the “happiness” and “suffering” meter, or to actually reverse the spectrum so that more happiness has been experienced …

I think the power to instantly eliminate mankind shouldn't be in my hands. I'd probably say, 'Des, take this device away from me before I'm tempted to press the button!' I'm like Steve Buscemi's character in Armageddon, I should not be entrusted with saving human life. There is a possibility that, given such choice, a number of nihilistic thoughts would flare up in my mind. Example: an exhiliration at being unconstricted and not caring; freeing mankind from all suffering as well as the struggle for happiness; the awareness that nothing is going to matter post-annihilation counteracts the notion that I have no right to decide for everyone; the narcissistic feeling of being the bringer of oblivion who 'helps' his fellow Homo sapiens - even if the majority don't know or think that they need help; the real Bodhisattva who brings nirvana to everyone by delivering the mightiest coup de grace.

deschainXIX wrote: But I wouldn’t dissolve our species, because it’s not up to me, and even if I thought that the gross suffering was greater than the gross happiness, I would still be violating the will of all humans.

In that case, you may be morally superior to me by refusing to violate their wishes - even if you believe that such violation would be for the greater good. If I felt that way, I'd probably try to reason myself out of it by reading books by cynics - taking also into account Parfit's assertion that it is not irrational for humans to follow unhealthy desires. Finally, facing the evidentiary truth about mankind's precarious condition, I would think, 'If it's not up to me, who is it up to, then?' Who is responsible or qualified enough to make this decision. A god? A chaotically impersonal universe? Nobody? Is it responsibility or irresponsibility that warrants the excuse to destroy all life? Is it just unconscious forms of matter, such as an asteroid or comet, that reserve that 'right'? :geek:

The view that life, or the conscious perspective, is precious, has potential to be the subject of debate - and it is certainly not shared by everyone. Those who get tired of life and want out usually don't stick around to debate the topic and tend to keep their feelings a secret. The ones that seek help are most likely in possession of paradoxically conflicting minds. The instinct for survival wins out when they manage to shake off those suicidal tendencies. But we can hardly argue against the notion that conscious matter is troubled in an uncaring world where unconsciousness seems to rule. Sentient beings are plagued with the awareness of danger and pain, and are the weakened descendants of non-conscious dust and minerals - structures that felt nothing let alone the need to move to safety. (Safety wasn't even thought about and danger didn't exist.) You see how this view - which is no delusion, by the way - upturns the much intuitively accepted sacrosanctity of life? 8-)

deschainXIX wrote: A bigger question: should biology itself exist? Should organic matter exist?

It can certainly be argued that it's mostly a problem... to itself.

deschainXIX wrote: Even if philosophical zombies are possible, I think there’s no point in asking the question of whether or not they are. It gets us nowhere. If that’s genuine philosophy that should be taken seriously, then why don’t we go around babbling things at strangers like, “How do you know this rock isn’t conscious? You can’t prove that! How do you know all the cells in your body aren’t individual consciousnesses? Ooooh! Spooooky!” We must operate with a policy of pure empiricism: the way things seem to be. All else--noumena--is useless nonsense. It seems like when we analyze magnetic resonance images and electroencephalographs from your brain and my brain, they look about the same, functionally. So--I know you’re not a zombie, as much as I can know anything at all. Of course, you can go the route of “Well, then, no one knows anything,” and the epistemic fallacy card is a fair one to play and it’s something to talk about; it just doesn’t get us anywhere.

Point taken. Consciousness seems to correlate with brain activity - or so we surmise based on reportability. A rock produces no reports so we assume that consciousness does not reside there. But if a rock happens to have a mental life, how could we expect it to report it? It is a rock, it doesn't possess a mouth and vocal cords, therefore it can't speak. It doesn't even possess a brain capable of language and mnemonic potential! We also know that mental faculties can be expunged through cerebral damage or malfunction, so, if a rock has no brain, what are we to conclude?

The fact that we possess a neoencephalon and more nerve cells than a dog could explain why our canine friend is incapable or irony and satire despite its playful behaviour with humans as well as members of its species. There is clearly a difference which appears to be made by diverse arrangements of brain matter in mammals.

deschainXIX wrote: I totally agree with your definition of ego. We’re simply matter aware of matter. The other night I was watching The Theory of Everything, the masterful film chronicling Stephen Hawking’s life, and during the scene when Hawking visits the Queen (and admirably turns down the proffered knighthood--he’s not one to pander to Britain’s “monarchical fetish,” as Hitchens called it), he remarks to his wife as they observe their children approaching them from across the garden, “Look what we made.” What does that mean exactly? “They” made those children in the same way “they” made the saliva in their mouths and the mucus in their sinuses and the lymph circulating their bloodstream. Yet they take responsibility--personal responsibility; I found that intriguing. This usage of the idea of “self” is acceptable to me; it’s a scientific usage, simply differentiating an individual organism and all the matter that composes its body from the matter composing its environment. It’s a definition that says “You are responsible for everything the body (which is you) does, even things that are involuntary and subconscious.” The individuated body of matter to which I apply the conception “I” as a means of preserving it is the self here. (Uh oh… my grammar is getting dangerously dualistic!) It’s like the example Dennett provided in his book: the psychological study that revealed people had no problem swallowing the spit in their mouths, but to spit it into a glass and then drink it? Revulsive. This self-other line is interesting.

Yes, I remember Dennett pointing out in his book that we appeared to have evolved with a feeling that things outside ourselves should be suspect because they are alien - and it's funny how we disown our saliva if it crosses that rubicon. This self-other line, however, can vanish when we acquire altered states of consciousness - especially when, in meditation, we cease to identify with the mind's egoistic conceptions.

deschainXIX wrote: This might surprise you, but I kind of like some elements of Hoffman’s interface theory (thanks for giving me synoptic treatises on each guy, by the way--I’ll probably still watch the video, though).

Some of Hoffman's assumptions seem to make sense, but they are only valid if his charming, panpsychic theory can be verified. Is it even falsifiable? He already seems to pose obstacles that seem convenient and almost make you want to give up. Descartes's dualism failed to explain consciousness because it lacked an explanation for how the hypothetical soul that resides in the pineal gland is conscious. Hoffman's monism has the same problem: What is consciousness? How does it come about? Dennett's theory seems more plausible to me. :geek:

deschainXIX wrote: And note that I’m operating solely on your description of his thoughts. At first the idea that “Consciousness is everything” just sounds like another voodoo, panpsychist, Chopraesque adage vomited up by people who don’t have any real thoughts but still want to seem like they do.

I still feel that way about them. :mrgreen:

deschainXIX wrote: And perhaps he didn’t mean it in the way I interpret it, but look at it this way: What is everything? Everything is just a phenomenon that arises in our experience.

I refrain from adopting this view as it borders dangerously on solypsistic ground. My awareness of the world would cease with my death but you would be able to see me perish and witness the continuation of the universe. The objective world would still exist. Ironically, subjective-objective is a dualist view derived from my subjectivity, but, I have no choice because it's what seems evident to me. (And the brain in the vat is as useless as the philosophical zombie.)

deschainXIX wrote: And what are these objects that arise? They are what define consciousness. Like we said, consciousness doesn’t exist without something to observe. So, everything is a result of consciousness; everything is a result of our psychic constructions.

I urge caution here with reminders that dreams and hallucinations are illusions which are not directly based on observations of the real world. Perhaps monism is true but I would contend that the mental part is merely what seems, the illusion begotten, simultaneously, by complex physical mechanisms. It seems to me that the question of what matter or physical forces are is a different one. (But then again, it could hold the key to the riddle of consciousness.) It is true that the observer-observed dichotomy can vanish - that witnessing and witnessed are interdependent - but I would maintain that the observed, or more precisely, the source of this ostensibly dichotomous observation, exists - the nature of which we are still trying to discern. The source of the mystery is reality itself.

deschainXIX wrote: But he fails when he moves on to talk about this “distortion of reality.” He doesn’t seem to understand that observing is a product of biological systems only, a mechanism employed to keep life going.

I think he meant to say that our biological systems ignore much of the complexity found in reality because we primarily evolved to conceptualise percepts in our struggle to adapt to the environment. But don't quote me on this. We should revise Hoffman to be sure.

deschainXIX wrote: Biology doesn’t warp the process of observation--it is the sole proprietor and operator of the process. Whatever it makes of observation, that is what observation is. He falls into the seductive but elementary trap we were talking about: the nonsensical “What does the world really look like?” fallacy.

I agree. The world can look like many things depending on the perspective (sentient beings/conscious organisms). To ask, 'What does it really look like?' is a symptom of the failure to understand that perceptions of the world are merely interpretations of the data received by organisms - mental models are founded upon biological mechanisms. The view that the universe has an intrinsic appearance is indeed nonsensical. (Appearance to whom?) :lol:

deschainXIX wrote: By the way, I found a few psilocybe cubensis while hiking after a rainstorm (I’m something of an amateur mycologist) and I might experiment with them and talk about my experience in “Why I hate drugs” soon--I seem dead-set to make that title seem as ironic as possible, lol.

That should be interesting and hilarious! :lol: Make sure the shrooms are not poisonous, Mr mycologist! :-D

deschainXIX wrote: I might chicken out, though.

Don't. :mrgreen:

deschainXIX wrote: Despite the relatively distinct and beautiful anatomy of cubensis, even with microscopic cellular analysis, psilocybe species have been mistaken for lethal amanitas. :D

I trust your mycology and stand schooled on such matters. I am only familiar with the wonders that the real deal can do to my mind. :-D

Mexican magic-mushroom tea is the best! :mrgreen:

Oh, one other thing... :mrgreen:

'It is surely a sign of our intellectual progress that a discussion of consciousness no longer has to begin with a debate about its existence. To say that consciousness may only seem to exist is to admit its existence in full—for if things seem any way at all, that is consciousness. Even if I happen to be a brain in a vat at this moment—all my memories are false; all my perceptions are of a world that does not exist—the fact that I am having an experience is indisputable (to me, at least). This is all that is required for me (or any other conscious being) to fully establish the reality of consciousness. Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.'

• Sam Harris

It seems to me that Harris beats Dennett on consciousness, too. :lol:

Here is an interesting poem about self-transcendence--illustrating the reality that the world fills our void and that's all we are:

Boundless

Like the wind searching, lifting feathers round the sparrow's neck, lifting leaves in a wave across the bean field, I find no place where I can say, here my being ends.

• Colin Oliver

Summerlander wrote: What if there is a way to improve the human condition to the point where the former is larger than the latter?

I addressed that null possibility when I said: "...how long would it take to balance out the 'happiness' and 'suffering' meter, or to actually reverse the spectrum so that more happiness has been experienced … and is this even possible? That’s a hard no..." Of course, my pessimism is based on pure conjecture--I'm aware of the air underneath my feet when I make this leap--but it's my conclusion because the entire thought experiment is rather silly in the first place. :lol: It remains that mankind *should be *destroyed. This I agree with you on (yes, hello NSA--well at least there are some observers of this debate other than ourselves now, Summer). The only reason I would refrain from being the executor of our little coup de grâce is because of my existentialist sympathies:

"Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him." --Horace

If Horace was given the hypothetical dilemma we've constructed, he would limit the omnicide to only women. :D

Summerlander wrote: I think the power to instantly eliminate mankind shouldn't be in my hands. I'd probably say, 'Des, take this device away from me before I'm tempted to press the button!' I'm like Steve Buscemi's character in Armageddon, I should not be entrusted with saving human life. There is a possibility that, given such choice, a number of nihilistic thoughts would flare up in my mind. Example: an exhiliration at being unconstricted and not caring; freeing mankind from all suffering as well as the struggle for happiness; the awareness that nothing is going to matter post-annihilation counteracts the notion that I have no right to decide for everyone; the narcissistic feeling of being the bringer of oblivion who 'helps' his fellow Homo sapiens - even if the majority don't know or think that they need help; the real Bodhisattva who brings nirvana to everyone by delivering the mightiest coup de grace.

I think such internal conflict would happen even in people with no conscious nihilistic tendencies. Having such tangible and direct and consequential power--like having an omnicidal detonator in my palm--would probably make me shake so much I would press the button on a subconscious reflex. It would be impulsive, probably.

Summerlander wrote: 'If it's not up to me, who is it up to, then?'

Technically it's not up to anybody, yes. My "will is all that matters" notion is something I have synthetically constructed as a personal moral code; it is based upon my egotistical desire to be "great" and "morally divine," or even "transcendent" of my "animalistic impulses." On a rational level, I know it's nonsense. The problem with saying that it's not up to anybody, is that the principle should extend not only to grandiose, macroscopic moral dilemmas but to little things as well. How you influence the world, how you "should" influence the world, is not up to anybody, and certainly not yourself. Should an insane person have the right to commit suicide? How about to kill another person? What's the difference, really? If there is a difference, then why do I have the right to kill myself when I am insane?

Summerlander wrote: You see how this view - which is no delusion, by the way - upturns the much intuitively accepted sacrosanctity of life?

It's perfectly understandable that as living matter ourselves, we would have an innate perspective that life is good and nonlife is bad. But what's the difference between a moral statement like that (in that it is based upon some inherent nature) and a moral statement like "Rape is good because it more efficiently propagates life"? Saying life is good is saying that war is good, hatred and fear are good, things that are direct consequences of being alive. So it's all much more convoluted, self-contradicting, hypocritical and paradoxical than it seems.

Summerlander wrote: Point taken. Consciousness seems to correlate with brain activity - or so we surmise based on reportability. A rock produces no reports so we assume that consciousness does not reside there. But if a rock happens to have a mental life, how could we expect it to report it? It is a rock, it doesn't possess a mouth and vocal cords, therefore it can't speak. It doesn't even possess a brain capable of language and mnemonic potential! We also know that mental faculties can be expunged through cerebral damage or malfunction, so, if a rock has no brain, what are we to conclude?

The fact that we possess a neoencephalon and more nerve cells than a dog could explain why our canine friend is incapable or irony and satire despite its playful behaviour with humans as well as members of its species. There is clearly a difference which appears to be made by diverse arrangements of brain matter in mammals.

Exactly. Assume makes an ass our of u and me, but frankly we're just going to have to settle for being asses. But I think that this admission of total, noumenological epistemic poverty needs to be followed by an obligatory and boring caveat to preempt the idiotic screams of "Aha!" from the religious. Within our phenomenology, there is still truth and non-truth, because our phenomenology seems to be coherent and uniform and non-chaotic--for example, if I go to a library and get a science book and conduct the experiments that it describes, I will get the same results as the authors describe; but if I boil frog legs and mushrooms as described by some alchemist's journal from antiquity, it will not yield an elixir of immortality. Thus it seems that one book is legitimate and the other is not. We still have true and false, they're just demoted from the status of being absolute. There is a spectrum, and we can always improve our conception of "truth."

Summerlander wrote: Yes, I remember Dennett pointing out in his book that we appeared to have evolved with a feeling that things outside ourselves should be suspect because they are alien - and it's funny how we disown our saliva if it crosses that rubicon. This self-other line, however, can vanish when we acquire altered states of consciousness - especially when, in meditation, we cease to identify with the mind's egoistic conceptions.

The line certainly can be devolved and degraded, because it is a built up conception in the first place. Infants, of course, have no conception of self--they view themselves and their mother as the same body or organism (which is no illusion before the baby is born, philosophically--the baby is getting its nutrients from the mother, just like an organ within the human body; there is no line we can draw based upon the scientific interpretation of ego used by Hawking), and this illusion is gradually rent as maturity sets in. Often anxiety about being separated from one's own body that sets in when the mother and baby are separated is alleviated by the use of teddy bears or blankets (comfort objects) that the baby literally sees as a part of itself. It and the object it is attached to are the same body.

Summerlander wrote: Some of Hoffman's assumptions seem to make sense, but they are only valid if his charming, panpsychic theory can be verified. Is it even falsifiable? He already seems to pose obstacles that seem convenient and almost make you want to give up. Descartes's dualism failed to explain consciousness because it lacked an explanation for how the hypothetical soul that resides in the pineal gland is conscious. Hoffman's monism has the same problem: What is consciousness? How does it come about? Dennett's theory seems more plausible to me.

I think that Dennett’s and Hoffman’s views are reconcilable based upon my interpretation of his thought, which was mostly semantic and admittedly says nothing about the actual nature of consciousness. It is instead a commentary on the relationship of consciousness with the rest of the world.

Summerlander wrote: I refrain from adopting this view as it borders dangerously on solypsistic ground. My awareness of the world would cease with my death but you would be able to see me perish and witness the continuation of the universe. The objective world would still exist. Ironically, subjective-objective is a dualist view derived from my subjectivity, but, I have no choice because it's what seems evident to me. (And the brain in the vat is as useless as the philosophical zombie.)

With my new opinion on the limitations of knowledge and our inevitable shortcomings, I totally agree with you. It seems like that is going to be what happens, so that literally is what is going to happen. We can do no better than that. And yes, I see now that we have to disregard brain in the vat just as we have to for the philosophical zombie.

Summerlander wrote: I urge caution here with reminders that dreams and hallucinations are illusions which are not directly based on observations of the real world. Perhaps monism is true but I would contend that the mental part is merely what seems, the illusion begotten, simultaneously, by complex physical mechanisms. It seems to me that the question of what matter or physical forces are is a different one. (But then again, it could hold the key to the riddle of consciousness.) It is true that the observer-observed dichotomy can vanish - that witnessing and witnessed are interdependent - but I would maintain that the observed, or more precisely, the source of this ostensibly dichotomous observation, exists - the nature of which we are still trying to discern. The source of the mystery is reality itself.

Our observations of the real world are dreams, with lots of filters applied to prevent informational regress and sensory overload, in order to be a functioning organism. You’re right that the “objective object” (blah, blah, blah) seems to exist, so it does. It seems like dreams are illusions, so they are. But objects themselves are components of consciousness--our separation of hallucination from actual observation is based on solidity--so we say that those objects over there are dreams because they are transient and insolid and don’t make much sense, while these objects over here happen in the “real world” because they are solid and uniform and seem to comport themselves in a manner that is logical, IE that it poses a legitimate threat to the longevity of ourselves, so we treat those objects as if they have a different kind of gravity and importance than those that takes place in the dream world.

Summerlander wrote: I think he meant to say that our biological systems ignore much of the complexity found in reality because we primarily evolved to conceptualise percepts in our struggle to adapt to the environment. But don't quote me on this. We should revise Hoffman to be sure.

I'm aware that that is what he said (or at least that was my interpretation of how you described his argument). What I'm saying is that we don't "ignore" anything. There is no extraneous "complexity found" beyond our perception--because there is no one to find it there. Things that are not observed do not seem to be any way--and complexity is a conception.

Nice poem. The idea of world filling void as a definition of consciousness is why I think there is validity in the claim "Consciousness is everything." Without objects, we are void. There's nothing to latch onto for sensory nutrition, or observation, so there is no centralized computation, no orchestra of mind required to maintain its own existence--it does not exist.

The problem is that the syntax of the maxim is troubling. It could be interpreted to mean "The objects themselves are conscious," which would be an erroneous assumption. If one simply replaced the word "is" with an equals sign (=), it would be more digestible. :D

"Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him." --Horace

Tut-tut! What would feminists say about this? Someone like Andrea Dworkin (nesgirl's goddess) would have denounced this poet as an abomination spawned by a rapist - seen as he thanked his father for being who he was and no mention of his mother! :-D

Horace most likely believed in a chauvinistic code of honour whereby women were only required to preserve their virginities for the right knight in shining armour and only good for weaving and spinning (while he spun the yarn, pardon the pun)... and multi-tasking! :mrgreen:

Joking aside, Horace emphasises status preservation as a human trait which begets the idea of honour (in this case, false honour). The notion that helping people against their will is insulting or belittling them exists only in pontifical minds. Help bruises their egos - hence the confrontational replies: 'I didn't ask for help!' or, 'I don't need any help!' And it doesn't help if the would-be helper stresses that he was only trying to make things easier. Anyone who seeks repute is motivated by egotism and pride.

In Ancient Japan, for example, the Bushido code of the Samurai warrior insisted that if you lost your honour, the only way to save it was to commit hara-kiri or seppuku - ritual suicide by slicing your belly with a sword. This seems almost paradoxical to me. It's egotistically motivated as the goal is to grandiosely save face, and yet, it's self-destroying. Image is everything and the individual is very much enslaved by his compelling doctrine. Perhaps the very difficulty of being honourable is what is heroic. But as Ernest Hemingway says in Death in the Afternoon, 'Too much honor destroys a man quicker than too much of any other fine quality.'

The problem with saying that it's not up to anybody, is that the principle should extend not only to grandiose, macroscopic moral dilemmas but to little things as well. How you influence the world, how you "should" influence the world, is not up to anybody, and certainly not yourself. Should an insane person have the right to commit suicide? How about to kill another person? What's the difference, really? If there is a difference, then why do I have the right to kill myself when I am insane?

Well thought out and I wholly concur with your sentiments.

It's perfectly understandable that as living matter ourselves, we would have an innate perspective that life is good and nonlife is bad. But what's the difference between a moral statement like that (in that it is based upon some inherent nature) and a moral statement like "Rape is good because it more efficiently propagates life"? Saying life is good is saying that war is good, hatred and fear are good, things that are direct consequences of being alive. So it's all much more convoluted, self-contradicting, hypocritical and paradoxical than it seems.

I can't tell whether your statement is cynical, or realistic, or both, but I definitely see the logic behind it. Life can be viewed from so many angles... (And I'm going to spare you from the tempting but platitudinal wish-wash of phrasal apogees such as, '...but that's the beauty of it!' - if it's beautiful it should be apparent to all and I shouldn't have to be told.)

Often anxiety about being separated from one's own body that sets in when the mother and baby are separated is alleviated by the use of teddy bears or blankets (comfort objects) that the baby literally sees as a part of itself. It and the object it is attached to are the same body.

Yes. The conception of a curious extention. The brain, even at a fairly early stage, has the potential to define itself in many different ways. Language, of course, adds a different texture and expands the narrative of self. It's funny how, in becoming aware of itself as a conscious agent (besides the world), the brain needs to invent a perspective such as the self or observer. This perspective is, literally, mental. It has no physical reality save for the physical forces that must generate it as a phenomenon. But when you seriously try to see who is aware of conceptions, there is nothing but the realisation of being. We are merely pure consciousness in which all mental things potentially manifest.

The idea of world filling void as a definition of consciousness is why I think there is validity in the claim "Consciousness is everything." Without objects, we are void. There's nothing to latch onto for sensory nutrition, or observation, so there is no centralized computation, no orchestra of mind required to maintain its own existence--it does not exist.

The problem is that the syntax of the maxim is troubling. It could be interpreted to mean "The objects themselves are conscious," which would be an erroneous assumption. If one simply replaced the word "is" with an equals sign (=), it would be more digestible.

Definitely more digestible. If we just say that conscious is everything, we lose sight of distinctions such as life/death and conscious/unconscious. It would be a neo-animism devised to mitigate our frustration at the incomprehensibility of consciousness. (I find it as abject as Creationism and the 'God of the Gaps' put forth as solutions to the origin of the cosmos.)

You have to admit that the following exists: There is something that it is like to be. And then we must ask: How? (How does something that it is like to be arise in things that just are - in other words, How does non-conscious matter, arranged in certain ways, generate consciousness?) What produces that 'illuminating' gestalt?

Summerlander wrote: In Ancient Japan, for example, the Bushido code of the Samurai warrior insisted that if you lost your honour, the only way to save it was to commit hara-kiri or seppuku - ritual suicide by slicing your belly with a sword. This seems almost paradoxical to me. It's egotistically motivated as the goal is to grandiosely save face, and yet, it's self-destroying. Image is everything and the individual is very much enslaved by his compelling doctrine. Perhaps the very difficulty of being honourable is what is heroic. But as Ernest Hemingway says in Death in the Afternoon, 'Too much honor destroys a man quicker than too much of any other fine quality.'

True, honor cultures are pretty horrible. The antebellum American south was a hierarchical, quasi-medieval honor society (featuring the “might makes right” code), and simultaneously the epitome of social decadence. I admire the beauty and elegance of traditional Japanese culture, but its many undeniable stains have marred its past and present. No one can deny that those ideas about honor you mentioned (as well as many others, like submitting to a despotic Emperor, a militaristic authoritarianism, and a selfless religion) made the Empire of the Rising Sun possible. Their Shintoist worship of ancestors, and subsequent tendency to kill themselves for dishonoring them, could certainly be interpreted as a kind of egotism. An egotism at the level of the supernatural gene, anyway.

I loathe false virtues like honor and loyalty--they’re the virtues of a mobster, not a “noble person.” But isn’t doing injury to the egos of some people very similar to doing real injury to them? I don’t think it is, but to many people, this is the case. Some would even contest that it is worse than doing physical injury. “‘Tis but a flesh wound.” I’m thinking of that famous Poe line: “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.” Of course, I realize that a person who is more injured by defamation than by a broken arm is extremely dim-witted (you could even say insane, like the protagonist of The Cask of Amontillado)--but that’s not the point. It goes back to what I was talking about with burying the deceased and not setting people on fire because you know egos don’t exist. We have to be careful about violating illusions. Not the illusions themselves, mind, but the experience of having an illusion rent can be damaging.

Did you see those videos of Russian factory workers bathing in the milk before sending it off for consumption? I was nauseated watching it, but realistically it is not going to harm anyone. It’s a case of blissful ignorance; undoubtedly the milk is pasteurized after that and the consumer is not physically harmed. Consider, however, if you were to tell a delicate, senile old woman what had gone on in the milk and she has a heart attack! This is a hyperbolic comic I’ve just sketched, but it illustrates the principle.

I disagree that it is pontifical to observe the people who are genuinely more hurt by insult than injury. The people who actually are are the pontifical ones. I’m simply making an observation about what I’ve seen to other people. The less enlightened members of our species would kill before they were disrespected or dishonored.

Well! It didn’t take me long to drag us as far as possible away from the subject topic! :D

Summerlander wrote: Yes. The conception of a curious extention. The brain, even at a fairly early stage, has the potential to define itself in many different ways. Language, of course, adds a different texture and expands the narrative of self. It's funny how, in becoming aware of itself as a conscious agent (besides the world), the brain needs to invent a perspective such as the self or observer. This perspective is, literally, mental. It has no physical reality save for the physical forces that must generate it as a phenomenon. But when you seriously try to see who is aware of conceptions, there is nothing but the realisation of being. We are merely pure consciousness in which all mental things potentially manifest.

Recently I was listening to a podcast with Joseph Goldstein and he made an interesting observation about language. The conversation was about achieving anatta, and whether or not it requires momentum. Some assert that it does, that one must first spend a week on a retreat in some mystical mountains, meditating and simply breathing and observing oneself and one’s surroundings, before one truly can become selfless. Others think that with a mere daily 3-hour meditation, we can sort of renew our sense of selflessness without leaving the world and its office buildings and coffee pots and trundling cars behind. Goldstein points out a mantric trick that the English language can provide (and other languages too, no doubt) in order to preserve anatta. Rather than thinking in the active voice (“I feel pain”), we should think in the passive voice (“There is a feeling of pain”). The brain is very dynamic in its early stages, like you said, so it would be interesting to raise a child teaching them to speak and internalize a monologue of thought in the passive voice. Sam Harris is clearly against this sort of thing and he thinks that a child should be brought up naturally, with egotism and self-interest, first before making an psychonautical endeavours to annihilate oneself. And he’s probably right about that.

Summerlander wrote: (I find it as abject as Creationism and the 'God of the Gaps' put forth as solutions to the origin of the cosmos.)

That’s a good point. In fact, panpsychism can probably be viewed as even more abject and sinister than creationism. Imagine if everything in existence is capable of feeling pain! Human beings have an astonishing tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, and so there is a scientific explanation for this bit of irrationality too, just like homophobia and theism.

Summerlander wrote: You have to admit that the following exists: There is something that it is like to be. And then we must ask: How? (How does something that it is like to be arise in things that just are - in other words, How does non-conscious matter, arranged in certain ways, generate consciousness?) What produces that 'illuminating' gestalt?

I don’t see why I have to. :lol: “Likeness” is a conception too. It’s a way of comparing objects in the phenom. Red is like heat. Well, sure, but what does that even mean? It means that we have that certain color associated with a temperature, probably because hot things tend to glow red. I think what I’m saying is that existence is only within the mind. But what I'm purporting is not solipsism, it's empiricism--and the theory of mind has to be accepted as true, because it seems to be true. But I think that if I can get a stronger hold on what I’m thinking here, everything would make a lot more sense.

deschainXIX wrote: We have to be careful about violating illusions. Not the illusions themselves, mind, but the experience of having an illusion rent can be damaging.

Are you talking about being sensitive to those individuals who hold frail minds? 'Cos I love having my illusions shattered. It gives me a buzz. :mrgreen:

deschainXIX wrote: Did you see those videos of Russian factory workers bathing in the milk before sending it off for consumption? I was nauseated watching it, but realistically it is not going to harm anyone. It’s a case of blissful ignorance; undoubtedly the milk is pasteurized after that and the consumer is not physically harmed. Consider, however, if you were to tell a delicate, senile old woman what had gone on in the milk and she has a heart attack! This is a hyperbolic comic I’ve just sketched, but it illustrates the principle.

I didn't but I understand where you're coming from. Sometimes tact seems applicable and the most decent approach. If I remember correctly, this principle is touched upon by Harris in either Lying or The Moral Landscape.

deschainXIX wrote: I disagree that it is pontifical to observe the people who are genuinely more hurt by insult than injury. The people who actually are are the pontifical ones.

Let's make sure nothing is misread here. Help should not be forced upon where it's unwelcome. Conversely, I find the notion that someone making things easier for you -- and sparing you from effort in doing so -- equals an insult to your character to be a gross misconstruction of what it might actually be intended by the helper. Why conjecture mens rea when that might not be the case? The intention on the helper's part could well be that of 'doing someone a favour' (which might even be accompanied by thoughts such as: 'He doesn't know it, but, he needs help'; 'She'll thank me later'; and 'I have been in situations where I thought no help was necessary and I was wrong.')

If there is one thing I can't stand is bruised egos imagining other parties boding inauspicious intent where there is none and acting upon their delusions and insecurities. Such people have trouble with humour, too! What they don't realise is that they validate egotistical conceptions by taking them for perceptions of objective reality. As I said before -- and I'll bring us back to the topic in one fell swoop with this reminder -- it's not so much about the misapprehension that egos don't exist (because, phenomenally, they do); it's more about realising that egos, identities, selves (you name it) are mere mental fabrications that don't have to define us by necessity -- in fact, some models of self are quite detrimental to human beings if these identify with them (as we've seen in honour societies).

Meditation provides a liberating perspective outside the mental maelstrom and can lead us to that unblemished, unbiased awareness. If someone helps you unexpectedly, it's not the end of the world; this unlooked-for helper may well know that you are capable of helping yourself and his aid may just be a gesture of good will. Can you imagine what would happen if we never helped anyone for fear of insulting them?

deschainXIX wrote: Well! It didn’t take me long to drag us as far as possible away from the subject topic! :D

We may have the subject topic to fall back to but we may also discuss many other things. We might just beat Megaman! There are many 'shocking truths', y'know! :mrgreen:

deschainXIX wrote: Recently I was listening to a podcast with Joseph Goldstein and he made an interesting observation about language. The conversation was about achieving anatta, and whether or not it requires momentum. Some assert that it does, that one must first spend a week on a retreat in some mystical mountains, meditating and simply breathing and observing oneself and one’s surroundings, before one truly can become selfless.

I disagree with this. You can be a novice at meditation and stumble upon selflessness (or self-transcendence) even when you're not looking for it. Sometimes psychedelic drugs can land you there. I only talk from my experience. I also don't think anatta is permanent; it can certainly be revisited, but, the ego is like a magnet that keeps drawing you in. The no-self experience, however, can have enough of an impact to make you think differently -- sometimes even leading to improved models of self which are stronger in the face of unfavourable conditions in the objective world.

deschainXIX wrote: Goldstein points out a mantric trick that the English language can provide (and other languages too, no doubt) in order to preserve anatta. Rather than thinking in the active voice (“I feel pain”), we should think in the passive voice (“There is a feeling of pain”).

Eckhart Tolle and Sam Harris propose something similar. We can certainly focus on that perspective outside the world of objects of consciousnes that make up minds and egos. We can even cultivate introspectively lucid models of self. But, realistically, we cannot be in anatta all the time (at least I don't think so). I believe the no-self state is ephemerally experienced. I could be wrong though. Maybe there is such a thing as the Buddha's enlightenment (permanent anatta), but I can't conceive of no-self as a permanent state. We are drawn to identifications. We can certainly become more adept at focusing on the present moment. :-)

deschainXIX wrote: The brain is very dynamic in its early stages, like you said, so it would be interesting to raise a child teaching them to speak and internalize a monologue of thought in the passive voice. Sam Harris is clearly against this sort of thing and he thinks that a child should be brought up naturally, with egotism and self-interest, first before making an psychonautical endeavours to annihilate oneself. And he’s probably right about that.

Sam Harris? Really? Where do I find his allusions to this? This is surprising since he commends his wife's meditative recipes for young children! :shock:

deschainXIX wrote: In fact, panpsychism can probably be viewed as even more abject and sinister than creationism. Imagine if everything in existence is capable of feeling pain! Human beings have an astonishing tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, and so there is a scientific explanation for this bit of irrationality too, just like homophobia and theism.

Exactly. That's what I fear. If we adopt panpsychism, we may be opening a terrible can of worms besides being grossly mistaken about the nature of consciousness.

deschainXIX wrote: I don’t see why I have to. :lol: “Likeness” is a conception too. It’s a way of comparing objects in the phenom. Red is like heat. Well, sure, but what does that even mean? It means that we have that certain color associated with a temperature, probably because hot things tend to glow red. I think what I’m saying is that existence is only within the mind. But what I'm purporting is not solipsism, it's empiricism--and the theory of mind has to be accepted as true, because it seems to be true.

But don't you think that you admit the existence of consciousness by saying that it seems to be? If you want to put it like that, how does this seeming appearance come about, then? Seeming is also a mental concept and it seems to me that consciousness is irreduceable in this sense. I don't think you can subjectively seem to be conscious; you either are or you're not. If I see red, I see red -- there is a visual experience of that which arises in my field of awareness and has a quality, a property, the quale. Are you trying to convince a conscious man that he is not conscious? I am conscious of you trying to convince me of that right now! :mrgreen:

Summerlander wrote: Are you talking about being sensitive to those individuals who hold frail minds? 'Cos I love having my illusions shattered. It gives me a buzz.

No, no, don’t get me wrong, I hate illusions and would always choose the truth, if it were myself in question. And in the real world, knowing the truth always makes you happier, more moral, and more at ease. If you and I were dictators over the entire world and we had limitless resources to execute our wills, we would probably adopt the same policies. I guess what I’m doing is making observations about how normal people tend to think. We both have a love for destroying our illusions; I think mine came from lucid dreaming. That ultimate realization is like a shot of dopamine right in the head. But I think others are different (frail-minded, if we would have it that way) and their illusions have to be considered. This is my solution to the Buddhist who would hurt people because their will to self-preservation is an illusion, and it’s also based on Dennett’s example of why we bury the dead. :P

Summerlander wrote: Let's make sure nothing is misread here. Help should not be forced upon where it's unwelcome. Conversely, I find the notion that someone making things easier for you -- and sparing you from effort in doing so -- equals an insult to your character to be a gross misconstruction of what it might actually be intended by the helper. Why conjecture mens rea when that might not be the case? The intention on the helper's part could well be that of 'doing someone a favour' (which might even be accompanied by thoughts such as: 'He doesn't know it, but, he needs help'; 'She'll thank me later'; and 'I have been in situations where I thought no help was necessary and I was wrong.')

If there is one thing I can't stand is bruised egos imagining other parties boding inauspicious intent where there is none and acting upon their delusions and insecurities. Such people have trouble with humour, too! What they don't realise is that they validate egotistical conceptions by taking them for perceptions of objective reality. As I said before -- and I'll bring us back to the topic in one fell swoop with this reminder -- it's not so much about the misapprehension that egos don't exist (because, phenomenally, they do); it's more about realising that egos, identities, selves (you name it) are mere mental fabrications that don't have to define us by necessity -- in fact, some models of self are quite detrimental to human beings if these identify with them (as we've seen in honour societies).

We both acknowledge that these people are detestable and sit comfortably on the lowest rung of human excellence. By no means am I arguing from their perspective, and I am not questioning the intent of the helper--it could be benign, it could be malign, and it doesn’t matter. I’ve laid my finger upon the problem: I am a deplorable writer! “It is pontifical to observe the people who are genuinely more hurt by insult than injury.” What does that even mean? It means that those who are offended when someone helps them are pontifical, and that those who observe their idiocy are not the pontifical ones, which is what you seemed to imply. What I was saying was that to some insult is more painful than injury, and that illusion has genuine weight to them, just as countless other illusions have genuine weight to people, so we have to proceed “with tact,” as you say.

Did you actually think that I’m offended when someone helps me? I even called those sorts of people “insane.” To think that is to miss entirely my point about the gravity of illusion.

Summerlander wrote: We may have the subject topic to fall back to but we may also discuss many other things. We might just beat Megaman! There are many 'shocking truths', y'know!

Let's keep it going!

Summerlander wrote: I disagree with this. You can be a novice at meditation and stumble upon selflessness (or self-transcendence) even when you're not looking for it. Sometimes psychedelic drugs can land you there. I only talk from my experience. I also don't think anatta is permanent; it can certainly be revisited, but, the ego is like a magnet that keeps drawing you in. The no-self experience, however, can have enough of an impact to make you think differently -- sometimes even leading to improved models of self which are stronger in the face of unfavourable conditions in the objective world.

I’m not as experienced as other people, so I take their word for it. Goldstein insists, like you, that “momentum” is not wholly necessary in maintaining anatta, and I agree with that. But I also think there are probably varying degrees of it. You have momentary feelings of dissonance or fragmentation within yourself when blood rushes to your head, and you also have the legendary “ego death” commonplace in psychedelic trips, experiences that leave the psychonaut totally disoriented and inane. The sensations of these two experiences are undeniably different.

Summerlander wrote: Sam Harris? Really? Where do I find his allusions to this? This is surprising since he commends his wife's meditative recipes for young children!

I’m referring to this line from Waking Up, and I’ve also read the line a few pages later about his wife teaching kids “as young as six”:

“A final word of caution: Nothing I say here is intended as a denial of the fact that psychological well-being requires a healthy “sense of self”—with all the capacities that this vague phrase implies. Children need to become autonomous, confident, and self-aware in order to form healthy relationships. And they must acquire a host of other cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal skills in the process of becoming sane and productive adults. Which is to say that there is a time and a place for everything—unless, of course, there isn’t.”

I take this to mean that children should continue to be nurtured the popularly-accepted way, being taught where the line between self and non-self is, and what the nature of the child’s relationship with the “non-self” should be. I think we agree that children can (and probably should) be taught basic five or ten minute meditations, but no one should be sending them on week-long introspection retreats or feeding them shrooms. :D

Summerlander wrote: But don't you think that you admit the existence of consciousness by saying that it seems to be? If you want to put it like that, how does this seeming appearance come about, then? Seeming is also a mental concept and it seems to me that consciousness is irreduceable in this sense. I don't think you can subjectively seem to be conscious; you either are or you're not. If I see red, I see red -- there is a visual experience of that which arises in my field of awareness and has a quality, a property, the quale. Are you trying to convince a conscious man that he is not conscious? I am conscious of you trying to convince me of that right now!

I admit the existence of everything, including consciousness. Every “thing” is a component of consciousness, and so is consciousness itself (we’re thinking about and discussing consciousness right now). And why can’t we subjectively seem to be conscious? For something to seem to be, we have to at least be aware of it. If you’re conscious of the apple in your hand, you’re not of necessity conscious of your consciousness of the object, which is the inevitable implication. And I’m not saying you’re not conscious. Consciousness exists, as a component of consciousness, as does everything exist. There is nothing, however, objectively real of necessity about your consciousness. Because what even is consciousness? What contains the conception of consciousness might not itself be a consciousness, but something that eludes that particular conception.

deschainXIX wrote: If you and I were dictators over the entire world and we had limitless resources to execute our wills, we would probably adopt the same policies.

I would probably establish a socialist government which would include the First Amendment of the United States of America in its constitution. It would thus be, of course, a secular state which would uphold freedom of expression and education -- a truly Marxist nation open to political evolution and run by leaders who understood the candid spirits of Leon Trotsky and Eugene Debs:

'Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation. I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world. While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.'

EUGENE DEBS

deschainXIX wrote: We both have a love for destroying our illusions; I think mine came from lucid dreaming.

Same here! Nothing like realising that you are dreaming. We should perhaps say that we love to have our delusions about what we think we perceive, shattered in such a way that we have a clearer glimpse of the noumena (as scientifically revealed) which in turn exposes the phenomenon as an illusion that is best appreciated the more we understand what's behind it. (Why do I feel like I'm on a Dennettist train of thought, now?) :lol:

deschainXIX wrote: That ultimate realization is like a shot of dopamine right in the head. But I think others are different (frail-minded, if we would have it that way) and their illusions have to be considered.

Again, I agree with this but would use the word 'delusion' instead of 'illusion'. We like the magician's tricks to seem authentic, like real magic, whilst knowing that nothing supernatural is going on. We can appreciate the illusion without being deluded. Like a lucid dream where the impossible seems real. ;-)

deschainXIX wrote: We both acknowledge that these people are detestable and sit comfortably on the lowest rung of human excellence.

Especially when they obdurately ignore or defy the voice of reason!

deschainXIX wrote: I’ve laid my finger upon the problem: I am a deplorable writer! “It is pontifical to observe the people who are genuinely more hurt by insult than injury.” What does that even mean? It means that those who are offended when someone helps them are pontifical, and that those who observe their idiocy are not the pontifical ones, which is what you seemed to imply. What I was saying was that to some insult is more painful than injury, and that illusion has genuine weight to them, just as countless other illusions have genuine weight to people, so we have to proceed “with tact,” as you say.

Don't be so hard on yourself. You can't be a deplorable writer if you intelligently spotted a miscommunication in your post. You also used 'illusion' here in the right context besides clearly revealing that what you meant is what I had in mind. It's great that we can both work together in turning misunderstandings into understandings. Here is something pertinent to weighty illusions: Dan Dennett does not subscribe to the delusion of free will (not a libertarian), but the illusion of such is weighty enough for him to act as though it's a reality (making him a compatibilist). Sam Harris should have addressed him with more tact in 'Marionette's Lament'. :lol:

deschainXIX wrote: Did you actually think that I’m offended when someone helps me? I even called those sorts of people “insane.” To think that is to miss entirely my point about the gravity of illusion.

I didn't think that for one second as I redolently recalled some of your previous posts where dislike for people who are easily offended was expressed. (Example: nesgirl.) I just thought -- for a second :mrgreen: -- that you believed in empathetically propitiating such pompous individuals against your own beliefs. But there was also a mantic voice in my head suggesting that you would soon make an éclaircissement...

deschainXIX wrote: I’m not as experienced as other people, so I take their word for it. Goldstein insists, like you, that “momentum” is not wholly necessary in maintaining anatta, and I agree with that. But I also think there are probably varying degrees of it. You have momentary feelings of dissonance or fragmentation within yourself when blood rushes to your head, and you also have the legendary “ego death” commonplace in psychedelic trips, experiences that leave the psychonaut totally disoriented and inane. The sensations of these two experiences are undeniably different.

You're right and well put. I'm going to put down an addictive book by former SAS operative Chris Ryan, called Strike Back, and check out Goldstein on anatta. 8-)

deschainXIX wrote: I’m referring to this line from Waking Up, and I’ve also read the line a few pages later about his wife teaching kids “as young as six”:

“A final word of caution: Nothing I say here is intended as a denial of the fact that psychological well-being requires a healthy “sense of self”—with all the capacities that this vague phrase implies. Children need to become autonomous, confident, and self-aware in order to form healthy relationships. And they must acquire a host of other cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal skills in the process of becoming sane and productive adults. Which is to say that there is a time and a place for everything—unless, of course, there isn’t.”

I take this to mean that children should continue to be nurtured the popularly-accepted way, being taught where the line between self and non-self is, and what the nature of the child’s relationship with the “non-self” should be. I think we agree that children can (and probably should) be taught basic five or ten minute meditations, but no one should be sending them on week-long introspection retreats or feeding them shrooms. :D

LOL! You're right. And I have checked out what Annaka prescribes for children; none of the meditative exercises entail a spur towards anatta but they do seem to encourage attention to sensations arising in consciousness and a focus on the present moment. This is good for a healthy self-awareness.

deschainXIX wrote: I admit the existence of everything, including consciousness. Every “thing” is a component of consciousness, and so is consciousness itself (we’re thinking about and discussing consciousness right now). And why can’t we subjectively seem to be conscious? For something to seem to be, we have to at least be aware of it. If you’re conscious of the apple in your hand, you’re not of necessity conscious of your consciousness of the object, which is the inevitable implication. And I’m not saying you’re not conscious.

I understand what you're saying and it is all valid. You have basically nailed Dennett's point against Harris. But for the latter, a conundrum remains. The neuroscientist cannot see how consciousness is an illusion; that unified sense of self certainly begets an illusory entity/identity -- a spiritual observer that doesn't really exist, but, consciousness itself (as a pristine awareness) is incontrovertibly apparent in contrast to unconsciousness.

For instance, sleepwalkers, albeit in the delta phase of sleep, can carry out complex physical tasks that they will never remember upon awakening. (Another piece of evidence showing that behaviourism is not a reliable measure of consciousness.) And if consciousness really is an illusion, somehow, it is certainly a 'weighty' one -- not just for Sam Harris but for all of us! If the question 'What is the nature of consciousness?' is not a legitimate one, then allow me to rephrase it: How does what it is like to be come about?

If it's neural processes, electrochemistry in brains, matter interacting with matter -- why should it generate awareness or subjectivity? How can the universe become aware of itself? Nobody here is saying it's magic, but, at the moment it seems like magic because we don't understand enough and we should recognise this. To dismiss it as a strong illusion and simply ignore it seems premature to me.

deschainXIX wrote: Consciousness exists, as a component of consciousness, as does everything exist. There is nothing, however, objectively real of necessity about your consciousness. Because what even is consciousness? What contains the conception of consciousness might not itself be a consciousness...

Granted. Perhaps consciousness really is poorly defined and this may be one of the main impediments to its study. And perhaps what underlies the consciousness conception is a physical something which will forever elude it. The brain is, after all, a remarkable organ that has had a speedy burst of evolutionary complexity spanning billions of years. And when one observes that a specific type of brain wave is ostensibly required to heighten conscious awareness during sleep -- as the hybrid phase state of lucid dreaming implies -- it isn't hard to imagine that consciousness may be a phenomenon that arises from, not just brain matter, but the space-time continuum itself. (Including its quantum mechanical properties.)

Unconsciousness cannot be defined without consciousness (and vice versa) just as in other dichotomies such as light-dark, matter-antimatter, big-small. And all dichotomies are defined -- and known to exist -- in consciousness. To paraphrase you: everything exists in consciousness...

What is consciousness? The opposite of unconsciousness. :mrgreen:

Dennett, Chalmers, Harris, Hoffman... Maybe all of them are partially right. I did check out Goldstein on anatta and he is pretty much in agreement with Harris. An exercise which is extremely hard to do is to catch thoughts just as they arise instead of observing them after the fact. Do this and you will realise that the thoughts themselves are the 'thinker' and that there is no self behind them.

Talk about reducing the sense of self: I went to Weymouth and had a tattoo done for the first time. At first, the pain inflicted by the needle was shocking, but, once I began to think of it as 'There is pain,' rather than 'I feel pain,' I successfully reduced my sense of self and the pain became more bearable. I also learned about my body as I noticed the difference between the types of pain that were produced as the needle made contact with different areas of my skin. It was interesting observing this! All in all, though pain was experienced, I was not suffering. Pain was pain in its own right. 8-)

Summerlander wrote: 'Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation. I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world. While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.'

EUGENE DEBS

Eugene Debs is the fucking man. You’ve got to admit that if he had been elected president, America wouldn’t have behaved so awfully in the Cold War (we share a great burden of responsibility for many terrible things). To America, all Leftism was a manifestation of the menace of the East, Communism, Socialism, they were all great evils to be resisted by the democratic powers--they were all dangerous radicals like Stalin. This egregious perspective wouldn’t have been prevalent--and wouldn’t be around still today, as it is--had Debs been an “American figure.” His beautiful cosmopolitan, internationalist comments would have been great in doing away with a lot of nationalist sentiment that America is known for.

Summerlander wrote: Same here! Nothing like realising that you are dreaming. We should perhaps say that we love to have our delusions about what we think we perceive, shattered in such a way that we have a clearer glimpse of the noumena (as scientifically revealed) which in turn exposes the phenomenon as an illusion that is best appreciated the more we understand what's behind it. (Why do I feel like I'm on a Dennettist train of thought, now?)

I agree, except that I still don’t see how one is to perceive the noumena. How can we ever know the objective truth? I don’t even think it exists. Is objective truth that which is consistent? Is consistency the attribute of noumena? How do we know that? I think that that which is consistent, that which is reconciled with everything else that is known within the phenom is true and real, but escaping phenomenology is impossible. I think I’ve made another realization: noumena and phenomena don’t exist! I haven’t read Kant of course and I’m only utilizing these words you provided because they are so useful in this discussion. But what I think is that there is only what seems to be. There is no phenomenon/noumenon dichotomy. Things exist only when something observes it; in saying this I acknowledge what I am, what the world is, and the relation between these two things. There is only observer and observed, thus noumenology is a missense.

Mine is an epistemology of the “seem”: given a set of data acquired by a faulty machine, the data that do not correlate must be regarded as illegitimate, and the data that do correlate and are constant are regarded as legitimate. This is the best we can do. The only other option is to conclude that this faulty machine and all of its fruition are useless and we can deduce nothing from its data. I’m partial to the former conclusion.

Summerlander wrote: Again, I agree with this but would use the word 'delusion' instead of 'illusion'. We like the magician's tricks to seem authentic, like real magic, whilst knowing that nothing supernatural is going on. We can appreciate the illusion without being deluded. Like a lucid dream where the impossible seems real.

That’s a great analogy to make people understand why the axiom “ignorance is bliss” is incorrect. Clarity and lucidity and understanding always make people happier than the confusion, uncertainty, and terror that haunted our ancestors. The atavists of delusion still try to sell people these cheap, delusional philosophies of self-applied ignorance, though.

Summerlander wrote: If it's neural processes, electrochemistry in brains, matter interacting with matter -- why should it generate awareness or subjectivity? How can the universe become aware of itself? Nobody here is saying it's magic, but, at the moment it seems like magic because we don't understand enough and we should recognise this. To dismiss it as a strong illusion and simply ignore it seems premature to me.

The point is that it could be an illusion; it could be something else entirely. I don’t think Sam Harris is right to say that the illusion feels real, so it must be real. That is the nature of illusion! It disguises itself with infinite dexterity because of its very nature. Anybody could play that game, really. They could say about anything that it seems like it is there, so it must be there.

Summerlander wrote: Granted. Perhaps consciousness really is poorly defined and this may be one of the main impediments to its study. And perhaps what underlies the consciousness conception is a physical something which will forever elude it. The brain is, after all, a remarkable organ that has had a speedy burst of evolutionary complexity spanning billions of years. And when one observes that a specific type of brain wave is ostensibly required to heighten conscious awareness during sleep -- as the hybrid phase state of lucid dreaming implies -- it isn't hard to imagine that consciousness may be a phenomenon that arises from, not just brain matter, but the space-time continuum itself. (Including its quantum mechanical properties.)

Very true. Once we divorce ourselves from the diminution of language, the world explodes and we plummet (or rise?) into an existential whirlpool of confusion and amorphous anarchy of the sciences. The trouble of finding consciousness might be that we are looking for consciousness. :?

Summerlander wrote: Unconsciousness cannot be defined without consciousness (and vice versa) just as in other dichotomies such as light-dark, matter-antimatter, big-small. And all dichotomies are defined -- and known to exist -- in consciousness. To paraphrase you: everything exists in consciousness...

What is consciousness? The opposite of unconsciousness.

What is life? The opposite of dead. What is light? The opposite of darkness. The trouble with this is that you are using something that does not exist to define something that doesn’t necessarily exist because its opposite exists. Because deadness and darkness are not “things.” They’re ideas, substrates of thought to denote absence. Absence of something isn’t a “thing.” It’s sort of like saying: What is a deity? The opposite of a… er… not-deity…

The above paragraph isn’t very clear, and I realize that. We’re about to fall into another bout of miscommunication. I don’t necessarily have trouble with the concept of proving something exists by proving its opposite exists. But they have to have a correlation with one another, and for that to be the case they both have to be genuine things.

“It didn’t make sense, the World was everywhere, in front, behind. There had been nothing before it. Nothing. There had never been a moment in which it could not have existed. That was what worried me: of course there was no reason for this flowing larva to exist. But it was impossible for it not to exist. It was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the midst of the World, eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was only an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in this immensity: this nothingness had not come before existence, it was an existence like another other and appeared after many others.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, * La Nausée*

Nothing is the absence of consciousness. There is nothing without consciousness. What is it when there is “no thing”? When we think to ourselves, “What if that thing over there … wasn’t there?” Nothing is not something. It’s just an idea in our minds, just like unconsciousness, darkness, deadness. The “existence” of nothing does not mandate the existence of something, but rather the other way around.

But I just read over what I wrote and what you wrote and realize I may have contradicted myself. Something is no more real than nothing, because, as you say, they are both objects of consciousness, as is everything. How can we say one conception within the mind is any more real than another? They’re all just ways of thinking about the world in a condensed, communicable way. However, I still think that there is not a necessary dichotomy between a thing and the absence of that thing, and the absence of a thing certainly does not prove its presence.

Summerlander wrote: Dennett, Chalmers, Harris, Hoffman... Maybe all of them are partially right. I did check out Goldstein on anatta and he is pretty much in agreement with Harris. An exercise which is extremely hard to do is to catch thoughts just as they arise instead of observing them after the fact. Do this and you will realise that the thoughts themselves are the 'thinker' and that there is no self behind them.

Talk about reducing the sense of self: I went to Weymouth and had a tattoo done for the first time. At first, the pain inflicted by the needle was shocking, but, once I began to think of it as 'There is pain,' rather than 'I feel pain,' I successfully reduced my sense of self and the pain became more bearable. I also learned about my body as I noticed the difference between the types of pain that were produced as the needle made contact with different areas of my skin. It was interesting observing this! All in all, though pain was experienced, I was not suffering. Pain was pain in its own right.

That concept is scientifically logical as well; it fits in with Dennett’s pandemonium model of the mind. Thoughts are demons whirling about the mind, vying for temporary control. Pain is, after all, just another evolutionary demon there only to notify the organism that damage is being done to the body and that it is imperative to put a stop to it immediately. Some pains feel good if you know that it is doing your body good--pains like weight lifting can feel absolutely orgasmic to me. This realization about the function of pain, and a few grammatical tricks like the ones you mentioned, lead to the ability to endure pain with little discomfort at all.

I’m curious what sort of tattoo you got. Anything interesting? :D

(I typed this in a rush, and it's probably full of cringe-inducing errors and ambiguous phrasing. Decoding my nonsense about nothing proving something due to the nature of dichotomy will be quite the challenge. I apologize in advance!)

deschainXIX wrote:

Summerlander wrote: 'Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation. I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world. While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.'

EUGENE DEBS

Eugene Debs is the fucking man. You’ve got to admit that if he had been elected president, America wouldn’t have behaved so awfully in the Cold War (we share a great burden of responsibility for many terrible things). To America, all Leftism was a manifestation of the menace of the East, Communism, Socialism, they were all great evils to be resisted by the democratic powers--they were all dangerous radicals like Stalin. This egregious perspective wouldn’t have been prevalent--and wouldn’t be around still today, as it is--had Debs been an “American figure.” His beautiful cosmopolitan, internationalist comments would have been great in doing away with a lot of nationalist sentiment that America is known for.

It is indeed a shame that Debs never made it to the Oval Office. He would have followed the Bill of Rights more closely (keeping America truly secular) and certainly would not violate the Geneva Convention. (And America wouldn't have bullied the non-aligned movement established by Nehru, Tito, Sukarno and others -- see Sam Harris's blog on the Indonesian atrocities.)

deschainXIX wrote: I agree, except that I still don’t see how one is to perceive the noumena. How can we ever know the objective truth?

We can't. We can only observe the phenomenon (which is why I appended in brackets 'as scientifically revealed') but at the same time I believe that the shadows in Plato's Cave can tell us something about the external world.

deschainXIX wrote: I don’t even think it exists. Is objective truth that which is consistent? Is consistency the attribute of noumena? How do we know that? I think that that which is consistent, that which is reconciled with everything else that is known within the phenom is true and real, but escaping phenomenology is impossible.

I know what you mean and I see now why Hoffman partially appeals to you. But perhaps we should bear in mind one particular truth, regarding Homo sapiens and other animals or sentient beings, before we go too far down this rabbit hole. Human beings and bats, for instance, are very different creatures. (Different enough for the purposes of what I'm about to discuss here.) Bats undoubtedly perceive the world in a radically different way to humans. We have vision, they have echolocation. However, both can perceive the same solid obstacles in order to avoid them. Both bat and human can perceive the truth of a mountain's existence, albeit in their respective ways. Therefore, the mountain must exist -- and will exist after both creatures are gone.

The truth of what the mountain really looks like -- its real appearance, if you will -- is what doesn't exist. Appearances are subject to observers. But consider the mountain's structure and shape made up by all its molecules. There is a boundary between it and the sky which can be perceived by both bat and human. This is undeniably true. The mountainous structure is denser and contains elements which are not found in the atmosphere. Only at the subatomic level, it seems, does what defines mountain and sky disappear.

deschainXIX wrote: I think I’ve made another realization: noumena and phenomena don’t exist! I haven’t read Kant of course and I’m only utilizing these words you provided because they are so useful in this discussion. But what I think is that there is only what seems to be. There is no phenomenon/noumenon dichotomy. Things exist only when something observes it; in saying this I acknowledge what I am, what the world is, and the relation between these two things. There is only observer and observed, thus noumenology is a missense.

I've got Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason which I've yet to read. There are certain truths about the universe which, according to logic, were there before they were discovered. In this sense, 'noumena' is a useful term. We weren't aware of those truths but they were there all along. (They must have been otherwise we fall into the pseudo-scientific Thomas Campbell's solipsistic trap where consciousness collapses reality where 'observation' is taken in its literal sense as regards the double-slit experiment, instead of being acknowledged for what it actually is in that context -- a measurement which inevitably affects 'subtle' quantum states.)

I don't want us to lose sight of this but perhaps I will have more ideas to contribute once I've taken a deeper look at Kantian literature. It is true, however, that when we remark, 'Ah, that's what it looks like,' we really should say, 'That's what it looks like to us/me.' The appearance in consciousness is what seems. Perhaps Dennett is right in saying that qualia are merely illusions, but consciousness itself?

deschainXIX wrote: Mine is an epistemology of the “seem”: given a set of data acquired by a faulty machine, the data that do not correlate must be regarded as illegitimate, and the data that do correlate and are constant are regarded as legitimate. This is the best we can do. The only other option is to conclude that this faulty machine and all of its fruition are useless and we can deduce nothing from its data. I’m partial to the former conclusion.

So am I. Whether the data begotten by the organism represents or interprets closely what is objectively real, I don't know, but consciousness certainly 'illuminates' (to whom?) this data and this is, still, a complete mystery. There seems to be a gap between knowledge and experience; this is what Noam Chomsky termed 'Plato's Problem'.

deschainXIX wrote:

Summerlander wrote: Again, I agree with this but would use the word 'delusion' instead of 'illusion'. We like the magician's tricks to seem authentic, like real magic, whilst knowing that nothing supernatural is going on. We can appreciate the illusion without being deluded. Like a lucid dream where the impossible seems real.

That’s a great analogy to make people understand why the axiom “ignorance is bliss” is incorrect. Clarity and lucidity and understanding always make people happier than the confusion, uncertainty, and terror that haunted our ancestors. The atavists of delusion still try to sell people these cheap, delusional philosophies of self-applied ignorance, though.

Like the pious and the parties of God. Knowledge is a thing of the devil. Avoid the Tree of Knowledge, they say. Science, however, is only guilty of deicide, and not, as it is claimed, the killing of aesthetics. For many of us, there is nothing beautiful about God.

deschainXIX wrote:

Summerlander wrote: If it's neural processes, electrochemistry in brains, matter interacting with matter -- why should it generate awareness or subjectivity? How can the universe become aware of itself? Nobody here is saying it's magic, but, at the moment it seems like magic because we don't understand enough and we should recognise this. To dismiss it as a strong illusion and simply ignore it seems premature to me.

The point is that it could be an illusion; it could be something else entirely. I don’t think Sam Harris is right to say that the illusion feels real, so it must be real. That is the nature of illusion! It disguises itself with infinite dexterity because of its very nature. Anybody could play that game, really. They could say about anything that it seems like it is there, so it must be there.

There are some very strong illusions which are later discovered to be illusions. We discover them to be illusory, ironically, with conscious awareness. Harris acknowledges the nature of illusions. But he argues that, when it comes to consciousness, it is the one thing that is irreducible. If you say to me that you seem to be conscious, you are, in essence, saying that you are conscious (for how could you be conscious of the seeming?). You see my point? And consciousness, if it is really a counterintuitive illusion, is yet to be proved so. Thus, Dennett's conclusion is premature.

The truth, however, could be unimaginable and may require a postmodernist approach in order to reach it. Perhaps, as some of Rick Strassman's subjects of his DMT experiment suggested, we have it all backwards and consciousness is neither a thing of the brain nor the universe itself. It could be primary, like an incomprehensible substratum of reality itself, and, in this universe, complex life is required for a limited portion to shine forth. This would make the brain a tuning device. DMT trips allow for perceptual overload and individuals could become aware of other realities. But, how can we even falsify this hypothesis if we are to take it seriously and ignore the physicalist approach that it's all just the brain dreaming away? Also, such hypothesis is still no explanation for consciousness (or its illusory phenomenon if it's not a real epiphenomenon).

Strassman's DMT -- The Spirit Molecule is an interesting read, by the way! ;-)

deschainXIX wrote: The trouble of finding consciousness might be that we are looking for consciousness. :?

That's a scary possibility for scientists because it would mean that they are wasting their time. What if a robot in the future passes an elaborate version of Turing's test but is not conscious? We would never know just as we can't be sure that every human being is conscious. And then there is the 'Bicentennial Man' case where the machine is conscious but is regarded otherwise. :shock:

deschainXIX wrote: Because deadness and darkness are not “things.” They’re ideas, substrates of thought to denote absence.

They are defined in the phenom, but, compared to a person, a rock seems pretty dead to me. Thus, wouldn't you say that there is some objective truth to 'deadness'?

deschainXIX wrote: Absence of something isn’t a “thing.” It’s sort of like saying: What is a deity? The opposite of a… er… not-deity…

I know. It's a perceived nothing. But what is the opposite of aware? Unaware. Why is it that 'unaware' makes sense but 'not-deity' doesn't? Why is it that unconsciousness, as opposed to consciousness, makes sense?

deschainXIX wrote: The above paragraph isn’t very clear, and I realize that. We’re about to fall into another bout of miscommunication. I don’t necessarily have trouble with the concept of proving something exists by proving its opposite exists. But they have to have a correlation with one another, and for that to be the case they both have to be genuine things.

The conscious 'spark' is present in some areas of the universe but, for the most part, not others. There is clearly a difference, an opposition. Wouldn't you say this is enough to distinguish between the two? The only thing going in Dennett's favour is that, like unconsciousness, consciousness is something which isn't found anywhere save for the observer's inherent experience. To find consciousness one must be the very physical thing that begets the phenomenon. And the million dollar question is: How is such gestalt produced? This cannot be denied: There is something that it is like to be. A something isn't nothing. (An an illusion isn't something that doesn't exist either -- just not what it seems.) Dennett can only say that something seems to be conscious about other people, but he cannot say that about himself. It's fallacious to do so. Dennett accuses others of not having gone far enough but sometimes I get the impression that he is the one who has gone too far. As a philosopher, he must have thought, 'What if consciousness doesn't exist?' and gone along with this. The problem is that this assumption denies what is subjectively evident and encourages us to not look any further.

deschainXIX wrote: “It didn’t make sense, the World was everywhere, in front, behind. There had been nothing before it. Nothing. There had never been a moment in which it could not have existed. That was what worried me: of course there was no reason for this flowing larva to exist. But it was impossible for it not to exist. It was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the midst of the World, eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was only an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in this immensity: this nothingness had not come before existence, it was an existence like another other and appeared after many others.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, * La Nausée*

Like quantum theory, it doesn't make sense. But it must be true in our heads, right?

deschainXIX wrote: Nothing is the absence of consciousness. There is nothing without consciousness. What is it when there is “no thing”? When we think to ourselves, “What if that thing over there … wasn’t there?” Nothing is not something. It’s just an idea in our minds, just like unconsciousness, darkness, deadness. The “existence” of nothing does not mandate the existence of something, but rather the other way around.

Nothing is conveyed by something. It is the 'thing' that lies between two objects that are attached to each other. If they are attached, there is no space and time between them. There is nothing between them. Why indeed is this definition in our heads when all we see is something which continues into another something? We feel tempted to add, '...and nothing in-between.' Separate both objects and distance emerges. Distance is space; space is something; time is concomitant. Take everything away and no definitions and distinctions remain. I believe Kant went further than this and I will soon look into it. :geek:

deschainXIX wrote: But I just read over what I wrote and what you wrote and realize I may have contradicted myself. Something is no more real than nothing, because, as you say, they are both objects of consciousness, as is everything.

Exactly! And all these objects of consciousness, these conceptions, can vanish in certain states. You can literally just experience pure consciousness where not even the self exists. It is what is known as 'pristine awareness' in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. (A book with a lot of mumbo jumbo but spot on when it comes to that blissful state.)

deschainXIX wrote: Some pains feel good if you know that it is doing your body good--pains like weight lifting can feel absolutely orgasmic to me. This realization about the function of pain, and a few grammatical tricks like the ones you mentioned, lead to the ability to endure pain with little discomfort at all.

I’m curious what sort of tattoo you got. Anything interesting? :D

And Dennett is, apart from ignoring subjectivity, mostly right in his explanations. It was mostly a process of self-discovery for me. I got a dagger or sword going through a skull with a strip spiralling around it for an inscription. The original design had 'Death before Dishonour' inscribed, but I decided to have my wife and kids names on it. The interpretation could be: They'll be the death of me! :lol: