Pure Consciousness?

[Gee]

I think behind your elaborate descriptions you believe there is a human transition into a spiritual transition.

From a scriptual perspective, or as you put it a religious one, it is clearly stated "the dead know nothing", there is no transition.

I don't really know what exactly you are searching for, but your confusion increases with every sentence. Would it not be wiser, to put down your text books and find your answers in this life time, out there in the "real" world, find your purpose once again and in this way your knowledge would be "richer" than any book could provide.

Well, you can think whatever you like about what I believe -- but that does not make it so. Consider that this thread is not about "what Gee believes".

I do not wish to debate specific religious concepts, and use religion only as a guide to understanding consciousness. If you want to talk religion, go to the religion forum.

What textbooks? You are the one who appears to be confused. My husband did not die in a textbook.

Please reconsider before posting again, as you appear to be leading the thread off topic.

G

Greylorn;

Your post is next, but it may be tomorrow before I post it.

G

[Greylorn Ell]

Greylorn;

Your post is next, but it may be tomorrow before I post it.

G

Gee,

Wine grapes need a season to grow, another to ferment, and a decade to mellow. Although I don't have another decade coming, take your time.

Greylorn

[reasonvemotion]

Gee wrote:

I do not wish to debate specific religious concepts, and use religion only as a guide to understanding consciousness. If you want to talk religion, go to the religion forum.

Yet you press others to do so.

I was under the impression it was about religion among other things.

Gee wrote:

In your response to my posts, you made no mention of the religious aspects, or my observations regarding psychology. Is this what you meant by not mixing methodologies and disciplines? Just ignore anything that is not science, or science-based philosophy? Or is it that you don't understand psychology and do not want to comment? Why do you not comment about the religious aspects?

[Greylorn Ell]

Gee wrote:

I do not wish to debate specific religious concepts, and use religion only as a guide to understanding consciousness. If you want to talk religion, go to the religion forum.

Yet you press others to do so.

I was under the impression it was about religion among other things.

Gee wrote:

In your response to my posts, you made no mention of the religious aspects, or my observations regarding psychology. Is this what you meant by not mixing methodologies and disciplines? Just ignore anything that is not science, or science-based philosophy? Or is it that you don't understand psychology and do not want to comment? Why do you not comment about the religious aspects?

You are off-track. Gee does not deal with religions, so do not make up stuff about her.

The only religion that even tries to deal with human consciousness is classical Buddhism. She's never used the term. Consider moving your irrelevant comments to a religion forum where you can pick a fair fight with simple-minded religionists.

[Ginkgo]

I don't know how anyone can study consciousness without some basic information about psychology. Think of what consciousness is; it is communication. Whether you call it intelligence, knowledge, memory, emotion, awareness, or qualia, it is all communication that we are aware of in our minds. It can be internal like thoughts and feelings, or it can be external like vision, hearing, and emotion, but it is all information that is gathered into something that we call mind. So I would think that a good understanding of mind would be required.

You would be correct in terms of each of the disciplines involved in consciousness lends support or criticism of the other. I probably would also like to say that I have some basic understanding of psychology, but certainly not anything like the knowledge required for a professional level discussion.

One can be a professional in any one single field of knowledge. There is no prerequisite as to the number of other disciplines you must have if you researching philosophy of mind. Philosophers of mind range from people who have qualifications in one or two areas, while others have qualification in three or four disciplines.

If you look at the psychology of emotion then you will probably find that is suffers from the same problem as philosophy of mind. Both disciplines in this area deal with competing internal theories.

So when I talk about psychology building a bridge between science and religion, I am not stating that they will be in complete agreement. That would be silly. What I am stating is that psychology can show us that there is value in religion, that some of it is cultural, some of it is interpretation, and some of it is about emotion. So people who state that religion is delusion are just plain wrong. This bridge is about building understanding and respect.

If you are taking in terms of respect then I thing this is a fair enough expectation.

Sorry, you lost me. What does "Keeping in mind that one of the containers is an apriori assumption" mean?

Not sure of the best way of explaining this. Basically it means to assume the truth of a proposition without the need to prove it through experience.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori

Regarding the first problem: As I stated before, I know as much about science as dolphins know about climbing trees, so don't jump down my throat, just correct me, if I'm wrong. But it seems as if science is learning through quantum physics that time and location are not necessarily immutable facts and that matter can form from something immaterial. Both of these ideas are contrary to the laws of physics, but are consistent with the ideas of "God".

Quantum time space is a difficult concept. You would you would probably need to ask other people. However, I would say that quantum space time becomes a mathematical construct for the purposes of understanding something that is not actually possible in the real world, but nonetheless useful for the purpose of prediction.

As I say, it is better to ask someone else this question.

Despite the philosophical implications quantum mechanics is the best scientific theory we have to date. Being a genuine scientific theory it has nothing to say about God.

Science studies what reality is, but religion studies what reality feels like. So, if we consider the possibility that these little somethings, particles and waves, that are flickering in and out of existence cause "feeling" or emotion, then it is possible that what science has discovered is what religion interprets as the "God" of love. Now I know that this is just speculation, but it is interesting to note that the unconscious aspect of mind also has no understanding of time and space, and it is ruled by emotion. Makes you want to go, "Hmmm." Is it all about perspective?

Yes, I also tend to think along these lines. Proving it is the problem.

[Gee]

Greylorn;

I reordered some of your comments and cut out a lot because I could not understand it within the context of holistic thinking. Explanation below. Please consider my following responses:

I'm guessing that somewhere in early childhood some dipshit authority figure told you that girls can't do math or science, back when you were young and impressionable enough to believe that ignorant nit.

Actually, when young, I was quite good at math. I liked it a lot. It was much later in the Junior High or High School that I had a teacher who made us spend months diagramming sentences. It was boring work, but was probably my first clue that language also has logic. That was when I discovered that I like to write. I always thought science was boring in school. Too bad that it took almost a life time for me to learn that the people, who taught science, were what was boring. Science is fascinating, but it is too late for me to start again. I could never learn enough to do it, so I just appreciate it. Yes, girls in my school were discouraged from math and science.

However, I propose that unless you include beginnings and endings, you are merely thinking in "holistic groups." Don't try to look that up, as I just now invented the term.

You could have been a lawyer. Lawyers are well noted for making up new terms to fit their needs.

Many of them will do this important work after hours, entirely on their own time, over a few beers at a local strippers bar.

And so far, the best that these silly holistic nits have come up with is Big Bang theory and multiverse-theory, neither of which can be experimentally verified, and neither of which explains human consciousness. Perhaps holistic thinking is over-rated?

Or perhaps holistic thinking in "stripper bars" is overrated. It may be a focus problem.

I will admit that I was disappointed when I first read your post. My thought was that you did not understand holistic thinking at all, and I believed that you did not look it up in Wiki. But then, I considered that you are not generally the type of lazy thinker, who pretends to know things without doing the work, so I checked Wiki. I owe you an apology. Apparently, someone rewrote the information under "Systems Thinker", and that someone did not have any understanding of holistic thinking. The problem with Wiki is that it can be rewritten and improved, or rewritten so that it is not worth reading. So I do apologize for sending you there and also apologize for doubting you. Please forget everything that you read at the Wiki site, as the writer mostly tried to divide types of thinking into types of catagories, classes, and careers. I doubt that the writer has a clue about holistic thinking, as holistic thinkers compare to learn -- rather than divide to learn.

A person can fit into any type of career whether their thinking is linear or holistic, but if I were to pick a career for a holistic person, I would probably pick something that deals in compromise. Holistic thinkers make very good mediators and ambassadors, they are good in-between people because they see the commonalities in the relationships and needs of opposing parties. In business there are a great many opportunities for a person who can connect a buyer with a product, which makes the holistic thinker valuable as a negotiator. In science, holistic thinkers are often employed in environmental studies because life does not work "single cause for single effect" Life and reality work multiple causes influence to cause an effect, which that effect becomes multiple causes to influence more. It is all cycles within cycles, patterns within patterns. The key words being commonalities and relationships.

Holistic and linear thinkers can often be divided by cultures and philosophies. To explain this idea, I will use something that is commonly known -- the clash between the European invaders and the American Indian. One of the first questions that the archaeologist, who noted that I was a holistic thinker, asked me, was, "Do you have any American Indian in you?" He explained to me that he works with a nation of American Indians, and that they value holistic thinking. It permeates their culture and philosophy. He also noted that the Europeans, who came over to conquer a new land were mostly of the linear thinking persuasion. Then we discussed how the linear thinkers actually believe that right and wrong exist, and they believe in progress; whereas, the holistic thinker knows that right can also be wrong, wrong can also be right, and progress is not always what it appears to be, and is temporary as you can't take it with you when you die.

This culture clash is well studied and understood by most people, so I hope it is a good example for comparing the differences in thinking. The linear thinking Europeans knew that someone was right and someone was wrong, and since the Europeans were right, then the Indians must be wrong. The Europeans also knew that progress was good, so if a culture did not progress, then they were backward, stagnated, and probably kind of stupid. The holistic thinking Americans did not understand this right and wrong thing, as they knew that it is rarely that clear cut, so it took them a while to wrap their brains around the idea that someone had to be right, someone had to be wrong, and the Europeans intended to be right. So the Americans were wrong by virtue of their existence. By the time they realized this, they were being run off their land and murdered, then they finally realized that in the foreigner's minds, might and right were the essentially same thing.

Most Americans (indians) did not embrace the changes brought by the Europeans because they understood that life is change, and it is the responsibility of people to fit into the changing patterns of life, not to create more changes. Not all Indian nations were holistic in their thinking. I doubt that the Iroquois were, and considering that there were more than 300 nations and tribes, some others were probably linear thinkers, but most of the holistic farmers and gentle thinkers were decimated. Happy Thanksgiving.

So one could say that linear and holistic thinkers have different philosophies about life, but does the philosophy cause the thinking, or does the thinking cause the philosophy? I suspect that the thinking causes the philosophy. Linear thinkers do not take being wrong very well. Being wrong means that their goals are not going to be achieved, their progress is going to be hindered, they are not actually going anywhere, so they have no purpose. Holistic thinkers do not accept change very well. They understand that everything is interrelated, so change changes all things which can have surprising and unintended consequences. Change is not necessarily progress and can, over time, actually cause a reversal of the intended progress.

While typing this, Santana's Supernatural CD has been playing in the background, and it occurs to me that whoever wrote the lyrics to the song, Smooth, is a holistic thinker. He does not mention her beautiful eyes, sweet ass, ruby red lips, or long hair as most writers do, and the only reference to her physically is that she is his "Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa". Mona Lisa is not known for her beauty, it is her expression, the relationship between her and the viewer that is notable. Then he talks about heat as "seven inches from a mid-day sun" which describes the spacial relationship as causing the heat. He does not offer her the moon, or say his love is as deep as an ocean because those are physical things. He says, "Just like the ocean under the moon, it's the same as the emotion that I get from you." Again, a relationship where the moon draws on the ocean tides. Then he offers to change his life to "suit your mood", which is an incredible offer from a holistic thinker as they don't like change, but his relationship with her "mood" is more important. Then he says, "Give me your heart. Make it real, or just forget about it." It is only "real" if it is a relationship. This is typical of holistic thinking as the relationship seems more real than the things in themselves. A linear thinker sees the individual things or events as being more real.

For a more practical example, consider this: We have a problem with rats in my city and my cat is two years old, has never been "fixed", and has never been pregnant. Two completely unrelated things, but I see a connection -- no one else does. Most people believe that the new store that was built more than ten years ago, and the expressway work, eight years ago, are the reasons for the rat overpopulation. I don't think so. The shelves of the hardware store have three times the rat poison, traps, etc., than they carried ten years ago, so this is an expanding and ongoing problem.

My cat regularly goes into "heat", but no male cats come around to take advantage of it because they have all been "fixed" or killed. The "do gooders" in my city send out flyers to let us know that they will be coming into the neighborhood to pick up any cat that they find. They will then have the cat "fixed" (broken) and the cat can be retrieved by the owner upon payment of the "fixing" cost. Any cat not picked up by owners will be sent to the Humane Society where they will be humanely murdered. The do gooders do this because they love cats and know that cats are supposed to be well washed, defleaed, and declawed, pretty little fluffs of fur that sit on pillows and eat canned cat food. This is civilized. One lady explained to me that she had to declaw her cats because otherwise the cats tore up the furniture. I responded that I understood perfectly as my children used to write on the walls, so I had to cut off their fingers.

I asked a City Inspector if there was any chance that the shortage of outdoor cats could be related to the infestation of rats. He told me that it was a ridiculous assumption because cats do not attack rats. He was mostly correct, but cats do sneak into the nests and take out the baby rats, much like a fox goes after eggs. So if your cat brings home a dead "mouse" that is rather large and plump, it is most likely a baby rat. Cats do not kill off all the rats, they just keep the population down. This is the way nature works -- it is all about balance.

As to the unintentional consequences: Since the dogs are chained and the cats are locked up or surgically civilized, the rats have free reign to multiply. There have been a few cats, dogs, and children hurt or killed by rat traps and poisons. One of natures greatest predators has been turned into a toy, a pillow-sitting "Tom and Jerry" type cat, who would not eat a mouse if it were starving because it does not know that a mouse is food. My best hope is that the "cat loving do gooders" will run out of funding before the rats bring some new disease to sweep into our lives.

This is holistic thinking.

I will work on trying to explain my idea of "beginnings" and post when I am able.

G

[Gee]

Greylorn;

Please consider the following:

However, I propose that unless you include beginnings and endings, you are merely thinking in "holistic groups."

Holistic grouping has it's value; don't knock it. But that is only part of the process. Every investigation has a beginning, a starting point, but that starting point does not have to reflect a linear beginning. Where does one start to investigate consciousness? There are two obvious starting points, either the internal consciousness that we are aware of, or the beginning of all things, the Big Bang, or whatever happened. The only other option is religion.

Being a philosopher by nature, I need a valid premise for an investigation, and the proposed starting points did not give me that premise. I had already learned enough about religion and mind to understand that religion interprets it's information, so we are not talking about facts. Although religion can give me useful information, I can not base my studies on it's premises. The Eastern religions/philosophies can also give me some useful information, but their internal study is subjective -- unless one can attain Enlightenment. That would take a lifetime of meditation and is still not guaranteed, so I did not choose that path to find my premise. Of course, I could start with the beginning of all things, the Big Bang, but I was not there, so I am clueless about it.

I researched philosophies, then considered religious views, the paranormal, and whatever science could tell me that I could understand, but I could find no valid premise that worked with all of them. Consciousness can not be tested or observed, so how do we even know that it exists? Well, the answer to that would be life. Life is the only indication that we have that consciousness exists, so I started to study the patterns of life, because if I could not know what consciousness is, maybe I could know how consciousness works.

Ecosystems were a good place to start. An ecosystem is a mass of life that is self contained, and can be a desert, a forest, an ocean, a tundra, etc. The ecosystem contains all kinds of life that is trying to destroy and consume other life, which appears very chaotic. One would think that after a while some of these species would win and others would be eliminated, but it does not seem to work that way. Somehow, the ecosystem maintains it's balance.

When the volcanic Mount St. Helens in the State of Washington blew, researchers took advantage of the opportunity to learn about ecosystems. They used a road as a dividing line and replanted one side of the volcano, while letting nature replant the other side. Years later, the sides were undistinguishable, as it had become one ecosystem. So, although floods, tsunamis, droughts, and volcanoes have the ability to destroy an ecosystem, it will rebuild itself as soon as the land returns to normal. A hundred years later, it will be essentially the same as it was before the incident with the only exception being if the land, water supply, or temperature changes and stays changed.

Then I took what I had learned about ecosystems and compared that to what I knew about the body. If one considers the "systems", insects, plants, animals, fish, and fowl, of an ecosystem then compares the systems, digestive, nervous, pulmonary, circulatory, lymphatic, etc., of the body, there is a similarity. If one could make themselves small like a cell, and observe the internal bodily functions, it would look as chaotic as an ecosystem looks, with cells from differing systems attacking, supporting, and disposing of other cells -- not even considering all of the bacteria. Again, all of this activity supports the body, just as all of the activity in an ecosystem supports the ecosystem, and it is all motivated by "want". The difference being that a body has a limited lifetime.

Although our bodies are limited by time, our specie is not. Again it is the "want" of attraction between males and females that causes reproduction. The child's "wants" start to break away in the form of the "terrible twos" then makes a bigger break in the teen years -- eventually the child is attracted to a mate, the cycle repeats. All of these "wants" in ecosystems, bodily systems, and intra-species relations, are guided by instincts, hormones, and pheromones, which are activated by feelings and emotions, which are an aspect of consciousness. These "wants" are self balancing and promote continuance.

If you take this idea up a level, you find that the health of the ecosystems causes the health of the planet, which prompts consideration of the Gaia theory. Most species are self balancing within their environments, but humans self balance themselves through conflict. As our families grow and expand, we develop cultures and societies, then countries, and in each stage, people are jockeying for position because of "want". The societies and countries then attack each other, again because of "want". (Or greed.) Although war is uncivilized and morally wrong, it is a fact that the solution for self balancing, from the destruction of war, is programmed into our bodies via hormones.

So all of life seems to continue and promote itself through change that is motivated by wants that are controlled by hormones and pheromones which cause feeling and emotions that attract and repel. Then I went to a science forum and learned that matter is not much different. Matter is also in constant change, but the change is caused by forces rather than feelings. In matter this is not called "change", it is called constant motion. From photons that will loose themselves only to be absorbed somewhere else, to atoms that have electrons and protons circling, to solar systems, to galaxies, all of it is in constant motion, and this motion causes continuance. This motion is also controlled by "wants", just like life, but these wants of attraction and repulsion are various forces as studied by physics, which I know nothing about.

So all of life and matter are in constant change and motion, but this motion and these changes do not actually cause change. What they cause is continuance, so this change is self balancing. When I say "self balancing" I am not talking about the balance of a teeter-totter or scale, as when they are in balance, they stop. This is a balance that works through motion, so what we are talking about here is perpetual motion. And this motion is all activated by "wants" of attraction and repulsion, whether feelings and emotions, or simply forces -- it is all "wants".

Since life is motivated by feelings and emotions, consciousness is the fundamental force that promotes life. So it appears to me that consciousness, life, and matter work as a "self-balancing chaos, motivated by want, in perpetual motion". This is the way that everything works at the fundamental level, so this is my premise -- so far. As to beginnings, this idea is not conducive to a beginning, as a singular event would not cause a lasting effect in this type of system. I know that this is blasphemy as far as science goes, but it seems to me that any "cause" that has an effect would promote a reciprical cause to nullify the effect in a self-balancing perpetual-motion system. I suspect that multiple small influences like introducing an insect into an ecosystem and/or a slight temperature difference can cause change. But a tsunami or volcano does not actually cause change. It is only temporary. So cause and effect would cease to function in the same way at this level.

I don't see how a "beginning" is possible and think that anything that looks like a beginning, would just look like it from our limited perspective and would not actually be a beginning. I suspect that religion got the "God always was and always will be" part of it right in their interpretations.

G

[Greylorn Ell]

Greylorn;

Please consider the following:

However, I propose that unless you include beginnings and endings, you are merely thinking in "holistic groups."

Holistic grouping has it's value; don't knock it. But that is only part of the process. Every investigation has a beginning, a starting point, but that starting point does not have to reflect a linear beginning. Where does one start to investigate consciousness? There are two obvious starting points, either the internal consciousness that we are aware of, or the beginning of all things, the Big Bang, or whatever happened. The only other option is religion.

Gee,

Why would I knock "holistic grouping?" I thought that I'd just created the term. However I've never formally studied holistics, and obviously someone who is better educated has developed some useful terminology without first consulting me.

The two obvious starting points have led to two theories that are supposedly different (omnipotent-God theology vs. micro-pea explosion science) but are actually functionally identical. A perceptive philosopher would notice that the premises behind Big Bang theory are functionally identical to those of monotheistic religions. You are forgiven for not making such an observation because you've not chosen to include physics in your educational repertoire.

Nonetheless I think that you were capable of making that observation had you turned your mind in that direction.

Should you be excused from accepting the contrivances of professional philosophers, all of them well credentialed, all of them professing to know something of the universe without taking the trouble to understand how it works? If you believe that Obama voters should be excused for not knowing of his fraudulent claim to U.S. citizenship, then you can excuse yourself for believing the lies of others.

You are currently reading, off topic, a book which explains existence from a different perspective than either of the alternatives you've proposed. It will be interesting to see how you deal with it. I hope that you will do so in a public forum. I'll create a thread in the books section to make it easy.

...and the proposed starting points did not give me that premise. I had already learned enough about religion and mind to understand that religion interprets it's information, so we are not talking about facts. Although religion can give me useful information, I can not base my studies on it's premises. The Eastern religions/philosophies can also give me some useful information, but their internal study is subjective -- unless one can attain Enlightenment. That would take a lifetime of meditation and is still not guaranteed, so I did not choose that path to find my premise. Of course, I could start with the beginning of all things, the Big Bang, but I was not there, so I am clueless about it.

Don't worry about that. The Big Bang theorists who weren't there either are infinitely more clueless than you. They have, and have always had access to the information that showed Big Bang theory to be an atrocious atheistic lie, but they ignored it because they are atheists. They felt that to reveal the lie would open the cosmological game to religionists. Big mistake, because religionists are insufficiently competent to play that game with real money-- that is, they will never bet the truth or falsity of their ideas upon their interpretation of hard science, because they know that they don't know any hard science, and do not want to learn it. Alas.

Please do not concern yourself with paths not chosen. I've studied enough of Eastern religions to understand their game. There is no path, except that of working people coughing up income better spent on a beer or a roll in the bushes to support a gang of useless beggars wearing red and saffron robes, and building fine temples for them to hang out in while practicing their absurd enlightenment acts, and while keeping a billion or so people in dumbshitland their entire lives.

Had you studied Buddhism in depth you'd have learned that enlightenment includes the understanding of reincarnation of the soul, and nirvana, and that nirvana is not a synonym for heaven. It means "extinguishment." The task of every "enlightened" soul is to extinguish its consciousness after death.

You would also have learned that modern Buddhists, phony jackasses like the Dalai Lama, have employed the rationalizational (sp) skills of the Democratic and Republican parties to absolve themselves of the need to achieve Nirvana. They'd rather be reincarnated as high-level Buddhist mucky-mucks.

Back to the beginning of your paragraph, where you wrote, "...Being a philosopher by nature, I need a valid premise for an investigation," Therein lies the mistake of philosopher wanna-be's. the inherent fear to take a position of their own.

If you had a valid premise at hand, what use would you be to that premise? Could you make it more valid?

You might consider making it less valid, which means that it was not a valid premise from the get-go. Or you could invalidate it, making it a premise that was not valid from its inception. (Yes, same thing.) Invalidation ought to be easy, since every premise of modern philosophy, and most of those from "ancient" philosophy, is and are invalid. So, what possible interesting relationship could you have to a "valid" philosophy?

(Other than to accept it as truth, live your life according to its principles, and deal with the consequences, learning therefrom.)

Finding a valid philosophy is no more noteworthy than spying a quarter on the sidewalk, picking it up, and being proud of your achievement-- then using it to buy some chewing gum.

You seem to believe that the unimaginative pedants who teach philosophy in universities are philosophers. Why? Because the gang of nits who call themselves philosophers and have obtained small pieces of paper to frame and hang on their den walls have perpetuated their irrelevant selves by declaring that some of their kowtowing students deserve the same papers and titles?

These self-called philosophers are just teachers, no smarter than whoever taught you 5th grade grammar, but born to parents wealthy enough to cough up the money (and that is really all that it takes) for them to acquire a Ph.D in a worthless field of study that is devoted to seeking out and promulgating the dumbest ideas ever invented by men who might score 120 on an I.Q. test, on a good day.

The job of an honorable philosopher is not to hold up billboards for "valid" theories. It is to blow holes in shitty theories that have been well regarded by pinheads who called them "valid." A true philosopher's job is to invent new theories and to defend them. Not everyone can do this. An objective philosopher who cannot invent his own theories can, however, find good theories that are poorly regarded and seek some value in them, and upon finding some value, defend those ideas by offering alternative perspectives on their value.

(That suggestion is totally unrelated to my proposal that you read and evaluate my book. Nope. Not related. Just coincidence. Did I even write this? Shame on me.)

Your demand for a "valid" theory as your starting point is like a quarterback demanding that his receivers catch every pass thrown in their general direction. Welcome to the real world.

I researched philosophies, then considered religious views, the paranormal, and whatever science could tell me that I could understand, but I could find no valid premise that worked with all of them. Consciousness can not be tested or observed, so how do we even know that it exists? Well, the answer to that would be life. Life is the only indication that we have that consciousness exists, so I started to study the patterns of life, because if I could not know what consciousness is, maybe I could know how consciousness works.

Gee,
As a woman who has studied emotions, no doubt from within and without, take a look at how yours affect your approach to philosophy. You keep demanding validity, like a woman who demands that her lover will always love her, even if she brings yapping little dogs, whiny cats, and undisciplined (at her insistence) children into his life and insists upon having sex during Green Bay Packer games.

You claim to be a "natural philosopher." But where have you sought your philosophical insights? Seems to me, from the field of philosophy.

The California gold rush was the result of validity. Gold had indeed been found. People traveled across country in search of easy money laying on the ground, and most of them died broke because they didn't figure on having to do any digging, shoveling, or pick-axe work. I guess that they figured themselves to be "natural" gold miners, born and bred to collect the nuggets lying at their feet.

Yes, validity is nice, because if a premise is already valid you don't have to do jack shit to validate it. All you need to do is say, "Yes, it's valid!" and declare yourself a philosopher.

That's like cooling your heels in a California creek, finding a gold nugget, and declaring yourself to be a gold miner. Shall we carry this analogy deeper into reality?

A philosopher studying philosophy books in search of ideas is like a miner digging a tunnel into the basement of Fort Knox in search of gold, then carrying out some of it and declaring it to be his own.

Is that the kind of philosopher that you want to be? If so, why are we talking?

Like you, I've researched a variety of views, same categories as yours. I cherry-picked, and found irrelevant bullshit in the best of them. There was a little bit of good stuff. Descartes was helpful.

Various religions were just variations on the premise that a bigger pile of bullshit is a better pile. Islam and Christianity are still quibbling (killing people) over the issue of who has amassed the biggest pile.

The philosophers you've studied are insufficiently competent to define consciousness. By following them, you allowed your self to be drawn into their stupifying confusions, to accept their intellectual shortcomings as your own. That's what comes from label-attachment. You want to be regarded as a philosopher, so you've adopted their tramp-stamps. Like a kid in the ghetto needs social acceptance, so joins a gang of nitwits and gets a tattoo to show allegiance. Okay, if that's what you want.

Consider the standards of philosophers before joining their club. They are pretty much a gang of inbred bullshit artists who have co-opted what should be a valid area of intelligent human inquiry. To pursue philosophy beyond their level, beyond irrelevancy, beyond their chosen ignorance of physics, up to the level of open-minded intelligence, you need to leave the pack, rise above the glut. It's hard to recognize yourself as an eagle when you've been living your life on a turkey farm where the birds cannot fly and their language is gobble-de-gook.

You can begin by giving up the conventional notion that consciousness is a function of life.

It is the other way around.

I don't see how a "beginning" is possible and think that anything that looks like a beginning, would just look like it from our limited perspective and would not actually be a beginning. I suspect that religion got the "God always was and always will be" part of it right in their interpretations.

G

With considerable respect for your open sharing of your beliefs, opinions, and insights-- so rare on a public forum--

Greylorn

[Blaggard]

Quantum time space is a difficult concept. You would you would probably need to ask other people. However, I would say that quantum space time becomes a mathematical construct for the purposes of understanding something that is not actually possible in the real world, but nonetheless useful for the purpose of prediction.

As I say, it is better to ask someone else this question.

Despite the philosophical implications quantum mechanics is the best scientific theory we have to date. Being a genuine scientific theory it has nothing to say about God.

There's only on person qualified to discuss quantum mechanics having studied it to a level that makes them if not an expert at least qualified on this forum I know of, and I assure you that person is not Greylorn. It's not me either, but then I am not trying to say that all of science is wrong from my sky palace in outer space.

Suffice to say if you want good information on something it is probably best to go the source or at least someone who made the source or if you can't do that at least someone who studied the source to a level to be able to competently relay information. Otherwise you are wasting your time quite frankly.

It's unfortunate that people try to mix religion with science, this always ends up in a mess as Grey so appositely demonstrates ironically.

I believe that it was Gingko, who stated that consciousness "resides" in the brain.

Did he say only in the brain, or that it was not in a feedback loop with the senses and CNS? Because I doubt that's what he meant although I am sure he is perfectly capable of saying what he means himself.

Suffice to say science doesn't believe you can account for consciousness only with the brain or the mind for that matter, but that it may well reside for the most part there. After all if you remove parts of the brain or if people suffer strokes, predictably according to the area they lose, they also lose skills in a specific area although some other areas are sometimes able to compensate.

Propreaception another of those senses never included in the senses, the ability to know where a body part is in relation to other body parts without being able to see it for example, amply demonstrates that it's a bit more complex than a brain only system.

Hunger and the motivation to eat certain foods, clearly is not a brain only based function either, but I wont digress as I already discussed that at length with the relevant links.

People have given information that validates this claim. They have heard things and seen things that they have reported afterward that could not have been learned if they were still in their bodies. But I don't want to debate this with someone, who is not interested in learning about it.

Oh trust me I already know far more about the subject than you no doubt I suspect, having studied it myself, like I say you really shouldn't presume just because someone is a little more skeptical than you that they don't take an interest in the more esoteric theories out there. I have attended lectures on the subject of NDEs from PhD students from Cambridge who's PhD thesis is based on them. And you can be assured I am well aware of the subject and the various interpretations of it. I find however some of them to be lacking either rigour or any sort of scientific backing, these I tend to be less favourable of. Like I say there's an easy repeatable experiment you could do to prove that the mind can leave the body at death, the fact no one bothers to do this experiment is perplexing hence. But hardly surprising since funding to such paranormal research is rarer than hens teeth, or rocking horse crap. There are however quite a few studies of NDEs that are scientific out there on the memescape we know as interweb, I'd look them up they will if nothing else make you more informed, even if they don't change your mind or beliefs.

The problem with anecdote is that it is such an unreliable source of information that no one in their right mind would use it to form the basis of a scientific argument. On the other hand if you looked at thousands of case studies with an impartial perspective and then interviewed subjects at length then eliminated all the explanations you would end up with something worth listening to.

On the other hand most people think bloke down pub said it. Must be true then, is a valid way of learning about the world with any rigour.

I had a mate who said he could balance a spoon on his nose and I said go on then and he blew on a spoon and there it was balanced perfectly on the end of his nose, he also claimed he could balance it on its end with perfect precision every time, and I said go on then, and could he do it? Could he fu..


I met a guy once who claimed he could move objects with the power of his mind, I said alright move that car over there. And did he?

There's a good reason why the police no longer take witness testimony as reliable especially if it's one word against another or even if one person is saying something or even if 10 people said it, and there's a good reason why police line ups are not as common as they used to be. Because the reliability of people is astonishingly so poor as to be an area of research unto itself.

[Gee]

Greylorn;

Well, you managed to take a poke at everybody, science, religion, philosophy, politics, and even women. Are you trolling to find someone to pick a fight with in this thread? I would prefer that you didn't. Personally, I do not get upset with your rants, because I treat them with all the respect due to a two year old in a temper tantrum, but some people might take you seriously. Please try to control yourself.

Following are my responses to the few points that may deserve responses. For your consideration:

Why would I knock "holistic grouping?" I thought that I'd just created the term. However I've never formally studied holistics, and obviously someone who is better educated has developed some useful terminology without first consulting me.

I never suspected that there was such a thing as "formally studied holistics", but will check, and advise them of the up-to-date terminology.

The two obvious starting points have led to two theories that are supposedly different (omnipotent-God theology vs. micro-pea explosion science) but are actually functionally identical. A perceptive philosopher would notice that the premises behind Big Bang theory are functionally identical to those of monotheistic religions. You are forgiven for not making such an observation because you've not chosen to include physics in your educational repertoire.

Nonetheless I think that you were capable of making that observation had you turned your mind in that direction.

I have noted a number of different ways in which science reflects religions's premises, but could not draw a comparison here because I don't know anything about the "Big Bang" except the name. I always assumed that the "Big Bang" theory reflected men's thinking, as they are always thinking about banging big things around.

If you believe that Obama voters should be excused for not knowing of his fraudulent claim to U.S. citizenship, then you can excuse yourself for believing the lies of others.

You just had to go to politics; didn't you? I am a philosopher, so I study truth and lies. I worked in law, so I have seen a great deal of fraud and lies. I know that getting to the bottom of lies so that you find the actual truth is extremely difficult, especially in politics. So I am going to go with my premise regarding consciousness on this one and note that the Republican party really really WANTS the White House. This "want" motivates them to do whatever they can to get into the White House, so if they could have proven it, they would have ousted Obama. They didn't, so they couldn't. That makes this rumor.

You are currently reading, off topic, a book which explains existence from a different perspective than either of the alternatives you've proposed. It will be interesting to see how you deal with it. I hope that you will do so in a public forum. I'll create a thread in the books section to make it easy.

Good. In the first chapter, you questioned whether "God" was all-knowing or a thinking "God"; something that I have also considered. I decided on all knowing, you decided on thinking. I found your arguments circular and self serving. Open that thread.

Back to the beginning of your paragraph, where you wrote, "...Being a philosopher by nature, I need a valid premise for an investigation," Therein lies the mistake of philosopher wanna-be's. the inherent fear to take a position of their own.

I would not need a valid premise, if I were willing to take someone else's. It is because I was not willing to take another person' premise that I had to find my own. You misread that paragraph.

If you had a valid premise at hand, what use would you be to that premise? Could you make it more valid?

No. No. I am not of use to a premise, a premise is of use to me. A premise is a starting point.

Your demand for a "valid" theory as your starting point is like a quarterback demanding that his receivers catch every pass thrown in their general direction. Welcome to the real world.

A premise is a starting point; a theory is an ending point. A theory is a long way off yet.

As a woman who has studied emotions, no doubt from within and without, take a look at how yours affect your approach to philosophy. You keep demanding validity, like a woman who demands that her lover will always love her, even if she brings yapping little dogs, whiny cats, and undisciplined (at her insistence) children into his life and insists upon having sex during Green Bay Packer games.

A valid starting point in philosophy is like valid numbers to a mathematician -- necessary. This has nothing to do with emotion. My dog is an 85 pound American Red Nosed Pit Bull, my cat, Billy Sitch, never whines, but is a silly bitch, which explains her name, my children are grown, and I firmly believe that sports were invented so a wife could sit down and read a good book once in a while.

You claim to be a "natural philosopher." But where have you sought your philosophical insights? Seems to me, from the field of philosophy.

Seems to me that you make a lot of assumptions, which makes you wrong -- a lot.

You can begin by giving up the conventional notion that consciousness is a function of life.

It is the other way around.

I stated that consciousness is fundamental to life. At no time did I state that life is fundamental to consciousness. I do not agree with the "conventional notion".

Do you remember that Pollock joke that you told a few pages back? Well go back to my prior post and . . . . read . . . . real . . . . slow.

G

[Arising_uk]

...If you believe that Obama voters should be excused for not knowing of his fraudulent claim to U.S. citizenship, then you can excuse yourself for believing the lies of others. ...

Hawaii not part of the DisUnited States then?
Obama's Birth Certificate
Long Form Version

So much for believing the lies of others.

What a racist country America is.

[Gee]

...If you believe that Obama voters should be excused for not knowing of his fraudulent claim to U.S. citizenship, then you can excuse yourself for believing the lies of others. ...

Hawaii not part of the DisUnited States then?
Obama's Birth Certificate
Long Form Version

So much for believing the lies of others.

What a racist country America is.

Arising;

Believe it or not, when you show evidence of that Birth Certificate, some people will claim that it is fraudulent. That it was fabricated, or the doctor created it, and/or the Department of Records is corrupt. Nonetheless, thank you for producing that link here.

Because I have heard all of these arguments before, I choose logic to find the truth. These are the facts:

The White House represents immense power.
Republicans want that power.
If the Republicans could prove Obama was not born a US citizen, they would have.
Therefore, there is no proof to these claims.



G

[Greylorn Ell]

...
What a racist country America is.

The USA elected an unqualified half-black man to the presidency, then re-elected him four years later after he demonstrated that he was a racist, and was as incompetent as he was unqualified.

You may freely accuse the USA of stupidity and abject ignorance. but not of racism.

How many Muslims do you non-racists have in the House of Lords? Any blacks or Arabs in the Royal Family?

Stick your racism accusations up your dorsal orifice.

I'll deal with the rest of your bullshit later.

G

[Greylorn Ell]

...If you believe that Obama voters should be excused for not knowing of his fraudulent claim to U.S. citizenship, then you can excuse yourself for believing the lies of others. ...

Hawaii not part of the DisUnited States then?
Obama's Birth Certificate
Long Form Version

So much for believing the lies of others.

What a racist country America is.

Arising;

Believe it or not, when you show evidence of that Birth Certificate, some people will claim that it is fraudulent. That it was fabricated, or the doctor created it, and/or the Department of Records is corrupt. Nonetheless, thank you for producing that link here.

Because I have heard all of these arguments before, I choose logic to find the truth. These are the facts:

The White House represents immense power.
Republicans want that power.
If the Republicans could prove Obama was not born a US citizen, they would have.
Therefore, there is no proof to these claims.



G

Gee,

While I like your mind, you are proof that a competent mind is subservient to brain-based programs, especially to emotions. Especially in your case. You seem to be mentally invested in the importance of emotions.

Beon Theory proposes that the brain is the necessary birthplace of mind, the cradle of consciousness, of self-awareness. Using a wider analogy than that of a child's cradle, like a family, do you want the family (and society) that programmed your brain with their rules of social behavior to run your entire life?

Seems like so.

Dealing with the BO certificates is taking a bit of work. Tonight I found some interesting and unexpected material that will prove the fraudulence of his US citizenship, but only to those who can think objectively. Be prepared to deal with the fact that by voting for him twice, you demonstrated the power of your brain's emotions over your otherwise rational mind.

Welcome to the majority.

Greylorn

[Gee]

Gee,

While I like your mind, you are proof that a competent mind is subservient to brain-based programs, especially to emotions. Especially in your case. You seem to be mentally invested in the importance of emotions.

Well, I like your mind too, but believe that you cheat yourself when you deny the importance of emotions. Emotion, just like knowledge, is processed both, top down and bottom up; they come to the mind and from the mind, so I don't see how you can call them "brain-based programs". The brain simply processes and interprets what comes in from either direction.

All life possesses "want". We know this because of the survival instinct that makes live thing want to stay alive. But I think that for a very long time, we have tried to deny this simple fact, and not think too much about what it means to "want". We have decided that other life does not think, does not feel, because the idea of thinking, feeling, lower-life forms is uncomfortable for us. But the truth is that in order to "want", there must be some kind of feeling/emotion and there must be some kind of knowledge/thought.

Instead of dealing with that simple truth, we prefer to think that the "lowest life forms" have neither knowledge nor feelings; that the next level, mammals with brains, have only rudimentary emotion, and that we are the only specie that has actual thought. This is our comfortable lie, but this lie has consequences, as all lies do. One of the biggest consequences is that when we are feeling, or experiencing emotion, we relate that to lower life forms -- so emotional translates to unthinking or stupid. In order to prove that we are intelligent, we deny our emotions -- but emotion is the ONLY thing that makes life worth living. Everyone seems to have developed a "Spock" ideology. Spock, the Vulcan on the Star Trek series is supposedly the only one who can think straight because he does not have emotion; but Spock is the most compassionate character on that show -- and compassion is an emotion!

Compassion is emotion guided by thought. How can a person guide something that they deny they have? They can't. So I prefer to understand emotion, so that I can guide my own emotions. If I denied emotion how would I know when emotion is influencing me? I wouldn't. I wouldn't recognize it.

Beon Theory proposes that the brain is the necessary birthplace of mind, the cradle of consciousness, of self-awareness. Using a wider analogy than that of a child's cradle, like a family, do you want the family (and society) that programmed your brain with their rules of social behavior to run your entire life?

Well, if I would have paid a little more attention to that "programming", I am sure that my life would have run a lot smoother. Wisdom came late in my life. (chuckle)

Dealing with the BO certificates is taking a bit of work. Tonight I found some interesting and unexpected material that will prove the fraudulence of his US citizenship, but only to those who can think objectively. Be prepared to deal with the fact that by voting for him twice, you demonstrated the power of your brain's emotions over your otherwise rational mind.

Greylorn

You should be prepared to deal with the fact that this is a philosophy forum, so assumption is frowned upon. Just because I told you in a PM that I would never willingly put a Republican in the White House after what the Bushes did, especially after Bush Jr., that does not mean that I voted for Obama -- that was your assumption.

I think the first time, or maybe the second, I voted for Ralph Nader. I never expected him to win the White House, but his integrity earned my respect a long time ago, so I accepted him as a protest vote. You have heard of a protest vote, haven't you? There are more than two parties.

The thing that bothered me most about Obama was that he was too young. My husband used to tell my son, "There is nothing that a young man can do with all of his power and strength that an old man can't beat with a little treachery." There are a lot of old men hanging around the White House.

Also consider that fraud is often a matter of perspective. I am pretty sure that if we found an American Indian, who was trained in law and studied the treaties that were between different Indian Nations/Tribes and the U.S., he could show us that at least half of our Presidents could be found to be fraudulent in their claim of citizenship. If traced back far enough.

Do you have any idea of how may times, since you learned that I was female, that you have stated that my decisions are based in emotion -- and been wrong? One would think that you would have learned by now.

G