The mental and the physical.

Yes, I agree that examining ideas from many angles makes it clearer. And that is often very hard to do alone. Our attachments create the settin in which experience is understood. Different attachments mean different understanding.

Is this an aspect of Fresco's point that "sense" is a collective production?

Maybe...

At least I think we are all contributing to the thing we are trying to make sense of.

Where is he when we need him?

"It" is here.

It had an early morning dream about an hour ago where all made "sense" within a an ostensibly bizzare context compared with what we call "being awake".

Gurdjieff argued that from the position of a "higher self" even "being awake" is seen as either bizarre or problematic. He encouraged regular "self-observation" in order for "man to take his rightful place in the universe which conspired against him keep keep him asleep". (He alludes here to cosmic forces such as the Hindu gunas).

Irrespective of cosmological speculation such as this, what we can surely say is that meditational practices are at least therapeutic at the individual level insofar as personal "problems" become defused by "objectification", and may be therapeutic at the sociological level as they encourage compassion for the attachments "suffered" by others. (Here may be a link with the "suffering" in the Jesus scenario).

And this "sociological therapy" may be one way into understanding the interconnectivity of all "life" from a non-technical perspective - the technical route being suggested by such writers as Maturana at the expense of normal semantics.

I do think, however, that compassion does not necessarily engender an intellectual understanding of the interconnectivity of all things as much as it simply reflects it. If I were not already one with you I don't think I could have compassion for you as I do for myself. (Jesus' scenario?)
But I do agree that the objectification of attachments is an effective way to be unattached. This is the process of "mindfulness" (vipassana).
Perhaps knowing--actually seeing--that one is dreaming is a kind of awakening.

I like that point JL, how compassion is a reflection of our understanding of interconnectivity or oneness.

there is a quote I remember reading that seems to have some relevance to this point. it went something like, " love is the philosophy of the fool, and the folly of th wise", the fools actions reflect the understanding of interconnectivity, whilst the philosopher is desperately seeking out an actual understanding of it, and failing.through thinking about love and that quote, I made this distinction that one cannot live life and understand life Simultaneously, and how we can think ourselves into a corner which we cannot escape.

Yes, understanding life is not wholly (holy?) living life. Understanding (in the sense of the intellectual formulation of experience) requires abstraction and that entails distantiation from experience. I am not saying we should not try to understand things (that can have both recreational and practical value), but the observation of immediate experience without understanding (and no desire for understanding, as in meditation) is spiritual joy, a joy without a theology.

Everything in our body and brain and behaviour is physical.
When someone says that it has "mental" illness this simply means that it has "phisical" illnes located somewhere in the brain. For example neurons might not be connected as they should be, or maybe electrical impulses between neurons are not firing as they should, or maybe there is some chemical imbalance present and so on.
Our memory our thoughts can all be located EXACTLY somewhere in our brain. For instance single picture is located in computer from address AFFE3 to address ABFE3. Computer displays this picture on the screen, we saw it and then it gets stored in our brain. If we give an address to each of our neurons then we could say that this image is stored in our brain on neurons AFFE3 till ABFE3, or it might be stored in neurons then dont come in a sequence so we would need to write exect address of each neuron which is used to store the image.

I think that if you want to understand the world then you will find that it is quite simple to understand it. If you want to make it complicated then you start introducing terms like free will, spritis, gods, religon, mental dimension, responsability, sin and so on and suddenly everything becomes blury and foggy and to hard to follow with all sorts of big meaningless words.

Vori1234, I agree that much of our thinking about the world is weighed down with false notions, but I think that the reductionism/physicalism you advance misses much. Remember that the brain is also an idea. Neither idealism nor physicalism. Both and neither.

Remember that the brain is also an idea.

I thought that brain is word we use to label the stuff we have in our scull whose function is our main processing unit.

JLN,

I wish you luck. In the middle ages our friend would have been arguing that "heart" is the word we use for "the seat of the emotions". The vantage point of observing historically shifting paradigms seems to be beyond him.

In the middle ages our friend would have been arguing that "heart" is the word we use for "the seat of the emotions".

There is nothing wrong in making false assumption as long as you are prepared to correct them as soon as some new info is available that points to the fact that assumption was wrong. Science is full of such cases and this is normal process of how our knowledge grows. When we don't have enough info on some process we make assumptions which are then used in decision making process.

Brain was for example considered as being used for cooling blood.
Nothing is wrong with this assumption.
If someone was able to measure difference in temperature as the blood enters the brain and then leaves it, and concludes that this is the purpose of brain because at that time he wasn't able to observe or understant complexitiy of neural networks.

Also I have never heard anyone presenting logical explanation of why would heart be source of emotion so I don't think I would say that. This is the same as saying that our soul is where our chest is.

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The vantage point of observing historically shifting paradigms seems to be beyond him.

fresco why do you have to use such complicated words and sentences?
It is really hard to follow your thoughts.
I believe they are hard even for those who use English in every day.
I better looku up what vantage and paradigm means.

Fresco, I'm speechless.

Vori1234, you seem to treat words as if their true nature was their function to point to things in the external world--naive realism. They DO behave for us "as if" this were so, but that's bad philosophy. Words not only serve to point to constructions, they ARE such constructions. And they are constructed by competent cultural actors in symbolic interactions and negotiations with other actors. That's what is meant by the SOCIAL construction (or "creation") of reality.

Words are constructed by competent cultural actors in symbolic interactions and negotiations with other actors.

I reeeeeally don't understand what this means so I can't offer any counter arguments.

vori,

Contrary your claim, nobody "understands" neural networks, and some philosophers might say we never will. I have put "understand" in quotation marks because your competence is limited in this negotation of that word by your preconceptions about "knowledge" and " reality" as being "objective".

Think of it this way. You are playimg a semantic game (like standard tennis) in which the components "understanding", "knowledge" and "reality" stand in a particular relationship to each other (like racket, ball and net etc). However, youv've forgotten that this is only one game that the players might chose to play starting with those items, or that they could modify them, discard them or add to them, by negotatiation.

1. Contrary your claim, nobody "understands" neural networks
I am pretty sure I never said that so if you could point to a qoute.
If this were true we wouldn't have discussions about free will and emotions and such

2.this is only one game that the players might chose to play.
Well then choose one of those other games, pick some aspect of our world and lets compare how this two games explain it.

Point 1

...which clearly implies now we can.

Point 2


How about: There are no "objective" aspects of our world. All "facts" are embedded in particular social and historical paradigms.
Do you want to play ?

Yes, as I've said before, facts are little theories.