Reality

Terry wrote:

fresco wrote:
As for nondualistic research, there is a whole area concerning of "life science" where "individual entities" have no meaning except as part of an orgaizational structure. In this area "life" "cognition" and "perception" are all considered to be isomorphic exemplars of organizational processes which cannot be "explained" by conventional causality.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Please be more specific about the research to which you refer.

fresco wrote:

Try Google references to VON FOERSTER (second order cybernetics), MATURANA (autopoiesis, consciousness), PRIGOGINE ( Theory of Structure). Twyvels holographic references also looks good.

fresco, just once I would like to see you actually answer a question instead of dodging it. How about a paragraph or two in your own words about these "organizational processes which cannot be "explained" by conventional causality"? I really don't have time to scan dozens of articles and try to guess which ones you initially read and morphed into this nebulous statement.

BTW, I don't put much stock in any reference (such as twyvel's holographic one) that gets the basic science wrong.

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JLN, please don't think I'm ignoring you, just still thinking about what you wrote. Smile

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Terry,

I'm not going to do the reading for you, and judging by your comments about "basic science" and "references" you obviously need to do quite a lot. These ideas need a little bit of effort from the receiver to get out of the trench.

...As the then Pope said to Galileo..."I don't need to look down your contraption to know the truth !" Laughing

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Re: truth

JLNobody wrote:

..... My congenitally blind friend, who I use sometimes in these discussions, has color categories--he can ask me the color of my car, and when I answer blue he understands up to a point--but his color categories are empty. They reflect no perceptual experience, nor do they stimulate such experience in imagination.......

perhaps jlN; your blind friend 'sees' colour via association; water is wet, much water is an ocean, the ocean appears 'blue' (due to reflection of the sky....), so there is an association between blue, and various sensory aspects of water? One of the most plentiful phenomenizations of green is grass; grass has a feel, a smell, a texture, etc.; hence associations of 'green' ?

and relative to 'madness' it is an important distinction; the bars of a prison are to keep the inmates 'in';
the bars of an asylum are to keep the 'normal' people 'out'!

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the nature of the brain is an important factor here (welcome Doomy, hi Terry); what is necessary is, however for the benefit of this topic, to be able to 'step' outside the very nature (and 'evolution') of our brains, and think without the strictures that assault our every activity - our every thought; to think without the built in 'hardwiring' growing deeper and deeper into every concept of our minds.

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fresco wrote:

Terry,

I'm not going to do the reading for you, and judging by your comments about "basic science" and "references" you obviously need to do quite a lot. These ideas need a little bit of effort from the receiver to get out of the trench.

Wow, condescending and lazy! Nice job, fresco, you've outdone yourself.

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truth
Come on, Joe. Are we here just to compete and be snide, or are we trying to gain from each other? Your critical abilities force me to make and express my ideas as clearly and defensibly as possible, and I hope you are gaining at least an exposure to a perspective, for whatever it may be worth, that is new to you. Fresco, Tywvel and I have a general perspective that challenges yours, just as yours challenges ours. That should be profitable for both sides, but not if we descend into adolescent bickering.

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Re: truth

JLNobody wrote:

Come on, Joe. Are we here just to compete and be snide, or are we trying to gain from each other? Your critical abilities force me to make and express my ideas as clearly and defensibly as possible, and I hope you are gaining at least an exposure to a perspective, for whatever it may be worth, that is new to you. Fresco, Tywvel and I have a general perspective that challenges yours, just as yours challenges ours. That should be profitable for both sides, but not if we descend into adolescent bickering.

C'mon JL, Fresco deserved the remark Joe made.

Terry can eat Fresco up alive in one of the debates. He's playing with himself if he thinks he can lecture her on these matters.

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truth
Eat him up alive? So this is only about competition and debate, not about sharing and mutual stimulation (pardon the reference)? Fresco is constantly giving us leads to the literature on the "cutting edge" of science, and you criticize him for not giving you enough to sink your fangs into?

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Come on, guys, let's cool it. I enjoy reading all of you even though I don't always agree with your ideas. This is supposed to be an exchange of ideas to get a different perspective of what we like to call "reality." Heck, I'm still trying to struggle to first base, but I can understand some of what most of you are sharing in his exotic philosophical field. I enjoy reading Terry, because she's smart, and she uses language that I understand most of the time. Some of you guys still talk greek, but that's okay. It's not okay, if you guys start slamming each other and get off the topic. Com'on Frank, get with the program.

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Thanks JLN.

Every time I offer references to back up my arguments I seem to get flack ! We could have a 1930's style book burning if this would help.

Maybe its different in the States, but in the UK this is the norm on complex subjects otherwise the argument tends to descend into "yes it is, no it ain't" - an academic Jerry Springer show ! ( Isn't he one of those poor lawyers Joe Smile

)

Some of these ideas cannot be adequately summarized in a single paragraph and I see no reason to cut and paste large chunks of material.
If you are interested - go visit - if not - lets not waste each others time.

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Bookmarking ...... Great thread!

RE: dualism

A favorite resource.

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cicerone imposter wrote:

Come on, guys, let's cool it. I enjoy reading all of you even though I don't always agree with your ideas. This is supposed to be an exchange of ideas to get a different perspective of what we like to call "reality." Heck, I'm still trying to struggle to first base, but I can understand some of what most of you are sharing in his exotic philosophical field. I enjoy reading Terry, because she's smart, and she uses language that I understand most of the time. Some of you guys still talk greek, but that's okay. It's not okay, if you guys start slamming each other and get off the topic. Com'on Frank, get with the program.

Fresco questioned Terry's intelligence. Joe gave him a bit of **** about it. JL gave Joe **** about giving Fresco ****. So I comment respectfully to JL.

Now I gotta get flak about that!

Fresco, as I have mentioned several times in the past, seems more intent on showing that he can compose a complicated, damn near undecipherable, posting than actually contributing information to the discussion.

Terry, on the other hand, not only knows her stuff -- she doesn't try to shove it down your throat -- or make it any more difficult than some of this difficult material is.

So....everybody "cool it."

We've had our say.

Now it is time to go back to the subject.

I do not know what the Ultimate Reality is -- and I do not have enough unambiguous information upon which to make a reasonable, meaningful guess.

I don't think Fresco or Twyvel or JL have either -- but they seem to be compulsive in suggesting that they do.

Hey...whatever get ya past the cemetery.

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JLN, OK, you do not distinguish between a "subjective" world and an "objective" world, but a World which one can experience EITHER subjectively or objectively, but trying to do both at the same time gives you a falsely dualistic version of reality?

Interesting take on Satan's role in converting us to dualism. I would put it more scientifically: at some point in evolution our brains evolved the structures necessary to generate self-awareness, and the ability to see ourselves as separate from our environment gave rise to dualistic perception. It also gave us the ability to empathize with others: put ourselves in their shoes in order to predict their reactions, influence their behavior, and make them feel better (or worse, in the case of enemies) based on our experience of how we would feel if in their situation. Competition with other human beings is said to be the primary selective force on brain evolution.

Non-locality in physics is a very fragile and limited phenomenon, applicable only to certain entangled quantum particles that have not interacted with anything else. It does not apply in the macro world in any manner determinable by science. In what sense is the Andromeda galaxy "here" "right now" if we cannot gain any information about its present state for millions of years? Or do you think that you CAN access info while in a non-dualistic trance? (If so, we could save a bundle on the space program!!)

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JLNobody wrote:

Twyvel, I agree that "the 'world' IS that which is observed at any one moment." But I would include under "observed" our memories of past observations. They serve to affect present on-going observations. This is a complex issue. I do understand John Searles' notion that consciousness is an objective fact in the world, yet that world exists FOR US only to the extent that it is perceived (and remembered). How can we talk about the TOTAL reality that we have absolutely no awareness of? This is the question that comes to mind when I hear discussions about "what's beyond the universe? (after the end of space) and "what was there temporally before time began?" Such questions are meaningless because we have absolutely no observational experience with extra-cosmological space or extra-cosmological time. We LITERALLY don't know what we are talking about. This also applies to our unobserved/unobservable Self.

JLN, I know you don't like cut-and-paste, but this is from a previous page and I think is worth seeing again. Smile

Is your atman eternal, or is a new one generated from the Atman for each child that is born? If eternal, what happened to your memories of previous and future lives?

How can you talk about a non-dualistic reality if you can only experience very limited bits of it? If you CAN experience the whole thing (and that feeling is not just an illusion) can you gather information about the far reaches of the universe? Or even events on Mars or the far reaches of planet Earth?

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I appreciate knowing that Joe and Frank see through fresco's subterfuges as I do. Laughing

fresco, if you cannot elaborate on your statements, how about posting a link or two to your sources? Yes, I can do a Google search, but it turns up far more pages than I have time to go through. YOU, however, KNOW exactly where you got the info, so it would be much easier for you to just post the correct links.

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Fresco: No need to call in the Sturmabteilungen and engage in a bookburning. All that we expect is that you provide the evidence for your own assertions, rather than passing off that task to others. Terry's right: since you know this stuff better than we do, it's your job to come up with the relevant sources.

If someone, for instance, had a question about Kant or Schopenhauer, I would never say: "if you're so interested, why don't you look it up yourself." That kind of response is either intentionally evasive or it's just plain lazy: I'll leave it up to you to determine which.

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As requested some elementary Google work.

Maturana (autopoiesis)
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/t.quick/autopoiesis.html
http://www.acm.org/sigois/auto/ATReview.html

Von Foerster (Second Order Cybernetics)
http://www.thehope.org/Bernard_Scott/Abs-Intro.html

Capra (Prigogine et al)
http://www2.tcd.ie/Physics/Schrodinger/Lecture3.html#sec9

The latter though the most recent, should not be taken as definitive of my own position which is also influenced by genetic epistemology (Piaget).
http://www.ensc.sfu.ca/people/grad/brassard/personal/THESIS/node35.html

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Contrary to my earlier refusal to "cut and paste" here's a "deeper" snippet from reference 2 concerning cognition which might give a hint to those not wishing to dive in:

'Cognition' is the term conventionally used to denote the process by which a system discriminates among differences in its environment and potential states of that environment. The evidence for this 'cognition' is effectiveness of system behavior in response to the dynamics of its milieu. Today's dominant perspective on cognition is 'cognitivism' -- the idea that effective action is explainable in terms of manipulating abstract 'data', 'information', and 'knowledge'. This approach is best known from the 'Human Information Processing' (HIP) school of psychology, artificial intelligence (AI), and the 'cognitive sciences' lying at their intersection. During the last decade, there has been a growing realization that cognitivism is at best a limited way of analyzing humans and their interactivity (cf. Winograd & Flores, 1986).

Maturana and Varela attribute the capacity for discrimination to the organism's structure, but not as an internal manipulation of extrinsic 'information" or "signals', as the cognitivist viewpoint would have us believe:

'This would mean that such inputs or outputs are part of the definition of the system, as in the case of a computer or other machines that have been engineered. To do this is entirely reasonable when one has designed a machine whose central feature is the manner in which we interact with it. The nervous system (or the organism), however, has not been designed by anyone... (T)he nervous system does not 'pick up information' from the environment, as we often hear... The popular metaphor of calling the brain an 'information-processing device' is not only ambiguous but patently wrong.' (Maturana & Varela, 1987, p. 169)

I have highlighted the last sentence to show how this on its own could easily be dismissed by conventionalists, but in context might begin to make sense. Note however that this context is embedded in the much fuller context of autopoeisis.

Now....anybody want to try a one paragraph summary ?

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Just heard on the radio this morning that there are actually eleven (or so) dimensions. Anybody else know about this claim? I'm not sure how this topic will explain "reality," but it's an interesting idea at any rate.

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