New Technology Opening Old Doors To Theories of the Mind

Yes, perception, fulfillment/recovery fits, I think. But I like to think of is as neutrally as possible. That is, "how well does it work?" And of course, that is relative to the criteria. I like my criteria, and recommend them to anyone. But there are others that work. However, as far as I can say, from my present perspective, given I've spent a lot of energy trying to decide, I don't, myself, think there is a better set of criteria that I've ever heard of. But I'm waiting, hoping to improve upon it soon.

Lola

The very nature of your profession causes it to be the sometime target of cynicism and negativism and you deal with it just as you deal with your patients----with sympathy and understanding. Those who view the world with such cynicism and bitterness could benefit from a long term course as your patient IMO.

perception wrote





Who or what does consciousness mean something to ? You don't experience consciousness, consciousness experiences you. I am the experience not the experiencer. (that is, this I as body/brain in this world.)

When the examiner is examining patients X's brain s/he is examining the contents of her/his own consciousness not patients X's.


The problem is we think we know something, but we don't know who knows or what it knows.

Twyvel wrote

[/quote]
You don't experience consciousness, consciousness experiences you. I am the experience not the experiencer. (that is, this I as body/brain in this world.)

When the examiner is examining patients X's brain s/he is examining the contents of her/his own consciousness not patients X's.[/quote]


Your statements above are to me a bit too absolute and that I must accept them. Who am I to say that you are wrong but this is not how I think of consciousness therefore I stick by my assertion that consciousness means some thing different to each person. This is exactly why neuroscientists refuse to use the word consciousness---it is too vague.
However in a philosophical sense it will continue to be debated.

mind
Perception, I do not understand why you characterize Twyvel's statement(that you quoted) as "a bit too absolute" (and an aside, you are aware, of course, that it must absolutely absolute, not a bit....). It's simply a description of his perception of the nature of consciousness. His statement that you do not experience consciousness; consciousness experiences you. Simply states that all we have is our experience, to the extent that all we ARE is experience, and this includes the experience of "you" It would seem to many people--especially the mystically inclined--that there is no experiencer apart from "his" experiences. BUT I agree that Twyvel's language departs so much from conventional usage, a useage that divides the world into subjective experience, and objects OF experience)--and a linguistic axiom that reality can be described in terms of subject-predicate relations--that people are taken aback and fail to see its profound descriptive adequacy. Alas, psychology is not likely to be phenomenologically adequate so long as it remains wedded to the conventional grammatical/dualistic model of reality (I'm recalling right now Nietzsche's comment that people would not believe in God if they did not have grammar--I think I got that right).
Sorry to be talking ABOUT YOU, Twyvel. I don't want to be presumptous. I would not be surprised if you disagree with the above.

JLNobody

You are correct of course---it is absolute absolute---how clumsy of me. Regarding the description by Twyvel and you of consciousness-----there was a time when I was confused in a similar fashion----I grew out of it.

Shhhhhh, you guys. Don't tell me I am the perceived. I don't want to know that. Sometimes denial is bliss. Please do not violate my privacy. My perceiving mechinism may go haywire and then where will we all be?

mind
Lola, I don't know. I don't mean to be violating your privacy, only to sharing mine. Maybe, as the mystics say, the bliss comes not from denial but from realization of one's ego's purely fictional (albeit functionally necessary) nature.

Yes, well, I do agree JLN that all we have is our experience, including the experience of ourselves. But if it's my experience, then it seems to me that it is me (being my experience of myself) that is perceiving.

mind
Lola, I suppose your claim to ownership of your experience is a way of reflecting ego-strenght in the psychological sense. In the philosophical/mystical sense (where "ego" refers to something somewhat different) it might be said that your statement that "but it's MY experience...my experience of myself...that is perceiving" is, phenomenologically speaking, a falsification of what's really occurring. If you really agree that "all we have is our experience" then your step away from that experience in the form of conceptualizing ABOUT and commenting ON it (and then reifying the concepts) in effect denies the phenomenological description of experience as fundamental. You (like everyone else, including myself when I'm not being reflective) treat your perfectly good commonsensical conceptions as more fundamental. I say that the GROUND of our being is our experience, something too close talk about. That would require a degree of distance, as when you step back, or up on the semantic ladder in saying that in that experience there IS a "ME" who has that experience. This step away/up goes beyond the experience itself, and while it is probably not relevant to your role as a therapist, or to an engineer building a bridge, it is for one's private existential--"religious"--life.

I agree JLNobody, you say it better then I, giving it a broader perspective.

Self---awareness is dualistic in that it is a subject---object relation. Yet I am precisely not anything I am aware of because it is awareness doing the observing.

We are habituated to not seeing the obvious. Firstly, that I cannot be anything I perceive, a clear contradiction. And secondly, the observed contents of the brain; thoughts, images, memories, anticipations, etc., do not include so called qualia, or sense perceptions; visual images, sounds, body sensations etc. yet the sense data as experienced are essentially mental, even though they are not observed to be located in the brain.

They are observed to be located outside the brain yet they have to be in the mind. In the immediacy of visually experiencing this screen I know that I know it mentally as a matrix of thoughts, yet it appears to be "out there" quite separate from any brain. If it is out side the brain as it is experienced to be then where am I ?

Twyvel


Twyvel wrote
They are observed to be located outside the brain yet they have to be in the mind. In the immediacy of visually experiencing this screen I know that I know it mentally as a matrix of thoughts, yet it appears to be "out there" quite separate from any brain. If it is out side the brain as it is experienced to be then where am I ?[/quote]

It is my opinion that everyt thinking person has had feelings similar to yours at some time or other and especially the most intellectual(because their egos are huge) but the next time you think your mind is outside your brain ask it to look around the corner or travel down the street and see what the latest newspaper has to say. If it comes back with an answer then I will enter your class as a very willing student.

mind
Perception, your depiction of Twyvel's meaning reminds me of a wonderful gothic Dracula movie in which the vampire's shadow moves around independent of the movements of Dracula's body. Twyvel's mind, appears phenomenologically (and remember we are talking about experience) outside of the brain's skull BECAUSE the objects of experience (which in fact ARE the content of mind) appear external to the perceiver. My PC screen definitely appears to be outside of me and on the desk in front of me. Yet we know that this object of experience (including the sensations of my hands resitng on its keys) is a mental or "internal" process (I think the internal-external distinction requires reconsideration). His "mind" is more like our own shadows that are fixed to us, are reflections of us and unable to wander down the street on their own.

i had to have my shadow removed, it wasn't doing what i was.

mind
Ugh! Dyslexia. Shadectemies are SO painful.

JL

What you speak of are nothing more or less that manifestations of the marvelous imagination that the brain creates while thinking and conceptualizing. The neurons of the BRAIN create this effect by billions of firings per second----is it any wonder that the imagination becomes the agent that is free to roam but neither can it look around corners not travel down the street. I believe it is the imagination that is apt to burst out of control in those who are unable to anchor it firmly to day to day reality.

mind
We clearly are talking past each other.

JL

LOL--I think you meant ----- Shadow-ectomies))))))

Dys----It's really quite painless ----- you would never know what hit you))))))))))

JL

What would halucinations be other than rampant imagination? Help---Lola.

Really---- do you think you and Twyvel are the only "thinking people" to ever give consideration to the internal/external manifestation of the self conscious while engaged with "introspection"?

i'm just a shadow of my former self. the doc left a sponge where he shouldn't.