- #176
mabs239
- 85
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Why all "of" are in red. Hope it isn't the mischief of a ghost ;)
You alone are seeing that. It is caused by the fact that you have arrived at this page by a search in which one of your keywords was "of".mabs239 said:Why all "of" are in red. Hope it isn't the mischief of a ghost ;)
CEL said:In reality, the phrase is "You cannot prove a universal negative."
You can prove that there are no elephants in your living room, but you cannot prove that elephants don't exist.
I agree. But what about this universal negative? All ravens are not white?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_paradox
wittgenstein said:CEL said:In reality, the phrase is "You cannot prove a universal negative."
You can prove that there are no elephants in your living room, but you cannot prove that elephants don't exist.
I agree. But what about this universal negative? All ravens are not white?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_paradox
Can you clarify how this applies? You cannot prove that there are no white ravens.
ideasrule said:... Put another way, what specifically causes consciousness? Is it a chemical in the brain? If so, I should be able to synthesize the chemical, pour it onto a table, and make the table conscious. Is it the system of connections between neurons? If so, could I make several billion wooden blocks, connect them with string to simulate these connections, and have the blocks gain self-awareness. Is it the electrical signals that the neurons send each other? If that's the case, why isn't my computer, which also uses signals, conscious? ...
fillindablank said:This post seems to me to be flawed on several levels. By analogy: I have a car that is traveling at 120mph. What makes it do that? Is it gasoline? If so I should be able to pour it on a table and make the table go 120mph. Is it the motor? I should be able to make pistons out of wood put them in a box on the table, pour gasoline on it and make the table go 120mph. Is it the gasoline burning? Now we are getting somewhere, all I have to do is light a match to the gasoline on the wooden box of pistons on the table and it will go 120mph. Hmmm, it still isn't moving.
fillindablank said:This post seems to me to be flawed on several levels. By analogy: I have a car that is traveling at 120mph. What makes it do that? Is it gasoline? If so I should be able to pour it on a table and make the table go 120mph. Is it the motor? I should be able to make pistons out of wood put them in a box on the table, pour gasoline on it and make the table go 120mph. Is it the gasoline burning? Now we are getting somewhere, all I have to do is light a match to the gasoline on the wooden box of pistons on the table and it will go 120mph. Hmmm, it still isn't moving.
I don't see the answer to this as any mystery.ideasrule said:I don't consider it all that unlikely that consciousness can exist outside of a body. I know this point has been discussed before, but nobody has the faintest clue what consciousness is. Nobody can say that if a system fulfills criteria A, B, and C, then it is conscious; otherwise, it is not. Put another way, what specifically causes consciousness? Is it a chemical in the brain? If so, I should be able to synthesize the chemical, pour it onto a table, and make the table conscious. Is it the system of connections between neurons? If so, could I make several billion wooden blocks, connect them with string to simulate these connections, and have the blocks gain self-awareness. Is it the electrical signals that the neurons send each other? If that's the case, why isn't my computer, which also uses signals, conscious?
Whether the underlying reason for consciousness is chemical, physical, or something else entirely, it's possible that existing non-living objects fulfill the necessary and sufficient criteria for consciousness, whatever they may be, and are therefore self-aware.
Freeman Dyson said:Stephen: Let’s suppose I’m having a lucid dream. The first thing I think is, "Oh this is a dream, here I am." Now the "I" here is who I think Stephen is. Now what’s happening in fact is that Stephen is asleep in bed somewhere, not in this world at all, and he’s having a dream that he’s in this room talking to you. With a little bit of lucidity I’d say, "this is a dream, and you’re all in my dream." A little more lucidity and I’d know you’re a dream figure and this is a dream-table, and this must be a dream-shirt and a dream-watch and what’s this? It’s got to be a dream-hand and well, so what’s this? It’s a dream-Stephen! So a moment ago I thought this is who I am and now I know that it’s just a mental model of who I am. So reasoning along those lines, I thought, I’d like to have a sense of what my deepest identity is, what’s my highest potential, which level is the realest in a sense? With that in mind at the beginning of a lucid dream, I was driving in my sports car down through the green, Spring countryside. I see an attractive hitchhiker at the side of the road, thought of picking her up but said, "No, I’ve already had that dream, I want this to be a representation of my highest potential. So the moment I had that thought and decided to forgo the immediate pleasure, the car started to fly into the air and the car disappeared and my body, also. There were symbols of traditional religions in the clouds, the Star of David and the cross and the steeple and near-eastern symbols. As I passed through that realm, higher beyond the clouds, I entered into a vast emptiness of space that was infinite and it was filled with potential and love. And the feeling I had was-- this is home! This is where I’m from and I’d forgotten that it was here. I was overwhelmed with joy about the fact that this source of being was immediately present, that it was always here, and I had not been seeing it because of what was in my way. So I started singing for joy with a voice that spanned three or four octaves and resonated with the cosmos with words like, "I Praise Thee, O Lord!" There wasn’t any I, there was no thee, no Lord, no duality somehow but sort of, ‘Praise Be’ was the feeling of it. My belief is that the experience I had of this void, that’s what you get if you take away the brain. When I thought about the meaning of that, I recognized that the deepest identity I had there was the source of being, the all and nothing that was here right now, that was what I was too, in addition to being Stephen. So the analogy that I use for understanding this is that we have these separate snowflake identities. Every snowflake is different in the same sense that each one of us is, in fact, distinct. So here is death, and here’s the snowflake and we’re falling into the infinite ocean. So what do we fear? We fear that we’re going to lose our identity, we’ll be melted, dissolved in that ocean and we’ll be gone; but what may happen is that the snowflake hits the ocean and feels an infinite expansion of identity and realizes, what I was in essence, was water! So we’re each one of these little frozen droplets and we feel only our individuality, but not our substance, but our essential substance is common to everything in that sense, so now God is the ocean. So we’re each a little droplet of that ocean, identifying only with the form of the droplet and not with the majesty and the unity."
DaveC426913 said:I would like to read your post but it is one giant block of text. No paragraphs to break up your thoughts.
There wasn’t any I, there was no thee, no Lord, no duality somehow but sort of, ‘Praise Be’ was the feeling of it. My belief is that the experience I had of this void, that’s what you get if you take away the brain. When I thought about the meaning of that, I recognized that the deepest identity I had there was the source of being, the all and nothing that was here right now, that was what I was too, in addition to being Stephen.
So the analogy that I use for understanding this is that we have these separate snowflake identities. Every snowflake is different in the same sense that each one of us is, in fact, distinct. So here is death, and here’s the snowflake and we’re falling into the infinite ocean. So what do we fear? We fear that we’re going to lose our identity, we’ll be melted, dissolved in that ocean and we’ll be gone; but what may happen is that the snowflake hits the ocean and feels an infinite expansion of identity and realizes, what I was in essence, was water!
So we’re each one of these little frozen droplets and we feel only our individuality, but not our substance, but our essential substance is common to everything in that sense, so now God is the ocean. So we’re each a little droplet of that ocean, identifying only with the form of the droplet and not with the majesty and the unity."
"Proved"?Freeman Dyson said:He is the guy who first proved lucid dreaming. That block of text is his answer to to the question about whether his lucid dreams gave him any insight into biological death and the afterlife. Basically it is his opinion on what happens at biological death.
DaveC426913 said:"Proved"?
His technique of signalling to a collaborator monitoring his EEG with agreed-upon eye movements during REM became the first published, scientifically-verified signal from a dreamer's mind to the outside world.
spacetype said:How could one go about proving that ghosts do not exist?
For me his experience is explained by Jill Taylor's My Stroke of Insight. A burst AVM incapacitated most of her language capabilities and some other important left hemisphere functions which left her living in a nearly total right hemisphere world: a world of bliss and euphoria for the most part. Ego and identity are sustained by talking to ourselves about ourselves and when a person can't do that they default to an unworried existence where they can't well distinguish between themselves and the environment, nor things in the environment from each other: all is one.Freeman Dyson said:Sorry, but that's exactly how it was transcribed in the interview. He's kind of saying that God is all of us united. Not just humans. But everything. We return to what we really are at death.
zoobyshoe said:For me his experience is explained by Jill Taylor's My Stroke of Insight. A burst AVM incapacitated most of her language capabilities and some other important left hemisphere functions which left her living in a nearly total right hemisphere world: a world of bliss and euphoria for the most part. Ego and identity are sustained by talking to ourselves about ourselves and when a person can't do that they default to an unworried existence where they can't well distinguish between themselves and the environment, nor things in the environment from each other: all is one.
At the time of writing she assessed herself as 100% recovered, but not the same person, having little incentive to revert to certain kinds of gratuitous and counterproductive worrying, and, despite being a neuroscientist, she now has a distinctly mystical proclivity in her thinking.
Anyway, the thing he experienced in his lucid dream was not what physical death represents, in my opinion, but death of the "ego".
Reading her book caused me to speculate whether autism might not represent the opposite deficit: some degree of right hemisphere malfunction that prevents the person from experiencing an automatic feeling of connectedness to other people and their environment. (Or it could be a left hemisphere deficit that renders the left hemisphere unable to process signals from the right.) In any event, her story has volumes of intriguing first hand reports about right hemisphere function.
RMN: There seems to be a correlation between psychedelic consciousness and lucid consciousness in the dream state.
Stephen: There’s a lot in common between the two states. In fact people can in the dream state, take a dream "psychedelic" and have it produce an effect.
DJB: Terence McKenna says that he smokes DMT in his dreams and then has the full experience.
Stephen: And what that shows is that what prevents us from having these experiences is not the chemical, it’s the mental framework. So in a way psychedelics can be a kind of guide in revealing some of the potential in the mind. I think they have limitations in terms of taking us to the visions they show us. One can take the mistaken path of saying, well since I had the taste of it with the substance, if I keep taking it I’ll eventually get the whole thing because more of the same should help. It doesn’t seem to work that way.
One thing I was thinking of including in my post was to point out that procedures for silencing the interior monolog are at the heart of every mystical religion. Jill Taylor had this forced on her by a freak stroke. It can certainly be achieved by voluntary practice to varying degrees. Voluntarily quieting the interior monolog is just about instantaneously reversable and it's quite frequent for periods of inner silence to be interrupted by verbal comments to ourselves. He got into this state by linear procedure, but not by thinking himself into it.Freeman Dyson said:But this man consciously brought this state onto himself. He did it through a linear thought process. It was controlled.
This is a left brain verbalization of a non-verbal right hemisphere experience intended to try and communicate something about that awesome experience to other people's left hemisphere's. It's one choice of words among a multitude of possible characterizations of that state: cosmic consciousness, Big Mind, Buddha Mind, Nirvana, and so on. A zen Buddhist would say all verbal descriptions are wrong, no matter how accurate, because the description is not the experience.He said it represented his deepest indentity.
He said "My belief is that the experience I had of this void, that’s what you get if you take away the brain." I'm saying that Jill Taylor's experience demonstrates this experience is what you get when you take away, not the whole brain, just the left hemisphere.And his deepest indentity is not physical. He has done extensive work on NDE and OBEs. All of which he thinks arent supernatural and totally explained by biology. So he knows a thing or two about the mind and the tricks it plays.
I just meant it in the everyday sense of the word.I don't see ego as a very descriptive or useful term in general though. But it could apply here. Are you talking about it in the Freudian fashion? What is the ego?
I haven't seen a video of her, but I'd recommend her book as almost certainly more comprehensive due to the inherent time constraints of a video.I have seen that video of Taylor on TED and I liked it.
zoobyshoe said:One thing I was thinking of including in my post was to point out that procedures for silencing the interior monolog are at the heart of every mystical religion. Jill Taylor had this forced on her by a freak stroke. It can certainly be achieved by voluntary practice to varying degrees. Voluntarily quieting the interior monolog is just about instantaneously reversable and it's quite frequent for periods of inner silence to be interrupted by verbal comments to ourselves. He got into this state by linear procedure, but not by thinking himself into it.
This is a left brain verbalization of a non-verbal right hemisphere experience intended to try and communicate something about that awesome experience to other people's left hemisphere's. It's one choice of words among a multitude of possible characterizations of that state: cosmic consciousness, Big Mind, Buddha Mind, Nirvana, and so on. A zen Buddhist would say all verbal descriptions are wrong, no matter how accurate, because the description is not the experience.
He said "My belief is that the experience I had of this void, that’s what you get if you take away the brain." I'm saying that Jill Taylor's experience demonstrates this experience is what you get when you take away, not the whole brain, just the left hemisphere.
I just meant it in the everyday sense of the word.
I haven't seen a video of her, but I'd recommend her book as almost certainly more comprehensive due to the inherent time constraints of a video.
The hope for Jung lies in true religion. The freedom and autonomy of the individual depends on deep inner experience of a metaphysical nature. This is not "faith"; it is direct knowing.
Let’s suppose I’m having a lucid dream. The first thing I think is, "Oh this is a dream, here I am." Now the "I" here is who I think Stephen is. Now what’s happening in fact is that Stephen is asleep in bed somewhere, not in this world at all, and he’s having a dream that he’s in this room talking to you. With a little bit of lucidity I’d say, "this is a dream, and you’re all in my dream." A little more lucidity and I’d know you’re a dream figure and this is a dream-table, and this must be a dream-shirt and a dream-watch and what’s this? It’s got to be a dream-hand and well, so what’s this? It’s a dream-Stephen! So a moment ago I thought this is who I am and now I know that it’s just a mental model of who I am. So reasoning along those lines, I thought, I’d like to have a sense of what my deepest identity is, what’s my highest potential, which level is the realest in a sense?
Freeman Dyson said:But the dreamer was thinking his way into it.