Cosmic meaning?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
41

I am arguing that there is awareness - which we can’t test for - and cognitive functions - memory, ability to do math, ability to read the emotions of others, ability to count, and millions of other active functions - which we can test for.

We cannot go up to a new species found in the amazon and measure its consciousness. We can find out how it responds to stimuli. Plants respond to stimuli, for example. Plants take measures in response to threats and they communicate about threats to other plants, not just intraspecies. Plants seem to remember and learn. But are they conscious? Can we take out our consciousness meter and say - look it’s showing 23 globs of awareness.

Even up into the 60s it was taboo in science to talk about animals being aware. Did we discover a consciousness detection device? No. The change happened because the old default got worn down.

We are getting better inside our own species. We can look at MRIs and find certain kinds of activities that in other people show they are aware. So, people with locked in syndrome may get discovered to be conscious. But this doesn’t work with ‘species’ or things not like us. And our bias has always been to assume that we are the measure of consciousness. If it is like us, perhaps it is conscious. Hence the long delay in science to stop considering animals mere machines without consciousness. (animists and animal trainers and pet owners knowing that was silly for a long time before science shifted on the issue)

So, my end sentence does not contradict what went before. We can see all sorts of behavior in plants that in humans we consider part of signs that they are conscious, but science has tended to assume the opposite and given their is no electric wand we can wave over a plant and say it has 12 glob of consciousness right now, the bias in science remains. But there has been a trend to challenge this and it is becoming less taboo to consider that plants might be aware and thinking, rather than merely doing things mechanically, with no consciousness at all. Generally they, like animals before them, are viewed as chemical machines, with no consciousness, in science. But the default, the bias is being challenged.

Science is conservative. We shouldn’t believe anything until it is proven with repeatable evidence and isolated causes - limit the variables.

But that assumption, that it’s best for us to live with only those beliefs, has not been demonstrated.

42

Can you do any of those functions in your sleep?

I mean. Non-lucid sleep. Sleep you don’t remember.

Fricken nevermind. How would you remember? Dah.

Implying … if you remember … you’re lucid.

So why do you think memory tests don’t show awareness?

43

Most people would say they neither do cognitive functions nor do they have awareness. I have experienced non-rem sleep and been aware I was in it and I could hear myself snoring - that was after meditating seriously for a years (it might be better to meditate humorously). I suspect that we are, in fact, aware during non-rem sleep, but nothing gets transfered to long term memory.

44

If nothing non-rem gets transferred to longterm, how is it you were able to communicate the memory just now?

Unanswered:

45

If we don’t treat person as person, the distorted (cognitive) reality (the cognitive distortion) isn’t “The Way It Is” — not really. It diverges from reality, instead of expressing it like art. It’s the ugliness we choose when we reject the beautiful.

46

:rofl: I try to power nap & more often than not end up laughing. Think I got that one nailed.

47

brings up the funny question… external to what?

synthesis: mutual production

irreducible complexity

If there is no person external to the person that is anyone with the DNA to recognize personhood… how did DNA ever get “person recognition” in it to begin with? Methinks the fractalicious source of our personhood dunnit.

48

Precisely because of the meditative practices. Most people get no transfer - though I think there is some duration transfer. IOW a vague sense that something was going on longer than the sum of minutes of remsleep, should one remember all of that.

But in my case it is because of the meditation. I mean, I said that in the other post.

49

Sure, there are all sorts philosophical positions which include these words as concepts. My point was that they have a specific meaning, not taking sides, at the moment, on any particular position that uses those terms.

50

I edited my comment :slight_smile:

51

I’m not sure what that means

52

I’m just saying your memory recall refutes your claim that nothing gets through. Assuming you were correct about that assumption in the first place. Apparently dreams are more likely during REM but still reported after being woke up during non-rem. According to Google.

My experience never tracked which sleep stage my dreams happened in.

You still haven’t answered why you think memory is not a good test of lucidity.

53

Why do you think memory, which we can test for, does not double as a test for awareness, since if we remember our dreams, it indicates lucidity?

54

No, goddamit. Please respond with the same level of charity I use in response to you. We don’t usually remember. The vast majority of the time we don’t remember. But sometimes we can. I think I could because I meditated.

I never said that.

I’ll ignore you for a while. Bye.

55

I am arguing that we may be aware, but not remember. So, testing for memory might conclude, if we dont remember, we weren’t aware. I think that is a false assumption. Yes, if we remember that double tests at least potentially for awareness. And if something remembers, is conscious of remembering, then it is conscious, yes, when it remembers. But if plants do things that show they adjust to past events, this is very like animal behavior in remembering. But is it conscious. Is it aware. Or is it a machine that adjusts without consciousness. There…now I’ll take a pause.

56

If the machine plant is telling you a dream it could not have remembered if it was unconsciously asleep or in an unaware vegetative state — then, that machine plant is conscious enough to communicate a dream it was conscious enough to remember — even if at the time it was dreaming it did not even know it was dreaming. Kind of like we are now. Conscious, but not omniscient. And we don’t even know what omniscience would be like. And some have never even thought of the possibility of omniscience.

I apologize for not addressing you with the same level of charity you use with me, which I am embarrassed to admit I am ignorant of having done, and I would just like to express my appreciation for how patiently you have explained your perspective to me, especially when I asked you not to give up.

57

Does the Cosmos Have a Purpose?
Raymond Tallis argues intently against universal intention.

Applying the idea of purpose to the totality of things cries out for examination.

The idea of purpose, perhaps. But connecting ideas to something that can be sustained socially and politically and economically?

Again, let’s focus in on the part where someone insists the purpose of life is encompassed only in being on the One True Path. You’re not on it? Well, let them tell you the price you might pay if you don’t get on it. And then those who insist that some will never be permitted to become “one of us” because given the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation or the God they worship, they’re lucky they’re not sent to a reeducation camp or to a gulag or to a gas chamber.

Is this another example of just how unimaginably vast the gap is between “I” and “all there is”? We can try, but how do we wrap our heads around numbers like that? What does it even mean? How was it even calculated?

And then the idea of the multiverse. Reconfiguring “an infinite number of universes” into whatever meaning our own might encompass.

And, of course, who can leave out the quantum world?

Not really sure what he is suggesting here in regard to purpose. But how would you connect the dots between “the purpose of my life” and something in the vicinity of a “universal purpose”.

Click of course.

As for those “localized, transient, and often conflicting” purposes each of us as individuals might acquire and sustain, start here:

Also, whose idea of universality? And all we have in the way of arguments are those we are familiar with on planet Earth. Who knows how many millions of additional civilizations there might be “out there”.

On the other hand, bring meaning and purpose back around to an omniscient and omnipotent God, and, just like that, there is nothing at all that can’t be explained [eventually] given His “mysterious ways”.

So, I ask myself, how, given arguments like the one above, are all those Gods still around? You know my own conjectures here.

58

Does the Cosmos Have a Purpose?
Raymond Tallis argues intently against universal intention.

It is difficult to see how unified cosmic purpose can be so dispersed, and so granulated.

Not to mention how a unified cosmic purpose might be reconciled with this:

Right?

Okay, it’s not a God, the God, it’s a Divine Universe. But how could that not be even more mind-boggling?

The part I root by and large in dasein.

Conflicting goods awash in contingency, chance and change. Not to mention ever evolving historical and cultural and uniquely personal experiences and interactions.

Death and oblivion. The ultimate “totality”? In that it goes on and on and on and on for, they say, all of eternity. And it’s not like when I do get back to star stuff, I can think, “well, here I go again!”

That, perhaps, is what makes today’s world appear especially problematic. More and more it seems less and less are able to fall back on God and religion. The world, instead, is now increasingly awash with Putins and Xis and Trumps and Netanyahus and Khameneis. Not to mention the amoral global capitalists for whom everything basically revolves around “show me the money”.

In fact, there are increasing fears that WWIII is right around the corner. As for progress, who’s rendition of that?

59

Does the Cosmos Have a Purpose?
Raymond Tallis argues intently against universal intention.

Cosmic Confusions

If we look beyond human life to life in general, conscious purpose appears singularly absent from the most authoritative account of the transition from single cell organisms to exotic megafauna like you and me, namely neo-Darwinism.

That might be the most important distinction for philosophers and scientists to make…between an ontological understanding of the Cosmos and then, having discovered that, exploring the extent to which existence itself has a teleological component. God or No God.

Here, I always come back to this: https://youtu.be/hxhL-mDbQGM?si=NyO7oCOWRKakid78

In other words, all the variables in our lives interwined in ways that we are never really fully aware of at all. Let alone ever been able to fully control.

And even here we have to assume that we possess free will.

And nature is such that, by and large, the only point of being born at all is to feed the predators. And, no, not just in regard to sea turtles, where only between one in a thousand and one in ten thousand hatchlings survive to adulthood.

What, all part of Mother Nature’s very own “mysterious ways”.

So, the bottom line [one of them] seems to be that all this speculation revolves around what we mere mortals on planet Earth have come to conclude about the Cosmos. But what of other possible civilizations “out there”…civilizations far more advanced scientifically? Of course, chances are we will all be well on the way back to star stuff before that’s nailed down. If it even can be.

Randomness is something – click – I can never quite wrap ny head around. The mutations that swamp the evolution of biological life here on Earth are either wholly in sync with the laws of matter or, re God or Mother Nature, there actually is a reason for everything being exactly as it must be. It’s just that from our frame of mind it might be construed as entirely out of the blue…even God or Mother Nature are knocked for a loop when they happen.

60

Trees don’t think. They have no neurons.