hermescience Vs evolution

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Well, I wouldn’t say different from non-sensory thought (depending on what you mean by that). Knowledge is a form of thought. Thought is non-sensory (i.e. it is not a sensory experience - but it can be about sensory experiences). Therefore, knowledge is non-sensory thought. Not all thought is knowldge however - fantasies are not knowledge.

What do you mean? How do they extend both into one another?

Well, just to be clear, there is, in my view, a difference between experiences in general, thoughts in general, and knowledge proper. Knowledge is a sub-class of thoughts in general, and thoughts in general are a sub-class of experiences in general. So knowledge is both ‘knowledgeable thought’ and ‘experiential thought’ - but there is no such thing as, say, a ‘knowledgeable emotion’. Emotion is an experience sure enough, so there is ‘experiential emotion’ but feeling an emotion does not amount to knowing anything in and of itself. Our emotions usually come with knowledge (about the emotion), and this can be explained neurologically, but the two should not be confused.

Perhaps, but I would just say such knowledge got incorporated into the box. The boundaries of the box are dynamic.

So, when you talk about ‘locations’ are you saying consciousness has a physical location in space and can reach out to other locations and thereby become conscious of whatever’s happening at that location?

Well, perhaps, but I think what’s at issue here is that we have different theories of consciousness. According to your’s (if I understand it correctly), the epistemic lack certainly could be a function of consciousness’s locality and its access to other locations. According to mine, consciousness has no spatial locality - rather, spatial locality is a phenomenon that arises from consciousness as a basis - and what determines the dynamics of this basis is the manner in which one experience leads to another (the flow of consciousness).

Sounds like Pythagoras or even quantum entanglement. Like I said though, this seems to stem out of your view more than mine. As far as your view goes, I see nothing wrong with it - seems consistent enough - but I think the main hurdle to incorporating it into mine is how you would explain this solely in terms of the dynamics of non-local, non-spatial experiences. We’d also need a definition of ‘resonance’ that’s meaningful in the context of my theory.

Despite the differences between my and your view, I really like where you’re taking this. A part of me actually hopes your right. Would you say this process - that of connecting to other people’s minds - is an evolving process that is to culminate into something big in the future? The launching of humanity into a higher state of being?

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hi gib, you may want to read through before answering and perhaps diverge from the ‘line’. :slight_smile:

is it? or is it a sense; i think of the mind/senses as like a hand, the [outer] senses are the fingers and the inner [mind-sense] is the palm. we die it clentches, we are born it releases [i.e. as we mature]. make sense?_!
the senses acquire info the brain receives and causes info. mind-sense-knowledge, all an interactive triad of consciousness.

as above. or where can we draw the lines?

i cannot disprove that, but in meditation we can allow feelings to flow through us without letting the mind form it into thoughts, it appears as though it is much like a wind of thought with data encompassed within. again we would have to draw clear distinctions to make the ‘difference’ tangible. perhaps you are right, but i cant help thinking that everything has a universality about it, like a core element which contains both knowledge [in various forms] mind and form.

good point. there are conditions to this:

  1. awareness expands into infinity as it is not physical. so the boundaries however dynamic don’t apply to it, only to the interactions between knowledgeable items. so there are limits for sure probably 99% but not total.

  2. knowledge is universal; recently both here and at some other forums i have been asking ‘does info exist’, with a clear and resounding no. we cannot classify data of any kind as physically existent, it belongs to the same realm of reality as awareness and mind.

so the dynamic is potentially vast whilst actually limited, is that a fair summary?

according to the given restrictions and fading [infinite regress] of said connection yes. in body it is very limited by the presence of the box, when not in physical body i would say that box is almost or completely non existent, and that is the ‘pure-state’.
not a physical location exactly, the physicality is existent reality, not non existent reality.

interesting. i think we can find a medium here, you could be right given that there is nothing prior to our physical existence. my theory is going on the ideas of eternals only ~ so physical aspects are like knots where the eternals are the string.
please excuse me for this, but you say there are no spatial localities then that they are created by the continuation of consciousness, ergo there are spatial localities? perhaps you mean they are not existent before we are born [i.e. not present without physical bodies]? regardless we have to conclude that while existent there are spatial localities.

i like pythagoras and entanglement :smiley: …we don’t have to blend the two, but anyway…

  1. how can we have a non-local spatial ‘experience’? i would think that experience is exactly that ~ local and spatial.

  2. the resonance is a function of infinite regress [if i may]. like an echo is to sound a resonance is to knowledgeable thought and omni-local consciousness. a function of infinity in terms of thought, the physical world then acts like a filter causing said infinite regress. maybe we will make more connections as we go or just keep separate theories, although i think we are both universalist in a manner, and will eventually find or disprove the differences.

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thank you! i hope i am right too, but am more than happy to be wrong [as one may move forwards in the light of truth etc]. it is certainly evolving, we have a few individuals like socrates, pythagoras, jesus, buddha, newton, einstien etc etc [quite a collection to put together eh], + all individuals who invent, discover and make changes [everyone] who act together as i would visualise it, like the wake of a ship in the waters.

the ship represents now, yet it must itself change form over time. if you visualise an image of say ancient egypt, then greece, the victorians, one holds an image in the mind representing this. can we imagine that reality has the actual version of that image, the changing ship!

before we try to imagine what that may end up like [there is probably not an end version as such], we can say that any line of advancement will reach its natural conclusion yes? for example, a mobile phone can only get wafer thin and do everything it needs to do, then it finds its natural end form. for arguments purposes we can say that it can progress further into 3D imagery and even into an augmentation of the brain which directly connects people gasp. then it wouldn’t be a mobile phone as such. even then there is a natural end to even that.

so what would this be in human terms?

without going into religious idealism i think we can find an actual vision of this. this is a massive area of debate, so if you wish to go there and return to other areas feel free. the human form itself is nearly ‘there’, as you probably know a brain cannot gain any extra powers by being larger, it simply becomes more cumbersome. the perfection of humanity can only come by improving our utility of its form!

this can only be done on a universal level, not on the individual level [genius is the result of the entire product of man]. everything we are going through at present and historically are functions of that end product regardless of what it is. even if the end product is vague, or completely intangible, the generality of it is a product - if you will.

ok i’ll stop there as i am sure you will have some interesting input for this blank sheet of paper to feed from lols.

thanks-Q

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Well, you could define ‘sense’ in that way, but that’s semantics. In that sense, every mental experience is a sense. But the reason I say thought is non-sensory is because I reserve the term ‘sensory’ for something more particular - experiences like color perception, pain and pleasure, cold and hot, sweet and sour, sounds, etc. It’s more useful for making distinctions between different qualities of mental experiences.

Well, I can see how sensory information extends into cognitive information - like the fingers picking up information and sending it to the palm, right? - but not visa-versa. What does it mean for cognitive information to extend into sensory?

As long as there’s a way to correlate this with physical event (quantum entanglement might be the most promising candidate), it works for me. The boundaries of the human mind are defined by what we can know - that’s my contention. If it’s possible for us to consciously connect with something - even if it’s an infinity away - and thereby gain knowledge of it, it becomes a part of our mind.

Yes, there are indeed spatial localities - so long as consciousness is creating them. My view is that space exists in a mind - not mind existing in space.

Sorry, that one flew over my head.

Sounds very interesting. It reminds me of some of my thoughts from the last paper of my website: http://www.mm-theory.com/pracapp/pracapp.htm. There’s a section near the end called history and evolution where I lay out what kind of spin MM-Theory (my theory of mind) puts on history and suggests possible courses our evolution might take. I also suggest, further down in the conclusion, that the greatest leap that mankind can make is to go from exploring reality from a singular holistic framework to a multi-reality one. It would be like finally coming to some kind of consensus or closure on the question of what reality is at it’s most basic level, and finding that the only thing to do after that is to explore other realities, posing the same questions anew to those realities.

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quite right yes. we can call them all senses, yet must also make such distinctions. so we have two levels here, the sensory side which is objective ~ the physical side of it, although that too has a non physical side. then the holistic side, [colour ~ as it is called in buddhism] where data and holistic/mental objects lay. the imagination is largely of the latter although fed by the former. this brings us more to the side of things to do with the eternal and the infinite, when we consider all-knowledge as we have defined so far. if we consider how info is kept and utilised it would surely have a ‘colourful’ side.

right yes. the colour red is a real external thing which is transported to the non-sensory element of mind you distinguished. however i can see the problem of how it goes in the other direction, from mind to sense to form. if you say “this is red”, that info is converted into wavelengths of sound [if spoken] or light [if shown e.g. a photo] which is then converted back into info telling me; it-is-red. so in both input and output there are a series of transformation whereby the non sensory are transferred from one source to another.

yup, quantum entanglement is most likely in experimental and applied variants. if we go back to our non-sensory colour info, there may be a way of accessing ‘all-knowledge’, we may even do it on a day to day basis. if we imagine a computer of the future which has every scrap of information in its memory banks and can make deductions from that like a calculator can with math, would we say that is all there is to intelligence and information finding? would we be incapable of finding out anything beyond that, where the computer would not, it would have to work within its perimeters, where we would not have such limits.
so as i see it we have to find something which makes this so, it would appear that the much underestimated imagination has the capacity as a tool to access said all-knowledge, perhaps it is a universal resource which everything accesses.

so if the human brain is not producing consciousness there are no spatial localities. could be, although we can say that spatial localities are produced anyway, i am inclined to agree with your position though. i can only disagree if we are not purely physical entities and if not, we are still only born spiritually when our bodies are. i would think though, that the spirit is part of the ‘colour’, so if we can show that side of things are real then spatial localisations are external to the body and brain.

if you are on the verge of a discovery the info you need is connected to the info you already have in your mind, and is in the ‘all-knowledge’ space. if you already have info ‘a.1’ it connects to info ‘a.2’ like an echo, but ‘a3’ would be less distinctive and so on [like echoes sounding in a distance resonating from the echo before]. hence we cannot connect to all knowledge due to infinite regress, ~ the connection gets weaker exponentially.

side note; to infinity all info would be directly connected.

most lekely yes. there always seams to be something that reality will throw into the mix that completely changes things. the world could fall apart at the seams, much of our info could be on disks we no longer have the tech for etc, etc. many reasons why we may never reach our ultimate version. or we may reach that level then there is nothing left to find, other realities will be variants on the same themes.
everything that happens both good and bad, will produce a middle society, where extremes will be shaved off and we will live more simply and be more at ease.

thank

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Ooooh, I see. I was wondering how one would think himself into hallucinating :laughing: but what you say makes perfect sense. It’s also interesting. I’ve always known that sensory experiences can ‘entail’ cognitive ones (my special term), but I never considered the relation to be mutual in the other direction - albiet, not as directly.

Once again, this reminds me of a section of my website: mm-theory.com/god/god.htm. Scroll down 'till you find Figure 6: Standard Versus Alternate Algorithms. It’s at the end of the section Standard and Alternate Algorithms (sorry - I’d link you directly to it, but I can’t seem to link to specific points in the page). The paragraph above figure 6 and the two below talk about something similar to what you’re saying.

Then again, there is the prospect of quantum computers, but I get your point.

You know what a good book for you would be? Roger Penrose’s The Emporer’s New Mind. You’ll have to read through a lot of seemingly unrelated - but very interesting - topics before you get to the end where he ties in a whole range of topics - from computers, to logic, to physics, to quantum physics - to the idea that spir-of-the-moment insights and inspirations - the sorts geniuses are known for stumbling onto - come from a source outside the mind - or at least, through a means unlike the basic mechanics of standard computers.

Don’t take me to be an anti-realist. When I say space exists in the mind, I don’t mean to say it’s an illusion. It certainly is real. You see, this is the whole spin my theory of mind puts on the conventional understandings of perception and reality. I don’t mean to say the world is merely perceptual, I mean to say perceptions are real. It’s our understanding of what mind and experiences are that my theory aims to correct. We tend to think of perception as these air-fairy, etheral, vaccus entities that have no real substance. But I say the exact opposite. The perception of a chair, say, is the actual chair itself - as hard and vivid as we take it to be - really out there in space, in the external world, outside our bodies - how 'bout that?! The mind is outside our brains! So rather than a mind inside a body, I say it is a mind surrounding a physical - and real - universe - the box so to speak.

Yes, I think spirit lives in everything - not something distinct from matter, but making up its very constitution. If matter can be reduced to sensory experiences, and if sensory experiences are mental (i.e. spirit), then we can say that all matter is based on spirit (I also believe spirit transcends matter and is the basis for a whole manner of entities - like truths, values, beauty, etc.)

Again, reminds me of that section of my website (link above).